thelee

Have to also chime in to say that I absolutely loved Beast of Winter. I hope it's not too much of a spoiler that one of the more interesting aspects of Deadfire is how basically your primary antagonist is a deity who is essentially the embodiment of pure utilitarian benevolence and is one of the kith's greatest advocates (if not somehow the greatest) in the pantheon. But while it was interesting, the writing/narrative didn't always convey the potential conflicts very well. By contrast, Beast of Winter deals with it a lot more, particularly in one specific section It helped address some of the missing potential from the base game Not to mention that I thought the art direction for much of the DLC was fantastic, especially for that section. EDIT to add: I though the difficulty for path of the damned levels 14-15 was satisfyingly challenging for a first-run. With the exception of the final dragon fight! While it was hard, it was actually so hard (probably my fault because I was going through with an under-optimized party) that it actually became easy. When I was down to one last person, instead of letting myself wipe I just kept running back and forth from two seals that deal damage to the dragon (the one on the left and the one on the bottom... no names to avoid spoilers) and killed the dragon that way.

I think this was something like "White Yefner?" But now as of 2.1 it's a missing string, both for its name (5350) and description (5351). See screenshot: Dropbox link to save and output log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3eo4uxn58txr4p9/AABdrXBBkseNB6MbBA8qpTCna?dl=0

what the heck would be the point of Confusion affliction then?

These are really good ideas. Wael's could also cause random perception afflictions at the start of each battles. I dislike the wael+wildmind idea because lore-wise wael is about inscrutability and revelation (which itself is a bit of a paradox, but that's par for the course for wael), not about randomness.

Also, I second having some sort of restricted rest option. (maybe some debuff that compounds with each rest until you sleep at an inn or resting instead of clearing injuries resets everyone to one special injury per rest e.g. 1st rest sets everyone to one injury, 2nd rest sets everyone to two injuries, etc 4th rest is death; plus maybe you can't use food that costs less than XX cp to rest--it's just sailor fodder). People who feel like leaving a dungeon to go back to an inn to rest and are annoyed by that can just not turn it on. I and the rest of the playerbase who used PoE1's limited rests as an actual constraint (and not just a "time to sit through some load screens" count down) can flip it on. (The bonfire style/enemy respawn option is a pretty good idea imo that might avoid the "time to head back to an inn" haters.)

Just to pile on some feedback, my thoughts on two of the challenges: Magran's: utterly pointless. I thought PoE was a real-time-with-pause game. What the hell is the point of me backing a real-time-with-pause event and then disabling that feature? All Magrans really does is "challenge" me to put together a lot of complex scripts. Berath's: would be actually worth turning on if the margin for permadeath wasn't so short that it obsoletes like half of the revive effects in the game (hitting particularly hard the ostensible best reviver in the game, the priest). I don't care that some people think it's meaningless without Trial of Iron, I've played with self-imposed "permadeath" before in BG games, and I can do that myself here; so long as the death feels "fair" (and 6s isn't fair when that means I can't even cast a resurrect or revive the fallen if I'm been caught mid-recovery). I second other people saying that the god challenge is not the place to increase PotD difficulty from level 14-20 (and imo Beast of Winter narrows that margin to 16-20; hopefully megabosses take care of that top end a bit). The main game should be improved, the god's challenges are a spot for weirder things. Abydon is closer to what I expect from a god challenge. If Berath's was a bit longer (10 seconds) then I would be happy with it as a god's challenge.

This. Of all things they could have borrowed from Tyranny this would've been a great one; I never realized how useful being able to sticky the combat tooltip could be.

There really needs to be some kind of collapsing or scrolling in those overlays. It can be real annoying not knowing what afflictions/inspirations are active on a target for when you are trying to counter something.

Random shower thoughts I had on improving sleight of hand: 1. Make a separate button on our action bar that appears if you have sleight of hand (like athletics's second wind), and make it usable outside of stealth--but not in combat. this would fix the problem with pickpocketing being heavily gated by stealth. it would also fix the problem of being unable to reverse pickpocket on hostile foes, because the pickpocket option wouldn't be overridden by the "attack" option when hovering your cursor over them. You would still need good stealth if you wanted to reverse-pickpocket on hostile foes, but I'm fine with that. 2. When reverse pickpocketing, you can only reverse pickpocket explosives that have a PL less than or equal to your your sleight of hand skill. (yes i know a patch reset all explosives to PL0, but whatever PL they used to have could be the threshold needed to plant them on an unsuspecting foe). 3. random loot tables on top of existing pickpocket for pickpocketing people. you can pre-generate a random seed at character creation to prevent save-scumming. but i'm talking about like pickpocketing a random commoner and having a low, but meaningful, chance to see that they have an Emerald or Adra Ban or Scroll of Maelstrom ready to pickpocket behind a sleight of hand skill of 15 or something. both encourages aggressive pickpocketing and investment in sleight of hand. plus, the idea of seeing a commoner with some randomly great item that you can't pickpocket later but have to make a note of to come back later is fun to me.

