Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[agris]

lolz, from the tyranny release comments sections, when a poster is asked about PoE

It’s not perfect, pausey-real-time-combat, is still kind of janky for all that I enjoy it, and the health/endurance divide seems to be there to make you do something dumb and need to reload, and not all of the text is as good as it thinks it is.

 

[Roguey]

They contain spoilers.

Yeah well, it's possible I'll never play this again so I want to take it all in.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Is it worth ever replacing Tidefall on my barb? I have St Ydwen's Redeemer here and supposedly there's a neat estoc I can get as well.

Edit: also, when do I start part 2 when I finish part 1?

 

[Rivmusique]

When you leave the white march area after completing part 1, the next time you rest you will have a dream that points you to part 2. The soulbound weapons are worth using, remember that they get better as you complete their "achievements".

 

[Urthor]

Is it worth ever replacing Tidefall on my barb? I have St Ydwen's Redeemer here and supposedly there's a neat estoc I can get as well.

Edit: also, when do I start part 2 when I finish part 1?

The Long Grass or w/e the Pike is called?

I don't recall any of the Soulbounds replacinggood old Barb+Long Grass knockdown combo in my playthrough. The hammer was patched to only work on a certain enemy type, so knockdown barb with long grass alting to tidefall was just the bestiest

 

[Hyperion]

Is it worth ever replacing Tidefall on my barb? I have St Ydwen's Redeemer here and supposedly there's a neat estoc I can get as well.

Edit: also, when do I start part 2 when I finish part 1?

Depends on what you want your Barbarian to do.

Tall Grass makes him a CC machine, and since it's a Reach weapon he can do without Plate Mail to speed up his attacks in your middle line. A couple of caveats to this, lots of enemies in The White March are immune, or at least resistant to Prone from high defenses, which makes Tall Grass kinda worthless. The Barbarian ability Blood Thirst eliminates all recovery time (including attack time) whenever your Barbarian lands the killing blow, which should be pretty often with good intellect for Carnage, so not wearing plate for the extra DR is silly imo.

Tidefall is honestly too good, too soon, and probably the best all around weapon since it can be Durgan Refined without the help of IE Mod.

St. Ydwen's Redeemer is a huge waste of time. Its requirement of being revived 5 times in combat for the final enhancement is such a pain in the ass to get. By the time you get it, you will likely have to *try* to get yourself killed and revived mid-battle to do it.

The Grey Sleeper is a far better investment than St. Ydwen's because the quest to uncurse it can be done without a single fight. In a long fight, Tidefall will probably do more damage because of the damage over time + durgan refinement, but The Grey Sleeper's utility from Paralyze, Twin Stones, and Invoke Vessels is pretty good shit. Invoke Vessels will summon a skeleton, Gul, and Revenant meatshields for you, while Twin Stones in melee range guarantees both projectiles to hit the target. If you have a lot of things you want to use your Durgan Steel on, consider this one to save yourself the 2 ingots for Tidefall.

 

[Grunker]

Bester and Sensuki bros, how advanced is the IE Mods NPC customization? Does changing NPC classes and attributes work flawlessly to the point where I can edit them entirely?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Neither of us has been involved with the mod for over a year and a half. Wouldn't know.

 

[Hyperion]

Class changes work just fine, the console command is something like: ChangeClass Companion_Name(Clone)_Position-1 ClassName

Keep in mind any changes that involve Durance have his name listed as 'GGP,' while Grieving Mother's is 'GM.' Everyone else is normal.

Changing attributes works for the PC, and possibly Hired Adventurers. Unfortunately, for the companions you need to go to pretty extreme lengths to make attribute changes work, with the use of a hex editor, or Unity Extractor and WinRAR / 7Zip.

https://www.reddit.com/r/projectete...od_news_everyone_theres_a_way_to_permanently/

The guy in this link has very detailed, and idiotproof instructions on one way to make companion attribute changes remain after a load screen, but I don't think it applies to IEMod, only if you play without. The good news is, you can run IEMod, change everyone as you see fit, then load it up using the normal launcher and any changes you made to characters stay.

