Fairfax
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2015
- Messages
- 3,518
Sawyer treats it like it's some MMO.
-
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Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread
- Thread starter Perkel
- Start date
IHaveHugeNick
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2015
- Messages
- 1,870,558
First of all, entire Obsidian catalouge is leftovers.
IHaveHugeNick
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2015
- Messages
- 1,870,558
He really does, doesn't he? I really don't get this shit. Its single-player, why even bother messiing around some low level mechanics. Just balance the classes so they hopefully don't suck gigantic ass, fix the bugs and fucking leave it alone. Hell, what does it matter if clasess are balanced. Your guy sucks? Pick the other guy. Its single player, it doesn't matter.
Part of the fun with these games is figuring out the most broken builds and ripping shit. RTwP makes me vomit, so I've made myself a completely passive party build that required minimal input in combat. That's my prefered playstyle for RWTP, that's how I want to play. Sue me. So of course, I launched WM and turns out Sawyer doesn't want me to play the way I want to play, because its not balanced.
Kindly fuck off.
Tigranes
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2009
- Messages
- 10,350
Per rest abilities for other than spellcasters are shit and need rework.Make them really powerful or more of them.Look at this shit
WTF
Also I had a blast going for less than 10 rests achievement and make me think how you can make people don't spam rest.Something like end game score that calculate how many you used,what optional quests completed and how, bosses you killed,make opposing dispositions detract form end score and stuff like that.
Dude, finishing blow is a no brainer pick for any rogue. You have no idea what you're missing out on until your rogue starts crit killing wounded bosses for 100+ damage. Twice, if dual wield. Fearsome Strike is situationally good, because it + the Sneak Attack upgrade talent means guaranteed bonus damage for the next 10 seconds on that enemy, allowing your rogue to basically do hundreds of damage to that enemy without any backup. Can't comment on Heart of Fury as I never tried it.
That said, there's a lot of "never take this sucks shit" abilities. Half the time they seem to be making random changes before fixing the clearly broken / useless stuff. For all their fiddling some tried and true stuff (Slicken, Adragan, etc) seem to stay the same, and you'd think they'd just focus on squishing bugs, fixing the experience gain, etc.
Criticising a dev for continuing to work on the game is fucking stupid though, and I doubt I'll see any of you morons say that when they fix something you don't like. Seriously maybe DOS and WL2 shouldn't get enhanced editions either?
Per enc / per rest will require a full rehaul for POE2, really. It just about held together at the seams this time, but it's a weird, slapdash and fundamentally dysfunctional system that just isn't going to last into higher levels.
It's nice,but good luck reliably criting bosses on PotD ,it's "win more" ability.If the enemy is already in state where FB will kill it you wasted slot for something useful all the time,like Deep wounds.Maybe you take it level 11 when there is nothing more to pick.
Or you can cast Blinding Strike/Sunbeam/Curse of Blackened Sight/Chill Fog every battle and sneak attack 20+ seconds.
All of the non-spellcaster per rest attacks should get at least +20 acc bonus like paladin's Flames of devotion and get one more use.
Tigranes
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2009
- Messages
- 10,350
Thanks for your good luck wishes, I do it all the time. Finishing off powerful enemies that are Badly Wounded or Near Death is actually very useful. Consider a situation where a given enemy has high DR, regeneration, and/or extremely powerful attacks so that taking it out as quickly as possible can turn the entire battle in your favour. Examples include bringing down a spectre (uh, the one that paralyses your entire party) in a large mob first, or bringing down a regenerating troll in a low level Act 1 fight, or taking out the enemy spellcaster, or taking out the petrifying dryad creatures in Act 3. Because your melee rogue is probably designed to have quite high accuracy and is probably already operating on a debuffed enemy, it's easy to ensure that at least one of your two dual-wield finishing blows hit, and being able to hit for 50 or 100 damage to take the guy out reliably instead of taking 2-3 more turns can be crucial. The label "win more" implies that killing something faster is a convenience and nothing more, and that other abilities somehow turn losses into wins magically in a way win-mores don't. The truth is, sometimes it does matter to kill something faster and more reliably, especially with regards to other enemies that are still alive and what else you could do with those 2 turns.
