Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Parabalus]

Actually, I have one other complaint and that's that Zahua is hilarious, but he sucks because he's a monk so I haven't used him much even though I'd like to see more of his weird stoner dialog. I've never been able to do much of anything with monks or barbarians on PotD without them basically disintegrating.

You can put monks in full plate, the soulbound one is pretty good.

But you can also easily go glass cannon (0 recovery) with The Long Pain. Either way spamming torment's reach will easily put you at the top of the damage chart.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Actually, I have one other complaint and that's that Zahua is hilarious, but he sucks because he's a monk so I haven't used him much even though I'd like to see more of his weird stoner dialog. I've never been able to do much of anything with monks or barbarians on PotD without them basically disintegrating.

You can put monks in full plate, the soulbound one is pretty good.

But you can also easily go glass cannon (0 recovery) with The Long Pain. Either way spamming torment's reach will easily put you at the top of the damage chart.

I might have to try it if I ever make it out of this play through. Usually I find the best way to sort out what a class is is to make one the MC and then support it with classes you're more familiar with since it forces you to use the character all the time and try and figure out how to make them effective. I don't want to abort this already massively long playthrough just to tool around with another class right now though. That'd just ensure I really never actually play through all of the expansions or Deadfire.

My addiction to alts and tooling around with different characters is awful sometimes.

 

[Decado]

So the pistol build has been a fun experiment and I might continue it at some point. But, I am determined to give Deadfire a serious try once again and before I jump in, I'll likely roll a Paladin, Monk, or Fighter to carry me through both games.

All of this has to done before Elden Ring comes out, I should add. God help me.

I lied, and rolled a Barbarian. This was a stretch for me, since in most games I prefer to be methodical and focused when it comes to my Player Character. I like Paladins and Rogues because they are basically single-target attackers, for example. So Barbs have never really done it for me -- basically, any class that induces a frenzy/berserk like state has never captured my attention.

But this fucking guy! He's a beast!

It was slow going at first, because of my abysmal accuracy. Since I had chosen to go the two-handed route, this made some combat truly painful; awful hit percentage and slow speed? Oh, and terrible penetration at the start? Motherfucking yawn.

Things got better once I was able to accumulate some serious Barb talents and abilities, namely Brute Force (uses fortitude defense instead of deflection, if enemy's fortitude is lower), One Stands Alone (damage bonus from adjacent enemies) and upgraded Frenzy.

But things really changed once I got Tidefall, revealing to me how gear-dependent this class really is, especially compared to a rogue. The latter gets so much damage potential from his sneak attacks and other modifiers that upgrading weapons feels good, but not overwhelming. The Barb, on the other hand, garners a huge boost in lethality with the right weapon, in particular a weapon like Tidefall that has special procs on hit (regaining endurance). Plus, yeah, the increased damage is fucking great.

So I'm having a good time with this guy, just hit level 8 and I'm on level 9 of Caed Nua. No complaints so far.

Any recommendations on armor? Right now I'm using Hand and Key, which is a good mid-range piece that gives me a pretty good attack speed and some nice bonuses. But, maybe there is something better?

 

[Decado]

Also, on level 10 of Caed Nua I found the Rod of Pale Shades. There is room here for a "Nice Rod!" joke.

Here's the item description:

"At the beginning of Waidwen's Legacy, a cleric of Berath in New Heomar petitioned his god to end the Hollowborn curse. He knelt on the stone floor of his temple and prayed for five days straight, forsaking food, water, and sleep for the sake of his vigil. On the evening of the fifth day, he fell into an exhausted slumber and dreamt that the Pallid Knight told him to restore the cycle by returning the souls of the living to it. When he awoke, he found a large but plain candlestick from the temple altar lying next to his hand.

He fashioned the candlestick into a weapon, and he prowled the city, murdering the elderly and the infirm in Berath's name. As the death toll climbed into the dozens, a mob of the vengeful and bereaved formed to track him down. They caught up with the cleric outside his temple and turned his own weapon on him, bashing his skull apart in the streets. Several onlookers claimed to see an elderly dwarf, cloaked and impossibly emaciated, standing in the shadows and laughing."

