cctobias

I am sure this will sound backwards to most people, but it is correct. For characters with low defenses +15 is going to be fairly crappy compared to other things. For characters with high defense +15 is incredibly strong and extremely good compared to other things. The curve for the effectiveness of defenses is not linear. 1% at the high end does not equal the same amount of absolute mitigation as 1% on the low end. When you are at 98% and you increase to 99% you have doubled your absolute mitigation. When you move from 0% to 1% you have increased it by ... 1%. So we have 100 fold difference in the effectiveness of "1%" from one extreme to the other. Due to the nature of things you can get truly wildly varying statements about such things that are actually both true in context.

Its true, and while I really like some of their voice actors (Steve Blum is a great Spike Spiegel in cowboy bebop), I don't think that VA makes the companion experience all that much better than POE. The return on investment in this genre is pretty low IMO. The exception there is probably for certain "cinematics", that is in quote as these could just be scripted things in the engine, involving the protagonist/antagonist etc. I am not sure if you mean DA origins or DA inquisition, but I would have preferred if they took all the money they spent on VA in DA:I and spent it on making the game feel less like a grindy MMO, but that is probably more about design than money.

I don't think the game really needs more voice acting. VA is nice and all but its not the core game, its just nice to have. Any case where VA cuts into real content is a mistake as far as I am concerned, at least in this particular genre.

Wrong. The way the math behind defenses works makes the defensive attributes extremely impactful. This is not an opinion, its mathematically provable. Each point of defense get stronger and stronger. So while there may be little difference betwneen 1 defense and 0 defense that 1 point difference becomes literally 100 times more impactful on the high end of the mitigation/effective health curve. The difference betwen 17 and 18 might is not that big and follows an obvious linear curve. Defenses do not.

I was considering doing a playthrough with this type of character, but it seemed like it would mature too late to actually be what I wanted. I didn't want to only be able to really play the idea for 1/3 of the game.

People do realize save scumming has been going on in roguelikes since well ... Rogue the game that every one of them is named after, right? You think PoE suddenly came up with some kind of magic to make things different? Hold on, don't answer that ...

It would only change for PotD and I would assume its non-PotD. Its a very good reference there are links to full stats for pretty much every monster type. One thing I wish we could see is Concentration values.

Which is why it can't be generalized to other parts of game play. All you have shown is that you can kill an ogre without being hit when using interrupts. You have not shown what happens without interrupts, though you have asserted it many times, nor have you shown what it likely to happen in other situations. No I/they wouldn't. We're talking about wolves here. They'd disintegrate on first contact and, even if they didn't, most of the classes have plenty of per encounter abilities I'd use long before spells. That was the second set of tests from AFTER you complained about him using cheats to hold the other stats constant and demanded "normalized" stats. So, yeah, at this point you're a liar and a troll. Man you are a lot more patient than I am. I bowed out of this days ago.

