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

[Daidre]

Inq is so good that SCS have a special component to nerf him into dust. Never installed it though)

 

[Elephantman]

People who say "mage battles" about BG2 instantly disqualify themselves from having brians. Shit never fucking existed.
You buffed up and chugged potions while bruteforcing through everything they got or killed them before they could even get it up. Shit was created by SCS.
And even there, casting the same 3 removal spells is oh so tactical!

 

[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.

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.

What a strange and pointless hill to impale your balls on. Of course Umber Hulks fuck you if you don't understand the mechanics, just like Lagufaeth do in 5 seconds. And on vanilla Normal / Core, you could spam your way through most IE games without really understanding the majority of the mechanics, just like Pillars. You can kill 90% of IWD critters with just Haste, and you could do something similar in vanilla BG2 spamming variants of Haste and Fireball.

The key difference is that D&D gave a significant subset of the playerbase background knowledge to comfortably enjoy IE games, which also had extremely good visual/UI feedback considering the 80 million things they had to represent. Pillars' failure was to go backwards on these 20 year old games with inferior feedback, and several major systems changes that contributed to more soupy messy interactions (e.g. POE1's grazes applying to status effects).

 

[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.

What a strange and pointless hill to impale your balls on. Of course Umber Hulks fuck you if you don't understand the mechanics, just like Lagufaeth do in 5 seconds. And on vanilla Normal / Core, you could spam your way through most IE games without really understanding the majority of the mechanics, just like Pillars. You can kill 90% of IWD critters with just Haste, and you could do something similar in vanilla BG2 spamming variants of Haste and Fireball.

The key difference is that D&D gave a significant subset of the playerbase background knowledge to comfortably enjoy IE games, which also had extremely good visual/UI feedback considering the 80 million things they had to represent. Pillars' failure was to go backwards on these 20 year old games with inferior feedback, and several major systems changes that contributed to more soupy messy interactions (e.g. POE1's grazes applying to status effects).

Lagufaeth just do damage. They dont confuse you. Confuse barely does anything at all in Deadfire.

 

[Shadenuat]

They paralyze but because of how PoE system works if you have sky high defenses you might never even notice it in RTwP.

 

[Tigranes]

I'm sorry, but that tells me you have zero understanding of what is actually happening in POE. Sure, that's partly because of POE's poor feedback (which I just pointed out), but you have no business comparing the two games' systems if you are that clueless.

Edit: OK, I'll reserve the possibility that maybe, for example, you played POE on Normal or something, and your defences were so overtuned you could just walk into Lagufaeth without realising they can paralyse you? If so, I'd be interested to know, because I only ever played on POTD. And that would at least identify a real problem with difficulty deflation. But paralysis, terrify, petrify, and other 'hard disabler' conditions are a real thing in Pillars.

 

[Riddler]

I'm sorry, but that tells me you have zero understanding of what is actually happening in POE. Sure, that's partly because of POE's poor feedback (which I just pointed out), but you have no business comparing the two games' systems if you are that clueless.

Edit: OK, I'll reserve the possibility that maybe, for example, you played POE on Normal or something, and your defences were so overtuned you could just walk into Lagufaeth without realising they can paralyse you? If so, I'd be interested to know, because I only ever played on POTD. And that would at least identify a real problem with difficulty deflation. But paralysis, terrify, petrify, and other 'hard disabler' conditions are a real thing in Pillars.

Honestly, I have zero understanding of what is happening in PoE but that didn't stop me from breezing through the games on PotD and hardly ever dying.

What is there to understand? Get big numbers and target the low numbers.

How does accuracy work? How does the armor types work? How does engagement work? Fucked if I know but this isn't something you need to know for any of the difficulty levels.

 

[Shadenuat]

Like all monsters people opinion on them would differ depending on level they meet them.

If you take your previous pre-Thaos party or something into DLC and hit around 110+ deflection you can indeed laugh off lagufaeth attacks. My Pallegina I think had something like 0.333 second paralyze on her or something like that. Don't forget Pierce Proof.

If you try White March on level ~8 or are masochist enough to dip in it on level 7 your party will die in 5 seconds to their high acc piercing attacks. Of course they're still respectable enemy on any difficulty but they do remind me a lot of Heart of Winter burial isle mobs, and less of BG2 mobs. Oh and on PoTD there are more of them which adds to "fun".
In BG2, with perfect knowledge and party composition, you can (at least I did) take on both dragons even at early game levels (like ~8 depending on class you play +-1-2 levels). In PoE I doubt ice dragon in WM would be in your reach unless you level up.
That's the difference between these 2 games. Well one of the important ones as I see it anyway.

