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Author Topic: Obsidian's "Pillars of Eternity"  (Read 206078 times)
Ingmar
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Reply #665 on: April 09, 2015, 10:34:20 AM

No real reasons to go fighter over a paladin as far as I can think, Paladin resists are nuts.

Reasons you might go with a fighter: fighters are a bit tankier overall, can engage more targets, have better crowd control, and don't lock you into particular conversation options to maintain their powers at a decent level (main character only for that last bit of course).

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Reply #666 on: April 09, 2015, 10:36:39 AM

Durance has spells to mitigate paralyze and dominate.
He was always one of the ones paralyzed or stunned so he couldn't cast!  It was a keep fight so you can't prepare before hand (and on that note why can't I cast buffs/protections out of combat?), you just click the button and bam you're in a smallish room three feet away from all the enemies.  I basically had to keep reloading until enough of my party resisted their initial barrage of disable spells to fight back.

I even tried to go into the keep and lay down a trap and a durant knock down circle but they got removed when the fight started.

The protection spells cast really fast, if you start off with one of them it typically should go off before the initial barrage. It isn't a guarantee of protection though.

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Reply #667 on: April 09, 2015, 09:06:52 PM

Overall I'm disappointed with the attribute system.
It felt half-baked that all form of damage is increased by Might.
And Perception played no part in Ranged Attack.
I get how heavy weapons draw from Might, but pulling a trigger or casting fireball?
Resolve should affect spellcasting more.
If they don't wanna backdown from this so called Principles of Dr. Sawyer's Balance, this game's banality in combat (nothing wrong with 6 lion pull and 30 guls in cemetery?) will just drag the game down more and more.

I'll just exclude Cipher from my list of complaint, that class is just playing by its own game rule at the moment compared to the rest of the classes.

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Reply #668 on: April 09, 2015, 11:17:31 PM

Overall I'm disappointed with the attribute system.
It felt half-baked that all form of damage is increased by Might.
And Perception played no part in Ranged Attack.
I get how heavy weapons draw from Might, but pulling a trigger or casting fireball?
Resolve should affect spellcasting more.
If they don't wanna backdown from this so called Principles of Dr. Sawyer's Balance, this game's banality in combat (nothing wrong with 6 lion pull and 30 guls in cemetery?) will just drag the game down more and more.

I'll just exclude Cipher from my list of complaint, that class is just playing by its own game rule at the moment compared to the rest of the classes.
I like the attribute system, I just think the concepts it embodies are not properly reflected in dialogue stat checks (and I feel it should utilise a bell curve for gains, but I just like bell curves).

The idea is more gamist than narrativist - you select attributes based on how you want your character to function in combat. Want to deal a lot of damage? Pick Might. Want to interrupt more often? Perception. Want to act faster? Dexterity.

Perception does impact ranged attacks - it increases the chances of them interrupting, which is what perception is designed to do. Resolve, in turn, helps prevent that, which is very useful for long cast times and not that useful for short cast times. If these stats aren't having enough of an impact it's more about the variance being small than about the stats being non-functional, per se.

It might have helped if they'd gone for different names, as there are a lot of assumptions regarding Str vs Con vs Dex inherited from D&D (which had and has an awful attribute system). Element names or something similar.

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Reply #669 on: April 09, 2015, 11:29:45 PM

Concentration doesn't really help if the AI can't even disengage to hit your caster on the backline.
The biggest culprit is the engagement system making most encounter resolved with a static tank and spank.
Deflection, HP, Concentration doesn't play a part in battle for nearly half of my party since the backlines don't get hit. Only the Paladin and Eder gets scratched.
I finished act 2, and every trash combat ends in mostly the same manner: Eder pulls, they mob him, everyone else dps or help keep him alive.
Only shades teleport to the backline and that's what Aloth 'Shade-bait' is for, standing by with a Grimoire Slam. If all else fails, Durance's Withdraw.
Also, having Eder stand at the door and have Durance cast Withdraw on him will make him untargetable. Making it even a bigger joke as the lines of mob just wait to get destroyed one by one by concentrated range attacks.


