Fight mechanics and lack of technical optimization are what makes me dislike the game

[fireflame]

Hello, I started playing PoE in 2017 and completed it. I started playing Poe2 in December and overall I xperienced again the frustration related to fight mechanics, which I don't find intuitive or natural.

I can deal with most fights, though I disabled level scaling completely because I hate that in general,but some fights feel unberable and excruciating, like Mega-bosses. I have read they are intended to encourage diversifying strategies and optimizing team, but this feels really frustrating to me(I play on Veteran).

I like the  story, universe, music of the game, but the fight mechanics are what annoys me as they are too "balanced".When I played BG2, I did feel overwhelmed at times, but I had my own mechanics to counter the difficulty(using traps, summons, Carsomyr was so good).

On a technical note, I feel frustrated by the amount of fixes I had to apply to fix performance issues: disabling many settings, telemetrics, chaning settings from nvidia panel control. I had to install game again on SSD to reduce loading times. Even now I still have issues and some crashes once in a while.

 

[xzar_monty]

I also think that mega-bosses are very poor, but apart from that, I cannot agree with your criticism of fight mechanics. Perhaps you could elaborate a little?

[Boeroer]

Fight mechanics of the Pillars franchise are objectively better than those of the infinity games.

So I guess it's more a matter of personal preference than actual quality - which is cool with me. I also don't like certain things that are critically acclaimed or preferred by a majority. 

One has to applaud the OP for voicing their frustration in a decent manner.

 

Edited January 2, 2022 by Boeroer

[fireflame]

3 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Fight mechanics of the Pillars franchise are objectively better than those of the infinity games.

So I guess it's more a matter of personal preference than actual quality - which is cool with me. I also don't like certain things that are critically acclaimed or preferred by a majority. 

One has to applaud the OP for voicing their frustration in a decent manner.

 

Well I know it is part of the "charm" of the game, but I don't like the way tanking work as enemies often seem to ignore the tank despite the punishment they take if they break engagment. There are many situations where even with a fully upgraded Eder some enemies will jump above him and go for casters who are behind, and the the casters either have to take down that enemy quickly, cast a scrol/potion to escape fight without taking penalty for breaking engagment(but even so it doesn't felel optimal) it seems positioning as a lot of importance in the game. I feel mechanics in Infinity games are more user friendly, as they go as far as allowing the player to cast buffs or minions before fights start. I canot explain it clearly but basically there are often situations where I either win the fight easily, either struggle a lot. This happens in all games but somehow, I find the gap in difficulty more extreme in this game. In the crucible some fights are rather easy then suddenly a fight gets much harder and nothing seemt to hint to that. I feel the game is about having a formation and adapting it but this is more confusing than usually in crpgs.

[Boeroer]

Engagement works a lot better in Deadfire than PoE - where it's indeed a rel. weak mechanic if your tank can't dish out enough punishment when enemies break engagement. But you compare the mechanics of Deadfire with those of an infinity engine game - which has no engagement at all and thus suffers from the same problem even more gravely.

I understand the problems you are having. I think they stem from the much higher complexity of the system. It takes a long time and also some research to truly understand the workings of the combat mechanics of Deadfire. And not only mechanics but also the enemies' AI response. This can be seen as drawback (beginners, more casual players, one-time players) - it can also be seen as bonus (system nerds, power gamers, tinkerers).

More metaknowledge also means less frustration and I guess most players start with a lot of D&D metaknowledge so those systems seem to work better for them - when in reality they just know and predict them better. 

I don't have any history with D&D prior to (or after) the Infinity Engine games - and when I compare the mechanics of those with Pillars oE and especially Deadfire the difference in quality (especially when it comes to the question whether they are well suited for a video game) it's like night and day. The combat and class mechanics of the Infinity Engine games are just bad from a systemic point of view. That doesn't mean those games can't be fun. But it's more like they are either fun despite the combat mechanics - or they are fun because one already knows the underlying systems so well that it's fun to play around with them and tinker. Deadfire's aren't perfect either - but the design goals "no frustrating trap choices" was def. met for example.

Of course it would be best if the system was complex yet consistent enough and more approachable so that players who don't exactly know what's happening under the hood are not frustrated. The somewhat murky or even wrong documentation of Pillars/Deadfire doesn't help either. And of course it's a very young and not extremely well "playtested" system. It would need more refinements. Check out mods like "Community Patch" and "Balance Polishing Mod" for a bit more refined experience. 

Sometimes maybe certain encounters cannot be designed in an equally satisfying fashion for all difficulty settings. That wouldn't be something the combat mechanics are guilty of but something the encounter/area design did a bit wrong. The DLC weren't directed by the base game's designer but younger and smaller teams. And while I think they are (mostly) very refreshing in terms of narrative and also new class mechanics it may well be that some combat balancing that needs a lot of experience wasn't done perfectly in encounter design etc. Just an idea though... 

 

Edited January 3, 2022 by Boeroer

[NotDumbEnough]

Really? If anything, I find that enemies pretty much never break engagement when I play, so much so that anything that only applies when enemies disengage is almost completely useless, unless I use a very specific debuff that makes them break engagement. It's not just Eder, enemies refuse to disengage even if the person engaging them hits like a wet noodle.

 

Also, I'm fairly glad that pre-buffing is not a thing in this game, it's not fun to wave your hands for 30 seconds before every fight and go in at full strength. Without pre-buffing you actually have to make conscious decisions on which buffs need to come first. Personally I don't think the developers took that philosophy far enough, as you can still cast a lot of offensive spells from stealth, so you can annihilate lots of encounters by syncing up multiple offensive spells at the same time once you can access powerful high tier spells. I'm currently playing with house rules that I can't cast anything from stealth, only use weapon attacks, otherwise most encounters are completely trivialized.

