anameforobsidian

It's worthwhile to change armor based on the dungeon and the actual range of the DPS. Many times a tank and spank strategy works, and then it's best to have as little armor as possible. There are other situations where light armor is better: Certain enemies will break or overwhelm engagement. Specters, Fampyrs, and xaurip hordes are particularly bad at this. Some enemies target your back lines with AoEs, especially kobold priests. Dragons and some drakes have larger aoes that are hard to dodge. Some enemies use dominate and confusion, like vithracks, spore mushrooms, and fampyrs. In those cases a well equipped party member can sometimes cut through your back line. Or worse, if they dominate your tank, you're basically ****ed. Basically, having one character in heavy armor and the rest in none gives you a lot of strength, but it's a brittle sort of strength that the right enemy can take advantage of.

You absolutely can run away from enemies and exit combat. If you go a certain distance, enemies give up, turn around, and go back to their spawn points. You can even exploit this for fun and profit. Few classes just have the speed required since many enemies (rightly) can move faster than humans. Chanters, barbs, wizards, and I believe monks have abilities that let you move fast enough to get away if you haven't found boots of speed yet.

I'm a bit more conflicted on XP now. On the one hand, the easiest way to fix a power differential would be lowering sidequest xp. On the other, there's more and in some cases more interesting content based on sidequests. A lot of times characters who do sidequests have accomplished a lot more, and that should be noted by somewhat significant in game progress. You get a lot of xp from killing monsters already. There's at least 32 categories of creatures, and (I think) 82 creatures within those categories. Most of those creatures give at least 120 xp for filling out the entry. That's at least 10,000 xp for killing things, which is enough to get you through the first five levels. In reality it's probably more. People act like kill xp is complete gone, when it's still relatively lucrative.

Sagani kinda sucks for most of the game. Personally, I wouldn't mind the ability to trade in pets for a dps bonus (but smaller than the dps you get from having a pet out). That gives you a nice static dps character (not everyone needs to be active dps). Rangers could also throw out "traps" to create zones of control. It would be unique from other classes and still be interesting.

I would love to see facing become more important in both combat and stealth. It could theoretically end the place of engagement if mobs got an attack speed and damage bonus for attacking the back of another character. Even better you could build it with varying strength into certain classes and monsters, which would help differentiate tactics some more. However, I don't think non-melee attacks really need a penalty. The system already carves up characters not spec'd for frontline combat if they find themselves in unexpected melees, and the combat is relatively fast and brutal already for a rtwp. Bonuses on top of the existing ones would basically lead to ranged characters getting chunked in 5 or 6 seconds after engaging.

Engagement: I like it the way it is, but I think a shift/5 steps solution would be nice, especially as a trait. Or, disengagement defenses could be a set of traits. Then people could build characters to their gameplay style. Also, a zone implementation rather than a move implementation would lead to more interesting combat if it could be implemented. Almost all of your suggested changes seem like basically soft ways to take engagement out of the game. Let's go down the list: 1. I don't understand how this would work. Disengagement attacks only function as an interrupt. 2. How would they do this and still have disengagement attacks? Far more time is spent recovering than attacking, and the time not spent recovering is spent attacking. It would it would mean the window to attack for disengaging would be so narrow as to be useless. 3. Absolutely. It would lead to greater verisimilitude. 4. I disagree. If you treat the system as an abstraction, when someone is trying to run away, either their defenses or movement should be lowered. If it's not an abstraction, why should they have an accuracy penalty? Enemies graze and miss enough as is. At least it should have the same accuracy as a regular attack. 5. Sure, why not. As it stands, your suggestions would strongly encourage a high APM strategy where you run when your enemy starts the attack animation so that they get a weaker attack and go to cooldown, and then come back in to strike. That's silly gameplay, even if it has a small set of proponents.

This is really getting pathetic. Sensuki's temper tantrums, the sudden flood of negative spam, the troll codex review, etc. It's a bunch of incestuous communities realizing that their groupthink isn't dominant, and they don't own works of creative expression that they had no part in making. The comments, like the original post, are neither valuable nor insightful. If the game was really bad, people would be ignoring it. I can't think of the last time I talked about Assassin's Creed 1 or the Syndicate FPS. To give an rpg example, I'll talk the **** out of some Geneforge and Avernum/Exile, but I've mostly ignored Avadon. People are still talking about and enjoying PE, despite the trolls.

