gkathellar

Trickster/Monk can do some impressive retaliation shenanigans, which helps a lot with groups. Flagellant's Path is also a solid AoE, although it comes pretty late. Otherwise? Wahai Poraga is your friend.

Always use Berserker. As to your second class, you have a bunch of good options. Rogue is always a good second class, in either Streetfighter flavor to take advantage of Blooded procs and abilities, or Trickster to help out with your defenses. Generally you'll be frail and tricksy. Paladin will help to counteract your squishiness, gives you some cool general defensive buffs (including resistance to Int afflictions), and a superb single-target attack/self buff via Eternal Devotion. You'll play a lot like a vanilla barb but sturdier and with healing abilities. Fighter gives you a lot of good passives and some good actives in Disciplined Strike and Charge and, as has been mentioned, a way to mitigate confusion. Devoted in particular can capitalize on some of a berserker's advantages. You'll be tougher and a bit more versatile. Monk has a bit of anti-synergy due to granting some of the same inspirations, but it works. Helwalker will hit phenomenally hard, but it's fragile as anything. Chanter, Cipher, and Wizard also get some mileage from Barb.

FWIW, it's actually more in keeping with PoE's lore than the first game was. Wizards explicitly cast from the book, rather than from memory. "Because lore says so," is not an implicitly good thing (if anything, I think it's a pretty bad reason), but it is what it is. Definitely true. It's a great boon to multiclassing, but in general the only reason to sink points into spells is so that you can use the spells you want that don't happen to be in Vaporous Wizardry. An unwillingness to commit to either total gamification ("COMBAT MODE ACTIVATED") or greater simulationism. (Full disclosure: I'd prefer more gamification.)

See this is why an ability list would help. We don't actually know what the stats and the gear are supposed to accomplish without context.

NWN has a dedicated modding and module building community that many other games lack, so it comes with a built-in audience and was almost guaranteed to sell at least decently well. This is the big thing. I owned NWN1 for years before I bothered to finish the OC, and I never really did multiplayer. What I did do was sink a hell of a lot of time into user-created modules. I think the visual differences and, much more importantly, the setting's differences and the factors revolving around it, are huge.The Medieval Era was hugely stagnant culturally and technologically and the content we usually get from that giant period of time has boiled down into very generic fantasy It really wasn't, and the misconception that it was is mainly a consequence of Victorian-era historical revisionism, reinforced by political theorists (on both the left and the right, incidentally) with axes to grind and by "medieval" fantasy written by people who don't actually know anything about the medieval period. It is difficult if not impossible to make broad generalizations about hundreds of years of European history - European, not just English and French, but Prussian and Baltic and Finnish and Andalusian and Catalonian and Neapolitan and Venetian and Byzantine and Russian - but it is a modern myth that the period prior to the Renaissance was one of general stagnation or decline.

I'm not really seeing where you're getting the idea that I'm attacking BG2 from - the thing I specifically called toxic was a D&D 3.5 wizard handbook discussing a build archetype in which a wizard has a tool on their figurative "utility belt" for every situation. I find that broad archetype creates a bad play experience in games, single-player or not, because it renders some character types totally irrelevant or at the very least redundant with others that can also do other things. BG2 didn't really have that problem except at a relatively high degree of skilled play, which is what it is. And to be clear, toxic is my word choice, not his. If you prefer, substitute "bad for the play experience" - I thought my meaning was clear, but apparently it wasn't. I've seen statements he's made to the effect of "wizards should not be able to do absolutely everything because magic," which I agree pretty strongly with. YMMV. Are you asserting that BG2 was a great game, so all of its design decisions were great and should be replicated? I'm just seeking clarification, I have nothing to say to that. I disagree, while its true the Wizard concept has the potencial to do anything and everything, it has a particular effective deterrent... it's hassle with little gain > Try to have a little of everything... you'll be too spread out to be effective > Buff yourself to ridiculous heights - you're still a subpar fighter, with just better defensive effects > Blast your way forward, and you better pray its dead before you run out of bullets > Utility spells - great out of combat and for convenience, but still eating slots from a rather small resource pool Most of these result in the Wizard either using too many turns for set up, or having too many tools for so little slots and not having the best spell for the situation at hand. Because naturally, he focused on what gives him a better shot at staying alive On paper the Wizard is indeed a god, but in practice it needs alot of circunstances going its way to be godlike Uh ... yes? Did you click the links? The "God Wizard" concept is specifically a battlefield controller who sets things up for other party members to shine, originally created for as a group-friendly optimization model for a game where wizards can outshine the rest of the party if they want to. It's not god in the sense of being all-powerful, but rather in the sense that it arranges things. I think it's a very good model to aim for, and I find that both PoE games tend to favor it and this is something I like. To be clear, I'm not saying wizards in Deadfire do the Batman thing, I'm saying I think it's a problem when wizards in games do the Batman thing. Both PoE1 and 2 do a pretty good job of averting that while still allowing wizards be versatile. QFT.

