It’s 90% physical for my hunter. I gave her glass cannon and she does OK, but my 2H warrior is king.
Are there any other skills that get special benefits from getting to level 10 (or some other level) other than summoning?
As far as my earlier problems, I think I was just entering the end game area, the way to the black pits which I was meant to be doing last, not first. I am finding plenty of mobs elsewhere I can handle quite easily. I once again have a boatload of quests that I have no idea what to do with. I would prefer a lot more hints then you get now. IE: I have a quest log. “I found a diseased chicken”. That’s it. No more clues. I of course tried to bless him, which momentarily cured his disease, but that didn’t work very long. I also keep forgetting to cast spirit vision in areas I know I should. I think the power should always be on, or you should get some notification that you should cast it here.
This has repeatedly been a problem for me, I also wish the spirits just stayed visible.
Act 2 is completely bonkers. Dungeons, dungeons everywhere. I haven’t seen level design like this since BG2. In fact, it blows BG2 out of the water for the most part.
If they manage to tighten up some of the game’s systems it’s gonna become an all time classic for sure.
I am still at Fort Joy but completed Barracus Rex dungeon and I was instantly transported back to BG2. It just has that feel it was like Deja Vu.
Loving this game
Holy crap.
- Cast Shackle of Pain on a boss.
- Cast Living on the Edge on your character that’s linked to the shackled boss.
- Cast Rupture Tendons on shackled character as well.
- Have ruptured/edged/shackled character run around through fire, poison, or whatever.
- Boss dies.
Alternately:
- Turn enemies into chickens.
- Cast Rupture Tendons on chickens.
- Cast haste on chickens.
- Let them run around randomly as chickens on their turn, killing themselves.
This is why I love this game. I would never come up with these combinations but it is great you can do that.
I have 40 hours into the game now, and most of what is being said on Larian forums I largely agree with.
Source system is just -really- poorly implemented. In what game design theory do you keep one of the primary resources of the game gated behind 20+ hours of gameplay? Non-sensical.
The higher level skills are already prohibitively expensive due to book cost, rarity, eating up 2-3 spell slots, and long cooldowns. To drop this huge resource requirement of Source which is extremely rare even through act 2 into the mix is comically bad game design. If you don’t have a mod to modify Source points I highly recommend one because SPOILER: It doesn’t get any better later.
The writing, voice-over, and general turn-based D&D rip-off is phenomenal. Waaaay too much emphasis on the mixing of elemental surfaces thus turning the game into an AoE spamfest. And the JRPG style number inflation to stats is also jarring.
I started off doing 20-30 dmg lets say on an attack against an enemy with a hundred or so hit points. By mid-late game the enemy has 5000 hitpoints, 1000 Phy armour, 1000 magic armor, and I’m now doing several hundred dmg per hit. Why? This could have been put on a more linear curve in actual D&D style instead of the “over 9000!” system in place now.
Quest log sucks, inventory is a disaster, but all those negatives being stated I absolutely love the game because it is different and takes risks. Both of which are rarified air these days in development.
If they can mange to un-f-ck their weird source/skill system and streamline some of the stuff above this game will have long legs in the way that Neverwinter Nights did back in the day.
But people love big numbers! Look at all that damage! Numbers! Boom!
How is it not getting better later? Once you learn source vampirism you just get it off of corpses. I haven’t bothered using it in combat but I believe you can. Even if you can’t, how many source skills do you need in one combat?
Wipe out the enemy, use their corpses to replenish your source, continue on with your killing, get more source.
As for spell stuff, the 2-3 spell slots and long cooldowns are both mitigated by investing a little in memory. More memory gets you more spells, and if you have 15 spells memorized the first ones you cast will be off cooldown by the time you’ve used the others. I don’t want to cast the same spell non-stop, that type of gameplay can stay in the arpg realm as far as I’m concerned.
Spell book cost is, through act 3, basically my only money sink and I’ve still got plenty of coinage. Rarity is a bit of an issue, took me a while to find some of the spells I wanted. Some I’m sure could be crafted; I’m carrying around blank spell books and essences but I just haven’t felt the urge to experiment with them.
I do agree with the comments about the quest log, inventory disaster, and the surface effect spam. I’ve had a few combats where I couldn’t even find the last opponent in all the cursed fire and just waited a round until they moved.
I found some armor and weapons that say they “scale with <ability” and have the descriptive text “phoenix egg”. What do I do with these? Anything? They don’t seem to scale right now.
I’ve also found the mnemonic talent to be very helpful there, especially for diversified mages. It gives you 3 skill slots. I don’t think I have anyone in my party with less then 18 skill slots at level 10.
And frankly you don’t even need to source vampirism. You get multiple teleport pyramids so you can easily plop one next to the infinite source generator in the basement.
Tedium for the sake of… I stick by my statement. It is a needless time sink that brings -nothing- to the table since the skills are already gated behind needing multiple slots, high prices, and book rarity. Likewise, having casted nearly all of them now on a 2nd game w/ cheats enabled many are quite lackluster even as compared to the 1 slot non-source skills.
Inelegant design, needs to be reworked or scrapped. But if you like having to teleport back to “the well” after every combat, go crazy.
Thats a great idea! I do caution people though, that at certain points pyramids are a great thing to have in your inventory.
mid-act2 spoiler
When your party is split up, it help immensly to be able to put them back together fast
Sometimes, but some of them are absolutely insane.
So I fired this up for the first time, got overwhelmed by character creation/selection/what is this thing and shut it down again :/
Why are backgrounds in the same sequence as races?
This sounds like another highly-rated but controversial game where I have to parse whether the complainers are just bad players or whining about stuff that won’t bother me.
I added it to my wishlist anyway because I haven’t played a satisfying tactical party-based RPG in a very long time. Pillars of Eternity was just okay.
Haven’t been following the thread too closely, has the Gamestop perfect score been mentioned? 10/10
I’ve put close to 30 hours into this, which is rare for me. So that should tell you that I really really like the game, however, they made some baffling design choices that people are justifiably complaining about. For me, the good has far outweighed the bad but I really don’t know how you could give this a perfect score with those frustrations present.