 

[Yosharian]

I'm sorry, but that tells me you have zero understanding of what is actually happening in POE. Sure, that's partly because of POE's poor feedback (which I just pointed out), but you have no business comparing the two games' systems if you are that clueless.

Edit: OK, I'll reserve the possibility that maybe, for example, you played POE on Normal or something, and your defences were so overtuned you could just walk into Lagufaeth without realising they can paralyse you? If so, I'd be interested to know, because I only ever played on POTD. And that would at least identify a real problem with difficulty deflation. But paralysis, terrify, petrify, and other 'hard disabler' conditions are a real thing in Pillars.

Oh OK, I'd forgotten about paralyze. I do actually play on POTD, but whatever.

I take your point but in BG2 Confusion lasts for at least 5-6 rounds, which is at least 30 seconds of your character probably doing nothing helpful, and potentially attacking a friendly.

Lagufaeth paralyze doesn't last anywhere near that long, and it is possible to get stunlocked by them but it's nowhere near as bad as BG2's Confusion. Also, Confusion hits everyone in a fairly large radius, whereas Lagufaeth paralyze only hits 1 target.

The only thing that comes anywhere close to this kind of effect in Pillars/Deadfire are the ghosts who paralyze your party with their scream, and the charm/dominate effects of certain vampiric enemies, and even these aren't as brutal as the things that can affect you in BG2.

 

[Shadenuat]

whereas Lagufaeth paralyze only hits 1 target.

Yeah, and that person is usually Aloth.

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah, and that person is usually Aloth.

Hopefully.

 

[Lacrymas]

Everything happens much faster in PoE compared to the IE games, though, so there's really no need for debuffs to last as long as in those games.

 

[Tigranes]

I'm sorry, but that tells me you have zero understanding of what is actually happening in POE. Sure, that's partly because of POE's poor feedback (which I just pointed out), but you have no business comparing the two games' systems if you are that clueless.

Edit: OK, I'll reserve the possibility that maybe, for example, you played POE on Normal or something, and your defences were so overtuned you could just walk into Lagufaeth without realising they can paralyse you? If so, I'd be interested to know, because I only ever played on POTD. And that would at least identify a real problem with difficulty deflation. But paralysis, terrify, petrify, and other 'hard disabler' conditions are a real thing in Pillars.

Oh OK, I'd forgotten about paralyze. I do actually play on POTD, but whatever.

I take your point but in BG2 Confusion lasts for at least 5-6 rounds, which is at least 30 seconds of your character probably doing nothing helpful, and potentially attacking a friendly.

Lagufaeth paralyze doesn't last anywhere near that long, and it is possible to get stunlocked by them but it's nowhere near as bad as BG2's Confusion. Also, Confusion hits everyone in a fairly large radius, whereas Lagufaeth paralyze only hits 1 target.

The only thing that comes anywhere close to this kind of effect in Pillars/Deadfire are the ghosts who paralyze your party with their scream, and the charm/dominate effects of certain vampiric enemies, and even these aren't as brutal as the things that can affect you in BG2.

Lagufaeth paralyse in practice can disable entire parties in the first 3 seconds given they show up in packs with a gazillion blowdarts. And you yourself listed ghosts and other enemies - we can add the fabled Xaurip Skirmisher (whose paralysis is much harder to intercept on POTD than it is to take the BG1 assassins out of commission).

Listen, my point isn't that POE is Greeeeeat. My point is to identify the real problem/difference. BG2 is not a particularly punishing game, and POE has plenty of hard disablers if you think about it. So what gives? And my argument is that POE's combination of difficulty deflation (an industry problem), certain soupy mechanics like bad interactions between grazes and debuff tiers (a designer problem), and awful feedback (a multiple areas of development team problem) all combine to make POE's hard disables less noticeable & less significant.

I imagine that you agree with most of this. The one thing I really didn't understand is characterising vanilla BG2 as "brutal", but that's not really a huge deal either way.

 

[Shadenuat]

Everything happens much faster in PoE compared to the IE games, though, so there's really no need for debuffs to last as long as in those games.

Things "happen" faster, but combats actually are often way more prolongued than in IE especially on high difficulty and if you graze more than anything else.

 

[Roguey]

Post-hard-counter-patch PoE priests became the op must-have class because of prayer against fear/bewilderment/imprisonment/treachery. Deadfire has its various inspirations as counters to afflictions. What they don't have are pointless mechanics such as "if someone gets petrified you need to use a scroll to unpetrify them" or "if someone gets ability damage or level drained you need to use lesser restoration or restoration to restore them back."