Not really since you could steal directly from many stores in those games and in BG2 you could even exploit that to get infinite money right from the start of the game. Barring exploits: In BG1 you really couldn't get much with pick pocket (most stores you could steal from just sold mundane items). In BG2 it was a bit better, but most stores didn't let you pickpocket. There were a few specific NPCs that had a decent item to pickpocket. In BG2:ToB I think they forgot to block pickpocketing from the few stores there existed. Boy that was a mistake. But even then at this point most of the best stuff you got was crafted, not bought. I agree with a PP that few RPGs have really gotten thievery right. Most of the fallouts have done well in my experience, but even then there were issues (infamous fallout 2 save corruption bug if you reverse-pickpocketed an activated explosive and then saved your game; fallout:nv has more possibilities than 3 but also fewer big hub areas to go wild with pickpocket/reverse pickpocket). Still, given that Obsidian has a direct lineage to the fallout games (especially New Vegas) I expected better from deadfire.

Thing is, Sleight of Hand isn't one of the fluff skills. It's one of the skills "at the top" which means it definitely does compete with key useful skills like mechanics or alchemy. That's why I said the "easy fix" would be to bump it down to a fluff skill that just so happens to earn you some money. But I would much rather the "harder" fix of making it worth being competitive with something like explosives or athletics.

by the way, if anyone's curious, here's the list I was putting together. this only documents "notable" pickpockets, i.e. not random folk you just get some money <100 cp from. As a general rule, named NPCs tend to have better stuff, but not always. I haven't done beast of winter with this char, and I don't think I ever will because I was starting to get bummed at how crummy sleight of hand actually was. The only really notable thing that you can pickpocket is deltro's caged helm, which ISTR was part of some build in one of these forums. Port Maje Torri - candied nuts Norgrund - key to his locked chest (mechanics 3?) Cinder bomb 3x, whiteleaf, ripple sponge Savia - port maje jail key ...Satahuzi Eofania - Huana Carving (alternate quest solution) Mokeha - rinco's coin purse Queen's Berth Wealthy gentleman - extra Zamar - extra Valian commoner - extra Martino - ring of the marksman 6soh or kill as part of quest for Zamar ...The Wild Mare Luca - Luca's Key for chest (and Khapa Leaf) Aenalys - Aenalys key ...Valera Estate Orso - 471cp Atello - ~230cp Martino - 282cp ...Bardatto Estate Ezzalk - 256cp, white yefner, potion of mental prowess, deltro's cage helm (!!!) (6soh) ...Sanza's Map Emporium Sanza - key to lock (6mech) Periki's Outlook Mataru Ship Owner - amulet of health, 150cp White March Merchant - ~50 cp, ring of minor protection ...Cuitzli's Exotic Herbs Cuitzli - ingredients ...The Dark Cupboard Fassina - Arkemyr's Manor Key ...Mahiri's Metalwork Mahiri - Mahiri's key (8mech) ...Iofri's Raiments Iofri - 262cp ... Arkemyr's Manor Yellow-eye three - quest item for vault Serpent's Crown ...kahanga palace Prince aruihi - folded note (garbage), 156cp The Gullet Overseer Hitenga - marked Soule (???) Begger - ruby ...The Hole fyrna and tavern server - ruby ...pitli's Pitli - Halgot's Warmth ...dereo's lair Dereo - potion of Ascension, scorching venom, 171cp ...delvers row Rust - razorgill dust, Jade, 198cp Bruiser (in ernezzo) - ernezzo supply room key, 35cp Pirate guard (in ernezzo) - 2x razorgill dust, 24cp Ernezzo (in ernezzo) - Coral snuff, key to ernezzo supply room The Spindle Man - the spindle man's key (10 mech) Sacred Stair Dawnstar Vendor - ~ 3x antidote [5soh] Temple Vendor - ~150cp, 2 palm slats, 2x antidote Tiabo - 127cp, solution ...Spire of the Soul Seekers Flaune Elette - 306cp, 2 reagant, potion of the focused mind (6soh), Blood-Soaked Correspondence Brass Citadel ...Fleet master's office Fleet master wakoyo - small key (15 mech) Aedyran Bodyguard - Ruby ...uto's gunsmithy Uto - key (14 mech) Fort Deadlight Snake eyes Condwen - peculiar dice Pirate guard (ramparys) - deadlight horn (??) Dunnage Barquami - fine dagger Carlo Fortuni and Kae Polzech - extra cp ...Kings coffin Pirate - Black Pearl Jacob Harker - fire kelp extract, tavern owner key (12 mech, 1328cp) Pirate (up top) - emerald ...radiant court Dessiral - exceptional dagger (7soh) ...balefire beacon Captain furrante -126cp (5soh), oiled iron key (5soh, ?? Mech much later in questline)