I agree with you about fearsome strike, although my point was it lets the rogue do it when backup is not available. But this is exactly why the abilities themselves should get a lot more attention instead of all this random fiddling they insist on doing. There's no real consistency; some per encs are just meh, some per rests are very powerful, others are not, etc. For instance finishing blow already gets 2/rest, but god knows why some of the others don't. If they do the right kind of rebalancing, the per enc spell rules is less of a problem (though it would still need overhauling for POE2).
I agree with you about fearsome strike, although my point was it lets the rogue do it when backup is not available. But this is exactly why the abilities themselves should get a lot more attention instead of all this random fiddling they insist on doing. There's no real consistency; some per encs are just meh, some per rests are very powerful, others are not, etc. For instance finishing blow already gets 2/rest, but god knows why some of the others don't. If they do the right kind of rebalancing, the per enc spell rules is less of a problem (though it would still need overhauling for POE2).
Sensuki
Arcane
turns
Ellef
Deplorable
Right, i'm not reading all this shit. Is there anything in this expansion that would bring back those disappointed in the basegame and have uninstalled it?
No.
Fairfax
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2015
- Messages
- 3,518
Quite the opposite, and I like the game.
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2014
- Messages
- 537
1.1 seconds (base 1 sec). Is that right? You wouldn't want to blink.
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,758
Despite not playing it I can tell that
story: it's there and not worth mentioning
combat: better encounters than the base game, but also more trash too because of the higher combat density
soul weapons: an interesting concept, but the "weapon needs x y kills to level up (as in, the weapon itself needs to get the kill, not just do damage)" sounds annoying as hell and not worth it to me
I feel confident not getting this was the right call for me.
Playing with TWM is more fun than without.
Just wouldn't bring around someone who didn't even like PoE enough to finish it (or think they would ever want to, having uninstalled it).
It does make playing through the vanilla content after doing TWM areas a whole new incredibly dull low (so most of act 2 and act 3), but the highs of TWM areas at appropriately-low-level (~6 to start, scaled up isn't so hot) and Cragholdt at ~max level is more fun than anything vanilla offered. And even without TWM content, unless you're dodging side quests, you're likely to feel like you're too powerful for a lot of the content. It seems to me all the quests from act 2 onward were made to challenge a party of the lowest level they could be when receiving it (~6), so once you've done 5 or 6 quests the rest of the act is out-leveled. So it's not such a quality loss, going from "most of the act you're a little overpowered" to "all of the act you're an unstoppable god"
.
Just wouldn't bring around someone who didn't even like PoE enough to finish it (or think they would ever want to, having uninstalled it).
It does make playing through the vanilla content after doing TWM areas a whole new incredibly dull low (so most of act 2 and act 3), but the highs of TWM areas at appropriately-low-level (~6 to start, scaled up isn't so hot) and Cragholdt at ~max level is more fun than anything vanilla offered. And even without TWM content, unless you're dodging side quests, you're likely to feel like you're too powerful for a lot of the content. It seems to me all the quests from act 2 onward were made to challenge a party of the lowest level they could be when receiving it (~6), so once you've done 5 or 6 quests the rest of the act is out-leveled. So it's not such a quality loss, going from "most of the act you're a little overpowered" to "all of the act you're an unstoppable god"
.
Ellef
Deplorable
Thanks all, hadn't thought about this game for a while but a friend mentioned that TWM had some changes that might bring me back, but eh. It's all about waiting for DOS:EE now, I think.
