Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's new CRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate

Qhue

Tranny Chaser
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Holy cow. I thought the original was very cool, but nearly every aspect of the game system has been improved. Wandering overland is much more sensible and adventure focused without being just trapsing around a map in stealth mode, the combat abilities / resting system makes more cohesive sense... I feel Obsidian really stepped up their game.

No spoilers but I was worried it would be the usual 'oh look we are back to level 1 and have to do stupid shit....' sort of sequel. It most certainly is not. Sure you are back to level 1, but with the changes to the game system it isn't crippling and the plotline is very much a worthy sequel to the original.
 
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I'm With HER ♀
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Thus far the amount of text-based events seems greatly increased, with the adventure map travelling, the design of the text-event interactions in general gives a feeling similar to the Merecaster system in Tides of Numenera rather than POE1. The graphics seems in general a bit more similar to Tides of Numenera, in how the characters move and combat, not sure that's a great improvement. But overall I'm liking it.
 

Drajakur

Molten Core Raider
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Don't pick an assassin single-class. They suck. I get 1-shot by almost anything. That's all I've learned so far.
 

turbo

Molten Core Raider
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Didn't play original too much and was a long time ago so pretty fresh experience. Is there an advantage to using the main story chars vs creating your own at the inn? Seems like the story ones dont really have sub classes?

Started on hard for the 1st play through just to learn abit. Restarted once and just got to inn and made my team so looking at

Main char - Wizard >> subclass evoker;(godlike death) fucking raw Might + Int maxed and grabbing dex for ability speed raping my other stats. Glass cannon ~
Fighter >> Unbroken (Costal Amarau); straight sword and board maximizing engaged targets
Barbarian >> Bezerker (Savana Folk/Human); dual wield battle axe focus crit build
Priest (story one); focused healing the two front liners
Druid >> Fury (Godlike; healing upon damage one) I wanted a dual nuke team with seperation. Looks like fury can drop some damage and has some great AE abilities with damage and cc

My only alternative thought was ditch the priest, move fighter to a paladin to serve as heals + tank and put in a ranger for 3 ranged damage folks (sniper) but really dont want to fuck much with pets etc and it seems the lvl 7+ power abilities for rangers are pet/melee etc oriented so abit scared.

Also as far as multi classing, for my above team i did toy with idea of making fighter a Fighter/Pali multi-class even further expanding engaged target max + healing. Just afraid on how well they multi class etc so figured first play through i'll keep straight forward.
 

Qhue

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I'm sticking to the main companions as their stories tend to be pretty interesting,plus who could ever turn down the lovablr country bumpkin Eder?!?

I decided to multiclass everyone so far which makes for a quite interesting mix of abilities. It's a good thing I did this for my main especially as he was a pure Wizard in PoE1 and he's only living through fights thanks to his new druid-half and the ability to shapeshift into a storm.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Took me forever to make a main guy but I multiclassed junkie drug addict monk and corpse eating berserker (he has a lot of personal problems) who also sees ghosts. BUCKLE UP PARTY MEMBERS!. Eder is just a fighter but I'll play around more as I find more stuff. Playing on veteran.

The footnotes feature is also really awesome. I love it.
 
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I'm With HER ♀
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another reason to use main story characters is extra exp via companion quests.
 

Pyros

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On companions, they are basically worse than mercenaries in almost every case yeah, but that's ok because they're not so bad you can't get stuff done and have cool stories and insight into the dialogues and shit.

Some of them also have unique subclasses however. For example Tekehu is a waterbend...shaper, his druid form is shark form and he gets some free water/ice based spells(which are all converted into foe aoe only so no friendly fire) every power lvls but can't use fire or beast spells while his chanter class has one invocation for free every powerlvl also, based also on water/ice but he can't use summoning invocations. The interesting part is the water/ice spells are pulled from wizard, so you get some interesting mix of stuff. Well some of them, the funny thing is that some of his Chanter invocation are literally Druid spells, so if you do a Druid/Chanter, you can get 2 versions of the same spells.

Some are just basic though, Eder is just a warrior, rogue or rogue warrior, no sub class, no unique stuff. Same for Aloth.

The other special ones are Serafen, only on cipher, he has Wild Mind, which lets you cast random shit; Maia, her Ranger class is Hawkgun or whatever, she has a unique hawk pet which is immune to engagement and has high PER/DEX but low everything else and she has better gun stats with no downside(I forgot what they are, more range and some shit like that iirc, also her armor has -20% reload on weapons, so she's definitely really good at guns); Pallegina, based on the choices you made in PoE1, can be Paladin of the Brotherhood of the 5 Suns, which gives her a special Marked target debuff thing that throws fireball, nothing else; and Xoti, who's a Priestess of Gaun and a Sister of something for her Monk class. I honestly forgot to check what her monk stuff does, her Priest stuff is just different spells you get for free, including a few damage ones that are nice. I think her monk stuff is that she gains wounds on kills?
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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On companions, they are basically worse than mercenaries in almost every case yeah, but that's ok because they're not so bad you can't get stuff done and have cool stories and insight into the dialogues and shit.

Some of them also have unique subclasses however. For example Tekehu is a waterbend...shaper, his druid form is shark form and he gets some free water/ice based spells(which are all converted into foe aoe only so no friendly fire) every power lvls but can't use fire or beast spells while his chanter class has one invocation for free every powerlvl also, based also on water/ice but he can't use summoning invocations. The interesting part is the water/ice spells are pulled from wizard, so you get some interesting mix of stuff. Well some of them, the funny thing is that some of his Chanter invocation are literally Druid spells, so if you do a Druid/Chanter, you can get 2 versions of the same spells.

