Mercbeast

A min/maxed party will still face roll with that mod. You need to be looking at punching the HP up to 2x and increase npc damage some, and then you will need to start min/maxing to the extreme to handle stuff.

You don't need that saber, there are a lot of good ones already.

I think the highest sustain DPS class in the game will be a fighter/streetfighter. The reason is pretty simple. Fighter for engagement slots, streetfighter for perma -50% recovery. Stacking all the recovery bonuses you can get, you can turn your character into a whirlwind. Throw that saber with the 0 recovery time proc on top of it, and nothing, NOTHING is going to swing faster. It will be ludicrous.

Can you share your method/files for increasing PotD health? I found the other mods for increased difficulty but not that one. It's in the global.gamedatabundle search for "pathofthedamned" it will take you to the difficulty settings. It allows you to change HP and damage at each difficulty level. The AI already hits really hard, and has massive accuracy/deflection advantages with the mods I'm running, so I just boosted HP and not damage! what value you suggest to put in HP? 2 or more?I edited this in my game to 1.5 but I don't think it's working. Maybe it's just for ships (I didn't test extensively). Enemies I fought were just as easy as before. it is working, I noticed an increase in HP setting the value to 2 2 doubles the HP. It's what I am running. It makes fights a pretty big slog. I'm enjoying it.

Can you share your method/files for increasing PotD health? I found the other mods for increased difficulty but not that one. It's in the global.gamedatabundle search for "pathofthedamned" it will take you to the difficulty settings. It allows you to change HP and damage at each difficulty level. The AI already hits really hard, and has massive accuracy/deflection advantages with the mods I'm running, so I just boosted HP and not damage!

I'd strongly argue that streetfighter is stronger than assassin. Both are strong, among the best subclasses, but they are strong for different reasons. Streetfighters are designed to turn your tank, or front line fighter into a DPS juggernaut. Assassin is for blowing up that caster or ranged. I have a streetfighter/mael priest, that DW's blunderbusses (could be blunderbuss + any other 1h ranged weapon tho), that is comfortably out dpsing Maia, and it's my primary healer. I should add, I am playing heavily modded. POTD has 2x hp, aggressive level scaling, less accuracy/defense from levels, less xp overall. So, sustain is favored over burst, cause it's just not possible to burst much down off of like 1 or 2 attacks.

Unbroken fighter is actually really, really, really strong. Match it with something like a streetfighter rogue, and it's arguably one of the absolutely strongest class combos in the game. How do you play it? Pump might (not sure if this is necessary, but it's to keep the AI from disengaging) and perception, drop resolve a bit. Get the reckless mail or whatever it's called, the one that gives attack speed on engagement, gives you extra engagement. Now run into the middle of a pack of enemies, engage 4-5-6 of them, enjoy 50% recovery from street fighter 30% from the armor, 45% from dual wielding and 2 weapon fighting. Take something like battle axes/spear/buckler or medium shield. Pop shield modal/spear modal on a weapon set if you need to lock down even more stuff. If you get the monk specific buckler in Neketara I think, that acts as a punching weapon + a buckler, you can go spear modal + buckler for +2 engagement slots AND 2 weapon fighting bonus. Watch as you sit in the middle of as many as 6 (or more?) enemies engaged to you, while you are swinging your battle axes at like 1.2s, or your spear even faster I think. A solo unbroken build can build for basically the same thing, it just won't get the raw DPS output, and it will lose out on one extra engagement, but it gets more tank overall, and higher PL abilities sooner. Build it to do damage, put it in the reckless mail.

I don't believe the dagger modal will actually stack with mirror images. It will just take the higher of the two, which is the images, until the images drop, then the dagger kicks in. I think.

