Combat is now mostly a dull chore

 

 

I find the combat to be a marked improvement. Now the combat in PoE1, THAT was dull and a chore.

Could you elaborate? I can perhaps see the "chore" part, as combat required more of the player's attention in the original. But, since most fights in Deadfire do not reward or punish the player for paying attention and actually using tactics, I'm failing to see how most combats are actually interesting in Deadfire?

 

With abilities and health regen between fights, individual encounters can be more dangerous. Because of this system, I try to punch above my weight far more often, seeking out red skull fights and seeing if I can pull them off. It also means I don't have ot conserve abilities as a resource, so I can comfortably steamroll trash mobs quickly. All the fights in PoE1 felt like they just dragged on. Resource management isn't fun. Playing with abilities and spells to solve an encounter is.

 

I'm gonna have to disagree with you pretty hard there man. You shouldn't have to seek out stuff that outlevels you severely to feel like you've found a compelling challenge. Combat encounters should feel at least moderately challenging on normal difficulty.

 

 

 

I find the combat to be a marked improvement. Now the combat in PoE1, THAT was dull and a chore.

Could you elaborate? I can perhaps see the "chore" part, as combat required more of the player's attention in the original. But, since most fights in Deadfire do not reward or punish the player for paying attention and actually using tactics, I'm failing to see how most combats are actually interesting in Deadfire?

 

With abilities and health regen between fights, individual encounters can be more dangerous. Because of this system, I try to punch above my weight far more often, seeking out red skull fights and seeing if I can pull them off. It also means I don't have ot conserve abilities as a resource, so I can comfortably steamroll trash mobs quickly. All the fights in PoE1 felt like they just dragged on. Resource management isn't fun. Playing with abilities and spells to solve an encounter is.

 

I'm gonna have to disagree with you pretty hard there man. You shouldn't have to seek out stuff that outlevels you severely to feel like you've found a compelling challenge. Combat encounters should feel at least moderately challenging on normal difficulty.

 

I mean, a large number of them DO. I've wiped on several regular encounters on Normal difficulty. I also don't want EVERY battle to be life or death, that gets EXTREMELY TEDIOUS if I have to treat every battle like a boss encounter.

Imma let u finish but can I just say: Jagged Alliance 2 has thee best rest/resource management/injury system of all time!

 

If not that, then copy BG1's resting system, where you could not 'rest until healed', you could only recover a certain amount of health every 8 hours dependent on the characters CON. In all other IE games the resting and healing is massively inferior and simplified.

 

 

 

 

I find the combat to be a marked improvement. Now the combat in PoE1, THAT was dull and a chore.

Could you elaborate? I can perhaps see the "chore" part, as combat required more of the player's attention in the original. But, since most fights in Deadfire do not reward or punish the player for paying attention and actually using tactics, I'm failing to see how most combats are actually interesting in Deadfire?

 

With abilities and health regen between fights, individual encounters can be more dangerous. Because of this system, I try to punch above my weight far more often, seeking out red skull fights and seeing if I can pull them off. It also means I don't have ot conserve abilities as a resource, so I can comfortably steamroll trash mobs quickly. All the fights in PoE1 felt like they just dragged on. Resource management isn't fun. Playing with abilities and spells to solve an encounter is.

 

I'm gonna have to disagree with you pretty hard there man. You shouldn't have to seek out stuff that outlevels you severely to feel like you've found a compelling challenge. Combat encounters should feel at least moderately challenging on normal difficulty.

 

I mean, a large number of them DO. I've wiped on several regular encounters on Normal difficulty. I also don't want EVERY battle to be life or death, that gets EXTREMELY TEDIOUS if I have to treat every battle like a boss encounter.

 

Truth. There's a rhythm that I want out of combat, where I feel like a badass but then have to push or challenge myself.

I don't know, POE2 fights can be very chaotic as well. But perhaps less so. POE2 does still have a few fights where enemies have abilities to teleport behind your front lines and wreck havoc on your ranged folks. If you are reading this Osidian, these features are very annoying. What's the point of even having tanks. I can see how POTD players like this sort of things, but for us average players it's too much. So many reloads in POE1, that lighthouse in POE1 in particular with the undead teleporting behind you. Your best hope was to pull some of them an not try to aggro too many. POE2 has a couple fights like this.

 

I also find they tend to fly by so fast that it's often not worth using my abilities. Slow them down a little.