Some are just basic though, Eder is just a warrior, rogue or rogue warrior, no sub class, no unique stuff. Same for Aloth.

The other special ones are Serafen, only on cipher, he has Wild Mind, which lets you cast random shit; Maia, her Ranger class is Hawkgun or whatever, she has a unique hawk pet which is immune to engagement and has high PER/DEX but low everything else and she has better gun stats with no downside(I forgot what they are, more range and some shit like that iirc, also her armor has -20% reload on weapons, so she's definitely really good at guns); Pallegina, based on the choices you made in PoE1, can be Paladin of the Brotherhood of the 5 Suns, which gives her a special Marked target debuff thing that throws fireball, nothing else; and Xoti, who's a Priestess of Gaun and a Sister of something for her Monk class. I honestly forgot to check what her monk stuff does, her Priest stuff is just different spells you get for free, including a few damage ones that are nice. I think her monk stuff is that she gains wounds on kills?

Xoti's Monk multiclass doesn't make much sense because she has to kill to get wounds when you usually want her to at least be casting priest spells most fights. I think she's better staying priest.
 

Pyros

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Xoti's Monk multiclass doesn't make much sense because she has to kill to get wounds when you usually want her to at least be casting priest spells most fights. I think she's better staying priest.
I think the idea is if you make a Priest MC, then you can have her be a monk for damage, or a monk/priest for some self buffing. If you don't have a priest the whole thing doesn't make much sense however and you might as well just single class priest yeah, that's what I did.
 

Hatorade

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Considering priests have the best CC in the game yeah go single priest, only way to beat it on Hard with any amount of assurances.

My main is pillar breaker devoted aka Fighter/Monk. Do damage to get wounds, focus is quarter staff for that extra defensive bonus as needed. So far though his fists are where it is at.

Assasins do insane damage once mid to high level they are just extra work, all about staying stealth until other party members are engaged then getting the flank shot for the kill.

Loved the first one, loving this one.
 
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Hatorade

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I do hope hard mode doesn't turn into everyone opens with pistol attacks to win like the first one. So far it has felt pretty good but only a few hours in.
 

Qhue

Tranny Chaser
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I managed to player PoE without ever encountering Pallegina (had no idea she existed until I saw some previews for this game) so I wonder if she will show up for me or not. Then again I'm also curious as to what happens if your Eder or Aloth were dead...who do you get as an early companion in POE2?
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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I managed to player PoE without ever encountering Pallegina (had no idea she existed until I saw some previews for this game) so I wonder if she will show up for me or not. Then again I'm also curious as to what happens if your Eder or Aloth were dead...who do you get as an early companion in POE2?

Try it and find out lol. I didn't bother importing but in the first game I went along with Woedica's plan. It let's you pick Woedica's plan, Rymgrand's (lol), and even the, "Worst Possible Option." Where you somehow got through the first game with the worst outcome for every single quest.

Eder was there for me but I think if you go with that one then all of your companions are gone. Only new ones for you baby!
 

Whidon

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So i bought the first game last summer.. still only like an hour in. I couldn't get into it much, the combat system... feels odd.... I'm thinking of playing it again soon as it's one of the few games that runs fine on my laptop when i'm away from my desktop. Does the game pickup at some point?

I have this and Dragons Dogma-Dark Arisen. Bought on sale and not played for a long time, i would like to finally get into one of them..
 

Droigan

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A little pro tip apparently (I haven't played it yet) is that several of the party members you get in the game have unique sub classes\abilities in their main class. You won't be able to use those skills if you multi class them since going multi class limits your class abilities to level 6.

Not sure how much it matters or what the skills are, but something to consider.

My plan is to multi-class my character to something, but never multi class any of the party members I get. Will only use characters I get on my travels. Don't want to miss out on story since every real party member you get have unique character quests.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Considering priests have the best CC in the game yeah go single priest, only way to beat it on Hard with any amount of assurances.

My main is pillar breaker devoted aka Fighter/Monk. Do damage to get wounds, focus is quarter staff for that extra defensive bonus as needed. So far though his fists are where it is at.

Assasins do insane damage once mid to high level they are just extra work, all about staying stealth until other party members are engaged then getting the flank shot for the kill.

Loved the first one, loving this one.

I'm not sure how viable my junkie corpse eater is. But using the barbarian benefit to stacking health and health regen abilities + loads of CC its been pretty consistent so far. I need an assassin or evoker party member but I haven't found one yet then we'll be solid.

Junkie monk has some weird limitations but they're fun. Drugs are 10x as potent so dump points into Alchemy so they last longer. I just need to go about crafting the better +dmg, +defense drugs and go to town. Eat corpses mid battle for more hp regen and rage for the very useful berserker abilities.

Modal combat for the weapons is just a bit... whatever so far. I have prorficiency for some dual wielding. But haven't found anything worthwhile yet.
 

Valderen

Space Pirate
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After about 4 hours last, I am enjoying the game a lot. It feels like a big improvement over PoE1. Everything seems to be streamlined and just cleaner overall.

Not exactly a critic of the game's combat itself as it is fine, but having just finished Divinity Original Sin 2 this weekend, I can safely say I enjoy turn-based combat more than real time combat with pause that the PoE game offers.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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After about 4 hours last, I am enjoying the game a lot. It feels like a big improvement over PoE1. Everything seems to be streamlined and just cleaner overall.

Not exactly a critic of the game's combat itself as it is fine, but having just finished Divinity Original Sin 2 this weekend, I can safely say I enjoy turn-based combat more than real time combat with pause that the PoE game offers.

I totally agree. Original Sin 2 combat is far superior.