Eternity Pillars of Eternity II Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

If they removed endurance they should have removed health regeneration as well.

 

Which stream is that? Obsidian->Twitch December 14th?

In IE games that only matters if you don't want to click the rest button out of principle, that's a minority, likely even here on the 'Dex.

Then you are back at the IE system, back to spamming cure light wounds for 20 sec or whatever. Should have just stuck with hp/end.

 

Well yeah, this is the first thing Prime Junta noted when he gave his first impressions on the beta.
Replacement of health/endurance by traditional hp meter is sheer decline. Especially since the game is still designed around encounters which are mildly demanding in terms of resources.
Fucks up the whole strategic dimension of managing health over the long course of dungeoning. Which was not even that hard to begin with in the first game, at least it was there :/

Or have it work around thresholds (33%, 66%, 100% or 25-50-75-100%). I think there are wounds that can impact this ? Someone who played through the beta will have the answer here.

This is my official 1000th post on the codex, unsurprisingly on a poe thread, and unsurprisingly a shitpost.
Cheers everyone!

 

:grumble per-rest spells grumble:

At the very least, they should've made it possible for non-wizard casters to choose which spells to memorize on rest. That would have made resting at least a little meaningful.

 

END/HP would be my choice, but when you have just HP and it regenerates why even have rest in the first place.

 

Looks like JES's Telemetry decided that nobody gives a fuck about strategy.

I agree, the only thing left for rest is Empower?

JES would probably liked to have removed rest completely, but "spirit of DnD" and all that.

Rest spammers ruined resting for everyone.

 

That plus wounds and bonuses. If you never get knocked out and never use Empowers, the only reason you'd want to rest is when you find extra-special food that gives you even higher bonuses.

Resting in P2 is vestigial. The changes that made it so are the main reason I'm feeling kind of meh about the whole thing, despite the many areas that look promising (scope, setting, faction mechanics, party dynamics, arrrr, etc.)

 

Any decison that will reward better understanding of the combat system is commendable. The endurance bar is the type of mainstream game mechanic designed to handhold lazy players that want to play on auto-pilot. Indeed, this is the first positive thing I read about this game.

 

Actually, the change was there from the beginning iirc.

 

Is that really bad though? Is resting some kind of nice gameplay feature? I can't easily think of a game where resting was well implemented to be actually anything else apart from a "mass-heal and buff".

So either you try to make it a bit more involved and meaningful (like Pathfinder:Kingmaker will try to, it seems) or you try to make it fast and forgettable as PoE2 tries to, apparently. The half-assed "see a splash screen for 5 seconds while people heal" kind of resting doesn't provide anything meaningful to me at least.

*Also the Expeditions games have a cool resting feature with all the shifts and hunting etc. Darkest Dungeon's resting was also kinda cool, with buffing depending on characters etc

 

There is ship stuff too which takes daily toll, guess it wouldn't matter but if rested/waited way too often, could negatively effect player's resources. Just guessing. Time is money in Deadfire

Tho this is a potential discouraging factor for resting.

 

I suspect that the rest mechanic will only be used in potd. Actually, I suspect the point of this change is to allow casuals who play on casual difficulty to completely ignore the rest mechanic.
Well, we'll see anyway.

 

This is the "stream", it's really an LP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kweyMWlKyY&index=7&list=PLCagUJdg-iWqxvk02t6pxF0a5GDuEbVQl

There are many ways to play the IE games, with regards to how often you rest. Depends on what's fun for you. My point is that in a system where your health resource is replenished after an encounter, certain low-difficulty encounters become meaningless ("trash mobs"), and the game would have been better off either without them, or with them rebalanced, in order to pose a challenge to a player who goes in with full health.

And item abilities, as far as I've seen. Or you mean that under "bonuses"?

No, "people" who decided rest-spamming as a play style should be a problem, ruined resting for everyone.

In a game that has "Story Mode", I don't know why should the baseline difficulty need to be dumbed down.

 

Um, yes?

For me, one of the core features of the IE experience -- which P1 did manage to reproduce -- is rationing my spells and managing my health as I push forward as far as I can before the next rest. Granted, Pillars is a bit on the generous side with rest resources -- the only time I was backtracking in it was when trying to push down the Endless Paths past the point where the content outleveled me -- but it was still there. And granted, most IE games handled resting itself clumsily. Even so, watering down the whole thing is like treating a pain in the knee with an amputation. It works, but I'd rather keep my leg TYVM.

