thelee

C.LE. on gamefaqs. You'll find that I have a very specific type of game I like to write about https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599 Reflecting more, I think there's a lot to be said about the downside of overwhelming the player with choices. I think having an artificial constraint or theme might indeed be helpful. Also there's a real "art through adversity" that I believe in, where having restrictions can help you be more creative/explorative than you might have been otherwise. Lord knows I've spent a lot of time on the celebrant (second hardest priest multiclass to crack after the universalist), but I finally found a build I was satisified with and is fun to play (if not the most powerful), and is not something I would've ever discovered if I was just trying to min-max the most interesting/powerful build without any constraints.

some of it is part of normal banter, but some of it is a pause-the-game-and-this-char-will-talk-to-you bit.

yeah, the romances are really underdeveloped in this game. i got maia and xoti to hook up, and xoti and eder to hook up, and eder to really crush xoti's spirits. i'm sure there's others. all of that amounts to a brief conversation with mainchar, and some specific banter between the NPCs (also possibly ending slides).

I think there's several things to unpack. 1. Direction. I used to have this problem a lot. These days I pick a strong "theme" inspired by some other thing I really like (mostly Magic: The Gathering color wheel, but also a bit of Warcraft 3 since I picked up reforged) and that helps me stick to a direction, to a fault (where I hate extraneous party members who don't fit into my theme and am eager to replace them). If something else catches my eye, I just commit to doing it on another play through. 1b. Another thing that helped direction for me is that I created a self-goal of eventually having run a party with every single variation of a priest (preferably as mainchar)--because I enjoy priest classes. So it becomes less "which is the most interesting party I can build"--which can be overwhelming ("paradox of choice" or "prison of freedom" as you say)--and more "what is the most interesting thing I can do with this very specific, narrow constraint", such as "my main PC must be a priest/barbarian of some sort" (in this case I ended up deciding on a skaen/corpse-eater. Wasn't great, wasn't bad either.) For reference, I still have not done a single-class woedica, a thaumaturge, and a universalist. I may never get to universalist or SC-woedica; just not interesting enough. 2. Hoarding. This is hard thing to do, and part of it is influenced by game design; not a lot of games get item usage and consumable usage right. For Adra Ban, it sounds like FOMO. Again, if I miss out on something, I just commit to doing it on another play through. Having a strong theme in #1 helps, because I do a lot of advance planning on the Deadfire wiki unique items list (unique weapons, unique armor) and plan out which items I want the most, and plan to upgrade all the way. 3. Increasing your explicit knowledge. On top of reading high-quality information (not random ****posting about mechanics), probably a lot more experience and lots of q's asked and tests. My gamefaqs guide goes into a lot of details of the mechanics, but I feel like in all situations in life, you actually need to actually put the theory into practice to really internalize it. Even with all the stuff I've written there, and all the stuff forum members have posted here, there's tons of implicit knowledge about stuff and still tons of interactions yet to test. I think just more playthroughs will start giving you a sense of what interactions might be interesting, and what to look out for to test and to mix with. YMMV. I've played Deadfire for 1000+ hours, and still am not sick of it. I think if you're fixated on getting just one run or two right, you may stress out more than if you just plan on playing however much you want to play, but that kind of long-term play commitment isn't for everyone (not even close). Over those 1000+ hours, I've made some parties that stunk and I didn't particularly like, and some that have been really great. Sometimes I've been playing and have already had ideas for three more parties to run. I don't run through all of them (some ideas I get tired of before I get to them), but I'm never too frustrated about doing something wrong or making the wrong choice. Plus, after 1000+ hours, I know most of the mechanics like the back of the hand, but even then I can still get surprised by new interactions just from chatting on the forums; it wasn't until hour like 900 that I tried a barbaric retaliation thanks to @Boeroer. If you also just like cycling through a lot of parties, I don't think it's too big a deal to just do that. A lot of people have restartitis. Maybe eventually you'll find a party you'll take all the way. This was basically me back in the BG2 days - kept starting new parties until eventually I think my first PC that I finished was a random thief character after originally thinking I would want to play a bard or wizard (I ended up liking the thief experience so much I wrote a gamefaqs guide to the thief class). That was a surprise to me because I tend to be a caster person through-and-through, but something about playing a thief just happened to click in my brain that I ended up finishing BG2 with it. Maybe something similar could happen to you.

can trigger some romances, or anti-romances but either with or without those it matters purely for banter.