[Boeroer]

I guess the tanks used had not enough engagement slots. And if you present your whole party including glasscannons right at the start of combat (not leaving squishies stealthed) swarming is pretty common, especially with Rogues and Barbs on the other side. 

[Boeroer]

Prebuffing (making buff spells available out of combat) also would clash severely with the spell-per-encouter system where you regain your spell uses out of combat. You can get a glimpse of that with Priest's sigil spells that persist after casting out of combat and you'll get back the spell use --> free spell.

[thelee]

On 1/2/2022 at 2:09 PM, fireflame said:

There are many situations where even with a fully upgraded Eder some enemies will jump above him and go for casters who are behind, and the the casters either have to take down that enemy quickly, cast a scrol/potion to escape fight without taking penalty for breaking engagment(but even so it doesn't felel optimal) it seems positioning as a lot of importance in the game. I feel mechanics in Infinity games are more user friendly,

the mechanics may be more "user friendly" to you, which is a reasonable opinion (but c'mon, THAC0 is not user friendly), but here I wonder if there's just some confusion around engagement mechanics? Like someone else said, in practice engagement is almost never broken by AI, it's almost too rigid. The main exceptions appear to be fampyrs and rogue-like enemies, who will use their abilities specifically designed to break engagement (like Escape, Shadowing Beyond, Defensive Roll)and in rare cases just eat a disengagement attack to strike someone squishy.

The big thing is that unlike PoE, in Deadfire melee-ers do not start with any engagement slots. You have to at least use a shield. Also unlike PoE, it is much easier to lose engagement, via afflictions, or even an interrupt.

 

On 1/2/2022 at 2:09 PM, fireflame said:

This happens in all games but somehow, I find the gap in difficulty more extreme in this game. In the crucible some fights are rather easy then suddenly a fight gets much harder and nothing seemt to hint to that.

TBF, megabosses really should be broadcast in-game as completely optional, only do this if you like smashing your head on the wall challenges. They are not meant for diversified parties. They are puzzles, that can only be solved by a combination of extreme metagaming and cheese. They don't even give you good rewards.

As well, SSS definitely does have some imbalanced fights, especially for certain party compositions. Even though FS is harder, SSS definitely feels a lot more unforgiving in that it pushes towards megaboss-style metagaming and cheese. In particular, if you go down the survivor's path, the battles can be extremely tedious slogs that are rudely surprising in how many extra enemies keep spawning. Even though it's against flavor, even just having a progress bar showing "enemies remaining" or a more clear indication on the enemies themselves what wave they are would help. Anyway, I think these are pretty fair criticisms, in particular because the system prides itself on "viability". If you have crit-path DLC encounters or main-map (mega)bosses that are significantly harder to do with a reasonable subset of parties, then the encounter design needs a bit of a pass or better scaffolding needs to be done around those fights.

Edited January 4, 2022 by thelee

[Helz]

 

On 1/3/2022 at 9:00 PM, thelee said:

As well, SSS definitely does have some imbalanced fights, especially for certain party compositions. Even though FS is harder, SSS definitely feels a lot more unforgiving in that it pushes towards megaboss-style metagaming and cheese. In particular, if you go down the survivor's path, the battles can be extremely tedious slogs that are rudely surprising in how many extra enemies keep spawning.

These were the hardest fights in the game for me (ignoring megabosses). I had to develop a completely different strategy for them. For the rest of the game, I could maintain buffs and stretch skills and spells to the end of the fight, but for these I was out of resources by the 3rd or 4th wave. Nobody in my party could regenerate resources, so this felt almost impossible and sort of unfair knowing that some classes have infinite resources. In the end, I had to limit myself to a single buff at a time, barely use any skills, and stuck to mostly auto-attacks in a battle of attrition. The worst fights were against enemies that gave stacking debuffs or bleeding effects that persisted until the end of combat.

I think the PoE combat mechanics are great, but there are two things that bother me. One is that certain classes are just OP compared to others. Particularly, I think that either every class should be capable of regenerating resources or none of them should. Also,  I don't like the short durations on buffs. I would prefer pre-buffing over constantly re-buffing.

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, Helz said:

Also,  I don't like the short durations on buffs. I would prefer pre-buffing over constantly re-buffing.

Short durations in general are a nuisance. For instance, there's a scroll called Rusted Armor which weakens enemy defenses. But if it's on for 5 to 8 seconds, it means essentially nothing.

[Elric Galad]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

Short durations in general are a nuisance. For instance, there's a scroll called Rusted Armor which weakens enemy defenses. But if it's on for 5 to 8 seconds, it means essentially nothing.

Base duration is 15s though.

The issue is that it targets Fortitude, Fortitude is usually quite high, so I guess it grazes often.

Well, Morningstar modal is your friend, I suppose.

[xzar_monty]

Fair point! I cannot remember it ever being on for 10 seconds even, so I suppose it really does graze often. You use it against the biggies, and the biggies have high fortitude.

[Elric Galad]

47 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Fair point! I cannot remember it ever being on for 10 seconds even, so I suppose it really does graze often. You use it against the biggies, and the biggies have high fortitude.

And to a lesser extent high Resolve too, which doesn't help.

Rust is utterly useless vs Dorudugan.

Edited January 5, 2022 by Elric Galad