AlphaMagnum

Your Barbarian is using the currently bugged "One Stands Alone" passive, which, instead of adding 20% damage as described in the tooltip, instead adds a flat +20 damage. This is a fairly well-known bug over in the "Character Builds" forum where people complain religiously about overpowered Barbarians trivializing the game difficulty. This is responsible for 20 of the 45 base damage you see. I cannot say where the rest came from, however, since your character sheet does list a max damage of 20. It could be that you had Frenzy active at that time but not when you screenied the character sheet, or there might have been some sort of debuff placed by one of your other characters causing increased damage. I believe a Wizard spell ("Combusting Wounds") can do this, but there may be other effects which do the same.

Difficulty Bug (game forces easy difficulty regardless of player choice) https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75166-difficulty-bugs/

So I couldn't help myself, and despite saying that I'd hold off on playing further until this got fixed, I went ahead and killed off my saves until I found one (2 hours previously) which was not experiencing this bug. I proceeded to continue on that save and so far (2 battles -- Raedric fight and Will O Wisps @ start of Temple of Eothas) the game has maintained an appropriate enemy density. It looks like something is definitely going wrong with save files since there was nothing I could do to fix the issue on saves which were experiencing it. I did not try uninstalling and reinstalling the game but that's a lot to ask for in order to fix a non-gamebreaking bug.

It is indeed. I've shelved the game for now since nothing I do, short of reverting 2 hours of playtime, will fix the bug for now. Not worth it!

Keep in mind that there's some kind of weird Difficulty level bug floating around that you literally won't notice unless you're playing on PotD. For reasons we still can't explain, the game will force your difficulty down to "Easy" regardless of what you set it to (E/N/H/PotD), even though your menu will keep listing it as whatever you choose. Manually changing the difficulty via the menu produces no change and enemy density and stats remain at the "Easy" level irrespective of your choice. Like I said, it's pretty much undetectable unless you know the game very well (i.e. in the intro, you know how many enemies should be in each area) and can identify when enemy density is inappropriate for the difficulty you chose to play with. This is easier if you chose PotD to begin with, since the difference between Easy and PotD is so massive that it's quite obvious when you're facing half as many enemies which are all substantially weaker than they're supposed to be.

That's great to hear. I seriously appreciate the communication. Please let us know if you would like any further information from our end, or if the team discovers some kind of temporary solution which we can implement before an official patch rolls out.

Mine went wrong around the Maerwald fight. As of the last major encounter (Raedric), things were working appropriately.

Ditto. Nothing I do with the difficulty settings actually changes the enemy composition. Things are stuck at "easy" regardless of what I do with the menu.

Is the difficulty-switching bug fixed in this version? I didn't notice it in the patch notes but my game seems to be permanently stuck on Easy, regardless of any changes I try to make.

Addendum -- changing the difficulty from Hard to Easy (and vice versa) has no effect whatsoever on enemy composition. The Maerwald fight when completing The Old Watcher quest ought to have 1 Flame Blight on Easy/Normal, 2 Flame Blights on Hard, and 3 Flame Blights on Path of the Damned from what I understand. Regardless of what difficulty I choose (Easy/Normal/Hard), I only ever get 1 Flame Blight in that fight. How can I fix this? EDIT -- Used IEMod's exposed console command "SwitchPotD" to attempt to force the game onto Path of the Damned difficulty. Nothing changed. Now I'm very confused.

Bumping this since there clearly hasn't been a fix for the issue. Thanks!

It's a question of scale though. You have to decide what degree of miss/graze/hit/crit chances are desirable for tank/DPS/midrange and engineer a number system to suit. In this case, because they chose (d100 + modifier) where modifier is usually somewhere between -20 and +20, you'll still get Grazes even at fairly high differentials. I'm generally a fan of the Graze mechanic where it applies to damage and most rebuffs, since it isn't nearly as punishing as an outright miss. Stuff like Petrify, though, is substantially more painful even on a Graze and I'm a big fan of the suggestion to make spells where: Hit/Crit = Petrify Graze = Paralyze Miss = (nothing) Or something of that nature, limiting your chance to Petrify but making sure the spell is still useful even if it just grazes.

Yeah, the fact that rolls are done with a d100 means that your dice roll has a huge chance to change the outcome of an attack or spell even if the difference between accuracy and whatever defense is fairly substantial. A tank might have ~100 in Fort/Ref/Will while the attacking spellcaster would have up to 80 Accuracy, so the modifier becomes -20 (80 - 100). Now you roll a d100 and have the following outcomes: 1 to 35: Miss (result 15 or less) 36 to 70: Graze 71 to 100: Hit Even with very high defenses, you run with a 65% chance of being grazed or hit, either of which spells instant death.

Interesting. I had people saying spells triggered it so I was quite confused. Do you know if it relates to weapon damage in any way?

Topic title says it all. I've seen lots of different posts about retaliation but each one has described it differently. Is it melee range only? Does it work against enemies at range? What triggers it? Spells? Autoattacks? Is it related to weapon damage? Is it a Primary Attack or a Full Attack? Thanks!

