JerekKruger

Oh that was the subclass I was talking about.

Harsh, but fair. I don't know if it was observation bias, but it always seemed like Khalid was the only character in BG1 to ever lose his morale. Given his personality, I always wondered whether there was a hidden penalty to his morale that made this happen more often.

Sounds good to me

If you do include the ability for lightning to strike characters please include an option to turn it off. It's a cool and funny option, but I suspect the novelty will eventually wear off and having to reload periodically will grow tiresome

Luckily real world history is full of non-European cultures who used armour which we can use as inspiration for realistic looking armour. Also there don't seem to be all that many purely Elven or Dwarven nations or communities (the Pale Elves of the White that Wends are an obvious exception, but they don't seem like a group for whom armour is a top priority), instead Dwarfs and Elves seem to exist alongside Humans, Orlans and, to a lesser extend Aumaua. Given that all kith have essentially the same basic body shape and distribution of vital organs, one would expect the culture they come from to have a bigger impact on the style of armour they wear than their race (e.g. you'd expect an aedyran elf to wear armour more similar to an aedyran human than a vailian elf).

Go look up the famous painting of Emperor Charles V wearing his plate armour. This is perhaps the most powerful and wealthy man in Europe in his time, and what does his armour look like? It looks like fairly normal plate armour of the era, but decorated more intricately. Why doesn't this hugely important individual have armour that, underneath the decoration, is the same as the low ranking knights far beneath him? Because this armour worked: it was the culmination of hundreds, if not thousands of years of first hand experience of what did and didn't work when it came to protecting soldiers on the battlefield. What you describe as badass would have been, at best, pointless additional weight, and possibly have limited mobility of joints or provided enemies with handy levels to grab when fighting in hand-to-hand. And again, you have a strange view of what a run of the mill trooper was wearing. Plate armour was inordinately expensive and the days where a lord or government would provide good quality equipment to their armies were a long way in the future. The vast majority of semi-professional soldiers would have been wearing brigandine or similar armour, and even some of the landed knightly classes might not have been able to afford plate. Also remember, the plate armour we see preserved in museums is rarely typical quality armour, it's almost always high quality examples since cheaper, lower quality armour would usually have been recycled after it became obsolete. So when you see the nice shiny classic Gothic, Italian or Greenwich plate armours you should be thinking "this is the armour of a wealthy individual", not "this is what everyone was wearing at the time". EDIT: here's Charles V in armour - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Karl_V_1605.jpg

I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement that Paladins are Fighter/Priests by default, but accepting this premise for the sake of argument: a Paladin/Priest could be the single best support class there is given that both classes have great support abilities which don't wholly overlap; Paladin/Fighter could be an amazing tank, combing the Paladin's innate superior defences with the Fighters various tank specific talents and abilities; Fighter/Priest could simply be a more traditional D&D style priest i.e. a decent front liner fighter who is also a good spellcaster. Well, many Monk builds already take Apprentice Sneak Attack (which will presumably be removed in favour of actual dual classing) so a Monk/Rogue already seems an obvious choice. A Monk/Fighter would have access to lots of abilities that don't require wounds to activate, which would be a useful addition. Monk/Barbarians speak for themselves if Carnage remains in the game.

Well, it's likely that before the battle begun Alexander formed a plan for it, part of which might have been "focus the attack on the weaker flank". If so, I'd say that's strategy, though the actual execution of that plan is of course tactical.

Nature's far too high level to still get xp from killing dragons

Hah! That's pretty cool. I mean it's obviously an instant reload, but still.

Wait, I played BG1 through loads of times and don't recall thunder storms firing random bolts that could actually hit characters. Did I miss out on this completely?

At least one fan of the IE games disagrees with you, and I suspect I am far from alone. What I wanted was a return to the isometric PoV with beautiful individually designed maps, to tactical real time with pause combat, and to a deep story. These were the things the made IE games great to me, not the individual mechanical elements ported over from tabletop AD&D, and certainly not the arbitrary party size limit.

Urgh! Now I have an image of Edér "petting" himself whilst spiritshifted.

I have a fairly good idea why he did, but I don't want to risk spoiling anything you haven't seen yet.

I ran a Kind Wayfarer build which wielded Tidefall (available fairly early in the game) and the killing was fine. You're not doing single target damage like a druid can but you make up for that by remaining pretty damn tanky, having good support skills and at higher levels by doing very good AoE damage. As for how a Kind Wayfarer is as a tank: all Paladins can be very good tanks. The order is a fairly minimal aspect of the class.

