BS skeleton fight

[MountainTiger]

Pulling is just good sense-lots of encounters start with enemies on favorable terrain, no reason to fight them there if you can fight them somewhere better. There are counterexamples-I've found fighting the Druids on Sayuka easier since I started just using wardstones to neutralize their sigils instead of trying to pull them away-but as a rule I find that I'd rather fight on ground I pick than on ground the enemies pick.

 

Splitting usually seems like more trouble than it's worth. There are encounters with stationary enemies or where two encounters are close enough to trigger if you fight one in place where I find it worthwhile, but the main point of pulling to me is just to control terrain.

[merkmerk73]

 

Grocery street is flat out impossible for many PC classes

false

 

using the tavern to make a full party on Port Maje

 

PotD rebalancing was tuned for people who like to powergame. The most trivial part of powergaming is to have a full party of five. A casual PotD-er could get away with just one hireling, but otherwise I would assume from beginning to end that you are expected to have a full party, unless it's physically impossible (i.e. Vilario's Rest where at most you just have Eder).

 

In my mind, people who are stubborn about not using hirelings for Gorecci St or the Engwithan Digsite are making the game harder for themselves, intentionally or not. Those encounters aren't balanced for a party of three (though they are imo easily doable with three via pulling and splitting), they are balanced for a party of five. With a party of five, Gorecci St or Engwithan Digsite are challenging, but not really that much more challenging (if at all) than any other PotD encounter.

 

w/e

 

your argument fails because the first game didn't fall into any of these problems in POTD and remained challenging except for the lack of good scaling

 

You didn't have to hire adventurers like you're playing icewind dale, you didn't have a bottleneck starting area that limited your story companions except the Caed Nua which was entirely doable with some prep.

 

In fact early game POE1 on POTD was extremely well balanced with some really tough fights that were all totally possible even on trial of iron.

 

Port Maje is the complete opposite of that - yet after Port Maje the vast majority of the game is very well balanced and challenging.

 

Also please post the video of beating grocery street @ level 3-4 with Eder (fighter tank), Xoti (Priest), and PC (druid lets say) on POTD, level scaling on and let's hear how many saves it took - no bull**** kiting or exploiting game mechanics

 

I'll wait.

 

edit:

 

 

 

Nothing about the watershaper's temple? When I went there at the recommended level the Naga Marauders were 4+ levels higher than my team, and

 

I haven't actually done that sidequest before and my current party is 17/18 so I can't comment. I'm sure there are a few more busted level scaling encounters.

Edited February 13, 2019 by merkmerk73

[thelee]

You didn't have to hire adventurers like you're playing icewind dale, you didn't have a bottleneck starting area that limited your story companions except the Caed Nua which was entirely doable with some prep.

for the record, you did have a bottleneck starting area in PoE. In Act 1 there are like 4 major quests (get the potion, find the lost supplies, deal with raedric, deal with eothas dungeon[1] and then a minor task to find the cook and resolve the grain dispute and then you're gated by needing to do caed nua. there's literally no way to do anything else until you do that, and you basically need to do those 4 quests/2 tasks to be strong enough to handle maerwald/caed nua. It's not literally an island like Port Maje, but it was for all intents and purposes an island. (in Deadfire the equivalent is resolving the huana/VTC dispute, getting the guy out of jail, dealing with gorecci st guy, kicking the guy out of the inn, and talking to the governor for free crit path experience)

 

you could recruit eder, aloth, kana and durance (though in truth you needed a bit of metagame knowledge to get kana because it basically involved heading straight east past everything to get to caed nua, and then doubling back to do act 1), so if you wanted a full party you did need a hireling. before i got better at PoE1, it meant I always rolled a hireling to get to a full party of 6, more if i didn't want to bother with kana or durance (i found durance as a character to be weak because of his crappy dex). so in this respect it's no different from PotD Deadfire.

