thelee

Sometimes I feel like having played PoE1 a lot is actually a hindrance, because I'm never sure what learned behavior I have to unlearn for PoE2.

Kind of +1. I used to always make my CHARNAME a wizard-type (occasionally branching out to be a cipher/rogue-type), until I went back and played World of Warcraft for a while. To do something different, I rolled a support/healer shaman, and I ended up loving the experience so much I rolled a healer druid, too. Since then my CHARNAMES in poe have mostly been priests (current count of run-throughs: 2x wael, 2x berath, 1x magran, 1x skaen). I think in party-games "support" take to mean "incidental" so people are reluctant to make their CHARNAME a support class. Whereas at least for me in WoW, while support role is not necessarily for everyone, it can tickle the right type of person's fancy to be critical for a fight in a way that isn't about taking down enemies or the opposing team but on saving your friends' lives. EDIT: that being said, if obsidian is interested in boosting the # of people rolling support classes (not that it really matters), they could just stop providing support NPCs. I have to imagine that back in the ol' Baldur's Gate/2 days very few people rolled a thief because the game gave you like a bajillion thief-y NPCs, some of them better than you could ever hope to be (thinking of Jan and all his special items). Same thing with wizards (Edwin would just pwn a CHARNAME wizard with his extra spellcasting, both in BG and BG2).

Wait, are graze/crit damage modifiers still additive in Deadfire?

Without constant interrupts like in PoE, it feels like perception really needs a helping hand. Especially since, as I understand it, MightStrength's weapon damage bonus is multiplicative, making it comparatively stronger in Deadfire than in PoE1. Humble suggestion: simply double the accuracy bonus (and penalty) from perception? You could do the same thing with the deflection bonus/penalty for resolve and restore StrengthMight to its former glory. Maybe I'm wrong and someone has crunched the numbers otherwise. But something tells me that +1 accuracy just isn't on par with +3% weapon damage, spell damage, action speed, or some bonus aoe/duration.

While it's true that committee-based or fan-based game design would likely be terrible, this is still ultimately a video game that needs customers, and "the customer is always right." Sometimes it means Obsidian taking its backer beta/fan feedback figuratively, not literally. (illustrative quote: "the cries of the poor are not always just, but if you do not listen then you will never know what justice is.") JE Sawyer had a story in a GDC presentation where people complained to him during PoE1 backer beta about how guns mechanically sucked. They changed the sound effects to be more dramatic and that solved most of the complaints, without affecting the mechanics of how the guns worked. There were several more stories like this.

