D:OS2 First Impressions

SirJames said:

Well, my games bugged out. Not long after getting to the swamp my party is permanently wet

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This is a known bug, it doesn't happen in every game, dunno (still) how to fix it.
Didn't have it in my game - I finished the starting island.
Anyway, to others, if you notice a party member can't get rid of "wet" status, reload some previous save.

purpleblob said:

@joxer; - how does it compare to Expeditions: Viking?

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DOS2 is richer when it comes to story, characters and graphics. Expeditions2 has something DOS2 doesn't include - romances.
Music is on the similar level (so far).

Combat?

Expeditions2 combat is awesomely simple. Make sure you have two bowmen in the party, keep shield on everyone because of no initiative stat and you pwn everything if you guard archers with other two party members. AI is nothing to brag about, seems it'll attack anything randomly. Despite that "basicness" it's so fun I love it!

DOS2 is extremely rich with skill/spell options, makes fights so complicated the game feel as a tough puzzle to crack. AI is unbelievably dangerous, trashmobs will aggro your weakest characters and ignore tanks, boss mages will peel magic armor on your strongest character in order to charm them and just when you think teleport spell is a path to victory, enemies will teleport your party all over the place!
I can't wait to hear… Wait I wrote that already, we have some forum members who play games only on highest difficulty as everything else is beneath them and I want to hear their whining ASAP.

Drithius said:

So I started playing this for the first time. The camera reminds me a lot of Neverwinter Nights 1. And that's not a good thing

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As NWN hater #1 on this site I can only say mentioning that trash in DOS2 thread is a plain insult!

tomasp3n said:

A couple of hours in and highly enjoying it. Not at all sold on the armour mechanics though, which makes a party specialized in a single damage type (physical or magical) much more effective than a versatile one. That's just a bad idea severly limiting your choices if you want your party to synergize well. I'm running a pure physical party now and the battles got alot more doable. When the option comes to respec I'll use it and try going 2 physical and 2 magic though, perhaps if they focus on different enemies it's still a decent tactic, and it will be alot more fun.

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This seems true on the first island. Because of protection difference where physical damage based party members cannot benefit from your magic armor removal and vice versa, full physical or pure magic party is better than mixed.
I'm playing with 2+2 mixed party and as you noticed, you need to go magic on trashmobs with low magic armor, physical on others. Also because of this, my physical based duo always uses weapons that do some additional magic damage.

booboo said:

summons, which saved my bacon before, seem crap (well, Ok, only have a certain game awarded summon…but its really useless, doesn't seem to get attacks of oppurtunity and every AI agent ignores it when in combat. If they ignore summons in general then they really have lost 90% of their utility).
…
Getting enough money to buy skill books is a bugger - I spent several levels with many empty memory slots because I didn't have enough cash to buy more than 1/2 skills books a level. It's improved now, but does limit the impact of levelling up unless you have money.

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I don't have a summoner so cannot say about that school. AI ignores your summons not because of them being summons but because those are weaklings. If you summon something and move party away from trashmobs visual range, you'll notice they do attack summons because now they're not weaklings to them.

$ problem on the first few levels is understandable, cmon, you didn't start as a filthy rich character but to be honest starting skills are enough to pass through any obstacle. After that just sell crap to traders! Don't hoard items you won't use.

But remember, on the first island you have the party of four and two more characters aside to use. You don't have to use those two at all except… Hell let's abuse the system man!

1. What character did you pick? What do you think of the character creation?
Ifan, 2H warrior. Lots of strength and constitution. The rest of the party consists of the Red Prince (fire, earth and summoning), Lohse (air, water and necromancy) and Beast (archer/sneaky stuff).

I like character creation, and I like the origins. No issues with any of that.

2. What do you think of your first few hours in the game?
Well, I've played about 30 hours now, so it's more than a few I guess. During the first 10 or so I was certain this was going to blow my mind. Not so sure anymore. I still think it will end up being a very good game, but there are a lot of technical issues, such as quests being left open despite being finished, talents that don't work and so on.

3. What did you like/dislike?
I like most things. The atmosphere, the overall art/design, the sound and voices and the smooth gameplay. However, I'm not overly fond of two decisions:
- The height thing may add a tactical element, but that element is too strong.
- I do not like how armor/magic armor interacts with effects, as it means that shields and gear with high ratings is vastly stronger than anything else. Your health is almost irrelevant; it's just there to keep you from dying until you can re-gain some armor or magic armor. It also means that the talent "glass cannon" is totally worthless and should be avoided at all costs, as the character in question will spend the vast majority of the time frozen, knocked down, stunned, bleeding, burning, slowed or charmed. In D: OS1, it was somewhat possible to actually protect more fragile characters. Forget it here. Anyone without protection will be targeted at once and taken out of the fight, so you can't afford anyone "squishy".