The result of TWM and patch 2.0 is that now, once in a blue moon, the combat isn't complete garbage. In my opinion the only way to un-fuck combat for PoE 2, which is within Obsidian's current capabilities, is to make a faithful replica of IE round-based combat. Which they'll never do of course. Because, in case you've missed the memo, IE combat wasn't fun, and even if you happen to think it's fun, smarter people than you have already established that you just think you know what you want, but in fact you want PoE's shit combat. There.
Sky
Novice
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2012
- Messages
- 10
Obsidian just failed to grasp what makes IE combat fun and unique, they tried to replicate it with a MMO like approach that makes combat very static and boring.
While I don't remember the exact numbers for Baldur's Gate at 30fps (I usually play it at 50) lets say that a round is 6 seconds and an attack takes 1 sec; a fighter with 2 APR will attack twice than wait 4 secs in those he can move or use potions and even magic wands (with 9+ int) since there is a different cooldown going on.
In POE, in a similar situation, a fighter will attack once (lets assume a 1 sec attack animation) than wait 2 secs than swing again, on paper it looks the same since in both games the fighter is dishing 0,33333 APS but gameplay wise is completely different; in BG you are encouraged to reposition ranged units and casters can use a spell any time is needed with the timing that the player wants without waiting for the attack cooldown to finish: this makes for snappy, reactive and tactical combat.
POE rewards you for having characters stay put and do nothing else but attack and spam abilities even with movement penalty and engagement removed.
As if the combat was not static and boring enough, engagement and slow cooldown on movement are the final nail in the coffin; with them going against and conflicting with gameplay elements and tools that could be fun otherwise: for example reach weapons are almost impossible to take advantage off since in cramped spaces your tank will need to eat a disengagement attack when moving a pixel away to make space or in open locations the mob will surround the tank on all sides making ranged weapons king in all situation with the ability of staying still and firing away.
Status effects are boring as fuck, aside from paralysis and charm (and even those have a very short duration) every status effect is boring crap that bring only some maluses with no game changing effect: blind in BG will result in characters stumbling about, scared characters will run for their life, poison if not cured will result in death very soon, petrify is a form of possibly reversible instant death and so on.
The only character stat in the game that matters is level.
This mmo like approach means that to have a good game you need to fight only monsters around your level, if you fight monsters that are way higher level all your attacks and debuffs will either miss or graze. Even when targeting the lowest defense most of the times the debuffs will not be enough to get the other defenses to approachable levels, on the other hand, enemies will crit with any attack and make quick work of your party. And after doing a bunch of fetch quest your party will start to steamroll everything. Even if you make an entire party of characters with 10s in all stats your experience will be the same, It's almost as the game was designed to make sure that every build could just power trough with level as their crutch.
Exp in this game makes no sense.
While I could appreciate POE xp system in a different game, 90% of POE is about killing shit and it just feels wrong when, in a game about killing shit, you need to stop and go help some peasant in order for your characters to get better at killing shit. This is also what contributes greatly in the difficulty curve sucking badly: if you delve in the mega dungeon before going to defiance bay I doubt you would be able to fight crystal spiders and “not mindflayers” easily because you don't get that much xp, wile in Defiance you can get shitloads just talking to people and solving simple quests.
Another aspect that I find annoying is the camping system. While it was very far from perfect and easy to exploit in IE games, in pillars it as no meaning whatsoever: not only you can rest everywhere without penalty but, playing on most difficulties, the game almost nags you to rest, since you find so many supplies and you can only carry two you will hand up resting every time you find one. The game not only feels balanced to appease rest spammers it's almost like it wants you to feel proud of the fact that you only needed to rest every other room…
Souls aka purple shit that ruins the game.
I find the story in this game pretty bsb but souls in particular are constantly ruining the experience by taking away consequences of your actions: you go trough a quest or a series of quests, you expect the results to reflect your choices but no… shit happens cause of souls instead.
A good example of that can be found right at the beginning of the game when you can resolve the prologue in all kind of ways having the warrior and the rogue not only die or survive but even betray you depending on your actions… than comes the purple storm that smears shit in your face and makes everything that happened before meaningless.
