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Baronjutter posted:Uh oh a bunch of traps? Any way to avoid these? Game certainly doesn't say. If you've scouted traps, you can have a character attempt to disarm them. Some characters are better at disarming than others: if you right-click on them you can see a Traps Resist % with the other resists, and I believe that communicates how good they are at disarming. If you haven't scouted traps than you're just going to eat damage. quote:Surprised!!! My guys are backwards and the enemy gets to go first. Critical hit, critical hit. By the time it's my turn (which I mostly spend re-ordering my people) I've got 2 people at deaths door and 2 at mental break. It's worth mentioning that being surprised doesn't mean you lose your turn, all being surprised means is that your party order gets messed up. You can flee battle if a surprise completely ruins your party order and try again. quote:Ok, maybe I'm doing bad because my light level is low. Let's keep it at maximum all the time. This time I might get half way through the dungeon before there's a disaster, but it's always coming. That one encounter where the enemy gets a ton of crits and you are sent into a spiral of stress and death. The point of good play is to keep a buffer of hit points and stress so that you can salvage bad situations like this. If you can't complete a dungeon than you are in a bad situation. The entire game is balanced around getting consistent gold rewards, experience and heirlooms from quest rewards. It may seem expensive to heal party stress after a dungeon, but that's because you're missing ~3000 gold from completing the dungeon, as well as the stress penalty. The game definitely has problems with difficulty tuning - the very beginning is probably too much of a brick wall for some new players, and failing early on can lead to a death spiral. It's also much more luck driven because you don't have to tools to build a really synergistic team. On the other hand, you should realize your crew is completely disposable at this point. They're level zero or one, and if they have afflictions and high stress than they're actually worse than Fresh-Off-The-Wagon level zero characters. You haven't spent any money upgrading them at the guildhall or the smith, you haven't invested money in the sanitarium to give them good traits. gently caress 'em, throw them away, get new guys (you have upgraded your stagecoach right?)
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:26 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 15:20 |
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Zaphod42 posted:Dear god why??
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:28 |
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they need to improve the plague doctor because he doesnt really play well unless hes against enemies weak against blight and even then he feels really borderline unless you are doing lovely stunlock parties
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:30 |
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Jackard posted:Possibly he keeps running out of gold and doesn't know about dismissing adventurers and/or suicide farming Yeah I missed his last post where he said he figured it out. Still, you'd think after the 3rd restart you'd say "okay I am doing something wrong here" Viridiant posted:Yeah something I like about this game is despite it's difficulty it seems like you never really need to restart. Sure you might get into some pretty dire circumstances but you'll -always- have new people to recruit, you'll never be locked out from recruiting them, and eventually as you upgrade more and more it should become easier going. On the one hand the game can be ridiculously stressful, and you can put a ton of investment into heroes that you lose completely and permanently. So its good to have something consistent, yeah. Your town always grows, it never loses value, it never deteriorates, there's no upkeep costs, and there's no real need to ever restart the game completely. Your town is forever... your heroes are not. Its a good balance.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:31 |
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what happens if you lose too many adventurers and didn't upgrade your coach's carry capacity to 4 anyway, can you actually lose
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:37 |
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Tollymain posted:what happens if you lose too many adventurers and didn't upgrade your coach's carry capacity to 4 anyway, can you actually lose Nope, it'll always let you field 4 heroes. That just means you'll have to consistently field stressed people or dismiss experienced heroes.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:38 |
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no i mean if you have less than 2 live adventurers and you get 2 adventurers in your coach per week, can you be locked out of any further missions
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:39 |
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Nope, it'll always let you field 4 heroes. That just means you'll have to consistently field stressed people or dismiss experienced heroes. You can't dismiss heroes if you only have 4, counting who's in the wagon. They'll be dust soon enough. Leads to an unfortunate situation of having to send rookies into a Veteran dungeon if you manage to get a level 3 hero while also leaving a trail of blood everywhere you go. Tollymain posted:no i mean if you have less than 2 live adventurers and you get 2 adventurers in your coach per week, can you be locked out of any further missions The wagon always brings enough heroes to get you to 4, even if you haven't upgraded it.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:41 |
