Enoch

The crash penalties are... odd. Related to the bonuses, but certainly not direct reversals. The Coral Snuff crash penalty imposes % reductions on Max Health and Action Speed. The Svef crash penalty imposes penalties to DEX and RES, but a boost to Stride and (hilariously) +2 Metaphysics. I didn't spawn the others into inventory to experiment with. As far as I've noticed, they last until you either Rest or take more drugs.

He's just saying it's easier to step on your own toes if you multi-class, say, a Wizard and Druid and pick spells doing the same thing. In that case, you may as well be doing a single class. But, if you are picking complementary spells you'll potentially be doing very well, from a min/maxing point of view. That's probably true of almost any multi-class though, just more so with wizards because you are only picking spells, not really passives. Here's Josh, saying pretty much the same thing in a tweet thread

Some icons, credited to Lindsey Laney.

That someone, by the way, is the writer Paul Dean. Josh interacts with him a lot on twitter-- this could very easily be an "in joke" between the two of them.

I can only assume it's a physical manifestation of Wael. Or a Waelite ability. Wait, really? I was trying to make a joke. My guess is that it's the VFX for one of the Symbol of Wael or Blessing of Wael spells. I might have to reconsider my Wael-Nalpazca Contemplative and go single-classed...

I can only assume it's a physical manifestation of Wael. Or a Waelite ability.

Didn't they say that the next update would be about audio? I'd expect more information then.

With all the discussion this week of armor, Polish, and armor polish, I think we missed an important tweet.

Tangential to the thread, but not worth the drama of starting a thread for this alone: In former-Obsidianite non-teaser tweet news, the Deadfire delay prompted a rare acknowledgement from Avellone that Pillars exists: https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/973649067325628417 Further down in the thread, he says that he's "wait and see" on buying Deadfire, unless Carrie Patel (whose novels he liked) had a primary role in writing the story.

Nothing on the official twitter feeds yet, but the Eurogamer article has quotes it's attributing to Obsidian. They're a reputable enough publication not to have just made it up. Could be a case where they ran something before they were "supposed to," though. That said, I don't really see how the departure of 1 producer (whose portfolio, IIRC, included managing the art team and backer-related stuff) has much to do with the overall project schedule. I doubt this kind of staffing change would even have been noticed by fans had she not also picked up a public-facing role in the various update videos.

Some wackiness going on in the bottom-left of that image. Either some kind of error or a very strange room next door.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/171289309831/various-deadfire-changes Thanks for this, good read. I just wish Josh would consolidate all of this VERY relevant information to the game in the one source. He seems to be spread across all of the interwebs social media. Nevermind, I'm glad I read it. Thanks again. 90% of it shows up in his Twitter feed, in one way or another. He links major interviews, stream sessions, and Instagram and Tumblr posts. The exception is his posting in the SomethingAwful thread, which he generally approaches in a more casual "hey, I'm just a normal Goon, participating in the discussion of a game that I happen to also be making" manner. Edit: Should have mentioned that Josh's handle on SA is "rope kid".

Weird question. Of course they would chose to bring back the companions who still have some unresolved issues. Admittedly, my taste in RPG companions is probably in opposition to that of the questioner-- where he/she sees "slight variation of a cliché," I see "has a relatably human outlook" (if a bit underwritten in cases). That translates much better to the new settings/themes/whatever of a sequel than do "high-concept" characters whose core "thing" got old long before Pillars 1 wrapped up. (Zahua's cool, though.) Moreover, GM has little reason to be an adventurer anymore, the Devil is dead in all endings, and Durance, if alive, probably has little inclination to leave the Dyrwood.

