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

[Desiderius]

I like Serafen and typically have him around just for bantz, but his passive is just awful design. In Wrath a passive like this would routinely lead to full party wipe, Deadfire gets away with it because it's so much easier even on POTD.

Why do the same people who brag about games being faceroll also whine the most about one little potential curveball?

Free yourself from one-weird-trickism.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Bro game isn't too easy you just need to play it badly and it becomes hard bro, like seriously bro just stop casting fireballs if they make things too easy haha bro wtf.

 

[Haplo]

PoTD is easier than Wrath core difficulty? I find that hard to believe.

I'd say its about Wrath Hard difficulty.

Well, except the superbosses, they are generally harder and require much more preparation then Wrath Unfair.

 

[Ontopoly]

PoTD is easier than Wrath core difficulty? I find that hard to believe.

Pillars 2 is a pretty easy game with regular average builds. i would agree with him that it is about core/daring. I would say Pillars 1 POTD is akin to Wrath's hard. Wrath is focused a lot more on good builds to beat encounters than Pillars though.

 

[Desiderius]

Bro game isn't too easy you just need to play it badly and it becomes hard bro, like seriously bro just stop casting fireballs if they make things too easy haha bro wtf.

If they do then yeah don’t do that. Who wants to play a trivial game? They’re good for some fights not as much for others. I like strategies that give me options for all the fights without the magic reload.

I’m not much for nuking in general so not sure. Haplo can the game be facerolled now by nuking it? Tehanu’s nukes are good but not *that* good.

 

[Desiderius]

Settled on Trickster Rogue + Shieldbearer Pal MC with Magran Shieldbashing. Pure Rogue just blows through Guile too fast and don’t want to end up auto-attacking even with the damage bonuses. Mechanics + Stealth sets up well for fights but gives less alternative action econ once in combat.

Pal and Rogue both have Full Attack abilities with bonus Accuracy built in and Mirror Image + Shield should be able to trigger Riposte full attacks. Shieldbearer nice with Persistent Distraction. Really like Escape to help position Paladin better and pick up needed Engagements. Going with Club for Will debuff modal since there’s a good one available early.

Fighter has too many Primary Attack abilities for two-weapon and Eder’s stats aren’t great for Rogue. He also starts out with subpar Hobbling Attack instead of Escape. Explosives skill doesn’t care about stats and gives him some more staying power/AoE as pure Fighter. May try him on the Morning Star this time with Sword and Board backup as needed.

Twin tanks frees up Xoti to move around setting up her AoEs and Blessed Harvests, and she can use Anguish to push stuff into tank Engagement range when not casting.

Going to try to open fights with Tanglefoot from Stealth from Tehanu boosted by the Dark Cupboard QStaff. QStaff modal boosts his Deflection by twenty and he just casts and Invokes anyway. Can Spirit Shift if he ever runs out. Trying to make use of his free spells (he starts with Tanglefoot) frees up picks for passives and Chants.

MC Wood Elf has Dex Resistance so would be immune to the Hobble.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I like Serafen and typically have him around just for bantz, but his passive is just awful design. In Wrath a passive like this would routinely lead to full party wipe, Deadfire gets away with it because it's so much easier even on POTD.

Why do the same people who brag about games being faceroll also whine the most about one little potential curveball?

Free yourself from one-weird-trickism.

Bro game isn't too easy you just need to play it badly and it becomes hard bro, like seriously bro just stop casting fireballs if they make things too easy haha bro wtf.

I agree with both.

My way to reconcile things is to try to take it slow when I play, and imagine in my head, as if I'm playing with plastic D&D figurines, what would the characters choose, sometimes even in combat. What some people call "roleplaying", and what the target audience of these games calls just "playing". You kind of have to be both the player and the arbiter. When I'm in the mood to do it, it's the most satisfying way to play.

 

[Haplo]

Bro game isn't too easy you just need to play it badly and it becomes hard bro, like seriously bro just stop casting fireballs if they make things too easy haha bro wtf.

If they do then yeah don’t do that. Who wants to play a trivial game? They’re good for some fights not as much for others. I like strategies that give me options for all the fights without the magic reload.

I’m not much for nuking in general so not sure. Haplo can the game be facerolled now by nuking it? Tehanu’s nukes are good but not *that* good.

I would not say its possible on PotD with regular builds.

My glass cannon Bloodmage / Assassin in Turn Based mode managed to nuke his way trough the game, but its quite a special case - and much not nearly as efficient and infinitely more risky in real time.
Plus I wouldn't call the amount of setup and preparation I was using a "faceroll".