 

(if you're going to be cheeky "your argument fails" you should at least be correct)

 

Also please post the video of beating grocery street @ level 3-4 with Eder (fighter tank), Xoti (Priest), and PC (druid lets say) on POTD, level scaling on and let's hear how many saves it took - no bull**** kiting or exploiting game mechanics

translation: "please post a video of doing gorecci st without doing any of the things that would actually be expected of someone playing on PotD". if you're going to artificially limit yourself, then sure, you're probably going to find certain PCs to be unviable (though a druid will be fine, one of my early PotD runs was a lifegiver). my argument was that given that the encounter is balanced targeting a full party, any PC is casually viable on PotD. even eder isn't a given in terms of recruitability, depending on what events you had in PoE1 set up. I would not expect an arbitrary PC + Xoti-only party to have a fun time at Gorecci St. That's why there's an inn. It's literally part of the game.

 

(also i'm not sure how using sparkcrackers to lure people around is "exploiting" game mechanics. it seems like by its description that's literally its intended purpose. "While they don't cause any damage, they can be used to distract patroling enemies.")

 

 

 

 

[1] The last two of these quests i would potentially as far exceeding gorecci st and digsite as potd challenges; how about a gorecci st fight except an entire castle full of it nonstop? Are you saying that you can take any arbitrary PC through the "kills-everyone" path through raedric's hold and not have to resort to the stealth/dialogue option? (Since you complain about feeling the need to have to use stealth or dialogue through parts of Deadfire PotD). Because I'll happily admit that I can't, my just-for-fun-builds will have to sneak and chat their way through and then grind through an awful throneroom fight with careful pulling rather than charge in guns blazing. (Also I always sneak along the bottom of Caed Nua and avoid all the fights except for the will-o-wisps at the far east of the map.) I'm probably better at Deadfire than I am at PoE1 (though I did do the Ultimate in PoE1 and have no plans to do something similar in Deadfire, though that is more about patience than skill tbh), but I don't see what's problematic about just admitting that one might not be good enough to meet a challenge given whatever constraints (if any) you put on yourself, especially since PotD is not balanced for everyone to beat and is not the only difficulty of the game.

Edited February 13, 2019 by thelee

[MountainTiger]

"Has red skull enemies" isn't really the same as "is not level appropriate". The Katrenn bounty is a good example-she has a bunch of high level constructs who are basically just damage sponges. The Watershapers' Temple is like this in my experience; the Marauders are high level but don't do much damage compared to the lower level enemies with them. Burning down the squishy stuff with them can quickly drop incoming damage and let you beat up the isolated Marauders once everything else is dead.

 

The Temple entrance also benefits a lot from pulling-the enemies start off fairly dispersed, so it's hard to effectively AOE them. They will bunch up on the stairs if you let them, though.

[thelee]

"Has red skull enemies" isn't really the same as "is not level appropriate". The Katrenn bounty is a good example-she has a bunch of high level constructs who are basically just damage sponges

This. A couple red-skull enemies might be an easier encounter than a swarm of no-skull enemies. An encounter might be designed to have one really hard enemy and some weaker complements, or like Katrenn which is just a few enemies which will require some tanking or prolonged picking-away-at to take care of.

 

IIRC, on any difficulty the megabosses will be triple-skulled at level 20. That does not mean they are not level appropriate for a level 20 party (otherwise they would never be level appropriate).

[merkmerk73]

 

You didn't have to hire adventurers like you're playing icewind dale, you didn't have a bottleneck starting area that limited your story companions except the Caed Nua which was entirely doable with some prep.

for the record, you did have a bottleneck starting area in PoE. In Act 1 there are like 4 major quests (get the potion, find the lost supplies, deal with raedric, deal with eothas dungeon) and then a minor task to find the cook and resolve the grain dispute and then you're gated by needing to do caed nua. there's literally no way to do anything else until you do that, and you basically need to do those 4 quests/2 tasks to be strong enough to handle maerwald/caed nua. It's not literally an island like Port Maje, but it was for all intents and purposes an island. (in Deadfire the equivalent is resolving the huana/VTC dispute, getting the guy out of jail, dealing with gorecci st guy, kicking the guy out of the inn, and talking to the governor for free crit path experience)

 

you could recruit eder, aloth, kana and durance (though in truth you needed a bit of metagame knowledge to get kana because it basically involved heading straight east past everything to get to caed nua, and then doubling back to do act 1), so if you wanted a full party you did need a hireling. before i got better at PoE1, it meant I always rolled a hireling to get to a full party of 6, more if i didn't want to bother with kana or durance (i found durance as a character to be weak because of his crappy dex). so in this respect it's no different from PotD Deadfire.

