thelee

i would kindly disagree here. It is true that conjurer doesn't get as much of a benefit from the +2 PL as a few other subclasses, there are still a few spells that get decent benefit (e.g. corrosive siphon), but more importantly their unique summon that gives you a guaranteed, stacking +1 PL bonus, along with some random other bonuses. you do miss out on illusion magic, but you still get arcane veil; but most importantly the survivability of a conjurer comes from reach (qstaffs and pikes) or range (kalakoth, black bow), not from evasion. i think the bigger deal is that a single-class wizard isn't going to help out too much for a dedicated spellsword; my argument that the conjurer doesn't suck is simply because you get a bunch of other stuff at +1 PL as well, which may not be "on theme" for a spellsword (though i think slickens and frozen pillars and even binding web are decent complement). and citzal's enchanted armory at AL9 isn't worth the payoff for a spellsword, except on lower difficulties, simply because the survivability of standing behind a tank while using a reach/ranged weapon is almost infinitely greater than relying on an autoscaling breastplate that won't help significantly defend against the boosted PEN of potd and maybe even veteran difficulty. that being said, if you're set on a single-class wizard, an enchanter might be a better choice. you get access to illusion magic as well, and the spells you miss out on (transmutation, evocation) are more likely the ones less "on-theme" for a spellsword. The +10% recovery penalty doesn't even hurt you too much because summoned weapons don't have any recovery. the class bonus is a little less good than the conjurer, but might be worth the tradeoff to pick up more "on-theme" magic from the illusion school. 1. intellect does influence how long things are summoned for 2. intellect will boost the AoE of kalakoth's minor blights and citzal's spirit lance, so can be relevant. it will also influence how long the debuff of black bow will last for. you can forget about resolve, unless you are going to go with boroer's suggestion with a shield. the way defenses work (especially on PotD) you have to invest in a lot to get good returns from them, which sorta necessitates a shield (which itself obviates the ability to use most of the summoned weapons). arguably you can worry less about constitution because you have Vital Essence at AL2, which is an easy way to get Fit (+5 con) for a real long time. you can also pick up Tough earlier as a single-class, which gives you a massive health boost. perception can be important, but a wizard can just cast Aware if they're having trouble landing some abilities. Has really short duration early on, but scales generously all the way to level 20, and can be extended with a Wall of Draining to last an entire fight. that sorta leaves dex, might, and intellect as important stats. Personally I would never dump intellect below like 15 for most caster-y classes and only go down that low if it can be justified (a conjurer can sorta justify it because many of their spells last so long innately). Dex is the king stat for offense - it makes your spell casting faster (still matters for a spellblade/sword-type because a faster cast time means less chance of being interrupted) and increases your net damage close to 3% per point (whereas might--because it's an additive bonus with so many other bonuses--is closer to 2% on average); so even though you can boost dex easily with Fleet Feet or Deleterious Alacrity of Motion it's still worth investing in a lot (versus perception or con). that being said, if you do want to use something like concelhaut's corrosive siphon or a draining spell like ninagauth's missiles, might is more important because it's more important to get more out of those spell casts instead of doing them slightly faster. if you put a gun to my head to decide right now, i would probably do a stat spread like 15m 10c 18d 9p 15i 8r, with any racial bonuses added in on top of that, and then choose whatever +1 stat from background you want that gives you might, dex, or intellect. yeah, this is a real fun way to play. if you don't want to do 2h sword, there are shields that do some retaliation attacks (not as much damage though) for an even more defensive build. just be careful about arcane dampeners

oh wow i didn't know that, thanks for that pointer

(sorry for triple posting). Yeah, players don't play separate tutorials. They also don't read manuals. (As someone who loved the thick Ultima manuals with their art and bestiary, the decline of rich RPG manuals makes me sad and is one reason why I backed so I could get a cloth map.) There's a reason why so much info gets stuffed into loading screens. Codexes are alright, but none of this is really relevant because at this point we're just talking about people who have already bought the game and are playing it. I'll admit I'm the worst judge for how well mechanics are explained, since I would be happy if the game just shows you all the equations it uses, so I don't know what necessarily puts people off or not. Though frankly if millions of people could figure out THAC0 in the infinity engine games, I don't see why they couldn't also get anything about Deadfire (except maybe inversions).

yeah, a lot of people say what Hulk-a-saurus say, but it's not true. The vast, vast majority of sales happen up front, which is why landing a game launch well is so important. It is true that RPGs and similar genres might have better long-term performance, but that long-term performance is a very slow trickle and will likely happen at lower average sales prices.

