Pillars of Eternity

Chanter can be plenty of burst damage if you give him a boomstick!

In general though I feel like Chanters’ real strength isn’t even necessarily the chanting, but their general high stats. They’re very capable at filling in as a secondary whatever, and that can be quite useful.

Plus they don’t need to sleep to get their spells --which makes them Cipher useful. But it’s faster combat now --and I can’t get the chanter to get his game on in fast fights – I mean --well, chant-wise.

Yeah, they suffer in the sped-up fights to some extent, for sure. Honestly, I know everyone loves Ciphers, but I’ve never been all that happy with them. They don’t kick Rogue amounts of ass to justify their squishiness, and can’t bust out the big guns like a Mage or Druid when shit hits the fan.

Maybe it’s just that trash fights tend to not be much of a problem and so the sustainability of a Cipher doesn’t matter that much to me - my casters always have plenty of spells left for the tougher fights. My party comp that I love dearly goes Fighter-Utility-Rogue-Priest-Druid-Mage, and I have liked Paladin best for that utility slot. Course that’s playing on Hard and not Federal Pound Me In The Ass difficulty or whatever.

That reminds me, I should start a FPMITA playthrough…

Playing on hard with 4 – I am NO expert – but wow they are doing well – I don’t recall the game being this easy. Pal/ftr/ciph/ and me --a hunter (of all things)
Oh and a wolf.

Nice. Hunters are badasses that don’t explode with nearly the regularity of rogues, but also don’t go like CRIT CRIT CRIT for 100 damage in 1.5 seconds.

But yeah, good times.

Aside from a few starting locations and some battles here and there, Pillars was pretty easy on hard. There were some encounters that were quite tough, but many could just be played without too much effort. Uneven balancing was one of the negatives of the game. Some of the White March expansion stuff was difficult. Despite that I thought the game was quite good though - the use of abilities in dialog / events, interesting characters.

I felt PoE on Hard is about right - all the way through the game, it’s a solid challenge but never (well, scratch that, let’s say rarely) frustrating.

I’ve never been brave enough to play with less than a full party - part of it is I like the classes to much to not have as many as I can.

A really interesting interview. Some choice quotes

FU: So, with Alpha Protocol, the challenge was that we weren’t even totally sure what we wanted to make until, like, way into the game - and that’s bad. You can do that with your own money; when you’re doing that with someone else’s money they’re just getting mad, they’re getting mad at you more and more and more.

There’s periods of time with our games where there’s been, like, two testers at a publisher working on it. I can’t make them do it. I can’t terminate the contract.

People have said that we should just crowdfund everything now, and I think we should crowdfund some stuff, but if we want to go and do something big we need to get that extra funding. We can’t raise $30 to $50 million.

Obsidian has been around for thirteen years now, and it would have been impossible to predict the ways the industry has changed in the time since you started. How has the reality matched up to your expectations back in 2003?
FU: I thought we would have our own engine at this point - and we tried. I thought we would have been purchased by now. I thought we wouldn’t be as big as we are.

Actually started a new group on hard --still 4 --and It has been tougher. I wonder If I found some weird synergy with that first 4? Though I wanted to play a mage …

Maybe go with your previous party, but add a 5th Mage character? Or is the idea behind 4 party members to keep the micro-management down?

Yes. I’ve been trying to run a 4 party group – the Obsidian dev diaries sorta indicate that’s one reason Tyranny is a 4 party – and I have always tried to 4 party it in old IE games. But I do get tempted into adding a 5…

I’d play with 1 guy if I could. And yes I know that it’s possible and there’s even an achievement for it but afaik it’s not possible to solo all encounters in the game. Having 6 as the party cap feels like a complete miss in this game, most indoor areas are full of chokepoints which means your melee fighters will try to walk over eachother (and fail, cause pathfinding’s pretty terrible) to get to the targets. And the game is very micro intensive, both from item management standpoint and combat control. The only reason I can think of for having 6 party member is because Baldur’s Gate did it.

Yeah, 6p party size definitely feels like a holdover. Totally agree that 4 is better.

My biggest armchair design beef is that the list of status afflictions is just way, way too long. The armchair designer in me says “two per defense type, maybe a couple meaningful interactions with other afflictions or damage types, call it good.” Pillars also suffers from charm spam (obviously) and the old D&D problem of having 15 different things that all could just be renamed “stun” and be done with it.

At least it doesn’t have the totally stupid legacy stuff like “whiff your saving throw and you’re incapacitated for the entire goddamn encounter” on seventeen different spells.

e: I should say that all the criticism comes from the standpoint of Pillars being something like a 9/10 for me and very much what I was hoping for when I Kickstarted the project.

Having spent fully 2/3 of an epic, climactic battle against a mud demon barfing my dwarven character’s guts out in revulsion at its smell (fabulously failed Con Save) just last night at a session of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG, I think I’m pretty onboard with the changes they made to “save or suck” as well. . . even if last night’s particular implementation was pretty funny at the time. But there’s nothing worse than, say, getting smacked with Hold Person in Round 1 of a 2-hour Pathfinder battle and just twiddling your thumbs the whole time. . .

I mean, I get that it’s a little different in cRPGs, but yeah.

Especially on the massive randomness of a d20. Ugh, D&D pisses me off sometimes. The normalized results of something like classic Shadowrun or the White Wolf games (I have a bag full of nothing but a copious number of d10s somewhere, heh) are vastly superior IMO.

So, uh, what happened to the Flame Princess?

That’s interesting because in Tyranny they went to a 4 person party, so it seems Obsidian agrees with people here.

Given the flavor of the game system and rulebook, I suspect nothing good at all.

LOL, until recently (reading @KristiGaines post, I think) it never occurred to me to play with less than a full party. Didn’t even cross my mind. Now I want to try it!

Couldn’t agree more. My first time through the game, upon recruiting Durance or Hiravias and looking through their spellbook:

http://i.imgur.com/QvYd8G5.jpg

Ok I have to say – been trying to run with 4 on “hard”. It has been tough. Note the passive voice --lets try it more active --the game has kicked my ass.

I wonder what the perfect 4 is? let me tell you one of the great advantages of less then 6 – MORE control. That is a HUGE advantage over 6 --unless you micromanage everything and are OCD. Which I admit sometimes, with a hot cup of coffee in me --I can be.

But 4 – I have to travel next few days but I will be thinking of the “best” 4 – Pally/fighter/rogue/ and —"control"mage. NOT a damage mage. Well and also thinking about other stuff …

I am happy to hear any suggestions – but I’ve tried Chanters – they seem weak. The Hunter does have a pet but …