Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Catch-All

Ship combat: keep moving forward until you can prepare to board, then proceed to wipe out the enemy crew. Don't even bother with fancy port and starboard maneuvers to line your cannons up, just get in there and slaughter them.

Also, with ship crew, once you've explored more ports, try to recruit and task experienced crew with the right skills in the most suitable role e.g. a 3* surgeon gives a huge boost like 40% reduced crew healing time. Not sure what the corresponding yields are for cannoneers, chefs, deckhands, navigators and boatswain...but if that makes such a difference then I figure it must do something beneficial.

I'm at the storyline point where I have to choose a faction. So I've paused the story to finish every other quest and bounties available plus map the rest of Deadfire. Battles are laughably easy at level 15 and I'm not even level capped. Eder and Pallegina no longer use shields and I just put everyone on autocombat. Hopefully next run on POTD will get me to see combat in a different light.

I think I am ready to turn on scaling, but only upwards. A lot of encounters are becoming facerolls, since I really took my time doing every quest in neketaka.

I shelved PoE2 till they beef-ify the encounters. Hope the patch hits early June as I was really digging the game.

XCOM2:WoTC has been filling the gap, though that's half customizing appearance of soldiers given all the mods (worse than 'Fashion Souls').

Finished the story. It was a bit of a letdown.

Really enjoyed the combat aspect of the game, like Icewind Dale. I started a POTD game with level scaling everywhere. Seems like I missed a few islands so I'll give that a go, on top of clearing the companion quests.

I finished the story yesterday also. I've got mixed feelings. Overall, I liked the settings and characters more than the first game, but the ending - the stuff after the point-of-no-return - seemed underwhelming compared to the first game.

Spoiler:

I don't really see what making this game less linear added. I thought it detracted from the game for the most part. The flow of the story is kind of messed up by the freedom and I think they'd have been better served by exercising a little more control. I liked the different factions, but I don't think they were integrated with the main plot well enough. I know it's a common thing in RPGs to have a world threatening event that you ignore while doing tons of side quests, but this seemed particularly egregious. I guess what kept me going is that a lot of the characters were interesting or fun.

I did enjoy it a lot, I guess I just had really high expectations that weren't quite met. That said, I plan to do another play through or go back to my save and spend some more time with the game eventually. The only new companion I really spent any time with was Xoti, so I want to do a game with the other three in my party plus maybe use a history much different from the one I imported from my PoE1 game.

I did notice that a beta for the next patch is up as of a couple days ago and includes an intro skip option and also some work on the difficulty of PotD as well as other fixes. It looks like it will be a pretty huge patch when all is said and done.

The ending was so abrupt, I suspect it needs a lot of DLC to flesh out the aftermath of those events. I am definitely finding POTD more enjoyable than Veteran, I suspect it's the difficulty level quite a few people here will enjoy as well, but I also get that some will want to shelve the game until they iron out the balancing issues.

I've found myself stuck in the gullet the last couple of days exploring in, around and under the area. The combat (i'm playing on Veteran) certainly doesn't seem to be providing that much of a challenge - even when I encounter multiple enemies that are a level or two above mine.

Spoiler:

I'm seriously underwhelmed with my rewards for completing the Conche's call

My Swashbulker does occasionally get knocked unconscious but he deals out a tremendous amount of damage when he's in his element - getting occassionaly taken out comes with the job description I guess.

I'm been enjoying it but like I said - it's not really grabbed me in the same way PoE1 did. I like the setting, and the sailing/map exploration is infinitely better than PoE1's areas mechanics, but overall I don't feel as engrossed in it as I was for the original.

I am still very early on in the story but I think there are a few issues. I think they started of the main story with a bang (or a grasp so to speak). The problem is that all the side stories and companion bits then quickly overtake the main story. I think there is a flaw when I care about filling Xoti's lamp with souls, Aloth's mission and finding Eder's woman than chasing after Eothas. Either that or it is easier to forget or push away the main plot when the ratio of side plots to main plot is 10 to 1.

Of course take this with a grain of salt because I am not even close to completing the main story. Those who have or are much further along, please chime in

Just got back from vacation where my extended family went to Disney. There were 9 of us all trying to figure out where we were going and what we are doing. I just kept hearing in my head: "You must gather your party before venturing forth..."

I love the female narrator's voice in POE2. She's such a good VA.

Umm yeah, so, the main story? It's terrible. We're talking about a race against time that is not a race at all. There's just no reason to progress the plot when you've got unchartered waters needing to be chartered. It doesn't give you any reason to be invested in the plot.