Crippling Strike is also a pretty phenomenal addition to just about every martial class.

Part of the reason school exclusion worked in BG2 was because the playstyles of others schools were actually pretty surprisingly viable. I recall the old BW forums ages and ages ago, when Alesia_BH ran her solo ascension challenge with a transmuter, which locked her out of necromancy and abjuration spells. This poked a pretty big hole in a lot of high-end BG2 spellcasting tactics (which she was extremely proficient in), so she made up for her lost defenses with extensive use of unusual tactics like turning into a mustard jelly for melee. This was possible because BG2 had the classic do-anything-wizard, so even if you lost access to a couple of tricks, there were always more. This is less viable in PoE, where wizards are more limited in scope, and for good reason - I totally agree with JS that the Batman Wizard is toxic for games, while the God Wizard is pretty much ideal. It's true that adding lots of additional wizard spells would help make specialists viable ... but it would also benefit universalists pretty significantly in being able to do anything and everything forever and ever. I suppose you could add specialist-only wizard spells (actually pretty trivial to do from a game architecture perspective), but I have concerns about making wizard into five different classes.

Not sure about "legendary" status, but so far many items were nerfed from 100% activation chance on crit to like 10% (like Nature's Embrace) or from 75% protection when near death to like 25%. Making a lot of them borderline useless. While they were possibly OP before, IMO it would be enough to nerf them a bit, for example to 40-50%, but keep them valuable and interesting. Yeah I really despise the activation chance nerf approach to balance in games like Pillars. It's a good approach in your Diablos and your Path of Exiles, where you spam moves so rapidly that "3% chance" really reads as "I need to attack X number of times for this to be functionally 100%." It's a bad approach in your CRPGs where the highest level of play involves making each action into a calculated arrangement of moves on a game-board.

In the sense that a god is a sky wizard who goes pew pew and woosh woosh and fwoom fwoom and demands you worship it and can exert vast personal influence over the natural world, they're totally gods. Argumentum ad baculum and so forth, throw the moon at people if they disagree. Pew pew. In the sense that a god is the mind of the world (or a part of the world), a being of unchanging, timeless perfection that has existed since the world's dawning epoch and whose will is in some sense basically defacto Right and Good, they are nothing of the sort. They are sentient, persistent spell effects manufactured with a big swirly biawac machine by a bunch of jerks to represent a very particular set of cultural ideals and beliefs about the workings of the universe. Just a question of definitions.

Pledging to all the gods is not peaceful and kind. They have different wills and you cannot satisfy them all. Not only is it irresponsible to make impossible promises and they will take revenge on innocents if you betray them, they also don't all want peaceful and kind things to begin with. Rymrgand, Ondra and Skaen want you to destroy the souls of the Hollowborn. Galawain, Magran and Abydon want you to feed them to the rest of the Dyrwood. Berath wants you to return them to her Wheel to be reborn (which is the most popular choice and also what normally happens to souls). Peaceful and kind would be supporting Hylea, who wants you to return the souls to their intended bodies. There is a Benevolent Soul premade history already And of course there's a strong argument to be made that Galawain's somewhat weird suggestion is the only one that legitimately makes the best of a bad situation, because PoE did a good job of remembering that "peaceful and kind" does not necessarily translate to, "has weighed the costs and benefits of a decision."

I think it's less that they're overpowered and more that they have great synergy that makes them attractive to pretty much every other martial class. This is especially true insofar as the three rogue subclasses are all pretty attractive and play really distinctively (the Trickster in particular does stuff that only Wizard and Priest of Wael can do otherwise) - the result is that no matter what your other class, you can probably find a way that at least one of the rogue subclasses would bring a lot to the table.

