Elric Galad

Just before anyone ask : it is not technically possible to mod with BPM. I did the change for Conjurer's Familiar (not counting toward summon limit) which resulted in a Familiar almost unable to fight. It was OK because the familiar is quite bad at combat anyway, and you use it mostly for the passive bonus. But for pet it would be another story.

Version 2.5.1 just released to tweak down a couple of overtuned ranger stuff, correct the immortal Paladin bug and make Wall of Flashing Steel Guile gain less confusing. Deadfire Balance Polishing Mod at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

I don't think it's technically possible unfortunately. In the same fashion, it is impossible to get 1 handed bonus with fists (no way way to tell the game that you fight with one hand only )

It depends too much on foes Deflection, pet own buff, pet category (cat and stag with intuitive...) to give an unique number. INT has especially big impact. Without Bond cost, the Bond gain is proportional to INT. With Bond cost, it is even worse since the first Bond gain with just put you back at zero gain. The ugly things that one has to do just to prevent multi-hit weapons from being an issue... Could have put a cooldown like for Divine Retribution Zeal gain. Because it costs 3 Bonds in Vanilla Actually Bonded Fury was added later so no foes in the base game has Bonded Fury. I haven't check the DLC. It's complicated because it won't help with Holy Radiance and Spiritshift use Cooldown too, and I can't think about an alternative for them. At least it means that I should avoid using Cooldown from now on.

Not that complex, but depends on foes, type of pets, etc... It is complex fur ultimate users, less for us that can discuss it quietly here. That said, there is quite a big major reason to put a cooldown on a free/cheap Bonded Fury, and that's afflictions. Bonded Fury cures any affliction. So it could be used to cure anything. At 2 Bonds, it isn't that big of an issue, but even at 1 Bond and granted that it also refresh duration, it would be still quite a powerful positive side effect of an already powerful ability. All Ranger Active Abilities involving pet (including Ghostheart summons) are tagged beast. Not Play Dead and Takedown since they are not ranger's but pet's abilities and won't benefit from any bonus PL (since even a Good Boy Wolf can't carry Spine of Green Thicket in his mouth). By the way about Deadly Surprise and Takedown : Pet are ALWAYS Single Classed, so their PL always scales as Single Class would do. The effect is super marginal in Vanilla (only affects Takedown PL multiplicative attack damages) but applies in BPM to pet inflicted statuses.

Hi all, I found an hilarious bug with 2.5. Divine Retribution chance to get Zeal back based on Health (equal to percentage of Health Loss) also applies when knocked down. So when Knocked Down (0% health) you gain exactly 1 Zeal every 12s. What's even more funny is that you will always gain enough zeal to trigger Providence. Basically, in "Balance" Polishing Mod v2.5, Single Class Paladin ALWAYS revives. Expect an Hotfix quite soon

Basically this, with a party Or maybe drugs? That is what I was thinking. Lower proc to 10%. Initially plannned 15% on hit/crit only but implementation failed so I rounded up and added Grazes too. I basically rounded every thing up for ranger with this version Since it is an ability to get back ressouces, it makes more sense to make it free. Ot it would involve complex calculation to check if beneficial. I will also put the cooldown to 90s (to reward high INT and PL ; spine of green thicket is somewhat of a decent choice for SC Ranger Now, especially as a caster stick before transitionning to ranged / backup crush damages. Works on Binding Roots too) Overall I might have gone a bit too far with 2.5 ranger buff. I might lower a bit heal/hardy companion to 10s and Vengeful Grief to 33% speed (48% with Nimble). Yeah, I didnt figure about script (I'm a Control freak that don't use script even if using FF12 gambit was a Smart move from Obsidian IMHO) but Cooldown mechanism has becomes somewhat of a base mechanic for BPM. I use it for "signature abilities" that deserve to be cast out of normal resource system. Implemented mostly for Spiritshift and Holy Radiance, but pet can be considered as signature for ranger too, so it fits my views.

Yeah, Feedback would be appreciated. I'm slightly worried about having overbuffed bonded fury, although a mere 90s cooldown instead of 60s would be an easy fix. Would allow INT higher than 30 to be useful, and it would still be somewhat covered by going invisible with Shadowed Hunters in solo.

