Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire + DLC Thread - now with turn-based combat!

[Seethe]

Port Maje is way overtuned. The game p. much has a reverse difficulty curve where it keeps getting easier but more busywork, except the megabosses I guess.

I just don't see why there needs to 7-8 level skeletons in the ruins with a skeleton mage that can oneshot your entire party with noxious burst in a place where you can arrive at level 3 and ideally level 4.

Oh man, you should never play Kingmaker, then

Look to the left, bandits in ragged clothes. Look to the right, more bandits in ragged clothes. One of these will one shot you, which way do you go? Repeat til the game ends.

 

[Grunker]

In 1.0 PotD wasn't working correctly, whether this was done on purpose or was a bug. Judging by LPs I've watched many people wouldn't have completed the game if it wasn't for the bug. All difficulty settings were serving the same numbers of enemies as Normal.

I've finished FS on PotD and my party is all lvl 20, but I want to try out SSS on PotD as well. However I am becoming convinced that the right difficulty for me would be Hard/Scale All/Only Upwards. PotD's extra enemies don't really require any change in tactics, and only add grind imo.

I don't get you man. You chastise me for criticizing your build but then say PotD is a "grind." I grant that hp scaling in Beast of Winter was grindy and boring, but lowering that difficulty would only make the DLC even more auto-attacky.

In the rest of the game - a lot of FS included except for some fights, which I thought were very satisfying - the game was fairly easy on PotD. This is not me posturing more of a "seems your build actually was the issue."

The only exception is megabosses which can be very, very tough and I think I can't even beat some of them on PotD (just to reinforce that I'm not posturing but rather genuinely confused you would find PotD the wrong difficulty seeing as you were ready to record fights to prove that your build wasn't a problem).

In any case, if your build is somewhat decent (as I said mine wasn't "optimized" by any standard) Hard/Scale All/Only Upwards should be pathetically easy.

 

[Grunker]

Also this:

Port Maje is way overtuned. The game p. much has a reverse difficulty curve where it keeps getting easier but more busywork, except the megabosses I guess.

Buuuuut:

I just don't see why there needs to 7-8 level skeletons in the ruins with a skeleton mage that can oneshot your entire party with noxious burst in a place where you can arrive at level 3 and ideally level 4.

I wish that difficulty stuck around during the whole game! Some of the most memorable combats I had were early game giant cave grubs and skeleton encounters. Those fights were fierce, interesting and required me to change my approach.

Dunno why that's a problem. The problem for me is that late and to some extend mid game is completely trivial.

Again except megabosses which are all really cool and some I haven't beat (yet).

 

[AwesomeButton]

I don't get you man. You chastise me for criticizing your build but then say PotD is a "grind."

I never chastised you and I never intended for the tone of my posts to give the impression of "chastising", in case it felt that way to you. In my view, I was explaining the reasoning which made me pick one or another ability.

Additionally, I posted my whole party, but we only ever discussed the player character, whereas I think it's important to take the player character in the context of the rest of the party. But that's a separate subject.

I grant that hp scaling in Beast of Winter was grindy and boring, but lowering that difficulty would only make the DLC even more auto-attacky.

Yes, I do not deny it would, but this is on account of the repetitive and predictable enemy tactics, not on account of enemy numbers or stats. My point is that filling the encounters with larger numbers of buffed enemies doesn't make the encounters more interesting.

Edit: Also, when I played BoW, I was playing on Hard, and this was exactly because I wasn't feeling like spending 10 minutes in constant pause and slowest speed, because I have to cope with 10-12-strong packs of enemies.

In the rest of the game - a lot of FS included except for some fights, which I thought were very satisfying - the game was fairly easy on PotD. This is not me posturing more of a "seems your build actually was the issue."

I most probably had a harder time because I began FS at lvl 18, but I had to look for every little advantage until I reached lvl 19 and eventually 20. At lvl 20 it really wasn't much of a problem and the final battle felt rather easy when compared to the initial encounters (with huge numbers of enemies) in the Collections or Archives areas.

 

[FreeKaner]

I can't wait to hear your feedback on the Old City or Sayuka, not to mention far-off side content like the Vampire Isle whatever its name was.

I already did old city, it wasn't hard at all, although I did it at level 8. The only fight that gave me a trouble there was that mad scientist guy whatever his name was, mostly because it took a lot of time. The boss was easy too after you kill the grub spawning pods at the corner of the room.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I don't know, for me Old City Overlook is always pretty tough. The previous two Old City areas tend to wear me down.

You are right about the grub spawning pods though. The giang grub still has quite a lot of HP. Did you do anything specific to lower its AR or boost your Penetration?

 

[FreeKaner]

I don't know, for me Old City Overlook is always pretty tough. The previous two Old City areas tend to wear me down.