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Reply #670 on: April 09, 2015, 11:56:22 PM

Worth noting that Resolve seems to be by far the most useful stat for conversation purposes.

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Reply #671 on: April 10, 2015, 12:17:13 AM

Worth noting that Resolve seems to be by far the most useful stat for conversation purposes.

It's basically Charisma with Will save tied to it.

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Reply #672 on: April 10, 2015, 01:07:59 AM

I get how heavy weapons draw from Might, but pulling a trigger or casting fireball?
It's because you're a mighty wizard why so serious?
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Reply #673 on: April 10, 2015, 01:14:06 AM

I finished act 2, and every trash combat ends in mostly the same manner: Eder pulls, they mob him, everyone else dps or help keep him alive.
In my experience fights might start with mobs going for Eder but then as soon as other people start throwing their damage from behind half of the mobs makes beeline for them instead, and so it requires more than just Eder to pin them down at safe distance, since he can only keep 3-4 things engaged max. That may be a result of difficulty setting, like there's higher enemy numbers on hard? idk.

Ranged mobs also love to ignore the tank and target the wizard instead a lot.
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Reply #674 on: April 10, 2015, 01:42:58 AM

I dunno, I play on Hard, and it's very very rare that melee mobs attack my squishies unless I really mess up positioning. Only exceptions are teleporting enemies (shadows/shades), and some troll-type things (those tend to hit whoever they want, though most of the time they end up hitting Eder anyway, plus they're so slow they're easily kited)... but everyone else sticks on him like glue. I do have him specced for all the talents that increase the number of engaged enemies (up to 5 with Defender and Hold the Line) and allow him to control stray mobs (Into the Fray).

Ranged mobs... yeah, rangers are #1 kill priority, since they love focus firing my 0 DR cipher (I just outrange them or break LOS until they're down). Casters do tend to hit Eder more often than not, but they spend 90% of the fight CC'd and/or dead, so I haven't been able to study their tactics in detail  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

e: this is near the end of act 3 and level 12 of the endless dungeon
« Last Edit: April 10, 2015, 01:48:41 AM by Zetor »

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Reply #675 on: April 10, 2015, 01:46:14 AM

I've been going for solo Path of the Damned, so resolve has been pretty important for my casters awesome, for real

However if you actually have a backline and they never get touched I can see why it's less useful. I don't know if that makes it a bad stat, I think there're a few other issues that are causing it to be irrelevant.

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Reply #676 on: April 10, 2015, 02:06:17 AM

Put me in the camp that thinks the stat system isn't much fun.
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Reply #677 on: April 10, 2015, 02:42:35 AM

Hmm. I wish they felt more impactful but I like a system where they matter, as opposed to BG2 where they didn't really matter (except for the caster's prime stat and the key Con thresholds).

Planescape had a fantastic attribute system, despite being 2e AD&D. All the attributes did cool things if you pimped them out - sure it was usually in interactions, but the were 90% of the game.

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Reply #678 on: April 10, 2015, 06:43:18 AM

The goddamn mob composition didn't help. I was exploring a sidequest area and got hit by 30 cultists separated in room by room clearing.
Fuck sake, if you take away the backers NPC from the nearby village they outnumber the population nearly 2 to 1.
That's just stupid.  swamp poop

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Reply #679 on: April 10, 2015, 07:09:45 AM

The goddamn mob composition didn't help. I was exploring a sidequest area and got hit by 30 cultists separated in room by room clearing.
Fuck sake, if you take away the backers NPC from the nearby village they outnumber the population nearly 2 to 1.
That's just stupid.  swamp poop

Considering the population is suffering an slow moving apocalypse, the dead are walking around without souls and the local lord is a crazy nutjob...sounds like an excellent time to form a cult.