the more accurate numbers have been pulled from the fig financial reports and fig dividends, which are legally bound by a specific formula. it's only updated every six months, but that's where the sub-"500k-1million" numbers come from. steamspy is quite inaccurate and would also count copies that don't actually count towards revenue, nor account for sales from other channels (GoG mainly).

i always considered that ability pretty underwhelming, but on my current run with a bellower it's actually pretty nice. you don't get extra bolts or jumps (from upgrade) from the +bellower PL but getting the bonus accuracy, penetration, and damage is very good, and you could trigger it pretty frequently (up until my evoker picked up some level 6 spells the bellower was actually outpacing everyone else's total damage done). with sasha's upgraded to give you full empower points, it works really well on a bellower to go from a super-charged empowered revenge and then into a 6-phrase or 7-phrase offensive chant right after. Constentine seemed to clue into this a bit, but having used Revenge extensively now it appears to be implemented very weirdly. I think it's less like a minoletta's which is one spell with multiple projectiles, and more like one spell repeated multiple times as part of one "master" spell (which is why nowhere in the tool-tip ability summary dose it mention there are three projectiles, you have to infer it from the description). This is most obvious with the jump upgrade - the jumps will still work even if there's only a single target in the fight, you'll get 6 zaps on a single target; literally no other jump spell works like that. At this point it seems like one spell repeated six times (half of them slightly different). I think this is why it might be interacting the Least Unstable Coil in such a bizarre fashion.

There are certainly "interesting" tactical decisions to make. I have definitely (and this is probably not very common for players) used AoE to deliberately knock out my own party members because they had something like a druid regeneration active and I wanted to pre-empt them from hitting the "permadeath" range (e.g. eder is at 20/80 endurance but 40 health and if i wait too long the regen will have their endurance catch up to their current health). That is certainly an emergent tactical decision to make. But I think it says more about the relative solidness of the rest of poe1's system rather than to the actual merits of the endurance/health system; i don't think comparisons to real-world help much in eliciting the merits of a game mechanic. It was certainly interesting and good that I could do the above given the other parts of the system (e.g. I am personally a little saddened by the greater prevalence of foe-only aoe in deadfire), but the fact that I felt the need to is not.

I like Deadfire's approach in broad strokes because it "rationalizes" the system a bit more. I think the main problem was the instances where it was poorly balanced: for martial classes, most abilities should only be 1 resource with uncommon 2 and a rare more than that, which is generally true, but violations of that make the class seem overly constrained (corpse-eater barbarian and rogue mostly, paladin to a certain extent for all the high-level stuff but they could also regen their resource if single-classed). Also Brilliant was way better for casters than martial for a related reason. I think a way to fix the "ability economy" you mention would've been to let picking up a new martial ability grant you an increase to your power pool by +(ability_cost - 1). That way you're less incentivized to stick to a few cheap low level martial abilities all the time (especially for rogue where their abilities escalate in cost very very quickly), and each ability you pick up never gives you fewer uses of abilities (whereas in the rogue case, you could go from 5 encounter uses of crippling strike and/or escape to picking up shadowing beyond and suddenly if you use this shiny new ability you only have 2 crippling strke/escape left, for a net loss of two abilities per encounter just from trying to use a shiny new ability). From a "rationalization" perspective I also like Deadfire because sometimes the level-up choices in PoE1 seemed arbitrary in whether they were per rest or per encounter. Of course, Deadfire also threw that out the window a bit by having item effects be mostly per-rest but also sometimes per-encounter for Balancing Reasons(tm) *shrug*.

Oh I comprehended the idea quite well. That's precisely why I *wouldn't* heal my characters even though literally anyone else in any RPG situation who sees a fighter at 10/80 endurance would, because I would be extremely aware that they were also at 95/320 health, so a simple 20 point heal takes them out of the range of a harmless knockout to be dealt with for a rest after the fight (along with the rest of the low health) and into a permadeath which would require a reload and having to do the fight again. Having to do that calculus is the least intuitive aspect of any cRPG i've ever played. And it's not like this is a one-time thing, every single run I did of PoE involved doing this calculus at various times. It happened in the backer beta even (I even left angry comments about this flaw in the feedback, because in the backer beta I had already encountered a situation where it was better to leave my wizard knocked out because healing them resulted in permadeath). Never mind that when your character has health < max endurance you start to encounter the fairly-unprecedented RPG situation where your characters are approaching death and you have lots of heals, but none of your heals will actually help you anymore (the only thing that can save you is Barring Death's Door which was such a niche spell in PoE1 that existed only to interact with this unintuitive mechanic). The endurance/health confusion for new players was by JE Sawyer's own assessment as well. (As a former new player, it was most confusing during the original backer beta in which instead of a health multiplier, you had equivalent health and endurance and a fraction of damage was dealt to health while the normal amount was felt by endurance, and that fraction differed between classes. Mathematically the same, but a gigantic "huh???" to anyone coming from any other RPG.) OK, maybe people don't like that a herald can keep your entire party up in perpetuity. Again, just because endurance/health was a thing that could do this doesn't mean that it was actually a good solution to that problem. (edit - Nor do I agree that it was a problem. I think if you are able to metagame a system into giving you infinite sustain in many combat situations, your reward should definitely not be permadeath during the long tail of other long fights.) (edit - the converse is true. if you can't muster the trivial dps to outpace a troll or battery siren's regen, you should not be able to grind out the fight anyway given enough de-aggros or enough time to put in 3 to 6x their max endurance's level of chip damage)

