Since Obsidian published Pillars of Eternity in the year 2015, it has always been on and off the lists of “spiritual successors” to Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate 2, along with names like Pathfinder Kingmaker, Divinity Original Sin II and, to a lesser extent, Black Geyser and Solasta Crown of the Magister.
This time we are taking on: Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, Seeker Slayer Survivor DLC. This DLC is all about the combat. What makes combat good in a video game? Is doesn’t matter if we are talking about Real time combat like the one in Sekiro, Bloodborne or the Dark Souls series, RTWP (real time with pause) like some of our favorite CRPGS, or turned based like XCOM… the secret is for combat encounters to DEMAND from the player strategic thinking and sound tactical execution.
This is what I think of the combat in the Seeker Slayer Survivor DLC
source
Can I slap your twitter son?
<3 the SWOT Analysis
Loved today's lesson, let me see if I got it right:
Strategy-Make your friend suffer on his Birthday, by exploiting his eating habits.
Tactics-Wait for his Birthday, travel to Portugal, get him a juicy cake that will make his saliva drip, count on his 'save for later' nature, eat all his BIRTHDAY cake!
You are all vultures! That's it I am signing up on Twitter #PoorEatalot, let's buy the man a Birthday cake that he can leave in the fridge until it goes bad.
Portugal? Where?
13:07 true. very true.
Love YOE as well as Redd Cat MTG, it's beautiful to see both smallish channels featured in the same video.
Nice vid! Great tips
Loved the game, found this DLC shit. Combat without story in the PoE setting is just awful. The Forgotten Sanctum(?) was amazing though.
I preferred the combat of the first game. In POE2 you have practically infinite resources, as you can heal forever, abilities refresh per battle and with the brilliant buff you have infinite ability charges regardless of class. Adding classes like the cipher that can innately cast forever, there is almost no resource management in the game. In my experience, that made the game very algorithmical, as nothing stopped me from using the same optimum tactics again and again.
I also felt that the main way the developers used to increase the difficulty was increasing enemy HP numbers. Every "difficult" encounter devolve into a slog. The final boss took me ~1 hour, the huge slime close to 2 (with me cheesing its pathing to finally beat it) etc. The whole game can be represented by the Survivor part of the DLC. What the Slayer is supposed to be, chaotic and explosive combat, I didn't find it neither in the base game, nor in the DLC. I have never seen such long battles in any crpg.
Furthermore, in order to "fix" pathing, enemies can push around their allies making body-blocking and using chock-points almost impossible. This change just devalues positioning, as the enemies will reach your squishes no mater what you do. Engagement is just too weak of a mechanic to fix this problem. Making almost every character a semi-tank seems as the only way to not drop one or two immediately.
Finally, the AI doesn't really use the same game rules as you. When you choose an armor, you have an interesting choice to make: sacrifice armor rating for better recovery time. I found far too many enemies that had the same or higher AR than my tank, but attacking as fast as my rogue. In general, any constrains you have when you build a character, doesn't affect enemy design.
This DLC barely does anything different, making not worthy imo. I haven't even touch the main problem of the game, that being cryptic.
Something I wonder seeing as I never played the second game. Did they ever fix the horrible pathfinding of the characters and the enemies that they had in the first game? Because I though the combat system was great if you discount that part.
Cool vid as always. I skipped this expansion personally cause it didn't seem that interesting. Sanctum and Beast of Winter were enough for me.
in my very first experience with this dlc, I was playing a cosplay character of Griffith from Berserk as Paladin/Chanter (amazing support/tank build) [what coming next IS A SPOILER —>] and eventually the dude was asking me to become a god, I was like, damn , "just like zerk" so I said yes and then the credits started, I've never been so happy to pick the wrong ending xD