warhammer 40k: rogue trader

[Sarex]

30 minutes ago, Azdeus said:

I've grown bored with all the bugs in the game now, not to mention how badly balanced it is with stacking bonuses and whatnot, but one of the bolters I got hold of somewhere kept upping its burstfire rate so that I empty the mag each burst. It also dealt demolitions/10 bonus damage on each shot. With concentrated fire and some other stacking items I splatted what should be a pure horror boss in the first salvo.

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The Halo device monster. As someone that came across one while playing endgame Dark Heresy, it was ****ing dissapointing to say the least.

 

I fully get you, but I am still having fun seeing how broken I can get characters to be. Although I just got to chapter 4 so there is a good chance I may also get bored. Also knock on wood, I did not get any bad bugs, but from what I understand chapter 4 is where most of them start happening. I am hoping that when I get to that point I will just switch characters and try something else. Although to be fair to the game, the story is not bad, plus it's WH40k so there is a lot pulling me there. Xcom 2 had the same issues, but there the story was not enough to pull me to the end.

For me I saw the heavy bolter that gets +1 rate of fire for every kill, plus gloves that scale rate of fire with BS and reduce recoil.

[ShadySands]

Yep, you can save them in chapter 3. 

I had to redeem the Commissar then ask the Harlequin to get them out. I couldn't get it to work without the Commissar and his redemption requires being dogmatic.

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

For me it's Argenta that went around and killed everyone, and I now see some broken ass items that you can get from vendors. It would actually be funny to see how many shots I can get off in one burst with her.

With all buffs and Firearm Mastery I'm currently at 23 shots per burst. Good thing the heavy bolter's magazine is 96 shots.

Yeah so that thing has 250% armor and 3000 hit points on Daring, and it still died in one turn. Mostly because the Fanatic level of Dogmatic gives your main character an ability that allows a character to completely ignore any sort of damage reduction for one round. Naturally, that's... Argenta. I mean, who else would it be. Shooting a Plasma gun with 2x INT bonus damage is nice and all, but it sort of pales compared to a 23 burst from a heavy bolter dealing 150 damage per shot because somewhere in its damage calculations, the game totally breaks down.

Well, breaks down. Camaraderie stacks off Ballistic Skill, and that is increased by 5 for every stack of Versatility Argenta has, and she starts with 2, gets one for every extra turn and basically one per attack. It also has a slightly bugged interaction (at least for me) with Firearm Mastery where the large heavy bolter base rate of fire allows for an impressive amount of single shots that all stack Versatility even though they really should not.

Bonus points if Cassia's overpowered abilities herded groups of enemies together to die in a burst.  

[Azdeus]

33 minutes ago, Sarex said:

I fully get you, but I am still having fun seeing how broken I can get characters to be. Although I just got to chapter 4 so there is a good chance I may also get bored. Also knock on wood, I did not get any bad bugs, but from what I understand chapter 4 is where most of them start happening. I am hoping that when I get to that point I will just switch characters and try something else. Although to be fair to the game, the story is not bad, plus it's WH40k so there is a lot pulling me there. Xcom 2 had the same issues, but there the story was not enough to pull me to the end.

For me I saw the heavy bolter that gets +1 rate of fire for every kill, plus gloves that scale rate of fire with BS and reduce recoil.

Yeah, ch 4 went horrible broken for me.

The only reason why I've put up with it is the setting, anything that has to do with the mechanics causes me to grind my teeth.

@majestic It's pretty neat in that he pops 600-700 damage over an 3x3 area and that he get's AP back from one of his background feats, and as a massive bonus you don't have to have Argenta in your party

[majestic]

9 minutes ago, Azdeus said:

@majestic It's pretty neat in that he pops 600-700 damage over an 3x3 area and that he get's AP back from one of his background feats, and as a massive bonus you don't have to have Argenta in your party

I fail to see how that is a massive bonus. Sister Argenta is pure of faith and fair in judgment. Your words sound dangerously close to heresy here.

Spoiler

Plus, she killed that Theodora bitch and made me Rogue Trader.

Anyway, I just checked all my plasma weapons and found none that would deal 2xINT bonus damage, is that gun for sale?

