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

[rusty_shackleford]

Come on, this list of balancing changes for 1.1.0.0035 (https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/101944-patch-notes-for-1100035/) makes one painfully fat and real strawman:

It's a strawman because it's not an equal comparison you dunce.
What does that have to do with what I originally said? "It's better to have items that completely make the game trivial than have a developer balance the game lol"?
Do you guys even enjoy RPGs beyond reading the text?

 

[Sabotin]

They looked at it from too close and failed to see the bigger picture. Hard CC can be very annoying but even killing someone in a 5man party is just a 20% reduction in ability. I feel #2 is much better in this regard with the buff/debuff per stat system, though I'd wish it was simpler and more intuitive, with the other bonuses decoupled and being just plain additive (lvl3 buff protects you from 3x lv1 debuff and is then gone). I'd also wish for a more restrictive system with less choices but that's a more personal thing.

 

[Daidre]

What does that have to do with what I originally said? "It's better to have items that completely make the game trivial than have a developer balance the game lol"?

And I answered that game with an often well hidden items that allow you to break pretty small subset of encounters is endlessly more fun than a game that suffered several attempts to balance all outstanding items to the point of vendor trash.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What does that have to do with what I originally said? "It's better to have items that completely make the game trivial than have a developer balance the game lol"?

And I answered that game with an often well hidden items that allow you to break pretty small subset of encounters is endlessly more fun than a game that suffered several attempts to balance all outstanding items to the point of vendor trash.

How is it well hidden when it's sold by one of the first NPCs you encounter in the game?
I know you're going to reply with the lie that it was CE only, Deidre was part of patch 26498.

 

[Daidre]

No I am going to replay that wasting tons of gold to buy a useless for anything else due to STR penalty shield against pretty rare enemies that has much cheaper strategies to defeat is far from stellar example also.

Without SCS rebalance most of beholders could be easily destroyed by couple of skeletons from the Animate Dead spell.

PS getting ToB was a problem in 2001 in my backwater, and getting patch to it was almost unreal.

 

[Shadenuat]

What does that have to do with what I originally said? "It's better to have items that completely make the game trivial than have a developer balance the game lol"?

And I answered that game with an often well hidden items that allow you to break pretty small subset of encounters is endlessly more fun than a game that suffered several attempts to balance all outstanding items to the point of vendor trash.

How is it well hidden when it's sold by one of the first NPCs you encounter in the game?
I know you're going to reply with the lie that it was CE only, Deidre was part of patch 26498.

I'm ok at one item being overpowered over whole itemization in game being underwhelming.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What does that have to do with what I originally said? "It's better to have items that completely make the game trivial than have a developer balance the game lol"?

And I answered that game with an often well hidden items that allow you to break pretty small subset of encounters is endlessly more fun than a game that suffered several attempts to balance all outstanding items to the point of vendor trash.

How is it well hidden when it's sold by one of the first NPCs you encounter in the game?
I know you're going to reply with the lie that it was CE only, Deidre was part of patch 26498.

I'm ok at one item being overpowered over whole itemization in game being underwhelming.

Are you really going to imply that d20-based games have better itemization than PoE 1 & 2?
Most items in d20-based games are "+2 shortsword"

 

[Shadenuat]

I thought they were all like overpowered and completely nulified enemies? Pick 1.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I thought they were all like overpowered and completely nulified enemies? Pick 1.

ESL in action.
Find me one post where I said this, I asked if it's good design to have items that completely counter enemies.

 

[Shadenuat]

Depending on the context, it's fine. Helmet of Charm protection protects 1 character but only from Charm - nymphs still have poison arrows, and you still have 5 more party members. Shield of Balduran would be fine if Beholder AI could switch targets intelligently like it does in SCS. So with bad AI it's bad item, but with good AI not so much. Design like this does not exist in vacuum.

As for strawmans, picking the most egregious example from ~20 yo game from a content which today would be considered p2w DLC + "d20 games are just +2 swords"... that's all equal comparisons in your mind?

Like come on, if you want to shit on BG itemization be a man and make a thread about it, all that masquerade is tiresome.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

picking the most egregious example

but I wasn't even talking about the cloak of mirroring

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, it's hardly unfair to use Balduran as an example. Mirroring, Wave, Crom...

I think in BG2 specifically having hard-counter items worked in a game that's all about a gazillion hard-counters harding each other up.

 

[Agesilaus]

PoE 2 is at minimum a thousand times better than Pathfinder, which is a total dogshit game. Not Planescape levels of dogshit, but certainly dogshit enough that I can't be bothered playing past an hour or so.

I can see you are a developer. Please let me know the name of your game, so I can NEVER buy it.

I am the blobber developer, I developed all the blobber games. I dare you to never buy a blobber ever again, and to give all blobbers shit reviews because they're a terrible form of RPG that was never actually enjoyable (except M&M Clouds/Darkside of Xeen, I didn't develop that so don't fuck with it).

Also, keep in mind that the gold box games and Mines of Titan are not counted as blobbers here because the combat switches view and style. Don't fuck with them, I didn't develop them.

 

[Shadenuat]

Mirroring, Wave, Crom...

I don't disagree with your point on hard counters, but these are endgame items. You're not really afraid of fireballs by the time you get Mirroring, but you are thrown into place with high phys damage, dreadknights, beholders and illithid. How many clay golems are you going to meet in last chapters compared to iron or adamantine ones?
If not for ToB stuff like Wave wouldn't be nearly as useful.

Balduran... I can only wonder if the truth is that they added this item because players found Beholders too hard. Did anyone ever asked for a reason for that trader from Bioware?