It's kind of hard to follow the thread (I agree that Gromnir's in-character writing can be tedious to parse at times, though frankly I'm impressed s/he's kept it up for literally years), but I just want to reiterate some points, underlining something I wrote, and possibly distill some confused discussion: 1. Overleveling is actually important. There's no point in levels/experience/advancement/whatever in a RPG if every encounter feels just as taxing as the one before you leveled up. Anyone who's ever played Oblivion would get a firsthand experience of this, which actually had a game system that for min-maxers actually encouraged staying at level 1-5, because at those levels enemies were handicapped and past that enemies scaled virtually as strongly as you did (and for suboptimal characters, moreso). (There are many other games that have similarly broken systems--like Final Fantasy 8--but I suspect a game like Oblivion is more on the radar of people in discussion here.) Notably for Fallout 3/New Vegas (which was based on the same engine as Oblivion), Bethesda/Obsidian learned the lessons from Oblivion and stopped level scaling for enemies at a certain point (and focused more on enemy mixes), and made it more of a step function instead of a continuous function. 2. I don't think hitting the level cap should only be possible for completionists. Some of the assertions being made here sound like Obsidian screwed up by letting you hit the level cap without getting 100% of side quests and critical path in PoE. I disagree. PoE was a little too generous with XP before bounties got scaled back, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to let people play with high-level toys without having to do 100% of the game. Completely made up but illustrative numbers here: if the critical path is 60% of level cap, then doing all the side quests should get me to 120%, with 20% wasted exp. I should have the freedom to not do quests if I want, because forcing me to do every quest just so I can see the high-level toys seems to me like a grind. 3. I don't think the problem is overleveling, but simply that: if you design a game with a level cap, design encounters that are intended to be done at that level cap. Overleveling past even whatever nominal high-level scaling for critical path is fine to me, both for the sake of mainly-critical-path-players and also the sense of power that completionists should feel for juicing up their characters (e.g. grinding to the star level in Chrono Trigger or level 99 in Earthbound). But if you're going to design high-end toys, I want there to be some a significant number of encounters that actually needs it, or at least lasts long enough where you can unleash them (i.e. the Lavos fight in Chrono Trigger, lengthy multi-form bosses in many Final Fantasies; whereas in PoE I can roflstomp high-level-scaled Thaos in what seems like a few seconds). It doesn't need to be a critical path thing (because that would be a hard gate for normalsauce players), but just give me/us somewhere to play with our big toys for a while. It doesn't even need to provide rewards, it could just be some special sigil that appears next to your character portrait. I think if such a thing existed, I think it would quell a significant share of "PotD is too easy" sort of complaints. (Arguably for #3 Llengrath was the level 16 content in PoE, but I disagree. Concelhaut was a refreshing high-level playground for the White March I level cap [ignoring the fact that you could use the Destroy Vessels effect on that soulbound two-handed sword to one shot Concelhaut himself] but for whatever reason it feels like Llengrath's difficulty did not scale up to the power one could have with the White March II level cap.)

I've taken to playing PotD with five party members (partially inspired by deadfire's scaling down to five party members) to give the game more reasonable difficulty. I still end up roflstomping fights if I level up too quickly in e.g. the White March, but it's better than before where any priest or wizard in my party basically had only enough time to cast their per-encounter spells before the fight was over. That being said, I think feeling powerful (read: overleveling) is important, and anyone who's ever played Oblivion and its utterly broken scaling system should know that wishing for high-level scaling to make enemies universally harder is basically a cursed monkey paw wish. However, one thing that annoys me a bit about PoE is that there's not much to do at level 16. You have all these immensely powerful spells and abilities, but not really anyone to use it against. It's immensely overkill for Sun-in-Shadow even with high-level scaling, and even in part for the Kraken and Llengrath fights (not to mention that some of the end-game stuff you get from killing Llengrath herself, so that's one less hard fight to get a chance to use it). I'm mostly fine with the difficulty curve as it is, and--unlike apparently many others--I recognize that my PotD-face-melting (and The Ultimate achievement-getting) self puts me into a small percentage of masochistic players. BUT I just want a small section of the game where I actually need to use things like Wall of Many Colors, Defensive Web, Reaping Knives, Hand of Weal and Woe not as a roflstomp-win-more but as an important part of my arsenal. Otherwise, what's the point of having all these cool toys?

Maybe it's the fact that I play on PotD all the time, but I've never had any shortage of enemies to unlock every soulbound weapon. I mean, some reasonableness is required - you can't do the stronghold questline to get Gyrd Háewanes Sténes after doing everything else in the game and expect there to be enough fights left in Sun in Shadow to unlock it all. I actually found one of the quest-based unlocks to be far more annoying - the one where you have to drink in every bar in the Dyrwood. Maybe early on this is OK, but for me, by the late game, save/load times are looong from all the trash I've been accumulating/selling (even with an SSD), so hopping around maps to unlock the soulbound weapon involves many minutes of staring at loading screens and is just plain tedious.