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Reply #680 on: April 10, 2015, 06:13:45 PM

For a game that doesn't combat exp this game sure loves to shit combat enemies in your fucking face.
I wouldn't mind so much if most encounters consist of enemies that require planning and teamwork to overcome, but that is not the case.


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Reply #681 on: April 10, 2015, 06:29:16 PM

Combat is annoyingly underwhelming, and classes are unbalanced. I started a new game with a rogue and made a pre-made team. Rogues and ciphers are just nuts.
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Reply #682 on: April 10, 2015, 07:19:06 PM

You don't get xp for combat? swamp poop

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Reply #683 on: April 10, 2015, 07:50:13 PM

You don't get xp for combat? swamp poop

The design lead said he hated the way RPGs devolve into 'murdering people for EXP'.
Instead we get people making bee-lines towards quests that are in no way paced well, if you did most of the side content early, you'll end up outleveling the main content by 2-3 levels not to mention the amount of loot you've amassed is enough to make money a non-issue.

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Reply #684 on: April 10, 2015, 08:33:05 PM

I don't get how people don't always have too much money. I went straight from the beginner dungeon to the first town and sold what I had and ended up with 1000 gold, if you actually kill stuff you get filthy rich very quickly.
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Reply #685 on: April 10, 2015, 10:19:38 PM

It's always surprising to me how some of you seem to hate a game...and then keep playing it anyway...and then keep bitching about the whole experience.

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Reply #686 on: April 10, 2015, 11:05:26 PM

[Clever] Yeah you're supposed to just buy a game, play it, get disappointed and walk off like a chump.

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Reply #687 on: April 11, 2015, 02:45:08 AM

Why not? It's a sunk cost, there's no point in throwing good time after bad money. I've frequently dropped games I'm not having fun with in the first couple hours. It's why I've never gone back to Witcher 2, Space Hulk, etc. /shrug

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Reply #688 on: April 11, 2015, 04:56:14 AM

Oh I don't mind stopping the play, but every chance I get to discuss the game, I'll just fire away till it's dead.
It's a pity, there's a lot of positives from the class mechanics and capturing the IE-feel of the game, but the encounter design is just really poor, I had to dial the difficulty to easy just to cut down the trash mobs from sections to sections.


« Last Edit: April 11, 2015, 06:15:46 AM by rk47 »

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Reply #689 on: April 11, 2015, 06:21:14 AM

Urging question! What do you all prefer and why?

Pillars of Eternity or Divinity Original Sin?


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Reply #690 on: April 11, 2015, 06:54:07 AM

Urging question! What do you all prefer and why?

Pillars of Eternity or Divinity Original Sin?

D:OS writing is weak, but the novelty factor is over the top.
I never played a RPG where you can set up elemental combos so often that it's really the primary way of dealing effective damage. And creativity is rewarded. Where else in RPG can you cast invisibility on yourself, walk behind a group of enemies and drop 3 explosive kegs before gleefully detonating the group to initiate combat with massive advantage?

I instinctively tried to execute elemental combos in POE with the oil slicken and fan of flame spell but got nothing.
That disappointed me somewhat. POE is more old school with some attempts at rectifying/revamp the classic D&D stats but ultimately lead to 'min-maxing' being the most optimal build.
I honestly cannot see why ranged weapon had to hit so hard with the 'swap rifle' build bypassing the reload time and lead to people chaining 40-60 x 3 shots within seconds of starting combat.

I appreciate what POE is trying to do in bringing back more isometric RPG but I'm very disappointed to encounter less interesting setups and fights compared to Icewind Dale or even Baldur's Gate.
Many I've spoken to commented that most combat devolve into tank and spank and rightfully so.
When I enter a game like POE, I expect to see unique encounters in most of its maps, remember the assassins in Baldur's Gate or rival adventuring parties you can fight with? That was fun.
There was so few of that in POE, I entered a wilderness and had to deal with packs of copy pasta lions. I enter a ruin and had to deal with nothing but shades shades shades. I enter a cemetery and contend with 30 ghouls, 5 tougher guls and 2 skeleton wizard.
It all devolved into rote fighting where you spam the same per encounter abilities over and over. Cause why waste those precious per rest powers - or maybe why not? Since the rest is just 2 loading screens away or if you prefer, just spend a consumable and bam, you're topped up!