Edit: The game is super schizophrenic when you are playing Dogmatic while still having all possible companions. I was standing next to Incendia Chorda, and she was praising me something fierce for being such an ardent follower of doctrine while I had an unsanctioned psyker, an Eldar, a Dark Eldar and a Cold Trader in my entourage, standing in front of her.

Edited January 7 by majestic

[Azdeus]

It's sanctioned, I'll show it to you if you'll just step into my secret chamber here disguised as an airlock...

Even if I were to play as dogmatic sometime in the future, I'm not going to bring her along anywhere. I'd put her in stasis with disengage only in case of emergency if I could.

I think you can purchase it from explorators.

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited January 7 by Azdeus

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, ShadySands said:

Yep, you can save them in chapter 3. 

 

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I had to redeem the Commissar then ask the Harlequin to get them out. I couldn't get it to work without the Commissar and his redemption requires being dogmatic.

 

Ah, nvm then. It wasn't something I could do on this playthrough.

[Gromnir]

just double-checked argenta's camaraderie bonus. curious, if she is surrounded by companions but then moves, she retains a camaraderie bonus as if she were still adjacent to a single ally. couple days past we did the cassia companion quest  event on dargonus and checked numbers. surrounded by four allies (heinrix were too far away at the start o' battle,) a buffed argenta were getting a camaraderie benefit o' 84%. had to move her to get a shot at the boss who annoying ignores the first crit shot and 'course argenta is 100% crit. argenta were only receiving a 21% boost by her lonesome.

the percentages offered above is numbers following her second heroic action, which am near always able to implement before any enemy gets a chance to attack. cassia and our main character is officers, and we made cassia a grand strategist. when combat starts, our grand strategist pasqal goes first, followed by cassia. cassia's first action is to give argenta a bring it down-- surrounded by four allies and complete unbuffed, argenta only receives 48% from camaraderie-- (5+ballistic skill modifier)x number of adjacent allies. 

in our game, camaraderie is working mostly as intended save that those acting solo appear to retain the benefits o' a single adjacent ally.

aside, we can't get where the shadows are deepest of all to advance, which is moderate annoying. supposed finishing kiava gama is the trigger, but for us it is stuck. oh well. 

HA! Good Fun!

Edited January 8 by Gromnir

[Gromnir]

22 hours ago, Azdeus said:

I've grown bored with all the bugs in the game now, not to mention how badly balanced it is with stacking bonuses and whatnot, but one of the bolters I got hold of somewhere kept upping its burstfire rate so that I empty the mag each burst. It also dealt demolitions/10 bonus damage on each shot. With concentrated fire and some other stacking items I splatted what should be a pure horror boss in the first salvo.

  Reveal hidden contents

The Halo device monster. As someone that came across one while playing endgame Dark Heresy, it was ****ing dissapointing to say the least.

 

we mentioned earlier how broken builds is an owlcat thing and they clear indulge the powergamer impulses o' their fanbase with the 40k title. pathfinder, particular with all the splat book material, allows for broken, but human dm/gm near always prevents such behaviour in rl-- makes campaigns and gaming sessions boring when one or more players is able to destroy every encounter without any effort. owlcat took potential busted pathfinder and then added their own take on mythic content which leads to stoopid busted builds, particular when combined with stoopid busted gear. curious, owlcat fans like busted and defend it. is nothing wrong with liking busted, but am personal thinking such diminishes the value o' having many character development and gear options when there is clear a handful o' best/right options. even so, is no shock busted builds is a thing for rogue trader 'cause that is exact what many owlcat fans want/expect. 

am also having observed how the challenge o' owlcat encounters would appear to be premised on players embracing broken content.  normal difficulties in owlcat games is frustrating challenging unless you embrace broken. not all encounters will be frustrating difficult for a more casual or role-play oriented player, but there will be enough such obstacle battles as to discourage players less focused on exploitive gameplay. we chose to play an officer for our first rogue trader run. we chose officer not 'cause it is our favorite build concept but 'cause we expected there to be threshold encounters in the game which would make the game decided unfun if we didn't have a powerful character/party.  