4. How do you think it fares compared to the first D:OS?
I prefer the overall world design and exploration to that of D: OS, but I actually prefer the combat of vanilla D: OS, even pre-EE. Yes, I know it was possible to create incredibly overpowered builds, but I really enjoyed the experimentation. In D: OS, EE and D: OS2, everything is much more balanced and tightly tuned, which means party composition and character building is almost pre-defined, or you'll handicap yourself to the point where everything becomes a struggle.

You guys move way too fast for me. I like to play around with several builds before picking my final setup. I've plalyed an elf female hydrophist/a human male battlemage/and now I'm messing with Fane. I don't really care for the Red Prince or Sebille at all, so I'll probably play with Beast, Mohammed, and Lohse. Kyle Lohse was a pitcher for my St. Louis Cardinals and he's never looked so good

I may stick with Fane, but if not I'm going with an undead elf next time. That way you get the poison healing and eat flesh skill in one character. That would be fun. I play on explorer as I think the combat is extremely dull.

crpgnut said:

I may stick with Fane, but if not I'm going with an undead elf next time. That way you get the poison healing and eat flesh skill in one character. That would be fun. I play on explorer as I think the combat is extremely dull.

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I've never played much with Fane, but I thought he gained racials when using his fancy face-changer thing later on? So he can "be" an elf.. ? I'll try him out next time I think.

Yeah, he loses it for the beginning areas though and I have my doubts as to how long I'll stick with the game overall.

Combat that takes minutes instead of seconds to resolve always bores me to tears. Like I want to watch a bunch of maneuvering on the screen. Watching moves instead of moving myself kills my interest. I went explorer, but the arena battles took 5 or 6 minutes…each! I like combat to stay under 30 seconds max.

Just a freeminder for anyone who asks why I'd buy a tactical game: I didn't. I won a free copy during the giveaway

I enjoy the looting and crafting, but hate the walk/run speed and the slowwww combat.
I love all the hidden stuff. I think I found 11 places to dig and 7 chests that you have to teleport to reach. That's the type of stuff I love.

Maylander said:

which means party composition and character building is almost pre-defined, or you'll handicap yourself to the point where everything becomes a struggle.

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Barrelmancy is still king of cheese

Ok, azarhal. Since I hate boring, slow combat I will try to become a barrelmancer! It looks like I need strength and as much AP as I can get. I wonder what would be the best combo for this class.....

crpgnut said:

Ok, azarhal. Since I hate boring, slow combat I will try to become a barrelmancer! It looks like I need strength and as much AP as I can get. I wonder what would be the best combo for this class…..

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It was a valid tactic in D: OS1 as well, before it got nerfed in a patch or EE or some such thing. Basically, all you need is strength + telekinesis. Don't use glass cannon for extra AP, as that means getting crowd controlled a lot.

I should warn you that it's quite boring though. The crate will eventually break, meaning you'll have to find a new one to fill with lots of junk. I guess the easiest is to have a smaller crate inside the big crate, and then fill the smaller crate. When the big crate is destroyed, just grab the full, smaller crate and put it in another big crate that you then toss around.

crpgnut said:

I may stick with Fane, but if not I'm going with an undead elf next time. That way you get the poison healing and eat flesh skill in one character. That would be fun. I play on explorer as I think the combat is extremely dull.

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Maylander said:

I've never played much with Fane, but I thought he gained racials when using his fancy face-changer thing later on? So he can "be" an elf.. ? I'll try him out next time I think.

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Fane is my main, especially because of Torment's Nameless One similarity - he changes race to get racial perks while TNO could change class and become +5 hammer wielding mage which is normally not possible:



Cmon people, I'm telling you, add an undead in your party already! It's too good to be true.
Geez, I feel as my posts feel like Fluent's shills sometimes…

@crpgnut; - undead can't get all the ladies, but the game doesn't have "risque" content anyway, so pick him!

EDIT:
Forgot to say, eating corpses sometimes add you a skill for free. For example from a certain severed head you learn First Aid. To use that skill you need however ranger 1. So if you're not playing Fane as marksman… And of course you aren't playing him as marksman, it'd be a waste…
Choices, choices…

EDIT2:
Addition to my spoiler above as I'm reminded by a certain steam thread (won't post it there).

