Answermancer

I'm looking for a pretty good rogue build focused on sneak attack and probably crit (I have less than zero interest in Backstab or Assassin). Also want to focus on dual sabres where possible for roleplaying reasons (though obviously I'd have a second weapon set for other damage types unless I can get some dual-damage sabres like Bittercut). I'm gonna restart my playthrough once the import bugs are fixed because my save didn't import properly , so in the meantime I'm playing Swashbuckler Devoted/Rogue focused on sabres. So far it's been awesome, but I'm not very far, only level 3 or 4. Devoted could prove to be a problem later on. I'm thinking when I restart I want either the same thing, or a Swashbuckler with plain Fighter/Rogue, or a pure Rogue, or a Shadowdancer (probably Shattered Pillar?). Do people have thoughts or advice on these combos, with my stated goal in mind? I tried a Shadowdancer SP/Rogue in Beta and it was super fun too, so I'm torn between that and the Swashbuckler, but Swashbuckler seemed to have great synergy with things like Disciplined Barrage and Cleave stance, and is probably a bit closer to what I want from a RP perspective, which is basically... a swashbuckling sneak attack rogue. Sadly, I think pure Rogue is probably out, I'm not impressed or interested in the tier 8-9 abilities, only Gambit looks somewhat interesting.

I've been super excited and positive about the game, and so far it's been great fun, but the import bugs are really souring me on the whole thing. I can't think of a single bug that would frustrate me more, to be honest, particularly since it's not realistic for a patch to fix my existing save where I've already had conversations about things that shouldn't have happened. I loaded my very first Pillars save a few weeks ago, my original character, and did all the White March content with her, and stayed up way too late last night finishing the game with some choices I was really happy with. Right off the bat it seems like Eder's outcome is not being reflected (he keeps talking about the Night Market, but in my end slides he became mayor). I'm really sad right now, what else it gonna be broken? Am I gonna come across Aloth and he's gonna be the Leaden Key grandmaster when in my ending he was dismantling them? Ugh. Really makes me not want to keep playing.

In the old game I almost need to use slow mode in every combat, and you think that is the right way to go hmmmm. For me, I like the trend of slower combat, but they make it overworked right now imo. Recovery time in last beta is okay for weapons, current beta is too slow. But I do think combat in PoE 1 is way too fast, and don’t hope them to change it back. No, don't get me wrong, I also play Pillars 1 in Slow mode pretty much 100% of the time. But that's my choice, I have that choice and others have the choice to play at 2 other speeds, I think that choice is important. Also, I think that the Normal speed in Pillars 1 feels more "realistic" in that people aren't standing around for many seconds doing nothing, so applying Slow mode on top of that feels good, IMO. I'm choosing to slow down "realistic" time into a more manageable "slow motion" form, I think that's basically better than the Pillars 2 approach in every way, where people still attack at "realistic" speeds, but then stand around doing nothing for multiple seconds afterwards.

Agreed, I think they should rethink the whole recovery revamp they're doing in the sequel. The old system with Slow mode was just better, even if they tune the balance here it will still feel more limited and less user friendly than the first game. I don't get it. The "no slow mode" thing feels like some kind of short-sighted upper management note or something "people felt the game was too fast and like they had to play on Slow, so to avoid confusing new players just slow everything down and get rid of slow mode."

Devoted seems like it could be a minor noob trap. If you haven't played a Pillars game before you might not understand the value of dual-damage-type weapons, and make a considerably less useful character just by choosing the wrong weapon type to focus on. Not that I think it's a very big issue, compared to other noob trap options, especially in older games.

Lol, you don't ask a player to work on localization within the game, it's developers job. The only input I think players should be allowed to do is to write their own ship's name if they so desire, which makes my suggestion the only viable suggestion. Or choose from a range of predefined names. I don't agree with this actually, there's nothing wrong with letting the player enter the various forms of a name, nor is it that weird or unprecedented. For instance, older Civilization games let you do this for your empire even in English, specifying a different long name ("Roman Empire"), short name ("Rome"), adjective ("Roman"), etc.

This is a great point, actually. I remember when I first noticed that it gives +25 Res and was like "that's cool, holy ****." I never really considered why it was possible for them to do that though, or like you say, that it would be impossible to do with basically any other stat.

Seems like a weirdly arbitrary goal, definitely so when it comes to the actual flow of real time. I mean, we're talking about an actual half-second difference of actual, real time that we actually perceive in the physical world. If we were to change all 1.5s to 2s just to meet some aesthetic aspiration of "only integers, please" that just makes for a purely worse experience as a player, IMO.

Yup. I thought everyone agreed about this years and years ago with ****ty implementations of Power Attack.

Holy **** I love this idea. +10 It would be fiddly and maybe too confusing, but they could certainly add some way for spells to just go into a "ready to cast" state when they finish powering up (rather than going off), and then you could move and cast them instantly. Maybe for a limited time, and probably only if you do nothing else in the meantime. It might be too powerful, and almost certainly too confusing or fiddly for new players, but it's certainly something they could make work if they wanted to. To be honest, it would probably be a bit cleaner than the recast feature right now (at least until they fix the "auto-pause on long ability cast" option to not be so broken and annoying and omg Obsidian fix this already for the love of ****, please).