And worse of all is the crafting being able to mimic the so called 'unique items' provided you bothered to 'explore' and click on herb spots and slaughter lions, spiders for their legs.
Right click a mundane sword, click enchant. Spend resource +25% damage. +4 Accuracy. Yay. And all this is gated behind levels, not skills.

The fatigue system is also hilarious, if you ignore the Athletics skill, party will get hit with -10 accuracy penalty if they don't rest after a certain period of time. Being engaged in combat repeatedly also contribute to tedious 'stop not because you've depleted resource, but because fatigue has set in' I dunno about simulationist design, but what purpose does this serve? There's no monster that will spawn and ambush a resting party. Suppose you ran out of marshmellows to break over the camp, no big deal, I hope you enjoy 4 loading screen as you backtrack to the previous inn.

Shit, I'm getting angry. I better stop talking about the bad.
The good parts come in the promise of a decent reputation building and disposition your protagonist can reflect in his interactions with the world.
Aggressive, Rational, Stoic, Clever, etc. Paladins/Priest actually take more bonus if they stick to the tenets of their faith. And certain faction reputation favors certain Honest individuals more than most.
Let's just put it this way, if Obsidian can stop padding the content with more of the same quest mobs, and fill it more with meaningful interactions and skill usage, I'd be all over it and give this game a glowing recommendation despite its flawed character system.
As it stands right now, the combat is a chore and the motivation to finish has greatly diminished.

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Reply #691 on: April 11, 2015, 09:36:12 AM

I think one thing that really irritates me about the combat is that you can do relatively little in many cases to set up fights or prepare tactically, but so so so many of the spells and abilities presume highly tactical set-ups to be used properly. I find it's damn rare I can use 3/4 of my wizard's spells because the layout of a battle is just rarely if ever going to favor them. The repetition of fights is also grindy and annoying, I'd agree--the Endless Paths levels are really tedious because of it. "Ok, fampyr plus dalghuls, yeah yeah, guess what, there goes the one person charmed, and now this and then that, how many times do I have to do this exact fight, damn."
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Reply #692 on: April 11, 2015, 09:47:05 AM

Yeah, encounter design is pretty 'eh' overall. Problem is that even when there are complex and varied encounters on a map (such as the bounty targets with at least 3-4 different kinds of enemies, assassin groups with a mixture of all classes, etc), there are catch-all tactics that work the same against them as generic_trash_encounter_00 with little or no use of per-rest resources. If you have a cipher, just paralyze the two biggest threats, and have everyone kill them from range while the tank + melee keep the other enemies from getting to the squishy casters. It doesn't matter if the enemies are animals, monsters, undead, humans, ogres, or drakes -- all debuffs / crowd control abilities work just the same on everything! Well, except for the end boss, the two dragons, and maybe some enemies near the start of the game... but it was still possible to get a paralyze / petrify to stick on those things, it was just harder. And then they die to focus fire in ~5 seconds, same as any other mook.

This game could really benefit from an AI mod like Sword Coast Stratagems for BG1-2. If enemy casters actually made sure that they were using the right spells on the right target (instead of just firing their one-use dominate ability on some summoned fodder, or their strong single-target nuke on the tank who's almost immune to damage) and had proactive/reactive countermeasures to make them harder targets to focus fire / control (e.g. by drinking potions or using their buff spells) and melee enemies tried to prioritize players over their aforementioned summoned fodder, encounters could be a lot more interesting and fun to play.

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Reply #693 on: April 12, 2015, 04:14:40 AM

D:OS has better combat experiences, no doubt.

