Bubbles

Alright, I'd forgotten to check this thread. I got four characters in the Black Hound common room, each with the mentioned spells and ready to level up and take the respective bugged elemental boost talent mentioned in the OP. Thus, you can check damage before level up and after level up and see that it is identical both in the log and in the floating damage numbers. Keep in mind that for the corrode spells, only the DoT portion seems to be bugged; the average for the initial direct damage seems to increase correctly after taking a talent. Some of the damage is foe AoE; you have to start a fight in the common room to test that. https://www.dropbox.com/s/m27d9mxa6fhvlku/ecb2363b-fd38-45c8-9392-22444df07ee5%20quicksave.savegame?dl=0 Sample way of testing that the log and floaters are not bugged and that the DoT is indeed not being increased: cast Necrotic Lance at Durance (hope that you get a Hit attack, otherwise reload) and let the DoT expire. Note the amount of initital direct damage and Durance's health score after the attack. Then, reload, level up, take spirit of decay, and repeat the cast. You will notice that Durance's health is only affected by the volume of the initial cast (For instance, if you do 41 damage + DoT without SoD, he has 390 health, and if you do 47 damage + DoT with SoD, he has 383 health). If the DoT were being "stealth buffed" by SoD, Durance would have lost more health.

You know, this does sound like a major bug.

Observed with Flame Blights and Will-o-Wisps on the Caed Nua map. 1) approach one of these monsters with a Druid (does not matter if in combat or not) 2) cast winter wind and hit the target 3) go make coffee, make a phone call, take a nap; keep the game running 4) come back and kill the still motionless enemy Savegame with a willing wisp just to the east of the party: https://www.dropbox.com/s/paz95t6nug6tiwl/cb02f9f6-e327-4afd-8fbe-b65da192ab0a%20quicksave.savegame?dl=0

I do not understand how "Currently unpaid" actually affects the game in any way except to be a bit confusing at first. It destroys the immersion. I worked very hard my whole life to be able to pay my bills, and now the game forces me to act like a moocher.

This might be the tenth or fifteenth bug report on this matter, dating back to early April. If this were easily fixable, they'd have done it by now.

Take a guess.

Are you volunteering or announcing?

Put it on dropbox, it's easier. Like so: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6undqgpuzwsk9g1/PoErandom-no-pics-1.01.xlsx?dl=0

You can build up full phrases in most encounters just by running away from the enemies for a while, or, later on, by using per-encounter spells like Hold or Withdraw. Keeping that in mind, I think the best way to address balance issues would be to allow mid-level Chanters to start with a certain amount of stacks and rebalance the invocations to compensate for that. You can also go the per-encounter route, but starting them off at per-encounters would be very OP during the early levels, and turning them into per-encounters with increasing level could feel like a nerf (since you can technically get infinite invos per battle with the current system). The ideal solution would be to make stack gain scale with something that requires you to be in combat. You can do something like "for every friend/enemy affected by your chant aura, you gain one stack every x seconds", with lower level chants getting size increases as you level and high level chants starting with reduced range. That would somewhat fix the problem of difficulty scaling, making Chanters feel active during trash fights while keeping their balance for long boss fights. It would take a massive systems overhaul and would give the class a completely different feel though.

You could already do everything this version of the editor does by going through the files manually. It's just less of a hassle now.

I wonder if a war bow user wouldn't be better off going for an extra weapon slot instead of Greater Focus. The extra damage from a Blunderbuss/Arquebus is still very helpful even without a weapon focus talent or quick switch, and it should give you about 7 extra focus anyway (more with buffs). I've found that warbows generally build focus faster and more reliable than blunderbusses/Arquebusses anyway. So using guns for Ciphers is pretty much a waste of talent points in general, unless you attack an enemy with 15+ DR. And even then, the pack you're fighting will probably have enemies with lower DR aswell. For focus generation, faster attacks trumph giant slow attacks. Often you are in a situation where you need to react fast; a terribly slow Arquebus will not do you good there. Granted, you get about 10 focus with just a single attack on an Arquebus. You can get a lot more than 10 focus per shot with a well enchanted arq/blunderbuss/pistol at max level. Shooting off one or two (depending on whether you take QS or an extra slot) pre-loaded top-of-the-line guns without a WF and then switching to war bow seems a fairly solid idea for the end game, espcially since Cipher might well be your only ranged weapons fighter (with three pure casters and two in melee). For extra fun, you can put a different slaying property on every top weapon, so you can almost always have useful +25% damage boosts on your alpha strike. That should compensate nicely for the lacking WFs. Especially since accuracy is less important with the Cipher's high weapon damage modifier. As for melee, it's a bit iffy on PotD, since you'll have trouble maintaining the Wood Elf bonus. The accuracy will barely matter for the guns, but it will fully affect the talents; that's not good. Since reliably applied CC and debuffs are helpful to the entire party, I see little point in going melee unless you're soloing.

