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Originally Posted by Glitchy
The barrier under the Gargoyle's Maze can be opened without using source. If you liberated Withermoore from his curse earlier in the game and touch the mysterious mechanism with whoever agreed to help him, he will appear to help you through.

That's interesting. I've somehow managed to avoid ever trying that on any of my play-throughs!


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I feel like the game has turned into who can start a chain CC first. Instead of fun, it's tedious.

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Originally Posted by vometia
Originally Posted by Glitchy
The barrier under the Gargoyle's Maze can be opened without using source. If you liberated Withermoore from his curse earlier in the game and touch the mysterious mechanism with whoever agreed to help him, he will appear to help you through.

That's interesting. I've somehow managed to avoid ever trying that on any of my play-throughs!
This didn't work for me and of course breaking his jar not absorbing it *is* using a source point anyway.

I tried all conversation options for all 4 characters and he didn't turn up. I had previously freed him by pulling out the spear and then freed his soul by breaking his jar. Perhaps something else is required.

It isn't worth it anymore unless you want the gloves anyway I guess.

I'm not sure I like this change as there are only 6 soul jars. Assuming you play nice you break 3 and that only leaves another 3 for the whole first act - not enough to try out source skills really.

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Originally Posted by lx07

I tried all conversation options for all 4 characters and he didn't turn up. I had previously freed him by pulling out the spear and then freed his soul by breaking his jar. Perhaps something else is required.


That's odd, it may just be buggy. I've managed to get him to appear on my last 3 runs though (2 last patch, 1 this patch).

All I remember doing is taking out the spear, accepting his offer with my dwarf, destroying his jar without absorbing his soul, going back to loot his body and that's it. Once I get to the barrier, I just need to click on the mechanism to make him appear :

http://imgur.com/JvUlAJZ.jpg

Considering the dialogue options, you may not even need to have found him in Fort Joy for him to appear, since the first option is to wonder who he is. Which, by the way, needs to be changed if we've already met him before.

PS. It seems to have been fixed this patch. You no longer have to click with whoever agreed to help him, my bad. Just tested with my other characters, they also get him to appear by touching the mechanism.

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I'm also extremely against these permanent fields. Especially with the exceptions fire and smoke it feels extremely inkonsistent. Also with the world interaction per se, like ice melting in the sun or water drained by heat, and so on.

As for the AI:

I like the fact, that most enemies now use their skills in a more flexible way. That's nice! But sadly for the most the power of the "new AI" comes from bugs and overinflated values, making gameplay quite antifun and really tedious. (and thanks to permanent surfaces you now even have to clean up afterwards...)
For example the voidwoken worm is really ridiculous, can teleport across the whole map now (had a character flee from combat to the shrine of lucien and the worm tunneled directly to his position), the tunneling AoE also bypasses protection... beside of all the "normal" aspects like his massive damage and so on.
Imho up to ~250 dmg each round at that lvl with no real way to protect is a bit overdone.
Managed to kill it in the end... by teleporting his prime target, my weakest character sebille, into his cursed fire. He followed, killed her, and the rest of my party ended combat (flee), he then slowly died, waiting in the fire.
What can I say... distilled anti-fun.

As for the "heaps of gold in the beginning"... I can just say: Huh...?
I actually had a lot less gold in the 2 playthroughs in this patch. Plus the fact that dropped equipment was much worse, only a bit countered by the new unique items placed on some enemies. Wasn't even able to purchase all the needed skills, let alone sufficient equipment.
Not that a lot of merchants would offer anything useful at all...

On the plus side I have to note the "handplaced loot". Feels a bit clumsy and underwhelming the way it's done right now, but it's a first step! Nice! Expand that, at best remove the RNG item enchantment-system, and extend crafting and we're golden!


Last edited by Seelenernter; 06/02/17 03:19 PM.

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@Seel

See I actually got more gold than I've ever managed in pre-patch playthroughs, maybe you just had bad rng. smirk

The equipment hasn't been that bad for me, I've found a lot of nice or decent gear to use without spending a penny, also could be rng, but who knows.