I'm playing with a solo barb right now on PoD. 1. Build some tankiness into your barb, you will miss enemies a lot, and they will hit you a lot. 2. Dual-Wielding is uniquely good for barbs because of the one stands alone talent. It can be viable from what I've heard. 3. Moon-godlike is best, but fire could work for a solo run. 4. It's received mixed reviews, unless you use retribution. I love it. 5. I would crank might, res, and probably int or perception. Might is great for moon-godlikes, because your healing ability triggers every single battle. Barbs do get a huge benefit from con. My stats aren't the best, so I can't recommend a stat build. I will say this for abilities: At level 1 it's up to you, although the barbs terror will mostly be overwritten by a story power you get at the end of act 1, so Frenzy was the choice for me. Get wild sprint at level 3 if you're soloing. It lets you run away from bad fights. Also, if you're careful, you can watch the enemies, and use it to pull groups of one or two at a time, which is easier. One stands alone is awesome. Get it when it pops up at level 5, because 20 static damage per hit can't be beat. My barbarian is now more likely to survive a fight with multiple enemies than a one on one duel. Talents: You need to get proficiency talents as soon as possible. Accuracy is a big issue in PoD. Adventurer has some really nice ones, but no range, and the weapons are hard to find. Also, I like accurate carnage a lot. It means that you can target the weaker and less armored opponents, and it's easier to hit the armored ones.

As someone who's first game ever was Fallout (and then Thief), I really like this game. It references the classics without being enslaved to them. It introduced new class mechanics that are actually pretty interesting, and stopped the whole wizards fight while the kids play outside nonsense. The best parts of it for me are: Party design. The game is immensely freeing when it comes to party design. You can do some very fun parties, and that's where the real replayability of the game lies. World design. The world is one of the most consistent worlds I have ever played in. The gods really are mysterious ****. Society really is moving forward from the past in an early modern sense. All the areas make sense in context to each other. The worst part of the game for me is simple: Not enough content. I never really got the feeling of setting off into the unknown and maps feel a bit isolated. One of the best things from BG is that the maps corresponded to regions. There were deserts out to the south and southeast, coastlines to the west and large forests in the North. PE could definitely use more npcs, and places to go divided into regions. Right now it's beautiful, but lacks the feeling of a complete world that BG had. The stronghold is similarly bereft of content. Yes, you're rebuilding a fortress, but it should have some real characters in it and feel a bit like a living village. A few quests from stronghold npcs, and some random personality would make a world of difference. Defiance Bay could also use some more quests in areas outside of Ondra's Gift.

Ciphers are really fun, but I do think they need to be toned down a bit. Part of that is that confuse needs to be more unique from dominate. The BG version of confuse where they turn uncontrollable and attack anything nearby would have been better. I might even like to see them push dominate back to level 7, and have a stronger version of confuse where the target goes into a barbarian rage (+damage / attack speed, - deflection). In later game fights, I hardly noticed focus because I had so much of it, and it only took a shot from my blunderbuss to get a lot back, so I also think that might be toned down. And repulsive wave or whatever definitely needs to be toned down. Also, I really enjoyed the game on normal and I'm having a lot more fun on my PoD run. It forces you to start playing with all the systems, and you can really see how they work together a lot better. Sometimes you do have to break engagement and run, or you will die. Knowing when to do so is quite valuable. The hordes of large enemies that overrun your positioning and force you to react is also more fun. Having the food / rest / potion / and item buffs work in tandem is quite nice, and makes you think about what you value. All of that said, I think the cipher's true secret to being more fun is not being slightly OP. It's being a unique surprise. IE engine classes were relatively samey. You had the cannon/tank/rogue/healer thing going on with multiclass leading to gishes, except by BG:ToB healers are pretty much dropped for rods of resurrection. Most games have some variant of this, normally dropping it to cannon/tank/healer. The cipher is a gishy controller that uses dps as a resource. It is what Pillars of Eternity fights are at their best: fast, smart, and lethal. I've found that the other classes that up the stakes like that are also really fun, particularly Barbs.

Aquaria disagrees.

If you're having a really hard time with him, send one character into the room. Then when the battle starts, run down to the spiders or beetles in the rooms on the bottom. They're different factions, and the two sides will kill each other while you watch.

I'm somewhat surprised you couldn't remake Eothas with the missing souls.

