Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[AwesomeButton]

. Examples of bad difficulty: PoE

Oh fuck off. How is this cheesing or all-right click:


Don't answer that question. It's rhetorical. Pillars of Eternity, haven't played Deadfire and have no interest in doing so; has some of the best Real Time Based Combat in the genre. So much so that it has surpassed the clunky Infinity Edge gameplay - some people think Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale have better gameplay, lmao.

You're obviously not ready for this conversation, kid. But I'll just give you two words: engagement, "personal initiative round".

Why are you even showing me this cancer video? It illustrates everything that sucks about PoE's combat. You defeated yourself with it. The constant pausing just at the right microsecond, the visual diarrhea, the information overload.

Yes, IWD is unironically light years ahead of this crap. And you have no taste to tell shit from honey.

 

[Lacrymas]

Meaningless information overload is what your brain looks like on RTwP.

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is good difficulty and dumb difficulty in RPG combat. Examples of good difficulty: Battle Brothers, Underrail, Age of Decadence. Examples of bad difficulty: PoE/Deadfire, D:OS/2, Witcher 3.

A characteristic of dumb difficulty is that no matter how you set it, it's never fun. Either it's select all-right click, or it requires some kind of cheesing.

Never understood why people praise AoD's difficulty, and I certainly disagree about PoE. It's one of the very, very few games that takes it's hardest difficulty seriously.

AoD on the other hand is so simple once you "get it" that all that's left to provide difficulty is the RNG.

Come on, it's got damage types and defenses. Target the right defense, protect against the respective damage type, and keep that spacebar finger ready.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Meaningless information overload is what your brain looks like on RTwP.

Lower to mid-level combat in IWD/BG2 was still fine in my experience. The personal initiative round kept the information overload of PoE from occuring even when enemies had multiple attacks per round.

BTW, I may be the only one to say this, but I think penetration brought some actual need for consideration to Deadfire's combat when choosing weapons.

 

[Grunker]

There is good difficulty and dumb difficulty in RPG combat. Examples of good difficulty: Battle Brothers, Underrail, Age of Decadence. Examples of bad difficulty: PoE/Deadfire, D:OS/2, Witcher 3.

A characteristic of dumb difficulty is that no matter how you set it, it's never fun. Either it's select all-right click, or it requires some kind of cheesing.

Never understood why people praise AoD's difficulty, and I certainly disagree about PoE. It's one of the very, very few games that takes it's hardest difficulty seriously.

AoD on the other hand is so simple once you "get it" that all that's left to provide difficulty is the RNG.

Come on, it's got damage types and defenses. Target the right defense, protect against the respective damage type, and keep that spacebar finger ready.

You can reduce any RPG to such simple sentences - CERTAINLY AoD.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You can reduce any RPG to such simple sentences - CERTAINLY AoD.

Can't agree about AoD. In AoD I found myself considering the odds at succeeding with a dice roll much more often. Every action has a cost and you get to feel its direct consequence. Same with Battle Brothers. Neither one can be reduced to what PoE's combat apparently can be reduced to.

What's not fair about my comparison is that Underrail and AoD are both obviously not party based games. And also fairly linear, especially compared to PoE/Deadfire which have so many more moving parts.

 

[Orud]

Apparently the majority of Obsidian's own employees could not, even with all the easy win buttons that ~1.0 PoE had.

Also dusting off this old compilation of his QA tester stories, people who are paid to play games yet are unable to play them well https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...expansion-thread.100006/page-133#post-4409223

Well, those were painful to read. Thanks, I guess.

 

[TedNugent]

Josh has the right ideas, he just doesn't know how to implement them or how to fix the genre's issues he recognizes. QED - damage reduction and penetration. He was right that damage reduction had multiple issues, but the solution he came up with (penetration) was worse.

Then he is a brainlet.

Additive damage reduction has inherently increasing returns. The solution is fairly straightforward, add diminishing returns.

For example, Blizzard developed a formula in WoW with perfect linear progression for armor. I feel like this is a case where a programmer was able to solve a problem whereas a pure game designer was unable to.

With additive damage reduction, obviously it gets better the more points you put in. If you take 10 base damage, and have 8 DR, adding one point of armor halves (50%) your damage (2 vs 1), whereas if you have 10 base damage, and 0 DR, adding one point of armor only gives you 10% less damage received (10 vs 9).

I'm not sure what Obsidian were trying to accomplish with the new penetration/AR system in Deadfire. Being generous, it's sloppy and awkward.