Okay that is extremely confusing. If that's the case then it should just say "Blunted Criticals: Cannot inflict critical hits." Or something.

I would also like it if it listed the tier of the affliction in the tooltip. Especially while learning the game it would be nice to be able to explicitly see "by the way, this is the Tier 1 Dex affliction" in its tooltip (Hobbled? is that right?). If not then I hope it at least lists all the tiers in the Cyclopedia entry on afflictions, the same way someone listed them all out in a thread on here.

That... makes perfect sense. I clearly wasn't thinking, lol. Thanks. Agreed.

I'll echo the feedback that even just having it for self-buffing makes an enormous difference from a quality of life standpoint. Just being able to tell my Shadowdancer to automatically use Swift Strikes when it's down makes me like the character about twice as much. I despise having to micro short-duration self buffs.

Good thread, and worth discussing. I think in general a lot of spells need a pass where their power level is tweaked, or their effects modified to match their expected level. At this point I imagine they're still finalizing most content before a serious rebalancing pass, so hopefully they'll do some drastic stuff here. Cipher is the example that keeps coming up for something that needs a drastic rebalance and can't really ship in the state it's in, between the Res/Might split, and the ridiculously long cast times on top of focus generation. By the way, I was just looking at tooltips for Charm vs. Domination... and Charm actually sounds better? I'm guessing that the tooltip is missing some crucial info but it just says Alliance flipped for Domination, while Charm has both alliance flipped AND can't use abilities? What am I missing here.

Good thread, thanks for the link. Man I think that's really gonna confuse people though (okay, I couldn't help myself, sorry, but it's true!). I can't think of another game right now where confusion doesn't mean some loss of control at least. Not that I think it's a bad change mechanically. Confuse, Charm, and Dominate were all pretty samey in the last game, so I think mechanically it's actually a pretty cool idea that distinguishes these effects. But I think it will be pretty unintuitive to people, though,

Wait, you don't lose control? Just friendly fire? Really?? I had no idea, I guess I should actually try that Bleak Walker/Berserker I made then. Shows what I know then, I didn't think it had changed from Pillars 1. That is kinda problematic though, since I don't think most people would expect that, and might write off the subclass the same way I did... (again, I read the description and just noped right out of there).

Alright, so Berserker/[Fighter/Monk/Paladin] sounds like it might be okay then, but probably still not for me. For one thing, all of those abilities are Rank 4, it looks like, so you'd go through much of the early game without them. Paladin is probably the least annoying, since it's passive, and I could see myself making like a Berserker/Bleak Walker, cause that would be hilarious and thematic. Actually maybe I'll try that later this week. The other combos would probably be a bit annoying to me, and having to wait til rank 4 in the full game would probably make me uninterested. Also outside of those combos I can't see myself ever wanting to play a pure Berserker or any other multi, having to depend on another party member (priest) to be able to get a spell off on him every fight or risk having him murder my own team sounds way too stressful to me. Edit: Oh, you can't even get to rank 4 abilities multiclassing in the Beta, so I made that Berserker/Bleak Walker for nothing :/

Probably gonna look like an idiot here, but sell me on Berserker. Like, the chances of me taking a class that's only powerful when it's Confused, and that self-confuses is... 0%, basically. Are you always comboing it with an Intellect inspiration or resistance from something to get around that? I thought I remembered someone talking about one of the races having Intellect resistance, or something like that to combo with it, but I just looked and I can't find anything. Anyway without something like that it just sounds way too annoying to play, for me. Having to constantly find ways to stop the Confuse from happening.

With most of the rogue characters I've made I've dual-wielded Sabre and Stiletto. Cause it's cool, dammit, and also covers two damage types off the bat. Sounds like Stiletto is not great right now though, before Pen was all-or-nothing so I think the combo worked okay, particularly since the modals for both give extra Pen. Well, I think the Pen modals are pretty great, or at least they were in the old system. Now that you're likely to only lose 25% damage, maybe less so. I mostly agree about the rest, I've almost never found them even situationally useful (except maybe the defensive ones on squishy backliners if they get mobbed).

Also, add Slow Mode back. ​No seriously, I still want it even with the pacing changes. Just because Normal speed is playable this time around does not mean that I don't want Slow Mode also. Ideally configurable with a slider, if we're asking for X-mas miracles.

Agreed on both. Honestly the flickering was so incredibly annoying (and functionally too, I could never tell at a glance how much health anyone had or even what abilities) that the last time I tried playing a week ago I basically ragequit and put the Beta aside. But I played a bunch tonight and it's totally fixed, and the game feels great to play now! I've also been replaying Pillars 1 recently and its really made clear how much all the subtle new visual additions add to the game. Great work Obsidian, it looks fantastic.

It might be worth mentioning that this only works if you click the item, mouse over the other character, and click againg. If you click-and-drag directly without that initial "pick up" click it doesn't work, which must be a bug, and made me think that this plain didn't work for a long time.

Personally I just hate dumped stats from a totally irrational "aesthetic" perspective. Seeing a character with one or more 3 stats or something just "looks" and feels stupid as hell to me. But it's a single-player game and it's no skin off my back what people do, as long as I'm not required to do it to be able to be successful, so I guess it's fine... I guess.

I don't really agree. The game is balanced around group encounters, so I don't think that what you're describing is required to be "well-balanced".