Sleight of Hand is definitely a trap skill choice. I recently rolled a rogue, investing in sleight of hand, and I was going to thoroughly document every single pickpocket opportunity to see what was good and worth it. I got through most of the game world, and it's... extremely underwhelming. First of all, I only put a few points into sleight of hand, and then used the Obsidian dragon pet for another +1. I barely missed out on anything the entire time, and the stuff that I couldn't pickpocket because it required a higher sleight of hand varied wildly in quality (mostly it was mundane daggers, sometimes even hardtack. one person in dunnage has an exceptional dagger, but that's essentially the only thing worth having that was locked behind a modestly high skill check and it was only a 7 required skill). Second of all, sleight of hand is actually gated frequently by stealth, to the point that stealth is actually much more important for pickpocketing than sleight of hand itself. All the sleight of hand skill in the world won't matter if you're trying to pick the pockets of two townspeople facing each other to talk. Third, most of the pickpocketing is just ~30-50 gold pieces (in various forms of currency). In some harder areas, it can go up to like 100-200, but if I'm putting non-renewable skill points into this, I would expect way more than an amount of money that becomes trivialized once I can start looting/selling exceptional or superb gear. Fourth, it would be great if sleight of hand actually influenced reverse pickpocketing of explosives, but: despite having been a "known issue" since 1.0, you still can't reverse pickpocket onto hostile npcs, which is most encounters in the game. and, see point #2 above: there are no sleight of hand checks involved for reverse pickpocketing, so you are actually gated on stealth (and to a lesser extent explosives), not sleight of hand Fifth, even in some of the cases where sleight of hand can yield significant rewards, it's actually no different from investing in mechanics, because you're pickpocketing keys off people to open store chests. Except arguably mechanics is much more useful since you can also use it for disarming/setting traps. The simplest fix would be to just bump sleight of hand from one of the "Active" or "combat" skills and turn it into a "passive" or "conversational" skill like diplomacy or intimidate. The one difference is that you could actually use sleight of hand as an early game money maker. The best fix would be to make sleight of hand actually worth being an "active" or "combat" skill. Meaningfully gated rewards (possibly even scaling with your sleight of hand skill), making it so that you're not either extremely reliant on stealth or extremely redundant with mechanics, and possibly linking reverse pickpocketing to sleight of hand in some meaningful way (and reverse pickpocketing is actually more useful).

I don't know about the other stuff, but I can confirm that Cloak of Poverty functions correctly. You need less than 10k gold, and you only see the resolve bonus during combat, according to the following range: [0, 1000) +5 resolve [1000, 2000) +4 resolve [2000, 5000) +3 resolve [5000, 8000) +2 resolve [8000, 10000) +1 resolve

i think this is related to the gigantic output_log (and fps drop) that occurs over time. to clear it - exit the game completely, find the output_log (instructions in this forum for reporting a bug will tell you how) and delete it. it is probably > 1 GB in size. relaunch the game. that works for me. have to do it every 30-45 minutes (and my recycle bin fills up with 1GB output_log files. so empty that bin and hopefully you have lots of hard drive space)

So, curiously, I switched out to Aedyr Channel Guns and they perform exactly as one would expect. That is, grapeshot primarily targets above-deck crew, chainshot -> sails, and cannonball-> hulls. In fact, with this ship set up, I had Aedyr Channel Guns on one side and Wyrmtongue on another, and it was actually jarring the difference - the Aedyr Channel Guns did pretty much as they expected, whereas Wyrmtongue performed very randomly regardless of ammo I selected. Is there something buggy about how the "fiery" cannons work? That's the only common thread I can see here - both the Magranite Flamethrower and Wyrmtongue have little fiery symbols on the "fire cannons" screen indicating that they have an extra chance to set things on fire. Has something about their aiming/ammo gotten confused?