I’ve not encountered enemies who teleport to my mages yet (only played a couple of hours), but that would be a great addition to combat. If the AI can’t find ways around your tanks, what is the point of having AI? If I am attacking opponents, then my first priority is neutralizing spell-casters. Shouldn’t my opponents do the same?

 

I don't know, POE2 fights can be very chaotic as well. But perhaps less so. POE2 does still have a few fights where enemies have abilities to teleport behind your front lines and wreck havoc on your ranged folks. If you are reading this Osidian, these features are very annoying. What's the point of even having tanks. I can see how POTD players like this sort of things, but for us average players it's too much. So many reloads in POE1, that lighthouse in POE1 in particular with the undead teleporting behind you. Your best hope was to pull some of them an not try to aggro too many. POE2 has a couple fights like this.

 

I also find they tend to fly by so fast that it's often not worth using my abilities. Slow them down a little.

I’ve not encountered enemies who teleport to my mages yet (only played a couple of hours), but that would be a great addition to combat. If the AI can’t find ways around your tanks, what is the point of having AI? If I am attacking opponents, then my first priority is neutralizing spell-casters. Shouldn’t my opponents do the same?

 

LOTS of enemies do that. Enemy rogues will Shadowing Beyond to your rear guard, enemy fighters will charge to them, etc.

It seems CRPG are chores masqueraded as entertainment.

 

LOTS of enemies do that. Enemy rogues will Shadowing Beyond to your rear guard, enemy fighters will charge to them, etc.

 

 

In my experience, enemies rogues will mostly use shadowing beyond when they're in immediate danger. At that point they will often use it to teleport to your backline. But it's more an annoyance than a real danger because they're already close to dying and they usually come one at a time.

 

Ennemies fighters on the other hand will sometime just rush your backline, ignoring engagements, which promply results in them being knocked prone and look like idiots, thanks to OP guardian stance (especially with the +20 acc on disengagement attacks).

 

Enemies melee guys aren't usually a big threat to your backline, unless you're ambushed from all sides.

 

On the other hand, i'm not so sure the game would be more enjoyable if every enemy could ignore your frontline and go straight to your squishies.

 

 

LOTS of enemies do that. Enemy rogues will Shadowing Beyond to your rear guard, enemy fighters will charge to them, etc.

 

 

In my experience, enemies rogues will mostly use shadowing beyond when they're in immediate danger. At that point they will often use it to teleport to your backline. But it's more an annoyance than a real danger because they're already close to dying and they usually come one at a time.

 

Ennemies fighters on the other hand will sometime just rush your backline, ignoring engagements, which promply results in them being knocked prone and look like idiots, thanks to OP guardian stance (especially with the +20 acc on disengagement attacks).

 

Enemies melee guys aren't usually a big threat to your backline, unless you're ambushed from all sides.

 

On the other hand, i'm not so sure the game would be more enjoyable if every enemy could ignore your frontline and go straight to your squishies.

 

It doesn't happen all the time, which is something I enjoy. One of my problems with the Siege of Cragholdt was that simply everybody just ignored my tanks at all times and just hard rushed my back line, which was a serious and continuous annoyance.

This is based on my first PotD run.

 

miss the health/endurance system where you'd get worn down over time and you'd have to push on to complete a dungeon without stopping to rest. The attrition style made for a sense of accomplishment when I persevered. 

 

Now its just go go go  and hit the magic rest button if I get two injuries as risking a perma death would just be idiotic. I like the combat but the challenge is pretty much relegated to how underleveled I am.  If PotD gets tuned harder it'll just mean that I'll need to pay more attention to level disparities as they make all the difference in the world.

 

In PoE Eder's armor with Second Chance was good as it tapped into his large health reserve as did his regen. Now I put that in the stash as getting back up just means he'll have two injuries instead of one since he'll get one shot when he stands.

 

How can Obsidian balance the encounters when their are how many hundreds of different class combos not to mention the thousands of different team make ups that are possible?

This discussion can be examined as an encounter design problem rather than a mechanics problem: Now that strategic resources management is gone, what should each fight achieve? Unfortunately, the devs ran out of time or ideas or design spaces or a combination of all, it isn't anywhere answered at this point.

I'm gonna throw my own view on the pile here and say that even though I wasn't a fan of the per rest system, this system in my eyes has a LOT of problems right now. Get ready for a lot of in-depth reading though, cause brevity is not my forte.