First off, kudos to your girlfriend Gairnulf, those are really nice and exactly the sort of sketch drawings I miss from the old IE games. Second, do we have a concrete reason to assume these sorts of images won't be in Deadfire? I am sure it's something Josh has mentioned before as something he would like to include, and also that the new version of Unity makes it easier to do. I'm guessing if they do include them then it'll also be easier to mod new ones in.

Possibly. It depends on the class and on the creativity of Obsidian I guess. Perhaps it's worth giving some examples of kits in BG2 to give some idea of how this might work. BG2 had the Fighter class, and the generic Fighter had all the abilities of a Fighter with no bonuses or penalties. You could then pick one of three kits: Berserker, Kensai or Mage Slayer (or Hunter, I can't remember). The Berserker got an additional ability that the base Fighter didn't called, unsurprisingly, Berserk, which temporarily gave a buff to combat ability and immunity to various afflictions. In exchange for this, the Berserker was prohibited from raising their proficiency in ranged weapons past the lowest level. The Kensai was a little more complicated. It gained a passive bonus to accuracy and damage every X levels, and a special per rest attack that did huge damage, but in exchange for this it couldn't wear any armour or use several different categories of items. So what does this tell us about subclasses in Deadfire? Possibly nothing of course, but my guess is the following. Each class's base version will be fairly similar to their current incarnation in PoE. Each subclass will then give various bonuses and penalties (for example there's a ranger subclass that doesn't have a pet, but my guess is they'll be better with their ranged weapon as a result). On top of this, I suspect certain class abilities will be off limits to each subclass (the petless ranger won't be able to take pet improving abilities obviously) and perhaps will have some new, subclass unique ability choices to replace those they lose access to (BG2 didn't really have this because most classes didn't get many abilities at all).

I wouldn't try to understand. The extreme anti-5 character party crowd have gone way past explaining why they don't like the reduction and moved onto doom saying.

You missed one: 4. Obsidian is just a shill for Big TV and Big Controller

Two reasons: (i) the conquest type system might not allow you to pick every single decision that is imported with a save and (ii) importing a game with your desired state is probably going to be quicker than going through the conquest system. Again: no one would be forced to change anything they didn't want to, so why would you want to disallow others from changing things like race and gender?

Nothing sad about that. I'm not a big fan of romance options but I don't begrudge others for wanting them.

Wow, your run of the mill foot soldiers are bloody wealthy if that's the sort of armour they are wearing. The four unique plate armours in PoE all look like the sort of armour that wealthy nobles or even kings wore. They are highly ornate and decorated: something that the vast majority of people who wearing plate (already something many soldiers couldn't afford) would not have had.

You're not skipping spells though, you're just disabling them whilst spiritshift is on. You can always turn it off and use spells. In fact this makes playing a druid significantly more tactical since, unlike the current system, you can't simply switch on spiritshift AND cast spells: you'll have to judge exactly how much time you want to spend casting spells before switching to you spiritshift form, and also consider whether there are circumstances under which you want to switch back and cast more spells. The main reason I favour this change though, is that at the moment being a druid who focuses on spiritshift just doesn't feel fun. Sure, there are ridiculously powerful builds that make use of spiritshift, but even with Gyrd Háewanes Sténes you are going to spend less than half of most tougher battles in your spiritshifted form.

Completely agree, and if there's going to be a spiritshifting focused Druid subclass that seems to be the obvious distinguishing feature to give it (along with talents that improve spiritshifting that aren't available to other Druid subclasses of couse).

Find it as suspect all you want, PotD was inspired by IWD2's Heart of Fury mode: a mode that was specifically included to provide a challenge to those players who enjoy punishing tactical real time with pause combat. That was the whole point, and it's the reason why PotD is the only difficulty that actually buffs enemy stats. But that's beside the point. You say that you don't find role-playing rewarding without a challenge, and are worried that with a 5 character party it won't be possible to play on PotD with a non-power gaming style. My response is that if it does turn out to be the case that 5 character parties make PotD only accessible to super optimised play (which, given the difficulty of PoE, I find extremely unlikely), then you'll still have your role-playing challenge when playing on Hard. From what you've said, it doesn't matter what difficulty you play on so long as it provides a challenge for the specific style of play you enjoy.