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StevenTheMathGuy

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Everything posted by StevenTheMathGuy

  1. Casting animations are totally unrelated to equipped weapon. Mental Binding has exactly the same cast time whether using a blunderbuss or a stiletto. I usually use an arbalest until I can get Leadsplitter, at which point I switch.
  2. Melee cipher is incredibly lackluster unless you REALLY know what you're doing and where/how to get the right items ASAP. Generally, a ranged Cipher will be far more useful and do far more damage. Anyways, there are three stats that open up a lot of extra dialogue option: Perception, Intelligence, Resolve. Might, Constitution, and Dexterity each open up a few dialogue options, but less than the others. Also, skills provide dialogue options, especially Lore, Stealth, and Survival. It's impossible to have every dialogue option with one character. For a Cipher with high resolve: Go with Human (sub-race doesn't matter). For powers, take Eyestrike and Whisper of Treason. Might 19, Constitution 3, Dexterity 18, Perception 3, Intelligence 18, Resolve 16. That's high enough resolve to get ~90% of the Resolve based dialogues. For a Cipher with high perception (and a slightly better character, thanks to racial passive): Go with Wood Elf. Same power selection. Might 18, Constitution 3, Dexterity 19, Perception 16, Intelligence 18, Resolve 3. For either one: Then choose one the following cultures: Deadfire Archipelago (+1 Dex), Old Vailia (+1 Int), The Living Lands (+1 Might). For feats, go with Biting Whip, Draining Whip, Gunner, Marksman, Weapon Focus (Ruffian), Penetrating Shot. Get an arbalest or arquebus ASAP (recruit Kana and give his gun to the cipher is the easiest way). Once you're past Caed Nua, go east from the Woodend Plains until you reach Dyrford Village. Get the quest "A Farmer's Plight", and then either kill the Ogre or recruit the Ogre abd pay the farmer 400cp. This will get you the Lead Splitter blunderbuss. Best weapon in game for a ranged Cipher.
  3. It's not the build, it's the tactics. Have tanks (typically Eder) up front to engage the assailants when combat begins. Your main character is not built to take hits, so your mistake was being in a position to get hit. Unless it's a ghost mob, if your DPSers are getting hit, you made a positioning error with the front line. Any great DPS build will go down like wet rags without a tank, just like any great tank build does minimal damage. There is no build that can do everything well, by design. Practice with formations and character ordering, and always keep the tanky characters up front.
  4. Action Speed means every spell, ability, and attack happens faster. When you have a tough fight and need to quickly crank out Slicken followed by Chill Fog followed by Miasma, a high Dex lets you get that Miasma cast before the Slicken wears off. When the Wizard is just sitting back shooting, it makes you shoot faster. Basically, DPSers want it.
  5. Could a tactics system have been implemented in PoE? Yes. Would it have made the game better? I really don't think so. First, scripting would burn through your Per Rest abilities. Second, tons of Per Encounter abilities have synergies with things from other classes, and you'd either spend hours coding your AI or have abilities used at foolish times. For instance, Flames of Devotion is probably the simplest ability in the game: Your next hit does double damage, with the added damage being of Fire type. But when should it be used? If it's a pack of easy trash, then using it ASAP is the best choice. If it's a challenging group, you could be better off using it right away on a weaker mob to minimize the tanking challenges or perhaps you should use it on the toughest mob to mitigate DR. But no matter what, you're probably better off waiting for the Druid to hobble the enemy and the Cipher to Paralyze it. But what about for fights when you've run out Druid spells... It's among the simplest abilities in the game, but the potential combinations and interactions is large enough that developing simple heuristics is still woefully inadequate. Even if you or the community at large figured out good heuristics, you'd still need to wonder if it was the best use of resources. I'm a software engineer (recently quit Google to move back East and be near family), and adding any feature always takes developer time. Project management does not leave talent fallow. There aren't days where designers, engineers, and artists are just sitting back doing nothing. That means you're either cutting something else that would take equivalent work or you're pushing back the release date. Pushing back the release date costs money (employee wages, building and equipment rent, etc still need to be paid), but I think we'd rather have seen that than to have had other features cut. Is this feature sufficiently necessary that its inclusion would draw enough added revenue to pay for the weeks of developer, designer, and artist time it would draw? Given limited resources is it the best usage? I think not. This is probably Obsidian's least buggy release, but it still has several bugs that vary from annoying to incredibly frustrating to completely game breaking. There are tons of balance changes that are needed. The Stronghold could really use some expansion to feel less boringly generic. Those all would be more useful and a bigger player draw than an AI system that would necessarily be lackluster. A player set "tactics system" kinda worked in DA:O and FFXII, but those games were much less complex than PoE. Even then, you were better off maintaining direct control. So, why implement it, if it won't be very useful and there's tons of other things? It's just not a good use of resources. PoE probably had a total budget around $5M. If the average employee compensation is $50k (VERY rough guess, figuring that artists make 40k, designers 45k, and programmers 70k) and it took ~2.5 years to develop (Sept 2012 to March 2015 is just over 2.5 years) with a team of around 30 people (using rough numbers). That's $3.75M in employee compensation. Figure that 2 years of rent, power, computers, etc. eat up the remainder, and that's why they needed to share the post-release with Paradox... there wasn't any more money to handle marketing. Even if they had another $1M, that money would probably have been better spent on expanding the stronghold system, getting more reactivity and variety in the quest solutions and other dialogue, creating more unique items, improving Q&A to ship with fewer bugs, and more variety in the Beta to achieve better game balance on release. A tactics system like that is probably near the bottom of the feature list in terms of player utility.
  6. Can you make it through with the pre-generated companions.... only if you're really good at exploiting the combat system. If you were to build a custom group and give every other party member an optimal build, then definitely. That said, it's an awful build, like "makes the gods themselves weep" levels of bad.
  7. Might and Int are the twin key stats for Ciphers, though Dex is useful. My current Cipher finding Hard difficulty very easy, with the following build: Wood Elf - Old Vailia - Aristocrat Mig 18 Con 3 Dex 19 Per 9 Int 19 Res 10 If you worry about spectral mobs teleporting or casters, then drop Dex to 11 to get Con and Per to 10.
  8. My Chanter on Paths of the Damned difficulty uses an invocation in about 1/3 of the fights. On shorter fights, he barely does anything other than the relatively minimal buff/debuff/heal that comes from his chanting. On longer fights, though, his skeletons make it easy to get flanking bonuses, his ghost helps bring down hard targets, and he never ever stops being useful. Only a cipher can stay at peak utility throughout multiple battles like a chanter. The only real thing that needs changing is that some of the phrases and invocations are useless, and you can't get rid of them in any way. I'd buff the worthless ones, and allow swapping phrases and invocations out on level up.
  9. I have restarted Steam several times, and still can not view the achievements in the Steam client. However, I can view them on the Steam website. Also, they are unlocking properly for me. This is almost certainly a Steam client issue.
  10. I filled out the survey a while ago, and I tend to lurk rather than post. However, I decided that I want to be listed. My OOoE title is "Supreme Mathemagician of the Obsidian Order".
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