thelee

"I'm not racist, look, I have a black friend!" yeah; how people react to media says a lot more about them than the media imo

Yeah, the surprising MVP for some of these harder fights is that if they're not actually immune to dex afflictions or body afflictions and are merely resistant, Petrify is A+ because it counts as a tier-4 affliction and will be resisted down to a "mere" paralyze (which is functionally identical), and the wizard AL9 petrification is still permanent at near death.

Maybe I'm colored by the fact that I played PoE1 since backer beta, but I agree with Wormerine's take. There was just so many filler fights in base game on PotD. Like, basically an entire map would be covered with trash fights of no consequence: every time you reveal fog of war there would be more enemies to fight. Like WTF. By the time WM1 came around, they had already started learning their lesson, and I thought WM2 was a great balance (and by then they had trimmed filler fights from parts of the base game). I espeically liked that WM2 had larger areas with more things to do in them, versus the PoE1/WM1/Deadfire(unfortunately) common approach of having small areas with a few things to do in them. Felt like there was more exploration. Reminded me of the better wilderness areas of BG and some of the best maps in BG2. Deadfire did better on the trash side. If anything, until the DLCs came out, I thought there wasn't enough fighting.

I didn't play PsT when it first came, I came around to it a few years after wards. It think it has incredibly awful gameplay (which is weird, because it's based on the same infinity engine as everyone else, which means they had to actively make it worse). I thought the numerous custom spells suffered from Final Fantasy-itis, having none of the nice complexity of normal D&D: virtually all the high-level spells I remember just being pure damage and high-level ones having annoyingly long "cinematic" qualities, hence I kept thinking that they were trying to be like FF7 somehow. On top of that the UI was extremely clunky, the color palette was dull, and the CGI portraits aged very poorly compared to the stylized art/watercolor of BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2. All that being said, I thought the game's saving grace was the writing, and the fact that if I wanted to (and I did), I could simply avoid most of all the annoying combat and gameplay by just sticking to pacifist options (and you were aggressively awarded for investing in the "soft" stats of wisdom, intelligence, and charisma which in other IE games were only situationally not dump stats). It was basically a point-and-click adventure game at that point, and a pretty well-written one IMO. If I were to revisit it now, I imagine I might find it a bit too floral or dense, but it would still likely be remarkable for how much was invested in the writing. I'm pretty sure the gameplay still sucks though. So if I were to recommend PsT to anyone, it would solely be on the virtue of the writing and I would be actively warning them about everything else.

Sometimes I can get around the crashes by zoning into another area and then coming back to the area in question. Sometimes it's a 100% crash to desktop no matter what, at least until I play for a while elsewhere (which makes me think the crashes are related to some sort of game state). I was getting 100% edgewater crash until I did some other quests for a while, and I was getting 100% cascadia crash until I did some other quests for a while (and I could zone in to another part of Monarch anyway, even though cascadia is in the same overall zone as the other landing spots in Monarch). TL;DR: even the 100% crashes appear to be resolvable eventually. That is, except for: that happens to me 100% of the time, no matter when, whether at start of game, or after hours of playing.

Had 3x adrena-time crashes. Died during a fight. Reloaded. Suddenly I have no crashes?

Actually I think this may be a dupe of the other game crash (PC) thread, since I just tried to go to cascadia (also mentioned in that other thread) and got a crash to desktop. Yikes! What happened?

I've been able to go to Edgewater before, but not now. Game crashes with 100% consistency. Gonna have to do some other quest instead. Here's a dropbox link to what I think is the save: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/h9dbja5x410ke8w/AAAdzpoQ1M3EgTR0A5u7vifAa?dl=0

I haven't gotten any acknowledgment that OBS has even received my emails, despite a reminder email. Does anyone have any channel to help prod some attention from OBS (like how Tenray finally got validated)? I have a sneaking suspicion that theultimate is not a very closely monitored inbox.

psions are actually amazing for caster-cipher multiclass because they don't have the same constraints on action economy. other caster-cipher multiclasses you have to do something to actively generate focus. a caster-psion can be a caster and then all of a sudden they can use some cipher powers when needed. i would actually say most caster-cipher multiclasses are underwhelming and psion is the only good one (said as someone who has rolled two different mystics). edit - i would concede though with the particulars of psion focus generation and the party-unfriendly interrupt spell they have that it is not a cipher subclass for any player looking for an "easy in". It is probably more micromanagement intensive, which may not play well for console.

