thelee

I'm an Obsidian fan since back when they were Black Isle and put Deadfire as my top cRPG ever and one of my top games ever, but Disco Elysium completely earns its awards. I started playing it off a sale on dec 31st, 2019, and even after just 40 minutes of playing in 2019 it I was already ready to put in my top 5 games of the 2010s. Having played it all now, the gameplay has its problems (downgrading it to merely being top ten of the decade), but the writing is really a masterclass. Outer Worlds just doesn't come close, sorry.

It all depends on your definition of "meaningful." I think Obsidian is a little lazy in relying on end-game slides too much instead of in-game reactivity (this criticism is leveled more significantly at The Outer Worlds), but there's a lot that can change a long the way, even if the ultimate result is the same. BTW (there may be more since I tend to do very similar things near the end-game), the biggest thing that I surprised myself into recently is: By the way, the latter part of that is another instance of me hating on full VO. It was very obvious that they voice actor(s) they re-obtained were recorded under different circumstances because those sequences sound very different than the rest of the interactions.

I actually thought the mobile fortress was a great idea, and I still like it. People talk about the strongholds in BG2, but only some of the strongholds are decent or give you any real reason to invest time into them; people are just remembering the good ones. De'Arnisse Hold, Mage Sphere, and Thieve's Guild are probably the best, but it's rarified company. Bard's gives you a huge money sink that maybe after many months of in-game time you can get some profit out of. Druid is lame. Priest is lame (a few dialogue checks essentially). Ranger is lame. Paladin is lame (basically just extra quest scaffolding around killing Firkraag). PoE1 with its lame stronghold had more interactivity than all those. Plus, as a place to hold your gear and spare party members, it was annoying because for a huge chunk of the game you couldn't even access your stronghold because you were stuck in the Underdark or in Spellhold or whatnot. ToB (an expansion that I hated anyway) obliterated any meaningful differences and gave you the same (along with music that annoyingly sounded a lot like Indiana Jones's mystical music). By contrast, Deadfire's follows you around and you can connect it to the gameplay loop via encounter checks and ship-to-ship encounters (not to mention it is one of five ways to Ukaizo). It'd be one thing if you were talking about intrinsic qualities, but it seems more rather that you're nitpicking on your own critiques of the game. I find it extremely baffling that you're discounting everyone talking about the setting, which is the biggest most obvious change about Deadfire--and contrary to what JE Sawyer said--really played up in the lead up to Deadfire (notably with the console release they are downplaying pirate imagery and the cover art just focuses on the core NPCs), and instead focusing on extremely minor, objectively disputable aspects of the game. I would venture to say literally 0 people have said "well, i'd buy this game, but I heard it doesn't have a compelling stronghold like the De'Arnisse Hold, so maybe not." Many RPGs (IE-style even) sell well without any stronghold. edit: original deadfire marketing imagery, versus console. notice the different emphasis?

I just finished Disco Elysium and it is frankly amazing what you can do with dialogue when you don't have to pay for full VO. Yes, I am going to harp on this a lot, I think a lot of compromises we see in Deadfire is a result of full VO breaking the bank and tightening the development schedule.

yeah, unfortunately the most important encounter checks are also the ones that are the poorest documented ones on the internet. i would go through game files, get familiar with how dialogue/encounter scripting works, and use the in-game console (in a separate game, so you don't disqualify yourself) to verify that your understanding of how to pass the checks is correct (essentially what I had to do since not being a wizard I was essentially flying blind for some of my stuff in the Ultimate). or you should do something that someone has already done and is well-known and video-documented. the bridge in SSS, to return to that example, can be easily beaten either with Binding Web on a wizard or "8 athletics, 14 dexterity, and high stealth or mechanics" (I ended up looking this up in my own video notes).