Tollymain posted:no i mean if you have less than 2 live adventurers and you get 2 adventurers in your coach per week, can you be locked out of any further missions NO you'll magically get more adventurers anyway if your guys actually died. The only way you *might* be able to screw yourself is if you have no stagecoach upgrades at all, your four guys don't die, then you put them into the abbey and tavern to rehab. But I'm not even sure that works mostly because I haven't seen anyone on the Steam forums complaining about it and if it were possible someone would have done it by now.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:42 |
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You can always cancel treatment, but your gold isn't refunded. It's a harsh lesson but it's generally learned quickly enough that people don't complain after the initial moment of pain.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:46 |
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Slaapaav posted:they need to improve the plague doctor because he doesnt really play well unless hes against enemies weak against blight and even then he feels really borderline unless you are doing lovely stunlock parties You can get some pretty nice blight debuffs stacks doing if you equip them with a couple of +blight% trinkets. Then again, my bounty hunter just crit a marked dude for 68 damage, so I'm not so sure anymore...
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:48 |
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gently caress this. If they patch in an easy mode I'll give this game another go. I just don't care enough to suffer through the horrible RNG. Sweet concept, art and presentation though. And I'm a huge fan of 'gently caress you' games like FTL but this is just insane. Hope they keep adding stuff to make it better.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:55 |
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Broken Cog posted:Then again, my bounty hunter just crit a marked dude for 68 damage, so I'm not so sure anymore... I'd like to have more synergies like Bounty Hunter/Occultist. For example, movement skills could make the target to stumble, and then a highwayman or Jester could take advantage of it with some of their attacks. Of course, that would mean more fiddly bits.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 18:59 |
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tripwood posted:gently caress this. If they patch in an easy mode I'll give this game another go. I just don't care enough to suffer through the horrible RNG. Sweet concept, art and presentation though. I find this game far less infuriating than FTL, and much easier
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:01 |
tripwood posted:gently caress this. If they patch in an easy mode I'll give this game another go. I just don't care enough to suffer through the horrible RNG. Sweet concept, art and presentation though. I honestly don't,t think the game is that random. Nine times out of ten people complaining about random are making basic tactical errors like letting their torch drop etc. The tenth time they got surprised and critter and deathblow bled on the first round, but that's rare.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:04 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I honestly don't,t think the game is that random. Nine times out of ten people complaining about random are making basic tactical errors like letting their torch drop etc. The tenth time they got surprised and critter and deathblow bled on the first round, but that's rare. This game IS random as hell. The entire gameplay is based around "Making the best of a bad situation" aka setting things straight when the RNG fucks you up big time. I'd honestly say the randomness is a bigger factor than it is in FTL, at least in the beginning. When you get going to level 3-4 (Can't speak for level 5 dungeons) it's easier to strategise, although you'll still get the "All enemies crit on AoE's during the first round, and now two party members are bleeding at death's door" every now and then.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:07 |
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Darkest Dungeon lives and dies by party composition, hero skills and armor upgrades. I've gotten to point where I can clear bosses and medium dungeons without ever getting hit or coming close to dying. Once you buff the Vestal's heals you basically have to go out of your way to die. Getting armor upgraded and picking skills that focus on dps and mobility (hence why the leper gets poo poo on) will make things a cakewalk. Honestly balanced is hosed up so bad I'm really curious to see what the end product will look like. With most EA games you can kind of see the end-point but this is a complete mystery to me. Hieronymous Alloy posted:I honestly don't,t think the game is that random. Nine times out of ten people complaining about random are making basic tactical errors like letting their torch drop etc. The tenth time they got surprised and critter and deathblow bled on the first round, but that's rare. Agree. Outside of hunger events I've found the RNG to actually be really forgiving. Crits suck yeah, but when you can heal 6 points a turn or dodge 20+% of all attacks that stops being an issue. Someone mentioned it earlier I think, but making combat less reliant on stuns early on and focusing more on the environment slowly wearing you down would do wonders for this game. As it is the only thing you really have to fear is monsters. For a game based around sanity and H.P. Lovecraft I kind of expected the dungeons to actually have a bigger effect on your party. That could just be my missed expectations though.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:10 |