With 5.0, I do appreciate--to an extent-- that they buff up the Ukaizo boss depending on how many megabosses you have killed. It doesn't change the fact that you can roflstomp the adds, but it does make the actual fight a bit more of a challenge. Also, in this respect I feel like Deadfire strongly exceeds expectations, because they have kept amping up difficulty and adding new late game challenges for the .1% of the already small player base that is into that. But I think it is a sorry state of the current field of games that even here Deadfire still suffers from the "I have tons of money and power at end" problem, especially considering how well they had actually balanced the game economy at first: you were never really flush with cash and there were always money sinks - now after a couple DLCs you can have literally hundreds of G and nothing to spend it on. Even in my Ultimate run, which involved doing as little content as possible, after doing FS I literally had more than 100k gold, whereas before that I only had less than 9k. RE: solo, I would not compare solo to party-based gameplay. A lot of solo essentially results in bending game interactions, and there are some solo tricks that only work because you're solo (the biggest one being invisibility/untargetability = de-aggroing, which doesn't work in party unless everyone has invisibility/untargetability). I consider PoE1 and Deadfire essentially two different games, one for solo, and one for party. I think that's part of why there were was backlash about making solo an achievement in PoE1 - you could love PoE1 to death but solo play could be (and was) extremely banal and uninteresting. Whereas I venture to say there are some forum regulars who prefer to play solo.

yeah that's the reason why they have berath's blessing the way they do, because most people just tend to play or replay the start of the game. which is... odd! so they wanted a new game+ method without actually requiring players to beat the game first. i mean, i kinda get it, the first time I had Baldur's Gate in the 90s I probably played candlekeep and the first part of chapter 1 over and over again re-rolling different characters. didn't actually beat the game until coming back to it years later. but i thought i was a weirdo, guess this is actually more typical than i thought. edit - in hindsight, i also did this with Fallouts 1 and 2 and Icewind Dale. I think it took around BG2 before I settled into my current playstyle.

this is my main criticism of the mechanics. I think they should lower the threshold for when you need to specialize, down to 40 at least. There's just too much of a margin for same-iness otherwise between different characters.

well, "played for a little bit and stopped" is still a sale though given the achivement rate for deadfire (and even poe1), most players barely play through just the crit path.

lol, the only thing i know about them is friends who got them, played them for a little bit, and stopped.

Here are some off the top of my head: Torment Numenara, Wasteland 2, PF: Kingmaker, DOS2 (arguably one of the main reasons they added a TB mode to Deadfire), Shadowrun, Tyranny - these all precede Deadfire and they all postcede PoE1. edit - some of these were backed on kickstarter as well; even if Deadfire was on kickstarter instead of fig, it would have still have faced a different backign environment than PoE1 did. (Though I don't discount the fig theory entirely - while I don't think it would singlehandedly saved the sales, I think being on a big platform like kickstarter would certainly have helped a little bit.) edit - interestingly, at the time Tyranny was considered a financial disappointment, but from fig's numbers/disclosures we know that Tyranny has outsold Deadfire so far (admittedly tyranny has been out for a while, but sales drop off steeply after a short period of time). At this point, it would be great if Deadfire sells as well as Tyranny. This suggests a broader trend than anything wrong with Tyranny or Deadfire per se.

One data point - the marketing person had a contract with obsidian that was decidedly not renewed. When I heard that news, my only thought was "they had a marketing person?" Which seems like self-evidence that the marketing sucked. That being said it feels like most everyone who played PoE1 should have known about Deadfire. That tends to work in favor of sequels and gives them a good boost up. So I don't think marketing is even a major explanation - the best marketing in the world can't hold back turning tides. (A data point in counter is that Ars Technica--despite talking about the PoE1 kickstarter--never reviewed PoE1. They did review Deadfire, gave it a glowing review, and made it their top story pinned for a while. I took it as a signal that people definitely recognized Deadfire, but for whatever consumers just didn't want to buy it. You know how there are like academy award winning movies that hardly anyone actually sees? Same deal.) The main explanation I saw from people in the industry (possibly Obsidian themselves) is that when PoE1 first came out it was basically the first or only one of its kind, and there was a huge pent-up demand for this kind of cRPG experience. With Deadfire, there was plenty of competition. So it could be that whatever pent up demand had already been fulfilled, or the market was much more competitive or saturated.

That was the main one I was thinking of.

You have to use spells that beguilers use, which is not a restriction on psions. Psions also get a unique interrupt spell. Beguilers are very good, but they're not strictly better than the other subclasses.