 

[Morkar Left]

Isn't there an option in the IEMod to change the npcs stats in the options? I think they have a pregenerated stats allocation which you can modify in a txt doc somewhere in the IEMod folder under customstats.

 

[Hyperion]

I haven't tried that recently, but the last time I did it didn't work. If it does, then great, it'll save a ton of trouble. At least until 3.04 goes live and breaks the mod until the community can get it up and running again.

 

[Grunker]

So you have to fiddle around with the console to change that kindda stuff? There are no comprehensive options for it in EternityKeeper or a Level1NPC sort of respec-mod?

 

[Infantry]

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88805-304-update-on-our-next-patch/?p=1851629

Updated bug fixes. This patch is going to be very comprehensive.

Full patch description (to date) here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88805-304-update-on-our-next-patch/?p=1837592

Regardless of one's opinion on the game itself, Obsidian's dedication to the POE community is commendable.

 

[Morkar Left]

I'm playing the game now again v3.03 with expansions. Last time I played with 1.xx and stopped halfway mostly because it was laughably easy on hard.

Started again with 3.03 on hard (npc party, no customs, main char as rogue) and I have to say the difficulty got better balanced with knock out penalties, the immunities and nerfed fighter but at around level 5 / entering the city it became easy going again. Could be even easier because I understand the mechanics better.

Anyway I took the bitter pill and started again on PotD difficulty. It seems a bit more difficult. Will see how it turns out.

The difficulty / balance issues aside I have to say the game grows on me regarding quest design and lore. There are different solutions to quests and the story appears more congruent than the first time I played. The fortress actually got a lot more useful and better integrated in the world. All the patching and additional stuff seems to pay off so far.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Regardless of one's opinion on the game itself, Obsidian's dedication to the POE community is commendable.

Making promises of a fully moddable game, releasing completely unmoddable shit, then when people in the said community work hard at fixing their shit, they decide they're going to release a patch per week to break those community driven efforts. And they do it for a year and a half. Commendable my ass, lol. They shit on the community.

 

[Sizzle]

Regardless of one's opinion on the game itself, Obsidian's dedication to the POE community is commendable.

Making promises of a fully moddable game, releasing completely unmoddable shit, then when people in the said community work hard at fixing their shit, they decide they're going to release a patch per week to break those community driven efforts. And they do it for a year and a half. Commendable my ass, lol. They shit on the community.

Why, yes, they really should have ignored all the bugs and focused solely on how to maximize compatibility with your mod.

Impressively butthurt, aren't we?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Why, yes, they really should have ignored all the bugs and focused solely on how to maximize compatibility with your mod.

What they realized was that the project managers had been so insistent on keeping to the "schedule" that programmers simply rushed through the coding process, writing extremely bad code, because the bug fixing phase was not a part of the formal schedule. There was no attempt to keep the bug-count down. Quite the opposite. The story goes that one programmer, who had to write the code to calculate the height of a line of text, simply wrote "return 12;" and waited for the bug report to come in about how his function is not always correct. The schedule was merely a checklist of features waiting to be turned into bugs. In the post-mortem, this was referred to as "infinite defects methodology".

That's exactly what's going on there. No other thing in the universe explains how you ship a code so ridden with bugs, it needs YEARS to fix. Some gigantic, galactic size managerial fuck ups there. I'm not surprised, seeing their work culture with pink haired freaks all over the place.

Spoiler

To correct the problem, Microsoft universally adopted something called a "zero defects methodology". Many of the programmers in the company giggled, since it sounded like management thought they could reduce the bug count by executive fiat. Actually, "zero defects" meant that at any given time, the highest priority is to eliminate bugs before writing any new code. Here's why.


In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix.


For example, when you make a typo or syntax error that the compiler catches, fixing it is basically trivial.


When you have a bug in your code that you see the first time you try to run it, you will be able to fix it in no time at all, because all the code is still fresh in your mind.


If you find a bug in some code that you wrote a few days ago, it will take you a while to hunt it down, but when you reread the code you wrote, you'll remember everything and you'll be able to fix the bug in a reasonable amount of time.


