Me too man, I hate the combat so much that had I not purchased the game through CDkeys, I just would’ve requested a refund from steam around 90 minutes. This game just isn’t for me.
The combat on the hardest difficulty has been extremely hard, even harder than POE was on release.
Every enemy is a boss that takes a long time to kill and can nearly instantly kill a non tank.
Ability for tanks to hold the attention of enemies seems worse in this game, which is bad given the damage output.
Magic spells are too short ranged… When you combine the short range magic spells with enemies being smart enough to target your casters, it becomes very annoying to be a caster. Every enemy will focus you down, ignoring whatever else they were doing previously.
Run now i have 3 people total and am in a battle with a sage, 2 archers and 2 meleers. I don’t know if the fight is even possible.
I was not gonna buy this game because I still have Civ 6 to play and the latest DX game. That said, I caved and bought it.
I am only a few hours in. So far I don’t hate it by any stretch but I don’t like it as much as POE. A large part of dissatisfaction is that I have a hard time role playing as the bad guy. Which this game absolutely sets you up as out of the gate. And to be fair, they make no secret about this. It might be that later in the game you have a chance to be the good guy, again I am only like two hours in but initially the game starts from a position where it is hard to see how you are anything but a bad guy, the devil in the details being just what kind of a bad guy do you want to be.
I also don’t like the combat, but I didn’t like the combat in POE either. I am of the opinion that every CRPG that is not an ARPG should have turn based combat. This isn’t that. Is it better than POE combat? So far I am not seeing that but I am still early and I just have a two person party.
All that said, I am happy to support an Obsidian RPG. The writing seems very good so far even if it is a little dense. So many factions and characters and past events to keep in mind when making decisions.
So don’t play it on the hardest difficulty?
To be fair – Playing on hard – I think the combat is GREAT. Much better than the mis-mash of pillars --it is quiet and controlled. Abilities mean something. I wipe a lot and then figure out why. Maybe I am playing a different game?
Best RPG I have played In ages - and the real reason is that it has a story/world that seems – what Is the word?
Hmm – so you play on the hardest difficulty and complain about the combat –
My impression is that the combat is very nicely tuned. I would suggest a few things about casters and spells and your npc followers – but my thought is by the time you have read this you have figured it out.
I like it so far, alas I have trouble understanding why the old caster guy goes down so quickly. So far he has died in every combat since I have him. Seems he draws aggro like crazy. I have set him to saboteur, maybe that is the problem? Playing on normal too, don’t like too hard combats and that seems to work fine mostly except this issue.
Where it absolutely shines is the world building and I immensely enjoy the green link mechanic that gives background and so makes sense of the setting for you. Chargen was also great in that it greatly set up your character and the world. When you start you already have a solid idea where your character comes from and what the setting is. Liked it. Feels to me like they iterated some ideas from Alpha Protocol, my favourite Obsidian game. Still in act one so too early for a final opinion but the first impression is surprisingly good.
My only real complaint is that the Main Character basically has no AI other than “auto attack things” so you can’t really say jump to a companion, make them use a couple abilities, then on to someone else. Because you’ll just be standing there attacking like a dork, never using anything ever.
I mean, it’s basically a classless game, so I sort of get it, but… something. Even if all you had was “Default” so you’d just use abilities as they came off cooldown, would be fine. Worse yet, I’m fast. Like really fast, so my cooldowns are really short and I’ve got like 3 of them I basically spam in every fight. Soon I’ll have 4. So I’m dealing with my cooldowns and just hoping my companions are using stuff because I don’t have many other options other than pausing and going down the line every few seconds.
That’s funny to read because in my playthrough, Verse is the one who goes down every fight. In fact, she’s usually the only one who gets knocked out. Also playing on normal.
One thing I’ve done is re-jigger my magic spells and added extra range on all of them. Maybe that would help? Or use Barik to taunt everyone? To be fair, though, I have noticed that some enemies will rush right to the caster guy. When I see that happen I usually focus fire on that enemy (because Barik can seemingly stand there and get beat on all day with very few ill effects).