Here's my question -- how did the Rod end up in Od Nua? On level 7, after fighting the animats and passing through the main door to level 8, we are told via Kana that (I'm paraphrasing) "We are now deeper than anyone has been in a long time." On level 8 we find out that it has likely been thousands of years since anyone has been down there. Okay, cool. If the Rod of Pale Shades is an artifact from Waidwen's Legacy (only beginning fifteen years before the start of PoE), how the fuck did it end up down there?

 

[Haplo]

Don't really remember which armor I've used. Sanguine Plate maybe? Extra Frenzy uses could be handy. Plus it looks great.

But make sure to buy Hours of St. Rumbalt greatsword from Dyrford ASAP. That, combined with Carnage and high Intelligence is just the coolest barbarian combo ever.
Well, Firebrand summoned sword was also cool AF on release, when it targetted Reflex instead of Deflection, so with Carnage you were essentialy a Kith-fireball rolling trough the battlefield - but it was sadly nerfed (though its still pretty solid with high base damage, all of it Fire, so Forgemaster's gloves or what are they called can be handy in some encounters).

Alternatively buy the fairly similar Tall Grass pike for the safety of reach and easier positioning - but significantly less crit damage.

And get the Accurate Carnage perk if you haven't already.

 

[Parabalus]

I like Tall Grass much more not just because of the safety, but because with it you can often traget the 2nd rank of bunched up enemies and hit several more than with St. Rumbalt.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I think if I have any significant criticism about WM1 from what I've seen, it's that there are SO MANY trash mobs, holy shit. I'm both a combat fag and didn't think the Deep Roads in Dragon Age: Origins were that bad, but on POTD, Durgan's Battery makes the Deep Roads look like something from Disco Elysium. I don't even mind the number of enemies per pack or some of the nice ambushes since they actually made me consider how to approach the battles and that's great. It's more that I'd probably cut the number of encounters by half. It's not even like it's an attrition based design because there are more than enough camping supplies spread throughout for you to rest to your heart's content unless you're terrible at the game or underlevelled, I guess.

Not offering XP for fighting is a decision I now accept since it de-incentivizes murder hoboing and helps reward sneaking or otherwise dealing with problems as a non-psychopath, which is great. The weirdness is, I think on POTD, POE has the most shit to fight out of anything I've played outside of games like Diablo. It's bananas. I'm not done OC Act 2 or WM1 and I've already got close to 2000 enemy kills and I haven't killed everything I've encountered. After a point, the constant fighting of stuff that you've already knocked around a bunch starts to become more tedious than anything.

Re: POE's enemy density in general: Where did all of these cultists and spirits come from anyway? I swear I've killed every dwarven ghost from every dwarf civilization in the region from the past 800+ years and the Leaden Key / Skaen / etc. must have recruitment teams that would make the US Army blush.

Other than that, the design and presentation of Durgan's Battery and its atmosphere is awesome. It's really bleak and ominous and really drew me into thinking about the place and its history which is something I don't get often anymore because everything is so BSB. A+, great dungeon.

 

[NJClaw]

Re: POE's enemy density in general: Where did all of these cultists and spirits come from anyway? I swear I've killed every dwarven ghost from every dwarf civilization in the region from the past 800+ years and the Leaden Key / Skaen / etc. must have recruitment teams that would make the US Army blush.

Sometimes I wonder how the fuck people even travel around. Every time a kid goes to visit his grandma he has a 95% chance of stumbling upon four Mênpŵgra, ten Pŵgra, and a pack of lions.

 

[AwesomeButton]

At least they don't respawn like in IWD.

 

[Ninjerk]

Re: POE's enemy density in general: Where did all of these cultists and spirits come from anyway? I swear I've killed every dwarven ghost from every dwarf civilization in the region from the past 800+ years and the Leaden Key / Skaen / etc. must have recruitment teams that would make the US Army blush.

Sometimes I wonder how the fuck people even travel around. Every time a kid goes to visit his grandma he has a 95% chance of stumbling upon four Mênpŵgra, ten Pŵgra, and a pack of lions.

I want to laugh-react AND Josh-react this post. Alas.

 

[mediocrepoet]

At least they don't respawn like in IWD.

You know, if they did, I might actually rage quit due to the amount of combat which is something that hasn't happened since the days when I used to play a lot of stuff with invisible random encounters jacked to super high rates like an encounter on every tile.

