Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Butter]

I'm about 10 minutes into this video. It seems pretty good so far.

 

[Ryan muller]

Is PoE 2 any good?

 

[Butter]

Is PoE 2 any good?

It's about on par with the first game. Itemization and character building are better. Stealth is better. The prose is less indulgent and overwrought. The companions are worse. The UI is worse. The story is worse. The systems design is worse. You play it to try out different multi-class and sub-class combinations in an open world. The first game is a more cohesive and satisfying experience IMO.

 

[Ryan muller]

Is PoE 2 any good?

It's about on par with the first game. Itemization and character building are better. Stealth is better. The prose is less indulgent and overwrought. The companions are worse. The UI is worse. The story is worse. The systems design is worse. You play it to try out different multi-class and sub-class combinations in an open world. The first game is a more cohesive and satisfying experience IMO.

Atleast the exposition problem is less terrible?

1 had absolutely zero sense of pacing, i was tired of reading 15 hours in

 

[Lios]

Is PoE 2 any good?

PoE 2 has maybe the best rpg itemization of all time.
Multiclassing means that you have even more options and toys to play with in character creation which is always good.
Open world with freedom to tackle your own battles and various factions which you can appease or betray to progress means replayability.
More skill checks and CYOA segments.

Writing is mostly bad sitcom-tier "Let's have a pirate cruise!!!". This goes for companions too which are OK, but I liked PoE 1 companions better (and I must say, I found PoE 1 companions well written in general, not just in comparison to the PoE microcosm)
There is no solid pacing here either, but you don't care anyway because it's open world. Work for a faction for a while and unlock the final island. Really bad endgame, by the way. The story in general doesn't go anywhere. Just don't think about it too much and have fun in a virtual playground.

I vastly prefer PoE 1 sombre and mournful atmosphere and writing, but I had much, much more fun with PoE 2. It's like being in a vacation for a few days after a year of getting wrecked by your day job: you want to have some fun without caring about anything else for as long as the vacations last.

Oh and make sure to download this: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/32
It improves the experience so much, it should be part of the official game.

 

[Haplo]

Is PoE 2 any good?

It's about on par with the first game. Itemization and character building are better. Stealth is better. The prose is less indulgent and overwrought. The companions are worse. The UI is worse. The story is worse. The systems design is worse. You play it to try out different multi-class and sub-class combinations in an open world. The first game is a more cohesive and satisfying experience IMO.

Atleast the exposition problem is less terrible?

1 had absolutely zero sense of pacing, i was tired of reading 15 hours in

Yeah, I'd say general gameplay and exploration is much better. Also the city hub is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better. Although trying to absorb its content all in one go might lead to fatigue. Good idea to make some exploration breaks between conquering the city - even if only on the very same island.

One other huge factor - combat is far better and less repetitive. PoE1 was sending hordes of same-ish mobs map after map after map. PoE2 has MUCH better encounter design and far fewer trash mobs/unnecessary combat.

Itemization might be the best in a computer game, ever.

 

[almondblight]

One thing that gets me is that PotD feels about right for the boss fights but it makes the trash fights a real slog, especially given how many of them there are. It's also annoying that they don't let you switch the difficulty during the game. I'd be interested in seeing what Hard mode is like and comparing, but not so interested in that I'd be willing to go through that prologue again.

 

[Grunker]

Is PoE 2 any good?

It's about on par with the first game. Itemization and character building are better. Stealth is better. The prose is less indulgent and overwrought. The companions are worse. The UI is worse. The story is worse. The systems design is worse. You play it to try out different multi-class and sub-class combinations in an open world. The first game is a more cohesive and satisfying experience IMO.

Astoundingly precise summary. Overall I like PoE2 better, especially because of turn-based mode, but the above is pretty much correct

 

[General Disarray]

Playing through the game with a fighter that mainly use long guns. Works pretty well and is fun. But I just realised that PoE char system with muscle wizards is the best system to roleplay as Judge Holden! Normally strength and int combo is unintuitive in rpgs but it worlds perfectly in PoE system. I imagine him being lawful evil. Maybe it might work to play him in DA:O also sense it has more evil choices in that game.