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Also I've done some dungeon runs with no healers and it can work fine, you just gotta play a little cagey. Just make sure to either take items to get rid of blight/bleed or have, like, a Plague Doctor available with the ability to do so because that will help negate a lot of incidental damage you'd end up taking and is basically the equivalent of healing in a lot of cases.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:15 |
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And quit clicking on poo poo. If you don't have the right item to get a good/neutral benefit from a clickable, you're asking for sanity/health/disease problems. Basically the dungeon items are 'if you invested X gold you get a Y return from this item'. I can't say that's particularly exciting design, but that's how it works. Otherwise it's 'woo, my dude got a horrid disease from that maggot infested corpse!'
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:17 |
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tripwood posted:gently caress this. If they patch in an easy mode I'll give this game another go. I just don't care enough to suffer through the horrible RNG. "aNoTheR . . . un..fortunate soul ...tossed into the abyss....sHo.CKed at tHe oRRors Down belo.w"
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:20 |
Broken Cog posted:This game IS random as hell. The entire gameplay is based around "Making the best of a bad situation" aka setting things straight when the RNG fucks you up big time. I'd honestly say the randomness is a bigger factor than it is in FTL, at least in the beginning. When you get going to level 3-4 (Can't speak for level 5 dungeons) it's easier to strategise, although you'll still get the "All enemies crit on AoE's during the first round, and now two party members are bleeding at death's door" every now and then. Most of the random is within a controllable range, though. Yeah, there is that tenth time when it fucks you, but overall its no more random than your average deck building game, say. Even if you get wiped the adventurers are just part of your game, you take the hit and move on.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:24 |
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victrix posted:And quit clicking on poo poo. If you don't have the right item to get a good/neutral benefit from a clickable, you're asking for sanity/health/disease problems. Yeah, never ever touch poo poo except chests. Chests will just activate a trap and do a little damage over time. It's a stupid design because most dungeons have so much loot that you end up filling you inventory to max without ever opening anything making keys and stuff useless to carry. It also means that most dungeons have you holding the "move right" key and just fighting things. There's nothing really tense about that after awhile and basically wastes a good setting. I would love to see locked doors that require you to find a key by searching stuff in the environment. They would need to tone down the negative effects by quite a bit but at least it would give an incentive to look for stuff. Also being able to find armor and weapons that subtly change your stats or skills would be nice. I wouldn't mind making a few characters insane looking for unique artifacts. *edit* Also as an aside leveled up jesters are straight up broken. Once you upgrade their song ability that buffs the entire party and stacks it just breaks balance. At max level you basically can give everyone 10% crit chance, 20% accuracy, and like 10+ speed. Shits absurd. Oh and he can restore the entire parties' sanity really easy as well. Red Mundus fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Feb 5, 2015 |
# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:25 |
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Choices that are less binary are mandatory if they want to make dungeon interaction more interesting. Currently the choices are 'possibly get hosed Y/N?' or invest X gold, use Y items in dungeon for guaranteed returns. If they had interactables that gave you a range of possible outcomes and some idea of what you were getting into, you could make a risk assessment based on your current party status, length of dungeon, desire for phat loot, etc.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:27 |
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I think you're all exaggerating the potential harm of non-chest environment objects, I pretty much always click on everything and the downsides are mostly quite minor while you can still get great stuff like confession booths removing bad quirks, and just more loot on average from cabinets and stuff like that(which can only do minor damage to you if it goes wrong).