 

[vortex]

Sometimes I wonder how the fuck people even travel around. Every time a kid goes to visit his grandma he has a 95% chance of stumbling upon four Mênpŵgra, ten Pŵgra, and a pack of lions.

I just can't get enough of Mênpŵgras and Pŵgras. There are too few trash fights in PoE1 and even fewer in Deadfire.
Is there a mod which can increase their fights and sightings ?

 

[AwesomeButton]

At least they don't respawn like in IWD.

You know, if they did, I might actually rage quit due to the amount of combat which is something that hasn't happened since the days when I used to play a lot of stuff with invisible random encounters jacked to super high rates like an encounter on every tile.

1st, keep in mind that what you are playing is actually after the patch that reduced the "trash fights". Obsidian had to do a special patch for that

2nd, and I mean this as a serious suggestion - if fights start feeling like work, why not drop the difficulty? Josh makes this argument here (https://youtu.be/zng4VfRZTNA) that he intended IWD2 for people who have already played the IE games and his baseline for difficulty was higher, and he also plans to do this with PoE, although not as high as IWD2. Now I know that "add more enemies to make it harder" is a dumb way to increase difficulty, but it's one of the factors.

This reminds me of a funny thing. I did a search on youtube for recent Deadfire on PotD playthroughs and I saw people who have very little idea about the systems, who expect to select all - right click on enemies, making dumb attempts at Lets Plays where they reguralry die to the same encounter and reload a hundred times. I guess they just wanted to put "(Path of the Damned)" next to their video, maybe for the views, but they just weren't prepared. Eventually I started looking at their fights just to laugh at their misery.

 

[Bigg Boss]

At least they don't respawn like in IWD.

You know, if they did, I might actually rage quit due to the amount of combat which is something that hasn't happened since the days when I used to play a lot of stuff with invisible random encounters jacked to super high rates like an encounter on every tile.

1st, keep in mind that what you are playing is actually after the patch that reduced the "trash fights". Obsidian had to do a special patch for that

2nd, and I mean this as a serious suggestion - if fights start feeling like work, why not drop the difficulty? Josh makes this argument here (https://youtu.be/zng4VfRZTNA) that he intended IWD2 for people who have already played the IE games and his baseline for difficulty was higher, and he also plans to do this with PoE, although not as high as IWD2. Now I know that "add more enemies to make it harder" is a dumb way to increase difficulty, but it's one of the factors.

This reminds me of a funny thing. I did a search on youtube for recent Deadfire on PotD playthroughs and I saw people who have very little idea about the systems, who expect to select all - right click on enemies, making dumb attempts at Lets Plays where they reguralry die to the same encounter and reload a hundred times. I guess they just wanted to put "(Path of the Damned)" next to their video, maybe for the views, but they just weren't prepared. Eventually I started looking at their fights just to laugh at their misery.

Post one of these for fun please.

 

[mediocrepoet]

2nd, and I mean this as a serious suggestion - if fights start feeling like work, why not drop the difficulty? Josh makes this argument here (https://youtu.be/zng4VfRZTNA) that he intended IWD2 for people who have already played the IE games and his baseline for difficulty was higher, and he also plans to do this with PoE, although not as high as IWD2. Now I know that "add more enemies to make it harder" is a dumb way to increase difficulty, but it's one of the factors.

Because the issue isn't that the encounters are too hard, it's that if you solve a problem 1 time, it doesn't mean you want to solve it 100 times. Your solution changes it from having say 3 encounters out of 10 being interesting to 0 encounters out of 10 being interesting but at least they go quicker. At that point, why would I even play the stupid thing?

Also, dropping from POTD doesn't drop the number of encounters, just the number of monsters from each one. Again, this is completely irrelevant to my criticism.

EDIT: Re: retarded youtubers. I'd also like to point out that I haven't bought any camping supplies at all and routinely leave most of them in containers because I don't need them. The issue is tedium due to repetitiveness, not difficulty.

 

[Haplo]

I think if I have any significant criticism about WM1 from what I've seen, it's that there are SO MANY trash mobs, holy shit. I'm both a combat fag and didn't think the Deep Roads in Dragon Age: Origins were that bad, but on POTD, Durgan's Battery makes the Deep Roads look like something from Disco Elysium. I don't even mind the number of enemies per pack or some of the nice ambushes since they actually made me consider how to approach the battles and that's great. It's more that I'd probably cut the number of encounters by half. It's not even like it's an attrition based design because there are more than enough camping supplies spread throughout for you to rest to your heart's content unless you're terrible at the game or underlevelled, I guess.