 

[Lacrymas]

Things "happen" faster, but combats actually are often way more prolongued than in IE especially on high difficulty and if you graze more than anything else.

That's a different issue, however, i.e. how the defenses work and the fact that you have to stack Accuracy. I can't recall very long fights in PoE1 as long as you've taken care of the acc problem, but since stuff happens every microsecond, CCs that last as long as those in the IE games will be grotesquely overpowered just due to the sheer number of actions in the same span of time.

Post-hard-counter-patch PoE priests became the op must-have class because of prayer against fear/bewilderment/imprisonment/treachery. Deadfire has its various inspirations as counters to afflictions. What they don't have are pointless mechanics such as "if someone gets petrified you need to use a scroll to unpetrify them" or "if someone gets ability damage or level drained you need to use lesser restoration or restoration to restore them back."

That's a roleplaying feature that I mostly like in games, as long as it doesn't become obnoxious. I wouldn't say it does in the IE games. Especially since protection against petrifaction is so readily available.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I really cannot believe that we are still having these discussions.

It's nice to say this and that about a 20yo game that you know like the back of your own hand and of course BG2 is not some sort of ultimate hc rpg, but it obviously was punishing. It had a metric shitton of enemies that could, and would, fuck you up. You'd get your ass kicked, had to stop, think and re-adjust. There is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between BG2 and POE. I never finished POE, but on hard I attack-clicked through the fish like through pretty much everything else, afair the only exceptions were dragons and walking bombs that exploded for enough dmg to insta-ko everyone (ooh, such clever design). You cannot click-attack through BG2 on normal or even easy, it's just not possible.

Question: do you guys actually think it's good design to simply have items that completely nullify enemies?
oh man I'm fighting beholders this is gonna be tou— oh wait I bought a shield of balduran lol

I don't like them, but why should I care if they are not forced on me and there is plethora of other options. Oh man, beholder encounters are actually pretty interesting, too bad I have to buy that shield. Is autism really such a widespread problem among gamers?

I never use bloodlust and would advise most people to do the same, but why would I think that including a weapon that is easily and quickly obtainable and instantly makes a very good fighter out of anyone who can wield it makes Wiz8 a worse game? Crpgs were always about lots of options and freedom of choice. Make op guize that waltz through stuff. Make poor guize and try to make due with them. You know, have fun.

 

[chuft]

“Perseus totally cheesed the Medusa encounter. He went in with a reflecting shield. What kind of encounter is that?”

“The kind we are still reading about thousands of years after it was first told?”

CRPGs have always presented freedom of choice for difficulty. You can make a hundred saves and go back in time to whenever you want, you can use console commands and cheat codes, you can edit saved games, on top of adjusting the difficulty levels, you can use mods, reload whenever you want.

You can use console commands to kill anything; or, you can play iron man, use SCS etc if challenges are your thing. Just because some hardcore players can beat game encounters designed for everyone doesn’t mean a game is too easy. The real question is can you find (with reasonably small effort) a set of options that makes the game fun to play for you.

I think the IE games have pretty broad appeal because players at most skill levels can find a mode that makes the games really fun for them, because they are inherently fun games to play.

 

[Yosharian]

I think the IE games have pretty broad appeal because players at most skill levels can find a mode that makes the games really fun for them, because they are inherently fun games to play.

Right, and solving these encounters e.g. finding the right spell to counter the Confusion spell, is fun to me, and satisfying.

There is no spell that 'solves' Lagufaeth paralyze in the sense of stopping the paralyze from affecting your party. Whenever I encountered these enemies I either came back when I was higher level and simply brute forced it, or used pull tactics to abuse the encounter, etc. I never had the satisfaction of 'Aha, this spell stops paralyze, and now I can beat on these guys with impunity!'

 

[Roguey]

There is no spell that 'solves' Lagufaeth paralyze in the sense of stopping the paralyze from affecting your party. Whenever I encountered these enemies I either came back when I was higher level and simply brute forced it, or used pull tactics to abuse the encounter, etc. I never had the satisfaction of 'Aha, this spell stops paralyze, and now I can beat on these guys with impunity!'

Sawyer doesn't consider solving a puzzle tactical or strategic.

* Does the game allow you to develop and use tactics?
* Does the game allow you to develop and deploy a strategy?
* Does the game allow you to resolve conflicts in multiple ways?

