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My guess would be that precasting multiple spell buffs before combat encounter is boring. PoEs allowed for buffing in combat only, 5e went with concentration. Personally I like it - I find having to protect your caster from damage to keep everyone stronger. Solasta has a very powerful feat (flawless concentration?) that prevents concentration checks unless damage exceeds 10. It is probably too powerful, but makes it much, much easier to keep the concentration spells up.

One man's balance is another's idea of fun. I personally found PoE and especially Deadfire way, way more fun to play than that double-cheese deluxe aka Wrathfinder. It means I can get creative within given set of rules and experience this wondrous, liberating thing of playing with any possible class combination instead of "take loremaster for spellcasting gouda, take a level in monk for camembert style, (alignment? **** that, you can change it later anyway); rogue? Don't be stupid, play a vivisectionist, oh and did I mention fondue monk dip? () you totally should take that" etc. To each their own of course, but my fingers crossed for Sawyer not taking parmesan bites from Owlcat's charcuterie.

I think, PoE is closer to PF, considering its single-player and story-focused approach (though, with more combat*), D:OS was more on the multiplayer sandbox side with awful stylistic coherence (gore + humour; but the narrative was backed up by the MP/competitive aspect). So, the full VA, while it was high-quality, was a pointless resource sink. Owlcat seems to know that their target audience does not need the full VA, while Larian is currently going for more "cinematic" games. Neither is inherently bad, but they are different. *PF still was offering more roleplay than D:OS, despite the amount of combat and the additional systems. E.g. the Trickster route was different from the Angel one in both mechanics and specific story content. I guess, it is good that Ubisoft keeps reminding me to avoid their products. Also, I am curious how it aligns with the customer protection laws in the EU - removing time-unrestricted licences cannot be legal.

We'll probably never know until he publishes a video on why Cameilla did nothing wrong. I also am more of a gameplay guy, at least for vidya, with pnp role-playing is often the gameplay. But I do think it's worth acknowledging that people look for something else than me in these games, even if I don't think it's that great in those games. Now time for balance. I don't think we're going to see a game with only good choices without substantial work, at the same time I don't think it's impossible (or even hard) to cut out the worst offenders in some way, like removing/buffing the bottom trash tier choices that are virtually always a mistake and making the s-tier/always picked options folded into the character or class by default. That would improve build variety and make more interesting stuff happen by putting in more choice. Exploits are always going to exist and we're very unlikely to see anything perfectly balanced, but I don't think it's a bad thing to at least try to make sure that the choices a player make can be competitive. I'd always take more interesting gameplay over balance, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive. After playing Pathfinder 2e pnp, which took a cap balance approach by establishing clear ceilings on the numbers, I found myself enjoying that approach because tactics became a lot more important. Build is still important (and I'd argue much more interesting than 1e), but it becomes more along the lines of building around what you're going to do than trying to push your numbers into the stratosphere.

Oh, I know. That's the reason I use that thing only for music, phone calls, some (paid, ad-free) games for unavoidable queues and keep its email separate from ones I use on PC. I also know just how bad google tracking is, and that Windows does it too, but just because I have a mild parasite infestation does not mean I must be okay with every parasite that wants to come my way.

It's basically there to get rid of using lots of buffing spells at the same time. Play the Pathfinder games to see the opposite end of the scale. Personally I like it. Most concentration spells are very good too, like Hold or Dominate. As for classes being boring, this is a big problem with 5th ED. Some classes are just plain boring to play. Barbarian comes out on top of that, imo. Fighters in PnP have a subclass that gets a lot of options, but they have a boring subclass too. In Solasta they're boring too. It's not that big of a deal when you control a whole party, though.

Good news

Yeah, that feat is a must on casters. Countering buff hullabaloo is a Very Good Thing (side-eyeing you so hard, Wrathfinder ), but surely a caster should be able to wrangle more than one spell at a time, no? And I don't quite get the logic behind it, like, Mage Armor is not a concentration spell but Barkskin is?