My MC is a Skald/Streetfighter. It's an absolute monster. On easy fights, it gets stuck with a +20% attack speed debuff, but on any difficult fights (My game is pretty heavily modified to make things hard), the -50% recovery speed buff turns it into an absolute freight train. A lot of builds are "win more" builds. What I mean is, they contribute to winning the fight more heavily. This build just gets stronger, the harder the fight is. Stat wise, I left might at 10, lowered resolve a bit (I want the AI to prioritize this character), pumped perception and dex, and put my left overs into int and con. Equipment wise, I prioritize adding tank to this character, because you want it to be sub 50% hp as much as possible. The more hurt it gets, the stronger it gets. So a big HP pool, less damage taken due to HP loss, stuff like that is great. It's easily out DPSing maia and maia is a DPS monster. This is without dump stats btw. I slightly lowered resolve, I didn't dump it. The stats are not min/maxed, because I don't min/max stats The mods I am using are, a couple of tweaks, about 35% less XP from quests etc, all levelups give only +1 to accuracy/defense (slightly nerfs higher level fights, but massively increases the strength of lower level enemies) POTD enemies have 2x hp, and a level scaling mod that allows enemies when applicable to gain up to 15 levels.

I actually run slightly lower resolve, and punch constitution up on my streetfighter builds. The reasoning is this, we want to encourage the AI to target us, to cause the flanking. Lower resolve helps this. We want to float safely at 50% hp as much as possible as well, so con helps do this. My MC right now is a skald/streetfighter, and im wearing as much +HP/Con gear as possible, and at level 7 I have 180 hp. Gives a nice cushion to sit in or around that sweet spot. I'd also not pump might. I'd pump dex instead. You're getting a bunch of damage boosts already from Barb/Streetfighter, that might damage is being reduced, whereas dex will just give you raw attack speed/recovery.

Are you talking about the +100% healing chant? So, multiclass characters only get level 7 at 19 and 20? Yes, they hit 7 at 19 from what I've seen. Don't get me wrong, this is an extremely potent healer, but it becomes that at level 19. Like I said, how much of the game is even left at that point? I feel like builds should mature much earlier to get max enjoyment out of them. https://pillarsofeternity2.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Pillars-of-Eternity-2/new_multiclassing_table.jpg I play on POTD as an Shieldbearer/Beckoner with Party. Exalted Endurance, Ancient Memory and the Healing Aura from the unique shield you can buy is enough to keep everyone alive ... even my summoned ogres most of the time. Nobody was killed in a fight yet. If someone gets to low Healing Hands is really useful, because it prevents them from dying (upgrade from shieldbearer). The +100% healing chant should make things even better. As for experience ... I haven't played much. But only doing stuff in Port Maje and Neketaka without doing any quest outside these islands has given me enough EXP for Level 12. If Deadfire is somewhat like the first game then you reach max level at half of the game. In think this build can also be used for SOLO (but I would prefer Shieldbearer/Beckoner for this). Your defenses and healing is enough to keep you alive and your summons kill the enemy. There are a couple of items that give scaling bonuses - for instance there is a large shield that gives deflection bonus that scales with Athletics skill and damage reduction that scales with Metaphysics skill. By siding with one of the families in the harbor you can also get an armor that gives a deflection bonus that scales with Intimidate skill. By combining these you can get really high defenses. Ahh, see, I never use summons. So my expectations on healing is that it has to be able to actually deal with the damage my characters are tanking. I just dislike summoning as a mechanic, so I refrain from using it. The upside is, it tends to make the game more difficult, because a lot of strategies people employ to play potd, is to use as much summoning as possible, and frankly, the AI is pitiful at dealing with it. So, when I look at a healer, passive healing is awesome, but there has to be significant direct throughput or else characters will just die. This persists quite well into the game before characters can become tanky enough.

Empower is a per-rest mechanic that doesn't reset all casts/resources (only half). As far as resting in general goes, Deadfire doesn't encourage rest spamming (unlike PoE 1) because of the way food/drink system has changed. Having six characters in a party (i.e. complexity for the sake of complexity) doesn't lend itself automatically to more compelling gameplay. Veteran and PotD difficulty settings haven't been tweaked yet. Yea, about resting. Nothing prevented you from backing out of a dungeon and just going to rest if you needed to. There was really only one place in the entire game that I can think of where you could put yourself in a position where you had to fight out through a level or two. Everything else "Oh that was a hard fight, endurance is down, out of abilities, got a wound or two, let me just run my ass back to town for more supplies". Rests being finite just added an unnecessary time sink imo. Unless they went whole hog with the mechanic, and made almost every dungeon a "Oh damn, the entrance collapsed behind us and now we have to fight our way out or game over" it didn't really impact the game in any measurable way, other than to make you spend X number of minutes running to an Inn and back.