By "try to interrupt" I simply mean investing in it on some people and throwing those people at the thing you want disabled as a tactical option. If you have three guys with high interrupt and your experience says 90% of the time they disable/impair something fast enough to not need any caster support then you have this as tactical theme your party can use that a low interrupt team may not be able to do and would either need to use ability based CC or some sort of tanking tactic on that something. Obviously some combination of all three is also possible. I never described how interrupts "work" besides mentioning concentration, so I have no idea what you are talking about when you say it doesn't work how I think when I never described how I think it works. As for the rest. If you want to argue that the current various forms of CC are equally or less effective than interrupt, then do so. I understand the rolls of reflex/will/fort versus accuracy and the rolls of interrupt vs concentration just fine as they have been described in the documentation. So far I have not really seen the resultant rolls from interrupt being particularyly reliable when tested out. I understand that abilities can be saved against, but with good accuracy you can get things pretty reliable. Yes there is an element of randomness to all games that use dice rolls. I was hoping I would not need to make that point and that it was obvious. If you are hitting 90% of the time then you are "close enough for government work" so to speak. I have not seen any interrupt builds even close to that. Perhaps your experience is different, I dunno. But I have not seen the ability to pump interrupt rating replicated the way you can boost accuracy and the fact that many spell also have increased accuracy as well. Additionally interrupts need both accuracy and interrupt rating meaning you need to pump both and even though Grazes may interrupt the final result of the roll is decreased by 50% so they suck pretty hard for that purpose. I have seen spells reliably CC things from a single character when you build a character right, additionally they can be AOE and this is not insignificant by any measure. I have not seen any single character able to replicate such a thing using interrupts, but due to the math and my experience I am willing to believe multiple characters could get enough procs at enough duration to do something similar in effect. If they did so they would have the advantage of doing damage while they CCd and could do it "forever" basically. Perhaps this is a sufficient advantage I don't really know as I have not given it enough thought. Obviously a lowish amounts of interrupts allows for some mitigation of damage and could be considered "soft" CC. A large amount of interrupts with sufficient duration is almost like a "hard" CC, it not entirely hard in that the opponent will try to do something again, but pretty much any action including auto attack will be cancelled by an interrupt and a period no action then imposed. With sufficient amounts of interrupts in a given tiem frame something can essentially be "hard CC"d. When we consider a lowish interrupt rate we can say that it could be considered roughly analogous to a condition like Blind, although not exactly as Blind impairs both offense and defense, however if we stipulate that reducing the amount/rate of defensive abilities is roughly analogous then they are similar and the only question is do the relative impairment stack up. If my accuracy is impaired by -25 and that makes me miss 50% of the time and something is interrupting me some and my overall attack rate is reduced by 50% but I have 100% accuracy. Then they are doing a similar thing. So there we can see perhaps that an interrupt rate of what often seen on a single good interrupting character might be equal to a Cipher with Eyestrike, except Eystrike is an AoE and has +10 accuracy and does need anything but accuracy to work and in increased by Intelligence. But when we consider that Cipher is also going to get Mental Binding what kind of interrupt rate do you need to start to see to get an effect of a paralyze that has extra accuracy on a class with medium high accuracy already, that can boost accuracy in other ways, is also AOE, and whose duration is increased by Intelligence? Its going to have to be pretty darn high. You would need to have an interrupt rate occurring on a particular opponent at a pretty darn high rate to come anywhere close to a Cipher with just two powers who is smartly stacking accuracy (and all even medium competent Ciphers take those two powers). Not only that but to enhance your interrupt you Accuracy and Intterupt rating and interrupt duration. The cipher can get duration from Int and will stack accuracy, but the interuptor has to get accuracy and interrupt from equipment so they compete. Now perhaps some posters are right that doing damage while causing the interrupts makes up for it. But if you are getting an interrupt based char to do anything even close to a decently built cipher with the normal low level powers almost everyone takes then I will be pretty surprised. And if you need 3 guys to do the same thing then what happens if you have 3 ciphers? Now certainly its the case that tanks will probably be swinging weapons have having some interrupt helps out. And the mechanics of a soft CC like Blind and Interrupt will work with each other without suppression so that is nice. But, really, so what? And certainly its the case that if an opponent has a miss rate of 25% and you have two guys beating on it enough that on average it gets every other attack canceled + the delay then you are taking little of the potential damage (actual amount depends on delay) . As multiple people have mentioned it can work quite well in some circumstances. And anyone using a tank is probably getting some use from it. But does anyone think that any one character can really make interrupt come close to Mental Binding on a well made Cipher? A well made Cipher can throw that reliably and do it many many times. I am willing to entertain the notion that a highly DPS melee/ranged focused party might be able to leverage interrupt such that they need much less, or possibly no, tanking, I dunno if its possible, but it might be and it sounds interesting. I think they would need some AOE caster CC though. But a high accuracy Cipher seems to be able to do more for less given similar equipment etc. I suppose you could take the track of saying a Cipher can do both. You really kind of want perception for intterupting and the equipment load competes etc. You are probably better off simply trying for as much accuracy as possible instead. Now I know the above quoted post specified "non-caster" but why would I make a party of non-casters if I want to CC things? This is kind of my point, if you take the right casters you don't need any interrupts. Now if the point of interrupts is to make it so you can have a party of completely non-casters and have something resembling what a Cipher would be doing for you, that seems OK. Is that the point of the mechanic? Maybe it is. Does it actually work for a party focused on interupt? I dunno I have not tried 4+ guys with good interrupt. Will one guy with high interrupt come close to a Cipher with good accuracy? Very very doubtful.

