I like Icewind Dale more than BG.
Then I guess you're going to like this game more than me. I think many of the peeps who were working on this game also worked on the Icewind Dale games.
Well, Josh Sawyer who was the lead designer & director of Pillars was the designer of Icewind Dale and lead designer of Icewind Dale II so that makes a lot of sense.
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I haven't played any Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale so my only frame of reference for IE classic rpgs are Fallout 1 & 2 ^^; But I really like Pillars!
Finished Pillars of Eternity - The White March I - On hard, I haven't felt anything like that since the first time I played SMT3 Nocturne. Was one of the toughest and most brutal rpg experiences of 30 years of gaming for me. Was doable as long as I took it slow and I learned so much about the combat system, build types and abilities through it since I had to in order to survive. The story choices felt kinda brutal too. Lots of tough stat checks and I'd often get to the end of a quest with 3-5 choices blocked out because even though my stats are good, they didn't meet any of those exact builds. So sometimes quest tales didn't go the way I wanted in The White March, but that's good roleplaying, sometimes things just don't work out in life. Brutal questing.
Took me about 20 hours and felt really substantial and great. It's definitely more of a dungeon crawler and it was only the final dungeon which took me like 4-5 hours where it started to feel a bit tedious with so many battles and most of them are challenging so you can't just get tired of it and auto-power through. I liked the story and the quests and characters are good deal. The art was great and the music for this game is some of the best I've heard, adds so much to the areas. Like Durgan's Battery outside map had this kinda thumping mysterious music that kept you on your toes.
I used all 3 of the White March new companions because I like role-playing like that. Unfortunately it meant running with 4 melee characters + priest + cipher gunner which might've made it even tougher than it needed to be. There were only two fights in the expansion that were so unbelievably hard I almost bailed. One I sorted did. It was the 2nd tier Bounty in Longwatch Falls
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the Flames of something, bunch of super mages and barbarians and the mages spam so much AoE stuff non-stop my team just could not survive the status effect/AoE damage/summons onslaught. After like 30 mins of retries with different tactics I bailed, changed out 2 of the 4 melee characters for Wizard and Druid and did my own AoE spell casting to wear down the enemies with status effects & damage while buffing and healing to barely survive.
The other fight was the final boss of The White March I. Fight was insane. After 3-4 tries I was gonna call it unbeatable with my party setup and thought I'd need to leave the dungeon, change in Aloth the Wizard for some Frost spells/DR AoE debuffs, and run back through the whole dungeon again to the boss fight, but on my 5th try somehow I kept surviving (Zahua was able to tank like 2 of the annoying caster enemies all on his own and survive with like no healing and take out melee enemies that flanked him. Dude is a BEAST) and eventually got through the fight. Was nice to beat it, but yeah one of the toughest fights. Seems kind of bullshit if you don't have a Wizard/Druid on you, but oh well.
Finished it up and went back to my castle and hit lvl.13, nice to start getting some of the expansion level cap new skills. Next up will be to do the rest of Endless Paths floor 7->15 and then I'll jump into Act III and save WM2 for after that.
Very good expansion.
2 hours and 30 tries later and boss of the Endless Paths is done.
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(https://i.imgur.com/D2lkYTj.jpg)
Ended up turning the AI off and setting EVERYTHING AUTO-PAUSE, which helped a lot for seeing every movement in the battle and being able to react to it.
Still, that fight is bullshit and broken piece of shit because of a random factor: When combat first starts, 90% of the time the boss will go straight into Wing Smash which takes everyone down to 5% health (or kills them) and makes everyone prone. Then the boss kills anyone left alive. Because the boss does this right away, there's not enough time to get buffs/debuffs in beforehand.
So it was like every single attempt I'd have my MC start by rushing the boss trying to knock it prone. This works 10% of the time. If it works, that gives me like 8 seconds now to start actually casting stuff and a chance for the battle. So it was like: retry -> 2 seconds into battle WIPE -> retry 2 seconds into battle WIPE -> etc... and every once in a while I'd knock the boss prone and then fight for a few mins before wiping and then a bunch of instant wipes, etc...etc...until I won.