 

In the per rest system, I felt classes like the Druid, Priest and Wizard were more or less a ball and chain around my ankles in many fights early in the game, likely to compensate for the power their abilities provide relative to someone like a Paladin or Fighter, whose per encounter abilities feel like a joke in comparison. Until I got to spell masteries or a sufficient number of spell tiers that I could "waste" in an easier encounter just to make things go faster, these caster classes were limited in what abilities they could use in consecutive fights, often resulting in just autoattacking because the out-of-combat resources of camping supplies and gold were limited in the very very early game (like early Gilded Vale). After that, it was a question of how much you want to run back and forth for camping supplies (and considering PoE1's load times, that usually meant just not using abilities unless necessary). Gold became way too plentiful and camping supplies and rooms in the inn were dirt cheap, so the only issue was that of time you spent going for a nap. The system devolved into a time-saving exercise rather than one of strategic significance, since you were never put in a situation where you simply could not get out of an area to go pick up more camping supplies or reaquire that resting bonus from an inn or stronghold. The resting system simply becomes meaningless if access to the resource your resting consumes is plentiful, cheap and at all times unrestricted (except for Sun in Shadow, but there are piles of camping supplies right in the starting area and by then the fights are not a challenge even on PotD). HOWEVER, even this twisted incentive to rest as little as possible to save time (not resources) was usually good enough to get me to try and optimise in every fight so that I don't lose unnecessary health and force an early rest and bunch of backtracking.

 

PoE2 has a different problem, one of a shared resource pool (and no, I'm not talking about the combat resource system). The significance of each fight is limited to "does my party get wiped?" If the answer is no, the fight does not matter. And the problem comes down to the same thing as in PoE1 though with different consequences. Once again, the resource your resting consumes is way too plentiful. The food you use up for resting and removing ALL your injuries is the very same you use to feed your crew. That could be a good thing, if supplies were limited and you had to weigh whether or not you can afford to rest, whether you will have enough cash to restock, whether you will be able to feed your crew if you **** up in the dungeon, etc. But it's not limited. You get PILES of that stuff. So not only are you not restricted in feeding your crew with your 500 veggie and 300 fruit piles, but you can rest as much as you want, with no backtracking, no in-combat or out-of-combat resource restriction, just...rest as much as you want. 8 times, back to back. Knock yourself out, because it doesn't matter.

 

With that comes the spellcaster routine. There would be no point in having per rest abilities on spellcasters when you can rest as much as your heart desires at any time, anywhere. The time-saving aspect from PoE1 isn't there because you don't need camping supplies, you need food, and you ALWAYS have food, so you would just rest back to back after every fight if you had to. That results in spellcasters having a routine each fight. You can use all your abilities, so you just set up a cycle (queue Eldritch Aim, Tayn's Orb, Chain Lightning twice, Pull of Eora, Delayed Fireball, Fireball, now press space and watch the fight resolve itself). Every fight becomes the same cycle for all your characters. It would take an extraordinary fight type (fighting a large merc company vs fighting a single dragon)/difficulty spike to occur for the routine to change.

 

Which brings me to difficulty. Granted, I haven't quite finished the first campaign yet. I'm currently resolving the last town I haven't done (Crookspur) and I'm set up for the final stage of the final quest. But so far, I have had ONE, count them ONE area where I had problems (because I went in WAAAY too early) and the rest was a snoozefest. Due to the open nature of the world map in PoE2, you're going to end up doing things completely out of order. All the time. In fact, having spent quite a good deal of time thinking about every quest and area and its difficulty, I still have no clue what the correct order of doing things is (where in PoE1 that was pretty self evident with the exception of Endless Paths and White March expansion content/some bounties). To that end, I believe the game HAS to be played with level scaling on (upwards only) by default if you don't want 90 % of fights to be you just pressing space to unpause at the start and letting it play out. You can level up through so many quests without fighting that when you do get to fighting, most of the things are way too weak to threaten you without scaling. You're not even incentivised to optimise in the "trash" fights because with the lack of long-term health and resources, all you "care" about is a character not getting knocked out (but you don't really care cause you can just rest instantly). You can easily autoattack through an entire fight because there is no long-term plan in motion, no attempt to conserve resources (time, camping supplies, spells) so you can just let things play out or just spam all your most powerful spells, up to you. Then again, level scaling will result in a problem I already mentioned before, that is, the routine. If all fights that are not way above your level end up having a more or less flat difficulty due to level scaling, there is no reason for you to deviate from the ability routine you already have set up. And since quests have an indicator for which ones you are ready for and which ones you are not, it's going to be rare for you to take a surprise buttkicking (like you would, say, showing up in Cragholdt at level 13 in PoE1 or trying the Alpine dragon at lvl 11).