 

Also please post the video of beating grocery street @ level 3-4 with Eder (fighter tank), Xoti (Priest), and PC (druid lets say) on POTD, level scaling on and let's hear how many saves it took - no bull**** kiting or exploiting game mechanics

translation: "please post a video of doing gorecci st without doing any of the things that would actually be expected of someone playing on PotD". if you're going to artificially limit yourself, then sure, you're probably going to find certain PCs to be unviable (though a druid will be fine, one of my early PotD runs was a lifegiver). my argument was that given that the encounter is balanced targeting a full party, any PC is casually viable on PotD. even eder isn't a given in terms of recruitability, depending on what events you had in PoE1 set up. I would not expect an arbitrary PC + Xoti-only party to have a fun time at Gorecci St. That's why there's an inn. It's literally part of the game.

 

(also i'm not sure how using sparkcrackers to lure people around is "exploiting" game mechanics. it seems like by its description that's literally its intended purpose. "While they don't cause any damage, they can be used to distract patroling enemies.")

 

 

You seem to really like arguing based on your post history here for the sake of arguing.

 

PoE1 POTD bottleneck was not a problem because it was entirely doable without any crazy metagaming or exploit strategies - PC/Eder/Aloth/Kana/Durance was entirely capable of clearing Caed Nua, as well as the Temple of Eothas if you wanted to - and with that you could find a 2nd party member and do whatever you wanted.

 

It's entirely different from Deadfire because you are going to struggle to get through Port Maje bottleneck with only your story companions and the degree of difficulty is out of whack with the rest of the game on POTD except for aforementioned areas.

 

Unless of course you 

-only use stealth/dialogue resolutions

-hire adventurers

 

This really isn't hard to understand

 

 

 

translation: "please post a video of doing gorecci st without doing any of the things that would actually be expected of someone playing on PotD

 

Translation: I shot my mouth off with a smarmy 'false' and can't back it up so now I'll move the goal posts

 

POTD doesn't come with a 'you are required to make your own party IWD style'. Your argument that it's part of the game is completely asinine - so is just lowering the difficulty, or using berath blessings.

 

My point is that the POTD starting island, and a few other fights, are poorly tuned while the rest of the game is not. I like the game on POTD, I don't care for the early Port Maje bull****

 

As far as Eder being unavailable - edgecase not worth considering. Standard Deadfire companion experience is PC + Eder + Xoti on Port Maje.

[thelee]

You seem to really like arguing based on your post history here for the sake of arguing.

I only like to argue when I think someone is wrong. I especially argue when someone is wrong and is being unwarrantedly aggressive about it.

 

PoE1 POTD bottleneck was not a problem because it was entirely doable without any crazy metagaming or exploit strategies - PC/Eder/Aloth/Kana/Durance was entirely capable of clearing Caed Nua, as well as the Temple of Eothas if you wanted to - and with that you could find a 2nd party member and do whatever you wanted.

Hey, you know what? You were probably better than me at PoE1 PotD, because in the early-mid days of PoE1 I found it a hair-pulling frustration at how quickly the spectres in the Caed Nua lobby could get out of control and annihilate me (not to mention all the friggin trash mobs in the Caed Nua yard that I just ended up stealthing past), and I needed that 6th party member. Not to mention the higher level that one could only get by doing all the Act 1 quests. I don't have a problem with saying that.

 

Maybe you're not as good at PotD Deadfire as other people and instead of feeling entitled to be able to beat PotD under whatever constraints with whatever sense of "easiness" you feel you must have, maybe some sense of humility about your limitations is in order.