It is a spell for Skaen priest. Tactician can get Brilliant from their passive, which is better than Acute. Intuitive is less redundant. In general Tactical Barrage has more raw power than Displined Strike... But Disciplined Strike fits better in the majority of build because you can get INT inspiration from other sources.

Display only Bug confirmed (apparently for all instance of Brilliant this description may happen) but seems to be a Vanilla thing (cause it also appears in French. I haven't modified anything in French, modified stuff appears in English. Anyway I won't correct it this time. New version 2.5 has just been uploaded : Deadfire Balance Polishing Mod at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) Feel free to test, especially SC Paladins and Rangers (and Fighters for Take the Hit) You may be interested in @NoqnStandalone Seeker Slayer Survivor mod to try new builds : S4 - Standalone Seeker Slayer Survivor at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

Experience, and a bit of forum help I guess. Basically the gamedata files are structured around objects that call each other using ID in UUID formats. UUID numbers can be generated from website (they are random enough to be unique). Each of the files have different categories of objects. The 3 main ones (the ones that are basically always opened on my PC) are : - abilities, with cost, link to description files, passive/active, link to attack and link to SELF INSTANT (0.5s activation isnt instant, but Savage Defiance is self instant) status and passive status - Attacks with casting time, recovery, Pen/damages/range, bounce, Aoe, target, link to inflicted status. Used by most actions including non instant buff, healing, summons to set their number and nature, etc... - status which governs the properties of active and passive status such as stats buffs, healing/Dot values, tick period, duration Special conditions are a bit split between the 3 files. The Type of summons is actually a Special property of the "attack that summons". Check the attack file with the name of the summons. Also there is a website that describes ALL parameters. It won't give you all the tricks but it helps. It isn't easy on the beginning. That's why I was suggesting to allow self exhortation, because I know how to do (you have to find and change 1 parameter per ability) and it is a good first step. I honnestly have no experience about scripts so I can't tell.

Okay, since I want to release a new BPM version soon, I'll go with the following : - 0.5/4s cast/recovery, 12s base duration, 1 discipline, 2,5 radius - Take the Hit grants 33% less damages taken by the to allies in the AoE - Take the Hit transfers stacking 33% more damages taken by the fighter for each protected ally (so +66% damages taken for 2 allies affected, +99% for 3 allies, etc...). I think it's less volatile than a 50% reduction in term of balance (I slightly buffed duration to compensate a bit, not much since you don't want the penalty to last forever). I'm pretty sure it won't break the game this way (33% damages reduction is great, especially for self-inflicted damages, but is it that much greater that +20 Deflection and +20 all defenses ? It is only more reliable vs High Accuracy and stacks better with other buff - there are not many active buffs that reduce damages) and that it would be useful. I also expect Fighter to be able to tank even with some active charge, by the virtue of Unbending (might require a bit of CON to avoid spike). We'll see how it goes, and if it requires further tweaking.

It's technically doable, even rather easy. The issue is that it enables to use all active abilities on items equipped by your clones. Which is broken for an "official" mod. But you could still tweak it yourself and rules out using active item abilities on your clones. This order of magnitude, yes. I'm actually thinking about +2 Zeal per downed ally with a cooldown of 30s, so the ability would mostly work as well as in vanilla for parties without many summons. You could. PoE2 is not hard to mod, I think. Consider it's my first mod ever and I'm no dev IRL. You can give it a try by enabling exhortations on oneself. It's not very complicated using the many tutorials. It could even be a nice small mod on Nexus (I've not found this by quick research).

Somehow Yes, but I've tweaked Tactician several Times too so it could be messed. Tactician should get the normalna brilliant Now (but under new condition : needs also to have more than 50% health, anf he gets Confused and longer recovery under 50% health. Not sure, but anyway it would mess with monk and wiz who only have non controlable summons. Honnestly the safest way is to put a Cooldown on Divine Retribution Zeal gain, so it works well on "normal party"

I think it works that well in this fight because the Megaboss has AoE Attacks that systematically kills your skellies. But in a larger party, a barb could have done the job. The annoying thing is that it is really only the skelly chant that leads to such absurd Zeal gain. Other summons work great, but not to such extreme extant. Brilliant is still 1 resource per 6s. The only BPM tweak was to make higher spell Tier more rare to regen (and it starts giving back resource 3s avec the start, not immediately).