 

To not be overly critical, here are the good points of the system and where I see potential in this greatly improving. Spellcasters are no longer a hindrance early, which is great, and you get to utilise all your characters fully at all times. If the combat scenarios were a lot more varied with significant, non-ignorable differences in enemy weaknesses and attack strategies, the spellcaster routine wouldn't be a thing and you'd have to use all the tools at your disposal at all times to make it out alive. You'd have to protect your party from charm attacks from fampyrs (btw, where are those? haven't met one yet, they were all over the place in PoE1), or have to deal with immunities (so suddenly your damage spell of choice can't be used), have enemies ambush you from behind (so now you're in mad panick protecting your spellcasters from interrupts, which, btw, are a great improvement over the PoE1 system). But the scenarios are mostly all the same, and since the only battles that matter are the ones where your party gets wiped, that MUST NOT be the case, otherwise, no fights matter. As it stands, combat is always the same. You walk up to the enemy, and either sneak and attack head on or talk and attack head on, or board their ship and attack head on. Very few ambushes, very few fights where adds spawn in unexpected places (Alpine dragon, I'm looking at you) or where you're brutally, brutally outnumbered by powerful enemies (Magran's Faithful, I hate you and love you at the same time). Very few areas where things are consistently just powerful and kicking your butt unless you intentionally go in too early. The one single area that gave me problems and that I would praise is the Old City Ruins dungeon in Nekataka. Since the lift gets pulled from you if you spend too long down there, you are suddenly trapped in a hostile environment and have to fight your way out (and hope you're strong enough to do so) to get back to civilisation. Having gone in way too early, I had trouble making it through like 5 fights without wiping. Even tried to race back through a few sudden spawns in areas I've cleared before to try and make it back to the lift before it goes up (and failed by about 2 minutes). That was great. The rest system still carried me through, where Camping Supplies would have not, which is a real shame. I could just chain rest after each fight if I felt like it with no consequences, where Camping Supply limitations would have made it so that I have to think and plan my route out of the hellhole I put myself in. Sadly, the Camping Supply system never took the opportunity to trap you somewhere and make you dig yourself out, and this system does not give such an event the gravitas it deserves. Lastly, I'd praise the injury system for its interaction with traps. Walking your Mechanics character into a minefield and realising midway through that you don't have the perception to detect half the traps and you already got 2 injuries...that's fun. What's not fun is that I can literally rest right there with my Rogue in the middle of a trap field and the rest of my party two rooms away in safety.

 

In my eyes, the fix to these problems would have to be two-fold, if we disregard the option of tying the rest system to a different resource (one that can become scarce without impacting the ship system's resources) and I believe it is very much doable with a few balance changes:
1) Make the difficulty more spiky or just consistently much higher. If the only fights that matter are those where you're at the risk of dying, then ultra hard fights in places where you do not expect them might be the way to go. That way you essentially have to try in every fight until you get a feel for its difficulty (meaning no autoattack autopilot) and you will frequently end up in situaitons where you have to redo a fight a few times to figure out its tricks (meaning that the fights have to have a trick to them though). This one has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it is possible that level scaling partially fixes this, and turning off the level indicators might also improve this greatly (so that you don't know which fights/quests to avoid). Hardcore mode (or Trial of Iron or whatever it is called) would suffer, however, since frequent difficulty spikes end up in dead parties. For that, level indicators would be required, which messes up Expert mode. Scaling things a little above your level (like when you High Level scaled White March when you were just barely above the level threshold and suddenly everything in White March was hard as balls) might be better in that regard. Simply put, fights have to be difficulty for this easy-rest system to work at all.