I like your comment, but I interpreted the situation with the Engwithans slightly differently. The impression that I got was that they tried to prove that there were gods and failed. Then, they analyzed their attempt to prove that there were gods and determined that anyone else who tried to prove that there were gods would also fail. Finally, they considered the ramifications of widespread knowledge of these facts and determined that chaos would result. I don't see this as a result of their strong religious beliefs, but rather a sign that their religious beliefs were in the process of dying. A people with a strong faith won't be questioning the roots of that faith, or trying to prove it scientifically. Rather, that measure to me indicates that most of their society had fallen away from their faith and this attempt to prove the existence of the gods was a desperate attempt by the theocratic elite to restore the base of their power. They didn't go looking for the gods expecting to find nothing, they went looking for the gods expecting to be able to find them and restore the faith of the masses. When their search failed, and they convinced themselves that their failed attempt was certain proof that the gods did not exist (whether it actually was proof as we understand it being irrelevant), they panicked. Being theocratic elite they picked a solution that was comfortable to them (preserving faith at any cost). In other words, a primitive people with power undertook an extreme and violent campaign to contain a perceived threat to the source of their power. That's about what I would expect, and so in that respect the story makes sense to me. Their level of scientific or technological or theological development isn't necessarily an issue with regard to these determinations, because there is no necessity that their determinations be "true". All that is necessary is that the Engwithans believe those determinations to be "true", and demonstrating flawed logic on their part or a lack of the necessary development to correctly reach those determinations simply reinforces the possibility that they reached those determinations incorrectly - rather than demonstrating that they could not have reached them. If they were not advanced enough to see the flaws in their reasoning, well, that just makes them all the more likely to respond to that faulty reasoning fanatically. The story says that they did what they did to try to save the world from the eventual chaos by creating gods (although it isn't clear exactly what that means), presumably ones that will hold up to cursory scrutiny (although it is not clear how they accomplished this), and then spread that faith while also secretly working to prevent anyone from repeating the experiments (or whatever) that they performed which caused them to conclude that there were no "real" gods. One of the advantages (eyeroll) of the vague nature of the story is that we don't know anything about the real nature of the world or how it works, and so we don't really know whether the Engwithans were right. We really don't have any answers about the "true" cosmology of the world; we only have (some) answers about how the Engwithans perceived the world. To a certain extent that is okay...this is after all our first foray into Eora, and it isn't unreasonable for the writers to hold back details for future products. I do feel though that the name of the game sold a story that was going to strike more deeply into this aspect of Eora than it actually did. There were lots of pillars, but no so much eternity (so to speak). So, while I can rationalize away a lot of story flaws, it bugs me that the story stopped so far short of where I expected it to go. I just wanted to do more than like this. That was a really good post.

Eh. There are problems in the game. Most of the criticism in the review and thread are so negative that getting valid problems out of them requires separating a lot of chaff. Examples of chaff: 1. It's not exactly like the Infinity Engine. - Judge it on its own merits. And I really don't like the bull**** tribalism that's building up around PE vs. BG1. I happen to think both are good games. I like PE's combat and writing better than unmodded BG1, but like BG1's exploration better. 2. I don't like Josh Sawyer so I'll mention his name and philosophy every time the system hiccups. - Tough ****. 3. Nitpicky ****. Writing a thousand word post on a minor flaw the game has. 4. Combat is boring, that's why I played it for hours and can offer in depth discussions of it. 5. I thought I was a developer, but then it turned out that they made decisions I don't like against my express permission and now I'm super butthurt about it.

I agree. Not only does it take a lot of in-game money, it also takes a ton of in-game time. Just stack the bonuses. It's still a non-trivial choice compared to some of the better inn rooms.

5 - Take one stands alone. It's awesome. I only saw it until too late, and now I can't make a dual-wielding build based off it.

