Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Excidium II]

I guess when people solo this, do they cheese their way through the game or do they just outlevel things?

They just cheese. Also using summoned monsters still count as "solo".

 

[Hyperion]

By that time Hiravas has exhausted all his meaningful spells and finished the dragon with his crossbow (took him more than 15 minutes). Such win is obviously as cheesy as it gets but I keep repeating to myself that my party demonstrated superior spatial awareness.

The Dragon fights are designed to really test your brain so you can come up with that type of stuff. They buffed up the Adra Dragon in the expansions anyway, because people would spam Gaze of the Adragan traps on her and trivialize the shit out of the fight. I know I only killed her because of a lucky Sunlance proc from Steadfast at the 11th hour with my PC Paladin. If you took her down painlessly, you did good no matter what.

Either I suck at positioning (which is likely) or the game is still insanely random with its NPC behaviour.

I guess when people solo this, do they cheese their way through the game or do they just outlevel things?

Tons of cheese. They make sure that the random loot in The Black Hound has the +Disengagement Defense cloak and lots of hit and run tactics. Non-stop pausing, which is incredibly fucking boring, and lots and LOTS of consumable use. Non-Priest runs require you to craft and use lots of scrolls, which generally isn't worth the frustration of having a different class in your party.

And the enemy AI loves going after the guys with the lowest DR. It's backwards as fuck, but if you give your casters heavier armor than your preferred tanks, they'll actually get attacked less. Just get enough defenses for your tanks so they get mostly grazed and they should last a long time.

 

[mitochondritom]

You can still paralyse / petrify some of them I think. I don't think immunity is the best choice, but maybe make it a really low chance so that 1 % of the time you can slicken the Adra Dragon and beat it to death while it tries to get up. Just like in BG were just maybe the chromatic orb fires and stuns Firkrag. For comedy's sake, if anything.

And the enemy AI loves going after the guys with the lowest DR. It's backwards as fuck, but if you give your casters heavier armor than your preferred tanks, they'll actually get attacked less. Just get enough defenses for your tanks so they get mostly grazed and they should last a long time.

This is such a pain in the WM2 Temple with those asshole monks. Having an engagement system in place, then designing dickhead enemies who just ignore it all is really annoying. I had Sagani and my Wizard in basically clothing to take advantage of the low recovery rate and these monks were pretty fucking frustrating to fight. They also have a power to throw your party all over the shop. They actually made me want to play a monk character though, so they are good for something also they have exquisite loincloths which sell for thousands for some reason.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Non-stop pausing, which is incredibly fucking boring

I used to pause all the time in the IE games, where combat pacing was more even. I wish pillars' combat was slower, not so much because I would pause less but because I wouldn't have to monitor every character's recovery timer and be required to hit pause in a matter of half a second.

 

[Sensuki]

The round system in the IE games actually made combat very easy to follow, because virtually every action unless it was full-round had the same pause after it.

They came in saying "we don't need rounds", but that system actually works very well, if you think about it as just a unified recovery system.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The round system in the IE games actually made combat very easy to follow, because virtually every action unless it was full-round had the same pause after it.

They came in saying "we don't need rounds", but that system actually works very well, if you think about it as just a unified recovery system.

Yes, and I never tire to repeat that on the Obsidian forums. BTW, looking at Tyranny's footage, their combat pacing seems much superior, ironically due to the "simplified" combat system - I think they've removed afflictions that modify recovery times and maybe armor doesn't modify them either? I don't know I don't follow the dev diaries.

 

[CptMace]

Josh mentioned the slow mode was the actual pace they should have gone for and after some testing, he's completely right. Although it doesn't matter that much for POE1 because the enemies are so that the game is too easy to care about a too fast-paced combat speed, really.
Hope they step it up and actually tune the enemies up for the sequel, they already seem to want less filler combat so, now's the perfect occasion to tune the badies up - I mean you have a story mode already, go crazy ffs.

 

[darkly180]

I came upon some free-time this past week and decided I'd get the ultimate achievement.

Went with a wizard using full plate+small shield. Took about 3 minutes to kill Llengrath and I lost exactly 150 health in the fight. Here are my stats. The first image is not completely maxed out; two of my food items wore off and shield/armor aren't legendary, but it is close to what I was running for all the hard fights. (Apparently greater peatsucker oozes are more powerful than any of the dragons or archmages?) Pretty fun.

Came upon this only just now but awesome guide. Only question I wanted to ask: how did you get the insane stats for your first image?! Please share your buffs!! Thanks

 

[Sacred82]

funny they still haven't managed to fix the bug where status effect icons become permanent

 

[Sensuki]

Slower speed is only the tip of the iceberg though. Their recovery system is pretty dumb, and they really need to simplify it.

 

[Hyperion]

BTW, looking at Tyranny's footage, their combat pacing seems much superior, ironically due to the "simplified" combat system - I think they've removed afflictions that modify recovery times and maybe armor doesn't modify them either? I don't know I don't follow the dev diaries.

I noticed that too, but it looked like the recovery timer was partially tied into the attack animations. Could be wrong, but I thought it made the game look clunky since each character was very deliberate in their animation and return to resting stance.