2) Make resting clear away only 1 injury instead of all of them unless you use extremely high quality food (that's rare as far as I can tell), and put a limit on the frequency of resting (one that cannot be bypassed by just Waiting, btw). That way, accumulating injuries in fights isn't meaningless due to the resting system. Currently, the only way you lose a character is if you either needlessly go into a fight/trap room heavily injured, if you keep resurrecting a character in a fight until they die, or if your whole party gets wiped. Accumulating injuries faster due to tougher fights and clearing them out only one at a time when resting, and not being able to rest more often than, say every two days, would mean that every screwup in a fight has longish-term consequences and triggering traps will make you rethink your mine-clearing line charge tactics. In addition, sealing a party away every now and then like you do for instance in the Old City Ruins would give the restriction a bit more meaning, since you can't just decide to spend the next 2 days running quests or sailing in circles around the island until you can rest again.

 

My 2 ce....my 2000 word essay.

My point is that both encounter designs can and did exist in the original and engaged in the player. Only the latter can in Deadfire. That's basically it.

 

Edit addition: As well a whole rich grey area between those extremes existed in the original (especially in White March as Taurus notes). Deadfire's design means only the "BF" extreme can possibly engage the player with combat challenge now.

 

I don't think there is a definitive answer to be had to that, since it also does come down to preference. However I do think even if the fights are all going to be the BF (Big Fight) category of fights, there is no reason the level you are taking the fight at, your gear, enemy composition, enemy tactics, enemy placement and consumables couldn't change the sense of difficulty in any given fight. I don't see why everything has to be maximum difficulty to still be engaging, and you can't even design for that, since so many variables affect the the difficulty of a specific encounter.

 

The window is smaller now, since wasting an ability isn't a disaster, and the scripts you can give your party are much better, so if it's outside of the (admittedly smaller) window, you'll just fast mode it. However the worst thing about per rest were the fights where you had to cast CC trash pack after trash pack just because you couldn't trust Aloth not to lose you an unlosable fight by wiping your party. The best were those moments where you actually had to take fights, while your party was already on the edge. How much weight do you give that stuff, like I said, personal preference.

 

But it's not like I'm not slightly worried getting the fights overall feel right is going to be quite a challenge for Obsidian in a game this complex (as stated above by KDubya), since you honestly have to look at every encounter on it's own (which apparently is what they are doing), but they also need to make changes to enemy AI, to make different creatures play differently, and I'd guess that's quite a bit of work. Although as I understand it, the massive SCS mod for the Baldur's Gate series was originally created by one dude, and it changes pretty much every fight and every creature in the game.

 

In short: Fights outside a certain window you will probably just fast mode in Deadfire, meaning fights need to be tougher overall to force the player to engage with the mechanics. Trash fights are now pointless, and level scaling is probably necessary. You see this as a loss, I see it as a win. There is still going to be variance in perceived encounter difficulty, but it's up to Obsidian to make them fun and not repetetive.

 

Flamesium also made some good points about this earlier in the thread:

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99893-combat-is-now-mostly-a-dull-chore/?p=2027479

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99893-combat-is-now-mostly-a-dull-chore/?p=2027658

 

Edit: last paragraph

Edited May 20, 2018 by tela2k

problem is this system probably going generate very simple response

 

Small selection of good spells used

small selection of food used

small selection buffs used

small selection of abilities

 

rinse and repeat for every fight as there nothing make you use anything else.

 

Once in while rest stop someone gaining 3rd injury

 

yeah in POE 1 rest or going back to inn was easily done as nothing stopped you or punished you.

But atleast for those pushed on they had to use spells not the best and had use some lesser buffs.

 

I just see way combat going it become complete it don't bother again as just to much same.

 

As said I vote for choice of combat syles at start game one per encounter and one thats per rest but both systems need changes to really make them shine.

 

Funny everyone discusses which is better system when real questions should be how can we improve per encounter and how can we improve per rest?

We also need be careful or we going end up with POE 3 with another new system that never meets its sweet spot.

 

I like if POE 3 does get made we not all starting from level 1 again be nice actually carry on from where we finish POE 2 level and equipment wise.

 

Maybe per rest requires been limited from returning to inn till reaching a point. Maybe needs also possibility that someone discovers camp site and attacks you. Less trash fights and more thought out fights

 

per encounter needs have something like when rest doesn't heal all in one go and limited number rest in a period time. Need huge range different enemies with different buffs use food spells and mixed will deflect etc to force people use more assets and not make each fight simple small sellection of things and rinse and repeat.

 

Also think POE 1 suffered with to much fighting and POE 2 has to little. I say to that POE 1 had to many big dungeons and POE 2 has to small need find middle sweet spot.