Simplified, the formula becomes: DR% = Armor / (Armor + (467.5 * AttackerLevel - 22167.5))

Consider the following table which can be derived from the above formula for a lvl 70 tank taking 1000 DPS of "raw" damage:

Stat Base AC1 AC2 AC3 AC4 AC5 AC6
Armor 0 5k 10k 15k 20k 25k 30k
DPS taken 1000 666 500 410 350 300 260
DPS reduced by the last 5k armor 0 333 166 90 60 50 40
Relative DPS reduction by the last 5k armor 0 33% 25% 18% 15% 14% 13%
As can be seen, the effectiveness of adding another 5k of armor is getting lower, there is a "diminishing returns" effect with respect to the DPS reduction. It isn't as pronounced as it may seem looking at the absolute numbers, though. The last line shows that the relative value of 5k armor drops from 33% to 13%, meaning that at the start, one point of AC will be about three times as effective in terms of DPS reduction as near the end. Thus, armor exhibits diminishing returns with respect to the total amount of healing needed to keep a tank alive.

The following is the same formula for a lvl 80 tank against a level 83 mob

Stat Base AC1 AC2 AC3 AC4 AC5 AC6 AC7 AC8 AC9 AC10
Armor 0 5k 10k 15k 20k 25k 30k 35k 40k 45k 50k
DPS taken 1000 769 625 526 454 400 357 322 294 270 250
DPS reduced by the last 5k armor 0 231 144 99 72 55 43 35 28 24 20
Relative DPS reduction by the last 5k armor 0 23% 19% 16% 14% 12% 11% 10% 9% 8% 7.5%

Armor vs. Effective Time to Live for Level 70 Characters

However, in terms of absolute time to live with respect to melee attacks, armor has no diminishing return effect. Given a constant melee DPS amount, each additional point of armor (whether it be from 0 to 1 or from 30000 to 30001) will increase the tank's time to live by the same effective amount. 1k additional armor increases time to live by approximately 9.47% (6.01% at level 80??), as shown by the graph. The formula for calculating time to live with respect to melee attacks is:

Effective time to live = 1 / (1 - DR%) * Base time to live
Where DR% is calculated according to the above formula. In this way, armor can be thought of as increasing the effective health of the tank with respect to melee attacks. Since DR caps at 75%, effective time to live caps at 400% of the tanks base time to live (time to live if the tank had no armor).

Prior to hitting the cap, armor is certainly a very desirable stat for tanks, but difficult to find. Most items of similar quality and rarity have similar armor values, and extra armor can be found only very rarely.

 

[Delterius]

There is good difficulty and dumb difficulty in RPG combat. Examples of good difficulty: Battle Brothers, Underrail, Age of Decadence. Examples of bad difficulty: PoE/Deadfire, D:OS/2, Witcher 3.

A characteristic of dumb difficulty is that no matter how you set it, it's never fun. Either it's select all-right click, or it requires some kind of cheesing.

Never understood why people praise AoD's difficulty, and I certainly disagree about PoE. It's one of the very, very few games that takes it's hardest difficulty seriously.

AoD on the other hand is so simple once you "get it" that all that's left to provide difficulty is the RNG.

Come on, it's got damage types and defenses. Target the right defense, protect against the respective damage type, and keep that spacebar finger ready.

is this the new definition of RPG

 

[Sunri]

Meaningless information overload is what your brain looks like on RTwP.

Only if you are a dummy.

 

[Pink Eye]

You're obviously not ready for this conversation, kid. But I'll just give you two words: engagement, "personal initiative round".

Why are you even showing me this cancer video? It illustrates everything that sucks about PoE's combat. You defeated yourself with it. The constant pausing just at the right microsecond, the visual diarrhea, the information overload.

Yes, IWD is unironically light years ahead of this crap. And you have no taste to tell shit from honey.

You lackadaisical fiend did you even bother reading before bloviating? If this was your attempt at persuading me that Pillar's combat is somehow worse than Infinity Edge based gameplay, then you've failed. Not only have you been unsuccessful at convincing me otherwise. You've made yourself in the process look like some retard who doesn't understand these games.

>engagement, "personal initiative round".
What?

>The constant pausing just at the right microsecond
This is your complaint? Are you high? Let me guess. You play at baby bitch difficulty and just click enemies to death with no microplay involved. Probably explains your claim from earlier. So off the mark like blind man attempting to shoot apple from head. Except you're trying to convince us all you ain't blind.

