Bonus AOE from stats/gear (colored yellow) does no friendly fire. Also spell descriptions will say what does FF and what does not (i.e. “Foe”).
Also targeting gets finicky with height differences.
First patch is live.
Notes!
I’m glad I got through spending so much time in Neketaka. I started having more fun when I started exploring down under The Gullet and then went to Hasongo to pursue the main quest. Cities just have too much walking from place to place talking, and it works so much better when it is broken up by combat and exploring locations.
I’m up to level 9 now. The combat is so much more enjoyable when there are fights of an appropriate difficulty. I don’t mind easy stuff sprinkled about, especially if it is relatively quick.
They did a nice job with the dialog and stories of the other party members too. I have Xoti, Eder, Aloth, and Tekehu in my party. I left Maia and Serefen on the bench. While the character / NPC dialog is well done, the narrative dialog can be a little too flowery as it was in PoE1 - but that isn’t too big a deal.
Have to say, Deadfire is going to end up being an awfully huge time sink (in a good way) if I keep going at this rate. After 22 hours, I’m still in the Neketaka under city areas (actually trying to find my way out; I cleared all the areas down here, but seem to be stuck) and haven’t even been back to sea since arriving. Always surprised that people can finish these games so quickly.
Anyone notice the odd behaviour of being kicked out of stealth if you are, for instance, sickened by a cloud of vapor? And then you can’t go back into stealth because the game thinks you are in combat because you are still sickened? I’m thinking it’s a glitch, but can’t be sure.
Yeah, that was a bit weird with the poison cloud. It sounds like you’ve taken the same route I did.
Indeed, at least I found my way back to Neketaka and moved on through the city.
There’s a bit of an obvious weirdness with the order of accomplishing tasks, though. All that stuff I did in the undercity is thought to be something of a mission I was sent on, but I really just stumbled into the whole lot. The difficulty of devs allowing players the freedom to roam means it’s hard to code outcomes for every permutation of hitting those goals along the way.
My new monitor’s OSD shows the current frame rate. Deadfire on a fresh load will hover in the 60s, but after a few zone loads it plummets to the low 20s. An F8 fixes it. So, yeah, definitely a performance issue they need to fix.
Yes, I know that. However, when moving the red area of an AOE around, with all the enemies and allys bunched up, it is very hard to tell who is in the red area and who is not.
I find myself using mostly “Enemy AOE” spells for just this reason. Spells that are simply AOE (like Chill Fog, fr’example) I tend to use on enemies that aren’t engaged at all (like ranged dudes).
By the way, if you want someone like Xoti to not run into the fray, I think you can pick “Defensive” for the attack status in the AI editor. Or maybe “Defend Yourself” (or whatever that setting is called). The dropdown is in the lower left of the editor.
I’ve set up custom priest behavior for her that does a few buffs and heals on people when they get low, and then I manually fire off a heal or two when people need it. Overall it seems to work pretty well.
If the selection circle becomes animated/bounces around, that figure is going to be hit. If the selection circle stays static, that unit will not be affected (unless they move of course, into the spell radius after it’s cast).
He needs a break. I mean to get a cool haircut and maybe a new surfboard. (please a break?)
I always have a bit of trepidation about a major name who designs games I love going on hiatus, retiring, moving on, etc. He certainly deserves his break and wish him the best on his next projects. I really hope, though, that direction is taken up by others who have a passion for the genre. I don’t want Deadfire to be the finale of the style.
Party hit level 19, so got access to PL 9 abilities. Gonna play another hour or so, bang out a few more bounties, and then beat the game.
Next build is probably a black jacket/sharpshooter evil pirate. Any recommendation’s on how best to spend the Berath Blessing points?
A bit of a moral dilema regarding the water shapers guild…
I just found the dragon under the water shapers guild. The guild master pleaded to strengthen the wards no matter what, but I think I am sympathetic to the dragon.
This is the type of stuff that makes the game good.
Playing my benevolent Votary I let it go, but my evil pirate will kill most anything that moves once I start over.
Apparently I have “2” in Shadey. I don’t know how I got it, maybe from stealing? The game does not say. And the rep screen just shows a quarter of a circle around the Shadey icon. So stupid. They used numbers for the factions, but not for the actual reputations? I have no idea what the values of other reputations translate into. “Benevolent” is two full circles, so am I to assume it can’t go up anymore?
It’s 1 through 4. And getting to 2 is way too easy - too many random ass dialogues have dispositions attached to them unnecessarily.
e.g.
(is cruel really needed to be flagged on #3? why is #1 asking about a fact rational?)
(like what the fuck am I supposed to answer here?)
Apparently a balancing pass on those will be done at some point. And I feel like some of the disposition checks should probably set at 3 or 4 instead of 2.
This game would be a 9.5/10 for me if it (a) had better balancing to actually take advantage of the vastly superior combat (b) dispositions fixed since it heavily breaks immersion to be an benevolent honest passionate shady cruel aggressive dudeperson.
Also the story kind of falls apart in the final act, which kind of doesn’t bother me that much, not sure why. I guess I find that the setup and worldbuilding through Hosango was good enough to carry the story dropoff later.
Anyway, will be back to play this in a year after all the DLC and balancing and stuff is out.
I just learned / figured out how awesome Tekehu is. Since his Druid subclass is some sort of watershaper (duh) that means all of his water/ice spells are foe-only AOE instead of (mostly) plain old AOE spells. That means you can cast AOE after AOE right on top of the party and it won’t hurt the friendlies. That makes him much more useful.
Yeah, there’s been some talk in this thread about how awesome he is. My issue is, how do I know that in game? He has an ability that says HE is not affected by water spells – but it doesn’t say anything about the party. I wonder if it’s a bug.
I completed Deadlight Fortress last night Hitman-style and it was a lot of fun.