I’m very tempted by this, but I’m wondering whether I’ve gotten too “old” for my favorite genre (CRPG). I started PoE and liked it fine, but once I got to the first big town I just lost interest in grinding through the wall of dialogue/lore and growing To Do list of quests. I think I just want something more streamlined without losing what I love about CRPGs.
A smaller party sounds like a good thing, as does the twist in the standard RPG “only you can save the world” narrative. I guess I’ll keep my eye out for a sale (Steamsgiving?). I’ve been playing Civ6 but the new car smell is wearing off quickly, and that game badly needs some interface and AI/diplomacy improvements before playing any further. It’s better than the horrible Civ5 release, but it still needs a lot of work. Some of the things they eventually fixed in Civ5 they once again failed to take care of in Civ6, which is very disappointing.
One thing that might help with this is queuing up your attacks. Hold shift when you select the second and subsequent abilities and you’ll do them in that order. Might give you more time to micro other party members. I usually only queue up one or maybe two extra abilities, since the battlescape changes so rapidly I want to make sure I’m maximizing my targets, but it’s been a godsend.
I can’t seem to get the order queue to work, any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong?
Other than that, enjoying the game so far - level 6, just made it to the first spire and had first choice of party members.
I like the switch to more abilities on timers and less on a per-rest basis; resting doesn’t seem like such a constraint now (playing on hard). I usually play a “good” character, at first it took some adjustment to be mean, but I’m enjoying the story, probably because it seems relatively fresh.
Anybody have an extra code for this? I have some Steam codes to trade. Money is a little tight right now and I’ve been slobbering over this.
Make sure you hold down shift when you click the target, NOT the ability itself. (I actually hold down shift the entire time I am selecting an ability and targeting just to be on the safe side, but some testing has shown that to not strictly be necessary, I think).
There are six hundred other forums on which this sort of thing isn’t merely acceptable, it’s their very raison d’etre.
I’m starting to like the combat. I don’t know what happened but after I restarted (as in, a new campaign), my tank seems to be holding aggro much better than before. Giving everyone a heal spell also made things a lot more managable. I also prefer the learn by doing system, especially for defensive stats such as dodge and parry.
I’ve played PoE and am playing IWD for the first time right now, and the RTwP combat is just not my cup of tea. Underrail and JA2 were a lot more satisfying.
The world building and the use of tooltips is top notch. I’m not sure I like being the ‘bad guy’, but they still offer decisions that can be tough to choose between, which keeps me engaged.
I still wish that Pillars and Tyranny used Divinity: Original Sin’s action point system (without all of the overdone environmental effects). I’ve just been manually pausing the action, but maybe if I used some of the auto pause functions it would let me treat this as more of a turn based game. The combat log is very good, but I’ve been letting too much action pass by between pauses, so I haven’t made good use of the log.
The guy picked up at the Chorus’ camp is very squishy for me and can be difficulty to keep alive. Between enemy spell casters, archers, guys that seem to teleport, and enemies that just break away from engagement - it can be difficult to protect him. Still, there has only been one moderately difficult combat so far (on Hard) that I had to try 3 times.
Does anyone have some auto pause settings that they feel work pretty well - let them examine the action in the combat log but not drag things down too much?
Yeah, he needs a few levels. In the first act(the timed one), I spent so much energy trying to keep him up. On hard, the enemies beelined right for his honey. I suppose you could take defensive skills and drop him in an iron suit, but I had him specced to heal/buff and that didn’t make as much sense to me. It got a lot better for me when I got the 4th companion and started the next primary quest chain.
Yeah, I have him spec’d to heal too. I tried keeping him back more and 1 enemy still went right for him, but he was far enough back so he wasn’t a target of ranged attacks. He kept himself alive long enough while the rest of the group killed most of the enemies, then he used his skill to avoid engagement and joined the gang again.