The main thing I did with Maia as geomancer is combine various wizard DoTs and Debuffs with Predator's Sense and Merciless Companion for the +50% and +30% pet damage bonus. You could also probably find some synergies with Takedown Combo (pure DoTs don't remove the damage buff, of which the wizard has a few).

one suggestion: get one rogue, and then a bunch of scrolls of withdrawal. start the fight, use gouging strike, then run back and withdraw everyone. fight will deaggro. wait until ner is dead. you'll have to clean up the mobs afterward, but they shouldn't be a problem for a level 10-12 party. (doesn't work for berath's challenge. for TB mode you'd have to make sure you have sufficient duration that everyone can stay withdrawn until everyone is withdrawn and combat can end) maybe you could do the same thing with a paladin and branding strike (no attack roll even)

best of luck! the one thing i would point out here is that if you aren't using a wizard, you should do research on the SSS dlc encounter checks. There are some pretty specific stat requirements so you don't accumulate too many injuries and/or die or do unnecessary fights. I think one of them is mentioned in this thread by me. (wizard can use binding web to make crossing the bridge in SSS really easy so they have less of a concern)

good to know. even with that i think for pure damage potential alone arterial strike is better opener. but now i feel less bad about an unupgraded wounding shot.

Wounding Shot is frankly a trap ability, it doesn't work the way you think (it only does 20% over the entire base duration, instead of 20% each tick). Upgrade crippling strike to arterial strike, and open with that from range, and just kite the enemy until they are severely wounded or dead (you need gear or auras/chants that upgrades your stride speed for this to work well though).

Yes, aoe weapons are great with Gambit, but I would argue Gambit is still too expensive unless you're dual-wielding hand mortars or blunderbusses. A little bit of extra damage for 2-4 guile doesn't sound great, versus for 0-2. If hand mortars are any indication, I don't think the chillfog will count for Gambit - the bounce from Fire in the Hole doesn't count for Gambit for crits even though it's still the same attack. A tad annoying that we'd have to test to be sure

I keep wondering how many people have actually beat megabosses on TB mode for precisely the length reason. I mean I know someone beat the Ultimate but I don't think they shared their videos anywhere. Dorudugan sounds like an absolute chore in TB mode. The original IE games did have multiplayer RTwP. I think it works reasonably well for casual players on a lower difficulty setting (I tried it a few times with a few friends), but anything more than that and everyone is constantly stepping on each other's toes trying to pause/unpause the game. Definitely not feasible for like BG2 dragon/lich battles. Though it was like a real authentic, low-level AD&D experience in BG because we'd keep getting each other killed by wandering off and getting crit by gibberlings and there's no real way to reload so we'd have to keep importing new characters in the multiplayer arbitration menu.

late to the party, but 1: like boeroer said, 1h style is not great. it's niche. it was better balanced in poe1, but in deadfire, i think they plain messed up dual-wielding (way too good) because they didn't understand how their own inversion system worked, and then they buffed 2h weapon style but never really touched 1h weapon style, so it's by far the most underpowered of the lot, unless you have a very specific reason to do want more crits/hits in a way that simply dual-wielding won't. I ran the numbers a long time ago, and even in PotD dual-wielding can give you more crits/second simply because you attack *way* more often with 2w style, and 1h only helps if your accuracy is really bad against the enemy (and even then, rapier has weapon modal that gives you a whopping +20 accuracy and the downside is not so bad when dual-wielding). 2: in terms of active abilities, dual wielding and 2h style are actually very competitive. it's not just because the bonuses are additive, like boeroer says, but because 2h weapons are balanced essentially to be on-par with dual-wielding full attacks (in fact, they had to add a -35% damage penalty to dual-wielded full attacks because they were just basically strictly better than 2h style full attacks for a while). even with dual-wielding nerf/2h buffs, ignoring backstab, i would actually prefer 2w style, because you have a faster recovery when using dual-wielding, and you get two separate chances to connect, which can be extremely relevant for abilities with powerful on-hit debuffs. In fact, Gambit is a high-level rogue ability that frankly only makes sense as a dual-wielded full attack, as otherwise it's frankly way too expensive.

i really get annoyed at these difficulty threads and these arguments. let me requote the important bits of my original post:

I would recommend a Blood Mage over Evoker. At the very least you can blood sacrifice Brilliant Departure back, and keep your health up with stuff like assassinate-bonus Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon. Plus, a lot of the synergies Boeroer mentions aren't available to Evoker (they are conjuration magic).

Yeah on PotD level 13 is a bit aggressive a level. It's doable, but I think you need a lot of sustain because there are so many ways for the enemies to summon help and iirc they also have a lot of druid heals for their own sustain. Make sure you're empowering spells and such. (I did it in my most recent party at around that level, but I was hravily carried along by the fact that I had Garden of Life that I could use for powerful healing after downing one or two naga.) The main loot is the same iirc, a unique item that you either loot off of Sugaan or Sugaan gives it to you after you talk your past them. If you're having a lot of trouble and don't feel like going elsewhere and leveling (and don't mind the role playing decision of not attacking them), I would say it's not worth the headache.

