Adragan

Sorry. Just write normally, i.e.: 12. Against the Grain Quest Bug: Report thread one, two, three Then copy the address you'll want to link to with CTRL+C, come back to your post and highlight the word(s) you want to turn into a link. Here, "one". Click on the link icon in the posting tools, it's the one below the "Size" drop down list that changes font size Paste the address into the URL field and click OK Rince and repeat for "two" or "three" with your other links

Tip: There is such a thing as warning fatigue, where warning too frequently used end up becoming ignored. Since your list with thread examples is rather huge, you could benefit from using the URL tag. Your posts will end up under 30 lines and become easier to skim through, which should help decrease warning fatigue. Example: 12. Against the Grain Quest Bug: Report thread one, two, three

Is it safe to play with the beta now ? Seems like it's actually ready for release but you guys are holding it some more for reasons that likely don't apply to me. My free time of this week vanishes in 4 hours and I don't know when I'll find a new opportunity to play properly (i.e. in 2 hours sessions), so if beta is safe now I should take it @peddroelm: Petrified damage dropped from x4 to x2.

Reading from disk is slower when there are tons of small files. Large single files are read fast. SSD drives are way better in all scenarios. We've seen SSD-guys with long load times, so we can rule out disk issues as the major contender. Loading data to the GPU can be slow, but the difference between high-end hardware and outdated cards is obvious. We have many people with slow loading times and very strong GPU, so we can rule out GPU loading of assets as the major contender. My money would be on data parsing being the bottleneck. The game probably loads everything from disk and to RAM and GPU fast enough, but is slowed down by the way data must be unpacked and translated to something usable. Doesn't matter if 2D or 3D, high-res or low-res. Autosaves are of the data parsing issue nature.

Wow, this one is rather dire. I thought this was fixed and was getting ready to resume my playthrough. Are there any workaround ? Removing +x spells items before switching off party members doesn't seem to be enough since the bug also triggers with the "Bonus 1st level spell" talents.

Yeah it needs some hard math or a simulation because there are too many variables interacting at this point. It's an interesting take on the RPG builds issue, anything that challenges the dogma of indestructible but harmless tanks generating unjustified aggro is good in my book. I'll keep my eyes peeled and explore the topic as I play for now

Right-o. My last post in page 2 miscalculates effective health. It uses a different viewpoint to get there but the result is the same as yours once corrected. So effective health is a very valid notion that I didn't consider previously, thank you guys It's interesting to know that any effect that is applied multiplicatively to damage reduction will benefit from the exponential growth in usefulness as well. Are there skills like that in the game other than defense-increasing ones ?

@Eos: That's right! All of my posts are correct except the last - I was not used to the concept of effective health and had to make a definition up, and failed to calculate properly in the process. Even with the train of thought I picked we do end up with 1000 effective health for 100 actual health with 90% damage reduction. Not 190. That's because health necessary to reach the same HP mark at 0% reduction and a constant incoming damage, is Health + DamageReduction*IncomingDamage, not Health + DamageReduction. (that only works when incoming damage is 100, duh) Indeed, effective health does grow exponentially as damage reduction increases. The rule applies to all sources of multiplicative damage reduction, not just defense, and it does mean that +1 Def is way more useful when you have 90 than when you have 10, assuming other potential damage reduction sources are the same. (As other sources grow the increase is usefulness becomes less drastic, but I don't know if there are other sources in PoE) Thanks for pointing this out to me

Whoopsies, I forgot to cover your last step. How does damage reduction (and thus defence) translate in terms of effective health ? Effective health can be expressed as the amount of starting health that we need to achieve the same end health value at 0% damage reduction than we would at a non-zero damage reduction. If we have 25% damage reduction and 100 starting health, we will fall to 25 end health against a 100 damage attack. With no damage reduction, we need 125 starting health to reach the same end health. 25% damage reduction is thus equivalent to 125 effective health, which is a 25% health increase. Is +1% damage reduction equivalent to a +1% health increase regardless of the amount of pre-existing reduction ? Assuming a base of 100 starting health and an attack of 100 damage: With 10% damage reduction, we get 10 end health, translated to 110 effective health, and thus a 10% health increase With 11% damage reduction, we get 11 end health, translated to 111 effective health, and thus a 11% health increase With 90% damage reduction, we get 90 end health, translated to 190 effective health, and thus a 90% health increase With 91% damage reduction, we get 91 end health, translated to 191 effective health, and thus a 91% health increase As you can see, the effective gain in health increases in a perfectly linear way as our damage reduction increases. Since +1% damage reduction is equivalent to +1 Def when foe accuracy is in range, as showed earlier, it follows that +1 Def equals +1% health indeed. When used properly, all indicators should confirm that the benefit from adding +1 Def is identical whether we have 10 or 90 Def -- modulo graze, crit, armor DR and non-exponential stuff like that.