PoI has nearly everything else better than D:OS though, including the stat and class design.

However I still don't think either touches the infinity games. For non combat systems and interactions, etc, nothing is in the same ballpark as BG2, and it makes a huge difference.

I do think I prefer D:OS combat, they just need the non-combat skill systems and the world, story, plot, character, etc design.
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Reply #694 on: April 13, 2015, 04:56:08 PM

I don't think there was a single thing in D:OS that I preferred to PoE.

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Reply #695 on: April 13, 2015, 05:55:45 PM

I found D:OS combat repetitive in different ways. I feel like in previous Black Isle/Obsidian games there was a wider variety of tactics and a richer range of enemies. But that might be nostalgia talking.
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Reply #696 on: April 13, 2015, 09:19:20 PM

Quote
It's a pity, there's a lot of positives from the class mechanics and capturing the IE-feel of the game, but the encounter design is just really poor, I had to dial the difficulty to easy just to cut down the trash mobs from sections to sections.
This is the wrong approach in my opinion. Much of PoE's immediate draw (contra to obsidian's reputation) is in the robustness of its moment-to-moment combat mechanics and the anticipation of improving your stake in them (through more levels & gear). If you dial down the difficulty to blow through the combat the story isn't strong enough to make up for what you lose.

Again: Path of the Damned potentially helps a lot w/ these issues in that every fight has to be carefully thought out, every character has to be carefully geared, to make it through.. which in fact can be both more and less repetitious (I am suspicious of the usage of this term) depending on whether you actually positively respond to working deliberatively through every encounter.

I've replayed bg2 fairly recently and it's weird how its pleasure actually 'works.' The game has no shortage of repetition; it is probably no more elaborate mechanically than PoE; you can handle 70% of fights in the same way by just keeping fighters between the problem and your backline and using a few important spells (haste, breach, fireball, confusion.. and higher level stuff that just repeats this). It is pleasant to both mow through 'trash' encounters and to think your way through more difficult ones - it would be less fun if it were only one of these. The sense of accomplishment at the end of your 'journey' is not 'hard won' in every case; the 'work' frequently takes the form of wandering across large maps, mowing through relatively simple encounters, getting gear, leveling up, admiring scenery, listening to banter.

All of these tropes are more or less faithfully replicated in PoE. But a lot of the 'repetitiveness' in BG2 can be ignored because: 1) the backdrop and the combat is at least superficially more varied and diverting (you go all over the place); 2) you have a greater power arc; 3) when there are 'difficult' fights enemies use cheap asshole abilities that you have to counter in equally assholeish ways; most enemy mages for instance have instant contingencies, throw confusion, deathclouds, etc., at you, that you have to either brute force your way through after ten save/loads (then congratulate yourself for 'figuring out') or counter-'exploit' w/ pre-buffing, summons, breaches, w/e.

PoE streamlines a lot of this uneven and janky stuff out; its spellcasters tend to play by the rules; there are no instant death spells ('hard counters' -- which their lead designer has explicitly come out against). And perhaps PoE actually suffers from this. The environments are also less varied. The game is shorter. The difficulty and pacing is a bit poorly tuned. This accounts imo for 80% of the 'problem.'
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 10:59:13 PM by Zane0 »
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Reply #697 on: April 13, 2015, 10:56:04 PM

DOS combat could be repetitive (there were certainly some patterns in setting up environmental hazards), but it was way more fun to me. I still stopped playing shortly after Cyseal, though, because the writing/story was sooo bad and non-combat gameplay started to get a bit stale by the second zone... so I think POE is definitely the better game of the two.

