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Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

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Everything posted by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

  1. Right now Blunderbuss is in Ruffian group with stiletto, saber, and . .something else?
  2. After playing the beta for a bit, my plan is Fighter, Paladin, Chanter, Priest, Cipher, Wizard. Healing is important but at least on Hard difficulty characters take damage and get healed very quickly and just due to reaction and casting time issues it's better to have passive than active healing, but the priest can provide passive heals. The bigger issue is buffing and debuffing. Since buffs generally aren't going to stack with themselves you want a wide variety of abilities; two spells buffing your party's damage resistance won't stack with each other, but a spell buffing party DR and a spell debuffing enemy damage will. So a priest and a chanter is going to be more useful than two priests or two chanters (though you could make an all priest or all chanter party work if you really wanted).
  3. I tried Thrice She Was for the first time this morning and was kinda blown away by how good it was, even with minimal Might. Gunswapping for huge alpha damage seems kinda exploity but people actually did that with muzzloaders so it's period accurate.
  4. I take it all back! Blunderciph is totally bogus! Fighters out damage me, half the time all the shots miss, and I get knocked out more than the rest of the party combined! It is fun though. I think it works well in the beta because leadspitter is the best weapon in the beta and it takes advantage of that.
  5. Yeah, what I've been doing has been biting AND draining whip, with the Lead Spitter, and usually ruffian weapon set also; Penetrating Shot would be a good choice if Lead Spitter didn't exist. Max focus is twice starting focus and you get (I think) a point of focus for every two points of damage, plus 2 focus "per hit" from all 8 blunderbuss fragments. Usually that first blast + starting focus will take you to somewhere between 60-90 focus, which is usually enough oomph to carry you through until the fight's decided one way or another. They seem to have taken out the range limitation on soul whip, which I agree with, close range ciphers aren't nearly as much fun.
  6. Eh, the market has changed a lot since the old days. I think the success of games like Darkest Dungeon shows there's more of an appetite than you might think for old-school, hard-core, seriously challenging RPG's. The PC game market has aged a lot in the past decade and it's grown up in the process and I think the success of the first Dragon Age game shows there's actually a huge market for this type of game -- tactical map RPG's in the spirit of the IE games and the old Gold Box games. Hell, the Gold Box games were massively successful in their day. It's just that 1) there was a ten year or so period where fancy 3d graphics were GOD, and 2) there's an industry myth that nobody wants these games so nobody's making them and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  7. You will notice this is an issue with many threads on the forums, especially ones created by long term backers who have been at the beta hard since the first day it was released. Oh if I'd been around that long I'd be just as likely to be down in the details and down in the dumps as everyone else. It's a natural thing that happens. I'm just fortunate(?) that I didn't figure out I could do an "addon" of the backer beta until a few days ago, so I'm seeing it all fresh for the first time. The game ain't perfect but it's a damn sight better than a lot of games I've been happy to pay good money for, and there's still time for final polishing.
  8. He has heard about PoE before he ever heard about Darkest Dungeons, as he interviewed BAdler at E3 2014 about it, but Darkest Dungeons was several days steam's best selling game and it is popular with twitch streamers and youtubers, so it is probably much better known game with his viewers than Pillars of Eternity, at least until PoE actually comes out. Yeah I guess I can see that it's just a funny juxtaposition because I think of Obsidian as major industry players and Darkest Dungeon as a scrappy upstart. Don't get me wrong I love Darkest Dungeon and backed it also but the idea that it's more high-profile than PoE is sortof hilarious to me, even though I guess right now it's true. It's like if someone introduced Peyton Manning by comparing him to this year's Heisman winner. Or the time I saw "If you like [Robert Jordan], you might also like [J.R.R. Tolkien]" on a bookstore shelf.
  9. Well, combat is good enough to carry some games. Hell, it's a lot easier to make a game that gets carried by the combat than it is to make one that gets carried by the writing. That's the reason the whole industry shifted to first person 3D; Skyrim isn't exactly a literary masterpiece, but it's fun to play, for a while at least.Hell, Divinity: Original Sin has great combat, it's fun to play, but after a while the story just sortof peters out and it gets old -- it's not a bad game and the writing is actually pretty decent but even the two together aren't quite enough to take it all the way. By contrast, how many RPGs have you played that actually were carried by the strength of the writing? I can't think of more than a handful, and almost all of them were put out by either the guys from Obsidian or the guys from Looking Glass. That kind of talent is painfully rare. If all this game turns out to be is another Divinity: Original Sin, hell, it'll be worth the price of my pledge, but honestly given what I've seen of the backer beta and these guys' track record with PS:T and New Vegas, I think I'm gonna get a lot more -- actual, quality writing, rarer in this industry than anything else -- and that's what I'm looking forward to.