 

[almondblight]

Finally trying to finish this up after dropping it around White March/Twin Elms. A few things that annoy me:

1. The way stat bonuses stack is unclear and the system does show it. If you have a +3 might ring and a +3 might armor, one of the +3's should turn red to show it's being suppressed. They don't even show stats on the inventory screen, so it's easy not to notice the differences.

It's also annoying with soul bound items. After several hours you unlock the final level of the soul bound item, and then it turns out it doesn't matter because it's boosting a stat another soul bound item is. In general, it feels like you need a lot of metagame knowledge to plan your characters, and it gets kind of boring with the amount of +X stuff you have (especially since there are 12 item slots that can boost your abilities and which can cancel each other out.

I've mostly just given up on trying to optimize.

2. Combat is like a fireworks display with a million different things going off all the time and it's hard to tell what's going on. It doesn't make the game look better, it just looks like a giant mess. I even got rid of one of my suits of armor that had a chance to mass cast thorn armor on being hit, because the animation for it had giant thorn trees sprouting up around my characters and 6 feet above them. Why not just tone it down and do a small thorn shimmer on the characters? You don't need to turn every single thing into an assault on the eyes.

And then you have a bunch of different buffs and debuffs going on everyone all the time. Debuff stacking also suffers from the same issues as bonus stacking, there's just so much -X abilities and you have to try to remember what afflictions suppress what (if someone is blinded and dazed, is it a waster to weaken them? What about hobbling them?).

3. I was never a fan of the per rest system, and was even tempted to drop the Wizard and Priest because of it. The problem is, again, that without metagame knowledge you're just flailing about trying to guess what to do. There's a group of fishpeople who stun, do I use some spells? None? I have no idea if there's going to be a campfire in the chest next to them, or if I have to go through 10 more enemy groups until there's the next campfire.

It ends up working OK, but I find myself playing in a weird way. Not using any spells/per rest abilities until some of my characters start to get low health. Then when their health is low, I start throwing everything I can at the battles. Or I'll find a campfire, and go around using up everything I it recovers (health, spells, abilities, etc.) until my chars are completely exhausted, then go back to it and rest. In the end it works out well enough, but it's kind of a strange way to play.

4. I avoid a lot of the unnecessary combat in order to not grow bored and quit. I completely avoid anything in Caed Nua, and avoid clearing out the wilderness areas. PotD difficulty feels pretty good for the non-trash mob stuff, but it makes going through trash mobs a boring slog. I'

 

[Haplo]

You know you can buy camping supplies and rest pretty much wherever, right?

Then again, playing without ever buying the camping supplies could be an interesting and fun challenge.

Regarding debuffs, I do think that the Deadfire streamlining was a very welcome change. However my answer to the question, which are usefull and how many you can stack would be: Yes.
No such thing as too many debuffs. And their penalties should stack, AFAIR?

 

[almondblight]

You know you can buy camping supplies and rest pretty much wherever, right?

Then again, playing without ever buying the camping supplies could be an interesting and fun challenge.

Yeah, I'm sure I'm hording things too much. My general idea is I want one campfire in case I really get demolished somewhere, and another in case a boss fight comes up (I never want to have to backtrack halfway through a dungeon, and haven't so far). So I'm always topped off, and only use them when I can recharge them (I actually end up using them even less, I've left a number out in the wilderness). I guess I should just trust the designers to give me enough and always drop one near a boss fight (and to be fair, they seem to). It just feels weird using up supplies assuming the designers are going to bail me out, rather than keeping them around for emergencies (since you can only carry two).

I'm not 100% certain, but I don't think I've bought a single campfire the entire game.

Regarding debuffs, I do think that the Deadfire streamlining was a very welcome change. However my answer to the question, which are usefull and how many you can stack would be: Yes.
No such thing as too many debuffs. And their penalties should stack, AFAIR?

I think they suppress other debuffs the same way buffs get suppressed? But you're right, just like with buffs I'm happier not worrying whether or not I'm playing optimally, and instead just throwing everything at the enemy and hoping for the best.