If you answered "no" to all of the above, you're playing a "pure" adventure/puzzle game.

Perhaps you'd like Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, it's a RPG where every battle is a puzzle to be solved.

 

[Prime Junta]

There is no spell that 'solves' Lagufaeth paralyze in the sense of stopping the paralyze from affecting your party. Whenever I encountered these enemies I either came back when I was higher level and simply brute forced it, or used pull tactics to abuse the encounter, etc. I never had the satisfaction of 'Aha, this spell stops paralyze, and now I can beat on these guys with impunity!'

When this works, it's really awesome, when it doesn't, it's just dumb. It works really well in Baldur's Gate 2, and that's because the magic system is so incredibly rich and so incredibly chaotic, in a good way. You really need to delve into the spells to find ways of (ab)using them, and when you make those discoveries it gives you a massive kick. The system is also so broad and so rich that it's fairly unlikely you'll be completely SoL simply because there's so much of it out there.

In most games however the magic systems just aren't rich enough to support this. There's so little material to work with that the counters are really obvious. "Use this spell to counter paralysis, there, done." That's just completely derp.

In re Pillars specifically: IMO the spell system isn't nearly rich enough to support this kind of gameplay. They did introduce hard counters in P1, and all it did was make the priest horribly OP and trivialise some formerly genuinely challenging encounters. Before you had a hard counter to fampyr charm, beating undead Raedric was a genuine challenge -- I first did it by giving Itumaak the "Loyal" perk, then using buffs to raise my defences against charms, then playing tactically. That was a lot more satisfying than just having Durance tag along and spam the right Prayer.

So I kinda agree with you, except that I think there's more to it. You really would need a massively richer magic system than any game since the IEs have to properly pull this off. If you don't, IMO games are better without them -- or, at least, with severely restricting them, e.g. to rare magic items you can use to give just one character in your party the immunity.

 

[Rivmusique]

I think the IE games have pretty broad appeal because players at most skill levels can find a mode that makes the games really fun for them, because they are inherently fun games to play.

Right, and solving these encounters e.g. finding the right spell to counter the Confusion spell, is fun to me, and satisfying.

There is no spell that 'solves' Lagufaeth paralyze in the sense of stopping the paralyze from affecting your party. Whenever I encountered these enemies I either came back when I was higher level and simply brute forced it, or used pull tactics to abuse the encounter, etc. I never had the satisfaction of 'Aha, this spell stops paralyze, and now I can beat on these guys with impunity!'

https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Prayer_Against_Imprisonment

 

[Yosharian]

I was thinking of Deadfire, but ok

Another aspect is that Chaotic Commands lasts for 1min/level, whereas that spell only lasts 20 seconds

 

[Yosharian]

There is no spell that 'solves' Lagufaeth paralyze in the sense of stopping the paralyze from affecting your party. Whenever I encountered these enemies I either came back when I was higher level and simply brute forced it, or used pull tactics to abuse the encounter, etc. I never had the satisfaction of 'Aha, this spell stops paralyze, and now I can beat on these guys with impunity!'

Sawyer doesn't consider solving a puzzle tactical or strategic.

* Does the game allow you to develop and use tactics?
* Does the game allow you to develop and deploy a strategy?
* Does the game allow you to resolve conflicts in multiple ways?

If you answered "no" to all of the above, you're playing a "pure" adventure/puzzle game.

Perhaps you'd like Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, it's a RPG where every battle is a puzzle to be solved.

And do Pillars/Deadfire have tactical/strategic combat? I don't think so. I find Deadfire's combat in particular terribly boring and mindless.

 

[Prime Junta]

Another aspect is that Chaotic Commands lasts for 1min/level, whereas that spell only lasts 20 seconds

Yeah Chaotic Commands is a bit of a "win" button against such situations. AD&D gets away with it because there are so many different things you have to counter and so many immunities you have to work your way around. Once again, Pillars just doesn't have the required complexity to make hard counters work; they just become rote, mindless busywork.

In all fairness, the same is true for BG2... eventually. Once you know what the counters are and what you need to beat immunities, they're just busywork. Of course you're gonna cast Negative Plane Protection when you're fighting vampires. Once again, the game works so well because it is so rich that learning all of them takes a lot of time and effort and is rewarding in its own right -- and in fact at least I've forgotten half of them whenever I return to the game after a few years' break.

But I am pretty confident that everyone except complete retards would hate Pillars (or hate it more if you already hate it) if it did in fact use hard counters and immunities as much as BG2 does, again simply because it's not as rich or complex.