  10. The Blunderbuss also works well with the Cipher talent that gives + focus per hit. Can get as much as 16 extra focus in a single blast, on top of the focus from the damage. Makes it relatively easy to top out your meter. Anyway, here's a thing, but I think it's mostly a visual thing and not actually effective in game (if you'll note Waymund's little targeting profile he only has one instance of the venom): http://i.imgur.com/hUW9rLE.jpg
  11. Ok the idea that he's comparing it to Darkest Dungeon because that's the only other RPG he's played is just ludicrously comic to me. Sometimes I forget just how few RPG's have been made in the past couple decades, especially if you discount FPS's like Mass Effect. I mean, hell, the guy seems decent enough, it's just hilarious that this guy heard of Darkest Dungeon but not Pillars.
  12. In addition to all the above, here's a post by Josh Sawyer on another forum explaining stacking: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3593502&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=341#post441845980 So no, if you had two talents that gave the same bonus, they wouldn't stack.
  13. They need to do a Darklands / Ars Magica remake. It'd be the best thing since ever.
  14. I understand both sides of this debate and think it's probably something that should go in, but with a toggle for "chant sounds enabled yes/no?"
  15. Wow, there's a lot of whining in this thread As someone just starting the beta now I feel like a lot of the complaints I'm seeing in this thread are the results of over-analysis. The game could certainly use some further tweaking (Perception and Resolve seem a little weak right now; the UI is good but could be improved in a few small ways) but overall playing it feels very much like playing the old Infinity Engine games, just better and more modernized -- they've done a good job keeping the spirit but evolving it forward, as I'd expect from a modern game. Comparisons with Divinity: Original Sin are gonna be made yeah. D:OS was a good game but fell a little short in the writing. I expect from what I've seen that PoE will be similarly good mechanically but have better writing. Two similar games can both be excellent without that being a problem, I have time in my life for playing two games, perhaps even three. I actually agree that turn-based in superior to RTWP but the IE games weren't turn based so this won't be either because this isn't in the spirit of the old Gold Box RPGs, it's in the spirit of the IE games. And it succeeds at that even if I personally wish it were a little closer to the old Gold Box stuff. End of the day the beta feels like it's doing what it says on the package. yeah, there's room for improvement, but in terms of tactical mechanics what I've been playing is pretty damn good as is and as good or better than any tactical map* RPG I've played since, oh, probably the first Dragon Age game; the writing is hard to analyze in this short snippet but if Avellone's writing in this is consistent with his past work it'll be the best RPG I've played since, oh, probably Planescape:Torment. *I say tactical-map RPG because Darkest Dungeon has neat tactical mechanics also but it's row-based and thus a very different type of game.
  16. Is it even possible to save her completely? With Cipher you get a choice to , but she seems to always end up dead at the end of the fight anyway -- even when I cast a Withdraw on her she just went *poof* and never came back and the script acted like she had died.
  17. As of February 17 you could still buy the Backer Beta as an addon on this website, if you had a prior pledge, for an additional $25, and then generate a steam key which you could use to download a playable copy of the Backer Beta. I know this because I did it, so it works. It was probably an unwise decision on my part, because I could've just waited a month, but I wanted RPG now and . . . I got just enough of a solid taste to leave me wanting a lot more of this game, unfortunately .
  18. I'm still on my first playthrough of the beta (just realized the other day that I could do an add-on of the backer beta!) and I've been playing a Cipher. I think a melee Cipher could work, especially if you took the various close range damage powers and so forth, but I've been playing a ranged Cipher with blunderbuss and crowd control and it's very fun. He's a little squishy but his crowd control really matters and swings fights. Overall he feels very balanced. Otherwise I've been playing all the BB classes plus a hireling Chanter. Honestly they all feel pretty solid except the rogue seems a little underwhelming, but I suspect that's because I haven't really learned to play her well yet.
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