Shadenuat

This is one of the scariest threads I've read after that one on now dead bioware social about Alistair dumping female Wardens because they're dirty forest elves/not nobility.

I think this is a bit full of gak, because varied and difficult encounters & core design for open world game remaining difficult should have been designed during development and be a priority, it's THE GAMEPLAY; it's their second PoE game, it's not the mega dungeon with copy pasted slimes anymore. Speaking of bestiary, BG1 had goblins and bandits, BG2 added golems, vampires, dragons, celestials, demons, illithid, beholders, liches, drow - that's how proper sequel should probably handle new adventure, difficulty & new bestiary, don't you think? Monsters scaled around +2/-2, with fixes they're now +4 (?), add gear to that, empower, many things, and eventually you seem to outpace everything. I thought so after release and a playthrough too. Btw, there is definitely something wrong with big monsters like dragons, which is because of interrupt system. Party seem to be able reliably interrupt and cancel actions of big creatures like dragons and they never seem to finish their abilities (that's not even talking monks just kick flipping kraken in the air for massive lulz). I wonder if anyone noticed that, because just mashing various interrupt rogue/monk/barbarian buttons on magma dragon seemed to completely stunlock her. These creatures should have immunity to interrupt maybe. I wonder what other people experience with these beasts is because I think current dragons are the easiest big creatures in the game.

Around 200 is max I think, made around Wizard Double spell.

Sorry dude, but this statement is laughable. PoE2 has quite a lot of encounters where you talk to person and end up fighting that person anyway, most of content is about party adventure and dungeons, and it's character system has literally only 2 skills to level up, with skills not affecting story much in any way. Deus Ex 1 has more roleplaying, player agency and endings than PoE2 and it's built on an engine of 1st person shooter. I still can't think up any reasons why you need whole 5 difficulty settings in your game btw. In any game.

I think you're mixing just classes with builds (which are classes + items and abilities, and many items don't feel as special to me anymore). As for Ranger, it's a class which is all about maxing accuracy. So guess how well it does in PoE system, especially if you mix it with any other martial class with it's 1 point +20 accuracy wounding shot +10 acc for mark +10 acc for pet .... that's more or less how ranger plays.

Most players wouldn't have 200-210 deflection so that extra +5 looks weak to them. If you balance most items around total stacking and power builds these items will all look unattractive to 99% of players.

I'd say Force in SW if we just take episodes 4 and 5 is actually a good version of mysterious magic. And it also serves the morality of the setting which is another thing going for it. There are a lot of players who want to play the archetype "normal person goes against improbable odds and wins". RP wise these are characters like say Conan the barbarian who distrusts magic and only uses his muscles and guile to defeat powerful wizards, or Garett the thief who uses some magic like magic arrows, but still uses only his guile and stealth to defeat incredible things like a demon, by stealing it's magic eye a-la "outsmart the god" story. I even had pleasure to play with players who even don't want to use magic items because it doesn't suit their style/definition of what munchkinism is.

Mechanically it would be easier to give these spells [TAG] probably, and do not allow Shifter cast anything but spells with this tag.

Yeah, you don't really lose anything for doing stupid things in combat. As the system goes now, you can use party to gather mobs and fireball them all together with mobs, have 1 dude left standing and win, no problem. It's actually a pretty degenerate gameplay. Only thing that fixes it is Grog, by the way. Which is pretty funny. I actually find all this deal "difficulty was not a priority" bizarre. You have a party based game where most of content is about combat, and difficulty was "not a priority". If combat difficulty was not a priority, then what was? What is even the point of the game then? It's main gameplay is combat. It's not a project like Numenera where combat, indeed, might not have been a priority.

This means literally nothing, because there is nothing clear cut about what souls are. You can say that all magic comes from waffles, and everyone can have waffles. It's same as description of Magic missile in D&D - what is the spell about? Well, it's magic. missile. Magic alright? So you don't need any more explanation.

OP basically has trouble with magic not being magical, because there's too much of it. Basically this And it's not like PoE setting has a particularly clever interpretation what magic is or even makes a good job at creating awesome rules for soul magic and how it works. It's basically "souls, so people leap in air and do meteor showers". So I don't see why there's so much thrown at op because PoE setting did not seem believable to him. It's not like it makes enough work to make you believe in it.