Not offering XP for fighting is a decision I now accept since it de-incentivizes murder hoboing and helps reward sneaking or otherwise dealing with problems as a non-psychopath, which is great. The weirdness is, I think on POTD, POE has the most shit to fight out of anything I've played outside of games like Diablo. It's bananas. I'm not done OC Act 2 or WM1 and I've already got close to 2000 enemy kills and I haven't killed everything I've encountered. After a point, the constant fighting of stuff that you've already knocked around a bunch starts to become more tedious than anything.

Re: POE's enemy density in general: Where did all of these cultists and spirits come from anyway? I swear I've killed every dwarven ghost from every dwarf civilization in the region from the past 800+ years and the Leaden Key / Skaen / etc. must have recruitment teams that would make the US Army blush.

Other than that, the design and presentation of Durgan's Battery and its atmosphere is awesome. It's really bleak and ominous and really drew me into thinking about the place and its history which is something I don't get often anymore because everything is so BSB. A+, great dungeon.

I rather agree about the too high encounter/mob density in the vanilla game.
But I never felt the same way about WM - maybe because the encounter design is so much better there - that for me basically all the encounters in WM were fun?

Note this issue is also vastly improved in Deadfire.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I think if I have any significant criticism about WM1 from what I've seen, it's that there are SO MANY trash mobs, holy shit. I'm both a combat fag and didn't think the Deep Roads in Dragon Age: Origins were that bad, but on POTD, Durgan's Battery makes the Deep Roads look like something from Disco Elysium. I don't even mind the number of enemies per pack or some of the nice ambushes since they actually made me consider how to approach the battles and that's great. It's more that I'd probably cut the number of encounters by half. It's not even like it's an attrition based design because there are more than enough camping supplies spread throughout for you to rest to your heart's content unless you're terrible at the game or underlevelled, I guess.

Not offering XP for fighting is a decision I now accept since it de-incentivizes murder hoboing and helps reward sneaking or otherwise dealing with problems as a non-psychopath, which is great. The weirdness is, I think on POTD, POE has the most shit to fight out of anything I've played outside of games like Diablo. It's bananas. I'm not done OC Act 2 or WM1 and I've already got close to 2000 enemy kills and I haven't killed everything I've encountered. After a point, the constant fighting of stuff that you've already knocked around a bunch starts to become more tedious than anything.

Re: POE's enemy density in general: Where did all of these cultists and spirits come from anyway? I swear I've killed every dwarven ghost from every dwarf civilization in the region from the past 800+ years and the Leaden Key / Skaen / etc. must have recruitment teams that would make the US Army blush.

Other than that, the design and presentation of Durgan's Battery and its atmosphere is awesome. It's really bleak and ominous and really drew me into thinking about the place and its history which is something I don't get often anymore because everything is so BSB. A+, great dungeon.

I rather agree about the too high encounter/mob density in the vanilla game.
But I never felt the same way about WM - maybe because the encounter design is so much better there - that for me basically all the encounters in WM were fun?

Note this issue is also vastly improved in Deadfire.

Yeah, most of the encounters have been fun. The 3 of 10 comment was more about the game taken as a whole. Really, the only time it got me down was when I'd fight some large combined group of ghosts and golems... and then another. And then another. And then another. All back to back. It didn't wear my party down so much as make me wish for either variety or fewer of them. That's basically what I'm driving at. Otherwise, the new types of enemies have been nice and WM1 has done a reasonable job at mixing them up, but had the Battery been any longer than it was, I probably would've taken a break from the game before finishing it. As it is, it started to become repetitive but was done with soon after. WM1 is basically done for me except about half of Longwatch Falls. I've gotten the WM1 ending read and prompt about how to start WM2.

Either way, I agree that WM1 stands above the OC and has shown me that they really did learn from the game's development and did some good work in their approach to it. I just find that the strengths of it in my mind are more about atmosphere and lore. The encounter design itself is pretty good, but it would have been nice for them to either reduce the number of them in a few areas or to try and mix up the variety a bit more which really only hit me as an issue towards the end of the Battery. So, I'd call that a win for the POE team considering the types of things I had been saying about it before going back now.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Your solution changes it from having say 3 encounters out of 10 being interesting to 0 encounters out of 10 being interesting but at least they go quicker. At that point, why would I even play the stupid thing?

