merkmerk73

Wild Mind benefits are once in a while some kind of empower +1 or w/e, and maybe a debuff here or there. But far more often it just makes him explode and gibs anyone near him It's extremely obnoxious

I've had it blow up Serafen and party 6 times in a pretty short playthrough so far. Or make enemies invisible. Anyone have any mods that changes this **** kit to something more playable?

It has to pass a hit chance on a corpse first, and then the reflex against the living enemies.

Was this one of the patch nerfs?

What I mean is I don't like a chanter class focusing on summons where it summons a bunch more - the swarm of wyrms or whatever - it just doesn't feel right to me. I'd rather the summons just be stronger, last longer, and there be some other penalty - but summons are always crazy strong in games like these so it's still a nightmare to balance.

I don't like beckoners anyway - too hard to balance. Also phantoms blow

Oh also level scaling is busted for this area - if you're level 4 the boars will be 3 skulls which is basically impossible since they don't come solo

The starting island is absurdly hard and overtuned compared to literally everything after. People would arguing with me before on this but the drake + panthers and the boars are too much right now So is grocery street (Buff the rest of the game to be this dumb or admit that the starting island is silly right now. I'm past the starting island and fights are simply challenging and fun instead of ridiculous like grocery street and boar/drake ruins fights)

It’s amazing but the first island has some fights that are way overtuned on potd I think the difficulty needs to be smoothed out a little

I think PoE2 is an improvement in almost all ways but it does suffer a few problems : -empower and concentration are kind of esoteric. It’s not that easy for a laymen to understand .. especially concentration - I really don’t like what they did with priests and wizards where you’re burning talent points to cherry pick spells. Grimoires help Aloth a little but I vastly preferred the original setup - and I can’t stand that they made some of the skills into spells - like interdiction and grimoire slam and arcane veil - like wtf? Total step down from first game

So another PoTD no scaling ToI update: * Hit level 4 again - but this time I had to go to the ruins because it looks like the quest experience wasn't enough by taking the '**** this guy' option when dealing with the dude who got beat up by the amuana chick. * Grocery street pretty much requires stealth or manipulating where you enter the location from. If you enter from that northeast corner you'll need to abuse pathing. * Level 4 definitely required for the ruins - the boars will be 2 skulls at level 3 and will just wreck your ****. It's not worth it. * First boar fight was all 4 boars + 2 wyrms this time - very tough - but still beat it. * I decided to go into the various ruins areas. ** The four skeleton (1 skull skellies, not the normies) fight was VERY tough and I had to use line of sight and juke aggro. BRING BLUNT WEAPONS FOR EVERYONE. ** You can get some fine quality gear and a couple nice items - such as the gladiator sword - definitely worth having. Also lots of components * Because of this I was able to make scrolls like Moonwell' and 'Ray of Fire' * Be warned - if you sneak into the arena, you'll get insta aggro'd when you exit - you better be ready to take on the drake fight. It was very very difficult, but I managed to beat it thanks to using all consumables. Just as a note - these areas are still overtuned. But not by much - grocery street has one or two too many enemies that hit too hard but that's it. The ruins area could use a few less enemies. However one of the most interesting things about Deadfire is how they balanced resistances - IIRC anything that targeted fortitude was usually garbage because PoE1 everything simply had a ton of fortitude defense. Deadfire is different - certain weapon modals offer debuffs on hit - which you can take advantage of with certain abilities/spells. I think the game has a lot of balancing left to be done as a whole though - and I was sad to see so little balancing go into spells. Holy Meditation gives resolute for 10 sec - not even worth the cast. Fetid Caress just isn't worth using, etc