You are right about the grub spawning pods though. The giang grub still has quite a lot of HP. Did you do anything specific to lower its AR or boost your Penetration?

Yes, I had teheku with shield cracks and my party at the time had high penetration relatively.

The most disappointing thing so far to me has been the lich at the poko kahara temple, I was expecting a tough fight but the poor thing just stood there and took it until he died:

I would say barbarians are underrated by the way, especially later in the game with spirit tornado and sufficient amount of passives.

 

[FreeKaner]

An interesting thing to me is tikiwara and poko kahara felt a lot like white march, and a bit different compared to rest of the (base) game. It's almost like as if they made tikiwara and poko kahara with the momentum of white march, there is a lot of depth and choice in those areas in a good way, a lot of genuine and naturally flowing conflicts of interest.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I agree, though I would compare them to the expansions. The base game has the rushed and by-the-numbers feel about its sidequests, with exception of places like Nemnok's island, Splintered reef, and Oathbinder's sanctum.

I miss in Deadfire the kind of quests that were in BG2 the big three out of city quests - Windspear Hills, Umar Hills, and Trademeet. Also, within the city - the Sphere and The Copper Coronet.

When Deadfire offers quests of this scope, they are expansions. I mean quests that span over multiple areas, have a self-contained story, varied enemy types, a puzzle or two.

We live in days of pussy developers.

 

[FreeKaner]

I wish that difficulty stuck around during the whole game! Some of the most memorable combats I had were early game giant cave grubs and skeleton encounters. Those fights were fierce, interesting and required me to change my approach.

Dunno why that's a problem. The problem for me is that late and to some extend mid game is completely trivial.

Again except megabosses which are all really cool and some I haven't beat (yet).

I think the problem is, the game throws you most excessive challenge when you have least tools to deal with it and doesn't properly scale the level of challenge as you get more tools. A character with 2 abilities or 3-4 spells is nowhere as capable of meeting a challenge as one with a fully working active-passive ability synergy, complimenting itemisation and full party combination etc.

In part it's the fault of how good the itemisation is I think, the enemies just don't scale up to your exponential power increase. Look at this item for example, it makes defeating vessel enemies trivial:

I agree, though I would compare them to the expansions. The base game has the rushed and by-the-numbers feel about its sidequests, with exception of places like Nemnok's island, Splintered reef, and Oathbinder's sanctum.

I miss in Deadfire the kind of quests that were in BG2 the big three out of city quests - Windspear Hills, Umar Hills, and Trademeet. Also, within the city - the Sphere and The Copper Coronet.

When Deadfire offers quests of this scope, they are expansions. I mean quests that span over multiple areas, have a self-contained story, varied enemy types, a puzzle or two.

We live in days of pussy developers.

They are not always expansions. The tikiwara and its extension poko kahara felt this way, so did whole of gullet with several plot strings being tied and solved together in or through there. The game is just extremely uneven. So much so it manages to at the same time both amaze you and disappoint you.

 

[FreeKaner]

I also haven't played any of the expansions yet except the start of beast of winter (which I liked a lot, Obsidian seems to excel at creating these remote snowy towns) because chronic rerolling.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Just to think that... mild spoilers about the Huana questline:

Spoiler

...in the basement of the Watershapers' guild the combat encounter and the dragon lair are in two neighboring rooms. Compare that to the Umar Hills or Windspear hills buildup to meeting a dragon.

 

[FreeKaner]

I liked how you meet the dragon in Ashen Maw, and in Beast of Winter. They could definitely make the whole "we entrapped this dragon here" feeling better in watershaper's guild though I agree.

 

[AwesomeButton]

BTW, your guy is stylish-looking, why not get him a better portrait?

I began replacing some of the ugliest obvious-rush-job or unfortunate-backer watercolor portraits with superior colored versions. It really adds to my immersion.

For example I gave Bekarna a portrait of an Ethiopian model Senait Gidey. I just found one perfectly matching picture before I found out who the model was, and then it was easy to find a second. Bekarna has two portraits for plot reasons.

 

[Tigranes]

I think the problem is, the game throws you most excessive challenge when you have least tools to deal with it and doesn't properly scale the level of challenge as you get more tools. A character with 2 abilities or 3-4 spells is nowhere as capable of meeting a challenge as one with a fully working active-passive ability synergy, complimenting itemisation and full party combination etc.

In part it's the fault of how good the itemisation is I think, the enemies just don't scale up to your exponential power increase. Look at this item for example, it makes defeating vessel enemies trivial:

This is probably the most nail-on-the-head when it comes to Deadfire. We have great itemisation, and we clearly have enough systems and tools in the game to create interesting challenges. The problem is that the former gives you scope for exponential power growth that the game cannot respond to.