The only way I could win the fight, because the boss's wing smash is too damaging has huge range (basically anyone who can attack even ranged) and breath is an instant killer, is
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To never let the boss get off a single attack the entire fight.
-Which meant having Aloth spam slicken over and over with a raw damage AoE here and there when he can fit it in.
-Having Grieving Mother spam Paralyze over and over while shooting in between to rebuild cipher meter
-Having my MC continually cast bash, bash, dash and bash, dash and bash
But the thing is for all the above attacks taking the boss out of the fight, the accuracy sucks because the boss has insane stats. I enchanted a shit down of stuff vs. beast and for +accuracy and camped for accuracy vs beast bonus and I was still getting like 60-70% accuracy on those. So winning the fight was really just a matter of chance once I got him knocked down the first time and if my accuracy rolls were hitting enough to keep him prone & paralyzed so he couldn't do anything.
To help this I had:
-Durance buff everyone's accuracy and at least protect against the fear aura coming from the dragon
-I don't think Durance has a single spell that could damage the boss since all his stuff is burn and boss is basically immune to that
-Then as long as the boss was out of it I had
-Maneha & Zuhau just doing melee attacks for minor damage. They only did like 20-30 damage per hit, so probably could've had different characters for these two's position. Grieving Mother whose my gunner was doing like 50-60 damage with a shot, but she was mostly just paralyzing so she didn't have time to shoot for damage much.
I guess I also could've respec'd to get the 25% extra damage vs beast on everyone if I took the time.
Actually, the funny thing is the time I won the dragon actually did the wing smash like always but somehow it only hit my MC tank and everyone was just a sliver outside the hit range and hadn't started combat yet.
So I had everyone rush in and start the prone/paralyze stuff as the boss was recovering from doing the attack before it moved on to the next attack. Pretty much fought for like 5-10 seconds of the fight before my MC even got up again and then I did the dragon strike lowering the boss defenses and beat him just a bit after he recovered from it. So even though on auto-pause the fight was about 5-10 mins, in real time it was probably about 30 seconds from start to the dragon kill.
Even though it's satisfying to have won without any cheat tactics or anything (well a little bit, I took out the 2 mage adds before the fight, otherwise they'd stun my party and screw everything up), it still wasn't a good fight just because of that initial 3 second wipe 90% of the time bs. It just wasn't fun reloading over and over for the first 2-3 seconds of the fight. Hopefully there are no more bosses that wipe the entire party in the first 2-3 seconds in the game.
Also reading online, apparently they BUFFED the fight after the White March expansions and added a bunch of immunities to counter the strategies people would use (like petrify, which now it's immune to). You don't see super bosses being buffed that often >< Not sure what's the point, so everyone who plays it later has a harder time than the people who played it at launch?
Yeah, I stumbled across a google link at some point that made it seems like they are in PoE2 but your stronghold will be
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Your pirate ship
Which makes sense to have a moveable base of operations.
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Like you get to Twin Elms, hear about burial isle, go to burial isle and once you jump in that's the end of the chapter I'm assuming? Sure there's the added sidequest stuff of doing one of the god's quests, but damn compared to the like 20-30 hour long Act II which was pretty huge, it feels kinda quick that I just got to town and already ate the potential Act ending put to jump in.
With all the sidequests and the few maps, it should be pretty satisfying size, but it's more like the White March pt.1 size act (which I was totally satisfied with). It feels like Act II is the big exploring the world meat of the game and Act III is like endgame main story and Act IV is probably just final dungeon/ending.
Also it helps that even if Act III's smaller, the main story is...getting interesting. It's actually going in a direction I didn't expect and I'm looking forward to how it plays out (and am now more interested in Pillars 2).
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I like how Act I/II is like a more normal wrpg story of humans and their factions and magic and politics with gods as a background
and then Act III is like Yo, gods everywhere in your face, godtime story. Reminds me more of a jrpg like Xenogears and stuff at this point.
