>>3683692
Sell me on the character building.

>>3684223
This

>>3684223
>>3684227
I have to preface this by saying it's nothing groundbreaking, just comparatively better versus Tower of Time where the character building was simply dumping points in an ability tree with either the choice of "better skill damage" or "worse skill but with utility effect like stuns/a different elemental damage type"

You have four main classes which can each spec into three subclasses. Warrior(melee tank man), Ranger(or whatever it was called, ranged physical attacker), Engineer(ranged/melee magical attacker and summoner) and Adept(ranged magical attacker, can also summon, probably more focus on skills) For example warriors have defenders(focus on defense), berserkers(lifesteal plus other stuff), assassins(less tanky but more damage, probably specs into dual wielding too), engineers get constructors(if you want to spec into summoning) or other two subclasses I haven't looked into.

What I like about the system is that I can change characters to suit the playstyle I like an not be forced to dump points into skills I do not care for(Kain's wall skill in ToT for example, or Maeve's anything that wasn't explosive arrows or rain of arrows) just so I can get access to a skill I do care for, and with the very limited amount of skill points you get(I've played 10 hours and I'm only at level 5, for reference multi classing starts at 7, because xp gains are shit unless you progress the main story which is a system I'm kind of ok with since you can't grind to git gudder) makes every new passive or ability feel like a new milestone.

And every skill comes with a status ailment and also has another synergy with another ailment(example for my current playthrough: Engineer stun bolt has synergy with "vulnerable", which either the warrior's throwing axe or the engineer's frost path(alternate, less damage version of his shock path) can cause, to bounce off the primary target and stun/damage a second one) that your class can't always cause but another class can.

>>3684385
>And every skill comes with a status ailment and also has another synergy with another ailment
Sounds good?
>stats
How do they work?

>>3683692
Was the dc made because there were plenty of bugs?

>>3684469
>stats
Pretty much like they did in Tower of time.
>Might: Weapon damage
>Speed: Attack speed+cooldown reduction
>Endurance: Health+elemental resistance
>(?I forget the name): skill power
>Mastery: Health/mana regen
And then you have milestones starting at 10 and then each increment of 5. Mainly it's just health/regen/whatever boosts but the standout milestones are +1 to weapon skill. Every weapon you equip(either by weapon type or unique weapons having their own unique skills) get a manaless skill that you can use once you have points in weapon skill. Examples of skills based on what I've used so far
>Some unique staff: basic attacks richochet onto nearby enemies
>Swords/dual wield swords: reflect damage
>greataxe: large cleave that can knockdown enemies.

>bugs
I do not know but I also do not doubt it, this dev isn't really known for their quality. I've ran into two bugs so far
>enemies wandering out of their patrols and entering a battle with me while I'm fighting other enemy groups. This also makes grabbing dropped loot finnicky at times.
>Some encounters have a barrier that becomes solid once combat is active to avoid you exiting/kiting enemies away from the intended fighting area. sometimes combat can become active before you even enter the barrier and you just have to spam move commands inside the combat area until your guys clip through it. This can also cause bullshit like attempting to fire abilities that don't actually deal any damage(the mana cost is still incurred and mana is a pain in this game at early levels, I'm assuming it's the same as tower of time where you only get big amounts of mana regen much later in the game)

>>3684590
>>Endurance: Health+elemental resistance
Sounds like super stat

>>3684599
Nah, most of these fights function like DPS races like in Tower of Time.

>>3684599
Not really, everyone hits like a truck, you either kill them fast or throw out as many stuns/debuffs as you can for your tanks to also heal/lifesteal/shield themselves back. the damage race aspect the other anon mentions is still present here, even more so since fighting large groups of enemies is a death sentence and enemies spawning in don't have much in the way of terrain to block them off via high walls or whatever.

>>3684603
I understand.

Has any srpg made it viable to use terrain and surrounds tactically? Taking cover is never used in any of these games.

>>3684620
There is a cover system here but I think it's made a bit moot by the Insane difficulty, because my ranged character(the one with less health/armor) melts inside or outside of cover. Tower of Time does the terrain bit pretty well until you get to later levels where every combat map is pretty open and you don't have much room to kite, but at that point your party will most likely be unstoppable and/or you'll have Kaela who has those infinite low cost stun towers that you can just spam everywhere..