Yes, deflection/accuracy gains will be more important, especially if you want to try and take on stuff that over levels you. I'd actually like to see someone power way through a play through on +1 gains vs +3. I think it would be significantly more difficult, and maintain difficulty much longer. That's amazing. I want to try this change out on my game but only going down to +2 per level. I don't want a ridiculous change in difficulty, just slightly harder fights. What file do I need to edit, and what are the values I need to change? I'm usually good at modding by editing game files, just point me in the right direction please. EDIT: oh but wait. Sure this makes the game harder against under-leveled enemies, but doesn't this make the game easier against enemies oh higher level? The difference between stats would be smaller than what it currently is, therefore, giving the player an advantage am I right? It shouldn't make it easier against higher level enemies. The relative gain in accuracy/deflection stays the same, except the AI has a 15 level handicap, versus a 6 level handicap. The difficulty against higher level enemies, SHOULD stay about the same, because say you're level 15, and you're fighting something level 15, you will have +14 accuracy/defenses vs the AI having +29, a 15 point gap. Right now, all that would change is, you'd have +42 and the AI would have +57, still a 15 point gap. The relative difference actually gets bigger. 14:29 vs 42:57. You're just shrinking the power gap between you and lower level enemies, while preserving basically the same power gap between you and equal level and higher level enemies. If you want to test it out, it's the global.gamedatabundle in Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire\PillarsOfEternityII_Data\exported\design\gamedata Open it up with notepad++ and edit "AccuracyPerLevel":3,"DefensePerLevel":3, just change the numbers to the value you'd like. At 1, low level enemies will be competitive with your bonuses right up to level 15, at 2, you will start to out strip the POTD bonus at level 8. Depending on how long it takes for a balance patch to POTD, Tanreds scaling modification could juice things up even more. What I meant was against enemies that have a higher level compared to yours. If now you are level 10 and fight a level 13 enemy, you have +27 (9*3) acc/def and they have +51 (12*3)+15), for a gap of 24 points. If I were to change the scaling from +3 per level to just +1 per level, a level 10 character versus a level 13 enemy would have +9 (9*1) acc/def against +27 (12*1)+15), for a gap of 18 points. Thus making the fight easier. Yes marginally easier, fighting way overleveled encounters will be slightly easier, while equal level and lower will be more difficult. You also have to consider the effect of their base level. They are getting higher base stats, so the gap is often going to be even wider than that. I'm also not a math whiz, so I don't know if it actually would be easier. Since the difference in the absolute values is still in favor of the +1. With 9 being 33% of 27, and 27 being 53% of 51. I'm not sure how that would work out in terms of dice rolling. The gap is bigger, but proportionately it's significantly smaller. I just looked at combat mechanics again, and the proportion doesn't matter, just the gap. So yea, the +3 has a bigger advantage the higher the level goes above your own. I still think that the tradeoff is worth it, since just with a 3 level difference, the AI is pushing auto graze land. Of course that's just the bonus, and each level difference adds another point to it. It will be interesting to get into some higher level fights and see if the AI still stomps me. I'll prob hit an area with level 10's when I am level 7, just for science, to see if it feels noticeably easier than the last time I did it.

Yes, deflection/accuracy gains will be more important, especially if you want to try and take on stuff that over levels you. I'd actually like to see someone power way through a play through on +1 gains vs +3. I think it would be significantly more difficult, and maintain difficulty much longer. That's amazing. I want to try this change out on my game but only going down to +2 per level. I don't want a ridiculous change in difficulty, just slightly harder fights. What file do I need to edit, and what are the values I need to change? I'm usually good at modding by editing game files, just point me in the right direction please. EDIT: oh but wait. Sure this makes the game harder against under-leveled enemies, but doesn't this make the game easier against enemies oh higher level? The difference between stats would be smaller than what it currently is, therefore, giving the player an advantage am I right? It shouldn't make it easier against higher level enemies. The relative gain in accuracy/deflection stays the same, except the AI has a 15 level handicap, versus a 6 level handicap. The difficulty against higher level enemies, SHOULD stay about the same, because say you're level 15, and you're fighting something level 15, you will have +14 accuracy/defenses vs the AI having +29, a 15 point gap. Right now, all that would change is, you'd have +42 and the AI would have +57, still a 15 point gap. The relative difference actually gets bigger. 14:29 vs 42:57. You're just shrinking the power gap between you and lower level enemies, while preserving basically the same power gap between you and equal level and higher level enemies. If you want to test it out, it's the global.gamedatabundle in Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire\PillarsOfEternityII_Data\exported\design\gamedata Open it up with notepad++ and edit "AccuracyPerLevel":3,"DefensePerLevel":3, just change the numbers to the value you'd like. At 1, low level enemies will be competitive with your bonuses right up to level 15, at 2, you will start to out strip the POTD bonus at level 8. Depending on how long it takes for a balance patch to POTD, Tanreds scaling modification could juice things up even more.