Update - lvl3 potd, no scaling, boars are 2 skulls. edit: nearest cave is full of 2 skull skeletons (sorcerer, archer, warrior) - seems pretty risky to take on. can't seem to stealth around the boars, so it looks like cheesing/stealthing the grocery street to hit lvl 4 is mandatory 2nd edit: grocery street absolutely aggros you immediately if you don't enter from outside the town - but you have time to mash stealth before they go hostile. if you approach from outside, you can easily stealth to the gang boss and resolve thru dialogue - still not very well tuned if you're stuck between this and 2 skull boars/skeletons at level 3 3rd edit: boars are 1 skull without scaling on - so it looks like the issue is scaling. Not sure if going from 3 to 4 should turn boars into 3 skulls. First try - the mobs that come seems a little random. I've had 2 boars + 2 young boars before, and 2 boars + 2 wyrms this time. FYI - the boars do slash/pierce apparently - so trying to go with pierce armor won't help vs them. edit: died to drake fight with 4 panthers 1 drake and a wyrm - boar didn't even join the fight. pretty sure this is the gated fight - you can't progress the game without doing this and you can't level up any further. i think it's doable but not reliably so people trying to do trial of iron should be amusing.

No this isn't ridiculous - it's feedback for a beta patch. Stealth should not be a requirement for an encounter that is over tuned. As an option it's fine. I've done it before by cheesing the pathing - doesn't mean that it's properly tuned. Stealth is not a requirement. People posted here about beating the encounter. Your feedback seems to be: It's too difficult for me and the reasons are: 1. its overtuned and 2. my Skald is too weak, which was proved as false claim in both cases. I do not really care about your cheesing. You claimed to play on Trial of Iron, and when failed (as expected because without prior knowledge it's very improbable) you admit to cheese the perma death with Trial of Alt+F4. Your arguments are invalid and their intellectual integrity questionable. While you can repeat your "overtuned" and call it feedback, it does not make it true. There is always story mode. No, stealth isn't a requirement if you cheese the fight - or you 'enter only from outside the city'. You don't seem to have a grasp on what proper tuning is. I'll give you a hint: just because you can manage to beat an encounter cheesing pathing or by 'leaving and exiting so you enter from the south side because going from within the city is suicide' doesn't mean it's properly tuned. 1.) Nobody has shown beating the fight with the 3 skull boars - let alone with a skald as PC - which seems to indicate a problem with scaling which I'll test later. They shouldn't be 3 skulls at level 4 as a critical path area- that demonstrates either poor tuning or a bug in the scaling. 2.) I alt F4'd only to test the 3 skull boar fight multiple times with a level 4 party. I've beaten PoE1 on trial of iron on POTD as well as XCOM. I enjoy high difficulty and high stakes. This is a beta patch and it's to be expected that difficulty tuning won't be 100% spot on. So you can **** right off with your passive aggressive bull****

No this isn't ridiculous - it's feedback for a beta patch. Stealth should not be a requirement for an encounter that is over tuned. As an option it's fine. I've done it before by cheesing the pathing - doesn't mean that it's properly tuned.

Not if you need the +1 level from the quest to have a chance at the ruins. I'm gonna head there to the ruins at lvl 3 and see what's up. I have a feeling it might have just been a scaling issue just like what the previous poster mentioned about how the boars leveled up and got nastier.

I also find tavern mercs immersion breaking and I only ever recruit them in these situations (did it in gilded vale. Searching for Durance and Kana before finishing eothas temple and raedric hold felt metagamey all the same to me). I'm just cool with obsidian making it about available mechanics in this particular instance. PotD is not the "normal" way to play the game. It is intended to be punishing and require metagame knowledge, such as when to recruit companions or where to find specific items. Back in the early days of PoE, the entirety of Act 1 could be really punishing on PotD, and you would have to recruit to max out your 6-person party (because by default you could only get eder, aloth, durance, kana for five, and you had to know in advance where to pick up durance and kana before doing some of the harder act 1 quests) to stand a chance at some of the quest paths (especially storming Raedric Hold's with violence). With successive power creep and players having better strategy/knowledge of the game, you don't need to do this as much anymore, but this just goes to say that I think it's perfectly reasonable that a PotD encounter in Deadfire be overly challenging without some sort of special recruiting or metagame knowledge. Raedrics hold was skippable. There was only one critical path fight - where you could only have 4 story NPCs - and it was entirely doable on POTD without anything overly ridiculous (and that is clearing Caed Nua) Metagaming for story companions I'm ok with. But I don't want to be forced to build-a-npc just to progress through the game. I will have to test with scaling off when I get home. In any case this is a beta patch and it's highly possible that some of these fights are overtuned. Grocery street - potd or not - is overtuned. I think I'd rather have the tight, difficult encounters last the whole game than have a ridiculous grocery street in the early game and then it gets easier again as you hit around level 9 or 10 and start powering up with 5 dudes