But when casting a cone ability, you can rotate at will. It would requires a Cone Aura to work as you describe. But as far as I know, it doesn't exist. Because you mentionned a "fairly large radius" so I thought you suggested a larger radius than the current circle. Nevermind Maybe the issue is the 50% values is just too strong. You were suggesting to add positioning constraint, which Swift partially solves. But I think I didnt get your arc idea. It is actually the very first change I tried. The issue is that damages transferred have 0 PEN. I couldn't change it. Which is both too strong and weird.

Well, that's quite out of the box as a proposal. I'm not sure I want to base the design on AI behavior. At least you don't have to remove allies engagement. That's a bit too weird. If one wants to build around, one can simply not pick engagement (or pick a ranged weapon). What I like with the "-X% damages taken for allies/+X% damages taken for self per ally" is that it is quite straightforward, easy to understand and somewhat aligned with the feeling of the initial ability. But I also agree that it could be a bit broken. It's really hard to get an idea. That said, if 50% feels too much, I could go with 40% or even 33%. The ability would still be nice since -% damages is quite rare. -40% could feel right because of all opportunity cost I see with this design. Or I could lower the duration to 6s.

Sure, but also on a frontliner with Unbending active, or any combination of defenses that would make it survival with a massive damages increase. But that's what Take the Hit currently does. Indeed, you can't. You can't change the damage reflection. But Take the Hit currently redirect some damages to the caster. But as said, @Shai Hulud, it's gross since your clothinling will redirect half of its taken damages to your hevaily armored fighter. There are some hidden costs. First the recovery, which should lower your fighter utility. Second Toughened Fury (the backbone of BPM SC) would be much less convenient. You can still take damages, but +200% damages for 4 targets would hurt. Third, all your beautiful defenses as a fighter would be much less usefull. +3 engagements, +20 all defenses, etc... Still usable but one isn't tanky with +200% damages taken. Forth, super bad interaction with summons. If you have plenty summons around and are protecting them, your fighter would be even more vulnerable. I would even say that it could somewhat refreshing to have some party tanking NOT based on summons. And of course, the risk of loosing the fighter from some random AoE. I like the idea of lowering mobility. Breaking on fighter movement would be tedious to implement, but it could break on protected target movement. Arguably it would even be an advantage to prevent summons from being protected. There could also be a penalty for fighter such as -75% movement (or -100% ??) as long as at least one target is protected. Or both. I don't want to make it over complicated though, and I'm not fully convinced it's necessary to add a penalty. But lowering movement is a good direction to look into.

Don't think an arc would change that much I you sit on the backrow, you can have your arc in front of you and cover the front row. It is even easier than a circle. Also SC Fighter has access to Swift just in case (from inspired strike, not the most convenient but still). It is 50% more damages taken by the fighter (per ally, stacking), not done by them. And 50% less damages taken by allies, not done. So your allies take less damages and you take more. The more allies protected the more damages you take. I know about Divine immolation, I've done some forum research before my proposal This would still work fine with (any) Immolation by reducing by 50% the damages taken by the paladin (for this part, it would be as before). The fighter won't take immediate damages from Paladin self immolation, but since it would take more damages from any source, he would still be quite interested by the extra healing specifically from Divine Immolation. It doesn't break the interaction with Immolation, but it is supposed to make Take the Hit less combo dependant, although it works great with any self damages (better than Voidward). So my proposal : - 0.5/4s cast/recovery, 10s base duration, 1 discipline, 2,5 radius (basically these are unchanged) - Take the Hit grants 50% less damages taken by the to allies in the AoE - Take the Hit transfers stacking 50% more damages taken by the fighter for each protected ally (so +100% damages taken for 2 allies affected, +150% for 3 allies, etc...).