@cctobias: You are confusing a +1 increase in chance to dodge, and chance to dodge increased by 1%. The latter indeed leads to the exact exponential figures that you showed in your graph, but the former is what actually happens in the game and it is by definition linear, being a flat +1 and all. The game to-Hit formula is I believe as follows: Accuracy - Defense + Random[1, 100] = Total Miss if Total <= 15 Graze if 16 <= Total <= 50 Hit if 51 <= Total <= 100 Crit if Total >= 101 Assuming a foe accuracy of 5, your chance to dodge is 10% at 0 Def, and 90% at 80 Def Assuming a foe accuracy of 5, your chance to dodge is 11% at 1 Def, and 91% at 81 Def Assuming a foe accuracy of 50, your chance to dodge is 10% at 45 Def, and 90% at 125 Def Assuming a foe accuracy of 50, your chance to dodge is 11% at 46 Def, and 91% at 126 Def As you can see, chance to dodge increases in a perfectly linear way as your Def increases, so long as foe accuracy stays within range. A quick search just now resulted in this: And this, from J.E. Sawyer: (It's been confirmed that 1 point of defense translates to a 1% shift as well, i.e. it's not per 5 points increments.) So the effetcs of extra defense to any pre-existing value is confirmed to be always the same in terms of chance to dodge. Now how does chance to dodge translate in terms of damage reduction ? Damage reduction can be expressed with the difference in actual damage vs full damage, i.e. if you take 75 damage when you were supposed to take 100 without some bonus stats, you have a 25% damage reduction going on. If you dodge successfully, you take no damage. If you fail you take anywhere from 50 to 150% of whatever your opponent's damage is supposed to be. Since our purpose is to prove that there is no exponential growth in usefulness to getting +1 Def, we don't need to obfuscate reasoning with variance in damage or armor DR because as you point out, it is going to be negligible in the face of exponential growth. So we can safely consider that we take 100% damage whenever we fail to dodge. For our purpose we thus have dodge equal 0% damage and no-dodge equal 100% damage: This equivalence shows that you can substitute 1 to 1 damage reduction with chance to dodge, and therefore if +1 Def translates to the same increase in chance to dodge no matter the amount of pre-existing Def, it follows that +1 Def translates to the same amount of damage reduction as well. There is no exponential

I've always disliked the tank paradigm, the towering guy who suffers as much damage as it inflicts: zero. It has become so dominant that many players and game developers have their vision of RPG combat constrained by the notions of tanks and aggro, which, IMHO, hurts gaming quality. Not to mention that the paradigm makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from a realistic point of view. As others have pointed out, who in their right mind would bother hitting a flat, inoffensive wall, when their whole party is being mopped up ? No, decidedly, I much prefer combat where fighters are actual threats that an opponent absolutely wants to hold back, either with fighters or barrage attacks, because they are unstoppable juggernauts. A raging man with huge plate armor, a massive shield and a sword is not someone you want anywhere near you, you want him held back or dead before he reaches you, but he's really hard to kill so your team has to focus on his butt. His weakness is definitely not fire power nor is it protection, it's speed and range. As for the concept of aggro separated from actual threat (e.g, tank aggro, taunts), do we need this notion when we have a realistic combat system ? We don't because threat immediacy is enough to gauge how much party resources should be allocated to a task. Tanks present no threat so an opponent should stop allocating resources to oppose them as soon as they become aware of the subterfuge. The only advantage to this notion of aggro is that it saves development time by making AI simpler and game difficulty easier to control. But without it we unlock the possibility to have wizard battles, priests being taken down so fighters can be stopped, strategic movement, and generally a lot of fun and variety as opposed to fun but repetitive battles. Pillars of Eternity doesn't have much of this variety because of its weak AI, not because the combat system is flawed. As it is, engagement is used a lot like aggro but there is no explicit aggro mechanism that skills rely upon. Only AI work stands in our way rather than the combat system and skills overhaul that other games would need on top Calculated disengagement doesn't necessarily mean that enemies can pierce our melee lines disregarding everything though. It's an AI issue and AI programmers know how to deal with this without having recourse to aggro-like behavior