It took me about 6s of looking, and 2s to change the two numbers. It took a bit longer to realize another mod was overwriting it all. So yea, less than 10s of mod work is going to be wiped away, likewise with changing the scaling. It's probably less than a minute to do what Tanred did. Ctrl-F replace all with whatever number you want. Repeat 3 times. Voila, you've just increased the scaling in 3 easy steps that take less than a minute.

Why is it wasting our time? Who is to say that people decide that they like a MORE challenging game, that is achieved via mods, like increasing the range of scaling, and decreasing the level bonuses? Not to mention, this could be very useful information for Obsidian to look at how to balance the games difficulty going forward. If they get enough user input, they might use some of this data in working out how they want to re-tune the difficulty of vet and potd.

Yes, deflection/accuracy gains will be more important, especially if you want to try and take on stuff that over levels you. I'd actually like to see someone power way through a play through on +1 gains vs +3. I think it would be significantly more difficult, and maintain difficulty much longer.

Well it changes the value both for you and the enemies so it shouldn't have an effect on difficulty I think. It absolutely will have an effect. Here is why. Monsters do not scale up very much, 1-2 levels. You can easily outlevel most content. That means, a level 10 character fighting level 4 monsters will enjoy +27 accuracy/deflection vs potd +15 + 9 from level 4. That means at level 10, you enjoy a +27 vs +24 modifier. Put the stats down to +1 per level, and now it's +9 vs +18 in favor of the AI. At level 10 vs level 4 monsters. Basically what it does is, shrink the power advantage of levels in terms of accuracy/deflection. Level 10 vs level 10 would look like +9 PC vs + 24 for the AI (15+9) potd difficulty. Basically what it is doing is, the difficulty AT your level will remain basically the same, but everything below you level wise will be a little bit harder to hit/evade because it is maintaining the advantage of POTD much longer. With levels giving +3 defense/accuracy per level, the POTD difficulty modifier is trivialized in like 6 levels. By making the bonus smaller, you're extending that POTD modifier for longer into the game.

It will definitely change things up, because stats like resolve and perception will become even more important in dealing with over leveled content. Likewise, different weapons may actually become more important. All this has a knock on effect, of, everything you strip out of your character to make it more competitive accuracy/deflection wise, is something you've stripped out of raw damage/utility. This will, in effect, change how people build their characters more. Level becomes less important in terms of accuracy/deflection, and more important in terms of abilities/passives/power level. I don't know/think it would break the balance, it will just change it, and the games only been out for 8 days right? It's not like there is a solid balance/understanding in place, nor is it like the game is very well balanced as it currently stands anyways. Now, if changing the value from 3 to 1 is too dramatic, we could always try a non-integer value (if they work) like 1.5, so you get 3 every 2 levels. I've also been using the XP tweak you posted, and it definitely helped in keeping me from just breezing through things too the point of critical mass where you just face roll everything. However, I'm going to try without it now, since I think this will be a big enough change not to need to slow down XP. I've also got to figure out what kind of character I want to play! I really like streetfighter for the attack speed.

Right, the idea is to make POTD more impactful, and not overcome by level 6. In theory what I hope it does, is clamp down on accuracy/deflection inflation. The bonus the AI gets from POTD becomes more important, levels in terms of accuracy and deflection remain important, but not to the point of trivializing POTD in short order. It also tightens the margins between player and AI. Think of it in terms of percentages. How big of a difference is 15 accuracy, at level 16? Level 16 gives the AI +45 accuracy/Deflection currently. POTD figures only 33% into that. Drop the gain to +1 per level, and now level 15 is EQUAL to POTD. Instead of a combined 60 accuracy/deflection, the AI gets 30, and you have 15. Meaning the difference between you and the AI is 100%, versus the difference between 45 and 60. The relative difference is much higher, preserving POTD difficulty, because now lower level critters, are not going to just get instantly exploded, because while a level 1 beetle is much weaker than you, it has the same bonus as you, which means you won't just auto crit/auto evade every hit. Maybe it won't have the outcome I hope it will, and maybe it will just make POTD basically impossible?

