Jump to content

sffrrrom

Members
  • Posts

    35
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by sffrrrom

  1. Just to update this, I never received any fix or further follow-up. I have similar, though not as significant, issues with Pathfinder Kingmaker and interface screens. I thought it was something unique to me and I wasn't going to push it, but I've seen others post about similar issues, and one of my friends actually just told me has the exact same issues with PoE II, so it can't be something specific to only me. Some official response would be nice, even if it boils down to you're SOL bu y a new graphics card.
  2. I previously played PoE II with no major issues well into the game. I returned to experiment with the turn based patch. Since that patch, I am now experiencing the same issue experienced by many others previously, where I cannot even successfully make it through character creation before the interface locks up. The mouse cursor remains mobile, sound continues to play, and it sounds like interface items can be manipulated, but the graphical display remains incurably frozen. Attached hereto are my dxdiag and output logs. No save game is available for obvious reasons. I have tried reducing graphics quality to low, altering or disabling a number of options such as vsync, disabling telemetry, switching between fullscreen and windowed mode, verifying files, running the game in administrator and windows8 compatability. Same results with all options. The game is effectively non-functional as it stands now. output_log.txt DxDiag.txt
  3. Don't think it's a bug though - I mean it damages per the value displayed correctly and one would assume it is using the value the dev's intended it to use. Maybe a balance issue - don't know where those go.
  4. Yeah that's why I wanted to use it lol. Who doesn't want to use a lightsaber? Think I'll give Sage a try instead though - I've found single-class Wizard to be a little underwhelming and am looking for a restart.
  5. This looks really neat - I like that you can effectively respec as you go on as well to shift from spell-focused to melee-focused or a balance of whatever you want. Think I'll try this out.
  6. Has anyone actually used this? I saw it and thought it screamed Jedi (i.e., Psyblade Devoted specializing in Sabers) but when I actually tested it out, it seems pretty terrible. The only benefit it seems to have is that deals raw damage, which is nice, and is slightly faster than normal (3 second recovery time as opposed to 4). On the down side, it's damage seems way too low to be viable as anything more than a niche weapon for certain enemies with extremely high damage resistance, and the only enchantments it offers are the standard ->Legendary branch. To compare, a fully Legendary Animancer Blade does 9-15 base damage (as Raw); a basic Saber, unenchanted, does 17-24. I'm not good enough with the mechanics to do the math, but just eyeballing it, it would seem that you would need your target to have a huge amount of damage reduction to make the Animancer Blade come out ahead? That's without getting in to how many other unique weapons offer additional benefits. Kind of bums me out, because I was really kind of digging the Jedi vibe. I suppose I can still do Psyblade Devoted and go with some other weapon/weapon type.
  7. Hey thanks - I appreciate your input. That's very helpful - also good to know the indicators are bugged. I think it just is a little extra confusing because, unlike PoE I, the map and therefore the encounters aren't as linear. I'm glad to hear that I don't need to be starting over, and should just be looking for content that is closer to my level range.
  8. So I'm playing on PotD with upwards level scaling only for all content, which I realize is pretty much the hardest way to play the game. Things were going fine, but around level 8 I'm having a great deal of difficulty, and I don't know if it's because I'm taking on content I shouldn't be, or if I'm just not doing well. I've tried three different fights that have all completely obliterated me - fight at Ruins of Amira's Roost, fight at Steel Preacher, and some Ogre guy at Dunnage's docks. Is there some way for me to tell what levels the opponents are? They all seem to have super high resistances/defenses, such that my guys can't even scratch them, no matter what I do - including vulnerability debuffs and the like. I'm wondering if I should be restarting on a lower difficulty, or if I'm not expected to be taking on this content yet and if there is some way to determine that.
  9. Well, the fight against Raedric was super fun - died once, but the second time I managed to take him down with only two party members left standing, and my main (a wizard) totally out of spells and abilities. PotD really makes you use those consumables - had to use potions and scrolls for the first time ever.
  10. From my understanding AI is probably one of the hardest things to do and definitely one of the most time consuming. A game like Europa Universalis IV (which is more complex obviously) has been developing it's AI, in various components, for 10+ years. FWIW it will probably be much better in PoE 2 since most of the core systems, and thus AI, should be recyclable.