Well, it's additive, as always. So if you would take 10, it would be from 30 to 35. Note that these bonus damages should stack additively with other bonus damages (weapon quality, mig, etc...). The same way as double inversions in general. +100% damages cancel -50% damages. (5 SC Fighters would get +200% damages -100% (cancelled by -50%, so +100%). In this case, the bonus from several fighters doesn't stack while malus does. ) What do you mean, exactly ? Vanilla : out of 100 damages : - 50 goes to target - 50 goes to fighter Your proposal (???) out of 100 damages : - 50 goes to target - 25 goes to fighter It is doable with mathematical trick (hand werdish display): - 25% resistance - 33% of the 75% left to the fighter. Or is it something else ? Pain Link points to the attacker (hard coded, I checked it too yesterday). Deal

Maybe by using a dummy Change Form ? (except without chaning model) ? Spiritshift are statuses that technically add abilities every time you use them (okay, I know that in Vanilla game, you can't use a particular Spiritshift several times, bt if you mod this way, you can cast bear fear every time you shift). EDIT : Gotcha, not tried myself, but should work : 1) There are Changeform status without appearance change (extract from Citzal's armory) : { "$type": "Game.GameData.ChangeFormEffectGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Citzals_Enchanted_Armory_SE_ChangeForm_Armor", "ID": "232ef96a-a26e-41ab-9765-16b426ed1c80", "Components": [{ "$type": "Game.GameData.ChangeFormEffectComponent, Assembly-CSharp", "NewFormAppearance": "", "TempAbilitiesIDs": [], "RemoveEquipment": "false", "TempEquipmentIDs": ["37c1590c-ed1c-41bb-aa9b-cdefb78a65b4", "0987eb38-d772-4705-8981-fb306bee9e88", "1c041870-a4aa-4d24-aa63-883ef387b92c"], "FormVariationID": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000", "AnimationController": "", "AnimationAudioID": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" }] } 2) Here an example of added ability by Bear Shift : { "$type": "Game.GameData.ChangeFormEffectGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "DEBUG_Spiritshift_Bear_SE_ChangeForm", "ID": "0c44ac2c-5155-462d-9c9a-d910b0cf07c0", "Components": [{ "$type": "Game.GameData.ChangeFormEffectComponent, Assembly-CSharp", "NewFormAppearance": "art/character/creatures/druid_bear01/a_druid_bear01_v01.asset", "TempAbilitiesIDs": ["7bf3cb65-52bf-481c-8261-fd7c9f22ba0b"], "RemoveEquipment": "true", "TempEquipmentIDs": ["8b96899c-12c6-42cc-a2cd-f3a73aed0bd3", "9e36cdaa-e21d-42ac-adcd-e7393e16ee15", "9e36cdaa-e21d-42ac-adcd-e7393e16ee15"], "FormVariationID": "b1441f51-a9e9-4aea-b14e-0d205e07bc85", "AnimationController": "", "AnimationAudioID": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" }] }