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Jesus christ that was stupid fucking tough.
>spawn you in a locked in cage with five 1k+ health rat burrows that infinitely spawn groups of 300+ health rats(for reference according to the end of mission screen for this level my characters average DPS are 72-24-11 and a boss that I assume the intended strategy is to bait him to charge into the burrows to instantly destroy them but staying put here is instant death because at least 12 rats will be decimating you with auto attacks
My strategy was to use charged path to stun everything once it was off cooldown and use that precious 3~ seconds of stun to attack a burrow and destroy it, and then I trapped the boss in this cuck cage with an explosive poison barrel that was there from the environment and outdps'd him.
I cannot imagine playing this game without an engineer desu. Even though I really want to try out the other two classes I cannot for the life of me think you'd have any more success in combat by having someone with a high dps ranged attack instead of loads of AoE utility and a turret that can pull aggro occasionally.

>>3685017
>infinitely spawn groups
Lame game design

>>3685044
The pain train seems to only be picking up steam. I don't know if I'm just not seeing the strategy but the first fight in the next story mission is absolutely decimating me, there's like a dozen of these tiny flying enemies that each deal 70~ damage(each of my guy's health range from ~700 to 500) per auto attack, there's no high cover to block them off and their attacks seem to be instant travel meaning I can't even steer their projectiles into walls with some clever movement.

>>3685136
Sounds like they designed it to keep the pressure up. Spamming healing items is also bad game design.

I'm glad to report that things are much easier now that I have specializations, a full party of four and a replacement power supply that doesn't die every two hours after using the new years sales to buy some new pc parts so I can run this unoptimized hunk of junk

Specializations get their own class points so you don't need to keep splitting points between main class and spec, but you're still locked to four passives and five active abilities so it's a lot of picking and choosing.
My specializations
>Warrior -> Blademaster: Dual wielding, bleeds, bleeds heal. Unfortunately i haven't gotten to the healing yet but regardless my guy's a beast now.
>Engineer -> Constructor: Summoner. Gets a very dinky shit tier robot to summon and an amazing flower patterned nuke which knocks enemies away from the center and then the 6 smaller bombs surrounding the center knock them back into the center. Kind of dinky and thinking about respeccing her into chain lightning wizard instead but waiting on her later abilities.
>Ranger->I forgot the name: Gets a line skillshot attack that's basically nothing but dakka. Surprisingly dealt less damage than I thought even though I assumed she was carrying the fights.
>Adept-> Elementalist: Lots of cone skillshots, party wide buffs and a summon to help out with drawing aggro.
Ended up fighting a boss for what felt like 6 hours, wasn't as difficult as the previous one but he had a load of health and I needed to dish out a load of micro in order to not get destroyed and restart the whole thing. which more or less matches up with the tower of time difficulty curve, unfortunately.

ALso this track is driving me crazy because 1.30 sounds very much like the hamlet theme from Darkest dungeon.
https://files.catbox.moe/3ulixn.mp3
https://youtu.be/09u0rZJ0WEs

>>3687621
>Specializations get their own class points
Explain, I was looking for that online, but couldn't find anything. Are there tow xp currencies (points) or how does it work? Looking for a rpg to sink 200h in.

>>3687627
You get class points for your main class, and then specialization points for the spec class.
>200h
I doubt this will be it, sorry.

>>3687628
Damn, only 50h then. Everyone has two classes?

Nvm, found it. So specialisations are subclasses, basically.

>>3687632
Four main classes, each class has three additional subclasses. You can apparently spec into two out of three of the specializations, one at level 7 and the other at 14, and every level up you get two class points and two specialization points.

>>3687648
I see. Not sure if that's peak game design. Two out of three subclasses, that aren't very similiar to begin with. Implementing progress in a class system is anything but easy.

>>3687659
I assume the game wants you to experiment because you can easily respec. Stats are completely free to respec and your specialization needs a trainer.

Really at the core of it I enjoy the combat because real time with slow-mo is almost always fun, I just don't get why it has to be attached to the more flawed games like this, Tower of Time or Aarklash Legacy. They really made the combat feel good here but in return we've lost out on the extremely comfy tower exploration, puzzles and secret hunting and uniqueness of every character. To be completely honest I can no longer identify which of my guys is which during combat, I just select them with hotkeys and assume the guy in melee range is Malakai.

