Elric Galad

Ngati's Tusk is a really cool weapon for party support. Unless you play devoted, you don't have to specialize toward Pikes from the start to be able to use them. Does Lance of the Midwood Stag PL Bonus Stacks with other PL Bonus ? Sounds like a very strong if it does. Does it work with Pollen Patch ?

Well, I guess there are several option. The reason I want it to become an AoE is to make it different from Rust Armor. Of course, AoE vs Single Target would lead to different numbers of procs for balance purpose. Oh, thanks for pointing this.

Okay, so here what I plan to do with druid (already coded and tested for Greater Blights and Call of the Primordials) : General Principle (also appliable to other classes) : Scaling may happen at levels 5, 9, 13, 17. Each scaling add +4 Acc, +15% damages, +1 PEN for weapons (spell-like abilities are unaffected) and +1 AR in addition to +3Acc/All Defenses that every creatures get. This is identical to already scaling creatures such as Pets or Animated Weapons (or summoned Weapons and Armors). But since some summons start very strong, they may not get all the scaling levels. There would be 5 categories : - Some summons will scale at levels 5, 9, 13, 17 (full scaling, for a total of +16 Acc, +60% damages, +4 PEN and +4 AR) - Some summons will scale at levels 9, 13, 17 - Some summons will scale at levels 13, 17 - Some summons will scale at level 17 (theoritical for the moment) - Some summons will not scale at all (for example Ryrmgand Incarnate is strong enough and do not require any scale. It might be interpreted as if the base stats of the creature already include Fine / Exceptional / Superb / Legendary weapons and armors. However, the main goal is balancing the various abilities. So low level summons may also get fewer scaling levels. In addition, I may change other stats of the Summon Spells or Summoned Creatures for various purposes. Side note : the changes will not affect the Bestiary creature that the summoned is based on. Ondra's Whip, Watery Double, Lashing Vine : no changes. I think these abilities are balanced as they are (and they all scale at levels 5, 9, 13, 17 ). Summon Sporelings : Will scale at levels 13, 17 only. These summons are already very tanky for their spell Tier, with very good duration. They are subclass-specific so I feel it is legit if they are a bit stronger, but full scaling would probably be too much. All Blights Summons : Will scale at levels 5, 9, 13, 17. I think these spells needed a bit of a buff, so full scaling felt suitable. In addition, since each Tier of Blight summon basically gives +1PEN, AR and damages (as well as a new ability), their stats would be very similar if Minor Blights scaled more than normal and greater ones. Higher Tier summons should be stronger than lower Tier counterparts, that's why I gave max scaling to all of them. Call to the Primordials : Scaling will depend on the Ooze : Greater Black Ooze will scale at levels 9, 13, 17. Adra Ooze will scale at levels 9, 13, 17. Magma Ooze will scale at levels 13, 17. Bog Ooze will not scale at all. (The difference is based on the base level of the creature, but they all end up with 11 PEN) Call to the Primordials nerfed to summon only 2 Oozes. This spell already feels too strong so I want to seize the opportunity to make it more in line with other summons. Fire Stag : (already scales at levels 5, 9, 13, 17) (minor) Change its fire shield so it procs on damages as other fire shields, and not on Hit/Crit. Set Engagement limit to base 3, so it can be more focused on being a decoy. Adjust base damages to 13 - 19 with PEN 8 (equivalent of a sword with +2 PEN and fast attack rate), so it feels potent for a summon of this Tier. Remove the possibility to abuse Barring Death Door for multiple self-destructions. Possibly adjust the self-destruction effect (maybe no friendly fire, also proc if the creature is killed ?) Aspect of Galawain : (already scales at levels 5, 9, 13, 17) Adjust base damages to 13 - 19 with PEN 8 (equivalent of a sword with +2 PEN and fast attack rate), so it feels potent for a summon of this Tier. Wolf would get higher base damage. Adjust armor base 5 AR -> base 8 AR, 25% recovery -> 0% recovery. Bear would get +2 AR. (they would basically get the equivalent of Spiritshift armors) Add a Prone on Hit effect to its base attack (EDIT : only Interrupt on Hit since the beast has very high attack rate) so it feels like a living Concelhaut Crushing Doom (or Animated Pike and its plentiful Knockdowns). This is meant to be similar to pet's takedowns since the ability is already based on Ranger's pet. Please tell me what you think of these changes, especially if something feels too powerful.

