Tales of the Watcher: A Pillars of Eternity I + II No Reload Thread

[Enuhal]

Deadfire PotD with a randomized party - The Great Questing Route (with a bonus early visit to the Old City)

I still can barely believe that we made it to Neketaka without an injury - this will give us much needed levels and gear. The non-combat question goes very well, we get no random encounters. Once we're done with our last bit (Arkemyr's Manor), at level 8, we're going into the Old City for a short trip to acquire Modwyr. The blade is pretty good but takes some effort to upgrade, so I want to get it early. There should be only two battles in our way to pick it up, entering from the Undercroft, though I have never done these at such an early point into the game. The main reason I'm going for it this time around is that we have so many physical damage dealing characters (basically all of them, except our Unbroken), so Adra Ban, which is always a rarity, well be especially short in supply - so we're unlikely to get enough for every important legendary upgrade anyway, in which case the downside of many soulbound weapons - stopping at superb - is not really a downside.

Our first battle is against skuldraks and cave bats. The skuldraks have poor will defense, the cave bats are beasts. While these foes are mostly 1-2 levels above us, that does give us room to get an advantage with Whispers of Treason (or rather, now, Puppet Master) and Charm Beasts:

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The cave bats seem to have some kind of ablity that causes Confusion, but luckily it seems to be single target. All in all, the battle does take a while and I wouldn't call it easy, but also not super difficult. The next one is against a wraith and a bunch of undead. The party stays back, waiting for Unbroken to trigger the wraith abduction - she uses her various stride-boosting items and the linger of the speed chant to immediately run past the undead and back to the party, effectively neutralizing abduction:

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We swap to our guns to take down the wraith - I've decided to keep up with those for this run, for future spirit encounters. After that, the darguls and rotghasts are not too much of a problem:

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Now, we sneak to the cave in the north-east and take our new talking sword along.

Fort Deadlight is next and quickly dealt with, and we move to Dunnage, do the quests here and get into the street battle. As is tradition, we charm one of the pistoleers, and the barbarians take the opportunity to flank and take out first the cipher and next the other ranged attacker. Combat takes a while as our low accuracy (and distinct lack of accuracy buffs) is quite notable, but we come out on top with superior positioning and mobility:

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After a quick visit to Crookspur to hire a naviator and buy the helmet for two-handed fighting, we sail east and use stealth, thief's putty, a spark cracker and The Spine of Thicket Green to cleanse Motare o Kozi:

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Very good. Next, we shall see how the party deals with ship battles and bounties. Our lack of AoE damage might be a bit of a problem here, but we will see how things go. Before seriously starting clearing up the south, we do pick up Lord Darryn's Voulge, though, so we now have two soulbound weapons we can start upgrading right away.

 

[Enuhal]

Deadfire PotD with a randomized party - Extended Southern Exploration

We start taking ship and land bounties in the south, and right away, I can tell that these battles are not going to be easy. While our Unbroken easily does the tanking job, there's no big AoE to spam on the approaching foes - instead, we have to take our barbarians to the backline, making use of our very high stride and clear it out, while also relying on help from our four NPC allies which we get in every ship battle. As a result, fighting takes quite a while, but it seems like we can handle that since a lot of our damage is just auto attacks anyway:

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A lot of these fights end up a bit close - we regularily have to keep up party members with The Moon's Light, Nature's Vigor, Second Wind, eventually Pain Block and Moonwell, but also healing potions, which I'm using at an unusually high rate (all of the other options don't offer much in terms of burst healing). Our Tempest generally adds in FotD and Returning Storm into the mix, sometimes some minor AoE with Sunbeam or Blizzard (usually activating rage before any damage spells), after that she starts hitting things. The Psyblade activates Barrage, sometimes charms a foe and hits stuff, adding in Pain Blocks as needed fornow. Our Unbroken mainly uses her defensive abilities, sometimes a knockdown for disruption purposes. The Corpse Eater mostly runs or jumps into the backline, rages and starts hitting (sometimes using her subclass ability in very long battles), and our Watcher often either paralyzes or de-armors groups of foes before running to the enemy backline, raging and hitting things, though once he gets access to the ogre summons he will generally start out with those.