Really, they should have done something like this. It's a much better approach that plays far more to the way players will want to focus on a narrower aspect of wizards' enormous versatility. I mean it more as a joke than anything else... but you do have to agree that decisions made in the name of balance have been detrimental to some aspects of the classes. Deleterious Alacry took a bit to return to the old action speed % boost format, from the simple nerfed version of a Dex Inspiration for example With any luck they'll reduce opposite schools to just 1 I'm not even sure they're balance decisions, so much as "ooh we have this cool new subsystem that unifies everything, let's use that instead," decisions. The problem, in my experience, with cool new subsystems that unify everything, is that they never do all of the things you want them to.

That is a lot of ground to cover. I suggest starting here. Also: Pallegina obeying the ducs is absolutely not the peaceful and kind thing to do. It screws over the Dyrwood dramatically, something you know will happen at the time of doing it.

... okay, yeah, this looks pretty awesome. Any particular reason you go Human? It doesn't seem like getting Bloodied is really in the battle plan. Just general panic-button reasons? EDIT: Actually, looking at it again, I think your attribute total is assuming two extra points.

An ability list would help a lot with evaluating it >_>

We don't have a specific number. They had a Biawac machine, and it sucked out a whole lot of souls and made a god. Probably thousands at the very least, given how big Sun In Shadow was. Well, at least that's how the Engwithans saw it - but then, a cursory glance through Engwithan ruins and the Endless Paths is more than enough to suggest that the Engwithans were violent, abusive monsters with little or not regard for the value of life. And while Thaos went on about the horrors perpetrated by people who had religious views different then his, he seemed remarkably disinterested in the atrocities committed by people with the same views (read: Thaos was a psychopathic cultural imperialist, an intellectually dishonest apologist, and one of the least reliable narrators imaginable with regards to value judgments). We also know that the Engwithans were technologically backwards in a number of respects (hence why their animats were basically decked out in garbage), and were mainly ahead of their time in the study of animancy.

Evoker is an even better pick for blasters, on account of only really missing out on some debuffs, Arcane Veil and Chill Fog, while the +2 PL provides disproportionate benefits for damage spells and a small chance to double cast is phenomenal. None of the others are worth a damn because the stuff they miss out on is still far too important (often specifically to them), their special abilities are mostly trash, and a lot of their spells see very limited returns for a bit of extra PL. Edit: Josh Sawyer does not just hate wizards. They're still one of the strongest, most versatile classes in the game. The problem is that their subclassing mechanic was pulled straight from the IE games and it very clearly shouldn't have been, because where those games had eight types of spell Deadfire has only five.

I can see a logic to a November release, if you assume that the people playing those games are not the same people who are going to pick up Tyranny. November-December is where the money is, in general. Not saying that's the right approach, mind, just that it Is An Approach.

For reference, thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy are in many ways the same thing. It may help to think of "chaos" as the process by which systems decay. At a fairly low level of entropy, the product of chaos is randomness, because decay produces unforeseen or extraneous elements that make the system behave erratically - dust on a motherboard, for instance - but at a state of 100% chaos there are no systems to disrupt. Information theory breaks down at this point. Bringing this back to Rymrgand, the entropy he describes is the breakdown of spiritual energy until souls, as a unit of information, do not exist.

Congrats, and great job!

You appear to have more than one character selected in the screenshot. Character-specific abilities aren't going to show up when you have more than one character selected.

What's the effect of the DurationOverride, then? Does it take precedence, or something?

Bear in mind that this board is a giant pile of sampling bias.

Indeed, going by Steam figures alone (and while Steam is the largest distributor by far it is not the only one), Deadfire is selling pretty much exactly as well as isometric, mechanically intricate CRPGs tend to sell in the same span of time if they're even moderate successes. The game's been out for 3 months, people. That's nothing. Relax. Tyranny didn't fail economically. It didn't reach what Paradox expected it to sell at release. But 562k copies + GOG + whoever haven't even started the game yet is profitable for Paradox. The team wasn't huge and the game wasn't being worked on for years. And it was frankly pretty stupid of Paradox to have expectations as high as they did. Putting aside the question of whether it was any good, Tyranny combined awful marketing and a premise that put a lot of people (including me) off from the first.