I've been asking myself the same thing very often, about PoE specifically.

I come to the conclusion, after about 350 hours in PoE and as much in Deadfire, that the combat system is too deterministic and leads to combats that you can see which way they'll go from the first moments. Either you are taking huge damage with every attack and you can barely heal in time, or you are wiping the floor with the enemies from the start and they never have a chance, because you have so much excess resources to pour on them. The cases when things get more interesting is due to positioning and other factors specific to that combat encounter. If you have the stone to their kind of scissors, there isn't much source of intrigue.

Maybe the more RNG-dependent IE games had more fun combat exactly for that reason (being RNG), even if the rules were so much more simplistic.

 

[NJClaw]

too deterministic

the more RNG-dependent IE games had more fun combat exactly for that reason (being RNG)

Dude, you trying to kill lukaszek or what?

 

[lukaszek]

too deterministic

the more RNG-dependent IE games had more fun combat exactly for that reason (being RNG)

Dude, you trying to kill lukaszek or what?

this bait will not be enough to play this turd

 

[Heroic Liberator]

You have to use potato as bait, NJClaw.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Post one of these for fun please.

Copy-paste the links into your browser, else you might attract them to this page.

Check out how this one dies to boars (26:38) https://youtu.be/21mYbWNSBWo The best part is that he stopped his LP soon after that video. Began a WOTR LP subsequently

Another PotD expert. More than half an hour of cringe here, same combat, starts from ~1:16:00 https://youtu.be/LHTlEeVXoPM

 

[mediocrepoet]

Your solution changes it from having say 3 encounters out of 10 being interesting to 0 encounters out of 10 being interesting but at least they go quicker. At that point, why would I even play the stupid thing?

I've been asking myself the same thing very often, about PoE specifically.

I come to the conclusion, after about 350 hours in PoE and as much in Deadfire, that the combat system is too deterministic and leads to combats that you can see which way they'll go from the first moments. Either you are taking huge damage with every attack and you can barely heal in time, or you are wiping the floor with the enemies from the start and they never have a chance, because you have so much excess resources to pour on them. The cases when things get more interesting is due to positining and other factors specific to that combat encounter.

Maybe the more RNG-dependent IE games had more fun combat exactly for that reason (being RNG), even if the rules were so much more simplistic.

I don't think it's that. Your point is interesting though. Like, I steamroll a lot of the game but I've had the occasional nailbiter in the White Marches. Like the first fight to cross the bridge east at around the middle of Longwatch Falls came down to everyone dead and just Durance up to fight an almost dead Lagufaeth Broodmother, his highest spells were all depleted and fortunately a pillar of faith was enough to blow it up. I was fairly certain that was going to end in a wipe. I don't face that all that often, so that was a lot of fun.

I was going to for a low rest, 0 knock out run up until I started WM1. If people can do that on POTD in the expansion when starting as soon as it opens up in Act 2, well, they're far better gamers than I am.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Post one of these for fun please.

Copy-paste the links into your browser, else you might attract them to this page.

Check out how this one dies to boars (26:38) https://youtu.be/21mYbWNSBWo The best part is that he stopped his LP soon after that video. Began a WOTR LP subsequently

Another PotD expert. More than half an hour of cringe here, same combat, starts from ~1:16:00 https://youtu.be/LHTlEeVXoPM

Yeesh. Please don't compare me to these guys.

The guy in the second link, watching his party crumble in slow motion: "Well, that was interesting."
Me: No, no it wasn't.

EDIT: Do these guys not know how to pause or why it's a good idea sometimes/often? Personally, I'd rather play at full speed with pausing than in this brutal slow mo shit that these guys seem to. I pause so often that I set copious autopause conditions and/or my space bar gets smashed more than an underage Thai hooker. YMMV

EDIT 2: The first guy is fucking reading his fucking tooltips while combat is going on and then is like: *surprised pikachu* how did my guy die? I can't watch this anymore, it's bad for my blood pressure.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Yeesh. Please don't compare me to these guys.

Oh no way, I didn't compare you. I specifically said that this talking about lowering the difficulty reminded me of them as an extreme example.