Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Developer Livestream – Multiclassing

With their Backer Beta in full swing, Obsidian Entertainment’s Brian Heins and Josh Sawyer have participated in a Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire livestream focused on the intricacies of multiclassing in the upcoming RPG. Over the course of the livestream, the developers talked about how combining classes and their class-specific abilities will work in the game and what changes we should expect to see in the near future as a result of the Beta feedback. Here’s the VOD:

At one point Josh mentions the recent changes to Strength and Resolve. You can read his thoughts on this topic right here. An excerpt:

Hey, everyone. I figured I should make an effortpost about Deadfire’s Backer Beta changes involving Might > Strength and Resolve. I want to explain the motivation for the changes as well as known shortcomings and possible deviations in the future.

In my tweet, I briefly stated the motivation for making the Might > Strength / Resolve shift, which was that Resolve is unappealing for caster classes. It was a little unappealing in Pillars 1 and even less appealing in Deadfire because Concentration in Deadfire is a binary thing that’s not associated with Resolve. Either you have Concentration or you don’t. While Concentration is important for casters, because it’s disassociated from Resolve, Resolve drops in importance for those classes. There are ways we could address that, but I’ll get to that later.

Here are things that are not motivations for the shift: to dumb the game down (?), to make the game console friendly (??), to make ciphers bad because I hate ciphers and hate you and want the worst things in life to happen to only you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

Going into this, I knew there were shortcomings. It does mean that for priests and wizards that abstain from weapon-based attacks (i.e. most of them), they can more safely dump Might. In that sense, it doesn’t mean they have more dump stats (since they were dumping Resolve) but it shifts what they dump unless they’re making a weapon-based priest or gish wizard. It also has the side effect of stretching points a little thin for druids (who need Strength for their spiritshift forms) and arguably fighters and/or paladins.

Even knowing those shortcomings, I was surprised at how many people disliked the change, including the renaming of Might to Strength. There seems to be a significant number of people across a variety of communities who really don’t like the shift for a variety of reasons.

We’re going to include this change in the next Backer Beta update, but I’m still working on/thinking through alternative ways to solve the problem.

Of the things that have been discussed, the one I think is most promising involves making Concentration better overall and allowing it to build up over the course of combat at a rate defined by the character’s Resolve.