Josh mentioned the slow mode was the actual pace they should have gone for and after some testing, he's completely right.

As long as they still retain a fast mode, I'd be OK with that. The bigger problem I had wasn't the speed of combat, but the speed of some enemies. Those goddamn Monks instantly shift into 4th gear and don't need wounds to cast their special abilities. By the time you realized what happened they already broke your front line, disabled your casters, and summoned their double avatars.

 

[Latro]

tbh they should have just made a diablo clone instead of wasting all of Sawyer's time on nerd shit

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think Josh went somewhat overboard with the hubris in designing the systems. From what I could interpret from the slides, he has taken a lesson from PoE. Who knows, PoE 2 may be geniuinely good.

Thinking about the speed modes as such - the very fact that you have to put in three speed modes (ok, maybe only two if we consider fast mode to be only useful for speeding through cleared areas) should in itself serve to tell you that your game's combat pacing is screwed up.

 

[Infinitron]

I think Josh went somewhat overboard with the hubris in designing the systems. From what I could interpret from the slides, he has taken a lesson from PoE. Who knows, PoE 2 may be geniuinely good.

Thinking about the speed modes as such - the very fact that you have to put in three speed modes (ok, maybe only two if we consider fast mode to be only useful for speeding through cleared areas) should in itself serve to tell you that your game's combat pacing is screwed up.

"The very fact that you have to put in a pause button should in itself serve to tell you that your game's combat pacing is screwed up." - commonly heard criticism of all RTwP combat. Careful, now.

 

[Fry]

Genuinely good for who? Nothing short of tearing out and completely reworking the combat and attribute systems would satisfy the grumps, and I think that's incredibly unlikely.

Personally I'd be happy with more focused writing and less annoying companions.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think Josh went somewhat overboard with the hubris in designing the systems. From what I could interpret from the slides, he has taken a lesson from PoE. Who knows, PoE 2 may be geniuinely good.

Thinking about the speed modes as such - the very fact that you have to put in three speed modes (ok, maybe only two if we consider fast mode to be only useful for speeding through cleared areas) should in itself serve to tell you that your game's combat pacing is screwed up.

"The very fact that you have to put in a pause button should in itself serve to tell you that your game's combat pacing is screwed up." - commonly heard criticism of all RTwP combat. Careful, now.

Nah, there is no place for comparison of the two arguments. PoE already has rtwp combat, the problem lies in the kind of rtwp combat itself.

 

[Infinitron]

lol of course there is. Pausing and slowing are both tools for managing the chaos of simultaneous multi-character real-time tactical combat, and there are other (good) real-time games that feature both pausing and variable speed control. Pausing can be thought of as functionally identical to slowing down combat to an extreme degree.

I get that you're mad about the non-constant attack rates but you're barking up the wrong tree here

 

[Sacred82]

I think Josh went somewhat overboard with the hubris in designing the systems. From what I could interpret from the slides, he has taken a lesson from PoE. Who knows, PoE 2 may be geniuinely good.

I've thought about it, and when Josh says people are missing the 'soul' in this game and 'soul' is hard to define, he's being - intentionally or not - diffuse. What's missing from PoE are the wacky elements, which are a staple of high fantasy. I think this is due to two things: 1) Josh's sperging and 2) the game trying to be serious business. Serious fantasy is horrible, you still have pointy-eared tree-huggers and hairy midgets who eat six meals per day, but it's also rashunal. They were obviously also going for darker themes but I'd rather they'd gone silly grimdark rather than serious halfdark.

And then Josh's sperging gave the actual high fantasy elements the killing blow. Reading through the manual I saw for the first time that Island Aumaua were supposed to get bonus movement, but they were the only race to get that so it was changed. There are no weapons that teleport enemies around, no level drain, etc.

It's like they set out to make a fantasy game without actually letting their imagination run free.

 

[Fry]

wacky

Eh. "Wacky" can go really badly really quickly.

 

[Sacred82]

wacky

Eh. "Wacky" can go really badly really quickly.

'Wacky' is what made good D&D games good, and didn't make bad D&D games bad.

 

[Fry]

I assume by "D&D" you mean fantasy games in general. In which case, I refer you to D:OS. Wacky devolves into cheesy.

Creative does not equal wacky.

 

[Sacred82]

I assume by "D&D" you mean fantasy games in general. In which case, I refer you to D:OS. Wacky devolves into cheesy.

Creative does not equal wacky.

I actually didn't.

I felt D:OS could have done much better with better writing, which isn't at odds with wacky systems (unless the writing aspires to be serious business). Being wacky in the D&D vein doesn't mean being super childish in tone like D:OS.

Also, while wacky can go wrong, it can also lead to Planescape: Torment

 

[Theldaran]

Bioware is presumably going bankrupt in the near future, so I don't think imitating them is sensible. I'm aware that Minsc is the most famous and widely loved character from BG... but most of its characters are pretty lifeless, even dear Imoen. Also with the general public being statistically morons, they dig Bioware antics, but I hope Obsidian knows better.

 

[Fry]

Bioware is presumably going bankrupt in the near future

Not a chance, but it's a nice dream.

 

[Theldaran]

For some reason people everywhere dig their shit. It's plain that stupidity is far more common than intelligence.