One imagines balancing POTD so that you are required to do these powergaming synergies to keep pace with the challenge, but presumably that was considered way too difficult even for most grognards/fans. Given that POTD is already played by a tiny fraction of the playerbase, that might well be the case (though I'd still personally delight in it).

I actually really enjoyed the souped up fights at the ruins in 1.2 or whatever the patch was, because it felt a bit like the what do you call it compound in Underrail; a fairly early moment where you can really do a litmus test on whether the player understands the mechanics thoroughly and can game them. (Of course, in Underrail you get more time to define your build and gather tools before the big moment, and the challenge lasts a bit longer after that, before the inevitable trivialisation of difficulty.)

 

[AwesomeButton]

As my wife summarized it after having played IWD and BG2 - Deadfire is a casualized Infinity Engine game.

 

[Safav Hamon]

For as much shit as Josh gets about balance, Deadfire is one of the least balanced CRPGs.

 

[oldmanpaco]

So I'm giving this another go. I debated waiting for the PS4 release but then I would have to buy a PS4 to play it. Thought about giving Pathfinder a go but they are busy releasing micro-dlc to fleece the fanboys and I won't pay for those until they are 75% off next summer. So lets do this. I guess.

Any of you people use any mods to make things better? Are there any mods that make things better? Or do i just bend over and let Sawyer have his way with me?

 

[Safav Hamon]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1510650230&searchtext=

 

[AwesomeButton]

So I'm giving this another go. I debated waiting for the PS4 release but then I would have to buy a PS4 to play it. Thought about giving Pathfinder a go but they are busy releasing micro-dlc to fleece the fanboys and I won't pay for those until they are 75% off next summer. So lets do this. I guess.

Any of you people use any mods to make things better? Are there any mods that make things better? Or do i just bend over and let Sawyer have his way with me?

I've made a few tweaks which I use myself but haven't released them anywhere:

1. I've increased the walking movement speed and animation speed so it's just a little bit slower than the running speed. The result is that you can walk around with your characters and they use the walking animation which IMO looks better, and you don't have the vanilla downside that they walk slower. It's so easy to do, if anyone at Obsidian gave a fuck.
2. Replaced the sound of dying elephants which is heard during the logos when you start up the game with silence. This was annoying me to no end. Still trying to mod the combat music but no luck so far.
3. Replaced About 20 NPC watercolor portraits with better and colored versions, and replaced all the companions' watercolor portraits with smaller versions of their colored portraits. IMO watercolored portraits are sometimes good, but most of the time are very bad and lacking in detail and this impairs the whole game, especially combined with the high schooler level of writing. Also, Pallegina and Eder get their PoE portraits back.

I haven't been doing big rebalance changes, because I'm still waiting for Obsidian to stop tinkering with the game and releasing DLC. I hate how with "games as a service" nowadays modders have to do 10 times the work they used to have to do and I'm not touching anything until the game is complete.

I also want to do a big editing pass of much of the game's text and disable most of the voiced dialogues, but this will also have to wait.

 

[Efe]

i want #2.
what did you do? replace intro files?

 

[AwesomeButton]

i want #2.
what did you do? replace intro files?

Yes. Not the intro video files, but only the music ".wem" file. I'm also able to replace the main menu music, though none of the ambient music so far.

The actual logos are silent .bik video files I believe - have to check. The music is set up with such length that it covers the videos' length exactly. Everything connected to the music suggests sloppiness. Even most of the music tracks names are "xxxxx_test" where the x's are some number.

I would replace the intro videos as well, but I believe this would not speed up the game's boot-up, because it just needs some time to load the main menu. Even if you skip the intros by pressing the spacebar, you see the game is like either hardcoded to wait some time before it shows you the main menu, or it's loading stuff.

I'll send you the file in 6-7 hours.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think she meant that more in terms of the combat - UI feedback, complexity of the ruleset, and need for the player to adapt his tactics to different enemy types. In all of these PoE is more forgiving and easier to get into than the IE games.

When you can play through Deadfire on PotD without ever needing to care what is Armor Rating or Penetration, that's "casualised"

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

still personally delight in it).

I actually really enjoyed the souped up fights at the ruins in 1.2 or whatever the patch was, because it felt a bit like the what do you call it compound in Underrail; a fairly early moment where you can really do a litmus test on whether the player understands the mechanics thoroughly and can game them. (Of course, in Underrail you get more time to define your build and gather tools before the big moment, and the challenge lasts a bit longer after that, before the inevitable trivialisation of difficulty.)

Ruins was a fun challenge on the first run. After that it quickly becomes tedious especially if you're a serial restarter.

 

[Orma]

I think she meant that more in terms of UI feedback"

She could always play in, you know, the expert mode. The way the game is meant to be played tbh.

But maybe she didn't even know it existed in the first place, cuz her husband is a scrublord