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

PoTD is easier than which Wrath difficulty?

Isn't POTD in Deadfire basically "Bloated HP: the Official Game".
At some point I don't even care about "making the game more challenging" if the added difficulty has to come from a bullshit design choice.

 

[Yosharian]

Adding extra hp isn't necessarily a bad thing if it forces you to engage with mechanics that you can normally ignore

For example if you usually blow up every enemy before they even get a chance to do anything, adding extra hp can actually introduce a lot of meaningful challenge

The issue is when extra hp just makes the fight go longer and nothing else

This is also why mass copy paste encounters aren't interesting, you're not changing the way the game is played you're just making it more tedious

 

[Desiderius]

People who grew up on Diablo 2 calling anything tedious are just saying "I've got a job, wife, and three kids now so don't have time to figure out why my memebuild I got online is making me reload so much."

Which is fine, but it screws up the process of making games for the kids who do.

 

[Sweeper]

"I've got a job

This alone is enough to kill like 95% of my motivation to play vidya.

wife, and three kids

I don't even understand how motherfuckers who have a family find the time (and motivation) to goom.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Adding extra hp isn't necessarily a bad thing

It really is, in the overwhelming majority of cases.

For example if you usually blow up every enemy before they even get a chance to do anything

If that happens, chances are you have a lot of rescaling to do across the board, on several aspects of the game.

 

[Desiderius]

Rocket tag is not the only valid game mode (and not a particularly interesting one).

MMO Raidors don’t play rocket tag, more like the opposite.

 

[Yosharian]

Adding extra hp isn't necessarily a bad thing

It really is, in the overwhelming majority of cases.

For example if you usually blow up every enemy before they even get a chance to do anything

If that happens, chances are you have a lot of rescaling to do across the board, on several aspects of the game.

Well, the point I'm making is that it isn't a bad thing in some cases. If you're going to argue that the number of cases are small, that's fine, I mean we're arguing on the finer points there.

I'll give you a solid example, in Kingmaker at the end of the Varnhold Vanishing questline you fight a caster boss who has paper HP. I think every time I have ever fought this guy I have destroyed him in one round. Maybe he gets one spell off.

Just by giving this guy a ton more HP, you'd actually have to engage with his mechanics, i.e. the spells he might fire off. That would make for a much more interesting encounter.

Another example would be Mephisto in Wrath, by the time I faced this guy I was level 19 or 20 I think and again he didn't last more than one round once I got my MC into melee range.

It's just sad when you have an enemy that is capable of interesting gameplay but because he's made of paper he just gets blown up in 1-2 rounds and doesn't get to do anything.

The number of times I see Raphael get one-rounded in BG3 by a range of builds, some highly optimised, some not that optimised, it's just really boring.

Of course there are other ways to solve these issues, for example in BG2 a lot of bosses are given contingency spells to enable them to get their defenses up quickly at the start of the fight, and this makes things much more challenging without having to simply inflate HP. But apparently RPG developers are hard to teach these lessons to

 

[Desiderius]

Did some more Arcane Archer/Wizard testing. Neither Summoned Weapons nor Wizard spells benefit from the Arcane Archer accuracy bonus. Summoned weapons take the -5 malus. Rays do get Marked for the Hunt and Stalker’s Link but whatever, not a great benefit other than using Wiz self-buffs to make auto-attax better when not Imbuing.

Straight-up AA gets insane Accuracy on Imbued attacks (and Empower upgrades everything on Minuleta’s Missiles) since they get Arcana to Accuracy (double with Spearcaster - it does stack) along with Marked, Link, etc. 133 unbuffed at level 12 in test (and that was Wiz multi, single-class would be higher).

Imbued Fireball with Driving Flight and Hand Mortars would be pretty nuts. Imbues are free picks (though of course they eat your Bond) but high Arcana means scrolls and there’s plenty to spend those picks on due to all the pet upgrades.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Deadfire can offer an okay challenge, but you'd generally need to at least mod xp and self-restrict from most gamey stuff, otherwise it's really easy to break progression.

Did some more Arcane Archer/Wizard testing. Neither Summoned Weapons nor Wizard spells benefit from the Arcane Archer accuracy bonus. Summoned weapons take the -5 malus. Rays do get Marked for the Hunt and Stalker’s Link but whatever, not a great benefit other than using Wiz self-buffs to make auto-attax better when not Imbuing.

