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Notes -
As a huge BG3 fan and off and on Warhammer painter, I picked up Rogue Trader a few months back but haven't really gotten into it. I feel like a lot of these games take a couple of hours of being confused by systems before they really grab you, and I haven't pushed through that yet (to my great nerd shame, I also wandered away from my PC after 45 minutes of Clair Obscur). Seems like Rogue trader is worth the effort to learn, though? Should I play with the DLC enabled for my first play through, and do you have any other relevant tips?
I enjoy it but yes there is quite the learning curve to push past. I'm not even truly degenerate about builds yet and I try to stay away from reading build guides as it sucks the fun out of it for me. The story is good, its fairly responsive to your choices. The romances feel great, the core set of characters have good arcs and potential. You can push your followers towards Chaos/dogmatic/humanism in ways that make sense. Overall it's a very enjoyable game.
Void shadows is a must. It seamlessly integrates with the core story very well. Technically the core story left side missions with references/hints prior to its release which makes it feel like it fleshed those out and made them immersive. The classes it adds are unfortunately very OP and very fun. 1.5v was a balance patch that mostly just hit them.
The gameplay tips if you are starting out is to abuse office mechanics via Cassia, you get extra turns on your heavy hitters allowing to scale up the needed buffs to be monsters. Late game they generally start fights with the buffs so its less relevant, but at low levels the power fantasy hasn't taken off yet.
Appreciate the advice! Other than this I'll try to go in blind, and we'll see if I succumb to the lure of build guides at some point.
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The DLC integrates well into the main game, so I would enable it (and did for my first playthrough this past year). I'm not great at character building so I don't have a ton of tips, but one thing I found is that RT is very much a game of stacking buffs. 3% damage here, an extra attack there, and when you add them up the character becomes a killing machine. And speaking of extra attacks, look out for things that say they do not count against the one attack per turn limit. They are generally very powerful options to take.
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