But if you find a bug in code that you wrote a few months ago, you'll probably have forgotten a lot of things about that code, and it's much harder to fix. By that time you may be fixing somebody else's code, and they may be in Aruba on vacation, in which case, fixing the bug is like science: you have to be slow, methodical, and meticulous, and you can't be sure how long it will take to discover the cure.

 

[Sizzle]

Why, yes, they really should have ignored all the bugs and focused solely on how to maximize compatibility with your mod.

That's exactly what's going on there. No other thing in the universe explains how you ship a code so ridden with bugs, it needs YEARS to fix. Some gigantic, galactic size managerial fuck ups there. I'm not surprised, seeing their work culture with pink haired freaks all over the place.

Most games of that scope - including everyone's favorite RTWP fest BG2 - have bugs that don't even ever get fixed by the team, yet now you're complaining because a studio took the time out to address those very issues and continued patching it for more than a year - far, far more than usual - after it was released?

All because those patches broke compatibility with your mod?

Do you even hear yourself, man?

 

[Hyperion]

the story appears more congruent than the first time I played

This is actually pretty significant. Sometimes the writing can be a little obtuse, long-winded, with a little too much flourish that you need to read it a couple of times instead of the usual quick glance through before fully grasping what they're writing. Granted, even if it is a sign of mediocrity in trying to imitate the likes of Tolkien, or, more recently, Martin, the premise isn't that bad.

The game is certainly a far cry from what it was a year ago. Main gripe is those fucking WM2 Monks that turn your formation to swiss cheese and necessitate Plate on most party members to prevent excessive chunking of health.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

yet now you're complaining because a studio took the time out to address those very issues

Liar.

They should've released the fixes in 2-3 waves max, that would've broken everything only a few times and would've been fine. Except one problem - they don't give a fuck about mods, and by extension, about the community.

Most games of that scope - including everyone's favorite RTWP fest BG2

Bigger in scope, is moddable, is superior in every possible way, didn't need a professional programmer on payroll to spend over a year and a half to fix the broken shit of a game to be even remotely playable/balanced. Nice try.

 

[Sizzle]

yet now you're complaining because a studio took the time out to address those very issues

Liar.

They should've released the fixes in 2-3 waves max, that would've broken everything only a few times and would've been fine. Except one problem - they don't give a fuck about mods, and by extension, about the community.

Translation from madman to common speak - "They broke my mod's compatibility! I hate them, I hate them, I haaaaaate them so much!" :D

Most games of that scope - including everyone's favorite RTWP fest BG2

Bigger in scope, is moddable, is superior in every possible way, didn't need a professional programmer on payroll to spend over a year and a half to fix the broken shit of a game to be even remotely playable/balanced. Nice try.

BG was also never intended to be moddable, modders made tools for that in their spare time. Also, it was still plenty buggy even after they "finished patching it." But nice try, you wonderfully crazy person, you

All in all, here we have a new Codex low - complaining about a game getting patched

 

[Roguey]

Making promises of a fully moddable game

They never said this. They said they're try to make as many things as open as possible.

 

[Infantry]

Regardless of one's opinion on the game itself, Obsidian's dedication to the POE community is commendable.

They shit on the community.

Really? This is just one example; there are many others I can reference as well.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/8...to-address-before-pushing-304-live/?p=1851687

Ongoing and honest communication with community members (i.e. customers), owning up to and sincerely attempting to rectify past mistakes while showing continued dedication to providing a refined product (based on a consensus, not just your personal opinion...sorry precious snowflake) to customers through commercially reasonable efforts are characteristics of an entity that takes customer service very seriously. As a paying customer, I respect that.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

a refined product (based on a consensus, not just your personal opinion...sorry precious snowflake)

It's ranked #40 in the codex GOTY 2015 vote lol... It's worse than 39 titles in 2015, most of which are no name obscure games that were made on the budget of $0. The rpg community consensus is that this game is shit. Sorry, shit lover.

 

[Infantry]

a refined product (based on a consensus, not just your personal opinion...sorry precious snowflake)

It's ranked #40 in the codex GOTY 2015 vote.

It is now October 2016; I am positing that the product has been refined since that vote was cast. Your rebuttal is moot.