Kingdom of Analur, DOS and now pillars are all games that would be better by having less “purple shit that makes no sense” in them.
Overall bad conceived game.
I don’t know if the game suffered from pressure from thepublisher backers or what but some choices in design are just bad: there are too many areas in the game that feel pitiful; cutting back on locations and flashing out the ones left could have been a good idea. Defiance is just sad, if you read the text description of copperlane than you take a look at the marketplace... well, it's justfucking pathetic. I wont even bring Athkatla into the equation but Baldur's Gate resembles the description of Defiance more than the “in game Defiance”.
I get that backer characters needed a place in the game but is the fanfic piece on every single one of them really essential? Also could they not make them fit a little better? Why not make a quest where there are a bunch of godlikes being oppressed living in the sewers or something and place there all the godlike backers that stick out like a sore thumb, than put the other flashy backers in the oppressing faction and have a little c&c… I dunno every town feels like a MMO hub with players dicking about.
If I needed to salvage the games economy/strategic resources management I will probably make a few changes: remove the stash, make items on the ground despawn every 8 hours, give the ability to drop non quest items to the ground, remove camping supplies number limit and make supplies expensive to buy like 5k +.
The D100 crap, combat systems and characters stats and progression are rotten to the core, they should be overhauled with a less boring/more practical approach.
What I don't get is why did they even try to reinvent the wheel, in BG systems work just fine, the xp progression already discourages you from grinding lesser enemies since they give very low xp and it will work even better in POE since there are no respawning enemies.
While I don't remember the exact numbers for Baldur's Gate at 30fps (I usually play it at 50) lets say that a round is 6 seconds and an attack takes 1 sec; a fighter with 2 APR will attack twice than wait 4 secs in those he can move or use potions and even magic wands (with 9+ int) since there is a different cooldown going on.
In POE, in a similar situation, a fighter will attack once (lets assume a 1 sec attack animation) than wait 2 secs than swing again, on paper it looks the same since in both games the fighter is dishing 0,33333 APS but gameplay wise is completely different; in BG you are encouraged to reposition ranged units and casters can use a spell any time is needed with the timing that the player wants without waiting for the attack cooldown to finish: this makes for snappy, reactive and tactical combat.
POE rewards you for having characters stay put and do nothing else but attack and spam abilities even with movement penalty and engagement removed.
As if the combat was not static and boring enough, engagement and slow cooldown on movement are the final nail in the coffin; with them going against and conflicting with gameplay elements and tools that could be fun otherwise: for example reach weapons are almost impossible to take advantage off since in cramped spaces your tank will need to eat a disengagement attack when moving a pixel away to make space or in open locations the mob will surround the tank on all sides making ranged weapons king in all situation with the ability of staying still and firing away.
Status effects are boring as fuck, aside from paralysis and charm (and even those have a very short duration) every status effect is boring crap that bring only some maluses with no game changing effect: blind in BG will result in characters stumbling about, scared characters will run for their life, poison if not cured will result in death very soon, petrify is a form of possibly reversible instant death and so on.
The only character stat in the game that matters is level.
This mmo like approach means that to have a good game you need to fight only monsters around your level, if you fight monsters that are way higher level all your attacks and debuffs will either miss or graze. Even when targeting the lowest defense most of the times the debuffs will not be enough to get the other defenses to approachable levels, on the other hand, enemies will crit with any attack and make quick work of your party. And after doing a bunch of fetch quest your party will start to steamroll everything. Even if you make an entire party of characters with 10s in all stats your experience will be the same, It's almost as the game was designed to make sure that every build could just power trough with level as their crutch.
Exp in this game makes no sense.
While I could appreciate POE xp system in a different game, 90% of POE is about killing shit and it just feels wrong when, in a game about killing shit, you need to stop and go help some peasant in order for your characters to get better at killing shit. This is also what contributes greatly in the difficulty curve sucking badly: if you delve in the mega dungeon before going to defiance bay I doubt you would be able to fight crystal spiders and “not mindflayers” easily because you don't get that much xp, wile in Defiance you can get shitloads just talking to people and solving simple quests.