Now that the appsflyer drama has been put to bed it's time for datamining No word on when the next dlc drops, but at this point I think we've seen most classes get an additional archetype, many of which are Owlcat originals. Only one found now and it's a frost themed druid. Off the top of my head I think it's just Fighter, Bard, Skald, Magus, and Warpriest who haven't had their new archetypes implemented in the data, but I'm going by memory here. Oh and there's some nice stuff for shield users and Stunning Critical has entered the chat.

Datafinder: the Wrath of the Players.

aeon is a powerful mythic path but the downside is it only becomes relative strongk once you hit mythic six. is our opinion, but wotr is most difficult early. in terms o' early game power, nothing compares with the merged spell book angel or lich. trickster is also relative strong sooner than other mythics. azata casters may be powerful early as either favorable or zippy magic is a serious upgrade for casters and the first superpower comes at mythic 4. aeon, on the other hand, feels a bit underwhelming with meh spells and ok-but-not-great abilities. however, the aeon gazes scale well, the greater dispel from improved aeon's bane is one o' the best abilities in the game, and the level six and seven mythic spells for aeon is busted powerful. oh, and the aeon's cloak is one o' the better items in the game. unfortunate, the problem with being the aeon being one o' the most OP mythics late in the game is every other mythic is capable o' being extreme powerful late in the game. HA! Good Fun!

I recently got my Pathfinder 2e core rulebook in the mail and I'm slowly sifting through the 640 pages to see how it has changed. It seems like most of the streamlining is for the better. I like complexity and options as much as the next guy, but 1e can get quite overwhelming. I think I like 2e better than 1e; too early to say if I like it better than D&D 5e. I suppose it's all speculation until I put it into action. As for Pillars, I finished the first game and I liked it well enough at first, but that faded over time and about 2/3 of the way through, around the time I encountered the 857th filler battle, I really really wanted to quit. I was so worn out but I forced myself to finish the game. As for Deadfire, by all rights it should have been a game I enjoyed more than the first, but it just didn't hold my interest. I don't know if I even got halfway through it.

Not to the extent that I would have ever even tried putting it on on either of my playthroughs. But this is related to another matter caused by excessive emphasis on balance: after a certain point in the game, gear ceases to matter, for the most part, because everything is essentially as good as everything else[*]. Goes for combat, too: after a certain level, there are no challenges anymore, even if the enemies come with three red skulls (were they skulls?) in their icon. (The fights that are really, really difficult are Gorecci Street, the Engwithian Digsite and the pirates on the waters before you're about lvl 7.) [*] For example, I completely stopped skipping and even trying new spellbooks, because they all just work, thanks. Never used potions other than healing, never used scrolls, never used traps, never used bombs. Never any need whatsoever. EDIT: Great game! No question about that. But this "balance" stuff war poorly implemented.

I encourage everyone to throw their cell phones out too, they are snitching on you BIGTIME!

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1184370/eventcomments/3812910932503680049?snr=1_2108_9__2107

Yes, they added an API call that sends info to Appsflyer regarding when you started the game from which platform and your OS version. They combine that info with when you clicked the ad to install the game. @xzar_monty I'm pretty sure they didn't install any 3rd party software, they are just sending data to that company.

Fair enough. Here is an explanation they posted. Here is the current EULA in the game before the patch and the new one. edit: although it seems to me like they make back down on this because of the backlash, so if you are against it maybe a good way to protest by uninstalling to force their hand.

I don't trust anyone who wants to put spyware on a device. Haven't downloaded the update and am considered uninstalling the game when I get home.

We've seen from the Twitter Files and a recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg that US government agencies were putting pressure on social media companies to remove content that in Zuck's own words turned out to be worthy of debate or true. Many individuals that proposed the lab leak theory for the origin of the Covid pandemic were slandered, demonized, and in some cases deplatformed (hence why there is currently a lawsuit, Missouri vs Biden, against a slew of government agencies). The lab leak theory since has not only gained traction, it's considered to be the most likely scenario by many, including the FBI. There is currently a bill proposed in legislation called the RESTRICT Act that's been dubbed the Patriot Act 2.0. In its current iteration it would give the Secretary of Commerce the power to block or withhold finances of any tech product that's even partially owned by a "foreign adversary". Given the multinational nature of tech companies these days, that could be almost any company (it's up to them who's a "foreign adversary"). In theory, the bill does include exclusions that are meant to keep free information flowing, but it would be a dangerous step down a slippery slope.