True this. Companies like Google, or even Blizzard, do betas for products that are essentially already finished and they just want to generate some hype or lower some expectations while they finish polish. Whereas the backer beta is super beta. Case in point - I haven't had a single stable playthrough, too many crashes and problems. When I did the backer beta for PoE1 I got really bummed out, because it seemed so rough that I thought my hopes were going to be dashed and I wasted my kickstarting money. I stopped playing the backer beta and being involved after a couple weeks or so. Flash forward to release and several major patches and DLC later, and I've clocked 900+ hours on steam for PoE, done all the achievements, written up a detailed guide, and I personally consider it the closest a party RPG has gotten to my platonic ideal of what a party-based RPG should be. This time around I have more realistic expectations for the backer beta, so I'm not so concerned. It will be janky, the mechanics will be rough, but now I'm a lot more aware that that's what a beta is. We're not supposed to be even close to a polished game yet. Even PoE 1.0 was worlds different from what 1.05 or what 2.0 or 3.0 ended up being. We're just trying to help lay down the basic foundation for what will likely be a very a good game (and even amidst all the instability and jank there's a lot of promising stuff).

Unfortunately, I tried this, and I still am unable to progres beyond the black screen beachball of death. The forum sticky lists a KI of some machines crashing on black screen on new game, but correcting on second attempt, but this is definitely not true for me. Essentially this beta just doesn't work on my OS X machine.

Click new game, select difficulty, start up music plays and "Obsidian Entertainment Presents" shows up, I click to skip the rest, fade to black. ...and never fades in from black. Beachball appears, and I force close PoE. I am a sad panda No saved game to provide. Am not sure how to get at output_log (no instructions provided in stickied post for OS X). System info: Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro12,1 Processor Name: Intel Core i5 Processor Speed: 2.9 GHz Number of Processors: 1 Total Number of Cores: 2 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 3 MB Memory: 8 GB

I've been having a bit of trouble with combat, so I quick-load. Which bumps me back to the main menu with an error about loading the next map and that to prevent save file corruption, I've been booted back to the main menu. Dropbox link containing output_log, dxdiag, and save file I continue from: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ew7o95sfqwny2dy/AADgiyvYk-e_-Q9sjoQYQSMha?dl=0 To repro on my machine, get into a fight and quick-load. (Haven't tested to see if it matters if I'm in combat or not.)

Just casting a dissenting voice that I think spell casting speed (for at least chanters, priests, and wizards; haven't tried druids or chanters yet) seems fine to me now. The addition of grazes is a *huge* boost because it's much less likely that you completely whiff on a spell. Keep in mind that the slow cast of spells is counterbalanced by the fact that you can retarget freely, which is a fairly novel gameplay feature. Again, I haven't played the more dps-heavy druid and wizards or opportunity-cost-laden cipher, so perhaps the damage math doesn't work out too well with the slower casts, just wanted to round out the perspectives.

Just adding that after playing around some more with the beta updated, I'm convinced that something needs to be done with either Repulsing Seal or Pillars of Faith. To reiterate some points: I've really been trying, but I can't find a good reason why to pick Repulsing Seal over Pillars of Faith. The latter actually does damage, has an aoe that is actually affected by intellect, a longer range, doesn't target Fortitude, and is less prone to buggy targeting (sometimes it'll look like Repulsing Seal's aoe will overlap with an enemy, only to find out that the enemy doesn't get affected by it). The only thing in Repulsing Seal's favor is that you can cast it without a target (i.e. laying it like a pseudo trap outside of combat or to pre-empt a location where an enemy will go during combat), but because Prone is now just a strong interrupt instead of CC the utility of being able to do these is extremely low.

I don't know what game you were playing, because I don't know who on earth thought Resolve was mandatory. Even when it did more stuff in Pillars, it was essentially a dump stat for everyone other than tanks. The lack of concentration in Deadfire made Resolve even more marginal. It definitely needed a boost. Well guess what, from a roleplaying perspective it absolutely sucks having to completely change those fundamental characteristics (attributes) of my imported Wizard in order to have her fulfil the same role they did in Pillars. You can't please everyone, so stick to your original novel concept of a generic Might and find another way of making Resolve tempting. Who knows, you might even find a way that avoids Strength/Resolve being dump stats for Spellcasting/Martial characters respectively, and wouldn't that be better than the current situation where I now can't make an effective muscly Wizard even if I want to. As for non-feely arguments, Hieronymous pretty much summarises my views perfectly. I don't actually agree with the OP, since Resolve is a dump stat in Deadfire right now and was probably the most dumpable stat in Pillars too. The justification in the patch notes made no sense to me, because back in PoE a whole lot was made out of the fact that Might was named that way because it meant like spiritual/soul power, and that's why it amplified both physical and magical damage. Some odd historical revisionism happening here. Personally I'm a little ambivalent about the change. Resolve definitely needed a boost, but having Might be *the* damage stat was a nice distinguishing factor for Pillars vs many other systems (notably D&D).