The number of skulls doesn't matter, boars are merely bodies. They have a slow attack speed, a slow attack animation, a slow movement speed and they don't have engagement, so they can be evaded and kited around. Also give Eder Xoti's chain mail, boars do pierce damage and these guys overpenetrate his saint scale armor. He can now tank 30% better The skulls absolutely does matter because it impacts their defenses and accuracy. You aren’t going to beat that fight with 3 skull boars swarming you with story companions only and a chanter PC I would have to tinker with the settings but I don’t use mods so it must have something to do with scaling - I’m about to get there in a no scaling job so we will see how it goes this time That’s a good tip for the armor type though for sure Just tried it with scaling, since I've learned this: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/101735-something-i-havent-seen-mentioned-about-new-patch/, and second try against 3 skulls with Skald and companions. I don’t understand this post - are you saying you reloaded and did the fight with 3 skull boars and level 4 story companions? How did you recreate this? And I didn’t see anything in the thread that covered the scaling - is that the issue? Or were you playing on veteran l? (Adult) boars in the video, judging from stats, are level 5 with PoTD bonus. He has scaling off, but that should not matter. What stats do you have in your game? My previous game with the 3 skull boars was on POTD, with critical path scaling on, and my party had reached level 4 by doing all of the content available up until that point. I am going to hit level 4 on my current POTD run WITHOUT scaling of any kind turned on and see if the issue persists. In any case, I don't believe the tuning is appropriate - either on grocery street or some of the ruins encountered - in PoE1 you could get up to 5 companions before committing to anything very difficult - you weren't required to use hirelings. I don't care if you only have to hire them for a quest or two - I just don't like the idea of balancing being dependent on the (for me) immersion breaking of stacking up some hirelings to fill your party out because you can't physically get the story companions yet

The number of skulls doesn't matter, boars are merely bodies. They have a slow attack speed, a slow attack animation, a slow movement speed and they don't have engagement, so they can be evaded and kited around. Also give Eder Xoti's chain mail, boars do pierce damage and these guys overpenetrate his saint scale armor. He can now tank 30% better The skulls absolutely does matter because it impacts their defenses and accuracy. You aren’t going to beat that fight with 3 skull boars swarming you with story companions only and a chanter PC I would have to tinker with the settings but I don’t use mods so it must have something to do with scaling - I’m about to get there in a no scaling job so we will see how it goes this time That’s a good tip for the armor type though for sure Just tried it with scaling, since I've learned this: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/101735-something-i-havent-seen-mentioned-about-new-patch/, and second try against 3 skulls with Skald and companions. I don’t understand this post - are you saying you reloaded and did the fight with 3 skull boars and level 4 story companions? How did you recreate this? And I didn’t see anything in the thread that covered the scaling - is that the issue? Or were you playing on veteran l?

The number of skulls doesn't matter, boars are merely bodies. They have a slow attack speed, a slow attack animation, a slow movement speed and they don't have engagement, so they can be evaded and kited around. Also give Eder Xoti's chain mail, boars do pierce damage and these guys overpenetrate his saint scale armor. He can now tank 30% better The skulls absolutely does matter because it impacts their defenses and accuracy. You aren’t going to beat that fight with 3 skull boars swarming you with story companions only and a chanter PC I would have to tinker with the settings but I don’t use mods so it must have something to do with scaling - I’m about to get there in a no scaling job so we will see how it goes this time That’s a good tip for the armor type though for sure