>>3687686
>wants you to experiment because you can easily respec. Stats are completely free to respec and your specialization needs a trainer.
Sounds zoomy, but OK.

>tower
Was exploration and puzzle actually good?

>>3687692
It felt rewarding, at least. The whole tower wasn't just some random map I've been through three previous times and some of the puzzles were fun to solve and it was even more fun doing the super hard secret fights like the 666 battle. It's still a fairly janky game and I remember feeling extremely frustrated with it by the end, especially the Orc Doctor fight.
Like don't get me wrong I'm not saying Tower of Time or Dark Envoy are 10/10s, but I think their roughness is simultaneously part of their charm and also part of the reason why they won't go past maybe a 7.5

>>3687695
>think their roughness is simultaneously part of their charm
That's awesome to hear. I wanted to try the tower, but ultimately decided against it. Nowadays game all feel like work, tedious and ungrateful. It's because devs think that gamers want a certain entertainment time and therefore they stretch content as much as possible, spaghetti stretching.

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Difficulty has unfortunately really fell off a cliff after advancing in the specializations. In a plot twist only seen in isekai manga, the constructor subclass which I thought was the weakest was actually the strongest. Not to mention the wand weapon special.
Putting it simply
>infinite wand special means infinite mana
>ice drones are a low cost, low cooldown(not to mention one of my equipped items has my engineer reduce cooldown every time she attacks), spammable three drone spawn that kamikaze into enemies, dealing big damage and also freezing them
>they're so low cost and spammable it's one of the skills that have an auto cast( the circle of arrows on the icon) feature
>two deployable goons to both pull aggro and deal loads of ranged damage, plus one of them has a 25% chance to stun on its attacks.
>low cooldown, high damage stun bolt that bounces onto a second enemy if I deal vulnreable, which my engineer already does, and so does my mage.
>the cluster bomb has pretty much fallen off but I think there's an upcoming ability in the tree that will make us unstoppable
And my melee tank strategy is unchanged from tower of time. Stack armor and lifesteal, stick them in the middle, go berserk(can't control them but they gain lifesteal, weapon damage, attack speed, movement speed and immunity to roots) and in between the restoration form lifesteal, restoration from enemies having the bleed effect, and health regen from nearby bleeding enemies he's unstoppable. Plus the other two just shit out untold amounts of damage or untold amounts of CC.

>>3688106
>Difficulty has unfortunately really fell off a cliff after advancing in the specializations
Not surprised to read that

Going from extremely tense 10+ sessions kiting and by the skin of my teeth scraping to fizzling a boss out in under 30 seconds and slowly waiting for the waves of enemies that are meant to spawn in as helpers to march to their doom.
This is extremely unfortunate and I find myself constantly going back to the options menu to make sure that I'm on the "Insane" difficulty.
On the other hand, this "free the mine slaves mission" was hilarious.
>get intel that mines of the elven league are using human slaves with terrible working conditions
>choice 1 is to let the elf noble slave who is locked up in the cells free, I did so because more loot
>his stash of loot was also his body stash where he kept the broken bodies of the miners he was toying with for sport
>finally get to the end of the mines, kill the entire security team
>turns out all the human "slaves" were contractors and we just fucked up their livelihood because now this mine is under the human empire
If only story choices actually mattered.

>>3688520
>Going from extremely tense 10+ sessions kiting
Poe1 had the right idea, but somehow the engage mechanic feels pretty bad.

Difficulty's back up again mainly because the mission I'm in starts off with a fight against a load of enemies, in an extremely open space with no way to reliably kite enemies, and the game keeps bugging out in increasingly stupid ways causing me to lose it all.
>Warrior's backstab ends up teleporting my two squishy mage/engineer characters right in the middle of it all, which gets everyone killed
>auto cast doesn't actually always work and I sit there not actually spawning drones.
>mana siphon doesn't actually work and the two characters whom I need mana on don't have mana
>warrior's auto taunt equipment doesn't work as intended and so my squishies end up eating shit
I'm a bit sick of it and playing this same elven forest map for what feels like the 7th mission in a row so I'm taking a break. Fucking hell I really want a good RTWP combat focused game.