I had a post a long time ago where I judiciously pick-pocketed every single non-hostile NPC. TL;DR - in base game, it's not worth the skill investment. It's useful only for a few thousand gold over the course of all the pickpocketing--nothing really special otherwise (might be useful early on, but doing a few mid-game quests quickly trivializes those returns). You don't even need a high sleight of hand for that due to how much of that is in the form of money and the game undervalues money for pickpocketing difficulty. You actually need stealth more than pickpocket. This is true even for reverse pickpocketing bombs. I basically wrote a manifesto calling sleight of hand a trap choice (especially since it's in the same group as much more relevant combat skills like alchemy or arcana) - and it was utterly nonsensical... sometimes you need like a sleight of hand of 7 to pick pocket a piece of hardtack, but then on another NPC you can get a fine-enchanted weapon with a sleight of hand of 1 (someone much later did some deep-diving and it turns out sleight of hand difficulty is based in part on the enemy level; which makes no sense from a player's perspective). Like @AeonsLegend says, with Loaded Pockets it's more interesting, it's low chance of getting some moderately good magical gear [and potentially some useful crafting mats] and it's randomized, but that means now I actually want to judiciously pick pocket again (in my most recent game I got some good magical gear in Port Maje, which was a nice boost). You still don't really need a high sleight of hand, though. Just moderate stealth and in a pinch some spark crackers to distract NPCs.

that's funny, because my only attempt where i tried that it failed miserably, so i consider interrupts much more reliable. might just be what kind of micromanagement you can handle (with 4/5 party members equipped with crossbows/arbalests, interrupting HoW is pretty easy; i'm sure you'd say something similar about body blocking)

IME, interrupts aren't THAT important in base game. The dragons, guardian, giant cave grub, and engwithan titans can all be made much easier by interrupting some majorly telegraphed attacks (especially ones that summon extra enemies) but you can largely brute force your way through them, especially since the base game basically maxes out in difficulty at around level 16 or so and you can still easily get to 20. I still think it makes the game much easier to interrupt enemies while concentrating your party, but it's not crucial. With DLC, the difficulty curves amps up quite a bit, so there's not really as much room for overleveling and just brute forcing your way through fights. Because of that, combat tactics (like interrupts) start mattering more than just hoping to roflstomp enemies. Edit: also, interrupts are basically mandatory for one of the megaboss fights (Haune O Whe)

have you tried DestroyWeaponInSlot ? edit - the downside would be needing to do iroll20s and disabling achievements

it might also be helpful to make it a universal upgrade, e.g. 100% miss->graze, 100% graze->hit, 100% hit->crit. That way it helps every attack roll in some way (except for ones that are already critting). duration would work, but there's something "nice" about the fixed number of hits. it seems like at such a low count (3) it was meant to be kind of a combo enabler, and having a luxury of time to set it up will work. it's just that right now it's so finicky to be worth the effort and even with the effort, there aren't many setups to make only 3 hit->crits that powerful to be a single-class-only spell (not to mention the extreme micromanagement you need so autoattacks don't eat it up).

there's an arquebus that gives you multiple shots per reload - that might be up your alley. it really feels like a double-barreled shotgun that you're quickly hip-firing. that's how they probably should have done eccea's arcane blaster - give it a bunch of shots per reload.