Disciplined Barrage is self-only. That's a pretty big difference. Of course not for Solo. LoH can save your life, Displined Barrage cannot. Initially I was comparing 1 concentration with LoH base healing effect, which I think is in favor of the later by a pretty big margin. But we're really comparing apples and tomatoes here. It also heals more than any instant healing abilities bar LoPZ and consumables. Actually, it's the Healing over Time that heals the most per tick. It's really middle ground between instant heals (life savers) and heals over time (damages mitigators), with the big distinctive feature from instant ones of benefitting from INT and PL duration scaling. It also has nice interaction with Wall of Draining for being a "short but strong" buff. As they are many source of DPS. Disciplined Barrage is precious because there aren't that many souces of crits though. Brilliant has the same effect on SC barb as in Vanilla. All this requires ability points. SC and MC get almost the same numbers, even if it is obvious that they are spent less optimally for having a single tree (especially since some Tier 1-7 passive are really broken). It's hard to figure what MC feature could beat Driving Roar in term of convenient cheap AoE DPS + fast cast Interrupt/push. And it terms of Spike AoE, dual mortar HoF is there too. Not everything works every fight. Blood Surge works well vs Belranga and to some extant vs Hauni O Whe (because Blood Thirst make Barb optimal for dealing with those parasite oozes), but require some Chanter skellies slaying to work a bit vs Dorudugan (and probably not a very optimal strategy then). Anyway, SC Barbs are seen as fine by most, so I won't change them, unless some other reviews argue about it. As said above "SC Barbs are fine" does not reflect only my opinion. This was even said before BPM, and I still buffed them. Parties require less balanced build in general. Noticeably, you don't have to tank or do the healing yourself. If healing 1/2 to 1/3 of health pool for 1 zeal is very very meh for you... well I don't know what you need. As said above, apart for consumable, I don't know what can beat it apart things that restore ~10 base health per 3s. Sure it heals more overall, but it is really slow. If we're talking about healing efficiency, IMHO nothing can top Nature's Balm. I start every druid battle by casting it, it is so fast, can affect the whole party (initial placement matters). Pain Link and Spiritual Ally (!) are also my bread and butter heals for their efficiency again. But when a character is dangerously low on health, LoH becomes better at "saving one's life" than the mentionned abilities (not to mention it can be stacked with said Robust). I guess for Solo, you have to think a lot about long term and attrition, which makes it "very very meh" instead of "basically okay", which it is in the general gameplay. Anyway, since we have more or less agreed on GLoH and HoL I propose to stop arguing here (you can answer but I don't guarantee responding). Actually I think I'll go with 30 health per 3s for 5s (instead of 6s as said above) for HoL/GLoH in order to harmonize duration with Shielbearer secondary effect (which is 5s in BPM). But I'll go with 15s Robust and 20s Courageous instead. So same level of power as described above. Also now I'm turning my attention on a final point before release (I hope) : Take the Hit. It is supposed to be the pinacle of "tanking" (in term of deviating attacks from others), but it is limited to damages transfer. Even with BPM change (no recovery, no cost), I find it hard to pick and cast (some combos do exist). Thematically, you're getting damages on your fighter in exchange for protecting your friends. The issue is that the said friends have usually lower defenses, so transfering damages make easy damages vs your supposed tank. It worked somewhat better in Vanilla since Unbending was overhealing there dues its weird implementation. So these excessive healing could be dumped with Take the Hit cast, even if the synergy didn't work. Take the Hit would be perfect if there was a way to make 50% of the attacks actually target the fighter in order to benefit from its defense. I must emphasize that there are no way to do that. The ability that redirect attack have they targets hard coded (Reflect stuff, Blade Turning). You all can make design suggestions, but remember not everything exists. So try to replicate an existing ability/effect. My proposal would be : - Take the Hit grants 50% damages resistance to allies in the AoE - Take the Hit transfers 50% stacking bonus damages to fighter for each protected ally. This can be mitigated by Unbending of course, which is a better synergy than the current effect. Also stacking defenses make these bonus damages less easy to take advantages of. The basic idea is to enable the fighter to protect what has passed their line of defense. Thematically, it fits remarkably well with Furrante's Breastplate passive (-10% allies damages, +10% to self)... which also has Take the Hit as castable effect. Duration, Recovery and Cost should be adjusted. Cost can't be zero in this case, so probably back to 1 Discipline. Duration should be relatively low. Could be 10s as original. Could be down to 6s if the effect feels too powerful. Recovery / no Recovery is also a question : I admit I fear having a backrow fighter casting Take the Hit repeatedly (even worse with a "Brilliant" Tactician), so at least recovery would prevent them from doing much else. Nope, they are not supposed to stack. Both are from active effects.

This and rolling vs Fortitude tend to guarantee the ability won't be an auto win button. In the meantime, even a Graze vs Fortitude would still do respectable damages. And in the case of severe underpen, just use it as a panic button that do a little damages. Or for healing the self damages from immolation that would have better chance of penetrating as you say. Ok I'm probably going on this route with 6 base PEN and current damages.

Second thought, it might be a bad idea. LoPZ has no casting time (only recovery, but really great action economy), no friendly fire, immediate damages and instant heal and has quite high PEN. There would be many fights that you could win just by using it repeatedly, especially with several SC Paladins. Even with its high cost, it is allows 2-3 casts that could trivialize too many fights (even if not so good for some boss fights). My idea would be to keep the current damages (92-123) but with much lower PEN (10 base -> 6 base, + 4 PEN as a tier 9 + whatever PL would give) 6 base PEN is quite average but not so low with dual type. Basically the equivalent of a sword. It is also BPM value for Maelstrom. Also Immolation is useless vs fire immune who tend to have low frost AR, except constructs who have low Elec AR. So it would be the best when the most needed by SC Paladin, while being slightly less of an universal tool. What do you think ? What is your experience with current LoPZ vs vessels ? Does it feel too strong sometimes ?

As I suspected, it is a purely display bug, the effective healing values are normal (tested at list Might, Practiced Healer, Mercy chant) It happens with attacks within status within attack within... etc. Just too complex for the UI to handle perfectly. I have no idea why, and display issues are not my priority when I don't know how to correct them easily.