Nice! A couple hundred Rand back in your pocket for little to no effort! Go treat yourself to dinner and drinks. Next up, how to remove and clean a "P" trap.

Cool to know. Now (if it's not too loaded a question) I have to ask: are there more female or male enemies in the game? Non-hostile NPC genders seem to be distributed more or less equally. As for the enemies though, I've never paid attention to be honest as I play zoomed out on my laptop and you can't really distinguish to much from that perspective. Has anyone cared to make at least a rough estimate? Also, just out of curiosity: do only kith (and lagufaeth?) enemies have gender mechanics-wise? Edit: I kinda start to feel like a maniac or a serial killer asking these questions.

I never said otherwise. I am aware that people like the PoE games and have absolutely nothing against that, but obviously not enough people liked the game. On the topic of Pathfinder, as @Bartimaeus said, you don't have to cheese it. It's a single player game you can do what you want. I personally, as far as I remember, never exploited/cheesed the PF games. I never dipped in to another class (multiclassed), I played a vanilla Paladin and had no issues on Core difficulty, even found it a bit too easy overall. Now that is my personal experience and I have seen multiple people on this forum complain about it, but that is why you can always drop the difficulty. Besides the point, it was discussed multiple times that PoE wasn't particularly balanced either and that there were clear outlier classes.

Concentration loss on hit is possible to disable in the options, if it is too irritating. Not sure if it applies only to the party or to the opponents as well. Also, as was mentioned, there are feats to protect from it.

Solasta. Really not a fan of that concentration thing, so much that I avoid picking spells with this tag when leveling. Why is this? To make casters less OP? Why not make a dude with a zweihander less boring instead?

In the wiki there is the experience gained for each step of a quest. For "Lord of a Barren Land" intermediate goals weigh more than the last target: https://pillarsofeternity.fandom.com/wiki/Lord_of_a_Barren_Land (see "Experience gained" in the right pane). BUT, if you read here https://pillarsofeternity.fandom.com/wiki/Experience_and_advancement#Quest_experience: On quest completion, the "end state" objective experience is granted, plus whatever experience remains from the total (typically consisting of the fractional remainders that accumulate if the total XP cannot be divided into whole numbers for each objective), meaning the end state will often grant a few more points of experience compared to objectives with a weight of 1. Ultimately, if there are objectives that have not been completed, the party will be granted experience equal to the value of these remaining objectives. As such, the amount of objectives completed does not influence the amount of experience granted throughout the quest. So if you go straight to the end state you get the total xp even if you skip intermediate tasks.

@Gfted1 You will be proud of me, I did my own DIY again but this time plumbing. I thought of you and your daughter My sinks in the kitchen were draining slowing and I did some Internet research and I watched a video about using a plunger. Instead of phoning a plumber I followed the video instructions and I used a plunger and I cleared the blocked sink Im getting good, Im close to advanced DIY skills

Yes, its a beautiful coastal town and famous for surfing . Since I moved to Cpt its actually closer to me and I driven through it several times

is why @HoonDing mentions spell focus... and presumably spell specialization. dispel is a modified cl check. on core difficulty the boss in question is an outsider level 39, and owlcat decided that means his caster level is also 39. you need a merged angel/lich with school mastery: abjuration, spell focus: abjuration and spell specialization: greater dispel, as well as a couple bits o' gear which boost caster level, to have a meaningful chance o' dispelling buffs on the boss in question... or you need be a trickster... or aeon. obvious your azata ain't a merged spell book angel/lich. is why we mentioned how on higher difficulties for the late game bosses it isn't worth the effort to dispel. makes more sense to just stack ab/dc and add debuffs. the boss in question also shows up in the aeon mythic, so if you wanna see the battle go a bit different, you may go the aeon route and create character with high initiative and a whole lotta melee attacks. btw, for a considerable amount o' time after release, it were not difficult for an azata party to dispel all buffs o' the azata quest boss 'cause aivu benefited from the same broke maths as the azata mythic boss. aivu's dragon level were her caster level. HA! Good Fun!