So the question is really why would I try to interrupt instead instead of using Slicken or some other similarly extremely useful CC? Is the answer get multiple people with high intterupt on a a Boss that usually resists most of those type things and you can get some CC you would not other wise get? Interrupt is just another form of CC. Its mechanics are different than spells but its effects is to slow/shutdown, this is a CC. I mean CC exists throughout the game and is pretty robust and quite available. If having 3 guys with decent interrupt being able to seriously mitigate a bosses damage/effects that seems ok but only when nothing else is working. There is a profusion of spell effects that will do exactly what interrupt can do (stop attacks or impair damage ). These spell effects are more reliable, usable on demand/plannable, and often more powerful in effect and duration. Given all the other CC effects what is the niche of Interrupt? Why would I try to interrupt instead of proning or blinding something. Interrupt is countered by concentration. And concentration is essentially a defense like any other and is directly related to stats; resolve. So things with high will saves will probably have high concentration and vice versa. Ogre have low concentration, do they also have low Will saves? Maybe they don't I dunno I have not checked. But if they do have low will saves you can use some AOE Will based CC and be more effective than trying to randomly interrupt with single target weapon. To take that bear example. That thing hits really hard, sure interrupt will save your life. No one says it does nothing. Or randomly you will just die if you miss a couple rolls. Or you can use some other CC smartly and win every time with good accuracy. Maybe a party of 6 guys with good interrupts winds up being very powerful. I dunno. That is the point of my question. What is the point of it? The game didn't need more CC. Melee classes often have CC (prone, blinds, hobbles, etc) so its not like its the melee version of ability-based CC. There are strong single target and AOE CC as spells/abilities. I would guess it is meant to represent/create some sort of extra advantage for auto-attack versus ability users. Meaning its meant to apply some measure of pressure on spellcasters when they are under fire. But in the greater context of the meta-game; so what? If there is something that is dangerous enough you don't want it doing something you make damn sure its dependably not doing something by being dead or chain stunnned etc. And if it takes 3 people to make the same thing happen as a couple stuns this seems like a pretty hefty investment. Now if it is the case that you simply can't chain stun or chain prone certain bosses and ONLY interrupt works. That is different. Or perhaps having a party of say 4 guys with good interrupt let's you run a party that is extremely light on casters and still have a good amount of "shutdown" CC perhaps that is another. But from the context of analyzing the effects of a single character focused on interrrupted it seems to be terrible when compared to other options that do similar things. Due to the nature of it (constant chance and always going) perhaps when you make it extremely redundant it can become very OP. If you have a three person team that can basically highly probably keep getting interrupt on anything they attack and still have a pair of caster AOE CC the trash, maybe you don't even need a tank. I dunno. Maybe interrupt should be though of as an overall party based stat. Perhaps it should be thought of as "pressure" and to be very effectie you probably need multiple sources of pressure.

Anyone know or have an educated guess about pet accuracy and/or its scaling?