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:33 |
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victrix posted:And quit clicking on poo poo. If you don't have the right item to get a good/neutral benefit from a clickable, you're asking for sanity/health/disease problems. I've actually done a couple TRUE HEROISM runs, where I click on poo poo all the time after going into the dungeon with 0 supplies. It's worked out OK. Everyone ends at 80-100 stress (mostly dependent on if they got a virtue or not), but I also clear more than enough gold to treat everyone if I cared. But, you know, I don't because that's kind of the point of these runs. See how Really understanding the tactical game and what actions are good in your current situation is the key to this game's genre. And if you don't have any good actions in your party? That's when you retreat, maybe from the battle maybe from the mission. If you get surprised and shuffled the only party comp that should stay and fight is a maximum mobility party. Scouted enemies seem much less likely to surprise you, and if you retreat from a battle you've obviously scouted it. victrix posted:Choices that are less binary are mandatory if they want to make dungeon interaction more interesting. They existing interactables ARE that way, once you're playing at a higher strategic level. Like, what do I care if my Hellion who already has 7 bad traits wants to read some spooky books? She might stress a bit, and then I'll have to camp a little sooner. I'll gladly risk blights, bleeds, and worse to check a loot container in darkness if I've already used all my items for it.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:33 |
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If you check everything in the level your inventory will fill faster than you can use any of it. Early on yeah, checking things is great to fill in loot but at Lvl. 3 or 5 dungeons you will be drowning in your ancestors bling and poo poo so it just becomes background decoration. Hell, most medium lvl.1 dungeons fill my inventory faster than I can use stuff up.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:39 |
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Oh one other thing, those 'bonus scouting % in area <x>' mods are really drat strong. If you bring multiple dudes with that, you'll have a full scouting read on the whole dungeon, which makes it really easy to optimize your route. Also I'm not 100% sure, but it sure feels like having an enemy scouted increases the odds of surprising them. I had a dungeon totally scouted and literally surprised all but one enemy group.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:47 |
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victrix posted:I find this game far less infuriating than FTL, and much easier Yeah, FTL starts easy but once you're like halfway through it, it becomes an absolute ball-breaker. If anything it just feels like you're wasting time at first because you know you're not going to make it all the way, at best you'll get to see the mothership and then be blasted to oblivion. I like this better because even when I hard-fail and everybody dies, I'm not starting completely over. Your town progress is significant and stays consistent. I guess in FTL you do unlock other ships which can be better, but most of them aren't a huge upgrade. Hieronymous Alloy posted:I honestly don't,t think the game is that random. Nine times out of ten people complaining about random are making basic tactical errors like letting their torch drop etc. The tenth time they got surprised and critter and deathblow bled on the first round, but that's rare. Yeah typical videogames Dunning Kruger. The game doesn't go out of its way to tell you what you're doing wrong; it just kills you. But if you're dying way too much then you should know you're doing things wrong and try to do things different rather than assuming the game is just crazy random and too hard. When I started the game every adventurer would come home with 100 stress, with 2 on death's door, and even then I had to abandon half the quests I started. I can't remember the last time I actually lost a full party or even retreated. Hell its been a really long time since I lost anybody at all. You learn tactics which really let you mitigate the danger for the most part. Like you said a bleed or a blight on the wrong turn can still gently caress you, but its rare.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:51 |
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Red Mundus posted:If you check everything in the level your inventory will fill faster than you can use any of it. Early on yeah, checking things is great to fill in loot but at Lvl. 3 or 5 dungeons you will be drowning in your ancestors bling and poo poo so it just becomes background decoration. Hell, most medium lvl.1 dungeons fill my inventory faster than I can use stuff up. I stopped keeping everything that drops. What good is another stack of busts when I could carry more gold? What need have I for that trinket that I won't equip? My gem stacks aren't all full yet, I'll smash open another chest and with luck there will be rubies and sapphires to quench my lust for loot. Glittering baubles in the dark promise wealth beyond measure if I have the courage to reach for them. (Also ancestral trinkets in the nomad wagon are EXPENSIVE. And running a short apprentice mission to get the ancestral trinket quest reward means I really have to squeeze all the gold out of the dungeon I can in case there's another in the wagon next week.) The party has 16 slots for loot. I strongly doubt you're consistently pulling 24k out of your dungeons in treasure alone if you're not still looting things after you've used your keys/shovels/bandages/herbs. Because I'm not either, but I'm closer and closer every time.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:53 |