Another aspect that I find annoying is the camping system. While it was very far from perfect and easy to exploit in IE games, in pillars it as no meaning whatsoever: not only you can rest everywhere without penalty but, playing on most difficulties, the game almost nags you to rest, since you find so many supplies and you can only carry two you will hand up resting every time you find one. The game not only feels balanced to appease rest spammers it's almost like it wants you to feel proud of the fact that you only needed to rest every other room…
Souls aka purple shit that ruins the game.
I find the story in this game pretty bsb but souls in particular are constantly ruining the experience by taking away consequences of your actions: you go trough a quest or a series of quests, you expect the results to reflect your choices but no… shit happens cause of souls instead.
A good example of that can be found right at the beginning of the game when you can resolve the prologue in all kind of ways having the warrior and the rogue not only die or survive but even betray you depending on your actions… than comes the purple storm that smears shit in your face and makes everything that happened before meaningless.
Kingdom of Analur, DOS and now pillars are all games that would be better by having less “purple shit that makes no sense” in them.
Overall bad conceived game.
I don’t know if the game suffered from pressure from the
I get that backer characters needed a place in the game but is the fanfic piece on every single one of them really essential? Also could they not make them fit a little better? Why not make a quest where there are a bunch of godlikes being oppressed living in the sewers or something and place there all the godlike backers that stick out like a sore thumb, than put the other flashy backers in the oppressing faction and have a little c&c… I dunno every town feels like a MMO hub with players dicking about.
If I needed to salvage the games economy/strategic resources management I will probably make a few changes: remove the stash, make items on the ground despawn every 8 hours, give the ability to drop non quest items to the ground, remove camping supplies number limit and make supplies expensive to buy like 5k +.
The D100 crap, combat systems and characters stats and progression are rotten to the core, they should be overhauled with a less boring/more practical approach.
What I don't get is why did they even try to reinvent the wheel, in BG systems work just fine, the xp progression already discourages you from grinding lesser enemies since they give very low xp and it will work even better in POE since there are no respawning enemies.
Last edited:
Immortal
Arcane
Excidium II
Self-Ejected
What are you, a nun?
Immortal
Arcane
I think he means that the guy is able to articulate why the game is bad without just rage shitting all over it.
As funny as it is to say "This Game is Fucking Shit" - it doesn't really say much of value.
Mortmal
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2009
- Messages
- 9,502
No , but saying the game sucks and few line of tew of profanity isnt very informative . Now thats good feedback too bad no designers wil lever read it.
Sensuki
Arcane
D&D attributes do matter - particularly in 2E and 3E, although some attributes don't matter much if at all for some classes (eg. Intelligence as a 2E fighter).
Con can give regeneration, bonus HP for Warrior classes in 2E, Intelligence determines max spells and bonus spells for Wizards ... etc
Not saying it's the absolute best way to do attribute design - but overall your attribute scores matter a lot more than in Pillars of Eternity and in PE they were specifically designed so that you could just randomly assign them and do just fine - to protect dummies from themselves and to support lolplaying.
Con can give regeneration, bonus HP for Warrior classes in 2E, Intelligence determines max spells and bonus spells for Wizards ... etc
Not saying it's the absolute best way to do attribute design - but overall your attribute scores matter a lot more than in Pillars of Eternity and in PE they were specifically designed so that you could just randomly assign them and do just fine - to protect dummies from themselves and to support lolplaying.
Couple more spells and 1hp regen when you can rest when you want,whoopty doo.Stats suck in d&d games too(not talking about the real tt),but if other designer get his hands on Pillars it can make it more interesting.Cut the level up bonuses and put them in the stats and talents or make items that require stats to wear.Though I agree that no bad stat distribution is kind of lame.
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