Also think POE 1 suffered with to much fighting and POE 2 has to little. I say to that POE 1 had to many big dungeons and POE 2 has to small need find middle sweet spot.

 

I kinda disagree with that. It makes sense for PoE 1 to have long dungeons because its resource system (Health, per rest skills, Camping Supplies) makes it so that gradual exhaustion is what kills you rather than individual fights (though Alpine Dragon and Magran's Faithful took care of that niche well enough). Death by a thousand cuts. Your spells start depleting, health gets low...one last stack of Camping Supplies. Ofc that only became a problem if you were, for some reason, unwilling to just go back for more supplies, rest up in an inn and go in again...so yeah, far from perfect. However, once you finished the game once or twice and the story ceased being a relevant motivator, I found the combat, character optimisation and party optimisation to be the real draw, and I was plenty satisfied with how much combat of widely varying difficulties I got from the game. PotD especially was quite satisfying.

 

I do agree with the second part though. It feels like PoE 2 is a bunch of bite-sized combat encounters, like the ones you meet randomly out there on an island or when boarding a ship, but a lot of sustained, long combat back-to-back is a rare thing to see. I'm almost at the end of the game and I feel I got more fighting done in White March I and II than I have in this whole game. Could be, though, that I've done plenty of fighting and then some, but it didn't feel particularly memorable because most of it was way too easy outside of areas where I was underlevelled. As someone going into the game blind (as in, no Beta experience) and learning the new systems from scratch, Veteran should not leave me feeling this way.

Edited May 20, 2018 by lMarcusl

*earshattering snip*

 

Good thing is, you did touch on many core issues there. Would've been slightly disappointed, if I'd read two pages worth of random rambling.

I'll keep this very short, since currently it's me who needs a rest, which fortunately doesn't cost me anything.

 

1. Good food needs to be more scarce anyhow, whether it's tied to resting or not. There are so many of those lobsters just laying around, and they're basically protection from magic scrolls. Immunity to three afflictions, available to you in heaps and piles, c'mon guys. Although, theoretically, if the game was hard enough, you'd start chewing through those, and then food would actually start feeling scarce, because you'd want to keep your super immunities up.

 

2. Encounter design does indeed feel very lacking right now, as does enemy AI. This is the main reason I believe the feel of combat might change significantly for the better, if they just put more effort into it. (Which they are apparently doing right now) Also I agree, Deadfire probably can't work without upwards level scaling.

 

3. I don't think they should balance the game from Trial of Iron or Expert Mode perspective. People do those when they know the game through and through anyway, difficulty spikes shouldn't matter. I'm pretty sure that part of the community is just happier the harder Triple Crown Solo is to do.

 

4. As long as there is a wait mechanic in the game, you can't restrict resting by time. I'd be totally OK with your suggestion of 1 injury = 1 food, it's a start at least.

 

5. Southeast and northwest corners of the map have a couple of encounters on random islands, don't miss them.

 You'd have to protect your party from charm attacks from fampyrs (btw, where are those? haven't met one yet, they were all over the place in PoE1),

Have you not been to the Splintered Reef? 

It's full of guls, darguls, fampyrs, and one ancient fampyr. These were some of the toughest battles of the game for me, with dominate, charm, etc. all going off. Eder murderkilled my whole party once.

 

Edited May 20, 2018 by Katarack21

I believe the combat system is great and speed is perfect.  I hope they don't touch it!  I agree with the OP, that it is the rest mechanics that probably needs some work.  I mentioned in my post the need for "fatigue" to set in and treat as injury or something that will force us to rest after a given time cause right now my party is like "there's no rest for the wicked"  we never sleep, lol.  I think limiting camps to 0, 1, or 2 times per inn/ship rest per difficulty., introducing fatigue somehow, and ramping up bad guy hitpoints per difficulty could help address the rest mechanics that the OP cited.

The LAST thing we need is incresing hitpoints for cheap "challenge". All that does is slow fights down, not make them harder. I think the difficulty is in a good place for the average player. I find normal difficulty fairly challenging. If you want a proper difficulty increase for POTD, add more varied enemies, preferably ones that will cover each other's weaknesses and (Ideally) Make enemies smarter.

The LAST thing we need is incresing hitpoints for cheap "challenge". All that does is slow fights down, not make them harder. I think the difficulty is in a good place for the average player. I find normal difficulty fairly challenging. If you want a proper difficulty increase for POTD, add more varied enemies, preferably ones that will cover each other's weaknesses and (Ideally) Make enemies smarter.