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Baronjutter posted:Oh yeah I stopped restarting a long time ago. I'm sitting on a ton of gold after doing the first mission like 8 times, but I can barely get 1/2 or 1/3 through it. Once I actually got through it but missed a single off-shoot room at the very start and starved a couple times on the way back. By the time I got to the room I missed I was out of torches and everyone was insane and near death You're doing something really stupid/wrong during the mission if you "can barely get 1/2 or 1/3 through it" after having tried it 8 times. You probably don't realize what your doing wrong, but at this point its not luck.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:55 |
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Who the gently caress did the narration for this game His voice owns
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:56 |
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Red Mundus posted:Someone mentioned it earlier I think, but making combat less reliant on stuns early on and focusing more on the environment slowly wearing you down would do wonders for this game. As it is the only thing you really have to fear is monsters. For a game based around sanity and H.P. Lovecraft I kind of expected the dungeons to actually have a bigger effect on your party. That could just be my missed expectations though. "Focus more on the environment slowly wearing you down" sounds great on paper, but how do you exactly implement that in game mechanics? Its easier said than done. The game could use some re-balance though. The devs are working on bugfixes as top priority right now, but they've already adjusted some balance and will no doubt continue to do so in a big way. The only question is how far they'll go. Considering the game isn't even done yet, it could go really far. Sunless Sea's combat system was so borked during EA they redid it completely. (Its not much better now though ) Red Mundus posted:Yeah, never ever touch poo poo except chests. Chests will just activate a trap and do a little damage over time. It's a stupid design because most dungeons have so much loot that you end up filling you inventory to max without ever opening anything making keys and stuff useless to carry. It also means that most dungeons have you holding the "move right" key and just fighting things. There's nothing really tense about that after awhile and basically wastes a good setting. Yeah I agree with all of this. Finding armor or weapons in dungeons would be great. And there's not much reason to use most dungeon objects other than unused torches or chests. Occasionally I'll dump holy water on something for a massive stress reduction, but that's it. They do need to adjust how those work. Honestly I think keys shouldn't be something you buy as part of supplies, they should have to be found in the dungeon, yeah. (And it feels lame to buy one only to find one anyways) In general a few more decision moments like "you are hungry, eat or not?" would be fantastic. "You are tired. Press on or rest?" Pressing on increases stress, taking a short rest decreases stress but also decreases light level and gives a chance for being ambushed. Things like that would add a lot to the survival side of it. I want the game to be even more like Oregon Trail. The heroes mention while camping that they can't really hunt the wildlife for food, it'd be rotten or plagued or whatever. But what if you could? You hunted for 10583 pounds of owlbear. You can carry 53. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Feb 5, 2015 |
# ? Feb 5, 2015 19:56 |
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ZenVulgarity posted:Who the gently caress did the narration for this game Somebody earlier in the thread posted an audiobook he did, so he must be a professional announcer / narrator. Yeah he rules. Up there next to the announcer from Bastion.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:00 |
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Zaphod42 posted:I like this better because even when I hard-fail and everybody dies, I'm not starting completely over. Your town progress is significant and stays consistent. It makes me wonder what the dungeon mobs thing about the adventurers. Think about it, the adventurers are an endless stream of bandits murdering their way through your home, looting everything that isn't nailed down. No matter how many you kill more keep coming, and every week their base of operations grows stronger on the horizon.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:01 |