 

Due to the way combat is resolved though, once you are out of spells (incl. "active abilities"), and are counting mostly on high Defenses and luck with RNG in order to progress, you are in a much tougher spot in PoE than you would be in an IE game. Sensuki's IWD LP is a good illustration of how you can squeeze your IE game party to the real limit before resting.

You can't really play in this way in PoE, and this is what I mean when I say PoE pushes you towards resting more sternly than the IE games.

Also, due to PoE's health/endurance mechanic, which I've said I consider as overengineered as anything in PoE, once you get down to an amount of health which is equal to the amount of endurance, every point of health lost in the next fight will limit the total to which you can restore your endurance - even within this same fight. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

 

I dunno man. I played BG recently and honestly, resting there was a joke. An unlimited magical button press that heals and restores statuses. The resource management you mention is your own decision.. In actuality, you could easily rest spam in IE games - not to mention that actually missing something you used is almost impossible due to the extreme abundance of potions, scrolls and wands..

I agree that P1 took a step forward but it was obviously not enough since people would actually travel 5 maps to rest and come back to continue on. lol.

As I said for me either you create an intricate resting system that will keep the player involved somehow and will provide something, or you can just as well skip the whole thing or at least make it insignificant. P2 went with the second route apparently..

 

No one makes you press it though, do they? Think of this as a "difficulty valve". If you want to roleplay and rest only when you consider it necessary, abstain from resting, and if you feel more like playing a videogame than RPG, rest away.

 

For the same reason "very easy" is no longer "very easy", but "Story Mode" - people are afraid of being told/don't want to admit to themselves that they are garbage.

That's not really something to be ashamed of (both the desire and state) in games played for leisure, but it started a race to the bottom for developers because of $$.

 

As I said, resting itself was poorly handled in the IE games, for the most part. BG1 is bad. BG2 is also bad but in a different way; there if you rest-spam, it'll make the scripted encounter system go haywire because it's wired to in-game time -- all of a sudden everybody will want you to do their pet quest, and all kinds of shit will be going down all at once.

IWD handled it better by only allowing resting in certain areas, forcing you to backtrack if you hadn't made it to the next one.

But even with those wrinkles, self-limiting resting made the game a lot more enjoyable, and self-limiting resting the same way in Pillars is the same kind of enjoyable.

 

Oh there's a more eloquent evidence of this. Easy and Hard respectively renamed "Chill" and "Veteran" or something

 

Strange that I see people making the point that in the IE games rest-spamming can be abused to restore memorized spells, but I hardly ever see people making the point that rest-spamming can be abused to make healing items and spells irrelevant outside of combat.

Maybe no one here has rest-spammed that intensively But it's a fact. Probably it's that kind of very stubborn rest-spammers that Josh was thinking about when he made the health/endurance mechanic. Only it didn't serve to make things more hardcore, as it was advertised, it actually provided rest-spammers with a convenience: You just got out of combat? Here, let me rest-spam for you and save you the button clicking!

 

To be clear, I'm all in for proper resource management but I'm just saying that if it's some half-baked afterthought we can just as well avoid it and focus on what is good.

 

Best way to play IE games is to go time attack against the real time counter on the lower left part of the screen.
Unnecessary to beat the game, sure, but damn enjoyable. Doesn't only affect rest-spamming but optimisation of travels as well, planning in a broad sense. Also, a habit one could have got from other games like M&M6 and their end-game score.

 

Meh. Seems like a weak argument to me.

I think your being a little hyperbolic on BG2's part. You trigger some NPC dialogue here and there. Whoopdie doo.

Generally the philosophy is: every player can decide to rest as little as much as they want depending on their comfort / skill level. Whether that means backtracking or random encounters or whatever.
Of all the examples I think PoE 2 has the lamest implementation because now we don't really even have that choice.

Everyone has a different line for what they consider "half-baked"
I liked ammunition / health potion management for a long dungeon treck. Felt pretty DnD to me.

 

My point, which still stands btw, is that with the current system we have literal trash mobs. With an afterthought as you call it, we would have had some incentive to approach even easy encounters carefully, because health would have been a more scarce resource.

The lack of choice is exactly what I mean. The game basically rest-spamming for you is worse than you restspamming "manually" because you wanted an easier time.