You're pretty much pointing the reason why I dislike this ability that much. OTHER classes don't have anything comparable except Light of Eothas which is a Tier IX Priest spell. BUT Paladins get another Party Heal on Tier IX : Light of Pure Zeal. It's expensive but still more cost effective. 100 Heal base is enormous, and doesn't decrease on secondary targets. So only jump range could justify Healing Chain, but overall I find it quite redundant and a bit... Uninspired (I mean, in addition to be overcosted). That's why it's one of the few abilities that I completely reworked for my mod.

My idea was to make it 2.5m radius, rise to 5 the number of procs (and remove the Interrupt part ). AoE would help diffentiating it with Rust Armor when trying to Bypass AR. Major problem with these 2 spells is that they are on Tier IV - V which happen to be incredibly good for Druids. So if you put on these levels a Chillfog-like spell... err no. EDIT : revised my judgement a bit. It's the most damaging spell of its Tier, so I guess it's OK. Wall of Thorns has to compet with Relentless Storm and does not even do as much damages as Fire Wall (okay it has an affliction effect...). EDIT : I also don't like Poison Keyworded spells in general, and Druid has a bit too much CON affliction based on Poisons for my tastes. It feels overall a bit redundant with Venombloom, less convenient and less powerful. I'm not sure what to do with these 2 spells (that I thematically like) Weapon/armor scaling is good enough for blight. They have nice Activable abilities. Also consider I will nerf Call of the Primordial to 2 Oozes after adding a bit of weapon scaling. This spell is too good and you can have only 1 Summon spell active so it makes all the other pale in comparison. I was considering this indeed. Honnestly, 30s +20% Action speed and a bit of healing if good enough in my opinion. That's the only Party Wide pure action speed buff (bar indirect one from Chanter). I was even considering removing MIG and PER buff but I can let them for what it worths. Not sure about removing weirdness. I don't mind it personnally and since it's not the only ability with this effect (Lay on Hand...), it will require the same treatment for the others. I was leaning to adding Interrupt on Hit and decreasin casting time to 0.5s and 4.5s recovery. This would be a way to promote the big range. Spell isn't a keyword. Maybe by making it into a per encounter ability ? It would be a bit weird, but why not ? Agreed, I only spoke about spell but I had this in mind too. My idea was to change the effect to a On Crit proc. So it synergizes with the new Entropy. It does slightly more damage per tick, last twice as long and proc twice more often. But I would tend to agree that a spell designed for melee could be better with shorter casting time. So maybe a slight buff to 3s/3s casting/recovery ? Was on my radar too. Reducing casting time to about instant is an option I considered too. If last 10% is to finish a Boss, it worths it. You don't strictly have to choose. I don't like auto-hit but an Accuracy bonus such as Thunder Rolls upgrade could be nice. Does this kind of effect apply on Graze ? Agree too. I will try to think about something. Pull of Eora doesn't sound too tornado, but "Vertical Launch" status has parameters. So maybe there is a way to increase the time spent in the air to something fun. Other option I can think is to give it a crazier AoE such as 7.5m or even 10m.

Given that I'm working on a Mod myself, I will point the list of spells that need buffs : - Entropy (3 Hit to Crit proc on a Single Creature is bad for a Tier VIII) - Wicked Briars - Wall of Thorns - Most summons except Call of the Primodials (slightly too strong, would nerf), Lashing Vine (pretty much Okay with its level 20 14 PEN) and Watershapers special ones. Blights scale poorly (weapons and armor don't scale), and Fire Stag and Aspect of Galawain are simply too weak. I'm working on it at the moment. - Nature's Bounty but more because it's cumbersome to use. I would probably tweak it into a weaker direct effect. I would also buff Sunlance a bit (add an Interrupt effect) but that's because Druids lack a well-rounded spell for Tier VI. All other spells are more or less okay for me. I agree with the Trinket idea, but they should be less powerful than wizard's in my opinion (only 1 spell per Tier, since Druids get 1 for free and Flexibility is the core identity of Wizards).