the owlcat approach is kinda odd from our pov. crpgs rely on maths which invariably lead to exploits being discovered by gamers no matter how hard a developer trys to balance a title. am s'posing the difference is that in a more balanced game there will be a handful o' exploits whereas owlcat offers players more choice... maybe? regardless, owlcat's rogue trader exploit or fail approach comes as little surprise to us.

as for bugs...

there is a reason why we rare play a title until six months has passed following release. particular for complex crpgs, there is always gonna be broken content both obvious and subtle. am thinking owlcat has actually improved insofar as the stability and quest integrity o' their titles at release, so credit where credit is due. however, we expected later game quests (content not available in the beta) would be problematic and am suspecting it will be a couple years before the vast majority o' minor and major mechanics bugs in rogue trader is fixed. 

am not making excuses for owlcat, but their design approach which promotes broken builds and the bugginess o' rogue trader is predictable and were expected based on previous owlcat releases. not exact caveat emptor, but...

and again, our personal rogue trader experience is more stable than we expected. yeah, the mechanics bugs is legion, but am genuine pleasant surprised by how few broken quests we has suffered given the fact the game is an owlcat title.  'course we only just finished chapter 2. regardless am thinking is fair to say, based on our admitted limited rogue trader experience, that each owlcat release has improved quest integrity and stability issues at release. progress?

HA! Good Fun!

 

[ShadySands]

40 minutes ago, Gromnir said:

and again, our personal rogue trader experience is more stable than we expected. yeah, the mechanics bugs is legion, but am genuine pleasant surprised by how few broken quests we has suffered given the fact the game is an owlcat title.  'course we only just finished chapter 2.

It gets worse in chapter 4, so basically post-beta content is a lot less polished. Most of the quest bugs I've had are just related to rumors not updating or completing. 

[melkathi]

My problem is that I can't know if there is other bugged content like Yriels questline not triggering, since I'd have to check spoilers to see what may have bugged out.

It is that thing that hurts my enjoyment of Bethesda games, when I have used the console too many times to spawn vanished NPCs.

 

I may quit my play through and wait a year.

[Malcador]

Sounds like Owlcat's QA department is a nice place to work.

[Sarex]

43 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Sounds like Owlcat's QA department is a nice place to work.

How bad was it before they got to it though.

[majestic]

That heavy bolter with +1 rate of fire for each kill does not work as advertised. You kill something with it, it does not update the rate of fire. At least not immediately, and really, who wants to wait for the next turn? The only saving grace is that it has a lot more initial damage per shot. Which is undermined by Argenta not being able to wear the extra rate of fire gloves, or the damage increasing gloves, since for no real reason it needs 70 STR to equip instead of 60 STR.

Eh, probably going to switch back to the regular heavy bolter. Makes no appreciable difference and more dakka = more fun.

Spoiler

Finished Pasqal's quest. I was very "surprised" to find out that he was Amarnat all along. Never saw that coming.

 

[Sarex]

But, but, but I need more dmg...

[ShadySands]

I just molten beam everything and hopefully summon a demon and molten beam that too

[HoonDing]

Anything made in Russia is literally Lada. First year you spend more time in the garage than on the road, but after that you can drive it your entire life.

[majestic]

I think I figured out why Argenta hyperscales so much in my game. I gave her Extermination, a talent that is supposed to increase her damage by +1 for every attack she makes. The game seems to count shots, not attacks. Argenta goes BRRRRRRRRRRRR. Might be time to see if that Calibrated Heavy Stubber isn't actually the king of weapons. Sure, the Blessed Bolter Casing is not going to work with it, but still, base rate of fire of 12 is insane.

So, probably going with the regular heavy bolter and the stubber as my weapons. Nothing wrong with switching guns for the heroic action single sniper shots.

[majestic]

Great, I got the "Marazhai's last quest does not work properly" bug in combination with "game crashes on same map when making an athletics check" bug. Both of which are only resolvable by tinkering with the state and teleporting away. Le sigh.  Up until that, there were a lot of quirks, but nothing broke completely.