The community pretty much agrees without a single debate that skillbooks and gear are far too expensive even with the increase in gold we can acquire, but I'm sure we'll see a fix to that since they JUST patched the game.

I haven't been able to tell what is handplaced and what is normal to find yet, though I guess that speaks to exactly what you are saying about clumsy feeling.

One of the things I noticed that I didn't like though was that Burro no longer drops his club at 100% drop rate and it is a nice upgrade for the first few minutes of the game when you enter fort joy, I hope that is a bug or they change it back.

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Levels 1 through 3 are a slog. However at Level 3 you start to get better; you just need to know where to go and what encounters are survivable, so this difficulty (I play Classic) is unfriendly to more casual players. Level 4 you start steamrolling Magisters even when outnumbered 2 to 1. I cleared Fort Joy of Magisters at that level. At this point you start having decent gear at least for 1 or 2 characters. Then you will presumably have difficulty spike in the jungle-forest. This feels like a hard mode currently, though I'd prefer the difficulty to be a bit more uniform rather than the slow start - then suddenly steamroll that is currently the case.

Last edited by Kelsier; 06/02/17 04:23 PM.
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Can we add gear requiring attributes to the list of cons? Its an incredibly frustrating layer that messes with the physical and magical armor systems, and makes both hybrid and classical character builds far more difficult than they should be. I'd even argue its just as bad... maybe even worse than skill books costing outrageous prices.

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The game is still really easy once you know what you will be facing but I have to say that with all the adjustment around, the game is really newbie unfriendly now. Here's an example.

Ifan now has 1 thievery instead of 1 sneak

This might seem like a good change but one thing we have to remember that unless you have 1 sneak, you can't grab the prison key without being detected.

Of course older players will know this and have Ifan get Sneak to 1 anyway just to be able to do the Withermoore soul jar and grab the Houndmaster crossbow but newer players won't.

Because of this, if the players get sent to prison even with Ifan, if they don't level Sneak to at least 1 at level 2, they have to restart the game.

There were also tons of balance change that weren't mentioned like how The Pawn (It's obviously too good) now has a required "1 scoundrel" to be picked up. The first-run experience is pretty much dead because the game is so heavy on the min-max now so unless you know exactly what you need to do or what you're about to face (Damn they fixed the Meat golem in a cage free hits D:), you will likely end up being forced to restart the game after a few hours in to have a better build and more gold/skills.

But for a player who already cleared the game a few time like me, the new min-max challenge is a fun one.

===

Now the real complain is without a doubt, on the extra cost of skill books, especially when you gain possession of them and the price drop back to the prepatched cost (so you can't even sell them back for some decent gold). Not only is this a major nerf to one of the reason to have thievery in the first place, this also completely kills the mage class variety in spell combination and you're forced to play the plain double wand shooter instead. The nerfed Thievery also becomes even more mandatory because you can't get the gold back from people you kill, only the tons of paintings and so on you offered to them so you are forced to steal 2-3x after a deal to buy a skill book before proceeding.

I don't have the issue with equip costs because everything we have is also ridiculously expensive now like Ancient Sword base gold is 1200 instead. Unique items are finally worth consider selling to make way for future items.

This also makes Barter much stronger and so does crafting because the easiest way to make gold now, is to buy materials, craft a potion or grenade, sell them back and go level up where the store will reset (or wait an hour) and do it again. Stick and Shell gives you 40+ gold a pop which is great.

I also have to be much faster and more tactical with how I kill my enemies so they die before using grenade in order for me to generate more gold from selling their stuffs.

One feature I also have to explore now is the "Attitude" feature. Giving the npc about 120 gold (2 gold per 1 attitude point) can end up giving me a 200-300 gold on discount and extra 100-200 gold on selling profit from buying and selling what I need and don't need, making it finally useful to try and befriend NPCs. Considering how they mention they are trying to make trading more important and impactful, it seems to be working as intended.