So, I just tried using Wyrmtongue at a more modest range (~300m) and it also appears to be targeting fairly randomly. A side effect of whatever the heck's going on here is that ship-to-ship combat is harder when I don't appear to be exercising much control over where I'm firing.

Degenerative error output/stack traces would be extremely repetitive, so it would be unsurprising that it would compress extremely well.

Uh, and then here it is again as a cannonball instead hitting the sails twice. Does the Magranite Flamethrower now just target randomly regardless of ammo type? *confused*

Uh, surprisingly, here's me right after that post using the flamethrower with cannonball (which is suppossed to target hull and below-deck) instead hitting an above-deck crew member.

I'm not sure where exactly the issue is, whether it's the cannon, whether it's the ships I'm fighting (generally galleons now), the range I'm at, or some other bug, but I used to be able to charge up to ships really close (70-100m) and bombard them with grapeshot every other turn to basically disable them, but now when I do that, I actually very uncommonly hit above-deck crew members. Frequently I hit the hull! Sometimes even below-deck crew members! Which is weird, because grapeshot isn't even supposed to damage the hull or below-deck crew members! In fact, here's a screenshot I took of the magranite flamethrower hitting below deck crew member twice, which in previous runthroughs literally never ever happened if I used grapeshot. So again, I don't know if this is a regression specific to 2.0/2.0.1, some issue with Magranite Flamethrowers, or the ships I'm attacking, but it really seems more like I'm just hitting completely random things on the enemy ship. Dropbox link to save before a ship battle, along with output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0goytf6og8p6l2q/AAD2rquBC1GlnVIzmWuZvWQVa?dl=0

Hey, I love my Od Nua statue and other collector's items, but I fully agree with this. There must have been some loony group-think rationalization to think that a game key in a physical box is the same thing as a physical copy of the game. This is deceptive, frankly. I backed PoE1 at a high level, too, and even though I literally never touched the discs (and I know that the discs were a pain in the butt for Obsidian because of patching), they were exactly what I paid for. Even though I never planned on using the discs for Deadfire, I nevertheless felt cheated when I opened the otherwise extremely excellent packaging to see a game key inside. Hell, if the obsoleteness of the disc as a media was a problem, a USB storage device would've sufficed. (I am not a lawyer and don't know what would constitute a slam-dunk case of false advertising, but I would suffice to say that if this were a AAA production and not a smaller indie studio fig-backed project, there would probably be lawyers sniffing around and I wouldn't blame them.)

Very similar to previously reported bug at https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/105103-20-no-risen-enemies-at-poko-kohara-titan-fight-on-potd/ Since the PotD rebalancing, the first fight in the Engwithan Waystation (enter and go to the right), some risen enemies spawn throughout the fight (running in from off-screen), including a champion and a wizard. This time... NO risen enemies. Combined with my previous bug report, it seems like 2.0 somehow broke some of the PotD difficulty rebalancing. Dropbox link to save at start of Engwithan Waystation, after the fight with no risen adds, and an output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l5triyeck7384ku/AADBngR4JCKg2gKKwuPr9WU7a?dl=0 PS. I have to say, I try to remain positive and stoic being a software engineer myself so I know bugs are just a fact of life, but it's hard not to get extremely frustrated that every single major patch seems to introduce some new set of regressions.

In the revamped PotD, during the fight against the Engwithan Titan at Poko Kohara, in addition to the titan, i also get some blights and beetles, but since the revamp I also get a few risen enemies (I believe some archers). This most recent run in 2.0 I got nothing, just the blights and beetles. Some trigger didn't fire. For reference: I *always* kite the titan away from the main fight, so I can deal with them first, then deal with everyone else, and normally that hasn't stopped the risen from, well, rising. I doubt the kiting in this run broke anything this time. Linked is a dropbox link to a save before the fight, after the fight, and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/06du6q4jgg3n2ly/AAAuhUmZNjgB2s4yWzSFOxMIa?dl=0

As requested in this thread (https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104533-20-when-boarding-enemy-ship-immediately-at-the-start-of-the-encounter-the-opening-taunt-is-attributed-to-main-character-instead-of-the-enemy/) I'm creating a new post for a case where when boarding an enemy ship, the opening taunt is being attributed to the main character instead of the enemy captain. I missed the screenshot of the text floating above my mainchars head, but here's one showing the dialogue entry in the log being attributed to mainchar ("Kyrie"): Dropbox link to autosave, quicksave before ship combat, and zip-ed output_log (it was a massive 15mb) https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9nk453nas907v0w/AAAH9YxL5UHnt3ZLP02EqZeJa?dl=0