What the story does offer however is the tension between the three factions. Natives, progressive expansionists and then there's the underworld. Of course I picked the swashbuckling Principi because of their awesome VAs.

That said there's a lot of great map design/quest branching giving you flexibility in how you resolve quests. I'd say the side quests or subquests are far superior to the main story itself which is about as exciting as the drawn out pursuit plot in The Last Jedi.

dat keyboard

Hot damn! Also, dagnabbit -- the Queen (our ED) has a bunch of us in, this Saturday, to unslack on our paperwork/admin level backlog. So much paper to destroy :-/

Hrmm, somewhat expected.. in addition to encounter tuning Josh-o leads [that segment] with ~'some abilities got the nerf hammer'.

Recreational Villain wrote:

Hrmm, somewhat expected.. in addition to encounter tuning Josh-o leads [that segment] with ~'some abilities got the nerf hammer'.

Pretty much everything got the nerf hammer as far as I can tell. Doesn't seem to have impacted my ability to win everything on Veteran though.

^Running beta patch (I read there were a bunch of areas that weren't done yet)? Or did you fire it up again just recently? I ask as I'd suspect the nerfs were in the foundation work before the encounters were tuned.

Recreational Villain wrote:

^Running beta patch (I read there were a bunch of areas that weren't done yet)? Or did you fire it up again just recently? I ask as I'd suspect the nerfs were in the foundation work before the encounters were tuned.

Downloaded the 1.1 patch this evening when I logged on and been playing it through. It's definitely changed the game more than a little (there seem to be quite a few cosmetic changes too), but so far veteran feels about the same as it was.

Harder difficulty will be welcome.

I suspect the "detuned" characters will be fighter and monk, possibly barbarian, then wiz and druid spells weakened.

Bfgp wrote:

Harder difficulty will be welcome.

I suspect the "detuned" characters will be fighter and monk, possibly barbarian, then wiz and druid spells weakened.

This is actually a pretty good summary of what’s been changed and what it means.

ProjectEternity subreddit

Kicked the tires a bit last night with a new game and the starting area. Almost all encounters had new adds. Some examples:

The bronzy animancy golem in the beach cave had two wights (or revenants? whatevs) in the same room with him -- ie, not 'skellingtons'.

Both looter groups on 'waterlogged street' buffed. First group had a caster added (iirc) and second group had approx 3 adds with one bearing a skull marker.

Edge-ish of the 'DS' area had the young boars and wurms parked near each other so they all aggro.

Also at the DS, the floor area near the 'cage' with you-know-who: the three (or was it four ?) cougars are now cougars, plus wurms, PLUS some sort of young drake that breaths AOE fire. Wasn't expecting him.. early-Eder with shield modal and the 3-way skill modal (also in defense) had to be healed a few times plus chug a potion so that my testing glass canon (cipher\assassin) didn't get rolled.

It's much harder.

Tldr; it's time to come back everyone!

I'm just off the starting island with my Shattered Pillar/Berserker and we stopped off to fight a wyvern encounter. POTD. Had Xaurip Champ as well. Wiped first time (fought too close to a totem). Second time my Kind Wayfarer/Chanter adventurer and Xoti KO but cleared the battle. Will have to see how the power curve looks like when I start looting the legendary loot.

Also they fixed the bug where an imported save wasn't spawning the fragments of a certain 2H weapon from POE1. Now I can test it fairly quickly once I land in Neketaka!

This patch really punishes your party for trying to take on anything beyond their level. I suppose that's one way to gate encounters/areas where one might be tempted to beeline to loot a specific item.

Difficulty changes sounds good.
Will try to hold out a little longer, some of the upcoming patch changes also sounds really good; this patch was the nerfhammer which Sawyer loves to use, but supposedly weaker abilities are up for buffs later.
Which is really needed, it felt like each ability in Deadfire was much much weaker than in PoE to compensate for dual spec, casts per encounter etc. which made it less interesting to choose between them. Hope they solve some of that.
And of course that first DLC in July. Hope it is early July so coincide with my summer vacation

I'll get to this after I finish the Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor - Martyr campaign. Sounds like my plan of waiting until the first big patch is working out well. Curious to see if they have any quest DLC out by the time I get around to this.

Uh so you know, POTD is now hard. As in, regularly find yourself outnumbered sometimes more than 2:1 hard. The difficulty has made even basic events nailbiting hard on POTD, so much so that a semi casual gamer like me is considering dropping back to Veteran until I can find my feet; the early levels are incredibly difficult because you don't have the gear or abilities/spells or health pool available later on past level 10. It's a little disappointing they decided to take such an approach to difficulty tuning (a lot of times just adding more creatures on top of level scaling) rather than making the fights more exciting. Oh well, I've barely explored Neketaka in this playthrough so my view might change as the party matures.