Can you test to see if you can get the "AccuracyPerLevel":3,"DefensePerLevel":3, to work when you change the values? I'm wondering if I've just broken something or if it just won't change. I got it working, I must have borked something with my other modding! Anyways. I think, maybe just toning down the per level bonuses might be a better solution than just scaling monsters up completely. The reason is, the bonuses they will get from levels will push their accuracy/deflection much higher, basically doubling the effect of POTD. By lowering the bonus of levels, you take away the biggest advantage the player has over under leveled NPCS, and by leaving the scaling as is, they don't get that massive double dip of almost 2x POTD. Of course, without the +3 accuracy/bonus, the emphasis on stats will change quite a bit, especially on POTD where everything is going to have a 15 level handicap in terms of accuracy/deflection. I think it will definitely change what is viable build wise in potd. Things like dagger/hatchet modals will become very useful. Tell me what you think about just dropping the per level bonus from 3 to 1. Higher level stuff is going to be much harder, = level stuff will be very difficult, under leveled stuff will provide a bit more challenge in swarm type encounters.

Do we know if its possible to change the accuracy/deflection gains from leveling up? I expect changing those values from +3 to +1 would massively impact the game difficulty on POTD. Edit - Yep, it's there, I found it! global.gamedatabundle "AccuracyPerLevel":3,"DefensePerLevel":3, Gonna change those to 1, and try a new play through. I expect it might be very hard. Oddly it doesn't seem to be having an effect.

So that means that at the very least, someone could go through and change the max upscaled levels for every critter in the game? Then adjust the scaling itself to allow up to a maximum of whatever.

Here is my total guess on how those numbers work. "ExpectedDifferenceMin": -50, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": -2, "AdjustedLevelAmount": -1 }, { "ExpectedDifferenceMin": -1, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": 1, "AdjustedLevelAmount": 0 }, { "ExpectedDifferenceMin": 2, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": 2, "AdjustedLevelAmount": 1 }, { "ExpectedDifferenceMin": 3, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": 50, "AdjustedLevelAmount": 2 } Difference Min/Max is setting the limits. So -50 to -2 is setting the min and max it is checking for. Perhaps cumulative accuracy/deflection? It looks like it's adjusting the level by -1. That might be just a -1, or it might be a factor of some sort, based on the difference. Honestly if it's only adjusting mobs down 1 level, or up to a maximum of 2 levels, that would be a little disappointing. Of course, this is just a guess, and we don't know what the expected difference is referencing, or what the adjusted level amount actually is. Now that there is a beta patch that makes scaling work. The best way to test this, is going to find a low level spawn of NPCs, something you know the base level is. And then test on them with different level groups to see how much they scale up. One thing to do, would be to just create like a level 5 character, a level 10, and a level 20, and do the sea cave. See if they all scale up just a maximum of 2 levels, or if they scale up more. If they scale up more than 2 levels, we know that the adjustlevel function is a factor based off of something we don't know. If they only scale up 2 levels vs level 5, 10 and 20, then we know its a hard cap. If it is a hardcap, it looks like you could add more entries making it a more gradual scaling process, that scales much more. So like maybe something like, "ExpectedDifferenceMin": 40, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": 50, "AdjustedLevelAmount": 5 "ExpectedDifferenceMin": 30, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": 39, "AdjustedLevelAmount": 4 "ExpectedDifferenceMin": 20, "ExpectedDifferenceMax": 29, "AdjustedLevelAmount": 3 Since it doesn't look like it limits how many entries there are. How much to actually scale the levels by, would be determined by testing I would imagine. EDIT - IT might be adjusting power levels as well. So their abilities hit harder, or softer.

NPCs don't actually get a level bonus for level 1. So a level 2 gets +3, 3 gets +6 etc.