So when they decide to fix this, instead of just reducing the price of equips and skillbooks, I would like it more to see

1) More way to bump up the attitude of NPCs beside just showering them with gifts. Very few merchants allow you to get extra attitude. For example, Butter doesn't even like you much after you both flirt with each other successfully.

2) Reduce the skill book cost by about 25%. Sure they might still be somewhat expensive but not to the point they're dirt cheap.

3) Buff Thievery slightly back up so they can at least steal something in the early game instead of being used as a way to just regain gold losses from attitude boost gift shower. This will also allow me to be much more merciful with how I play because atm, I pretty much only shops with merchants I know will die at Fort Joy because I will get my drops back (except gold so I have to be careful with gold) to sell to the other merchants. Every other merchants has to wait until all 4 of my party member can have thievery gear so they can steal all the gold back.

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Yes to more ways of befriending merchants. It's been way too time-consuming trying to figure out how much each merchant gets plus-relations for which amount of gold. Some merchants also have different ratios. Zaleskar for example, if you shower him with a gift worth ~100 gold, his attitude went up by 7. On the lizard water mage book merchant, attitude went up by 50+.

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Originally Posted by Kelsier
Yes to more ways of befriending merchants. It's been way too time-consuming trying to figure out how much each merchant gets plus-relations for which amount of gold. Some merchants also have different ratios. Zaleskar for example, if you shower him with a gift worth ~100 gold, his attitude went up by 7. On the lizard water mage book merchant, attitude went up by 50+.


I would also like to see more ways to raise attitude aside from persuasion, and giving items and gold for free, or at least a more consistent ratio for what values of gold/gifts raise attitude.

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Originally Posted by Kelsier
Yes to more ways of befriending merchants. It's been way too time-consuming trying to figure out how much each merchant gets plus-relations for which amount of gold. Some merchants also have different ratios. Zaleskar for example, if you shower him with a gift worth ~100 gold, his attitude went up by 7. On the lizard water mage book merchant, attitude went up by 50+.


Yeah I pretty much test the water now with something like 12 gold to see if the attitude divider is 2 3 or 4. The water spell lizard was 1 which is really good and majority of the characters that sell decent stuffs are 3.

And right now, I actually find gold to no longer be an issue simply because the game has an exploitable craft-and-sell method that is helpful to do on the first 3-4 hours as you slowly make your way out of fort joy so everyone will have their skill learned before killing a few selected NPC (Quest) to regain all the crafted grenade/potion and trade to other NPCs Zaleskar later.

Combined with extra thievery+ gears (and you might as well teach everyone Walk-In-Shadow because The Pawn requires rank 1 scoundrel anyway to make it really really easy to steal without any preperation), it's really easy to recycle all the gold and leave Fort Joy with a few thousands like before this patch. Just gotta avoid being tempted to steal at level 1 to 4 and just start at level 5 with extra thievery gears because the gold limit is around Character level * 60 + (Thievery level - Thievery level required * 30).

Last edited by Ellezard; 06/02/17 11:07 PM.
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Hi all!

Thx for all your feedback & for playing! We're taking early access as an opportunity for trying out new things but we obviously also don't want to frustrate you when we err on the wrong side which is why you can expect an update soon that takes care of some of the most pressing issues, specifically the economy, the longevity of certain surfaces and the removal of some cc from the early enemies.

As we're getting closer to finishing the game and more and more game systems start being activated (we still have a lot of work but for the first time we can actually see the light), you can expect a few more drastic changes. Several of these have to do with the overall experience throughout the entire campaign and the removal of Source surfaces in the early game is related to that. Things like source vampirism, source vision and cursing surfaces are gradually introduced over the main campaign and in the first parts, Source is meant to be something that's hard to get.

One other pretty big change will be the introduction of the level 1 content, which comes before the area where you are now starting (which is supposed to be a level 2 area). That's why the encounter frequency in the beginning is what it is. That said, we may change it if we still see it as a problem after we added the level 1 content.

