gkathellar

Kind of? I'm gonna say the reason is most likely that the scavenger hunt is a versus evil publisher thing. They (Obsidian) are probably contractually obliged to only have this on Steam. That might also explain why some Obs dev once talked about MAYBE putting this on GOG, because they just weren't aware of the legal stuff (not their area of expertise). If you check out the Steam and GOG store pages, then you'll notice that GOG lists Obsidian as both publisher and developer, while Steam has versus evil as publisher. I even remember remember the tweets from versus evil, promoting Pillars II before release. They exclusively talked about buying the game on Steam, as if GOG didn't exist. I'm guessing versus evil only gets money if people buy the game on Steam and the game is only on GOG because Obsidian themselves put it there too. Releasing these items as an extra DLC on GOG is so simple, that Obsidian would have done it by now, if there wasn't another reason stopping them to do so. Or we could just apply Hanlon's Razor, instead of indulging in baseless conspiracy fantasies.

Pfff, whatever Boeroer. Poe's Law is just a myth, sarcasm is obvious in context-free forum posts. DUH.

There are no dialogue choices regarding SUBclasses in Deadfire, only base classes. Nope.

I asked for this back in PoE1 and I would still like it now. PoE's iteration of RTwP already looks a lot like an ATB system, and this would allow it to basically function as such. Really, the only reason I can think of not to have it is that the game might have a hard time detecting idleness. Which might be the case, mind - I'd love to hear a dev/modder/etc answer if it is. Off the top of my head, it would help a lot with in-combat movement, effects that remove your character's target, the expiration of conditions that prevent your characters from taking actions. It would also, hopefully, solve the somewhat awkward timing of the "pause on ability end" option.

Oh yes, I remember that time when we could heal with potions of infuse with vital essence. IIRC the trick is to use the potions at the start of the fight, so any health loss comes out of the bonus, rather than your actual pool. I never did this, mind, so I may not be recalling it right.

Yes, I agree. Bear in mind my initial comment was in response to a suggestion - that upping charge's cost would have been a better solution to its high power than messing with its particulars. I brought up the question of shared resources to note that this comes at a cost to flexibility, because either charge would then be so expensive to be unworthy of using, or still strong enough but would pretty rapidly leave your fighter devoid of resources to do other things. This is unlike, say, PoE1, where you could've cut down the uses/encounter or something.

Yeah, it can be honestly shocking how responsive this game is to player skill.

Rogues are great mixed debuffers/damagers, in general, and dual-saber rogues can hit phenomenally hard. Deathblows in particular turns stacked debuffs into a uh ... death sentence. With deathblows. Of death. That said, they don't fit fantastically with my playstyle, either, due to my predilection for melee off-tanks ... and then there's the Yellow Flash (which I incidentally used a variation of for DoC on my most recent playthrough). Tank rogue is love. Tank rogue is life. (Yellow Flash incidentally has really high Int/Per/Res, making a good MC for conversation reasons.)

My name is gkathellar and I endorse anything even tangentially related to Toshiro Umezawa, the single best monoblack heroic character.