I wonder if a war bow user wouldn't be better off going for an extra weapon slot instead of Greater Focus. The extra damage from a Blunderbuss/Arquebus is still very helpful even without a weapon focus talent or quick switch, and it should give you about 7 extra focus anyway (more with buffs).

Change your Dexterity to 1000 in the console and you'll see that reload time scales with Dex.

Confuse doesn't turn the enemy to your side, it makes them "behave randomly". In practice it might be more powerful than it should be, but there's nothing to assume that it's bugged.

Ah yes, makes perfect sense now. I assumed "a graze reduces damage by 50%" would be multiplicative, since otherwise grazes would get trivialized as characters and weapon enchantments increase in power (especially if they raise the level cap and introduce new enchantments). I guess that is what is actually happening. Cool, cool. They really need to make crystal clear which modifiers are additive or multiplicative in game, because otherwise I am tempted to assume the option that seems most sensible to me (which is usually wrong).

Steps to reproduce: 1) cast Rot Skulls 2) attack a target standing next to another target 3) observe that the AoE always hits both targets for 100% damage as long as the weapon attack at least grazes your primary target This can be abused by firing your Rot Skulls at a weak friendly summon standing next to, for example, the Adra Dragon.

I thought about this some more; actually, the best way to use Rot Skulls against a high level enemy might be to cast it on one of your low-deflect summons. Since the always-hit Foe AoE is the main prize of that attack, and the summon can be freely positioned, you can do tons of that damage without ever having to roll against an enemy's defenses.

Druids can shape**** into another form, cast Rot Skulls, and then around dumbly staring at nothing, because their weapon isn't firing. I assume Rot Skulls was supposed to be implemented the same way as Firebrand; you shouldn't be able to cast the spell when in animal form.

The value of WF:A really depends on your difficulty level. Rot Skulls does most of its damage with its stacking DoT AoE, which cannot graze or crit. As long as the relatively feeble main attack at least grazes, you will apply the AoE. So going for +accuracy might not be worth it on easier difficulties, where the risk of a full miss with a +20 accuracy weapon during the endgame is rather small anyway. It's great for PotD, of course. But Dangerous Implement...? It's of very questionable worth, since it doesn't buff the DoT.

*after reload After release there were a couple of bug reports from people stating that they had fought a battle against an enemy, reloaded halfway through, and then returned to find that the enemy was not at full health, but Badly Wounded. I just had the same thing happen to me again (with the Forest Lurkers in the NE corner of the Black Meadow), so this bug has either returned, or it was never fixed.

Are you sure that isn't due to the low duration of the spell? With a base duration of 6 seconds, a high Int character will barely be able to fit three casts in before the first DoT expires naturally. edit: AoE stacking makes Rot Skulls do absolutely filthy damage by the way. A base corrode damage of 52 in a base 1.25m AoE on every hit of an Average speed weapon. As long as the original attack at least grazes the target, the AoE always does its full damage to everyone in the area; it cannot miss, graze or crit. Probably the best attack in the game. edit2: I thought about this some more; actually, the best way to use Rot Skulls against a high level enemy might be to cast it on one of your low-deflect summons. Since the always-hit Foe AoE is the main prize of that attack, and the summon can be freely positioned, you can do tons of damage without ever having to roll against an enemy's defenses.

I noticed that certain spells and abilities are only partially or not at all affected by their corresponding elemental bonus talents. This includes: For Priests: Iconic Projection (also always bypasses DR) For Druids/Mages: Autumn's Decay (DoT portion) Rot Skulls (AoE DoT) Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon (DoT portion) Necrotic Lance (DoT portion) -> Hypothesis: any damage where the tooltip states "Effects: x damage over y seconds" is not affected by elemental bonuses. For Bards: The Dragon Thrashed

I keep noticing grazes with elemental spells that do more damage than they should. For instance, I just saw a Chill Fog graze for 15.9 damage before DR, when the stated damage on Chill Fog was 16-23 (base 12-18) and I had only Secrets of Rime to boost the spell (character level 2). This is true across multiple characters and playthroughs. One possibility -- the only one I can currently think of -- is that the 20% boost from elemental talents is fully applying to grazes instead of being halved.

Insect Swarm also stacks with itself. So does Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon. I'm guessing all DoTs stack in the beta, which is presumably intended.

FYI, Rot Skulls' AoE DoT component also stacks. If you don't want to abuse bugs, don't use them.