I have to say that despite this being a mechanically better game that PoE, it feels like a game that has some how lost it's soul. These are very very mild spoilers, I'm only adding the spoiler tag just in case to be honest: Just taking about the factions and one or two of the companions and their quests:

Spoiler:

The writing isn't there - the main quest is no where near as compelling as the original game, and even the character questlines are......... average at best. I quite like Xoti's character, by Maia is just another tough guy (although she's a girl), Aloth is something of a whiner and Eder, as much as I love the guy (I had a Garrus Vakarian moment with him when I got full approval) his storyline could have been so much more interesting if they'd actually followed through on what was suggested.

The factions however are all pretty obnoxious from where I'm standing. The pirates are, well pirates, the Vallian's are unprincipled money grabbing scum (something I'm currently having issues with in real life, which is not endearing them to me), The Raiutai are the British Empire which just makes me feel guilty and the Huana, while probably the most sympathetic faction in the Deadfire, have a dreadful caste system that I just want to smash to the ground.

All of them are pretty contemptible to be honest. I don't really want to side with any of them

Yeah, I mostly agree with that. I dont mind all factions being kinda terrible in various ways - they also all (or at least most) have positive aspects, but the negatives sure make it nearly impossible to care that they might have had a good cause at one point. But again, I think that is fine.
The actual story stuff just isnt as interesting as I found it in the first game - not that the first game was excellent in the story department either, it all was cramped into the later part of the game.

I the end I also just like the type of fantasy in PoE1 more than I like the pirate theme.

Yeah, the issue I have with the factions remains that the game is determined to have them all be equally muddy in a way that is not at all organic. It feels like they are throwing away a fantastic narrative opportunity to explore colonialism and instead opting for squishy centrist nonsense. Aspects of the game are really solid, and it’s interesting for sure - but it’s failures feel really frustrating given how close the game is to being phenomenal.

Agree with everyone. At a certain point later in the game I realized I didn't have a strong connection to anyone in my party, although I'm glad I took at the quipiest characters.

The both-sides-ism of all the factions was bleh too. Yeah when the British were colonizing and then departing India neither side was perfect, but there were magnitudes of difference between them, and actual motives behind the decisions. In Deadfire it feels like every faction focuses on their one trait to the exclusion of all else, including common sense. Very bleh all around, which is disappointing, because the build up and revelations of the first PoE IGN.COM BLEW ME AWAY.

OK, so I'm actively cross with the game now: End game spoilers

Spoiler:

I've reached the point, despite still have quests active for each of the factions in their questlines, where I guess I'm supposed to making a choice. However the game isn't spelling that out - it's just let me complete a Huana quest (With the watershapers guild which as made me dislike them even more) but the conversation with the queen I was meant to have at the end (about releasing the dragon) seemingly started out as me being forced to ally with them instead. I didn't want to do that, so chose the "I haven't made up my mind yet" dialog choices - or at least chose what I thought were those options, and instead it gave me a "I don't believe in your system" outcome instead. I immediately spoke with the queen again, who then immediately gave me a second chance (after I told her I didn't mean for things to work out the way they had - seriously, I haven't made up anything like my mind) but she insisted I'd have to part ways with Maia. again, I didn't want to do that, refused and now the Huana are my active enemy and I can't ally with them any more, even if I wanted to..

It's just so confused and makes no sense at all. What a shame, the writing feels all over the place now. You get the distinct impression that in trying to make it so optional (all the different factions and what have you) that they just lost track of all the different threads and so situations like this can occur.

I'm just going to run to the end game now and hope that it all gets addressed through DLC and patches, but right now my thoughts on this game are running towards active disappointment.

Response on end game stuff brought up by Sorbicol:

Spoiler:

I agree 100% homie G. The Vaillan and Royal Deadfire Company are like that too. You start a conversation, and you're gonna end up either locked as their ally or their enemy, and in BOTH cases you'll lose a party member. (Except for maybe the pirates?) I see what the game is trying to do, but also I should get a chance to convert my party member from their faction to my personal faction, aka, my party. Poorly done all around by PoE2...

Just finished the game and I have to say that my general feelings are of being underwhelmed. There is a lot in this game that needs fixing in a Larian "Extended Edition" way as they did/are doing with the Original Sin games.