  11. If you're dying constantly against them, you're doing something wrong. PotD will throw enemies like that at you a lot -- something that'll either hit so hard you die, or be so hard to hit they'll wear you down. You have to figure out how to neutralise their attacks and get past their defences. Once you do, they become pretty easy really. So study them a bit and figure out the right tactics to beat them. You will need to be doing that a quite a bit in PotD. (Or it could be you're just underleveled. Going there with just you, Edér, and Aloth at level 3 is not going to be easy whatever you do.) Yeah I was just severely underleveled but I didn't want to come back to it. Was playing with two custom created characters as well but both level 2 and neither capable of really doing much. I beat them all eventually - the fights against everything else were challenging but doable, just the shadows/shades that are really tough at such a low level. Since then had zero problems clearing out two wilderness zones. About to try to do Maerwald (probably underleveled as well) because trying to open up the way to get to Pellagina and Hiravias ASAP.
  12. I'm glad I'm not - I've died like 10 times in the Temple of Eothas alone lol! But I would never play ironman on PotD anyway.
  13. Been pretty fun so far, except for the Temple of Eothas...****ing Shadows. Man I hate those things. It's not even that they teleport (which is cheesy but you can manage) it's that they're just damn hard to hit and you don't have many options this early in the game (as opposed to say, when you fight a lighthouse full of them later). At least my main wizard has eldritch aim, but my low-resting mantra pretty much has to go out the window for this dungeon.
  14. Alright, I think I'll try taking on PotD with regular experience gain then.
  15. I played this when it first came out and thought it was ok but generally mediocre and lost interest about halfway through second Act. I have some time now and am interested in picking it back up; although I know all the patches and expansion will not have fixed some of the design choices I disliked, I enjoyed the original product well enough that I think with all the subsequent work done I may enjoy the current game enough to finish (and I don't have time to wait for White March Pt. 2). I am planning on playing through with a half custom, half NPC party (Pallegina, Eder, and Hiravias, as those were the only NPCs I liked - possibly Sagani if I feel like it). All that being said, I have a few questions: Difficulty: I played through on Hard the first time. I found the difficulty to be ok for the first half of the game, and enjoyed, as an example, the following fights: final fight in Raedric's Hold, Ogre level in Endless Paths (for whatever reason), first dungeon (the one with the shades and the ratpeople and whatnot), random encounter brawl with that death godlike robber guy, fight with that banshee lady in the sealed section of the city and the sealed section of the city in general. However, as the game went on there were few fights that felt enjoyable or tactical and too many trash mobs that had to be hacked through (for no real XP or loot, either), such as all the wilderness fights, or the fights in the docks section (particularly thinking of that reassemble the scepter quest), etc. Experience: The last game seemed to suffer from severe XP bloat. I'm the kind of person who tries to do every quest, and by the midgame I felt severely over-leveled (I also did not feel the game scaled well). So, my question is, what difficulty/XP level should I play the game at (assuming IE Mod is still a viable option to decrease XP gain)? Have they scaled the content better, and if so is the higher level content enjoyable? PotD regular XP gain? Or Hard regular XP gain? Or Hard 1/2 XP gain or something? I like to try to roleplay somewhat in my combat, so I don't necessarily optimize my party, and I don't abuse the resting system - try to complete at least one level of Endless paths at a time, only rest if it makes story sense to, etc.
  16. Thanks very much for everyone's feedback - it is greatly appreciated, and I especially appreciate how pretty much everyone was polite and helpful. Based on the variety of responses, I think for right now I will hold off and let them work on it some more, but possibly when they have had more time to tweak the current expansion I may return and try out that lowered XP mod, or see what other mods there are. Thanks again all.
  17. Reloaded my old game and it looks like I had just unlocked level 8. I love all the Shadowruns and have beaten them all. You're very right about how those are definitely less combat oriented, and I love them for what they are. I don't expect PoE to be the same - it's fine to me that it is more of a dungeon-crawler with a heavy focus on combat, but not if I don't enjoy that combat. I'm surprised to see you think the classes are "classic" because that wasn't my recollection at all. Maybe it has more to do with the attribute system, but I remember having to basically make a high might wizard if I wanted him to be able to do damage, and then having a dialogue option at one point where I grabbed someone by the scruff of the neck because I had high might. I don't think the dialogue was mandatory at all, but it really did not jive with what I wanted from my character from a roleplay perspective. But speaking more mechanically, classic or not I just struggled to find any distinction among the classes - my druid wasn't really doing anything my cipher or mage weren't. But maybe they have tweaked that since I played at launch? Here's my advice: 1) Play on Path of the Damned difficulty. This is non-negotiable. 2) Play a Rogue. Take his two initial active abilities, Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike. When fighting enemies, watch their Defense scores and notice how those two abilities change them. Read about the Afflictions that they cause, and the games' other Afflictions as well. Notice how your other party members' spells and abilities can become vastly more effective as a result of those Afflictions. 3) Extrapolate what you learn from that experience to the other classes in the game. Make note of how their abilities and spells can provide similar utility. Hopefully, those wizard spells won't look so samey anymore afterwards. 4) Take Durance with you. Notice how his Suppress Affliction and Prayer spells can provide you with protection against those Afflictions when they are applied against you. In time, you will find this useful, even essential. I could try PotD - I did have a major problem with experience bloat so maybe that would help address that obliquely? Wouldn't be maining a rogue, but your advice mostly boils down to pay more attention to the affliction system and how various classes and spells interact with that, which I could definitely do. I don't recall paying much attention to that at all, so maybe I need to look into it much more (and maybe they have emphasized it more? I don't recall all that many interactions).
