Shadenuat

I finally added pure chanter to custom party and tried some spells. I couldn't find a single bad one just by checking descriptions, honestly. Compared to Wizard/Priest feels like cheating. At first I was all like fus ro dah and tactically shoving enemies around, then I got paralyzing shout and now I'm not sure how to lose combat anymore because, uh, I have unlimited amount of paralyzing AOEs.

Strangely enough from all vancian casters, Druid was affected the least. Great versatility, creat cc, damage, best heals, ability to spiritshift, lift half a dozen giants with tornado in the air during endgame, destroy packs of enemies with insect plague & later 9th level storm just obliterates everything. Hope Josh doesn't read this. Everything is fine with druids. No change required. - per/acc items - weapon modals (harder to pull off and requires some micro) - Insightful buff - spell combos (debuffs, followed by nukes) - target lowest saving throw. turning off Expert will show you which is lowest - Alchemy>Deadeye drug - just cast more spells (grimoire of volatile wizardry) I mean, basically, stacking. It's the basics of understanding rpg systems - look at everything that matters and stack until you get results.

Aloth just kinda sucks. Make your own massive STR/PER/INT wizard. Get that Perception buff from somewhere. Invest in Alchemy & get some drugs if you feel you're missing too often. Combo with other casters, like shoving enemies into your AOEs. And don't run specialist. The amount of spells is so low you'll cry. Some levels have like, 1 spell of your school. So you get to cast one spell faster, and the expense of all the options. The transmuter's ogre is also weak. Although Evoker/Transmuter are the better of the bunch. What I like more about transmuter is that you get both damage & cc and some things like heals & teleport. And Chaotic orb spam.

BG2 "devoted" - you can't wear armor at all, can't use helmets, no shields, no bracers, you do get some ac bonus though, attacks, speed per level, unique crit ability. PoE: you get + damage and penetration on weapon. Pick best with 2 types of damage. You're awesome. And many kits do look like just a nifty roleplaying thing.

There's a lot of unique clothes and armor in the game but they're not used to make unique equipment. Why? Because gotta add more swords and sabres.

I also dislike all the menus you have to open to understand what is ability doing. Hover over ability to open menu to hover over status effect and then get into cyclopedia to read more about status effects since it doesn't state the whole picture. And then the descriptions. Trickster: "Gives rogue illusion spells". What spells?? Aside from 1st level one? "Ranger and pet get bonus if they're within 4 meters". Just how big the bonus to acc and def is there? And the descriptions of classes. Imagine you're some casual and read description of a chanter. Or Trubadour. Something something linger modal phrases something. What the hell does the class do? But they did put what is the name for Cipher is on glanfathan. Into class description. Why? What does it have to do with anything about the class? Write what the class does, not this.

Btw wish I could buy Grog for berath points right in the beginning of the game. Worth it just for party members permanently getting killed instead of wounded. It would make me play combat differently.

Second game and they already nuke their whole cosmology established in the first game. Well that setting went well. D&D with it's Mystra death and whatever feels almost tame in comparison how quick stuff goes, and all centered around 1 watcher person.

The first thing they have to do is remove the ability to replenish resources in combat. Empower should only allow increasing a single ability strength per combat, that's it (although even that may not be a good idea as you can just nuke encounters into fog of war with this). It's too much of a crutch and allows you almost infinite amount of buffs, heals, etc. compared to what enemies can bring to the table. Then lower the amount of your D&D4 power points you gain per level, as having so many makes everything absurd in the endgame. Once that is done, one can design encounters around "beat that only using your 4 power points on everyone", without ability to replenish. Maybe allow more classes to replenish pp with effective actions in combat (like Barbarians can with their kits and Smash attack). Also, nerf heals. They are simply too powerful now, a single dedicated healer can make whole party ignore all damage. Some points in Athletics give any character an oh**** button on a level of class based special abilities. The long term drain in resources could come in using consumables. Although then there are some other problems, like the fact that you swim in money, especially later when you can sell 12 naga bows for 100k; and that consumable recipes are dumb as hell, like make le bomb out of stuff that is artifact upgrading tier and often lacks in game (vithrak brains for a single potion). But I guess you could just buy them and game is full of them so it's not a big deal. I'd say the food is pretty ridiculous too, as eating rice bowl gives you more protection than wearing full plate but eh.

Specialized wizords conjure cloud of poison tier 3: that be transmutation make a cloud of poison tier 5: that's already conjuration friend

The problem with hours spent in Deadfire is that half of them is clicking around the map driving little ship, clicking 1111 through ship combat, collecting junk and rice and fruit, and engaging into other meaningless content like that 22th bounty you have to get. In that respect I'd much rather hunt some cult with Keldorn or re-capture castle from trolls than run around a map full of small scattered isles which are not really connected to anything. The areas in Deadfire are big, and map is vast, but the content is simply not there.