Is it a problem that Paladins can't tank as well as fighters, heal as well as priests, or deal damage like Rogues and Barbarian's? I mean, if I could build a pally to out-dps my rogue, whose only capability is damage-dealing, I think there would be an entirely different balance issue at hand. In my eyes, the value of a paladin is that while you may not tank as well as a fighter, you do it while providing party-wide buffs to damage or survivability, and while also healing a little on demand. Likewise for a DPS pally -- you may not out-damage a Rogue but you'll certainly off-tank more effectively and you'll be buffing the whole party and healing a bit, neither of which the Rogue can do. Ultimately, you don't do one thing very well because the specialized classes (Fighter, Rogue, etc) have the specialist roles. Your role as a paladin is to do a little of everything. Now, one concern here is that taking one or more such hybrids is inferior to making a party purely filled with specialists like 2 Fighters (tanks), 1 Wizard (CC), 1 Cipher (CC/DPS), 1 Rogue (DPS), 1 Priest (Buffs/Heals). How big is the gap, though? Balance is an ideal and I don't expect perfect balance; so long as things are reasonably close (for some subjective value of reasonable), I'd be satisfied.

Since no one in that room notices your party initially, what I did was have my whole party hang back and place traps just past the enemies' vision radius while sneaking. My main character subsequently went in to start the dialogue alone and then led the enemies on a short but merry chase toward my death trap. There isn't really any reason for the enemy not to follow my lone monk since they have no reason to suspect that there was anyone else involved. The trap placement allowed my main character to survive and was done in a manner consistent with my own approach to role-playing. Was actually awesome to see.

Yup. I'm getting absolutely slaughtered in Lord of a Barren Land at lv3 with 5 party members. I basically have to get some cheesy trap setup if I want to stand any chance at victory.

Is Retaliation really that bad? I mean, apart from the barbarian's (bugged) One Stands Alone passive, does it really do that much damage on other character classes or on barbarians without that passive? I'm not sure as to what sorts of abilities trigger Retaliation, so I won't comment as to it being too easy to prod, but I am curious about how it stacks up in the absence of other effects. Also, are you certain that it stacks? Because that's pretty weird given how pretty much every other bonus doesn't stack. A simple fix might just be preventing stacking rather than nerfing the effect itself.

Modded my dll to increase required exp by 50%. Now I can be a completionist guilt-free. This had the added bonus of making the early game somewhat more challenging, since my party is still level 2 and now heading to take care of The Smith's Shipment and A Mother's Plea. I'll be just level 3 as I begin the more challenging sidequests of Act 1 (Lord of a Barren Land and Buried Secrets), which will hopefully be fun as well. The ultimate goal, of course, is making Act II a bit tougher since many players seem to arrive at that point quite overleveled.

Are there any other damage bonuses at play? Grazes (-50%) and Crits (+50%) just get added to all other modifiers. For example: 10 Base Damage, 20 Might (+30%), Superb weapon (+45%) Hit = 10 * (1 + 0.30 + 0.45) = 10 * 1.75 = 17.5 Damage Crit = 10 * (1 + 0.30 + 0.45 + 0.50) = 10 * 2.25 = 22.5 Damage Graze = 10 * (1 + 0.30 + 0.45 - 0.50) = 10 * 1.25 = 12.5 Damage Assuming 8 - 12 damage range, your character sheet would show (8*1.75) to (12*1.75) = 14 to 21 damage Thus, the expectation that a 12.5dmg graze originated from a 25dmg hit is not consistent with the way the game does calculations. With the same damage roll, a hit would've been 17.5 damage as I illustrated here.

My lv3 Cipher with no generic Accuracy bonus fits this model, having 3*(3-1) + 1*3 + 25 = 9 - 3 + 3 + 25 = 34 Accuracy + the spell's bonus (5 or 10) Here's a question -- enemies can still have exceptionally high Fort/Ref/Will, even beyond the theoretical "base" spell accuracy of 70 at lv12. What other sources of spell accuracy can we obtain to boost our effectiveness? Does Zealous Focus boost it?

Azureith's Stiletto - Jolting Touch proc on crit once per encounter, buyable from Gilded Vale blacksmith for around 2k copper

I've heard a great deal about how the game is initially quite challenging, but has the difficulty drop off as you get into Acts II and III, assuming you do every side quest you find along the way. With that in mind, I'm looking to start a discussion on the "recommended" levels for each major story or side quest, to ensure that we are adequately challenged for as long as possible. For example: Raedric's Hold @ levels 3-4 Temple of Eothas @ levels 4-5 Caed Nua @ ??? Of course there'll be ranges and I'm traveling in a party of 6 to further reduce the experience gain, but of course having 6 warm bodies with their own skillsets is enough to reduce the difficulty of encounters a fair bit. Let's assume a party of 5-6. Do any of you have suggestions as to when I should be tackling the major quests and areas in the game?

For DW builds you should also definitely take Deep Wounds. Deep Wounds doesn't stack with itself, but it does 4 damage (one tick) immediately on application, even on refresh, making Deep Wounds basically +4 damage per hit (plus the small DoT), making it pretty much a superior Vulnerable Attack. This isn't obvious since it doesn't show up on the combat log, but you can see how it works by attacking a party member. I've never used Deep Wounds before but that's wild. +4 damage per hit is excellent, particularly if you're dual-wielding the (slightly) improved fast 1h weapons. Do DoTs not show up at all in the combat log? I've honestly never used one so I don't know how they work. How do you know that you're dealing 4 damage?