The problem that then arises is that you also wouldn't be able to do anything else in most battles. Ultimately that's an issue with the way they've replaced uses/encounter with resources/encounter - every ability has to be balanced as something repeatable that potentially replaces all preceding abilities, rather than as something that will happen X number of times per encounter. /shrug Why that is an issue? U can choose to use FoD 10 times or use SI x1, Lay on hand x2 FoD x4, it’s more flexible than PoE 1. Yes u can barely do anything if u use your high cost abilities a lot times, but it’s all up to you and in PoE 1 you cannot even do this, can u has SI twice in 1? No. It's so flexible that it can be homogeneous. Let's take the paladin as an example: when I built an FoD-focused paladin in PoE1, they'd have a couple of really impressive alpha strikes to use at advantageous times, and then they'd be doing other stuff (healing, tossing down scrolls/spellbinds, tanking, etc) - throughout the fight, I could realistically expect to do a variety of different things. By contrast, a PoE2 paladin optimized for FoD will just use FoD over and over again, because that's what they're built to do and is, in general, their best option. Of course, that's an exaggeration, and in particular the difference is more limited at early levels when PoE1 characters tended to have only 1-2 abilities available. It's also variable based on class and build, and for characters like Chanters who replenish resources over time, it tends to be untrue. But hopefully it gets across the point I'm trying to make: tying everything to a shared resource pool sounds good in theory, and it can be good in theory, but it can also encourage extreme specialization and one-trick pony builds. It''s also less of an issue for multiclass characters, since those tend to be two or even three-trick ponies just as a result of their two resource pools. Finally, from a design perspective, I'd personally be leery of it because it's really difficult to balance - and this brings us back to cases like Charge. See, if an ability exists in a vacuum, it can be tuned as an isolated function, i.e. "if Charge is usable x times than it should do y damage at level z." The fact that such an instance can be thought of in simple mathematical terms is tremendously valuable with respect to tuning it, because all the designer has to do is consider the context it occurs in, and then make sure the function is appropriate for that context. If there's a problem with Charge, that can be addressed, and then if there's a problem with Knockdown, that can be addressed. The two cases do create context for one another, but it's a limited context because the ability to use one does not come at the direct expense of the other. On the other hand, if all of a character's abilities draw from the same resource pool, a secondary consideration arises: the opportunity cost of using ability A instead of ability B, and more crucially, the player perception of that opportunity cost. In practice, unless fights really do prompt radically different styles of play, players are going to look at the cost of an ability and the effect of an ability and either say, "oh, wow, that's better than what I have right now, I'll use all of my resources on that instead," or, alternately, "oh, wow, that's not as good as what I have right now, I won't use any resources on that." If the developer then tunes it the other way, the player may change their conclusion, but the process of evaluating opportunity cost to determine worth still happens. This is why in games like Path of Exile, functional builds tend to have one skill for AoE, one skill for single-target, and buffs - they all draw from mana, so the only skills worth using are the ones that maximize either defense or DPS. It's not an inherently bad thing, but it is a thing I don't like in Pillars. Hopefully that provides some clarification on my perspective.

The problem that then arises is that you also wouldn't be able to do anything else in most battles. Ultimately that's an issue with the way they've replaced uses/encounter with resources/encounter - every ability has to be balanced as something repeatable that potentially replaces all preceding abilities, rather than as something that will happen X number of times per encounter. /shrug

Maybe, but certainly not one like BG2's Underdark. Acts 4-5 in that game weren't bad because they were linear, but because they went on forever. In my last playthrough of BG2, I was so impatient by the time I reached Ust Natha that I ran straight up to the Temple of Lolth, killed the guards, took the eggs, and then just up and left.

The problem with a 4-second stun is that this is a game with 3-second recovery times. That's less-impressive than it looks on paper. I still don't get why they couldn't give it a fixed damage number, as in PoE1.

Absolutely not. Endless Paths was a mess - it was trying to be a spin on Durlag's Tower or Watcher's Keep, but those were actually four floors each, and each floor had a gimmick far more complex and interesting than, "this is the type of monster on this level." By contrast, the Endless Paths had only the bare bones of a narrative, no real puzzles or gimmicks, and fight after fight after fight after fight and I can count the memorable ones on one hand. Mind you, I'm not sure it could have been otherwise. The Kickstarter required it, and a 15-floor dungeon that's actually good would've been pretty much an entirely game's worth of work.

I think that since these little things are already in the game - developers simply forgot to add this where this should be (otherwise this talents would not have been created) I hope that in the future all this will be in the game. Well, if Obsidian will not be lazy. The company received a lot of money on Kickstarter to create the game, and it continues to make a profit from every sale. And this attitude with 'cutting content' to the fans be is bad. Nah. All it means is that the assets in question were created during a pre-release build, and that when they were removed from the final game for whatever reason, removing them entirely from the game's files was more trouble than it was worth. This isn't unusual: BG1 and BG2 have hundreds of unused assets left over in their files (and having played with a lot of those assets by way of Unfinished Business, I feel confident in saying that most of them are bad and that they were cut for a good reason). Just because you can find something in the files with some digging does not mean you're being robbed.