>The visual diarrhea
>Information overload
If you can't tell what's going on in that video without having a aneurysm mid way. Then that means you're too fucking dense to understand Pillar's combat.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You lackadaisical fiend did you even bother reading before bloviating? If

Starting your reply with "Oh fuck off" and then whining that you're not being taken seriously.

f this was your attempt at persuading me that Pillar's combat is somehow worse than Infinity Edge based gameplay, then you've failed.

I'm going to cry in a corner. It was my life's goal to persuade a person on the internet of something that's obviously true anyway, and I've "failed"

The zoomer times are upon us. Godspeed.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Did they seriously nerf the base campaign at some point? I have to keep checking that I have it on POTD because it doesn't feel like it used to.

 

[Haplo]

But PoE's difficulty is way different than Deadfire's in my experience. The first is a linear curve that is hardest at level 1 and easiest at level 20, with the sole exception of megabosses. Whereas PoE has the easiest AND the hardest encounters on its high levels.

Not 100% accurate I'd say, at least if you also use level scaling and play the DLCs.

Sure, you get a major level/power boost by pacifist questing in Neketaka before mid-game and things can seem trivial for a while afterwards. That's why I recommend exploring a fair bit before landing in the main hub. Or at least make brakes in questing there, rather then try to do everything at once. That's good both for the challenge and game pacing.

But some late game encounters can be pretty brutal, if you're not good at it. A certain imp, the Splintered Reef, a certain battle lich and probably some more.
However the DLCs change this balance a lot. Even Beast of Winter provides a solid challenge when done at the recommended level (particularly the bridge section). Forgotten Sanctum and SSS both have the best end game encounters in the whole game.

 

[gurugeorge]

The "visual diarrhea" critique of PoE's graphics is correct though, the battlefield is often just a white sheet of nothing.

It doesn't stop you from understanding what's going on conceptually, but it does block you from being able to rely on the automatism of your visual system to see what's going on instantly.

It's one thing that I think nobody could deny PoE2 improved on, quite drastically, no matter what else they might think about the game - it's much more visually readable.

 

[FreeKaner]

You're obviously not ready for this conversation, kid. But I'll just give you two words: engagement, "personal initiative round".

Nothing wrong with engagement in a real time game. It makes martial classes just do their job, especially when the AI is designed to focus your squishies & casters instead of whomever is the closest. Especially the way it is in POE2 where it is limited to shields and abilities (though functionally most melees will still have it.)

Lower to mid-level combat in IWD/BG2 was still fine in my experience. The personal initiative round kept the information overload of PoE from occuring even when enemies had multiple attacks per round.

BTW, I may be the only one to say this, but I think penetration brought some actual need for consideration to Deadfire's combat when choosing weapons.

BG2 experience is of sending melees forward so they roadblock the enemy AI and you kill everything with your wizard? Even on my "proper" run playing as an inquisitor in BG2 you mostly just watch the melees roadblock enemy AI (without engagement but functionally the same) as mages destroy everything.

BG1 is indeed a fine experience but that's because the power level of your party is limited, so the "RTS-like" combat of focus firing, kiting a bit and casting sleep etc. makes sense. BG2 is overrated as hell combat wise. What it has got good is exploration and gameplay flow. In terms of combat it basically feeds into all of the degenerate gameplay tendencies of high level DND.

The fact that Sawyer himself thinks that BG2 is the "peak" of RTWP combat experience, rather than BG1, is also a possible explanation for some of his very questionable decisions. I also partially blame Sawyer considering League of Legends as an ideal of balance for this. As the modus operandi of that game is balancing classes within role individually. While a party RPG should balance on composition of the whole party. Especially the amount of active abilities on classes don't need them, it feels like a Japanese MMO late game.

 

[Delterius]

The "visual diarrhea" critique

the visual diarrhea critique is as old as baldur's gate 1. its as vapid and pointless as calling rtwp rpgs 'twitch based'. which, by the way, is also as old as baldur's gate 1. essentially the codex is afflicted by a cargo cult of the Old Ones who liked turn based rpgs and turn based rpgs only. whatever their rotting eyes said about real time games is repeated even today as criticism towards whichever real time rpg came out lately. i know exactly what is going on whenever i'm playing the IE games, nwn, dragon age or pillars 1 and 2. if i was to give credit to the Old Ones' opinion then i'm some sort of alien genetic project with hyper awareness.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

You know it's funny that you mentioned League of Legends because I picked up Pillars again yesterday following a 2 year Hiatus and the combat reminded me a lot of league.
> Screen covered in special effects so you can't see shit
>Everything happening so fast and at once that even with slow mode you have to no idea what the fuck is going on.
> Party members getting stun locked constantly before you can do anything and then they die
> Can't remember what ability does what because there's a thousand of the fucking things and most of them do the same thing anyway, be it "this deals damage to a group" or "this buffs your guys for 20 seconds, after which you can't use it again"
My favorite part is getting paralyzed before I could use the spell that prevents paralyzed, because the game wont let you use that ability out of combat and it only lets you use it once anyway, so if it runs out mid combat you're fucked. /s
Also, why is stun not the same as paralyzed? They do the same bloody thing. And why is there no cure for dominate? Why doesn't the spell that helps against confused help against dominate?