What is the interrupt mechanic meant to accomplish in the overall design of the game? Is it a minor feature meant to add some extra dimension to mitigation? As far as I can tell it would require an entire extremely focused build to make decent and even then it not particularly good. It can't even shutdown one guy and that for an entire very focused build. It seems like a vastly inferior form of CC that is ridiculously expensive. In comparison to other things that do similar stuff and have other useful side effects as well it fails miserably. In general I would say it needs a serious re-examination by the devs. Except for a barbarian it purely signle-target and it ability to shutdown is pretty much not attainable. At best maybe you cut one thing's DPS by 50%? And all this for an entire build that would need to take a tanking stat to max interrupt and is therefore probably not maxed for damage. Is interrupt just some extra little thing tanks are meant to have? Or is it meant to be a full on mature mechanic. If its the latter I think it has failed. If its just a sideshow minor benefit for tanks that are gonna take Per anyway then I guess it does ok although its barely noticeable in that case and therefore was not worth the time to put into the game.

Yeah instead of a sharp transition to bam 4 at level 9 there was a say 1e/3r at level 6, 2e/2r at level 7 I think that you would kill two birds with one stone and have a much less jarring change in gameplay while also addressing the problem of caster doing very little most of the time in the early game unless they seriously cultivate blast or whatever. I don't think a transition from per rest to per encounter is problematic in and of itself, but the huge change in what you can do is simply far to jarring. You still need to manage the gamechanger higher spells on a per rest basis etc. Now we need to differentiate that some spell are possibly too strong to be level 1. People will probably say 4 per encounter slicken is to OP. Fine but that is not an issue with per encounter low level spells, that is an issue with Slicken. So currently, esepcially for Wizards, we have a double effect. Per encounter plus a very powerful first level spell makes the transition from level 8 to level 9 wizard pretty insane. You go from a decent CC guy that may need some resting to keep it up to a crazy shut down tons of stuff every encounter caster. You go from helping in some/many(depending on how often you rest) encounters to dominating every encounter where you can prone things. In general I would say no level 1 spell should dominate an encounter even if its cast 4 times and I would say slicken cast 4 times can do this. On the other hand the Wizard lvl 1 deflection buff seems quite reasonable to have a few times per encounter and allows for a different more tanky playstyle which is good. So I feel that per encounter is fine, but way to jarring currently and some spells simply radically change things when you can machine gun over and over, but that is a problem with those spells really. They still cause the same issue on per rest anyway, just hopefully more rarely.

Being overpowered or underpowered is irrelevant to the actual logical flaw of the system. The current system is simply flawed. Even people who like the delay must at some point admit at some point that once the delay reaches a certain length things become worthless. How about this, we put in a special invocation and it works like this. If you wait for 40 hours you can cast the invocation and automatically clear whatever current map you are on of all monsters instantly. That would be the most overpowered ability in the game and only crazy people would use it. We could instead have an invocation that takes 40 hours and only summon fluffy bunnies. This would be one of the least powerful abilities in the game and again only crazy people would use it. Functionally the same and independent of power. The power is a moot point since no one would use or could have cleared the map in far less time anyway. Fine I will grant you they could not have otherwise have gotten fluffy bunnies (or could they ...) Obviously this is absurb. But the absurd is useful for illustrative purposes. Yes summons are strong. Yes the current times are part of the way the class was balanced. None of this changes the consequences of the way the numbers will work out. Its flawed and it will fail if its extended.