Believe it or not, that's how it works. It was a conscious game design choice so that players didn't have FOMO if they picked up an interesting new weapon - short of niche situations that the modal would've been used for, every one can use the weapon as well as any other. It also means it doesn't "prescribe" certain build approaches - people who wanted to make battlemage types in poe1 had to accept they were always going to be a bit crappier in terms of landing hits (It was already a big deal in poe1 backer beta when everyone had separate melee/ranged accuracy and rangers had crappy melee accuracy - people got pretty pissed about being "forced" into playing a ranged ranger or a melee rogue, so the designers scrapped the separate melee/ranged accuracy. taken to its logical conclusion, the designers scrapped any differentiation in accuracy). In PoE1, martial and caster classes were differentiated in part by different starting accuracy/defenses (and casters had special caster accuracy for spells). In Deadfire, martial and caster classes are differentiated moreso by (optional or automatic) passive abilities: e.g. Fighter's Confident Aim, Barbarian Carnage or Thick Skin, Rogue Sneak Attack or Dirty Fighting, etc. Casters rarely have passives that actively boost their auto-attacking (cipher and chanter are sort of hybrid classes so they get some passives [chants for chanter]) which in the end tends to make martial classes better suited for grindy auto attacking. The flip side is that casters tend to have way more active abilities to use (monks being an exception). Do note that classes are still differentiated by health and defenses (mostly non-deflection). So there's still a rough guideline on how you should be using the classes; the tankier classes are therefore still barbarian (extremely high health) and fighter (only class with a bonus to deflection). Nope No, that's a deliberate tradeoff for all multiclasses - you lose out on power level and high level abilities in exchange for diversity and more abilities. Sometimes this tradeoff is hardly a tradeoff, because multiclasses can sometimes create insanely synergistic outcomes. A mindstalker (cipher/rogue) for example gets so much extra weapon damage from sneak attack that you end up supercharging your focus generation.

If people are wanting to critique TOW for having "fetch quests" they should go back to the 90s cRPGs (or just play some MMORPGs or "rpg-like" grindy games) to find out what "fetch quests" were/are really like and why people hate them and use them perjoratively. Incredibly low-value, no-story, no-narrative, low-impact, low-reward, "go pick up this random item or X random items" from an unclear location or unclear enemy. Back when I first started hearing the phrase a lot it was in BG, they were literally filler (admitted as such by bioware) because they didn't have enough content going on (BGEE makes it better because they updated the journal tracking into something semi-modern so you don't have to dig through random journal updates just to find out that you were supposed to not sell that random bottle of wine you found in that house). BG2 still objectively had "fetch quests" in that you had to go to locations and retrieve something, but bioware pretty much solved most of the "fetch quest" criticism because they interweaved with the main story, had reactivity, developed your companions, meaningful outcomes or rewards, had something interesting going on, etc. You could say "boy that just sounds like fetch quests with extra steps" but in terms of cRPGS it's those "extra steps" that make all the difference. edit - also for some of the comparisons I see to borderlands for aesthetics (and the marauders running at you in TOW do seem very borderlands-y), the borderlands franchise has tons of fetch quests, and some of them in an extremely grindy capacity. No, "random voice over that chimes in after you collect X out of Y widgets or animal body parts" doesn't count as "interesting quest design" to me.

Oh yeah, this is a solid combo. You can also use soul ignition as a weaker version of this combo early on, so it's not just a late game interaction. As a side note, cipher DoTs work well predators sense (though with takedown combo you don't want your pet attacking and dispelling the combo). If you're going for a melee cipher/ranger setup you could also maybe get some mileage out of soul annihilation as a sort of finisher with takedown combo.

fakc is exaggerating, or is leaning way too hard on companions without good personality or leadership skills. as for your point, i'm playing on hard (life is too busy for supernova's limited saving) with high charm and lots of investment in leadership, and my companions roflstomp most everything (and i get lots of XP from the +50% companion kill XP perk). however, if there's a big enemy (a mega raptidon/raptidon colossus) or if it's a prolonged fight and i'm slow on the inhaler, companions will still go down. so i think companions could easily be effective without as much of an investment, just not as much of a roflstomp (as would be expected since you'd be leaning on yourself more). but yeah, the supernova interaction seems unbalanced to me. A couple hits from a mega raptidon is enough to knock even my beefier companions out on hard, and I would be ragequitting the game if that meant I permanently lost a companion or lost a half hour's worth of gameplay to reload a save.

I don't know what the bug reporting practice here is (mostly used to reporting PoE or Deadfire bugs), but this was 100% reproducible for me: 1. when to phineas's lab to get shrink ray 2. first time in phineas's lab. If at any point I open my inventory, game crashes. That's it. I eventually figured out to avoid opening my inventory (had to suppress the urge to examine the shrink ray) to get in and out, and this issue has only ever happened in phineas's lab.

I just want to add that with text-size considerations, I also hope this includes icons. On my big screen TV not only can text be hard to read, but it is extremely hard to differentiate between the various icons for status effects and debuffs.