JerekKruger

I believe that it has been stated that Paladin subclasses will be their Order. It had also been stated that they weren't planning to add more orders, but perhaps the $2.8M stretch will include some new ones.

Baldur's Gate 2 didn't face nearly the same problem that PoE2 would have to if they carried on from the same level as PoE ended at. At the end of BG1 were you fighting dragons, legendary arch mages and immortal leaders of ancient cults that literally created the gods? No, you fought a level 13 fighter (Sarevok), some midlevel demons and some werewolves. As such Baldur's Gate had plenty of room to expand on the challenge. Given where PoE ended up, if you were to continue from level 16 PoE2 would essentially be Throne of Bhaal level content. I enjoyed ToB, but it was short, and had it been much longer it would have felt incredibly silly. All that said, it's rather irrelevant since Obsidian are reducing the Watcher back to level 1, and even more so than the change in party size I am fairly certain they will not change their minds on this.

Enemies will ignore your engagement when (a) the character that is engaging them is not threatening enough and (b) there are more threatening and less protected characters to attack instead. Post patch 2.0 your tanks need to do something other than act as punching bags and your damage dealers need to be tougher than wet Papier-mâché. Knowledge is our best weapon in PoE. In my first few play throughs I found Hard to be hard, now I find PotD to be fairly easy (apart from the early game) and thus deliberately do certain things earlier than the game expects you to (e.g. clearing Caed Nua or heading to the White March as early as possible).

Oh I agree. I like to hit max level a little while before the last fight so I actually get a chance to play with my finished build (similarly I like to get the best gear a bit before the end too) but I agree that hitting max level too early is a shame.

Combat doesn't directly give experience in PoE at all, and never has. You do get experience from completing encyclopedia entries on monsters, which you do by killing a certain number of those monsters, but after you've done that you don't get any further experience from killing that monster. In particular, there are no encyclopedia entries on the Kith races (humans, elves, dwarfs, godlikes, aumaua, and orlans) which means you never get experience from killing them. As for unconscious companions not getting experience from combat: assuming you actually mean the experience from completing encyclopedia entries, to the best of my knowledge this isn't true. I don't see any reason this should necessarily be the case. Obsidian will, presumably, be designing encounters around the smaller party size so, for example, where an encounter in PoE might have had 6 ogres, the equivalent in Deadfire might only have 5.

Well, Ultima VIII was, if I recall correctly, solo, but otherwise you're right. I remember wandering around with a huge party in VII. I think PoE does a good job of returning to this, at least post patch 2.0. The changes to AI targeting made what MMOs so elegantly call "tank and spank" much less viable, forcing tanks to diversify (Fighters need to do damage, Paladins need to provide support etc.) and making glass cannons much less viable. It's a huge improvement in my opinion as I never really liked the tank/damage dealer/healer split, in particular I really don't like the concept of MMO tanks. I hope this is something Deadfire sticks with.

I thought the whole point of the bounties was to provide challenging encounters for players who like that sort of thing.

I believe that Archaven was referring to Aloth's character model in the sand fight video. That was the only new material I could see of Aloth anyway.

It's all but a certainty that we'll reach this goal now. I can't remember the exact figure, but there's somewhere in the region of $500k in investment backing that hasn't been confirmed.

If the side quests are well written I don't really mind not getting experience for completing them: I enjoy doing them for their own sake.

Don't jump the gun, we might never hit $2.8M

It's a little weird that they put all three of those into one goal, when any one of them would probably have produced quite a bit of hype from the community. Not that I am complaining.

I much prefer expansion content to come at the end. Ideally I'd like to see expansion content to be a bit like Throne of Bhaal, and form a minicampaign after the events of the main campaign. EDIT: whilst I love the White March content, I do think it fundamentally messed up the balance of the main game in a way that the level scaling didn't really fix.

I doubt I'd ever use Empower on a summon since it seems likely that the only thing that will scale with a summon is it's duration. In my experience, Invocations don't come anywhere near as late as you're describing (although to be fair I play on PotD, so fights do last longer). In my last play through Kana was casting 1 or 2 Invocations in even the easiest battles, and obviously against tougher enemies he cast a lot more. This is, however, a fair point. I don't disagree that the Chanter could be improved.

I think the implication is that it is to make things easier for tester, and thus allow less testing. theBalthazar seems to be selling the idea that this is just a cynical move by Obsidian to make things easier for themselves and, whilst that is a possibility, I think it's far from the only and obvious conclusion that he claims it is.

My guess is it'll be something defensively orientated, though what exactly: I have no idea. I am hopeful that, like the Black Jacket, it'll be something a bit unusual i.e. it won't just be a Fighter who gets +2DR when wearing armour or +8 Deflection when using a Shield.

The most obvious answer would be to have their Empower points be used on Invocations. You're right that this won't be as appealing as for other classes, since Invocations come later into a battle when you'll be less likely to want/need to use an Empower point, but in a sense this fits with the design of Chanters as a low maintenance, relatively passive class. So long as they are balanced overall around this fact, it's not necessarily a bad thing that they get less from Empower points that other classes. That said, it could be that Chanters are being redesigned in some way to make this less of an issue. One idea that just sprung to mind would be having Chanters start off fights with a certain number of Phrases built up already, thus allowing them to cast some Invocations straight off before needing to build up more. A level 1 Chanter might start with no phrases built up, whilst higher level Chanters get more.

Each island must have at least fifteen floors of dungeon on it, and at the bottom there must be a dragon

Of course you still need to be careful. If you go running into combat alongside your actual tanks you might catch attention you didn't want, but with a melee Cipher you should usually be casting Whispers of Treason before wading in anyway.

I want a Vithrack companion so much.

The lore description is quite specific that the only part of their face that has to be covered is their eyes. Of course Obsidian are free to change this as they want since it's their IP and it's in its infancy, but certainly going by PoE lore it should be possibly to have a death godlike with relatively little facial coverage. Of course, if you wanted your portrait to match up to an in game character model, and all the character models had full facial coverage, then that would be a problem.

Adam Jensen is the protagonist of the two most recent Deus Ex games. He has is a heavily augmented man, and one of his augments are a pair of sunglasses lenses build into his head which he can retract at will. Whilst these lenses are out, his eyes are covered by small black discs, pretty much the minimum amount of black material necessarily to completely cover the eyes (and hence qualify as a death godlike). The part time refers to the fact he can retract them at will. I feel that this joke is kinda ruined by the description, assuming it was ever funny to begin with...

I definitely wasn't healing every two encounters with this build, I know because I am the stingiest rester in the world and generally only allow myself to camp once per map (ideally not at all). That said, beyond the very early game I was able to avoid getting targeted by enemies that often. Part of that is simply giving your tankier characters a little bit of time in melee before joining them, but I think a lot of it is that once you get Weapon and Shield Style your deflection gets high enough that whatever arcane formula is used by enemies to decide whether to switch targets doesn't consider you a better target.

Adam Jensen confirmed part time Death Godlike!

Not in the slightest.