 

[Haplo]

I don't know about suppressing. I remember being able to debuff enemies by some really massive figures.

 

[almondblight]

According to this, some get suppressed. From what I understand it's if they're directly targeting the same thing. But they can influence the same thing without getting suppressed if one of them is influencing that through an intermediary stat.

This is one of the things that annoys me to about the game, there's just too much stuff, and so they through in rules that kind of felt like hacks to balance it, but didn't explain it. There's really no need for 12 different item slots that can give you stat boosts and dozens or hundreds of different items that can do so. Just like you don't need so many debuffs in the game. When they realized they went overboard, they should have just cut back instead of throwing in rules that most people don't even realize are there.

 

[almondblight]

The Sky Dragon fight really drives home the issues with Pillars. I've had a couple of fights now where the Sky Dragon just became untargetable, and I had to restart. Sometimes where the pathfinding just kills off one of my characters (Aloth has a path to X, I tell him to do something at X, a few seconds later I notice he's at the other end of the screen trying to circle around the Sky Dragon. The size of the Sky Dragon is big, meaning I can't see or easily target what's behind her. To add to this, I'm trying to do precise things like bunching everyone up to cast protection from fear, or spreading people out so I don't get my party wiped by the breath attack.

The whole thing feels less like I'm planning a strategy and more like I'm trying to care a big plate filled with ball bearings down the stairs while trying to make sure none of them roll off the edge.

 

[ColonelMace]

I always found dragon fights in PoE1 to be a complete mess in terms of feedback. I never see neither the tail nor the breath attack animation. It's just chunks of hp that suddenly disappear and you gotta keep attention to it constantly. They're very disappointing.

However, once you know the drill, I don't remember them being particularly annoying to strategize upon. The Sky Dragon specifically is the least hp-bloated of the three, and should be the least annoying to play against.

 

[almondblight]

The defense bloat seems to be a bigger issue than the HP bloat. Once I sent Durance to reapply Protection from Fear on the frontliners, but it's such a low range he has to run up to the dragons face, and she did a one hit KO. Without any buffs, my melee were hitting her and doing almost no damage, while Aloth was throwing every spell he had at her and having everything miss. They lasted for a couple of minutes, but just weren't able to damage it. It feels hard to do without a Priest or Cipher.

 

[Butter]

Sounds like a PotD problem. Don't listen to the clowns ITT insisting it's the best difficulty to play on.

 

[Sweeper]

Sounds like a PotD problem. Don't listen to the clowns ITT insisting it's the best difficulty to play on.

It absolutely is thoughever.

 

[almondblight]

Sounds like a PotD problem. Don't listen to the clowns ITT insisting it's the best difficulty to play on.

I can't change it now, though. I'm honestly not really sure if I like it or not.

Some of the PotD combat feels real swingy, and a lot of time it feels like I'm doing well or not based on luck (or the bugs and pathfinding screwing me over). For instance, when I finally beat the Sky Dragon, it was because a couple of Gaze of the Adragans happened to connect (weirdly, the time I didn't have Eldritch Aim running). Even though they kept missing on other tries, I got a couple of good rolls this try that just happened to be when my frontliners weren't mass stunned/proned by the dragon, and those few seconds I was able to do about 95% of the damage I needed to. Then the dragon was "almost dead" for a long time while my entire party was slowly chipping away at it.

It was lucky as well, because Grieving Mother kept missing with her paralyzes that time (usually it's the opposite, and she's hitting about 60% of the time while Aloth keeps missing).

I had an unlucky one before that, where the dragon - who was pretty far away at the time - cast breath, and my entire party went from 100% to 10% health. I thought the dragon was occupied but I guess someone went just out of melee range and that was enough to ruin everything.

 

[ColonelMace]

Ah yeah, POTD bloats everything, including the composition of trash encounters (the biggest gripe I have with it). I get how the Sky Dragon in POTD with the occasional level scaling on can be a chore to go through.