It is. Never intended for it to be taken as anything more.

Hey @BruceVC, have you ever been to Mossel Bay? Shark Week, going on right now, is my absolute favorite time of the year for TV-watching, and I especially love the leaping great whites of Mossel Bay, the thing I'd love to travel to SA for some day. Seeing Colossus come 15 feet out of the water with a squirming seal in its jaws is f---ing awesome! That's 18 feet and 4,000 lbs of fantastic seal-ripping fury!!

Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention somthing about a certain Dagger: Lover's Embrace has this Frenzy enchantment as I already said which stacks with everything. Well, the even better part is that it can get triggered by ANY crit you do (against the specified gender), be it from your Rapier, Dagger, spells or whatever. So it procs a lot more often than one might have thought initially.

No, not really. See, the raw damage of Soul Annihilation (I'll call it SA from now on) doesn't rely on the damage your weapon is doing at all. It is solely based on the focus you dump into it and then gets amplified by damage bonuses (Might, Sneak Attack, Deathblows and so on). So for SA's impact it doesn't really matter whether you use a fat great sword for it or a dagger. What is more crucial is that you don't miss (or graze). And for that weapons like Rapier, Spear, Dagger and Club are great because of their +5 accuracy bonus. Some special weapons like Sun & Moon are also great because it has two attack rolls bc. it has two heads that strike seperately (two chances to not miss or graze). It is true that SA is a primary attack and thus the dagger won't be used for it - but that doesn't mean that the dagger has no impact at all: because you are dual wielding your recovery will be shorter (just from the fact that you are wearing two weapons - on top you could be using Two Weapon Style for additional speed). That shortened recovery does not care whether you use a primary attack like SA or a Full Attack like Crippling Strike. Full Attacks get a -35% dmg malus though - that would be not good for SA, its raw dmg would be diminished. But for your rogue attacks a two weapon setup like Rapier+Dagger is often still better than a two hander (or a single weapon) because the Rogue has so many good Full Attacks. So you don't need to worry about that in combination with SA: it's totally fine. For more confirmation: one of the best weapon combos for Trickster/Soulblade is considered Sun & Moon + Tuotilo's Palm (or another bashing shield) for the same reasons I explained above: you keep high speed bc. of officially dual wielding, you have a good main weapon that hits often and in case of bashing shields the primary ttack makes sure you don't even use the weak bash but can attack with the good main hand weapon mostly - and on top of it you get nice defense because not only does the shield give you defensive stats by itself, but bashing shields work with both Two Weapopn Style (bc. they are weapons) AND Weapon & Shield Style (because they are shields). Your setup is not far off: Rapier & Dagger are better for Rogue's Full Attacks and not detrimental to SA. You don't get the defense boost of a bashing shield, but your Full Attacks don't suffer from a weak bash. It would (both). Furtunately it only starts once you switch to the weapon set. It doesn't matter that the start of combat already happend. For the weapon the combat starts as soon as it gets switched to - so to speak. So using a ranged weapon at combat start and only afterwards switching to the dagger totally works. However: if you switch away from the dagger the buff will instantly vanish and it won't even come back if you switch back to the dagger. It does! Unfortunately the +2 PEN only counts for the weapon attacks of Marux Amanth (including Corona of the Soul) but nothing else (not the Rapier's attacks and also not spells for example). It does that. But so would Smart or Acute (like from Tactical Barrage - both grant +5 INT). The potential powerful effect of Brilliant is that it restores spend class resources like Discipline or Focus. And - and that's what's really impactful - used spells (for Wizard, Priest and Druid). It is significantly more potent to gain +1 spell use back per 6 secs instead of just 1 Discipline or +10 focus (which can be regained anyway) or phrases of Chanters or wounds of Monks (same as focus - they come back easily anyway). It's easy for Ciphers to generate 10 focus without being Brilliant. It's less easy or impossible for other classes to regain 1 Discipline, Guile, Zeal or Rage or so... so Brilliant can be nice for them - but it's still only 1 point and you cannot do that much impactful stuff with it so it takes time to regain a meaningful amount. On the otehr hand: one wizard spell per 6 seconds is... great. You can simply spam Shadowflame every 6 seconds or so - or you can be a Priest and regain Salvation of Time every 6 seconds and use that to prolong all buffs of the party endlessly... So Tactician/Cipher is not bad by any means - it just so that it feels like a bit of a waste to not pair a Tactician with a caster in order to form a Multiclass instead of a Tactician/<insert class that regains resources anyway> if you know what I mean.