difficulty is extremely subjective. my sense is that veteran is supposed to target BG2-level difficulty, which means being punished for your mistakes or for not being aware of certain mechanics (much like how i would get screwed by not understanding how mind flayers or vampiric level drain worked). i think it maps pretty well onto that, actually. normal is where you get more allowance for mistakes or unfamiliarity with the mechanics. (PotD I put on the level of IWD or IWD2 with heart of fury mode on--basically you have to know everything in and out and be ready to min-max)

yeah, if you look at the map there is probably a part you haven't visited yet. the thing about that area is there are parts you can go walk on that you might not have thought about (and what you can walk on is different from time to time). i have definitely gotten stuck here only to realize that i could go walking on some floating rubble.

hard disagree. i have to imagine it's some form of stockholm syndrome, absent imagining better alternatives. endurance/health was one of the worst, most unintuitive aspects of PoE1. it was an immense source of confusion to new players and it led to extremely bizarre outcomes and incentives in-game. (I have literally let characters get knocked out instead of healing them, because it meant the difference between unconscious-and-ignored-by-enemies vs permadeath. in certain setups, consecrated ground or other persistent regeneration is your own worst enemy for squishier characters. in addition, you could grind out fights you had no business winning simply because enemy health would slowly go down over time despite potentially infinite healing either in-combat or from deaggro-out-of-combat-regen; not gonna lie my poe1 ultimate won some fights like this.) of all elements of poe1, i would consider endurance/health the biggest design flaw. the only thing i would tweak about deadfire's wound management is to make it more like tyranny's, where simply getting low health would trigger a wound (iirc you had a higher wound limit and a knockout yielded more than one wound so it was still worse than falling low health). This would solve the "don't be careless" aspect better than returning to endurance/health. in practice in poe1 when you're high enough level, your health pools are so large that chip damage is ignorable, so i don't see how endurance/health solves this any better. edit - i would also make the change to make "wound" a less common-type of injury. it is by far the most punishing injury since it actively reduces the effectiveness of heals on top of a minor max health reduction and might lead to a desire to rest as soon as one gets an injur. iirc, tyranny's wounds all had the same effect that simply stacked, so it was less "jeez i should rest right now" and more ad-hoc decision-making about how much of a penalty you wanted to accumulate. i think there's virtue in having a diversity of wound types even if it is a bit murky (it's not like you really have a choice on how your character gets knocked out), so i wouldn't go all the way to tyranny style, just that there exists a happy medium between the two approaches.

the big thing about ner is that there's only one real important ability to interrupt, which is llengrath's safeguard. if you can interrupt that, you really don't need much else in terms of interrupt - you can find other ways to deal with other abilities and ner is likely dead soonish. But especially on PotD accidentally letting a single llengrath's safeguard through can cause the fight to spiral out of control, because then it takes so long to deal with Ner that their cooldown on using llengrath's will expire and they'll use it again (and it'll be harder to interrupt this time because they'll likely still have an active llengrath's safeguard buff up); not to mention that the highly enhanced defenses while safeguard buff is up makes all ner's regeneration effects that much more potent (and more important to interrupt). basically, you either need a few precisely aimed interrupts to get through the first set of concentration and llengrath's casting, or you need an exponentially increasing number of them. because so few other fights actually involve llengrath's safeguard, i could see for many players this coming out of nowhere and being an interrupt-fest/graze-grind.