 

 

translation: "please post a video of doing gorecci st without doing any of the things that would actually be expected of someone playing on PotD

 

Translation: I shot my mouth off with a smarmy 'false' and can't back it up so now I'll move the goal posts

 

No, your comment was objectively false.

 

POTD doesn't come with a 'you are required to make your own party IWD style'. Your argument that it's part of the game is completely asinine - so is just lowering the difficulty, or using berath blessings.

See above. You are not required to hire more hirelings, much like you are not required to hire hirelings in PoE1. But you may need to, depending on skill level and your chosen PC. I could probably take most PCs with just Eder and Xoti, but sure it will take many reloads in some cases, and be stupidly easy in others (Debonaire, Blood Mage). It's almost as artificial a constraint and varied an outcome as trying to solo the game because that's not the target balance. But it is objectively false that Gorecci St is just straight up impossible for many PCs.

 

Also "lowering the difficulty" is a real option as part of the game. I'm not going to load up a Civ game on Deity and complain that the only way I can beat the game is by pursuing some specific strategy with some specific civ and everything else I'm going to die horribly and therefore the difficulty sucks. I'm going to lower the difficulty. This quote has been pulled repeatedly, but it needs to be pulled again: 'At this point, if someone is having trouble on a higher-than-Story difficulty level and refuses to turn the difficulty down, the problem can be found in the nearest mirror.'

 

My point is that the POTD starting island, and a few other fights, are poorly tuned while the rest of the game is not. I like the game on POTD, I don't care for the early Port Maje bull****

hire a hireling or two. and/or pull+split the encounter. if you refuse, be a little more humble about your own skillset maybe and act less entitled about it. PotD was literally balanced in concert with someone on the Obsidian crew who loves to powergame/min-max, they tuned and tossed him encounters to check for appropriate struggle factor. Therefore, act like someone who likes to powergame/min-max starting with Port Maje, not after.

 

As far as Eder being unavailable - edgecase not worth considering. Standard Deadfire companion experience is PC + Eder + Xoti on Port Maje.

"this is inconvenient for me to consider, so i'll ignore it"

Edited February 13, 2019 by thelee

[baldurs_gate_2]

 

When in doubt, lower the difficulty.

 

Oh so you now you can lower difficulty after you start on POTD?

 

I tried it once in 3.1 i believe and you could.

[gunman78]

I think it all boils down to the fact of this being a RPG and how the mechanics of the game allows solving situations with any build you make in a smart way. In an ideal game, the developers should give player means to bypass apparently hard encounters with strategies more or less obvious based on the build they are playing, so as not to frustrate those who dislike power gaming but in the same time they want to use their brains.

 

Ironically, Baldur's Gate games, while more rudimentary in their mechanics, with their liberties of roll of the dice luck, allowed far from power gamer's parties to push through hard encounters and live to enjoy another day. In BG if you don't know what you are doing you can be dead in a second, but if you play smart you win in a second. In comparison, PoE feels like a slug, and you don't even get the chance of surviving just for being lucky. In this respect, Baldur's Gate games are way more fulfilling than PoE.

 

For some reason, I never played BG above core difficulty, perhaps because the reason the luck is such a major factor in the outcome of encounters that I don't need an extra layer of artificially bloated attributes. It's almost like real life. On the other hand, PoE is like a mathematical equation. You either play on anything below PotD and there is no satisfaction at all, or play on PotD and have to find the few solutions that see you make it through but, again, those solutions does not bring you any satisfaction from a role playing perspective.

[Verde]

I loved how impossible Beholders were if you stumbled upon them. And then discovering all you need is little coin and a shiny shield.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Verde

[Boeroer]

In BG if you don't know what you are doing you can be dead in a second, but if you play smart you win in a second.

It's exactly the same with PoE and Deadfire. Not in a literal second, but figuratively speaking. Else we hadn't the two most frequent complaints about them:

 

a) It is too hard

b) It is too easy

 

While the parts that are considered too hard/too easy overlap.  

 

And: Is it a boon of a RPG ruleset if sheer luck with dice rolls alone lets you win alleged tough encounters? 