Do you remember what happened that might have caused the reaping knives to stick around? Devs aren't going to be around to help fix issues anymore, so we're on our own. But it sounds a lot like a similar issue I had where grimoire imprint spell stuck around and I couldn't get rid of it. Sounds like some clean-up isn't getting properly triggered in certain circumstances. One thing I would try if you haven't, is casting Reaping Knives again on Eder - maybe this time when it wears off it'll clean up properly?

definitely bring a long a chanter or cipher. priest also. chanter has huge amounts of persistence because their chants and invocations are basically infinite. with some good chants and a quality summon invocation they will basically carry any party through most of the megaboss fights. I recommend either a single-class or multi-class bellower or troubadour, mostly because they are both capable of getting 100% uptime on animated weapons or dragon, just via different mechanisms (though ingeneral troubadour is widely considered the best chanter subclass, or at least the most versatile). cipher for similar reasons - they have ancestor's memory which casts Brilliant for resource regeneration over long fights - only affects party members, but a cipher him/herself has a regenerating class resource. A single class cipher can also get Reaping Knives, which not only helps their focus regen, but can give you a massive DPS boost in some of the tougher fights (especially megabosses) where you might have an extremely hard time having enough PEN against the enemy armor. you also effectively have infinite healing via pain block. priest has plenty of support options (salvation of time is a big one, mentioned upthread) and there are degenerate options open to you if you have a source of brilliant (either via cipher or some other metagaming option) so you can use priest effects perpertually. you don't have to bring one of these along, but they make the tougher fights so much easier that these days i always have at least a chanter/cipher along with a priest.

yes. there might be some difficulty spikes near the end of SSS and FS, but normal is pretty forgiving. depending on your target difficulty, my recommended answers sort of vary in how much min-max-y or metagame-y they get. it also matters whether or not you do turn-based mode, which haplok alludes to.

What difficulty? On normal, probably almost anything would work, so you could just go with whatever sounds fun.

unfortunately no - i tested it myself a week or so ago. it's actually a little bit more broken than one might think - I thought it still might be OK for a non-dualwielded setup, but in practice it's not even great for that because the recovery bonus doesn't start applying until the next reload after it triggers, which means given its extremely short duration buff, you'll waste most of it reloading as normal, and then have like one shot with a short (still non-zero) reload.

have you actually visited the black isles and cleared the maze there? (there may be an alternate way to unlock that involves doing that, leaving, and then triggering an event, and coming back)

While I'm not as negative on the "choices didn't matter in the end" aspect of it, it does strike me as an oddly inconsistent tone with PoE1. PoE1 I thought was fascinating from a world-building perspective, because it was a traditional fantasy world was at the cusp of enlightenment/industrial revolution, as evidenced by the growth of renaissance-era gunplay, revolutionary sentiment in dyrwood, a nascent science (animancy) to replace the more traditional magic, and most relevantly a war in which a literal god was destroyed by a man-made bomb. If a god could be destroyed by man (not to mention the big reveal at the end), it upends all sorts of things in the world, right? It did strike me as odd that noone in Deadfire seems to care that the gods aren't real (I think I've raised this point several times in the past on this forum) and in contrast to what PoE1 was about, there's literally nothing you can do to stop Eothas's mission - you can change the ending slides a bit, but it feels a bit of a cop-out writing-wise. What you did at the end of PoE1 still felt impactful even if it was just mostly ending slides (to the extent that I was annoyed and repeatedly reported as bug that you didn't get Wael's blessing for pledging to do what Wael wanted, even if it only mattered for like the last 15 minutes of the game... it still felt very impactful and important).