Exactly, I am not saying you shouldn't balance, but it should never be the highest priority or the guiding light you follow.

From what I gather he actively does PnP sessions, I would think he plays the games too, but who knows... These games, at least for me, were always more about the gameplay. The story/roleplaying aspect was never particularly great in any of them. I think it's hard to tell a good story when you want to have multiple paths/choices and when you want the game to be that long and as you said, when you want the game to conform the genre/ruleset. On the topic of balance. I agree that ideally it's great to only have good choices that are all interesting to play, or to at least have one good choice that is interesting to the person playing, but realistically can you think of a game like that? Lets say that is the goal you want to strive for when making a game, how big of a priority should it be? Should it trump everything? Should you tone down interesting skills, to bring them in line with other skills at the cost of making them less interesting. Making a good build is a part of the difficulty of the game, if you don't want that then drop it to story difficulty and pick whatever skill you want. I think that chasing balance in a single player game is a waste of resources, you are never going to achieve it, people are too good at finding exploits or just things you never thought about. But let's say you do, are you aware that even games that revolve around being balanced, aren't really. From my personal experience of having played League of Legends, that game for all its balance patches was constantly shifting metas and for a couple of reasons. Most people would probably say it's because the devs are incompetent, but that is BS, it's unbalanced because that is what keeps the game interesting and fun. Besides even if they made it balanced, a one trick pony (a person playing only one character all the time) would probably stomp the ladder. Also who do you balance around? A bad player, a good player, or a no lifer? But back to the topic of a single player game, between a choice of a balanced gameplay and an interesting gameplay I would always chose the latter. I'm saying this because I cannot think of a single player game (of this genre(IE style games)) that was both.

I noticed some reviews were complaining about the humor, but I'm getting a kick out of. The Beast is my favorite character so far.

I took advantage of an unusually cool July morning to hike up to King's Pinnacle in Crowder's Mountain State Park.

Donald Trump

It wasn't so much launched as it was dropped. People said it was da bomb, so I guess it was well received?

Story time with Baphomet is a step in a more wholesome direction.

I dunno, I kinda prefer necro threads to creating new and short-lived microthreads. It shows that the necromancer bothered to read quite a bit instead of just plopping a lazy question, and reading is good.

When POE first came out you could count cRPG's in one hand. Of course people will buy and enjoy it for what it is. When POE2 came out, the market was already fully satiated with a big list of meaty cRPG's and having options allows you to be more peaky and pedantic with a purchase. If 5%(random number) of POE players didn't like the walls of text, some others the combat system or the graphics or the story or whatever else, they could afford to look elsewhere. POE2 wasn't the only option in the market. Reviewers can't even influence their own grandmothers anymore so let's stop pretending that positive/negative reviews do anything sales wise. Give a 5% special offer to Cyberpunk and watch it stay as a Steam top sale for days

Exactly this. When I saw the original numbers - from 20% damage to either 40% damage or 20% damage + 100% increased focus gain, I was very split, (double the damage bonus or double the focus gain), but with the nerf to 30%, it's now a 10% more damage (ends up more like 5% more total damage) or double focus, the choice was extremely obvious for my Soulblade. Double focus. Yeah, it would make sense that double focus gain would be overall more damage for a Soulblade, since it is a direct boost to how often or how hard you can Soul Annihilate.