Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Axel_am]

In truth by end game all of the classes preform well. I think they've achieved a good balance with how the classes were designed. Maybe some were better at others at that one specific thing, but I never felt like that was part of bad game design.

From my experience you can still have a strong group with pretty much every reasonable party composition. And what's written in this thread confirms it. Yes, the Cipher does more DMG than the Barb, but if I replace my Cipher with a Barb I'll still be able to crush my enemies. This applies for pretty much everything except for the Priest.

Class synergy isn't really an issue with Pillars and neither is the way Cipher and Chanter were designed.

 

[Haplo]

The most overpowered class is the Priest, but I doubt any of the elite gamers we've got over here is going to mention that since all they seem to care about is big dmg and having everybody operate within the same system.

Yeah, the Priest is absolutely the biggest party force multiplier in this game - by far.

 

[Lacrymas]

Here's the thing, though. Every class is overpowered compared to the mobs by the end and it happens at around lvl 10, so I wouldn't exactly call this balanced.

 

[Haplo]

Not really true concerning bosses.
Or WM2 content.

 

[Axel_am]

I had tons of challenging fights in the Upscaled version of White March. I would say I even had some challenges in Vanilla Act 3, but definitely not as much as in White March. I can't comment on Thaos as I was fully decked out by the time I got to him, but from my experience last boss fights in CRPGs are rarely the most difficult ones so I'm giving the Thaos fight a pass too.

 

[Lacrymas]

Not really true concerning bosses.
Or WM2 content.

I've seen other people say the bosses are challenging or whatever, but I managed to defeat all WM bosses on the first try, including Concelhaut and Llengrath. The party is so freakishly overpowered by then that I don't know how you can even fail.

 

[Haplo]

Well, the Adra dragon was still pretty tough from what I remember. The Sky Dragon was no slouch either.

The WM monks were fun too.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, Adra Dragon is tough, but it's tough because it doesn't follow the game's rules. It's a big fuck you to people who think the game is easy. WM monks are a highlight as well, I had to reload like 5 times to beat them. I found the white dragon tougher than the Sky Dragon. It depends on what level the party is, I don't think I've found anything challenging after the party hit lvl 10.

 

[LanciaArdita]

Coming to this series from playing the hell out of NwN (especially the MotB expansion from the sequel), I detested it with a passion.

I disliked the attribute system because obviously, they wrestled all control out of the player when it came to attribute allocation since the range of variation is just order of magnitudes inferiour to AD&D and 3.5.

This decision in turn affected party composition and strategic choice of feats and spells/buffs/debuffs etc., since you can build any and all party member into whatever niche role you deem fit (a rogue can play the role of a tank just as well as a fighter can, N.B. ignore so-called number of max engagements, it means jack shit especially on PoTD) the two aforementioned aspects were rendered inane.

Idem for picking feats, they were reduced to such a degree that you basically couldn't go wrong, and the feats that were available cross-class didn't matter anyway because they were useless utility shit. Gone are the days of theory crafting and carefully designing your EK from level one by carefully niggerfiddling with the Byzantine feat tree so you would not be denied still spell and heavy armor prof. by the time you reach level 15.

Lo and behold same applies to skill selection, apart from mandatory athletics for tanks and a couple of other ones, it just didn't matter anymore so long as you reached the obnoxious cutoff for passing skill checks in dialogue and scripted events.

Then there was the lack of TB at release which was an ABYSMAL design choice since once again, it wrestled control out of your hands and just played itself. To counter that, the decision was made to include buffs that are impossible to cast outside of combat, which made RTwP somewhat more tactical due to strained action economy, but that also introduced a great deal of problems on it's own.

This was not rectified by a patch, but the system evolved in PoE II to include TB, a sound choice by all means...

 

[LanciaArdita]

Now I don't remember any particularly unbalanced and OP build in the original (but that may well be due to failing memory since I only played it at release), but there certainly were such ones in the sequel.

You could niggercraft a monk/mage build wielding the spirit lance that does physical AoE, and together with Swift Flurry (monk ability that gives extra attack procced by critical) that would start an AoE loop which would render 80-90% of the encounters trivial. This was never patched AFAIK.

A system that allows such gameplay all the while claiming to be balanced is engaged in a schizoid war with itself basically.

As I understand that shitting on PoE on this forum doubles as an introductory thread, my job here is done.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Yeah, Adra Dragon is tough, but it's tough because it doesn't follow the game's rules. It's a big fuck you to people who think the game is easy. WM monks are a highlight as well, I had to reload like 5 times to beat them. I found the white dragon tougher than the Sky Dragon. It depends on what level the party is, I don't think I've found anything challenging after the party hit lvl 10.

All the classes, mobs, and bosses in PoE I and II strictly foillow the game's ruleset.

 

[Lacrymas]

...except the Adra Dragon.