I don't think that is the consensus at all. Please try to beat the ruins using a skald chanter as your PC and let me know how that goes I was curious if it's really class dependent. This is 3rd attempt, 1st wipe, 2nd without video. Note that since I play mostly solo I don't even know some abilities (like Fighter stances) very well. Also I did not follow my plan too closely Comparing to my Assasin + companions this was much easier as Sklad has some AoE. Shall I let you know how the next fight goes because I've seen enough and would play it just to help out. Your boars are only one skull. In my POTD they were 3 skulls at level 4 What did you set scaling at? My current attempt I turned all scaling off to see if that makes a difference - nothing in this video would be possible with 3 skull boars. Eder would die before you got to do anything really. There is a way to make that pack even smaller though - on my attempt I got wiped by just 2 3 skull boars and 2 young boars because their stats were just insane - couldn't be hit by anything and hit my guys for 50 damage with 'gore' which also did a DoT - you can pull that pack with a trap , ramp down on the southwestern side or so

I don't think that is the consensus at all. Please try to beat the ruins using a skald chanter as your PC and let me know how that goes Thanks for the tip! Done, it's fun spamming invocations and critting with mace. Made the hardest encounter on first island (pre-aloth fight) with a 4man party (swashbuckler edér, xoti contemplative, skald warden, and Seer hireling). Took me 4 reloads: fight at narrow ramp, bear+edér on choke, skald behind wih pistol spamming aoe stun, xoti on heal/xbow duty and seer shooting/resummoning bear/charming drake. I'm pretty confident it could be done on Trial of Iron with a second hireling crowd controlling (wizard or druid). Both Engiwithian pit fight and Gorecci street are not fair fights without hirelings. Which is fine by me: hirelings are 250gold each and it's only reasonable potd encounters are designed for a full party the moment you are able to make one. PoE1 potd was never balanced around the requirement of having to go to the tavern to make up some new toons. It was always doable with story companions.

It doesn't seem like it does but I'm curious if anyone knows for sure

I don't think that is the consensus at all. Please try to beat the ruins using a skald chanter as your PC and let me know how that goes

While I have not tried it with other but Assasin (who either had to be ranged not utilizing her abilities or melee while being a liability) and companions, I do not believe the encounter in question is impossible without using non-traditional techniques so in this sense its "properly tuned". The encounter is imo tuned to the use of environment (choke points) and available resources (scrolls and explosives) and planning. It's not tuned to running in the open and hack and slash everything no. All those potions/scrolls/etc have like a 20% chance to hit on these boars. They were running up and hitting my PC in a breastplate for 50. I'm sure the potency of your PC has a lot to do with it. God help you if you make a priest and you have to pick up Xoti if you're only doing story companions.

ToI is fun. Perhaps not as well suited to this game as Ironman is to other games since there's no evac option. In any case after the first wipe I figured "just need to level up" but I was wrong The thing about the bear cave is that you could go grab eder/aloth from gilded vale and then go back and do it. You could get kana and durance before taking on the gilded vale temple ruins, and then get prepped for the next hard fight which was the phantoms/spirits to get Caed Nua. This is different - even if you can hit level 4 by cheesing the gerocci street - you can't progress and get aloth without dealing with the boars. It's just not tuned properly. Which is to be expected - it is a beta. I just want to provide my feedback. For the record - if an encounter *requires* the player to use stealth to circumvent, or some kind of kiting/cheese strategy like what I did to get past the grocery street fight - it is not properly tuned. Properly tuned means with prep (attainable gear, leveling, etc.) and consumables you should be able to do it with any class/weapon/gear etc. and the story companions. I do not believe the current engwithan ruins are possible with some compositions (such as my chanter skald + story companions) without extreme cheese tactics (pathing exploiting, kiting the lack of disengagement attacks). I mean those options should be usable, but you should be able to play the game conventionally - for example I always had to kite the nature golem dudes in magrans fork (or black meadow I can't remember) but you could level up a bit and come back and do them This doesn't seem to be an option in this bottleneck