Mine hasn’t arrived yet :(
So is there any functional reason to get PoE now, versus at a sale later on? There’s no multiplayer or “real-time” events, right?
Ack, Steam sales have turned me into such a Scrooge miser.
Right, there’s no rush. The game’s very playable now, with only minor unpatched issues (at least, that’s all I’ve encountered), but it will probably get even better before the first sale.
Being able to play it now instead of later?
So I’m making my way to to Defiance Bay (hey, someone should write a song that starts that way), and I pick up Sagani, the dwarf ranger. I know that a barbarian is a better fit for my party than a ranger (I need the frontline power) but I swap out my hired barbarian because I’m all about the plot and I want to help her find her village whatever-it-is. (And heck, I haven’t had a tough fight in a while.) I look at her weapons and they’re pretty basic (at least they’re all “fine” quality), and I figure there’s room to upgrade from the hunting bow and hatchet. Then I look at her abilities, and…
PEASANT WEAPON FOCUS? Are you f’ing kidding me? Someone please explain how this is a good thing.
I think the best I can say is that Shortbow is fast recovery, and you can build Sagani for even faster recovery and crit, so she just becomes this solid crit stream, actually very deadly, especially with the Chanter recovery bump on top and the rest of your backline with blunderbusses (i.e. her stream of crits fills in, inbetween the big blunderbuss hits). Double hatchets give a fair amount of extra deflection as well, so she’s pretty good temp offtank in melee too, if anything too deadly wanders or teleports up to the backline wiz or cipher.
Plus the pet is a great source of extra cc (2, count em 2 knockdowns, possible with it) and mob blocking via placement - extra character, not to be sniffed at, and can be buffed to be either tough or more deadly. Even if not buffed, it lasts long enough to run interference for the averagely tough fight.
That’s about as much as I can say for Sagani. She’s a lovely little character though, personality-wise - cool dwarf/eskimo chick tribal nature girl, sort of - her banter with other characters is some of the most amusing.
The companions have abilities that fit their backstory, not in an effort to min-max them (fwiw).
Yeah, I’m definitely playing more for the characters than for the min-max (my barbarian was doing really well, in fact). Before too long I’m going to ask who has the best stories/banter, because I’ll have some tough choices soon, I imagine. (Sorry Aloth, you’re probably going to get the boot–as much fun as it is to have two wood elf magi, it probably isn’t meant to be.)
Backline cipher? Heathens.
Grieving Mother, more like Murderous Hero of Destiny.
50+ hours in and I finally meet the final two companions. It really makes for some tough decisions as I’m one of those that like keeping a party intact throughout. I’ve taken to keeping my core group (the first three companions I had: Eder, Aloth, Durance, and my wild-orlan rogue) and swapping around the remainder as needed, even though I dislike doing it. There’s just no other way for me to experience those late companions much if I don’t.
I figure that the game is designed around the idea that you can, and should, swap out companions as needed, but from a role-playing perspective I find it hard. With characters coming so late in the game, it won’t matter if I replay since I’ll be up against the same issue. Is there much penalty (if any) for switching them out?
There are two penalties, both minor. The first is that they don’t gain experience, but you can compensate for that by sending them on stronghold adventures. Besides, the level cap is 12, which I hit early in Act III. The other penalty is that when they aren’t in your party, their quest-specific dialogue won’t trigger when you explore the relevant locations. Unless you either figure out where they need to visit on your own or consult the net for spoilers, you won’t see the end of their respective questlines.
They do gain experience. It does appear to be at some reduced rate I haven’t determined.
Not too bad, then. I can plan their quests for a next game if I miss out, or I can switch 'em in and go exploring again and hope I didn’t break a quest by doing something without them. The fact that there are penalties (xp) at all suggests that Obsidian wanted people to stick with a single group for as much of the game as possible. Minor but manageable. Thanks for the tips.
I got to the point of jumping at the place where you jump, with the party I’d grown up with and loved through the earlier part of the game, but because I’d finished some of their personal stories, I decided to pull back from there, go back and switch the party around and do some of the other personal stories, tidy up some of the other quests and do some of the Endless Paths with a few team variants. Seems to work fairly smoothly that way, and in doing that, I realized that a slightly different “ultimate” team composition would be more suitable for the endgame and my playstyle too.
The xp penalty isn’t that bad really, just a very minor slippage.
It’s also worth switching around just to hear the intra-party banter, some of which can be quite funny.
It’s really interesting how you get some very different dialogue options for crucial bits of the plot depending on some of the companions you have, as well (e.g. some team members pipe up with interesting comments and take part in the dialogue in interesting, plot-relevant, character-apt ways at crucial plot points, giving you options for dealing with a given situation that you might not otherwise have had - the game has some great attention to detail in that regard).
Totally burned out in the 2nd half of this game. I really want to see it though but I know myself well enough to feel that I’m moving on.
I figure I’m at least half way through the game and I get the feeling of burnout, but I suspect I will power through and finish it. At this point I don’t feel its a great game, but is still a good game. Greatness would cause me to want to play it at longer then two hours spurts at a time, but that’s about what has been the case with this one. So something isn’t quite lining up for me, even though I appreciate the setting and some of the quests are quite moving. But others are very FedEx, and I think the game suffers from the loot not being much more then marginally better as you go along. I don’t feel like my characters are advancing to great power at much of a pace, which takes away some of the fun of this type of game.
The loot is definitely uninspired. The fact that enchantments are limited to 12 points means there’s only so good an item can get. Combine that with the level cap, also 12, and it felt like my characters maxed out early in Act 3. I tend to lose interest in RPG’s when character progression stops, and PoE’s design pretty much ensures that happens.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I’m early Act 3, abused the bounties a bit, which bounced me from 9 to 12, and I haven’t finished the dungeon yet either (level 13). The story alone isn’t compelling enough to drag me through acts 3 and 4.
If I were to rebalance the game, I’d do the following:
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Either raise the level cap to 14 or slow the leveling down. Either way, you’d have new abilities to anticipate during the final third, which you don’t now.
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Give artifact level weapons, shields, and armor as rewards for particularly difficult quests or battles. These items would be considerably stronger than a 12 pt enchantment, but their powers would be unalterable. Currently, the only drops that boosted my power from early in Act 3 on were rings/boots/belts/neckware, which (not coincidentally) aren’t part of the enchantment system.
These two changes would give combat and questing purpose they lack now. I wanted to see the end of the story, so I powered through the endgame, but battles in particular wore me down because they were pointless. Quest and kill XP did nothing for me, and neither did the vast majority of the drops.
I’m only in Act 2–I’ve done maybe half or a quarter of the things to do in Defiance Bay, and then I tried to go to Stormwall Gorge but got my ass handed to me by some feral druids. (Probably I could have done it with some elemental protection spells, but whatever.) I went back to the stronghold, fought off some bandits, buried a scroll, etc. My barbarian went on a stronghold quest, and I’m told he got reputation in Dyrford and put some loot in the treasury, but when I went to the treasury the chest was empty. Guess the per diem ate it all up…
We’ll see if I feel it slowing down when I hit the level cap–right now I don’t have enough resources to enchant all my stuff and finding named weapons/armor/etc is still very exciting. I’m totally loving the game.