 

Making sure that enemies don't just die to a strong alpha strike is also pretty important.  The increase in health will mean that "there will be multiple rounds of combat".

 

In PoE1 one of the key things I abused a lot are doorways, but seem like in PoE2 maps feel a lot more open.  Ship battles in particular is essentially one wide open field unless you count the stairs...

Well some people love awful combat with even more awful balance, it can make things somehow more "difficult", yes? Yes.

 

So let's not knock that. At least Obsidian said they are working on tweaking this for us, too. That way more people will enjoy it not being a chore. That's the point isn't it? For the game to be as fun as possible for everyone, not just the fans/backers. At least, as a backer, I want the gameto be fun for everyone and I know Obsidian feels the same, thank God.

 

I find the combat to be a marked improvement. Now the combat in PoE1, THAT was dull and a chore.

Could you elaborate? I can perhaps see the "chore" part, as combat required more of the player's attention in the original. But, since most fights in Deadfire do not reward or punish the player for paying attention and actually using tactics, I'm failing to see how most combats are actually interesting in Deadfire?

 

 

POE2 combat seems to require more micro something I really enjoy. POE1 really did not.

I'm very fond of the POE2 combat and rest system. For me, going back to town to buy some wood... was an unnecessary feature of the 1st game.

 

Playing Veteran mode with 5 man party- Spent about 2&1/2 intense hours on one boss fight where I used practically everything I could throw at to defeat so I cannot say that there aren't challenging fights.

 

Empower, I do like this a lot, and creates some very powerful and interesting combinations...  but this really could do with some tuning down or I may restrict how often I use this in future playthroughs, it's too strong in its current state IMO. There are too many examples I could give.

 

POE2 there is no lack of great items/great spells/enchants at your disposal already that I'm not entirely sure why they added it. I'm not complaining though as I think it's a nice feature, especially for solo runs.

 

DLCs aren't released yet (which i'm sure will remedy this) and I haven't finished the entire game so perhaps premature to say - Would like to see some more monstrous, titanic, epic high level bosses that make you tremble on sight!! More dragons and sea monsters and stuff!!

I want to thank everyone for adding some really insightful comments on this thread. I'd especially call out the long Marcus post on page 7 as worth the time it took to read.

 

I do think the roots of a strategic layer exist in Deadfire that could, if tweaked, bring back some of the challenge that the original had. So I wanted to throw out some suggestions. Some of these might only be applicable on the higher difficulty settings. These are just some thoughts after continuing on in Deadfire but also after taking up a session of the original game recently.

 

1. Encounters and enemy AI really needs to focus on scoring knockdowns. If this happened at a pretty frequent rate, it would make the wounds system superior to the original's health system. An across the board damage increase or a nerfing of healing options could help here.

 

2. Food needs a redesign. Food should be more expensive but also more limited in curing injuries. Perhaps the solution is to have only recipe foods cure injuries. And you can't rest unless you feed everyone at least something. Players might be extra loathe to squander certain bonuses from the food to cure just one injury in the party, for example.

 

3. Ship crew wages should be greatly increased and should be charged more often. This will help create a tension between resting alot to cure injuries and wanting to wrap up a dungeon or island crawl ASAP.  Right now this is a nominal, nearly meaningless fee.

 

4. The high seas should be more dangerous. There would have to be a certain grace period after the first island before this kicks in. But something needs to be there to motivate the player to spend money on their ship and crew so that changes in 2 and 3 have more bite. These above changes would really change the dynamic of setting out from Neketaka in a cool, immersive way, imo. Player would have to plan ahead for their dangerous voyages and would regularly return to the game world's hub as a place of refuge to restock for the next adventure.

 

5. Empowers need a tweak. I'm not smart enough to give specific advice here. But something should happen that motivates players to use empowers more frequently. Perhaps give them more diverse uses. But as they are essentially Deadfire's "per rest" ability, the game will benefit greatly if players are using them more frequently and thus treating them the way they did high-level "per rest" spells and abilities in the original. Right now I'm only using these as emergency party wipe avoidance. It's possible this last point becomes moot if encounters are redesigned to be more dangerous in general.

 

I'll reiterate, some of these suggestions might only work for players on the higher difficulties.