That's not quite correct. Ignoring grazes and critical hits to simplify the discussion: If you are to endure a thousand 100 damage attacks and have a chance to dodge each attack independantly, 1 more percent chance to dodge will always mean 1000 less damage taken. It doesn't matter whether you had 50% chances to dodge or 98%, if you get 1 more percent you dodge a thousand extra points of damage over the course of these 1000 attacks. What you point is something else, ultimately meaningless: With 98% chances to dodge you will take 2000 damage, so removing 1000 damage from that means you will take 50% less damage than you would have otherwise. With 50% chances to dodge you'll take 50000 damage, so removing 1000 only represents a gain of 2%. It doesn't matter though because it's 1000 damage saved in both cases and you have a flat health value and its decrease is linear. What you're talking about is reminding me of the mathematical trap where I'll tell you that a hare has to run from A to B, but will never reach B because everytime it does 50% of the remaining distance, there's still 50% left to cover. It doesn't matter because the hare runs at a constant speed and total distance is the same regardless of how many times we cut it in sub-values while hiding the fact behind percentages and wording.

Hi guys, I have an NVidia GeForce 9800M GTS with the latest driver and a 1440x900 screen. I think the game has a problem with blurry backgrounds and I think there are some fixes available here and there, but I would like to give a try to NVidia's GeForce Experience Pillars of Eternity profile. Sad panda, I didn't install GeForce Experience when I installed the graphics driver, but I can still modify whatever GeForce Experience game "profiles" modify using NVidia control panel. My question is then, can you guys who have GeForce Experience and benefit from its Pillars of Eternity support show me what this "profile" tweaks ? Assuming you can't see it easily through GeF Exp UI, you can simply take a screenshot of NVidia's configuration panel: - Right click on your desktop, select NVidia configuration panel - In the left pane, select "Manage 3D parameters" or whatever it's called in your language - In the right pane you have two tabs. Select "Program parameters" or "App parameters", whatever it's called - Pick Pillars of Eternity in the scroll menu (If you don't have it, you probably don't have the PoE NVidia profile and would benefit from updating GeForce Experience) - Take screenshots of all options (You'll have to scroll down to see them all, so I guess 2 screenshots are necessary) - Upload them here with my many thanks! It should take you 5 minutes, 10 if you're not used to doing such things Thanks if you can help!

I guess I'm the only Planescape:Torment liker that actually has a little something against the picture book sequences (see my first post in this thread for argumented opinion) I was rather thrown out by the game's first use of the picture book, but like music and voice acting, there are places where it is a precious tool.

I read somewhere on these forums that the action speed bonus from dexterity is not applied (bug). Is it true or am I dreaming it ?

I suspect the new save format of 1.05 is there to improve loading times. If 1.05 shows no improvement in that area, it's possible that the new format is groundwork for optimizations aimed at patch 1.06... Or not

Voice acting is only good when used sparsely IMO. Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape:Torment did it awesomely. The will to add voice acting to as many lines of text as possible doesn't suit an IE-style game IMHO. In many games, story and narrative are constrained by voice acting. It should be the absolute opposite. Not even a middle ground where some voice acting is done where it feels good depending on budget, no, voices must be added as sparingly and cleverly as music is used. The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster knows how music in video games can become obnoxious just as much as it can deepen immersion.

I'm an absolute fan of Planescape:Torment, so don't get the following wrong, because the main interest for me in a video game is the quality of the narrative and overall ambiance. I find that that such picture book sequences tend to violently break my immersion when they are used to depict action. They are good for passive narration, such as the arrival to a city, a new chapter that begins, the introduction to a dream. But when there is action I enjoy way way more seeing actual characters acting on screen. In doesn't matter if they aren't graphically animated as the narration says. Baldur's Gate 2 did scripted sequences awesomely but they didn't contain narrative, they were dialogue and actions. Planecape:Torment went full text most of the time and that was perfect. I guess the rule of thumb for me is that UI walls that block the screen break my immersion. I'm immersed in the scene (of which the dialog window is a part), and that picture book sequence has a bad tendency to kick me out of it. I had a pretty bad experience with the ambush in the very first area: I felt no threat or immediacy whatsoever. Heodan's was way more acceptable as it was a closure to a chapter.

Yay. Thanks! Definitely waiting for 1.05 full release for my real playthrough then.

This is a rounding bug: You can convert to integer positive float values after adding 0.5 to them, and it will in effect be a fast rounding operation. For negative float values though, you need to subtract 0.5 before the integer conversion. As long as the game does this erroneous rounding once for all afflictions, rather than once for each individual affliction, this bug is pretty much meaningless (It's still rather minor even if it occurs for each individual afflictions) This one is a little more concerning if it confirms.

What's with the bug where difficulty gets decreased silently by the game ? You guys said it was fixed in 1.05 before the beta, but it isn't present in the patch notes. Since this is the one thing that makes me wait instead of play, I'd be happy to know