Combat - Companions vs. Adventurers

[Gromnir]

Whether pre-made or hired adventurer depends on what is important to you.  Also now that you can drop the pre-mades to level 1 you can build them up as you like.  

of note, this feature does make more obvious that some o' the joinables has abilities that one cannot get from a premade.  for example, kana has a free chant and eder has a free talent, which is less obvious unique features than is sagani's animal companion. hiravias shapechange is unique, but am admitting that we shape change him as little as possible.   similarly, is more than a few boardies who were complaining that josh's paladin joinabale npc had a better unique ability than a player could create with the adventurers hall feature.  etc.

 

haven't ever considered before, but am suspecting that aloth, grieving mother and durance is the only joinables that ain't having unique abilities or talents... though we seems to recall that durance initial skills allocation is odd.  not certain 'bout durance.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[roller12]

cant say that any of PoE premades have anything worth losing sleep over, where say Coran in bg has an extra, otherwise impossible to gain, 1/2 attack and could get to, otherwise also impossible, 21dex, which counted together with how overpowered archery was in bg1, easily made him the best NPC in the game. And the only thing that kept the bg2 Edwin from being the best NPC for having 3(three) more spellslots on each level compared to generic Wizard,  was the Sorcerer class, which is not even in the AD&D ruleset.

 

Imagine Aloth having 7 spellslots/level and maxed mainstat, whats what some NPC in bg-series are.

 

 

edit: plus they also had tons of smaller variations, not only stat changes(more than just for show) or some unique abilities(more than just for show) but stuff like unique items(more than just for show) and of course different opinions about each other(could lead to a deadly conflict), all in all that made them feel unique and fun to play with, something im missing a bit from Poe premades, they feel and play like gimped generics with a bit of dialog. 

Edited June 8, 2015 by roller12

[Gromnir]

sorcerer wasn't a bg class. (edit: ah, we see clarification via edit)

 

compare to admittedly broken bg joinable npcs?  poe companion value is not bolstered or diminished by comparison to bg options.

 

HA! Good Fun!

Edited June 8, 2015 by Gromnir

[Nakia]

Why should joinable companions be superior in some way to what the player can create?  Eder does have constant recovery and can be built, buffed, given items that make him a fantastic tank.  He's my man and go no where without him.  My hired barbarian can hold her own though and is a big asset.  As far as I am concerned I have the best of two worlds rolled into one.

[Fardragon]

Why should joinable companions be superior in some way to what the player can create?  Eder does have constant recovery and can be built, buffed, given items that make him a fantastic tank.  He's my man and go no where without him.  My hired barbarian can hold her own though and is a big asset.  As far as I am concerned I have the best of two worlds rolled into one.

They don't need to be superior, they just need to not be inferior. As it stands the joinable NPCs are worse than anything a player can design from scratch. Very much worse if they are allowed to auto level up and you don't encounter them early on. Eder can be a passible tank because (A) you encounter him early on, and (B) his stats where tweaked in a patch to make him less sub-optimal. But It's still easy to create a much better tank from scratch.

 

Many of the BG companions where weaker than player designed characters too, but the made up for it with special abilities that the player simply couldn't get. They didn't have to be powerful abilities, just unique and interesting. There was some attempt to do that in PoE, but in the end the unique abilities are all so timid that they don't have any noticeable effect.

 

On the other hand, PoE is better than the NWN2 OC, where the NPCs where not only weaker than player created characters, they also had personalities that you would cross the street to avoid.

[Drath]

Party of own making, fully customizable and combat oriented brings to mind IWD2 more than BG2. Both were good in their own right certainly. On my subsequent PoE runs I took different classes, barbarian, ranger, monk to see how differently they worked out. so yea some companions weren't used much.

 

 

That's not true. They show their personality in other ways. For example, all the characters will leave your party depending on your reputation. Good characters leave when you're too evil, and evil characters leave when you're too good. Some also fight each other (such as Minsc vs. Edwin) as a way of displaying their personalities.

 

 

On PoE NPCs leaving the party, well...

Grieving Mother does leave the party if you sacrifice the baby.

Aloth and Pallegina have some fairly strong opinions about animancy too. But yea PoE companions don't react to your dispositions much as far as I can tell.
The DnD alignment system is fairly black or white though, with not very much in between. It has its own charm certainly, but I was thinking perhaps an affection/approval meter could also be good?   In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you got fairly varied reactions from each companion depending on

which faction you supported, templars or mages and how you dealt with them.

As for making premade characters a little more special/unique in terms of gameplay mechanics, maybe make them gain a few additional stats or get an additional talent or skill after resolution of his personal quest? I was actually hoping Hiravias got something a little more substantial after he finished his personal quest, with all the description of autumn glow settling into him.
 

Edited June 8, 2015 by Drath