Straight-up AA gets insane Accuracy on Imbued attacks (and Empower upgrades everything on Minuleta’s Missiles) since they get Arcana to Accuracy (double with Spearcaster - it does stack) along with Marked, Link, etc. 133 unbuffed at level 12 in test (and that was Wiz multi, single-class would be higher).

Imbued Fireball with Driving Flight and Hand Mortars would be pretty nuts. Imbues are free picks (though of course they eat your Bond) but high Arcana means scrolls and there’s plenty to spend those picks on due to all the pet upgrades.

So when you do it's an amazing build, when the rest of us do it, we're playing it wrong and trivializing the game.

Curious.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Deadfire can offer an okay challenge, but you'd generally need to at least mod xp and self-restrict from most gamey stuff, otherwise it's really easy to break progression.

I remember the vanilla game being exceptionally easy, to the point it wasn't that hard few hours into the game to have a party that was virtually unkillable at that point.
But I've also heard that the DLCs and updates put some effort into SOMEWHAT increasing the overall level of challenge.

 

[ferratilis]

Encounters were significantly changed between release and the current version. Engwithan Digsite used to be a cakewalk on release on PotD, now it's a lot more challenging.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah on release difficulty was a joke. I still remember loading up my original save to do DLCs and I discovered there were starter items equiped on most party members because I didn't even bother equiping better loot. It's much improved now, but still nowhere near wrath, aside from megabosses which are optional content.

 

[Haplo]

Encounters were significantly changed between release and the current version. Engwithan Digsite used to be a cakewalk on release on PotD, now it's a lot more challenging.

Enwightian Digsite PotD hard filters lots of players... its one of the toughest battles nowadays.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm not entirely in love with the fact one of, if not the hardest fight in the entire game is in the beginning, not gonna lie. Once you beat it, it feels like nothing else will compare.

 

[Desiderius]

Deadfire can offer an okay challenge, but you'd generally need to at least mod xp and self-restrict from most gamey stuff, otherwise it's really easy to break progression.

Did some more Arcane Archer/Wizard testing. Neither Summoned Weapons nor Wizard spells benefit from the Arcane Archer accuracy bonus. Summoned weapons take the -5 malus. Rays do get Marked for the Hunt and Stalker’s Link but whatever, not a great benefit other than using Wiz self-buffs to make auto-attax better when not Imbuing.

Straight-up AA gets insane Accuracy on Imbued attacks (and Empower upgrades everything on Minuleta’s Missiles) since they get Arcana to Accuracy (double with Spearcaster - it does stack) along with Marked, Link, etc. 133 unbuffed at level 12 in test (and that was Wiz multi, single-class would be higher).

Imbued Fireball with Driving Flight and Hand Mortars would be pretty nuts. Imbues are free picks (though of course they eat your Bond) but high Arcana means scrolls and there’s plenty to spend those picks on due to all the pet upgrades.

So when you do it's an amazing build, when the rest of us do it, we're playing it wrong and trivializing the game.

Curious.

Those infinite Fireballs would not be enemies-only! Probably would play similar to the Haplo solo Assassin Wiz where you could nuke from Stealth but Hand Mortars are pretty short range so you’d end up roasting yourself half the time.

Solo builds not a great fit for team play so… yeah don’t use them. Companions aren’t set up for that anyway so just choose an MC combo that isn’t either since you… don’t need to solo with a team.

RTwP in general is like herding cats when enemies are spread out as they often are so on AA I’d probably focus more on high reliability Alpha Strikes with Spearcaster. Imbues blow through Bond pretty fast and no easy way to recover it so non-alphas could be lackluster (unless carefully supplemented with strategic scrolls). I like the utility of reliable Binding Web to provide a couple rounds for buffing and pots and the like instead with upgrade to Pull on pure AA. I was wrong about it being a better caster in general.

Either way on to the Holy Slayer/Trapper and trying to get there with Tanglefoot on Tehanu. Killer Xoti is a nice one.

 

[Desiderius]

Encounters were significantly changed between release and the current version. Engwithan Digsite used to be a cakewalk on release on PotD, now it's a lot more challenging.

Enwightian Digsite PotD hard filters lots of players... its one of the toughest battles nowadays.

Can sneak into sublevel, and with a Rogue all the way to the Adra Pillar. Coming at Gorecci from the south lets you bypass that too.

 

[Desiderius]

I'm not entirely in love with the fact one of, if not the hardest fight in the entire game is in the beginning, not gonna lie. Once you beat it, it feels like nothing else will compare.

Old City can be pretty tough depending when you go there. Guess I’m old because PotD keeps me consistently on my toes.