JerekKruger

Whilst I agree with you anameforobsidian, I do hope that Obsidian will find interesting ways to achieve these distinctions. For example, the Black Jacket Fighter subclass fits your "melee DPS" idea, but it does so in an unusual way. I think it would be a shame if the other Fighter subclass was called, say, a Shieldbearer and simply got extra deflection when using a shield.

Actually, I think for romances to be realistically represented in these sort of games this is an important factor. Perhaps one of the things I dislike about romances in so many CRPGs is that you only have the option of initiating a romance with one of the romancable NPCs, and that so long as you select the right dialogue options they will reciprocate. Meanwhile, in the real world, I've been attracted to lots of people who never felt the same way towards me and vice versa. In fact if a romance system is going to represent real life relationships, at the start of each game a random, hidden roll should be made determining which NPCs can be attracted to the main character, what sort of approach they find attractive and what sort of relationship they are looking for. Your female Watcher fancies Aloth? Too bad, the random roll determined him to be gay this time round. You want a deep committed relationship with Eder? Too bad, he's just looking for something casual.

That complexity is one of the features that makes PoE fun for me. Deadfire doesn't need to be more complicated, but I'd be disappointed if it were less so. You're almost certainly missing several factors, or assuming certain weapon properties work in ways that they don't since they rarely work in the way you'd think they do. For example +20% attack speed doesn't make you attack 20% faster, and +50% crit damage doesn't make your crits do 50% more damage, and there are many more counter intuitive things like that. But the thing is you don't need to know which weapons the most damage. Most the time, early in the game you'll pick a weapon focus so you'll only be using weapons from that group. Then as you find new weapons in that group it will usually be fairly clear whether they're an upgrade, and if it's not clear then it probably won't make much difference anyway so you might as well go with whichever looks nicer. Now perhaps you're the sort of person who absolutely needs to optimise, and know how everything works. If that's the case then I'd recommend heading over the the strategy subforum of the PoE1 forums because, like I said, the way mechanics work in PoE1 are fairly counter intuitive and you're likely never going to work them out yourself without digging around in the source code and doing in game experiments. But if you're not this sort of person then I'd urge you to let go and not worry since it really doesn't matter.

Yep, I think the best one can hope for is that the weakest class combinations are still fun and powerful enough to be able to play on the hardest difficulty, and that the most powerful class combinations aren't ridiculously overpowered in ways that make the game trivial. Perfect balance is impossible to achieve in competitive multiplayer games where the developers have the benefit of a constant revenue stream from microtransactions to keep working on balance, so the idea that it could ever been achieved in a game like Deadfire is wishful thinking.

So don't multiclass in PoE2. Seems simple enough.

If PoE2 is like PoE, your character is never going to really rely on any attribute, so you'll be fine.

I wouldn't want to see the sketches replaced by 3D models. If 3D models are included, it should be as an extra.

I can understand this concern definitely, and I do hope that there'll be an easy base of operations where we can regularly go and have a chat with our companions, including those we don't bring adventuring with us. Of course, we'll still miss out on any banter they might have had whilst travelling with us, but short of having exactly the same number of companions as party slots this will always be something of a problem, and seven companions to four slots is a better ratio than PoE's eleven companions to five slots and a lot better than BG2's 17:5 and BG1's ~a billion:5.

So long as it can be done with relatively little effort by the dev team, I agree with the "why not" sentiment.

The fatigue system was overhauled in one of the later patches. You no longer gain fatigue from travelling or from battles, instead fatigue is one of several injuries a character can pick up when they are knocked out.

As I understand it, per rest abilities are being done away with altogether. They are being replaced by per rest "empower" points, each of which can be used to boost the power of your per encounter powers.

There'll still be the option of not multiclassing or not taking subclasses, so I don't see the problem with the system being complicated and I can say with some confidence that complication will be a feature for a small subset of players.

I think it's safe to say a lot of characters and abilities will need significant reworking, as it's not hard to come up with broken multiclass combinations with the current PoE classes. For example, a Barbarian/Wizard using Citzal's Spirit Lance could, depending on exactly how carnage and the lance interact, result in one shots of big, difficult encounters and/or crash the game.

Well, they've mentioned that they're extending the reputation system from PoE to include companions' opinions of the Watcher and of each other, and that the way they act towards the Watcher, and each other, will vary based on this. Obviously we won't know the true extent of this until we get a more in depth look at it, but it's a step in the right direction to my mind. It always felt odd that a character like Eder didn't bat an eyelid at the Watcher leading a group of prisoners to the deaths in order to gain personal power, and hopefully this new system will change that sort of thing.