Insofar as it's becoming a cliche in CRPGs, I can sympathize. It's certainly realistic, especially in a sweeping fantasy epic full of political turbulence as most CRPGs tend to be these days, but the whole thing was significantly more novel back in the days of Fallout 1 and BG2 and the like. These days, I'd be surprised to see a CRPG without at least three factions you can take the side of. It's not an inherently bad thing, but I can certainly understand your frustration with the universality of the trope. That said! Yes, well, people with identical religious beliefs frequently kill each other. To say nothing of the people who don't believe it's a god, the people who don't care that it's a god, the people who worship another deity (especially a rival god), etc. And on the other side of the equation, despite the optimism of fiction about people's ability to unify in the face of shared existential threats, I have yet to see that actually happen. They make perfect sense, insofar as man's inhumanity to man ever does. Rauataians see the Huana as backwards, superstitious, and in need of guidance from a superior people, and that's when they're being generous. That's because the VTC is pretty explicitly Eora's version of the Dutch East India Company. Most pirating, historically, was state-sponsored, or at least state-tolerated. The idea of a pirate nation with an unrealistically high opinion of itself ain't as crazy as you might think.

I mean, yeah? Content gets cut. It's a thing that happens. Game development often consists of coming up with a large number of ideas, and then figuring out that some of them can't be salvaged or aren't worth the time it would take to salvage them. What about it?

I know that Hylea gives you the World's Best Assortment Of Fruits And NutsTM if you helped her in PoE1, but what about the other gods? I've played with having helped Galawain, and I'm still not sure what his reward was.

I wonder how much you write in comparison when you do care lol. I spoke in jest with respect to CM - I actually really appreciate that someone even knows about it. In terms of afflictions, yeah, that makes sense. It comes of generalizing stuff don't to a limited set of ailments, which ... is handy in tabletop and less useful in a video game where all of the heavy lifting is done by the machine.

The context is hermetic magic, which has roots in real history and where latin was a language of the educated. Hermetic magic is an entire family of syncretic belief systems, with their own deeply entrenched theological and cosmological justifications for what they are and how they're practiced. Fantasy certainly copies its imagery (although it's not unique imagery by any means, itself owing a great deal to the Indo-European diaspora), but that imagery is overwhelmingly separated from its justifications - one could liken it to have characters take communion in a setting where there is no Christianity, nor any remotely equivalent belief system. I can think of a couple of exceptions, mostly from the tabletop: Ars Magica is explicitly hermetic and take place in a pretty specifically Medieval Christian universe, while in settings like WoD's Mage, Shadowrun, or Unknown Armies, all magical traditions work. There's also Alan Moore's Promethea, which is pretty much a comic about the philosophical underpinnings of modern Hermetic theory, and also science heroes. I'm seeing a whole bunch of very separate points being lumped together here, so I'm going to address them separately. I'm not gonna do the quote-by-quote because it's a pain and I don't care that much, so ... yeah. PoE's soul schtick makes less sense than D&D: Eh ... it makes more sense sometimes, and less sense sometimes. D&D's "default setting" (including both Spelljammer and Planescape) is sort of a big floppy grab bag of ideas, and you have to really stretch to make them anything coherent, but that's half the fun of it. The other half is that, by a mix of accident and design, D&D has ended up with something truly and profoundly weird once you really get into the details of it. Hell, it even has its own soul schtick, incarnum, which looks a lot like PoE's. D&D certainly looks like standard fantasy on the surface, but that's because one can only immediately see the fuselage, the same way that you can't tell that someone has replaced their car's engine block with hamster wheels and crystals until they pop the front hood and the garage turns purple and everyone starts hallucinating. PoE's soul stuff is comparatively straightforward, if a little bit vague by design: everything runs on soul power, and people can manipulate that soul power with their minds and certain objects to produce various effects along the lines of what we expect from D&D-esque fantasy adventurers. This has its virtues - you don't need to toss out nearly as much crap, for one thing, or devise really obtuse explanations for how everything fits together. It also loses that bizarro-universe charm. PoE2 doesn't make sense because losing your soul doesn't make you turn into a demigod like in BG2: You're certainly entitled to dislike that PoE doesn't work on the same narrative rules as BG2, but I don't know that you can really field it as an objective statement of PoE's incoherence. If anything, the narrative rules for soul loss in BG2 are extremely vague: you're slowly dying, and in your weakened state your Bhaal essence is starting to take over, but we don't really know anything else about the significance of souls or their loss in general. PoE actually gives us all of that information pretty explicitly in both games. The only reason for the soul stuff was the backer NPCs: Do you have a basis for this beyond speculation? Because just as the Watcher junk could've been skinned in any one of a wide variety of different ways, the backer NPCs could've been done differently. I think it's far more likely that the setting designers just wanted a single, cohesive source of phlebotinum, and since they didn't want to call it "chi," or "prana," or "life-energy," or "spiral power," they called it souls. Obviously I have no particular basis for that notion, either, but I'm generally willing to assume that not everything Obsidian does is a cynical cash-grab. Watcher powers are just a way to spice up narrative things that could've been done in other ways: For sure, but I'm not convinced being reductive has any use here. Seasoning is good, after all (or so I tend to think). Aesthetics are important. Presentation matters. Explaining certain narrative beats through talking to ghosts and performing psychometry and whatnot is a tonal decision, but tonal decisions are hugely important. 4e comparisons: ... are quite apt, and I guess if you just globally dislike 4e's approach and game flow, that's an opinion you're entitled to. I wouldn't overstate the point, though, since even in Deadfire the system of ability management for casters is quite different from that of non-casters. I quite like 4e in spite of its warts, and I find the entire "its just like an mmo so it sucks" line of reasoning to be silly. In general, this is something I think we agree on the facts of, and simply diverge on how much we like it. Insulting Codex Martialis: I will fight you with my fists. Martials having nice things hurts gameplay: It changes gameplay, certainly, but just because the specific beats aren't exactly what they were in the IE games doesn't mean it's bad. With respect to your rogue example, I've certainly never felt that having caster support was unhelpful to a rogue in either PoE1 or PoE2, and, if anything, rogues really shine with a wizard to back them up. Fights are repetitive: ... because they're numerous, pointless, and often homogeneous throughout an area, which lends to using the same tactics over and over again. Were they more varied and more complex, this wouldn't be a problem. But, you know. Trash mobs.