Slow speed is gone, but I still like exploring in Fast Mode and it'd be nice if we had an analogous option to switch to Normal speed like how we used to be able to have auto-slow mode in PoE and Tyranny. Normally this is not too bad (I have auto-pause on enemy sight and I just disable fast speed when it triggers), but there's at least two encounters in the main critical path so far where this enemy sight auto-pause doesn't trigger (in similar cases to PoE where i there are hostile enemies that appear during a cutscene, the enemy-sight autopause may not trigger once the cutscene ends) and things start off frantically before I can disable fast speed. I'm only on Veteran, so losing some fast response time at the start of combat isn't too bad yet, but I imagine once I feel comfortable to do Path of the Damned this will become more annoying.

In many ways the combat feedback in Deadfire is better than PoE, but there are still some places that really lag. I don't know if it's because the game is still incomplete or deliberate misses that need improvements. But anyway, I have no idea when Mirage (Sand Blight) triggers and what exactly it does, other than a vague sense that I need to get out of there. Similarly, I just party wiped because "Boiling Blood" spread through my party without me really noticing, other than my characters suddenly taking damage very quickly. I feel like there's a surprising amount of stuff like this, where things happen without much signaling and if I'm not paying close attention to my combat log, things can get out of control really quickly. It's especially notable because some stuff (like the pain effects the Spirits lay down on the ground) are broadcast _really_ well. For Mirage, if it's an aoe zone control-type effect (like that ability the Engwithan Saints use), it'd be helpful if it was more obvious. In Tyranny, anytime there was a big "get out of here now" effect, it was properly broadcast. So again, I don't know if it's just learning curve pains for learning a new system (then again, everyone will be learning soon), incomplete spell effects and combat log records, or if this is important feedback to offer.

I haven't done this before. Do they usually expand the beta to other parts of the game for us to test later on, or are we just helping with this piece? For the PoE backer beta, and it was just the same place. It was mostly about testing mechanics, not the game at large. (When PoE came out for real and I got to the point in the game covered by the backer beta, I knew exactly everything I needed/could do, since I had played the backer beta several times through).

I'd go with this approach. Inventory management is an important part of a proper RPG experience in my book, and it forces the player to make decisions on what to take with you and what to leave behind. It also ties in nicely with STR score via carry weight, like in D&D. You can get back inventory management already by unchecking "unrestricted stash access" in your PoE options. I've always played like this, because otherwise the stash seems utterly pointless/broken precisely because you no longer need to make decisions about what to bring with you. (Now it costs you a rest outside of towns)

I guess I should abandon all hope that traps will ever be fixed. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/90670-3045-please-please-fix-traps-have-been-getting-2x-their-penalties-for-god-knows-how-long/

Just spitballing, but if wounds reduced just your _base_ max health, then constitution would be important since it would help mitigate the effect of wounds.