I mostly meant the merchandising/sheer-IP-overload that Star Wars pioneered. There weren't any James Bond rolexes and action figures or other tie-ins until well after Star Wars.

Star Wars came out in a different era where there "franchise" as a movie/media/entertainment concept didn't really exist - in fact it basically invented it. And LotR (if you're talking the movies) are absolutely successful because they had a built-in fanbase and mindshare. I don't think it would've been greenlit if it didn't have that. People do enjoy and recognize new things, but it's a pretty risky proposition these days. Hollywood is doing ok these days even with streaming nipping at their heels, but only because they're basically all franchises, remakes, and/or reboots. The riskier new stuff is on the streaming platforms where the risk is handled much differently. (The Irishman on Netflix is fantastic, but if it were a traditional theatrical release it probably would've flopped and/or never been greenlit.) edit - i wonder if this implies if you had some sort of netflix-for-games (Xbox Pass and Stadia aren't even close) interested in developing their own properties if stuff like Deadfire would do a lot better and get more support.

This isn't turn-based specific and has been the case since day one. You start with enough phrases to cast your most expensive invocation ignoring the effects of subclass changes. So what you start with is not even based on your level, if all you do is have one AL1 invocation, you'll never ever ever have more than 3 phrases to start (and you'll never accumulate more than 4 and only if you have a subclass that increases the cost of that invocation by 1).

What'll really bake one's noodle is how suppressing effects like Suppress Affliction and Arcane Dampener vs duration-reduction effects like Cleanse interact differently with durational effects. For the unaware, if you have a buff that is suppressed you can't refresh that buff. Casting it again won't do anything, and can mess up simple AI scripts because the AI will think they're missing an inspiration/buff and try to re-cast that inspiration/buff, only to no effect. If you have a custom AI script that has a 0 second cooldown on this kind of conditional, your character will happily eat through all their class resource trying to recast the buff. However, you can still interact with inspirations/afflictions that are suppressed via normal countering/overriding mechanics, even as they're suppressed. All this has some odd interactions; in some cases, Arcane Dampener and Suppress Affliction and Liberating Exhortation--despite being lower level effects compared to Arcane Cleanse or Minor Intercession or similar duration adjusting effects--are actually much better than the direct duration-adjustment effects: For example, some enemies have basically unlimited use of their buffs and will happily just rebuff if their effect is dispelled. If you Arcane Cleanse it away, you just spent a valuable AL9 casting slot only to just waste one of their actions to rebuff it. If, on the other hand, you suppress it, they can't refresh their buff while it's supressed. If you're in one of those fights where you're getting charmed/dominated a lot by the same effect, you're better off suppressing it then trying to counter it. Successive attempts at dominate/charm won't do anything (unless it's a different named effect). If you have afflictions on your characters that are actively suppressed, you can still counter them by casting a paired inspiration, so that when the suppression wears off they don't get the affliction back. Suppression can be a good way to buy yourself time to do some cleanup like this (since most suppression effects I can think of are very fast cast). Also, the only use I've ever found for Potions of Major Recovery (-10s to hostile durations) is to accelerate how quickly dampener wears off, because man it sucks getting hit with one.

Yeah, if you hover over yourself or an enemy in combat, you'll see persistent effects in either the top ("beneficial") or bottom ("hostile"). That's what "beneficial" effect referring to, and it's pretty broad. On top of the exceptions that Boeroer mentions, the chant/linger duration of chanter chants are completely bypassed by beneficial effect modifications (e.g. if you have an amulet that is +10% beneficial effect, then you get no benefit even when the chant is affecting yourself). There's some override that happens late in the process for chant/linger that seems to only include intellect and chanter-specific effects (like troubadour).

The game does actually keep track of your old reputation/decisions a bit in a relevant way, at least in one major way I've found.

yeah silly me i never thought of that interaction, that's a fun little synergy.

as contemplative or pure monk though?

Notably Tenray (#2) actually completed the Ultimate again a second time while his first run was still being validated. It was with a priest of skaen/streetfighter. Either he didn't submit it for validation or you only get one recognition per person.