On that note, I've always found the notion that magic is performed exclusively by waving your hands around in odd patterns and muttering to be rather silly. There's no particular reason this should be the case in a majority of settings, and while I suppose it's meant to be evocative of mudras and mantras, it tends to be disconnected from any of the symbolic reasoning that those have in real esoteric and occult traditions. In general, I find the whole, "wave hands and talk in Latin," bit is devoid of context and uncompelling, and I far prefer the old wuxia standby of "kung fu gives you superpowers." I think the prevalence of the trope comes from a lot of places, notably tradition and nostalgia (which aren't bad, especially in a game, but they also don't move me personally). I've also encountered an odd, toxic, "but wizards are nerds," argument at times, which is ... very strange and has a lot of geek elitism to it. Basically, the premise is that magic is like programming or the hard sciences, and is therefore not the province of jocks fighters, who are inferior in personal combat because I guess CS majors make a lot of money, and have low intellect scores because martial arts definitely don't engage your intellect. The whole notion feels weird to me, but I've definitely seen it around, especially in the tabletop gaming community.

Mostly because it pretty much couldn't happen by accident. YMMV, I suppose. What do you mean by accident? Did pre 1.1 recovery on DoC breastplate happen by accident? If its possible to stack defenses so high that it makes a player untouchable, how figurines, per rest bonuses, and empower matter? I do not understand what matrix you use to determine what needs to be balanced and whatnot. Seems to me it does not have a rational base. Clarification: it couldn't happen to a player by accident. The only way a run like this would realistically happen is if the player made a conscious choice to do so, at which point you're really metagaming so intensely that you may as well be allowed to see what happens. (As a general word of advice, I would hesitate to ascribe motive to an opinion without a significant base of evidence, were I you.)

Mostly because it pretty much couldn't happen by accident. YMMV, I suppose.

To echo and perhaps speak a bit more harshly than evilcat, priest is an absolutely terrible example and, in general, I would hesitate to generalize about the experience of playing any one of the eleven classes.

It's not even totally clear what that means, right now >_> More seriously: probably not, and it's extremely metagame-y, but the concept is honestly just kind of cute and fun and weird enough that I don't think it really needs to be balanced.