Regarding the starting classes - those too will be changing over the next couple of months as more and more skills (including those of other schools) get completed and talents get finished. Speaking of talents, lone wolf aka one man army will be available at level 1. We just deactivated it for now cause there's some issues with it.

This was also the first deployment of AI 2.0 and over the coming months we'll continue to work on it. We didn't go over all of the encounters yet to ensure they'd take advantage of it so all you've basically seen so far is AI 2.0 using the skills that were assigned to the enemies under AI 1.0 scripting. Once AI 2.0 is more evolved, we'll start modifying the encounters to balance them for fun. That's also when we'll start handicapping/powering it up to work differently at different difficulty levels.

I also would like to repeat that we're aware of many of your requests and that a lot of them are on our lists and being discussed. Since it's a long list however, some things may take time to materialise but I did want to make a point of posting here to thank you and to ensure you that the effort you put in posting here is worth a lot to us. It's making the game a lot better, even if from time to time we may screw up as we try out a couple of things.

Thanks for your patience!

Swen


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I knew there had to be more content pre-beach start. I mean it is kind of obvious with all the dialogue that suggests you were on a ship that actually crashed, but still.

I'm excited to see that and how it treats itself as a tutorial and to testing new systems.

Thanks for personally posting an update to us.

Last edited by Kokoro-Sensei; 07/02/17 07:46 PM.
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I just hope, the game won't be as easy as the first one, because right now it's feeling a bit the same with early lvl being correct, and the more you get levels the easier the game is, which is sad.

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Some new issues with AI 2.0 I absolutely hate

- Encounter with Silent monk involved, there are chances the playable characters will just derp entirely and can no longer move or attack. They are stuck in the idle animation until Quick load takes place.

- Frozen field, electric field, etc are on the field permanently after combat. You have to remove them with skills like Warfare Battle Stomp just so the characters don't randomly trip once in awhile as they walk through the area. Very annoying.

Also the Paladin Cork is... well.. better? He doesn't even move from the spot you start the fight with and spend majority of the time just ending turn as you fight all the magistrate while trying to keep him alive with all the archers using all there fire arrows at the start of the fight, trying to kill him.

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Thanks for the update Swen! New level 1 content will help the early pacing a lot. Lone Wolf will be nice to play with (assuming it works in single player properly).

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Now I'm getting worried that this Alpha bootcamp will over-prepare us for the actual release. But hey, at least I finally get to claim bragging rights and be able to play at the hardest difficulty.

It sounds like the new Level 1 content will balance out the sluggish early-game; alongside economy tweaks, it should be smooth sailing. Only thing I'm still a bit worried about is how the current AI reacts to thievery. I don't think the (practically) forced inventory checks and infrared vision equipped NPCs are immersive or fun, or the random fights you get into for thievery (for example, stealing from the Magister spy at Gareth's Rallying Point making everyone - including Gareth and his posse - turn hostile towards you). I'm not sure how else to punish stealing, though, or discourage people from just hoarding every item that isn't nailed down.

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Thanks for the update Swen. Can't wait for the new update (hope attribute requirements goes in the next patch too). I know that not every idea you guys try will be perfect (its early access for a reason), but I'm glad you guys are using early access to experiment with what works and what doesn't.

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It really turns out it doesn't really matter if the AI is better when you whole team can easily wipe about 3-4 targets on the 1st turn. The only time the game is really difficult is still the same "Voidwoken used Chain lightning and it's super effective!" moment because of the inflated number and insane stat, not the AI.

And what's up with my AI wanting to climb every possible Ladder now?

Edit:

Another complaint here. For a patch that emphasize on trading, there's barely anything worth buying after escaping Fort Joy. All the Epic and blue gears sold by NPCs are not around for me to purchase like pre-patch and I'm just running around with 10k gold.

Last edited by Ellezard; 08/02/17 01:41 AM.
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