Spoiler

Also recruited Incendia as companion, great for the achievement, less great as a character. Man, her build... sheesh. I mean at this point in the game everything works well enough, but eh, I wonder if Uralon or Winterscale would be better.

Guess I'll just finish the game without finishing the quest first.

Savegame Size also seems to have exploded (such is typical for all the Owlcate games as they really just dump the entire game's state as json files onto the disk, which is fun for editing the save games, but pretty wasteful), and it broke GOG's cloud sync size limit. Good thing I don't need really cloud sync for this game.

The game is also really inefficient. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 without my fans spinning up to the point of being audible, but Rogue Trader? Constant audible fan spinning. Not even BG3 does that, and BG3 also is pretty heavy on the CPU.

Edit: Complain, and an hour later a patch comes out that seems to have fixed all three issues. Well, good on Owlcat.

Edited January 12 by majestic

[Gromnir]

6 hours ago, majestic said:

Edit: Complain, and an hour later a patch comes out that seems to have fixed all three issues. Well, good on Owlcat.

...

we had same reaction to the patch as bruce campbell's character did to peter parker's diamond in spider-man 3..

what genuine shocked us were an owl cat person reacting to queries in the steam thread for the patch. 

is nice to see that  imperial world characters, including companions, not getting the benefit o' common talent attribute improvements were addressed, but am thinking am gonna wait a bit before we go beyond chapter two.

am gonna take two dogmatic and one iconoclast characters to near end o' chapter two and then wait for a couple more patches.

HA! Good Fun!

[majestic]

Finished the game, checked every possible ending - unless there is another, supar secrat hidden one.

Spoiler

Unsure what to make of it lore-wise, even in a weakened state after millions of years of imprisonment and with a chaining device throught up by the Dark Eldar and renegade tech priests, a group of seven mortals should not be able to fend off a C'Tan shard. I obviously did the sensible thing and swore allegiance to the Star God. The companions took it less well, no way to ascend for them this time around.

The most fun ending is the one where you create Nomos, the Divine Avenger of the Emperor. I suppose that serves as the game's secret ending this time around. Although it is not that secret. I suspect Nomos becoming His enforcer is linked to playing through the game as dogmatic and therefore giving him dogmatic answers.

Did not get the achievement for visiting all optional locations. It was either bugged or I have missed something.

The final battle was a joke. Sure, the boss has 14000 hit points on Daring difficulty, but even that much is just leaves in the wind for Argenta and her insane attack rate at this point. The Calibrated Heavy Stubber combined with the Compensator Gloves on an Arch-Militant is insane. Make sure you sell only the stuff giving the most reputation to each faction. It is <expletive> annoying to do, but the reputation items are something else.

Worst part of the game goes to the enchanted forest part of the main quest and, as per usual, the mini-game Owlcat can't help but put in. Void ship combat is at least more fun than Bad HoMM was, but it still was not very entertaining. Halfway through the game I abused the fact that the game is basically just saving json fiiles in a compressed archive and gave myself 999 Navigator's Insight. I am not sure if that made me miss any random battles worth of note, or any random events of note, but damn, travel between systems is hyper-annoying, and it is slooooooooooooooow.

[Sarex]

Just had a random planet fight with 3 chaos marines and some big ass chaos helbrute. They did not get to shoot...

[majestic]

That fight is much more fun when you do it in Chapter 2, although I am uncertain if I was supposed to be able to reach it in chapter two. I think it took spending Navigator's Insight to create a warp route to the system. Should have been a hint, I suppose...

[Sarex]

25 minutes ago, majestic said:

That fight is much more fun when you do it in Chapter 2, although I am uncertain if I was supposed to be able to reach it in chapter two. I think it took spending Navigator's Insight to create a warp route to the system. Should have been a hint, I suppose...

I searched all the planets in chapter 2 and didn't get that encounter, only when I went through all the planets again in chapter 4 did I find it.

[majestic]

25 minutes ago, Sarex said:

I searched all the planets in chapter 2 and didn't get that encounter, only when I went through all the planets again in chapter 4 did I find it.

Probably buggy. The pirate encounter zones also stuck around on my map forever even though I hunted them down.