I was grocery shopping a few days back, side-eyeing the cookie aisle aisle as I strolled through, and realized that, to my knowledge, the boys (who are now 4 and almost-2) had never had an oreo. This turned into an entertaining personality test. The older brother refused advice to dunk it in his milk, and ate it just like any other cookie. The younger immediately popped it open and played with it. When he figured out what the filling was, he scraped as much of that off as he could with his fingers and ate it. Then took 1 bite of the cookie before deciding he was all done. Part of this is certainly age-related, as toddlers are more into playing with their food than are 4-year-olds (especially when the latter know that they have a high-value foodstuff like a cookie). But it also fits them generally-- the big guy is somewhat fastidious, and insists on things being done the right way. His brother is much more entertained by things getting messy. Also, I think of this every time my younger son tries to get onto his practice potty:

Given the discussion a few pages back about whether Josh's "HELIOS One" coffee mug is a relevant clue, it might be notable that he tweeted a better shot of it yesterday.

I found weapon-based alpha strikes very effective early in Pillars 1's patch progression. But once certain missile weapon ranges were tuned down, I had better results opening with debuffs. Best combat-opener in Pillars 1, to me, was a simple Sunbeam. Small AoE, sure, but it's one of the longest range spells and the Blind (a fairly debilitating soft-CC effect) duration is really long. If you can get 2 or more enemies standing next to each other, it's lovely. Also good: Painful Interdiction, which you can get per-encounter before you've Mastered Sunbeam; Ryngrim's Enervating Terror for when you're willing to spend a higher-level spell. Anyhow, whatever your opening attack of choice, I do agree that a party-wide low investment in Stealth to enable this was a bit overpowered. I suppose the solution is to tune up the vision/listening ranges of higher-level enemies, such that a character will need to have a significant Stealth investment to get into range. Related: have fewer 15M-range spells/abilities.

Thanks. I recall Yrden being too fussy to used much in the previous games (didn't it require setting 2 endpoints to make a line?), but your description makes it sound like it's definitely something I should explore here. I'd prefer to go as far as I can without dropping to the minimum difficulty. Ideally, I'd like there to be some challenge-- I'd just prefer to meet it more with gear/talent/buff optimization than with thumb-twitching.

I has a new computer, so I decided to stress-test it by jumping into the most graphically demanding game that has been on my "meaning to play" list for the past few years: The Witcher 3. I'm still level 1, tooling around the starting area, and trying to decide which skills I'm planning to build on. I found one Place of Power and put the point in Axii, because the description said that it helped with conversational use, and I knew that I'd want that eventually. I'm not much of a twitch gamer-- I made it through Witcher 2 mostly on Quen-spam. But I'm guessing that isn't quite as hilariously overpowered here as it was in the previous installment. Is there a generally accepted way to build Geralt to get by with a lackadaisical approach to silly details like "timing dodges" and "aiming"? I'm assuming that something Signs-heavy is the way to go, but the new system where only a limited number of abilities can be active is confusing me.

Yeah, I should specify that I don't hate the current-BB STR-RES setup.

Better than a random empower would be a random chance that an Empower that you decided to use would end up being costless. Although by "better" here, I really mean "less bad." Not sure what corresponding drawback a low-RES character would face. A chance that an incoming Crit would knock off one of your Empower resources? All that said, the least-bad outcome here, of those presented, is probably a reversion to Pillars 1 Might.

One would hope that their metrics do some sort of screening for l33tness. Otherwise, mediocre results from single-classed Rogues could be heavily influenced by dilettantes like me underutilizing the Mercenary Rogue, while serious grognards who can sink dozens of hours into a Beta are wrecking faces with their Devoted/Assassin (or whatever). (Granted, this could probably be said of any class, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rogue were the class where the difference was the most striking.)

Sawyer SA post responding to someone who doesn't like all the ship stuff. Responding to a comment that read, in part, "I legit don't understand why they're focusing so much on a feature half the players are probably gonna either hate or ignore":

In other news, Obsidian folks did promise Update 45 hitting some time this week. So we might have that to look forward to later today. That said, they've been tying updates to Beta version releases, so last-minute issues with that might have pushed things back.

Voiceover work underway. Carrie Patel reports that Matt Mercer was in the studio yesterday, recording Aloth's lines.

And one more while I was doing all that: "there are a small number of variables that are not set in the manual state interface, i.e. they only come over from a save game. however, it is genuinely a small number and only for minor reactivity."