Well I kind of wanted to avoid discussing specific implementations but I want to point out the following, Once you admit that the current trend will fail then you have two options: 1) don't continue the trend and then make up for it in some way, for example talents. This could be in anyway, make them better fighters at later levels, give them talents that boost the effect of a chant or invocation. Whatever 2) alter the trend. To do this I think a maximum practical time goal should be established. One of the "features" of chanters is the choice between fast weak buffs and then getting to an invocation quickly or slower stronger buffs and getting to an invocation later. You also have various permutation in between like fast chants to later but strong invocation. The first casualty of the flawed trend will be these "choices" as the trends gets worse and worse more and more permutations will become practically useless. In my above example I picked the worst case for illustration slowest chant slowest invocation, but at some point medium chant + slowest invocation will become useless as well. At some point chants become so prohibitively long that all invocations will be unlikely especially if you party has good damage. Or some combination of the two. In order to follow the second path we must establish at what point most parties would simply never use an invocation or the use of that invocation has limited use. Summoning a drake when 80% of the encounter is dead is often kind of useless. Personally I think the level 3 chants + level invocations(about 40 seconds to invoking) are already a long enough time period to be close to a useless permutation. Some people will throw out summon etc. If you want to summon as a cornerstone stactic you better be usiing level 1 chants or you are doing it really poorly; it takes half the time. While I don't think its an emergency I do think we are already at the point where we are actually feeling the effect. Invoking much past the 30-40 second mark is very anti-climactic. I understand that part of the design of the chanter is that it is backloaded and not front loaded. But we MUST admit there HAS to be a limit to this backloaded design. It has a hard falloff. It can literally be made useless. Some people will say "Look if you want a quicker invocation just use lower level chants". This does not address the issue. If there is are no cases or only very rare case where I would use level 3 chants AND a level 3 invocation then our panoply of choices is already being abrevviated the system is already on the verge of collapsing and not working. The point at which this happens is actually easier to pinpoint than may seem. We simply need to have fairly wide agreement as to what time span is likely to have an invocation that has real use and what timespan is not. The only wrinkle there is it does depend on party makeup, the stronger the damage the lower this number becomes (for the most part). I would say 30 seconds is the edge of what is a good idea and the level 3 stuff is already pushing that. Others may disagree but since the chanter system is completely invariant that is all we need. That number. After than you can decide on path #1 or #2.

Yeah pretty darn certain you can make a Paladin that is good at damage and good at surviving. Not the best damage, and not stand in the middle and everything and not bat an eyelash like some tanks can be pretty close to, but good. Ok temporary offtank, won't fold like a lawn and hits hard enough to matter. Pretty sure Paladin can do it fine. Probably fighter too, but Pally probably easier.

I don't really want to get into all of this post as it is simply beyond my quite simple point. Please look at the parted I underlined/bolded above. The is exactly right and highlights the basic logical flaw. If we continue through the system to the logical conclusion, Invocations become literally unusable. The system is inherently flawed. As I said in the first sentence of the OP I believe current chanters are an OK class that you can take along for the entire current campaign just fine. Are they optimal? Dunno, don't care. They are useful enough and fun enough. Yeah they are obviously bard like. Yeah they buff somewhat different than Priest (priest buffs might as well though and at level 2 just fine, and that becomes per encounter). We can argue back and forth about the relative merits of Priest vs Chanter buffs. Personally having gone through the lists I think Priests buffs are at least as good, blessing buffs all defense not just 2 like a chanter level 1 chant. Chanters are obviously the best summoners. Whatever. But that isn't the point. This simply doesn't change the fact that the chanter design is missing a critical design feature that exists in every other casting class. That the logical progression of the system just can't really work, probably at level 4, shows its flawed. 10 second chants? with 6 phrase invocatinos? Doing level 4 chants and level 4 invocations would be 60 frigging seconds to get one off! That start to get kind of absurd guys.... So as a chanter hits level 15 16 whatever they get .... unusable crap at level 4 with everything previous behaving EXACTLY the same with no way to make it better in anyway but a Druid gets even more uber spells that are just as easy to get off as any other and even more uses for his previous spells. It just doesn't add up. The trend for chanters is the following: Previous things - no improvement at all Later things - longer and longer until they are useless from a practical standpoint. This is a bad trend. This should be admited. Its not an emergency or anything, but the class simply can't work in its current form at say level 20.

Crowns for the Faithful buffs three stats by a large degree as well. The 3rd level invocations are pretty on par with 6th level spell. Sure they are nice. Some of the summons are very nice even the early phantom is very nice. Cipher even is capable of quite large stat buffs. But a Priest who cast Crowns for the Faithul Immediately and then chain casts 4 1st level spell is way far ahead of the chanter who hasn't even built up enough phrases to cast the level 3 invocation Buff AND when he does won't even have done as much. And if the chanter is using levle 3 chants the situation is even worse as they take longer to chant but count for the same number of Phrases. The priest comes out far ahead in the later levels when these strong abilities are available. Doing far more in far less time and a lot of casts being per encounter as well.