  18. First off, let me say I'm not trying to start an angry debate about the relative merits of PoE here, just get a little feedback on what has changed since the last time I tried and abandoned the game. I was a significant backer, so I have the expansion. I last played a couple of weeks after release; there were a number of bugs, but those weren't really the defining reasons I stopped playing (about halfway through the game). I thought the plot was on the weaker side, character interactions and quests were pretty good, didn't like the attribute system, but the big problem for me was that combat basically was just really really bland, and in a game as combat-heavy as PoE, that was a big problem. The other elements of PoE weren't bad, but they weren't nearly good enough to hold the game up despite the combat ala Arcanum. First, I felt characters were all really samey. I got that a design principle was to break free of the stereotypical robed-wizard, plate-mail knight archetypes, but all of my characters felt like they fell into one of two roles - tank or DPS. Hybrid characters, or characters in-between those roles (like for me, Sagani), felt useless. This was even worse with the caster types, whose spells seemed to have virtually no difference. I could have a wizard, whose spells were mostly geared towards DPS, or I could have a cipher, who functioned slightly differently, but was mostly geared towards DPS, or a Druid, who had some neat spells that were...mostly geared towards DPS. For someone who was hoping this would be the second coming of BGII (which at least for me had lots of interesting spells) this was a huge disappointment. (Not saying how I perceived it is necessarily all that there was to it but it is how I felt). That plus the encounter designs - which I felt, although there were a few standouts such as Roderick's Keep - were by and large very poor, really turned me off the game once I got about midway and the experience started to pile up in a fairly unbalanced way. So my question is - with patches to game mechanics since release and esp. w/ 2.0, and w/ the expansion, does the combat in the game feel better/tighter? Or should I go replay BGII for the millionth time? Again, NOT trying to anger anyone who loves the game; just asking for some perspective given my previous experiences.
  19. I don't know about hard counters and D&D v. PoE's system and whatever personal axes some of you seem to have to grind with one another, but I can say that I find BGII's combat system (which is D&D based) three or four times more enjoyable than PoE's, hard counters or no. I don't know if that is arguing for more D&D on a serious level; I don't design games and I don't pretend to be an expert on design philosophy (and I appreciate that many suggestions here are intended to be constructive). But if the binary choice were between more "D&D style" gameplay and more "PoE" style gameplay, I would certainly not be picking PoE (I don't pretend that is the actual only binary choice or that PoE couldn't potentially be improved to change my opinion, but that is my outlook at the moment).