I'm surprised people ask really, since I realised it during my first playthrough - you enter locations from the side of which you travel on main map. So if you go to darcosi street from north, you end up in ambush against 8; if you go from location of the port, you end up at the south of location and then stealth & divide&counter are your friends, as well as water that hobbles everyone, not just you. You can ambush dudes near well first without aggroing mage lady and her goons. The drake, it is a difficult fight, but that's why I pointed out that this drake is the most memorable part of new difficulty - just like in Tyranny with prologue fight, nothing really comes closer to it later, because you're underequipped, have no abilities etc. It's a good fight. I pointed exactly that it's a good fight. But it's only 1 fight. And low levels were already hard. It's after levels 8-12 things begin to go back to your unpatched routine. And a random high level enemy added to some encounters (like one redskull flame bat added to bunch of drakes in Ashen Maw), is your example of designer getting a task and that's what he came up with in a patch. That's not a good encounter design, it doesn't change anything.

You only really need Mechanics, else is for combat or is simply flavour. You can even pass many quests if not all without any diplomacy or similar skills and don't suffer for it at all. I'd wonder if there is a single quest in the game that has major consequences if Watcher has some high dialogue skill.

Ultimately it's hard to disagree with this - if it's a party based game, then hardest difficulties shouldn't be beaten by anything but full, competent party of characters with builds supporting each other. Unless you skip ton of fights and just use bugs and exploits. Skipping fights you can't win is your idea of a challenge? Ahahah.

You don't have to fight them all at once. As for elaborating, there's more text to thread than the thread title.

1) take tape 2) tape over part of monitor where empower button is so you can't see it 3) enjoy game.

Evokers and Trasmuters are p. good. Even without meh ogre form, Transmuters have good spells so they work alright. But in general, I think specialist wizards are just wizards who have +power on one spell per level, and for that pay with half of spells available to them; generally defeating the point of a generalist class of a wizard. The bonuses are just bad and not worth it to lose so many spells; spell selection is very small, and picking grimoires is a total bitch. If not for annoying excel grimoire work with checking what spells to pick due to no grimoire suiting you ever, specialists could have been a good choice to dual with other casters though.

Thing is, I think Deadfire with it's multi class system had potential for some cool encounters. Imagine enemy parties and monsters using builds players make. Imagine like flame naga monk paladins crushing into your party and activating self immolation and **** like that. The dual class and load of abilities (and afflictions if they ever get reworked, since now they're very underused) could have allowed designers to make cool encounters. But so far best they seem to come up with are Delemgain + Golem + Slime cause, slimes gotta have rights to be in encounters too. Yay slimes. The magic system, yes it's a bit primitive and often binary (3d level supress spell cancels everything be it arcane magic or natural abilities or heals, very weird and simplistic). Inspirations/Afflictions could have been a good system but seems like vampires are only monsters who give you trouble with them. In my opinion the key new difference after patching is scaling armor. You really have to work to pen enemy armor (until you get high level and simply crit and overpen everything). The best example I can think of was me fighting troll bounty on level 5 or so, and I had to use druid flame sword spell to kill troll since even PoTD trolls have 4 flame armor meaning you overpen them whereas nothing I had at the moment could do good damage to them (not everyone even had Fine weapons yet). PoE works best when you fight a mix of enemies with like 14/10/4 armor and defences like 120 fortitude/90 reflex/50 will. But it also has ton of 90/90/90 enemies where all that tacticool magic ceases to exist. But, well... yes, it does take longer due to number inflation. I fought deathknight under berath temple on relatively low level and it took me 2 full ability rotations to take him down. This is often how PoE plays though. You either glance enemy to death, or overlevel enemy and they die very quickly. It's that accuracy inflation syndrome. You rarely feel that fight is just perfect and well tuned for you.

Most enemy ships are underequipped. For example, galleons with 2+2 cannons and other nonsense. They also have strange and often dumb mix of cannons that have different threat ranges so AI just misses.

I am more of interested at how developers kinda missed on fixing their system for open world game than maxing enemy stats with mods really. As for my play style, I don't use drugs (well that sounds funny), don't really use potions and try to never press the awesome button - although I WISH game would MAKE me use all these things; but no matter what I do, these things still exist and they are obviously not good for balance of the game. So why have them? What was the reasoning about even having Empower button? I find that on new PoTD (during levels 1-8 or so) Empower is really useful for classic casters who simply run out of spells; while fighters and casters who have "infinite" spells do not suffer much. I'd even go and say that if you increase amount of spell picks and spells per level for druids, wizards & priests, you might as well remove Empower from the game - game won't lose anything, really (replace the button with an ugly skull so you know you're playing PoTD, hehe). Anyway, mods are cool, but I'd rather replay BG with SCS instead, or if anyone would make one, play Deadfire with SCS-level mod instead of bumping numbers, since PoTD already means longer battles, not more tactical battles. I am not that masochistic and don't want to solo or exploit or powergame; I just want some fair, tough party on party battles.