I'm seriously loving what amount of crazyness one can do in this game, it's so much better than Sawyer's balancing idiocies that are no fun.

So he does gain the racials, as I suspected? That's pretty cool, need to try that. I guess he still always heals via poison though, right? Unlike an actual elf.

Edit: That's still actually awesome though, as it means you can use two different cooldowns to heal: One for regular party members and one (poison arrow for example) for Fane. My only worry is whether the chain heal stuff also hits him and then hurts him.

Yes, poison still heals him. Means his best friend is Ifan and we (okay, me) already said default Ifan (ranger/geomancy) is a musthave in any party.

Heal stuff hurts undead enormously so don't even try to use him as tank. If in front, everyone will cast restoration and first aid on him! Go bows (which is kinda not good considering default Ifan) or magic.

You might have spotted on my pic I have Restoration on Fane. But I use it mostly as offensive spell! There are many undead to fight against, they're my first victims. If not undead, I remove magic armor from a hostile, set decay on them and then restoration - decay temporarily turns enemies to suffer from healing.

Thanks for the impressions, guys. All the hype almost tempted me to break my rule and play on release. I think I'll wait for the patches, or possible EE.

My suggestion is to wait for sure, Ripper. The game is fun, but most of the quests are broken in one way or another. I can't believe that Larian actually did ANY bug squashing during early access. The simplest things are broken. There is a particular lizard that Larian used for 3 different chapter 1 quests. If you don't do this in an exact order, it breaks the chain so that you can't keep one of the companions . Kinda important and it's in chapter 1 and they missed it completely.

What most quests? Only two are problematic. What lizard? You can keep all companions whatever you do. Sure you don't get every journal entry but that's normal as you skipped something, it doesn't break anything.

Break the rule!
It's so fun it's worth it.

While I'd love if they fixed those two quests that don't close properly in the journal (you still receive the reward!), I refuse to wait for whatever EE.

joxer said:

What most quests? Only two are problematic. What lizard? You can keep all companions whatever you do. Sure you don't get every journal entry but that's normal as you skipped something, it doesn't break anything.

Break the rule!
It's so fun it's worth it.

While I'd love if they fixed those two quests that don't close properly in the journal (you still receive the reward!), I refuse to wait for whatever EE.

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Um, the dreamer guy has 3 quests related to him. Let's call them oranges/Red-dreams/and Spy Killer. Those won't mean anything to non-players till after the fact. You get the xp as you mentioned, but these stay in your logs.

You can finagle these so that you get a ton of xp though if done exactly right. Done in a certain order gains an additional 1600 XP! Nice bonii

On level 1 it's perhaps a nice number. On level 8 where for the next level you need more than 50K XP, that amount is... Irrelevant.

joxer said:

On level 1 it's perhaps a nice number. On level 8 where for the next level you need more than 50K XP, that amount is… Irrelevant.

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Ooh! Really? Since I keep starting over, I've probably never been above 3rd level. I haven't ever left the keep. I'm not even sure I've found the right cave that turns out to be the exit. Maybe….I've found one with fire bugs that looks pretty big but no idea. BTW, I lost the fight in the arena, even on explorer. I only had 3 guys vs their 4 or 5 dudes and no healer. It was me (Fane), Prince, and Beast. Definitely need to take Lohse for some heals. I kept both Prince and Beast as warriors. Fane is an archer with Earth. Lohse will need to be a cleric and I'll probably swap Beast out for Mohammed or whatever the Middle-Eastern sounding dude's name is….

Okay, Fane won the battle, but Beast and Prince bought the farm and I'm too cheap to actually USE a resurrection spell till I have thousands of gold shinies.

@joxer; Do combats get longer as you play further? Right now I'm facing parties smaller or of similar size as my party. What killed DOS1 for me, was battles with 10 or 15 monsters on the enemy team. I got to watch 20 minutes of the other guy playing the game while I watched….uninstall.

Question 2: When do I get my mask back? Before Chapter 1 ends? You might put that answer in spoilers....

Ok I just had to restart the game on classic difficulty. Tactician is way too hard or I'm just too stupid, fighting some level 3 dudes at level 3 and they kicked my arse easier than most other games' "boss fights"...

Was it down in the arena? I lost that battle on Explorer mode, wolfing. Though I technically won, I lost two party members and reloaded. No idea if they wake up after battle if you don't use resurrection scrolls. So if you're too old, I guess that makes me super-wimp.