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Adul

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Everything posted by Adul

  1. To make sure my point is clear, I don't actually have a problem with confusion itself, confused combatants should indeed do random actions and/or wander around aimlessly until their condition wears off. What I have a problem with is my party's AI, which just ignores confused enemies. Of course, there's a good argument to be made for AI treating confused targets as less of a threat than non-confused targets, but in my opinion it should definitely not treat them like they were neutral or friendly creatures, which currently seems to be the case.
  2. Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I'm using a bunch of other bows, including Cloudpiercer, on my various characters. My whole party is using bows in order for everyone to benefit from Twinned Arrows, so I'll take all the nice ones I can get my hands on. I might stick with Sabra Marie, as sometimes the confusion is actually somewhat helpful. We'll see. How this game handles confusion just kind of annoys me. Wish it was like in BG, where confused enemies stayed hostile, and just started acting erratically. I think the game changing up their allegiance is messy and weird. That's my feedback for the devs, I guess, in case any of them is listening. As I said, otherwise I'm really enjoying the game, and I think I'm starting to love it like some of those old Infinity games.
  3. I'm playing through PoE for the first time, and I'm really enjoying it. I've first played it years ago, but never quite got to the end of the game. This time I have a 6 ranger custom party. Right now I'm doing the White March expansion, and so far it's been great. I've recently found the unique bow "Sabra Marie", which is a very nice weapon, so I stuck an elemental lash enchantment on it and gave it to one of my rangers. But since I did that, I've been experiencing some very irritating behaviors during combat. Here's the thing: Sabra Marie has an enchantment that confuses enemies on a critical hit. So during combat, enemies attacked by the character who wields it have a tendency to randomly become confused. That much is expected. However, I've noticed that when that happens, the confused enemy's selection circle sometimes changes to green, and since I'm using AI to direct most of the combat, my characters and pets stop attacking the confused enemy and go for someone else. This often results in all sorts of unfortunate situations. For example, this just happened to me: all of my characters were attacking a large troll. My pets surrounded it, and my rangers attacked it with bows from afar. Suddenly, the troll becomes confused, and my characters stop attacking it. The pets run past the troll to start attacking the ranged xaurips in the back, and my rangers also move forward to attack the other enemies. But then the confusion wears off, and the troll is now in the middle of my ranger group, and starts wreaking havoc on my poor defenseless back line. And that's no good. I'm not sure why the AI is programmed to stop attacking confused enemies. It's not like confused enemies are no longer a threat. They're just somewhat less of a threat, temporarily, until the confusion wears off, at which point they become a full threat once again. I've looked through the in-game options to see if there's anything I could do to change this behavior, but I couldn't find anything. But maybe I missed it? Please let me know if I did. The way it is, using Sabra Marie is more of a detriment to me than a benefit. If there's no other solution, I'm thinking of downloading a save game editor and try to remove the pesky enchantment that causes me all this grief, if that's indeed possible to do.
  4. Ultimately we all know that levels are an abstraction anyhow for the "gameist" part of an RPG. I'm probably more bugged by the narrative railroading to accomplish the level drain than being reset to level 1. I don't necessarily disagree. I suppose it's up to the designers of each game how abstract or literal to the narrative they want character progression to be. Some games like Mass Effect and The Witcher treat levels as if they had very little to no bearing on your character's story, as even at level 1 you are an incredibly capable person. But in games like Baldur's Gate level is hugely responsible for what enemies and challenges your character can face, and therefore there it plays a larger part in the story. E.g. if your character is so incapable starting out that they cannot even survive an encounter with a hungry wolf, it's hard to argue that level isn't part of the narrative. Though I think you're right in that PoE might be closer to the "level is an abstract" end of the scale.
  5. I can't ignore the fact that starting from level 1 allows Obsidian to reuse the same character progression system from PoE with little to no required rework, potentially lowering the development cost and time of the game, and when this is justified with a seemingly contrived story event, it has the outward appearance of cut corners. Though I do agree with the others who said that the change itself would be less grating if we were playing an entirely new character or a reincarnation, rather than the actual Watcher from the first game. But even that would not explain how the returning companions took a dive in the combat effectiveness department.
  6. I hope it's not too late for a change and they reconsider. Deleveling the protagonist puts an unnatural break into their progression, which is an integral part of every RPG. When you create an RPG sequel, this is a limitation you should keep in mind and work with, rather than try to cheat the system and reset everything, which sends a message to your players that their previous toils were less than meaningful. Not to mention it disincentivizes replaying the saga as a whole, as the player will know from the start that their level progression from the first game will be lost when they start the second one, which makes it more difficult to care going into it.
  7. I have to be honest, I would find it disappointing for Deadfire to use the RPG sequel trope of "traumatic event happened, you're back at level 1", which is just an unfortunate cop-out in my opinion. Mass Effect did this, Gothic did this, and I think it's a mistake that's best avoided. What I would hope for instead is the same dedication to long-term character progression that the BG saga managed to achieve, which is one of my favorite things about that series. BG2 managed to make high-level combat not only approachable to new players, but even more satisfying than the original game's combat was. It's not easy to do this, but if it's done right, I think it's worth the effort. There's just something magical about having your level 40 looking back at their journey of hundreds of gameplay hours, starting as a lowly novice and becoming a godlike master of battle, or magic, or whatever else. It would be great to have another CRPG series where this sort of arc is attainable.
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