Since we're looking for every small advantage, we kept up with our gun collection for spirit encounters, to pierce veil-shrouded defenses:

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With the battles lasting so long, our Unbroken does actually take serious damage sometimes - while I usually rarely even have to activate Unbending in regular content, it's crucial for her survival this time:

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After struggling through the encounters with heavy use of our healing options and healing potions, I decide that the Woedica temple seems a bit too challening for now - first, I want to get Frostseeker for our Psyblade, because he's still using a regular war bow, which just won't do. However, since I generally want to use Captain's Banquets for those encounters, this means that we also should go after the Death Guard Fanatic with the same rare food buff, so we sail east for a bit and trigger the vessel ambush first:

Spoiler

I'm trying to make use of our Watcher's Mage Slayer ability - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Not super reliable as a way to disrupt spellcasters, though at least somewhat helpful. Now, for the crypt - this one turned out to be very tough. The many debuffs here and the fact that some of the vessels are rogues doesn't help, we end up using our unique per rest Watcher ability to keep our Tempest alive, which barely works:

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It's a constant struggle for survival - basically, our druid & cipher healing is constantly being pushed to the limit, and we drink five healing potions during the encounter, which is more than I have been using in some entire runs. Still, we are able to keep up and take down the vessels, while the Death Guard stays up, weakened via Shards of Woedica and The Shield Cracks:

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With some figurine summons and other per rest aid, we finally take down this foe, and while most of the party is bloodied, nobody got knocked out:

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After that, getting Frostseeker is very easy in comparison. Now, we feel ready to complete the southern exploration and take on the Steel Garotte. This turns out to be another relatively close fight, once again our healing options are limited but just plentiful enough to win here, with our barbarians taking care of the spellcasters early on. Though some of the damage comes at the end of the fight when it's basically won, as we try to get kills on Modwyr for the soulbound upgrade, so we leave some enemies alive for Howler to take them down.

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All right - we turn in quests and are now at level 11. We also end up buying healing potions, which is something I never had to do in Deadfire before. It's interesting - despite all the trouble, we have suffered zero injuries. I would guess that this is the result of everyone having high constitution scores while deflection isn't that great, so we take a ton of damage, but we can survive that for surprisingly long times - which gives our healing over time effects (mostly the robust inspiration) the time to work and keep the party up. Now, constitution afflictions could certainly ruin this balance, but they are rare (mostly by naga marauders, which we won't fight for a while), and barbarians also get resistance to body inspirations while at higher life totals (also, the passive +1 armor has certainly been helpful).

Let's see. I'm planning to do a few things in Neketaka next, and after that either go to Crookspur early or explore the east.

 

[Enuhal]

Deadfire PotD with a randomized party - Return to Neketaka and Eastern Exploration

Back in Neketaka, we first took down Lord Admiral Imp and Lady Epero - the latter being high level as per usual. However, this turned out to be a pretty easy battle, as I was able to get all melee foes to target my Unbroken (okay, one of them went after our Tempest) while running the Watcher and Corpse Eater into the backline, first taking down the wizard, next up the Lady herself:

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Next up, we equip our ranged weapon and take down the Soul Collector - takes a while, but a very safe method:

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Now, I had this plan to also clear the Hanging Sepulchers next, mainly to get the follow-up quest from the Principi to go to Crookspur (since I now know that doing this out of order would cost me some experience and the reward). However, this didn't turn out as I hoped for: I sadly took no screenshots here (maybe because the fight was too intense to remember even doing that), but once I got to the first big battle down there, I was facing a group of skeletons either two or three levels higher than the party, with high level priest and rogue abilities at the ready. I had to basically pull out all the spots - pre-rest abilities, figurines, a bunch of healing potions (which forced me to buy more of those again) - and barely made it out of there alive. We still didn't take a single injury, though, but it was close several times before healing potions or abilities came in just in time. Since there are two more big battles down there which are arguably harder than the first one, I decided that we'd just have to wait, and returned to the surface.

Instead, we travelled east to complete the exploration here and take down the various ship bounties in the area. No troubles here, surprisingly I felt like the maze on the Black Isles was different this time (I only had to leave a single party member behind) - though I can't remember doing anything different. Doing all that plus the turn-ins ended up getting me to level 13. Notably, we've kept the Captain's Banquets we used before taking on the Deathguard for this entire time, which is very nice.