You know, every time this dialogue repeats, I wonder - why does it repeat, and why is it stuff from other games just doesn't come up as often as BG2 itemization? You probably know my answer to this, but whatever.

 

[Roguey]

BG 2 has brutal permanent debuffs like level draining and petrification and permadeath for party members.

When Deadfire designers were almost religiously afraid to inconvenience player with any impactful debuff, requirement for protection spell from specific spellbook or even simple encounter-to-encounter HP-pool managing and healing.

This is because the go-to response to these things is to reload.

 

[Shadenuat]

Go-to response for missing important 95% thc shot is also reload; go-to response to change outcome you don't like due to some C&C is to reload. Might as well turn all games deterministic and remove any pressure from players whatsoever.

 

[jf8350143]

BG 2 has brutal permanent debuffs like level draining and petrification and permadeath for party members.

When Deadfire designers were almost religiously afraid to inconvenience player with any impactful debuff, requirement for protection spell from specific spellbook or even simple encounter-to-encounter HP-pool managing and healing.

This is because the go-to response to these things is to reload.

permadeath always feels like something pointless unless paired with iron man mode.

 

[Roguey]

Go-to response for missing important 95% thc shot is also reload

If it's your opening shot? Sure. If it's one attack among many, most people aren't going to bother.

go-to response to change outcome you don't like due to some C&C is to reload.

Sawyer has explicitly stated he doesn't see this as a problem. It's what reloading is for.

permadeath always feels like something pointless unless paired with iron man mode.

It encourages you to play better instead of scraping by with mediocre tactics. I think Josh was being excessively reload-averse here.

 

[Shadenuat]

It also can make magic feel awesome and put fear into the player when they know that slow moving emerald orbs main villain throws around like candy do indeed turn things they touch into little particles of silver dust.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

BG 2 has brutal permanent debuffs like level draining and petrification and permadeath for party members.

When Deadfire designers were almost religiously afraid to inconvenience player with any impactful debuff, requirement for protection spell from specific spellbook or even simple encounter-to-encounter HP-pool managing and healing.

This is because the go-to response to these things is to reload.

permadeath always feels like something pointless unless paired with iron man mode.

Term you're looking for is "consequence persistence"

 

[Yosharian]

For me the brutality of BG2's encounters are part of what makes the game satisfying to beat. For example, when I first played BG2 I was a complete newb to D&D, had no idea what I was doing. Umber Hulks' Confusion ability wrecked my party. I had no idea how to penetrate the maze of spell defenses that boss spellcasters used. Level drains seemed like the worst thing ever.

Then I slowly learned how use Chaotic Commands, Death Ward, and other protective spells. How to use Breach to defeat Stoneskin. And so on.

Learning these things was satisfying. I now knew how to 'own' BG2. But this satisfaction can only arise when brutal mechanics exist.

Also, having brutal mechanics like permanent level drain makes the game feel more hardcore, more like an actual PnP game, as opposed to a 'computer game' where nothing is really of consequence.

 

[Tigranes]

BG2 wasn't brutal in the sense that it was super difficult. Rather, yes, there was a fair bit of difficulty for the non-metagaming D&D / CRPG veteran, but it was also important that BG2 made the consequences of your and enemy actions very clear visually and mechanically. A BG1 player learnt very quickly how Sleep is literally the difference between taking out 2 gibberlings and 20. A player learns what an Umber hulk does in 2 seconds and it is impossible to ignore what they do.

In fact - and we've all forgotten this due to our years of familiarity - BG2 can still become opaque to a new player in terms of how to effectively counter these 'brutal' mechanisms; in a BG2 mage battle it can be hard to keep track of which of my or enemy's 8 protections are nullifying which attack (not for us, because we remember what a Globe of Invul looks like and that the projectile there was an Acid Arrow and we know globe covers up to 5th level spells and how it interacts with AOEs etc etc etc). But the baseline was there - and it's something that is subpar not only in POE1/2 as Codex has pointed out a million times, but also in many other RPGs across the board.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

when some robe wearing sissy talks about "mage chess" and other dumb magic shit

Spoiler

 

[Yosharian]

BG2 wasn't brutal in the sense that it was super difficult. Rather, yes, there was a fair bit of difficulty for the non-metagaming D&D / CRPG veteran, but it was also important that BG2 made the consequences of your and enemy actions very clear visually and mechanically. A BG1 player learnt very quickly how Sleep is literally the difference between taking out 2 gibberlings and 20. A player learns what an Umber hulk does in 2 seconds and it is impossible to ignore what they do.

In fact - and we've all forgotten this due to our years of familiarity - BG2 can still become opaque to a new player in terms of how to effectively counter these 'brutal' mechanisms; in a BG2 mage battle it can be hard to keep track of which of my or enemy's 8 protections are nullifying which attack (not for us, because we remember what a Globe of Invul looks like and that the projectile there was an Acid Arrow and we know globe covers up to 5th level spells and how it interacts with AOEs etc etc etc). But the baseline was there - and it's something that is subpar not only in POE1/2 as Codex has pointed out a million times, but also in many other RPGs across the board.

A single Umber Hulk can confuse your entire party quite easily, and if you don't know how which spell protects you against this status effect (or how to draw out the spell so that only one person gets hit by it, for example), you basically lose that encounter (die).

BG2 is brutal.

Pillars/Deadfire is a fucking walk in a flower garden by comparison.

 

[Yosharian]

when some robe wearing sissy talks about "mage chess" and other dumb magic shit

Spoiler

Ah Inquisitor, the most broken kit in the game

I abused the shit out of that Dispel Magic, heh