  20. My two cents (for whatever they are worth to you) is that PoE is an above average game generally - since there have been almost no games of its genre released until the recent renaissance, that makes it definitely worth playing. It has some very enjoyable aspects - I happen to think the characters are very good and at least as engaging as anything over the past half dozen years. The writing is not bad - it does grow a little flat in some places but does the job for the most part. Atmosphere is fantastic - that room in the Temple of Eothas will stay with me for a while, and I actually am a big fan of the reputation/personality system, which I think has ample reactivity and adds flavor and even some consequence. Story is a mixed bag - I agree with those who have said it suffers from serious motivation/pacing problems; I actually thought knowing the villain from the beginning in, e.g., BGII, was a huge advantage. But there are still good parts to the story. (Admittedly, the stronghold was an enormous let down, and really something it felt like they didn't want to do but had no choice - did not fit into the story at all and had no meaningful content attached to it). However, the single biggest problem with PoE, though, is that gameplay isn't very enjoyable, at least for me, for many of the reasons that people have pointed out here. I think there is a reason the Codex review spent an inordinate amount of time on gameplay, and though I disagree with a few of his criticisms about other elements of the game, most of them are fairly accurate, especially as to gameplay. The gameplay being poor isn't necessarily a death sentence; I love PS:T and (especially) Arcanum, and I consider both of them to have terrible gameplay. Arcanum is especially bad given the gameplay radically alters depending on what mode you play on, yet they all manage to be wonky, horribly balanced, and tedious. But both of those games have some other sterling qualities that are so strong they surpass the poor gameplay; PoE isn't quite good enough to make me want to slog through the poor gameplay to experience the other elements; I'm stalled about halfway through and don't have much motivation to continue on. Also, it is a huge problem for PoE in particular because PoE throws TONS of encounters at you. It is designed to. PS:T and Arcanum both went out of their way to provide non-combat options for at least significant portions of the game. And while those of you who are saying this is the first game, and there are going to be growing pains, have a point, I am concerned that (again, for me personally) the gameplay would need such radical overhauling that you would basically need to blow everything up and start over. For me, it's not just the engagement system; it's DR, it's the samey feeling to almost all of the classes, it's the counter-intuitive attribute system that manages to be meaningful in all the wrong ways (why does my theoretically frail yet arcanely mighty wizard keep getting options to hoist people up by their shirt collars?), it's the encounters that all play out almost exactly the same way, over and over again. In sum, PoE delivered up to my (IMHO conservative and reasonable) expectations on the "Role-playing" front, but failed to deliver on the "Game" front, making it decent but not great.
  21. see, is these kinda blanket generalizations that make folks look silly. HA! Good Fun! Well that's even better, if you summarize people's opinion here you get: - BG1 was crap but better than BG2 - BG2 was crap but better than BG1 - PoE is crap because it's too similar to BG1, which is superior to BG2 but still crap nonetheless even if BG2 was the best IE game. Now I'm waiting for: IWD 1/2 was crap, PT was crap and Fallout 1/2 was crap. You're in luck. IWD 1/2 are soulless hackfests that completely lack any nuance whatsoever! Fallout 1/2 are soul-crushingly boring games set in an absolutely bland and uninspired post-apocalyptic world, and the balance is horrible! Any volunteers for PS:T? The combat sucked? Honestly, it totally did, but I don't think anyone cared.
  22. If 3.5 was an option, that would have been my vote. A good try but more than a few flaws. I am enjoying my first playthrough, but do not see me replaying the game much, as some of the flaws (esp. re: combat) are too severe.
  23. Wow, great to see all the different opinions. No one has made me reconsider Kana, but Durance and GM maybe. I wouldn't say Durance is badly written at all, but my character at the moment is a bit of a ruthless mercenary type who isn't inclined to put up with his judging. GM is harder to define, IMO. Maybe for my second playthrough I'll be more of a "good guy" drop Hiravias and Aloth and add in Durance and GM. Kana will remained entombed forever.
  24. Your opinions on the companions you find most entertaining personality wise? For me, based on my playthrough of about 30 hours (restarted post-patch) it's as follows, grouped from most enjoyable to least, roughly: Tier 1: Pallegina - Love her peripherals (art, sound) and her sometimes fiery, sometimes practical personality. Her interactions with Hiravias have been entertaining as well. Hiravias - Comic gold from my perspective, at least so far. Rude, crude, and entertaining, with enough moments of serious personality interjected to keep him from being a one-dimensional caricature. Tier 2: Eder - Could be seen as pretty basic, but has an affable, albeit slightly vanilla, charm. Could get old faster than some of the other companions due to his relative flatness. Sagani - In some ways seems to be the most realistic companion, i.e., the most similar to someone from real life (if someone from real life was from a tribal society and on a sort of vision quest for years). Tier 3: Aloth - Hard to get a feel for, due to his, erm, personality issues. Seems like he provides some real comic moments, but also sometimes feels out of place and makes me want to replace him. Grieving Mother - Weird and offputting at times but also seems well-written and with a lot of depth to her. Probably depends on your personal tolerance for cryptic mysticism. Much like Aloth, I'm at times inclined to include her and other times she makes me want to bench her. Tier 4: Kana - Want to hate him less but I really can't. His portrait with the pointy teeth gives me the willies, I hate his voice, and I also just really don't like his character. Just seems like a stupid jolly annoying giant. Durance - STRANGER DANGER. DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THE CRAZY BEARDED HOBO WITH THE FLAMING STICK. The only companion I have been tempted to murder so far. At the moment I'm going with everyone from Tiers 1 and 2 and Aloth. Tempted to include GM, but my PC is a cipher, so I think I'll stick without her.
×
×
  • Create New...