[Boeroer]

I loved how impossible Beholders were if you stumbled upon them. And then discovering all you need is little coin and a shiny shield.

Mechanics like that are pretty nice. Kind of a puzzle. Or like "find the key".

But they can also frustrate the hell out of impatient players (who don't like to read). So I guess designers often shy away...

[gunman78]

 

In BG if you don't know what you are doing you can be dead in a second, but if you play smart you win in a second.

It's exactly the same with PoE and Deadfire. Not in a literal second, but figuratively speaking. Else we hadn't the two most frequent complaints about them:

 

a) It is too hard

b) It is too easy

 

While the parts that are considered too hard/too easy overlap.  

 

And: Is it a boon of a RPG ruleset if sheer luck with dice rolls alone lets you win alleged tough encounters? 

 

 

Why not? An unexperienced archer with a lucky shot can one shot a much more experienced opponent. A low level wizard with a simple spell can CC a bunch of higher level enemies and turn the tables, etc.

 

BG simulates such situations better because all creatures have relative low HP and a critical with a two handed sword can often one-shot an enemy, and CC spells duration give enough time to wipe a bunch of enemies. In PoE the hard CC spells have the duration so low compared to BG that often you don't have the time to kill a single enemy, let alone all of them, and the enemies have so much HP that on PotD there are very few enemies you can one shot and most of the time you have to work like at a factory, chipping away at their health.

[Boeroer]

Why not? Ask players here how they feel about Wild Mind and you'll see why too much randomness is not considered to be a good thing with game mechanics. Because if you can win a hard encounter with a lucky roll you can also lose an easy one with a bad roll. 

 

Also being able to one-shot enemies all the time is not considered to be satisfying game design - unless you want to make an Action RPG maybe. It's supposed to be tactical combat in real time with pause. Not roulette. I mean if you like that kind of stuff that's fine. But I suspect you don't represent the majority of CRPG players. Both extreme randomness as well as constant one-shotting don't help with tactical combat. Especially not when going for stuff like Trial of Iron. 

Edited February 14, 2019 by Boeroer

[gunman78]

I didn't say I want one-shooting all the time, where did I say that? To cut it short, since I don't want to dwell on this: it's just the overall feeling of PoE is too predictable and tedious compared to BG, which leads to boredom.

[Verde]

 

I loved how impossible Beholders were if you stumbled upon them. And then discovering all you need is little coin and a shiny shield.

Mechanics like that are pretty nice. Kind of a puzzle. Or like "find the key".

But they can also frustrate the hell out of impatient players (who don't like to read). So I guess designers often shy away...

Not so much don't like to read, it's more bout not having the coin or knowing about the shield. Edited February 14, 2019 by Verde

[Boeroer]

I didn't mean that specific "puzzle" - I meant puzzle-like encounters in general. Where you have to figure out a way to beat an otherwise unbeatable enemy. A bit like Belranga actually.

[Boeroer]

I didn't say I want one-shooting all the time, where did I say that? To cut it short, since I don't want to dwell on this: it's just the overall feeling of PoE is too predictable and tedious compared to BG, which leads to boredom.

But this is highly subjective and changes a lot from player to player. For you the randomness makes it less boring, for others it's just frustrating.

 

I played both BG and BGII only once each (IWD I & II twice I think) - because the story etc. was nice. But the mechanics were so bad (for my taste) that I didn't want to play it more than once. PoE and Deadfire I play(ed) a LOT after completing the first playthrough.  

Edited February 14, 2019 by Boeroer

[Verde]

Yeah that's true. And I will agree that Deadfire has a lot of replayability esp with build variety.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Verde

[Alhoon]

I played that skeleton fight on my Tactician / Assassin like a week ago, PoTD (Upscaled)+Triple Crown+Solo. It wasn't that hard, and my character uses guns most of the time, so I had to resort to using suboptimal weapon (I think I used regular Quarterstaff, not even magical). That weapon is so bad because you can't use Smoke Veil right after doing damage, since only guns have reload instead of recovery and all guns are pierce damage.