Yep, best Aloth is drug Aloth. Keep him on deadeye until his elvish eyes shrink.

buff yourself debuff them target their lowest saving throw nuke when numbers are green

Hard to judge since after particular threshold any class makes monsters explode But Ranger has least interesting skill tree. Priest also has so many great spells you'd better go dual. Esp. high level spells - heya, level 9 blind spell. Lol.

levels 1-8 dis gonna be gooood After level 8: select all>left click

Posting in a great thread. Gj Obsidian doing every mistake possible when including romances. - Dragonspear-level tacky fangirl level flirting? Check. - Bioware everyone is a lover? Check. - Old writers blocking romances cause they didn't want their characters to be ruined, even if these romances (Eder/Female Watcher) would actually make more sense? Check. - And bugs for days! Poor Josh. But maybe in his next historical game if ever approved, he won't have to deal with all this. And this is a studio that did Mask of Betrayer.

The only adventurer activity that NPC scheduling can add to is stealth and thievery (generally, another one could be crafting and trade like caravans and NPCs making stuff to sell like in Ultima), which works better in sandboxes. If even with all scheduling party can just go into any house and take everything it's just cosmetic stuff. Quests with detective work is another thing but it's a lot different from just placing NPCs at house at night and at vendor stall at day. And knowing modern design Obsidian would write everything you need to know in your journal as always making figuring out where NPC might be moot.

What's the disadvantage of making everyone for example a 1st level fighter/15 else with 20 extra beginning points of accuracy and regen? Are class abilities gonna get nerfed then?

VC was always an illusion/self imposed challenge in IE games and in PoE. Knights of the Chalice did it, some old rpgs did it, rogues like Darkest Dungeon or even FTL did resources right, Dark Souls did something quite similar to VC - note all these games either had respawning monsters/forced you to finish content without resting. Actually, Mask of Betrayer did similar stuff, but let's face it - Obsidian will never, ever repeat that, because backlash from community would be hysterical. People are too afraid of strongarm design like that and missing content because they weren't good/quick enough. The most logical thing for Obsidian would be to just make their own system with difficulty based around single encounter instead of a big dungeon. They could expand on cipher-like magic, for example give priests Faith points that would allow extra/stronger casts and would increase if priest behaves accordingly to his god and other possible Ars Magica-inspired stuff. Anything actually interesting and unique and inspired by pnp games would be welcome instead of boring and pretentious not-D&D system PoE had. For actual D&D to happen you'll have to simulate adventure, where you go out of the "safe space" of city/rest places into "adventure" and it takes lots of time and supplies and then party has to survive in the "adventure" microcosm. Whole game design would have to be changed from one people are used to (a checklist of things to do). That or every act of the game only giving you a set number of days to finish it/MoTB curse etc. One other thing I want to mention is casting times. They were not used in PoE much, but if some per-encounter spells would be instant while others would require multiple rounds of casting, you could get your powerful spells in a non-VC system. Not to mention Interrupt value would finally become useful. It's a real time game so why not actually use the friggin time as a resource?

It's true for many classes; you can't be wise and good healer without high Might (and dialogue options coming with that); a battle mage; a rogue who does high damage. Thing is, as an example, PoE system means that you can't make a character that does a lot of damage because he is a master accurate deadly fencing rogue; you will always need high Might to keep up with other damage builds. As such we have high Might fighters, barbarians, rogues, wizards, priests, druids, whatever. In my opinion, in that sense PoE system is not much better than d20 SRD/D&D or even worse; you can't replace your STR with CHA or DEX and call it a prestige or something, and make up a sensible in-world explanation how it works; everyone draws their damage from same source. Wizards, instead of drawing their damage from their skill with magic and thus being different than warriors also pump Might and so on. All ways of doing damage, including friggin guns, are tied to 1 attribute, and so characters become banal.

I just don't concider weapons that add 1.2 more DPS to character as good/interesting/well-designed. I think weapons that now stand apart from others in PoE are either with elemental/physical damage or soulbound weapons. Those really bring something new to the table.

I think most one-handed weapons just don't get enough attention from people. Partially because with DR system players naturally gravitate towards things with higher damage per hit, partially because many of them are weak and uninteresting anyway - nothing like Celestial Fury/Daystar/Mace of Disruption/Crom Fayer. There's custom made spear, two sabres and firebug-proccing dagger which was already nerfed from what I remember of any worth. And aside from spear with tongue twisting name and Resolution, else is WM content.

A few minor things I thought about when playing last patch: - Enough with swords maybe? It's not great that you get high quality Pollaxes at the end of the game and only by making specific choices, but it's so easy to make party stronger by using estocs/greatswords/sabres. - Add DR3 armor that is not robes. Like jackets, gambesons, buffcoats. - Just from design perspective, isn't it weird that debuffs to lower enemy defences may not work because enemy defences are not low enough? That makes buffs stronger than debuffs since they work all the time. In comparison, in IE games some debuffs and most spell breakers just did't allow saving throw at all. Speaking of which adding talents to spellcasters for extra accuracy for specific spells like Spell Specialization would be nice.

I think Obsidian should pull a MoTB, but without epic levels, and make PoE2 in a completely new and weird place (Living Lands, Republics, whatever), with starting level 1, and new story and characters, with old characters being only as legends, rumours, cameos.

Replacing companion with Adventurer is always an option. Can give PoE1 a pass for a chance to slay everyone in Vailian embassy with Pallegina in party since Obsidian didn't have enough time to work on reactivity on systemic level, like in New Vegas. But wouldn't want to see PoE2 go yesmen route that Tyranny did. It turned out completely unbelievable.