I actually don't really get the prebuffing argument, either way. Deadfire and PoE1 still have lots of buffing, I guess the main difference now is that it's part of the fight and subject to the action economy so things can be balanced around that. (Also you can automate it a lot better in Deadfire.) Sure you don't have to lay on tons of buffs before each fight, but whenever I have a druid or priest (and sometimes a wizard), their actions at the start every fight are pretty samey. From a purely mechanical standpoint, you can still lay a delayed fireball or a seal or traps in advance of a fight. I guess because that's such a narrow thing you can do, people don't care or do that much? Or maybe it's saving us from ourselves. It was pretty annoying to cast Protection from Evil, Bless, Chant, etc. in advance of every fight and remember the precise order to maximize durations. But I still pretty much do that now (e.g. in my aforementioned party Tekehu pretty much starts off every fight with Woodskin, Nature's Fit, Moon's Light in that order), the only difference is that it feels a bit more "interactive" now that it's actually part of a fight where I have to worry about interrupts or circumstances that might get me to change up the order a bit.

i agree that the companions in deadfire are narrower even if deeper. all the companions in poe1 had deep aspects to them, whereas in deadfire you get a handful of even deeper interaction, but another handful of very shallow (BG1-level) interaction. Combined with the fact that you had a larger party size in poe1, and deadfire actually feels a bit emptier in this respect, especially outside the DLCs. Using my most recent run as an example, I have a hired companion, two sidekicks, and tekehu. The net effect is that I only ever really get interactivity from tekehu (and briefly from serafen when I was trying to get his hand mortars) so this party feels shallower and less reactive than my typical poe1 party: myself, maybe one or two hired companions, and four or three (respectively) companions who--though they might not have the same reactivity as in deadfire--would each have their own quests and might chime in on stuff. Even at a low end of just three OBS companions and even considering poe1's lower bar, that is way more interactivity/reactivity than my typical deadfire party. But i think this is in part because of: once you commit to full VO, adding content for companions becomes an ordeal. Sidekicks existed as a sort of bridge compromise IIRC. They did add some extra sidekick-specific reactivity in the DLCs (especially konstanten in sss, ydwin in fs, and fassina in fs; and heck even mirke got random dialogue) but nothing like even what poe1 offered and very little (if any) in the base game. Again, using my last party as an example, the first time Tekehu did an out-of-band conversation it was a little surprising because I had gotten used to the utter silence of my party (which uses konstanten and rekke as sidekick companions). Full VO is a pandora's box that is going to squeeze the quality of games from smaller and indie studios, full stop.

wow! I totally had no idea about this bit o' history. But i mean, josh isn't wrong . IWD2 min-maxing is all about taking 1 or 2 levels of random classes because it's like WotC had no idea that players would ever actually multiclass with their multiclass-friendly system (and the only reason why min-maxing is optimal in IWD2 is because of hte increased level cap to 30; so poorly-balanced was multiclassing on both the bottom and top end in base 3e). edit - i appreciate 3e because it set up the d20 world of systems, and how it rationalized some of the mechanics a bit. but in terms of "fun" AD&D is better to me. I tried 4th edition in a couple tabletop sessions and it really seemed like "World of D&Dcraft". Haven't touched 5th ed.

They would have to strike a deal, much in the way Larian is doing (as I understand it). Licensing is expensive though, and most license-holders these days are risk-averse, so unfortunately Deadfire not doing well is probably not going to build a case with WotC to license an IWD3 unless there's a strong change in direction. Also, IWD and IWD2 did significantly worse than BG and BG2 (critically and in terms of sales). I mean, I'm pretty sure Black Isle made decent money off of them since they saved a lot of costs by leveraging the IE engine from BG and the IE engine from BG2 and the general lower complexity of building a super-linear dungeon crawl, but while we're here talking about "niche of a niche" I would go so far as to speculate that Eora has more of a cache than Icewind Dale as a franchise.

I feel like literally a lot of the enemy assets were recycled with minor technical upgrades for Deadfire. And yes, all the PCs look much better in Deadfire - before they were all basically what happens if you crank Red Dead Redemption into potato mode. And I wouldn't spend too much debating @Archaven, it's clear that they're arguing in bad faith. As for them, jesus, just go look at some porn. How can someone be so hard up that they spend so much time analyzing whether or not a spirit known more in fantasy and mythology for dooming people with its wails is adequately sexy or not.

it sounds like you already skipped ahead and did the successive part of the RDC quest chain. if that's the case, then all faction quests are gated on you going to Ashen Maw first (because then you have to align yourself with a faction and they all come a-courtin')

Have you somehow done Sayuka/Overgrowth yet? How far along the main quest are you?

a) have you already been to Poko Kohara/Tikawara? b) did you talk to Atsura downstairs? He's the one who gives you the first RDC quest.

Not to mention that MSFT has plenty of market research and marketing staff. They might not be able to fully create the esoteric games they might have wanted to make, but what games they do make are probably going to be better set up for success

only problem with that is that if that is true, then the same effect should be at play for American developers in American markets, no? (which may be a larger market than eastern europe anywa)

...are you an echo? see:

Hmmm, is there sourcing for this? Why would it have sold particularly well there?