 

Just pull one skeleton at the time with traps and they weren't difficult 1 on 1. The mage needs to be pulled WAAY back though, since he casts Dimensional Shift and this pulls all the other skeletons (noticed this on my parallel non-ToI practice run).

[bringingyouthefuture]

I played that skeleton fight on my Tactician / Assassin like a week ago, PoTD (Upscaled)+Triple Crown+Solo. It wasn't that hard, and my character uses guns most of the time, so I had to resort to using suboptimal weapon (I think I used regular Quarterstaff, not even magical). That weapon is so bad because you can't use Smoke Veil right after doing damage, since only guns have reload instead of recovery and all guns are pierce damage.

 

Just pull one skeleton at the time with traps and they weren't difficult 1 on 1. The mage needs to be pulled WAAY back though, since he casts Dimensional Shift and this pulls all the other skeletons (noticed this

on my parallel non-ToI practice run).

 

And this is why POE and Deadfire have the best combat out of any RPG in my opinion ... so much cool stuff you can do.

[thelee]

 

I didn't say I want one-shooting all the time, where did I say that? To cut it short, since I don't want to dwell on this: it's just the overall feeling of PoE is too predictable and tedious compared to BG, which leads to boredom.

But this is highly subjective and changes a lot from player to player. For you the randomness makes it less boring, for others it's just frustrating.

 

I think some randomness OK, it just depends on the scope and the context. In BG/BG2, most fights were over pretty fast, so if a wizard got off a lucky Hold Person on someone important, or I failed a Touch of Death save it's not expensive to reload. By contrast, PotD fights can be longish (many minutes) and the worst thing to happen in such a context is to have Serafen suddenly pull an aoe blast out of nowhere that causes you to wipe. Wild Mage was a thing in BG2 (and in BGEE) and it was nowhere near as annoying as Serafen's Wild Mind even though I'd hazard the distribution of positive to negative outcomes was way worse for the Wild Mage than for Wild Mind (though there was also a lot more upside potential... so again, it was swingier).

 

similarly this is why graze mechanic works so well in poe/deadfire (and why it sucked when grazes were briefly not a thing in backer beta), because given the general intensity and length of fights in poe/deadfire world, without grazes outcomes just became a little swingy given how long and tough fights were. obsidian said that grazes made CC too good or too consistent, and in my mind that was the whole point - while you could still stack defenses and get lucky about dodging a hit or despite lots of buffs get unlucky and miss a hit, grazes really smoothed that out so it put more onus on straight up skill and strategy than blindly getting a string of lucky rolls.

Edited February 14, 2019 by thelee

[Kilburn]

I'm just completely blown away that the OP thinks the only solution here is a full party of MC Bleak Walker Wizards.

 

 

Ya i'm min maxing and trying out different builds. 

[Kilburn]

OK. It isn't too hard. The problem is ciphers suck. 

 

and i was also not aware of the new penetration system. was probably using padded armor I think. 

 

but I was right. paladin/wizards are soooo much stronger. spirit shields is a very strong level 1 spell and infuse with vital essence is great too. 

 

My new party is crushing everything. Devoted fighter is also so strong. +2 pen dual wield sabers, what more do you need!??!!?

[thelee]

OK. It isn't too hard. The problem is ciphers suck. 

 

and i was also not aware of the new penetration system. was probably using padded armor I think. 

 

but I was right. paladin/wizards are soooo much stronger. spirit shields is a very strong level 1 spell and infuse with vital essence is great too. 

 

My new party is crushing everything. Devoted fighter is also so strong. +2 pen dual wield sabers, what more do you need!??!!?

 

well, i'm glad you find something that works for you, but I think if you stick with the "cipher suck" attitude you're going to get a lot of push back here also i think Eurhetemec was making that comment of bleakwalker/wizard because I don't think there's many people who would argue that pal/wizard is a particularly notably powerful build

 

but a lot of the fun of the game imo is discovering what works and what doesn't, especially for your own play style. best of luck/fun in your journeys