Yeah, I don't like the combat in Pillars. It has strong points. Combat mechanics is not one of them. Which would be fine, if there wasn't so much god damn combat and they throw 10 enemies at you at a time.

 

[Butter]

RTwP games should be uniquely positioned among RT games to avoid the visual diarrhea criticism. Why isn't there a command to show only the visuals that are affecting the currently selected character? Or a way to cycle through the effects one at a time?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

RTwP games should be uniquely positioned among RT games to avoid the visual diarrhea criticism. Why isn't there a command to show only the visuals that are affecting the currently selected character? Or a way to cycle through the effects one at a time?

There is a way to see effects, but they are very tiny at the bottom of the screen and you have to hover over it.

 

[TedNugent]

Nothing wrong with engagement in a real time game. It makes martial classes just do their job, especially when the AI is designed to focus your squishies & casters instead of whomever is the closest. Especially the way it is in POE2 where it is limited to shields and abilities (though functionally most melees will still have it.)

Wait - Deadfire eliminated engagement for melee by default?

 

[gurugeorge]

The "visual diarrhea" critique

the visual diarrhea critique is as old as baldur's gate 1.

You can't look at those big huge blobs of white-out when spells are flying around and tell me with a straight face that that's good, readable graphics.

Also, since the devs fixed it in PoE2, it was obviously a valid criticism that they took seriously (I think it's mentioned in one of Sawyer's talks).

 

[FreeKaner]

Nothing wrong with engagement in a real time game. It makes martial classes just do their job, especially when the AI is designed to focus your squishies & casters instead of whomever is the closest. Especially the way it is in POE2 where it is limited to shields and abilities (though functionally most melees will still have it.)

Wait - Deadfire eliminated engagement for melee by default?

Yes. Some passives (fighter and barbarian can get +1 via talents), shields (+1 by default), modals (I think pollaxe? As well as fighter defensive stance and its upgrade) give engagement. Most rogue enemies won't be able to engage for example.

 

[TedNugent]

> Party members getting stun locked constantly before you can do anything and then they die

Depends on the encounter, there's a lot of groups that spam paralyzed/confused/dominate.

There are both spells and consumables that prevent this, and many items that have affixes that help with this. Also, obviously, getting the appropriate defensive stat increased helps. Will and fortitude mostly. There are common boots that give you defenses to stun/prone and several items with charm/confuse resist. You can also get talents that either increase your will/fortitude and a further two talents that increase your defense by a further 10 against those inflictions. Once I got those on the majority of my party members, it became less of an issue.

Also, there are several suits of armor with +50 and +25 stun/prone resist or +50 to defense when stunned/proned.

Also, why is stun not the same as paralyzed? They do the same bloody thing. And why is there no cure for dominate? Why doesn't the spell that helps against confused help against dominate?

It isn't, paralyzed is a higher tier than stunned, and stunned is a higher tier than knockdown. The effects are stronger on the higher tiers. Higher maluses.

Snowcap for example gives +20 defense to dominate.

I believe you can also use suppress affliction on Durance (tier 2, so available early and can be mastered) or liberating exhortation on Pallegina to remove dominate. Also, Paladins have an ability called Aegis of Loyalty which gives them +20 defense against mind afflictions and allows you to hit anyone afflicted with those afflictions and instantly restore them with an auto attack.

Yes. Some passives (fighter and barbarian can get +1 via talents), shields (+1 by default), modals (I think pollaxe? As well as fighter defensive stance and its upgrade) give engagement. Most rogue enemies won't be able to engage for example.

That is absolutely, fucking, retarded. That was a core mechanic in PoE. Did Sawyer hit his head on a rock before he made Deadfire?

 

[FreeKaner]

That is absolutely, fucking, retarded. That was a core mechanic in PoE. Did Sawyer hit his head on a rock before he made Deadfire?

The way it generally works, fighters, barbarians, enemies with shields will usually have engagement. It really singles out rogues and ciphers mostly, which works fine. High level rogues also have persistent distraction which is a massively effective engagement.