It's just not a great review. Pretty standard "this game sucks, and its over too quickly" fare from the codex. The reviewer hated the game so much that he played 15 levels of an optional dungeon. Let's go point by point otherwise: Stats leading to samey -builds, because the game wants you to play with one tank and five nukers. Then he recants and says, unless you go for something crazy like a 6 wizard party. This is a non-criticism. The game leads to boring builds if you choose a boring playstyle? Wow. Talents being boring. I didn't find this to be the case, at all. You can strongly change a character based on talent selection, and there's a whole thread complaining that the game autoselects skills and talents for you. Druid being the best class in the game. Except it can't revive, it's heals are slow, so its not the best healer. It's certainly not the best melee, and beastform can disable spells anyways. It does have strong damage potential, but it's not better than the other classes. The cipher is terrible because its unbalanced, and balance is killing the game. Sure. Waves of repulsion is overpowered, and the cipher could do with less focus, but its a pretty solid class design. Crafting does the job. It needs access to more unique status effects, but you only get to make one superb weapon and piece of armor, so it needs to count. Engagement could use a shift/5step system, but it makes combat more interesting by meaning that you have to structure and plan your movements. Enemies break engagement all the time, but more enemies could play with it. The health/endurance complaint is ridiculous. Regenerating endurance is bad, because your characters lose more health is a terrible argument since if one of your characters drops a lot of characters lose a lot more health. There are quite strong consequences to letting characters lose health. But even more problematic is his praise of limited resources (and healing potions were barely limited resources in the IE games), yet complaints about the rest system being ineffective. The health+rest system means that you do have to carefully manage limited resources, far more so than the IE games because there's no resurrection. He says buffs are terrible in the game, but then complains that there's no stat to control accuracy. Buffs are the main way you tactically alter accuracy. Also, the whole it only works if it's a hard counter schtick is tired. Buffs can make a situation better or worse, the control is graduated in a way that binaries don't allow. The stronghold does need more interaction. It's three screens, not four from the paths to the stronghold. The writing does need stronger focus on one theme. However his criticisms of Thaos are mostly unjustified. Of course Thaos isn't going to fight you. Guards are everywhere, looking for someone to kill. The text adventures do need more variety in skill checks, but failures have penalizing debuffs. "This is literally the worst Obsidian game I’ve played to date. That’s right, I even had more fun with Dungeon Siege 3 - at least it was a fun beat ‘em up, as opposed to this lifeless, uninspired husk." That's just stupid and wrong.

I did it on normal without any cheese. Charmed the dragon with my cipher. She killed the adds. Then it was a slow buff the party, debuff the dragon, beat it up game. Everyone did have beastslayer weapons though.

I'm soloing PoD with a moonlike barb, as a way for scouting out my triple crown achievement. I'm definitely going with a chanter for that. It's working fairly well so far. You use the fast running power for retreats a lot, and to get the perfect pulls. Caed Nua sucks, basically it's a save and reload until scrolls swing the right way game. Xaurips skirmishers are stunlock murder machines. That said, I don't think build matters as much as people make it out. It's more a matter of good tactics, stealth, and smart pulls.

I actually would have liked it if they had given less information about the Gods / hadn't given the big reveal. Save that for a sequel, because it felt a bit rushed and less climactic than it should have been. I think the game sort of lacked thematic focus in general though. They should have honed in on one of these aspects, and repeatedly made all of the companions and story affected by it: The dangers versus potential of animancy. New technology leading to a conflict with piety. The danger of going insane from your past lives (plural). International politics and the consequences of Colonialism. Focus on fixing Waidwen's Legacy. As it stands, we got a bit of each, but I would like it if a few were made more dominant and thus stronger. As it stands, only Pallegina and possibly Durance adequately incorporate multiple themes.

On PoD Solo certain parts absolutely require scrolls. Also, there are some spells that are scroll only. Also, enchanting is absolutely necessary to get the best gear in the game. Foods provide a unique buff that adds on to other bonuses, rather than suppressing them. Some potions are in limited supply, and they can make a big difference in hard battles.

If your going to criticize the game at least get it right. Wichts are hardly wights. Wights are later game than ghouls, level drain, and semi-intelligent. Xaurips are kobolds. They're dumb lizards that serve dragons. There's more stuff related to D&D, but that's just because D&D has taken heavily from most European myths already. Part of fantasy is a connection to myths, so there will always be some overlap. I'm just glad there's no evil races like Orcs or Drow in this game. Also, wichts (despite being similar to the tradition of kobold) and Skuldyr are relatively unique.

You can also charm your charmed characters. It works like a....

A. That's ridiculous. You can't complain about the game being tank and spank and then say that you should let your tank die as quickly as possible. So, the ideal strategy is to have a tank, kill him as quickly as possible and then win? B. The system punishes you for taking damage, like it should. Yes, tank & spank with heals can be an effective strategy, but it's not terribly efficient. Crowd control is better. C. The knock out itself drops health pretty substantially. D. The total health damage to the party can be significantly greater if the wrong people get knocked out. E. You're comparing two suboptimal modes of play, and saying the game is broken because it encourages neither, but it temporarily numerically disencourages one less than the other.