Probably finish up Act III in a few sessions and then on to the White March II! Difficulty-wise I did the high level scaling + hard mode and with my lvl.13/14 party the enemies are tough and hit hard but as long as I can keep them around my tanks I've got enough buffs to hold out while smashing non-stop big spell damage & status effects from my Wizard/Cipher/Druid on the enemy groups that it's satisfying but I'm doing alright.
Next session I'm gonna try using Sagani again for the first time in like 50 hours because I want to finish her questline so I'll actually check a guide to making her useful, respec her and try running a mid-line ranger + priest/wizard/druid with 2 tanks up front. I've also been ditching shields completely and using a 2H Soul-bound sword on my Fighter tank MC to bring the damage. Been working ok but on the harder fights might need to drop back to shield. It's annoying how many of the good swords are all 2H.
Was questing in Act III and accidently ran into the Sky Dragon lol, wasn't prepared for the fight but was strong enough to wing it and make it through on my 2nd attempt. Then I tried the Cragholdt Bluffs and I did not expect that I was going to spend the next 4-5 hours going incredibly slowly fight by fight through that map. That was pretty hardcore. The boss was intense too. And there wasn't much story when you beat the boss so it kinda felt like the whole point was just the hardcore battle challenge. Oh well.
Just have a few quests left in Act III now.
Cragholdt Bluffs were insane on LVL1. Those 2 generic monks slicing through my party in 2 seconds were just terrifying. Hardest area in the entire game + WM1.
Which were the two monks? The drunken orlan at the start? I definitely fought some monks along the way but everything was tough so they didn't stick out that much to me.
Gotta say, at 80 hours now (and not even started WM2), I'm getting a little burnt out at this point. Some of the questing in Act III feels a bit simplified in terms of choices and ways to solve the quests. For example:
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The Servant of Berath quest where you have to kill the 2 leaders, there's a talk option for 1, but for the dwarf guy there's nothing you can do besides fight. Plus there should be an option to side with the 2 and outtalk Berath.
And then the Sacrificial clan where the elder wants you to kill a baby and the only options are 1) kill baby or 2) kill elder, and there's no 3rd clever option.
A lot of Act III feels rushed compared to Act II, like they didn't have time to really flesh out the questlines in big elaborate ways. So doing all that stuff + spending 4-5 hours going through Craghold just to have a non-story ending quest log = I killed a wizard.the end.
All that combined over the last 10 hours of gameplay or so is burning me out a bit. I'll probably finish Act III next session (just have the ice quests + raederic keep 2.0) and then maybe take a break for a bit before I jump in and do WM2 -> Act 4 finale.
Act 3 was eh, alright. Felt rushed and like they spent all their time/budget on Act 2 and then had to do Act 3 with what was left. Too many quests felt like "wait, that's it?" when they end and too many end with "ok, kill everyone" because there aren't good workarounds. The city doesn't feel super developed/connected in the areas and the MSQ is ok but really short. There's stuff I liked in it, but overall Act 3 is sorta like what I would have expected after Act 1, a solid, but unspectacular 7/10 rpg or something. Act 2 was like 9+/10 awesome and WM1 was like 8-9/10 awesome as well, so it was a little disappointing. Also Endless Paths is pretty good and I did that before Act 3 so doing Act 2/WM1/Endless Paths back to back was like 50 hours of awesome and Act 3 was kinda so-so after that.
Funny story too about one of the optional super bosses in Act 3
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I heard that Undead Readeric was a tough super boss like Cragholdt and the dragons so was nervous going in. Got to the fight and just sat back and buffed, buffed, buffed because was going to play it careful.
Raederic rushes with his crew and my MC runs up and meets him and hits him for like shitty 12 damage (weapon ineffective msg). Oh well.
The there's this explosive flash and Raederic IS GONE and I'm like WTF and look at the turn log and it says MC destroyed Raederic.