The AI is dumb yes, funny that it's also dumb just like in PoE1: like, enemies adore low hp/armor characters and sometimes go to great lengths (like shuffling around for 10 seconds without doing anything) to kill them; also, doors and corridors are anti-difficulty, pulling and using doors gives AI a total brain freeze and murders it's pathfinding. But, fixing AI is one thing. At very least I think developers should begin with at least giving AI similar strength, and for now even this yet to happen.

Not sure why you thought I insulted CM - it was an example of a system that makes martial classes use martial rules and abilities, instead of ninja magic soul abilities; but since it's more complicated (power pool in real time wouldn't work), we don't see this kind of design often. I am all up for martial classes having things to do in combat, but if they are, as OP stated, are just another form of magic, there's little roleplaying (and, frankly, systemic - hobbled is what hobbled does for both rogues and druids for example) difference. I wonder how much you write in comparison when you do care lol.

So after 1.1 and, as Josh said, a great scythe swiped over items & abilities and "reworked" encounters (I think most people would only ever remember the boars, panthers and dragons living happily together) I began another playthrough with 1+3 custom characters, not very optimized and mostly some fun builds, PoTD+all level scaling, only up. The beginning was promising and game began reminding me of Tyranny on highest difficulty - people who played it probably know that final fight in prologue there was supah difficult, although then it just fell down. So I began using actual healing spells, switch weapons to fit enemy armor. I explored just 25% of the world map, and due to even more xp gains from monsters, and overall enormous amount of xp you gain for quests and such, hit level 15 (!) and almost abandonded the playthrough again. I only kept going to check on possibly reworked encounters, but so far only few were tweaked (the prologue, engwithan titan and it's dungeon was, for sure, gullet dungeon a bit, some random redskulls were placed - a few); most encounters, secondary & faction locations, bounties, mini-dungeons were not touched and are just as easy as they were. So here's the thing. Player abilities got cut in half, all items got Sid Meier'd "cut everything 50% and see what happens", yet the game is still too easy. Well, a few points. By cutting on player abilities, you also affect enemies. For example, enemy fighters are not an unkillable fortresses anymore due to Unbending nerfed. Rogues are still the only ones which can 2-shot your characters, while others don't seem as strong. The items and stacking, sure, may have affected some powah builds, but ideally you should actually balance endgame for player having some high tier items, not just turning them all to worthless junk. But here's the thing. No matter how much you plug the holes, the ship continues leaking. Why? Because PoE leveling system is simply not balanced for an open world game. Cause, a) You gain XP too fast. and b) Levels are everything, and accuracy is everything. Most of your potential, comes from levels, just like in PoE1. Where after first big city, game became super easy. Baldur's Gate countered this somewhat with the flat AD&D leveling system, where after particular level, gains did not matter as much ("you leveled up. you gain +1 to saving throws and +1 hit point"). Also some classes were hard to level up (Druids and their 13 to 14 leveling). And I think PoE2 should have done this during development too, compared to basically linear PoE1. So, why not do something like this now? Without MODS WILL FIX IT agenda, I think 2 things should happen (at least maybe on Veteran/PoTD): 1) Without touching much on XP rewards, it's probably possible to make higher levels require more xp. Most players I've read feel that levels 1-8 are fine, since you need to get them quickly to feel like you well played 1st game. The difficulty during these levels is also pretty good. So I'd keep these levels as they are. Then there is a particular something about going from level 9 to 12 or so. I felt it and many others said that "after level 12" (which is when player vacuum cleans Neketaka) people become overpowered. So maybe this should get 25-30% or so increased xp requirement. Finally, going from level 12 to 20 should give diminishing returns. So the further you are, the more xp you need to gain these levels. 2) At some level, character system should create sort of "plateau" (like levels 8-12 in IE games), and your accuracy and defences, as well as hit points gains, should diminish. Naturally it's same for the enemies. That way, most of Deadfire populaton, which primarely consists of low level critters and various pirate goons won't explode the moment you click on them. Or, you know, maybe scale everything +10/-10. But many believe that level scaling is cancer etc. Naturally, there should also be more high level content. There are nearly not enough strong creatures and crazy encounters in the game, which we haven't seen in PoE1, and many were just copypasted from it or White March. I played up to level 18 after all the super patching, and it's same story as ever - at some point, enemies simply cease to be any threat, and begin exploding from your dudes armed with better weapons, or simply die to a single empowered spell... all while you barely touched second half of the game. Oops.

I don't know if people noticed but the whole revelation from 1st game doesn't mean **** in PoE2. Not just for 2 companions but, like, for everyone.

If you skip the story and go with your own party for power and loot it's way better than the first one. Then again if you mainly ignore the story in the first one, it also becomes better than it is. So I rate it 6.5 Storms of Zehirs/10 and wait until modders will fix it, remove the rest of the story and maybe add Aerie romance to it. And sabres. There are just not enough sabres to dual wield for everyone in the party.