 

[ferratilis]

What WM monks are you guys talking about? I don't remember any monks in WM. For me, Adra Dragon was the hardest, followed by Llengrath and Alpine Dragon fights. And Concelhaut, to some extent.

 

[Butter]

What WM monks are you guys talking about? I don't remember any monks in WM. For me, Adra Dragon was the hardest, followed by Llengrath and Alpine Dragon fights. And Concelhaut, to some extent.

I assume that refers to the guys on the roof of the Abbey.

 

[ferratilis]

Oh, the Ondrites, I remember now. There's a hard way and an easy way to deal with them. Afair, the easy way is following the quest to some point where you can turn some of them to your side, then the fight becomes more manageable. If you attack them outright, it's much harder.

 

[Lacrymas]

The Shining Society bounty or whatever their name was.

 

[Roguey]

A bit old, but Sawyer explains the Pillars lore dumps and the weak writing: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=502982256

I've said this before, elsewhere, but the front-loading of lore in Pillars 1 (specifically) was me trying to recreate the feelings I had reading through 1st and 2nd Ed. AD&D setting books before actually making a character. I remember getting the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk boxed sets and reading through all of the books inside multiple times before I ever made a character in a campaign. When I did, I really felt like I had a sense of who I was making in the world. Those details stuck with me well enough that even 25 years later I was able to make a 3.5 Greyhawk character with just a little bit of brushing up on the setting.

I don't think that is "the way" to build or present a world, and by Deadfire we pulled back a lot (especially in character creation) on the text, but that was the goal I had with the first game. I understand why some players don't like it and why other developers don't build/present their settings in that way.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=505432572

The only reasons we were able to do iterative writing passes on Deadfire were because we had scheduling data from Pillars 1 to work with and we had 5 full-time writers (in contrast to 2 on Pillars 1). Everything took longer to do on Pillars 1 because we built up the engine from the basic Unity middleware package. On most games, we have more writers and we have an engine that's already built to handle branching, conditional dialogue.

Regardless of quality differences, it's not reasonable IMO to compare the scope of Pillars 1 to other Obsidian games. Other than Pathfinder: Adventures, it's the lowest budget game we've made to date. I mean, you can still think the writing sucks, but the scope was much smaller than anything else we had done at that time.

Gives props to 5e for solving the prebuffing problem once and for all, also has only minor regrets about his own solution https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3891331&userid=17931#post512176592

Well, for whatever other issues it has, 5E figured out the solution. In Pillars and Deadfire, we used another (less elegant, IMO) solution, which was that most buffs were marked as Combat Only. Some people complained, but I saw much more feedback that said, "I'm so glad I don't have to pre-buff for ages in every fight" (though in Pillars you could still wind up doing that with food -- changed in the sequel).

 

[Lacrymas]

The character creation screen dumping lore on you is the least of this game's problems ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And 5E didn't solve anything, it just made a specific buff the most optimal choice.

 

[Roguey]

And 5E didn't solve anything, it just made a specific buff the most optimal choice.

"Every caster can cast one buff before combat" is more agreeable than "now to go through x rounds of buffing with all my spellcasters before this encounter in order of longest to shortest lasting"

 

[Bester]

I'm pretty sure "DND" 5 wasn't trying to solve a problem when they made 1 concentration slot. It just so happens to fix the prebuff problem. They ruined magic with this 1 concentration slot bullshit.

 

[Max Damage]

I've played many D&D games, the only buff I always have on regardless is Haste (and Delay Poison Communal in Pathfinders). I've said it before, making shit like Bless usable only in combat just makes me skip in entirely, and something like fire resistance isn't optional anyway when fighting dragon who will roll you over if you don't have it. Instead of casting a buff once every X fights you end up casting it every fight, even in Deadfire where spell attrition doesn't exist. Sometimes I'm not sure if Sawyer is pretending to be this retarded, or just doesn't playtest (as in, sit down and play) his own games from start to finish.

 

[Bester]

Sometimes I'm not sure if Sawyer is pretending to be this retarded, or just doesn't playtest

I just cut myself on occam's razor by reading this.

 

[Sannom]

Instead of casting a buff once every X fights you end up casting it every fight, even in Deadfire where spell attrition doesn't exist.

I disagree. Spell attrition between fights isn't a thing but it's a real thing in fights themselves, what with casters only having 2 slots per spell level. It makes casting some buffs dangerous in the long run if you want to keep those slots for spells more suited to a reaction against something the enemies have done.

 

[Max Damage]

Casting times and limited per combat casts is exactly what makes the mentioned above lvl 1 Blessing never worth learning in first place, Deadfire's Priests in general are one of the least balanced attempts at balancing Clerics, a few really strong spells and many trap options, looks like Sawyer doesn't really care about average player as much as he says.

 

[Haplo]

I was always saying that Sawyer's balance is nothing but a meme.