What
So I check my MC's weapon which is the 2H Soulbound St. Redeemer weapon and it has 25% to do 30 raw damage and DESTROY VESSELS
So on the very first swing, it literally one-shotted Raederic into an explosion of goo
I was laughing for minutes after that. After hours dragging through Cragholdt and tough encounters I needed a moment like that in my playthrough. Even took a screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/r4lKw7t.jpg
Also question for Act 4:
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So I realized in Act 4 that once you jump into the pit you can't leave. Which means you can't leave and resupply on camping supplies? Which means if you take too much damage and blow through your 2 camping supplies on the way to the final boss you could end up fucked and the game unfinishable?
I'm a little concerned about doing high level scaling because of this...how long is Act 4 before the final boss? Like is the final boss basically a few rooms in so it's no big deal? Because if it's a full hard dungeon and you can't leave and resupply before the last boss...that sounds like trouble.
Will play through WM2 soon. I'm lvl.16 across the board, so max level. Playing on high level scaling and will see how the challenge level is.
White March 2 - Haven't left Stalwart yet. Talked to everyone and got some quests, did the Mines which are long and I was like
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Man, another dungeon of Vithrak mind controlling people?
...but it was actually a spore controlling the Vithrak controlling the people, ic what you did there Obsidian.
I hope there are no more Vithrak controlling people subplots in Pillars 2. Like, the one in Endless Paths was good. The Stragholdt Bluffs discipline was zzz, and I swear there was one more along the way too. Just seems kinda repetitive.
Gonna head back to the White Forge now and check out what's new before heading to the new map enemy camp.
PS. That spore fight was kinda nuts with the amount of enemies. Only reason I survived was I had people teleporting straight to the boss and I took it out first and although I lost a character or two, the cleanup afterwards was manageable with the remaining party members.
Justicar armor :larry
Also forge knights are such a terrible idea but Dyrwood needs all the help it can get :idont
haha, yeah it's like I don't want to stir the pot with these Crucible Knights who generally seem alright and are gung-ho on this forge knight thing, but boy does that seem like a bad idea.
Woohoo, beat the game.
White March 2 MSQ was pretty good. I liked the ending and the
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Gods v Gods stuff with Ondra calling down the moon and Abydon destroying it with his hammer and then Ondra re-using his mecha dolls to keep technology hidden. Also liked how it was more fantastical with giant Kraken boss and mecha dudes and you're weilding the hammer that destroys them on crit.
Act IV/aka the ending was ok, the final boss high-level scaling was fucking broken on hard. Dude would almost one-shot my entire party with magic spells even with buffs on. After a few tries lowered it to normal difficulty and was pretty easy. Not sure why he's so ridiculous on hard and higher.
Plot-wise the ending
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Felt really underexplained. Like Thaos's character, his motivations, what Woedica was going to do after coming back in power, etc...is not explained. Basically you show up and he's like "yo, I like things how they are" and the MC is like "gods are manufactured dude" and he's like "fuck you, let's fight". Like the entire flashback storyline that runs parallel seems pretty empty? MC worked for Thaos, and betrayed his/her master for him and then came down to Sun in Shadows and asked Thaos if there were no gods and he's like "who cares, go home and be a family man/woman" and...the MC did? And that's the whole backstory? Idk....
I hope Pillars 2 MSQ focuses more on the artificial gods of Eora. They're the most interesting part of the story which WM2 showed. The conversations with the gods in Act 3 and Act 4 were really good. I like Wael because he's like "do random shit for the lolz"
Also speaking of gods. The entire premise for the world in Pillars 1 is the Eothas god dude becoming personified in The Saints War and then Woedica? and Magran teaming up to blow him up with the Godhammer. But how Eothas ended up becoming personified and starting a war is never really explained at all.
Basically a lot of stuff isn't explained very well unfortunately which is kind of disappointing since there's a lot of interesting world lore. Hopefully Pillars 2 fills in some info gaps.
Was a great game. Took me around 90ish hours, probably 55 for main game, 35 for WM1+2 or something. Real good combat, interesting story, interesting companions, lots of good quests and dialogue choices. Great Soundtrack, great background art.