since the old original post i watched some interesting youtube series about what it's like for a non-gamer playing a game. i'm not saying you're not a gamer, i'm just saying the video series made me appreciate the importance of proper scaffolding of game difficulty and game concepts. However much I like Deadfire, I have to concede that it doesn't do a great job of scaffolding information. As an example that I referenced on page 1 of this ancient post, is concentration/interrupts. The game very vaguely teaches you about concentration/interrupts, and then doesn't reinforce it with any major experiences of how important they can be. So for a lot of players, concentration/interrupts are just a murky side combat element that occasionaly frustrates your own spellcasting, up until they hit Neriscyrlas where the difference between one successful interrupt and a missed interrupt is a modestly hard fight vs an extremely annoying and difficult grind. So I think it's a reasonable criticism--especially given how difficulty between base game and DLC is balanced--that the game might be overly forgiving or lax about certain combat concepts before suddenly pulling the rug out from under you. I think it's a bit less of a problem with vanilla game because vanilla game can be beat even on PotD by like level 14-16 (even earlier if pacifist). But even if BoW and SSS can/should be done in the middle of the vanilla game, they clearly were developed after the base game, because they suddenly assume that the player is much more well-versed with a bunch of combat skills.

i actually don't trust my ability to get that right (not necessarily in deadfire, though it has happened). i've been bitten in the past where stuff i've added has not been correct, or there's some subtle interaction that direct-add doesn't do, so unless it's something i literally can't do without console (mostly for an item that i need to test or need to enchant differently) i do the extra tedium of recruiting a character just to make sure whatever i'm doing is what is "normal" for the game. I actually have two different saves, one with iroll20s on and one without, so any console-related stuff i keep isolated away from possibly polluting a "normal" test save.

you haven't gotten an event regarding the black isles (an earthquake or wave)? you might just be able to navigate manually - if the island has changed, you can just go down into FS without needing a quest or anything.

to be fair, I thought it was way too good in poe 1. there was no reason to not always take it and blindly use it in every fight (other than fire absorption on the enemy, though i'm not sure if that existed in poe 1). i'm not sure the ability is bad (it's only really bad if you're trying to consider the paladin in isolation and not with support or consumables to keep them up), i think mostly it is just costed a bit too expensively when the paladin has plenty of exhortations and other abilities you want to use.

i'm not even sure if the paladin counts as a spellcaster for captain's banquet purposes. Any time you have a penalty, you need to invert it. You can't just subtract it. In this case, a -25% from voidward would actually be a -.33 adjustment. For your later example it would be .45 - .33 => .12, which is positive, so you don't need to re-invert it, so it's a +12% bonus. (the inversion basically tries to emulate how in multiplicative systems, penalties are more severe and harder to trivialize) Importantly, you should add-up all the bonuses and maluses that affect a number in one go (don't separate out the healing) because otherwise the order of operations with regards to inversions could really throw you off. The only situation where you treat modifiers in a different step is PL scaling (which are multiplicative). I'm normally a big fan of theory, but you should only use theory to guide actual real experiments and is merely saving yourself time from pursuing dead-ends, and that theory needs to be accurate to begin with. To wit, getting the inversion math is absolutely critical to getting an accurate model of what's happening, especially when you're talking about accumulating enough to cancel out self-damage (being off by a little bit means the difference between infinite sustain vs dying throughout a long fight). Plus, not only could assumptions be off, Deadfire having been a game implemented by human beings, there are plenty of exceptions and edge-cases and weird implementation issues. Personally speaking, I have one save game from an old character that's just sitting around in a tavern to recruit level 19 adventurers so I could verify any theory with an actual test character.

it would be one of {5, 10, 15} * (1 + [PL * .05]) * (1 + [might_over_10 * .03] + [wounds * .05] + misc_dmg_bonuses) a max-level bloodmage helwalker, with maxed out might, at 10 wounds, would be: {5, 10, 15} * 1.35 * 2.25 = one of 15, 30, or 45 damage to self, on average 30 damage per use. honestly a lot worse than i expected (normally my characters have around 10 might and aren't helwalkers) - my typical end-game beefy character would barely survive ten spams of it, and forget about trying to get back a tier 7-9 spell (only one in three chance each use, so on average 90 health just to get one of those back). probably might want to invest in barring death's door, the last stand potion, or a shieldbearer, all plus a priest for salvation of time, or a cipher for brilliant to spam those abilities back.

blue! or purple! seems appropriately nightclub-y to me