>>3689556
Also, the "ultimate skills" of each of my specializations ended up sucking dick.
>Constructor: TITAN, big ass robot taking up three(I have four) summon points, touted as this damage machine that can tank everyone. Force titan(more health, skills are more utility via knockback/pulls) dies instantly, Fire titan(less health, touted has having more damage) dies even more instantly.
>Blademaster: Blood duel - get to lock an enemy into a duel where no one can heal or damage either of you. You win, you get your health back and reset cooldowns. Except it doesn't restore mana, so you if you use it on an enemy without much health you're pretty much fucking yourself. Also it releases any aggro you've pulled so lmao enjoy having everyone else die in the meanwhile, also if you don't kill an enemy you lose 50% hp AND get an attack speed/movement speed debuff.
>Gunslinger: bulletstorm. AoE attack, except it deals tiny amounts of damage, and the +100% dodge rate doesn't mean shit.
>Elementalist: Meteor - MUCH weaker than the tower of time one which could one shot bosses if you stacked enough skill power.

>>3689560
>>Blademaster: Blood duel - get to lock an enemy into a duel where no one can heal or damage either of you. You win, you get your health back and reset cooldowns. Except it doesn't restore mana, so you if you use it on an enemy without much health you're pretty much fucking yourself. Also it releases any aggro you've pulled so lmao enjoy having everyone else die in the meanwhile, also if you don't kill an enemy you lose 50% hp AND get an attack speed/movement speed debuff.
Some cool ideas, yet too gamey for a rpg.

All in all the names for the skills are atrocious.

>spend what felt like 6 decades escorting these poison balls for the oracle trials, it's not difficult it's just slowly advancing and keeping the waves of enemies CC'd
>game bugs out and refuses to actually let me complete the trial, have to reload a save and do it all over again
please
In other news, my titan is less shit, somehow. I don't know why but taking a break and coming back to the game it's practically holding up waves of enemies on its own until my party can get to them.

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lole

Does the game have a penetration mechanic? Does any game get it right? Shouldn't be plain damage resistance or flat damage threshold imho.

>>3691253
>Does the game have a penetration mechanic
Two of them.
You have two types of armor:
Flat armor(integer) for physical damage
Resistance(percentage) for elemental damage
Corresponding to both, there's a penetration type.
>Armor strip: reduces armor by a number.
>Resistance...??: reduces resistance by a percentage, and this percentage can go negative for weaknesses.
>Does it get it right
I don't think so. I admit I haven't done much thinking about it since the difficulty isn't as challenging as I would have hoped. But the strategy in tower of time is to pile on as much elemental reduction as you possibly can and have everyone rocking elemental damage. Since every enemy would have negative resistances you can just melt them really easily especially when a mage will most likely have some form of party wide elemental damage empowerment buff.

The weird thing is, without actually planning for this, this seems to be the case for my party with DE. Mousing over enemies while I'm fighting them I see most of them have negative fire resistance almost always, which my mage can empower my dudes with fire damage. I don't even know which of my stuff even strips resistance to that degree.

>>3691511
>pile on as much elemental reduction as you possibly can
Pretty much diablo and their clones and many rpg in general follow that rule.
Penetration is rather something thst poe2 tried and failed miserably with. It poe2 it works as damage threshold, meaning not high enough penetration does marginal damage, effectively making penetration a super stat. High pen protection equals damage immunity.
>no idea what my gear does
I bet you this equals bad game design. Is the loot random by any chance?

>>3691523
>Is the loot random by any chance?
Yep, with some "uniques".

>>3691524
Posted too early.
I put uniques in quotes because I think the only unique thing about them is the enchantment or weapon skill, because you can encounter the same unique multiple times.
For example there's a unique called "soultreders" that gives you more skill power if anyone dies in your line of vision and I have a tier 1 and a tier 2 version of those boots.
There's also a 2h unique sword that I got from one of the two random side missions that spawn after every story mission completion.

I admit it's my laziness that's not making me track down where that elemental strip is coming from, but there's also a bunch of passives that I can't be bothered to keep scrolling through until I figure out which one.