Oh that's a shame, I quite like the idea of having something like Sanctifier (vessel slayer) as a Paladin subclass, then being able to choose an order on top of that.

Do we know for certain that a Paladin's order and a Priest's deities will be their subclass? If not, then I actually doubt that's the route Obsidian will go.

I very much doubt that this will be how it works since, as you go on to say, it's kinda broken. At a guess: every character will start with the same base accuracy (20 perhaps) but different classes will get different accuracy bonuses per level (a fighter might get +5 whilst a mage might only get +3 say).

I suspect that if any class gets a summoner subclass it'll be the Chanter, given that they are the main summoner in PoE. That said, I'd definitely like to see a few more summons on classes other than Chanters, but that's because I am fond of summons.

That's the second time you're misrepresented what was said. When asked whether it would be possible to mod the game to increase the party size the answer given was "yes, but it will be tricky because of the UI" (I paraphrase of course). You've contorted that into the weird idea that the devs designed the UI first then went "oh derp, this UI doesn't work with a party of six, oh well let's just drop it to five". There's no evidence for this view and it runs counter to the way things are developed (things like UI get designed later specifically to avoid problems like this). There's also a much more plausible explanation: Obsidian decided on a party size of five for other reasons (be it path finding, encounter design, reducing visual overload or simply because 5 is Josh's favourite number) then designed a UI around this (in the same way PoE's UI was designed around a six person party). That this makes modding a larger party size harder shouldn't come as a surprise since on top of changing the game code to allow you to have more people in your party, you'd have to find some way to give access to the extra characters' inventories and character sheets and so on since the UI wouldn't natively do so. I can pretty much guarantee that there would have been the same problems raising the party size of PoE to 7 say.

Here you go: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/91241-josh-sawyer-something-awful-poe2-posts/?p=1879801 Not much information yet.

No name has been given, but Josh has confirmed that there will be a shapeshifting specialised Druid subclass (on SA I believe).

Actually if the classes in Deadfire are fairly similar to those in PoE then I can already envisage a rather cool Paladin/Priest build which is all about damage dealing and not at all about helping others. There are already Paladin builds that take Scion of Flame to boost the damage of Flames of Devotion and Sacred Immolation, often using various items with bound fire spells as well to maximise the benefit. Priests also have a surprisingly large repertoire of very powerful fire based spells. A Paladin/Priest could be made into a very cool frontline flame based combatant, a job I don't think either could do half as well on their own. In particular, if it were possible to get access to both Sacred Immolation and Minor Avatar (both gained at level 13) the combination would be amazing. So, there you go, a Paladin/Priest build that can do something neither class really does by themselves, and in fact abandons the shared aspect of both classes.

Agreed! One of the disappointing things about companions in PoE was that (apart from Durance and GM) as soon as you met them you could burn through all their character dialogue. I think it would be very cool if the amount that each companion was willing to reveal about themselves grew as they travelled with the Watcher and gained his/her trust.

Do you understand the notion of an opinion Lanyon, because I am fairly certain that what kanisatha was expressing there was their opinion. The fact that there is an active community around Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 does not mean that kanisatha is wrong about how they feel about BG2. As for whether PoE will ever have the same following that the BG series has I suspect you might be right, but not for the reasons you assume. After the release of IWD2 there were no more IE-style isometric RPGs (very few isometric RPGs at all in fact). Developers decided that 3D was the way forwards, and fans of the old style had no choice but to turn reply the existing ones and, unsurprisingly, a modding community sprung up to extend replayability. Meanwhile with PoE we've got a sequel on the books, we had Tyranny (which I've yet to play) and we'll have Tides of Numenera. Slightly further afield we have games like Divinity Original Sin and its sequel. If all goes well, fans to more old school RPGs aren't going to find themselves in the position they did in the early 2000s and so aren't going to be forced to replay the same games over and over again. I very much hope that in three or four years time I will be looking forward to PoE3, or another isometric title set in the Eora or even a different IP. I used to be a serial replayer of BG2: playing through it every six months or so with a different character, but I haven't done so in a while now and a large part of why that is is because I've got PoE instead, and despite having played through PoE four or five times it's still a lot fresher than BG2 (the dialogue of which I could quote verbatim in many places).

At least our quest isn't in vain... is it?