Hard Crowd Control effects were brutal in PoE1. This could destroy a not well prepared party. Remember base Lagufaeth and their Paralysis effect ? High level monks ? Adragans ? Health also made Healing pretty annoying. In PoE2, you can tank anything with enough healing. Having a Priest in your party slowly made you invicible on High Levels though. Party Buffs were so strong and immunity towards afflictions basically cancel my first point for prepared parties. The only thing that could still beat you on High level was basically Adra Dragon Breath because it was so strong it could kill several party members before you are buffed and/or the dragon is Crowd Controlled.

Well, you did. Not enough IMHO, but you did I think I pretty much know the content of CP as well as the base rule. TBH it's pretty hard to draw the line between legit modding and ruthless powercreeping <getting back to add weapon/armor scaling to all summons>.

I could imagine having a whole party under the effect of Nimble through Hastening Exhortation branding all foes or spamming White Flames could be efficient or fun. I like the idea behind this ability, but it is too short, too small AoE and too long casting time (OR too expensive). Last time I picked it I seldom used it. On contrary, all 3 Tier I abilities are excellent and cheap, so... For I mod, I felt that I had to tweak all Paladin active abilities except these 3 and Rez Command .

They really dropped the ball with Paladin PL 2 to 9 for active abilities. Apart the rez Command which can situationnally save your day, all are meh to bad (overcosted is their main pb). That said Divine Retribution is good enough to justify Single Class. It can even lead to pretty hilarious party build with several SC Paladins involved because Knock Out would result in a net Zeal gain.

I think that if you don't want to commit with a beckoner, any chanter with Many Lives... Phrase would be okay too. Since those skeletons don't scale with level, they should be easy enough to get killed. If you don't trust foes to do the job, a barbarian with Blood Thirst Can do the job without recovery. You may want to combine this with Grave Digger saber to get free Chillfog. How Healing Chain isn't Bad ? For 3 Zeal, all you get is 50- (decrease with jumps, 15% if I remember well) Healing, and the Jumps can even be "stolen" by summons which means extremely Bad synergy with Divine Retribution. Finally Healing over Time effets scale very well with PL, so Lay on Hand is pretty good with SC Paladin.

Did someone mentioned Ooblit pet yet ? Thta's the semi-obscure item one should know about when going SC Assassin as Main Character. It provides +3s on all beneficial effect on "bearer" which is especially interesting with Unbending and Vanishing Strike.

Nope, OP stated he will use Community Patch, so fast weapons are optimal if no special attack is used. But sure axe + fast weapons full attacks is optimal.

Ney, it still works as before. Attacking doesn't break invisibility from vanishing strike.

Then if it is supposed to be similar, it would require any MC characters that want to build around summoned weapons to be more or less forced to stack PL. My own opinion is simply that I'm not 100% confident it doesn't create balancing issue... And even if it was the case, it could even be fun enough to justify a bit of Imba. It's simply that because of that, I don't want to try to make this change by myself for now.

Do Stone of Power stacks with Potion of Ascension ? Anyway, Conjurer's familiar provides a stacking +1PL, so there is still a way to get to 18PL. If the whole build is focused for this objective, I guess it's not that bad if it provides good stats. But this example still shows why it is a bit tricky to balance. Yup and Monastic Unarmed Training is a rather meh talent. Unless want a bashing monk shield or play a Devoted whose weapon focus does not provide crushing damages, I don't see much point in this talent.

Chanter Phrase's Thick Grew Their Tongue or Druid Insect Swarm will remove all layers of Concentration at once before starting interrupting. It would be a bit sad to waste Interrupting abilities just to get rid of Concentration.