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Fat Samurai posted:Depending on turn order, you're a stun failure away of losing both your frontliners. I didn't stun it a single time. I didn't need too. All I had to do was shuffle them back and keep healing, and it worked out fine. What the gently caress do you think the mushroom can do when its alone? All I ever see it do is spray spores. quote:How did you end up with your tanks blighted and one hit away from deaths door, anyway? You have no stress on them, which means you didn't get any critical hits. If you had, though, at least one of your guys would be dead. No I got critted a bunch. If stress is related to crits it sure as hell doesn't feel like it cause I've had guys get crit with 0 stress before. Also I've gone through dungeons with 4 people at max stress and didn't notice enemies critting more than usual. Also the plague doctor's heal is garbage that somehow manages to fail 4 turns in a row. quote:What I'm trying to say is that this looks like bad play, trying to leave the artillery for last and ignoring the fact that it powers up the big dudes with mark. Pulling the arty forward would have reduced your damage considerably, but would have left your party facing a thougher enemy that's harder to stall against. Again, the decisions aren't as obvious as you make them look. Are you seriously trying to tell me how the battle I loving played went out? No, the mushroom did not kill anyone. I healed back up and completed the dungeon instead of running away or getting killed. I didn't try to set up that situation either, the artillery ended up as the last guy simply due to dodges and misses. There were two in the formation so its not shocking one ends up as the last enemy.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:05 |
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ZenVulgarity posted:Who the gently caress did the narration for this game The narrator is Wayne June, who is a professional narrator. He also occasionally puts some recordings up on soundcloud. Here's some Poe as read by him.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:14 |
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I'm not a big fan of any part of the item/equipment system, either. Armor and Weapons are just generic +1s that you buy in town which diminishes the characters' ability to be unique and separate from one another. The Relic system is really bad. I only have one character that uses Relics, there are some without negative effects but even then the benefit is minor and unnecessary, so I don't bother spending the time to look at what they do anymore and actively avoid looting them. They're just so boring, none of the choices are meaningful and they're poorly designed with no build synergy. The ones that provide a benefit under one light condition and a negative under the opposite are particularly puzzling, because when have you ever struggled with light? I'm sure I could make my party slightly more effective by poring over relics but I don't see a point since the combat is already easy once you get the hang of it. It's too early to complain about this stuff though, I'm sure there are plenty of changes coming. I've kind of hit the brick wall of the current EA version, I could progress and keep farming dungeons and killing bosses, but any form of difficulty is pretty much gone. Since I know what to expect in each dungeon there's no tension or apprehension anymore and I'm beyond the point of any of the enemies feeling threatening. I'm hoping they'll smooth out the very-early-game difficulty issues and add either more challenge or more RNG fuckery to the rest of the game.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:14 |
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Funnypost Collabo posted:I'm not a big fan of any part of the item/equipment system, either. Armor and Weapons are just generic +1s that you buy in town which diminishes the characters' ability to be unique and separate from one another. The positive effects are usually slightly better than the drawbacks, so if you find a relic with, say, +20 dodge, -10% damage, and another one with +12% damage, -5 dodge, you can get an overall positive out of it. A lot of them are not worth the hassle though. Also yeah, I feel like the generic equipment system really drags the game down a bit. Broken Cog fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Feb 5, 2015 |
# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:17 |
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I wish the plague doctor had something like strong moves that only work on blighted/bleeding enemies.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:18 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 15:20 |
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Yeah, I can squeeze out some more damage or defenses or whatever, but honestly - the combat in this game after the beginning is too easy and I don't need an advantage unless it's going to make me kill enemies in fewer turns, and the benefit from relics isn't enough to do that.
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# ? Feb 5, 2015 20:18 |