It does, essentially, because AFAICT it's all packed into the same compressed file and every area load is accompanied by an auto-save, and the serialized objects need to be processed, compressed, and are expensive. This isn't exactly news. When the chanter frost and rime trap bug was around, a lot of people were digging into this. And yes, dummy traps in random parts of the world would definitely cause load/save inflation in e.g. Caed Nua (where one would not expect to have tons of empty traps). See these threads as examples: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73986-chanter-rime-and-frost-traps-get-saved-causing-mobileobjectssave-to-grow-out-of-control/ https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72764-quick-saving-and-loading-times-increased-greatly-after-20-hours/page-5?do=findComment&comment=1615960, which includes this gem of a discovery: " That is 97% of all stored objects being rime and frost traps!"

the longer loading times are not specific to the area, but in general anywhere, which is why you wouldn't see anything special about black hound/gilded vale vs anywher else. i think a dev has remarked on this in the past; there was a related bug where the chanter chant that laid those frost traps caused *explosions* in save file sizes and save/load times because they weren't being cleaned up at the end of their duration, so the game was recording lots of extra entries for those dummy hazards/traps. If longer save/load times was related to repeated quick save/loads, that would be even more baffling, because that would suggest some sort of massive memory bloat/leak related to those functions. I highly doubt the game is that busted, whereas increasing vendor inventory makes more sense (and aligns with other comments I've seen). Though I wouldn't be *that* surprised if that was the case, since the version of Unity they used for PoE sounds like it had weird issues (like how a small change results in a multi-GB patch to download).

FWIW, Icewind Dale 2 did a thing where most enemies dropped the gold equivalent of whatever loot the enemy would have had, with some exceptions. It was nice because I got really annoyed at having to manage all the umpteen gems that dropped in Baldur's Gate I/II. Plus, Icewind Dale 2 was more dungeon-intense, so there was far less opportunity to unload trash. However, I will concede that it made fighting enemies a little more emotionally unrewarding, even though it was more convenient. There is some happy medium, though. Because PoE on Path of the Damned had so much trash loot/craftables that money was never an issue (something that sells for like 5 is eventually worth a lot if you have countless quantities of it; never mind the boundless quantities of exceptional trash you could sell in the DLCs), and more critically, would start to dramatically lengthen your start/load times as various vendor inventories filled up with hundreds of xaurip spears and vessel fleshes. If Deadfire could hit a happy medium where the game economy was preserved and they fixed whatever Unity issues caused that save/load bloat while still having enemies drop some loot, that would be great.

This was really interesting, thanks. That's exactly why I'd never completed a melee cipher run in PoE -- I could never figure out a way to build them where they weren't crazy squishy. I've done plenty of melee casters: quarterstaffs and pikes let you have reach, which means with how strong engagement generally is in PoE, I can stand behind a good tank and whack safely away for modest damage. Works really well with a cipher because 2h weapons plus clothes/naked = lots of focus generation. (Engagement in PoE is strong versus Tyranny and even Deadfire because in PoE engagement completely stopped most enemies, whereas in Tyranny enemies feel free to disengage all the time, and in Deadfire enemies are still more willing to disengage vs PoE if not Tyranny-level and more importantly it seems like you can actually move around without triggering an automatic disengagement attack so long as you stay within range.) Anyway this is to say that having a separate health system was an absolutely necessary balancing component to these builds. They rarely ever got into much danger despite how powerful they could be (e.g. wizard with Citzal's Spirit Lance and Deleterious Alacrity of Motion), but their low health multipliers meant that they were still rest-constrained over several fights from incidental damage and the like; they were still glass cannons. I agree with much of the sentiment in this thread that the health/endurance split in PoE1 helped create a more strategic/resource-balancing element to the game and is an element I sorely miss in PoE2. Plus, when I was doing my The Ultimate achievement run, the health aspect was the only way I actually managed to win some fights against enemies with natural endurance regeneration . But I also understand that health/endurance was an extremely confusing gameplay element - I remember the first time I loaded up the PoE backer beta and being utterly confused (UI changes later on significantly helped that out). I guess I would be happier if there were more ways for characters to accumulate injuries, to sort of emulate the steady drip on your time/resources that health loss represented in PoE. Maybe on Path of the Damned simply getting to low health (near death) would also trigger an injury (sort of like Tyranny), and/or maybe in general if you got critically hit or took enough damage to exceed some % of your max health you automatically got an injury (this would have the side effect that squishy low-health characters would still need to be careful over multiple fights from incidental damage). Maybe some extremely powerful abilities/spells can add an injury as a component.