The rationale is simple : if a Summoned Weapon doesn't match the level of power of endgame Equipment, it would be useless. So Summoned Weapons have to scale well for Multi-Class... and not "too well" for Single Class. They feared Summoned weapons to be too good for SC if they have to be good enough for MC. So... errr... they based it on character level so it's "balanced for eveyrone". This is a bit the same for Summoned Creatures & Pets. Summoned Creatures, pets, summoned weapon, monk fist and natural Attack from shapeshifters are a recurring balance problem in most games (from DnD to Skyrim) because they don't scale like the Player Character and, more importantly, the foes. Consider the PEN problem of summons : it doesn't scale as your foe AR, and that's the reason why I even started this analysis. PoE1 pet and druid shifter scaling is another food example. Using Character Level for this sort of scaling solves most issues that's why I'm reluctant to open this box, even if I totally get the point. That's why Kaylon is suggesting to follow the same rule as Monastic Training : it takes the levels of the character into account (through a virtual PL) BUT also take into account PL modifiers.

OK, I check the code and I still didn't find anything weird. But this bug wouldn't surprise me. For the summons themselves, I think it could be complicated because I'm not sure if and how the creature "carry" the PL of the spell. For summoned weapon, scaling based on PL is feasible but I'm not sure it can follow the rule of Monastic Training. Monastic Training seems to be coded as a regular PL scaling, but it seems to use a "phantom PL" only because it is not a "class ability" but an "universal one". It may work like this because it is the only classless scaling ability. So there's always the option to make summoned weapons scale based on PL, which will be very nice for Conjurers at least, but rather meh for multiclass. That's good ideas for sure, but I will probably not try them before I release version 1.0 of my mod.

Added to the table (with a couple of details, such as Fire Stag's Carnage and Fire Shield)

Can you be more specific about the unaffected summons ? I quickly looked at the code, and my best bet would that it does not affect "non-activel-summoned summons" such as "many lives..." phrase, split skeleton from the skeleton Invocation or the Drake upgrade's second drake. Well, given that summons scale with level and not PL, this one sounds indeed complicated.

Well, not so simple for a set creature. We can have conditional passive that apply only for summons, that's for sure. Conditional Progression Tables, not sure at all. It would require that the Boolean that test if the creature is summoned can be used from this file. That is not confirmed. Consider that they didn't do it like this for Beckoner. They coded a non-contionnal ability that is conditionally applied. For Items, I don't know either. But Passive Ability can be used to "add a Mod" on a weapon.

By the way, it is very important list if someone want to create a new summon spell based on an existing critter. You should post it in the modder subforum if you haven't done yet.

Wow Such list Very mod But the main question here is : can it be modded ? But @Boeroer what would be the point of creating a carbon copy if I can add a condional scaling on summoned creatures ? I think summoned creatures should have their stats based on the related non-summoned one (especially because these have Bestiary entry that can be convenient for people to refer in order to get base stats).

In a gamedate file called Characters.gamedatebundle. Creatures are "objects" within this file. These objects are linked to another base stat object in the same file that can be shared by several creatures. For example all oozes have the same base stats. Their list of Ablities is in Progressiontable.gamedatebundle. Their armor and weapons, even "natural" ones are in Items.gamedatebundle. The attack from the weapon itself is in Attacks.gamedatebundle. The summoning action is an Ability that proc an "Attack" that actually does the summon. All Gamedata objects are linked to each others using UUID. For example, the Creature object refer to a Progression Table by a UUID, weapons by their UUID, etc... There are a few exceptions to these link. Summon attack actually calls their summon through another rule : "Filename": "prefabs/characters/character_templates/creature/summons/cre_dragon_summon.prefab" This file is nowhere to be found, so I suppose it is generated when the game run and is a hard-code of some sort. All these are within following directory : C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity II\PillarsOfEternityII_Data\exported\design\gamedata Except for add-ons which are in : C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity II\PillarsOfEternityII_Data\XXX\design\gamedata Where XXX is called lax1_exported to lax3_exported or laxa_exported to laxi_exported