Note that I am not proposing a beneficial "extra resource" pattern for chanters. There could be a lot of implementations for such a thing. But I would like to know if people agree a) this is lacking and b) that it is an issue that it is lacking. The only real argument I can see for it not being necessary is that invocations are just that powerful. But frankly this is complete bunk on its face. The lvl 1 invocations cannot possible measure up to wizards or druis 4 1st level spell per encounter. Whatever implementation of a beneficial pattern there would be would probably have to somehow maintain at least some wait time before getting an invocation off. Or alternately only affect a lower level of invocations. I dunno. But the first step is to agree whether or not there is a problem to begin with. I can't come up with a good so justify that there is no problem.

I want to preface this by saying Chanter are a decent class, they are useful and viable to use in the game as a whole. But from a just standpoint of analyzing and comparing classes I don't really see how the Chants and Invocations scale correctly. Now you may wonder what I mean by scale. If examine the other casters they get more of a caster "resource" each level. Either more focus for a cipher or more spell casts per rest/encounter for druid/priest/wizard. However chanter do not get anything more as far as chants or invocations as they level. Compounding this the higher level invocations actually take even longer. Let us take a cipher for a second once you hit level 2 you can cast two level 1 powers right after another since you have 20 focus to start a fight but a 5th level power will cost 30 focus and you would need to be level 4 or above to cast it without regening focus. Now Invocations follow a similar pattern higher level invocations take more Phrases. OK fine. But chanters get no "extra resource". So we have one detrimental pattern without the a balancing beneficial pattern. So, for example, you could somehow adjust how the linger vs base ratio works as you level or you could adjust how many phrases are needed for invocations as you level to have a commensurate beneficial pattern that maintains a hierachical resources usage (in this case time/speed) while also providing more of the resource. When I look at Chanter I don't see anything that really makes up for this severe penalty compared to other casters. Yes they do have higher deflection and accuracy, but they also can't do anything but fight for at least 3 Phrases, so they kind of need that. Especially in higher levels when Wizard etc start getting 4-8 casts per encounter. So it seems to me that Chanters somewhat mechanically flawed in comparison to other casters.

I put some thought into this as I was planning out a solo tanky chanter build and my conclusion was basically the following: -Either you have sufficient defense and are very rarely hit or you die real fast (this is solo thinking) -All of the defense based racials are situational: Wild - need a will attack, Elf- need distance, Amaua - only prone, dwarf- only poitson. In all of the racial cases if you have good enough defenses anyway they don't matter. For the one with either DT or heal I figured if that is regularly somehow saving your life you are kind of screwed anyway. So since Wild Orlans get slightly better tanking stats I went with them but I don't think it matters that much. Whether their racial is actually better is debatable, when it triggers its better. But in the end you still need really good defense when you are not getting will attacked or whatever. So in other words you absolutely have to build your tank as if the racials never occur since they are probably not even happening 50% of the time.

I think they would be fine if there was a talent that gave a once per encounter use +3 phrases instantly. That +3 is negotiable, but you get the idea.

Look in your combat log (the crossed sword tab) you should see a "to hit" roll against fortitude, reflex, or will defense. Accuracy affects everything spells, melee, ranged etc and its rolled against a defense.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72272-combat-mechanics-attack-speed-recovery/

Its not just that they are bad, which they are, but they fill no interesting roles. You literally can't use them to make interesting parties. The only interesting thing about them is their story. Without that they should be thrown out. Its not just effectiveness or min/maxing. You want to play your main as a pure glass cannon? Tough luck go get an adventurer if you want a non-mediocre tank to supplement it. You want to be a great tank PC with terrible damage, tough luck if you want a good Nuker cuz none of the companions fit the bill. The only party build you can use these companions for is the "random bundle of mediocre crap build". You get an decent survey of class mechanics but they suck for filling a slot in a party in an interesting way because they are almost all a big bowl of mush.