Gaze of the Adragan

That's the single best wizard spell against dragons iirc. I remember it rarely connected against the adra dragon even on hard. Can't imagine the savescumming fiesta it became in POTD (prior to White March release, that is).

 

[almondblight]

Ah yeah, POTD bloats everything, including the composition of trash encounters (the biggest gripe I have with it). I get how the Sky Dragon in POTD with the occasional level scaling on can be a chore to go through.

I think it's the amount of trash encounters, and the number of enemies in general that really drain my energy for playing on PotD and will probably leave me to dropping the game (and the game isn't good enough for me to want to start over again on hard).

For instance, with the Sky Dragon, there's two parts of the fight - the first half where you're taking out all of the blights while keeping the dragon distracted enough that it doesn't take out your entire party with a breath attack, and then the actual battle with the dragon after that. You can't save during combat, so you have to go through the entirety of the tedious first phase of the combat (taking out blights while distracting the dragon) each time you want to try a different strategy on the dragon. And it's easy to lose in the first part if you're not babysitting everyone constantly - one of your back row folk screwed up their pathfinding and ran right in front of the dragon - reload. One of the melee folks attacking the dragon got a little too far away, so the dragon kills off the party with breath attack - reload. Oh, the bug where you can't target the dragon again - reload. Or how much an unlucky returning storm strike can screw things up.

Also having to micromanage the cipher during the entirety of that time to farm focus, because after the blights go down she can't really regenerate any focus from the dragon.

It took me a few tries to figure out the best tactic for the dragon itself (which ended up being, "ignore its stats, just throw everything at it and hope you get a few good rolls here and there"), and wading through the first half of the fight just to try a new strategy against the dragon was really annoying.

I also wonder, since I actually had better luck when I wasn't using Eldritch Aim than when I was, if PotD suffers from the same thing many games do when they scale. That is, they don't scale all of the stats equally, so some stuff that was very useful during normal playthroughs ends up losing its usefulness during the higher difficulties.

 

[goregasm]

I'm replaying this as well, still early, just got caed nua, have had it since launch and have a good chunk of hours in it throughout various characters.

I definitely agree with a fair amount of your sentiments when looking back to when I first picked up the game, but now I feel I "get" most of the decisions.

Combat is this weird mix of kitchen sink and rock paper scissors but CC is key in it, especially on POTD where you will run into 12 plus enemies at times.

Lots of kiting, lots of doorways etc. Which can certainly get tiresome.

I remember my last playthrough I dropped right around twin elm/wm2 and same deal with the (ice?) dragon...the one in the cave, because suddenly the game puts you in an arena where position and cc mean fuck all.

I think most of the issue for me revolves around PoTD and the stat increases, especially for dragons. There are powers/spells ciphers and wizards get that can absolutely make the fights with dragons easier though.

The mess with effects never really got to me, I suppose because I played cipher in almost all of my playthroughs and it required me to micro and pay attention a bit more than say a fighter.

At least for me, it helped pick up on the nuances of abilities quickly, when to use, what to use etc.

The per rest system is something I VASTLY prefer over per encounter across the board, I like that there are a mix of them though, and as said earlier, if you get in a fight where you use all of your wizards spells, so be it. I get it's a waste of time to travel back for supplies, but I dunno, I like the idea of having limits on things.

I will say from playing this for almost 100 hours at launch, putting it down, and picking it up for about 10 hours a year or two ago, then picking it up again this past week, some things seem different...

Loot seems worse. I seem to be finding much less equipment and not nearly as good. It seems to be focused on purchasing stuff from the deadfire guy and vendors, at least early on, which sucks for a dopamine hit, but whatever.

Latest patch fucked up some barks and audio too. Overall though I still enjoy the game for what it is and will eventually get around to playing 2 before my kids put me in an old age home.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Loot and itemization has always sucked donkey cock and balls, items are for the most part similar and just not interesting to experiment with.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Atleast the exposition problem is less terrible?

1 had absolutely zero sense of pacing, i was tired of reading 15 hours in

The key is not reading the moronic self-inserts from the backers. All the 'blast from the past' characters can be safely ignored and they are, fortunately, color coded.