(snip)

I've replayed bg2 fairly recently and it's weird how its pleasure actually 'works.' The game has no shortage of repetition; it is probably no more elaborate mechanically than PoE; you can handle 70% of fights in the same way by just keeping fighters between the problem and your backline and using a few important spells (haste, breach, fireball, confusion.. and higher level stuff that just repeats this). It is pleasant to both mow through 'trash' encounters and to think your way through more difficult ones - it would be less fun if it were only one of these. The sense of accomplishment at the end of your 'journey' is not 'hard won' in every case; the 'work' frequently takes the form of wandering across large maps, mowing through relatively simple encounters, getting gear, leveling up, admiring scenery, listening to banter.

All of these tropes are more or less faithfully replicated in PoE. But a lot of the 'repetitiveness' in BG2 can be ignored because: 1) the backdrop and the combat is at least superficially more varied and diverting (you go all over the place); 2) you have a greater power arc; 3) when there are 'difficult' fights enemies use cheap asshole abilities that you have to counter in equally assholeish ways; most enemy mages for instance have instant contingencies, throw confusion, deathclouds, etc., at you, that you have to either brute force your way through after ten save/loads (then congratulate yourself for 'figuring out') or counter-'exploit' w/ pre-buffing, summons, breaches, w/e.

PoE streamlines a lot of this uneven and janky stuff out; its spellcasters tend to play by the rules; there are no instant death spells ('hard counters' -- which their lead designer has explicitly come out against). And perhaps PoE actually suffers from this. The environments are also less varied. The game is shorter. The difficulty and pacing is a bit poorly tuned. This accounts imo for 80% of the 'problem.'
Yeah, vanilla BG2 definitely has a lot of sameyness along the same lines -- even if we ignore cheese like Staff of the Magi, Mislead, etc, there are almost foolproof "one-size-fits-all" tactics that exploit the braindead AI, usually involving summons and mass disables like confusion/chaos, or using Keldorn + Holy Avenger's super-dispel to get rid of annoying mages with their 435987 different kinds of protections. OTOH you need to actually expend some per-rest resources to execute those tactics, unlike POE where I completed the overwhelming majority of encounters without having to use a single per-rest ability: on Hard, send in tank -> paralyze #1 -> paralyze #2 -> focus fire #1 -> focus fire #2 -> repeat worked for almost every encounter, including most named enemies and major plot fights.

But when you use SCS, a lot of those tactics stop working in BG1/2. Enemies start being smarter about targeting, the ones in scripted encounters drink appropriate potions / cast appropriate (de)buffs, mostly ignore summoned fodder when they can, and become much bigger nuisances in general. I found myself using a lot of different abilities because of that - including underused spells - and the game became a lot more enjoyable as a result. Trash encounters were still just speed bumps, mind. That's why I said that POE really needs a mod like this to add some much-needed variance to encounters.

edit: that, or just nerf paralyze (and/or ciphers in general)  awesome, for real
« Last Edit: April 13, 2015, 11:52:11 PM by Zetor »

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Reply #698 on: April 13, 2015, 11:29:27 PM

Much of PoE's immediate draw (contra to obsidian's reputation) is in the robustness of its moment-to-moment combat mechanics and the anticipation of improving your stake in them (through more levels & gear). If you dial down the difficulty to blow through the combat the story isn't strong enough to make up for what you lose.

I rather play Jagged Alliance 2 for combat and gear upgrades. Mods even add crazier stuff in there.

Overall if you're saying the fun is in seeing bigger numbers and accumulating bigger numbers to beat that number, I'll just agree to disagree.
Going through the PotD route just to validate there are 'fun and interesting' encounters is somewhat a flawed assumption.
As someone has said here, advocating a bigger speed bump when running across trash is not gonna improve the rest of the game when the 'moment to moment' in combat revolve around the same rote per encounter buff followed with unloading of cipher CC on primary targets, and then unloading with the dps on the hapless paralyzed target.

All I'm saying is please, less of this:










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Reply #699 on: April 14, 2015, 03:16:28 AM

While I'm still mostly enjoying PoE, the more I play it the more I just want to load up Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, even though I'm holding off until the last of the major mods I use (Item Revisions) is made compatible with BG1EE.
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