>finally bring up the Tower of Time ending
>somehow the avatar's party ended up creating the empire against the League's suspicions
>completely disregarding the fact that the avatar wasn't only humans as the empire suggests but also had elves and shadow people(two races in the league) and dwarves and frost giants which seem to have not been brought up at all
>no mention of proteus or the organthe
what

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Gee, do I fight for the dickhead human supremacist empire that used me for suicide missions and also doesn't care one iota for its citizens or the dickhead elf supremacist league that used me for suicide missions and also doesn't care one iota for its citizens?

If only there was an obvious twist with the siblings that's going to completely make this choice completely meaningless. oh well.

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>abduct me in the middle of a fight for a pointless cutscene which then teleports my entire fucking party smack dab into the middle of the enemy group
If you can't tell, my patience with this game is waning.

>>3691636
>finish this fight after what felt like 20 centuries because I sided with empire and forgot the league has healing enemies
>teleport into new area
>multiple ancient revenants just show up and kill my entire party in 3 seconds before I can even react or my mage can even get the frost spikes off
>quicksave corrupted so I have to do the empire v league fight again

>>3691635
Can't you sabotage both at the end?

Is the party ai useful?

>>3692316
I usually have them in the manual mode so I wouldn't know.

I will say that sometimes I accidentally put my ranger in autonomous mode and she kept doing the short range AoE attack when no enemies where next to her to even get hit by it and I got really sick of her suddenly losing 130 mana for nothing.

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Holy shit, the second specialization can be for ANY subclass.
Granted you can only pick skills and not passives but that's barely an issue.

>>3692437
My party appears to have graduated from invincible to FUCKING INVINCIBLE
>Melee/tank guy now has a vortex that can pull in enemies and explode, dealing damage and turning them berserk which means they turn on each other. He also has a second shield skill which has 50% damage reflection AND damage mitigation AND explodes after a bit AND stuns.
>Engineer now has chain lightning, which is shock bolt on steroids in terms of both damage and stun since it can stun/damage more than two enemies, it instead damages EVERYTHING in a 5m radius which coupled with my tank's vortex is a nightmare for enemies
>Ranger didn't get much except for a 20% buff to damage and a big range increase stance.
>Mage didn't get much except for a very powerful parasite type explosive AoE attack

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>>3692450
Also the league is assmad at me for choosing the empire. They're both shit but fuck dem elves.

Also, I've found the Tower of Time destroy everything with magic damage enchantment. I just need another set of enchantments for melee weapons but the game should in theory be over now.

>>3692456
We've also recruited our last party member who is a badass looking construct bounty hunter.
In a lame turn of events, he does not have a unique class or really unique anything and is just a generic ranger. He will probably remain parked on the benches mainly because I'm too lazy to mirror my existing ranger's skill tree and equipment onto him, until I get to his companion quest.

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>>3692458

I don't think I can accurately describe how fucking annoying it is to fight the league enemies but I'm very much regretting going the empire route.

>>3693192
Actually you know what, I can actually describe them.
The League has three common enemies, and they range from bullshit to "jesus christ what is this bullshit".
Rangers
>ranged enemy with extremely high damage, but it's mostly skillshot abilities that you can move out of the way of
>have a roll mobility move so they almost always roll out of the way of environmental hazards
>love the ability "toxic golems" which spawns three little shits with extremely high damage and also they have a kamikaze charge that's a bitch to deal with
>these cunts are the most common enemy so get ready to face off against at least 6 toxic golems every time you enter a fight

Air Lords
>elemental affinity for air, meaning they're immune to stuns because almost every stun skill is a shock bolt of some kind.
>ranged enemy with stupidly high damage, none of it can be dodged
>stupidly tanky

And the worst of the bunch, whispers
>even tankier than the air elementals
>ranged enemy with ridiculously high damage, none of it can be dodged
>has innate skill reflect, if you played tower of time you know how infuriating this stat is to deal with but basically you eat shit every time this asshole gets hit with a skill some of that damage gets reflected. Your highest damage/utility is from skills, and your most powerful skills will be on your less tankier enemies.
>immune to stuns
>has some extremely low cool down passive ability where every time you attack it the little shit teleports away and your dickheads have to go and chase him, in this DPS race of a game where simply walking your entire group into full view of incoming enemies this is a fucking death sentence, and he deals so much damage you can't just let him be
FUCK whispers. FUCK elves.