I recently fired up Deadfire again properly, first time in a couple of years. Tried it in turn-based mode. Guess what? It's much better than I remembered. I'm pretty sure Josh's balance stick has done it a power of good. I've just been wandering around the Deadfire murdering things and pretty much ignoring the story and it's a quite a lot of fun. I still have some beefs with it, but overall it's really not bad. I also recently replayed Pillars 1 and man is the combat in it a giant opaque clusterfuck by comparison. Josh also seems to have done something to the relationship flags, the party isn't trying to jump on my cock the minute I meet them anymore. I've been playing with more sidekicks in the party though, which helps; they're also much better written than the companions.
Likes:
- Boy is it pretty.
- I love the sense of discovery. There's a ton of hidden stuff on the map just to stumble upon.
- The sidekicks are cool. I like Vatnir and Ydwin especially. Mirke isn't half bad either although she gives me PTSD from real life.
- Some pretty cool maps and encounters. The Hanging Sepulchers is a terrific dungeon.
Beefs (apart from the usual ones about story, writing, silly ship combat, and bugs):
- Some bosses have obscene HP, making the fights much grindier than they ought to be. Once you've figured out how to beat their debuffs and get through their defences there's not much of a challenge there, but it still takes a long, long time to whittle some of them down. Neriscyrlas and the jumbo megaboss black pudding, here's looking at you.
- On PotD at least, armour levels are so high that Pen becomes too important. Low-Pen weapons just aren't very useful until the very late game when you get the really good Pen buffs / Armour debuffs, and by that time you're already committed.
- Priests are a bit too necessary. Fights are radically easier with Crowns for the Faithful, Triumph of the Crusaders, Dire Blessing etc. than without them. The high-level Symbol spells are extremely effective also, as is Dismissal when applicable. Both Xoti and Vatnir are racking up incredibly high personal damage numbers too.
Other notes:
- Troubadours are LOLpowerful. With the rapid chanting perk you get a wide-area Paralyze every other round (or something even more powerful a bit more rarely), or a really strong Summon continuously up, plus one continuous buff that's situationally super good; at high levels these get really strong as well. And the tornado Invocation is hugely strong; my troubadour is a wimp with 8 STR and he still does hundreds of HP of damage with that.
- I'm no longer so bothered by the "everything per encounter" thing, largely because PotD is hard enough that you really need to use everything you have on many of the encounters.
- There's too much XP in the game. I'm not even close to finishing all content and I've been at max level for a quite a while now.
