Uni

I guess the question is also about shield bashes in general. Unarmed attacks are affected by Confident Aim and the bash of Tuotilo's Palm benefits from things that affect unarmed attacks. Or at least the wording on it's upgrades make that seem to be the case. If the item can proc Confident Aim, does it need small shield proficiency or does it use the automatic unarmed one?

Nerfing is good because it makes selecting abilities a real choice instead some of them just being obviously 100 times better than others. This makes the game much more fun as you are incentivized to use a spell that is good for a certain situation rather than just always spam the same few overpowered ones. Deadfire was completely unplayable on release if you wanted to be challenged by the combat. Even on hardest difficulty the game became a complete joke halfway through. Its in so much better state now even if the balancing done by obsidian is still pretty poor compared to what is seen in multiplayer games. Asking a dev to not change the game for the better when it has huge balance issues is really weird. And if you really hate change so much you can always play the release version. I guess you cant do that with the DLC thou. I do agree with you that buffing a lot of the bad abilities would be good and while obsidian did some of that there are still a lot of really bad spells that are almost never worth using over their competition.

Woedicas challenge sounds really interesting but some heals like lay on hands being combat only clash with that in pretty annoying manner. Would be amazing if those were made to be usable outside of combat.

I feel like the problem of deadfire becoming too easy is more about encounters not scaling hard enough with levels rather than you getting too many levels. Your party gets way more from leveling up than the enemies do as you have more optimized gear, builds, synergies and more control over all the possibilities high level brings. This means that the game can be hard in the beginning, reasonable in lv8 and way too easy from 14 onwards even if you arent outleveling the content. Its true that XP is concentrated on neketaka and you can temporarily get overleveled if you do that content asap but i dont think that is the core problem of the game unlike in PoE1 where enemies were reasonable if you werent overleveled bt getting to that point was way too easy. I havent played with the latest increases on lategame difficulty so my experiences could be outdated.

Assuming that its possible to reduce party stat gain while leaving enemies to get +3/level. Id really like this kind of effect that reduces lategame power and makes being strong be more about unique abilities than all the raw stats you just get from levels.

Did you feel like the game was generally getting easier when you got more levels and went into later game areas or did it stay similar to the early game/even get harder?

I love what i have heard of the beta, but has anyone here played more into lv10 or smt? Im really interested if the game stays hard like in the beginning or if it starts to become easier and easier when you level up like poe1 and poe2(at least before this patch) did. Id like to make my first complete playthrough in this patch but i really dont want the game to become trivially easy after i played more than half of it. I have had to restart all my previous attempts because the difficulty curve is so bad. Even last time with pretty heavy difficulty mods everything just started falling with no effort around lv14.

The problem with both pillars isnt really the overall difficulty being too low, but rather the games challenge dropping drastically the longer you go on. Parties just get a lot more from levels than enemies and POTD goes from reasonable(early game) to completely trivial(late game) in both titles, at least if we ignore some optional fights that are huge difficulty spikes from the rest of the game. All the difficulty mods i have seen add flat raw power to enemies and thus do not help much with this major difficulty curve problem. I have relatively heavy difficulty mods and while they managed to delay me becoming OP for a bit now at lv16 my frontliners are practically invulnerable and the party just blenders enemies with no effort/thinking needed even if they are occasionally up to 4 levels over me and have extra hp. I havent played the latest beta, but from what i have heard it has actually made POTD hard in the early game. This sounds good, but im pretty sure it will still become way too easy later on. One way to make enemies become tougher towards the end could be reducing the statgains your party gets from leveling without doing the same for enemies. Id love a simple mod that made party get +2 to stats per level instead of +3 or smt. I know reducing xp gain drastically can make the game be hard even towards the end, but its a really bad solution as then you dont get to use the cool toys at later levels. Id much rather have a high level party with less stats than a lower level one.

I think INT makes drugs last longer(and dampener certainly blocks the effect) so that spell should be able to extend it. But its not like getting 10-20s more for a drug matters much when they last minutes anyway.

Do you play the game in english or with a localization? I have heard that some of the translations have problems. I play a female character in english and havent noticed weird things, but im a man so its possible im just blind to those because of it.

I got my targeting to work by restoring default keybinds, and now i feel like a total moron for not trying that earlier. Left mouse click is tied to multiple different things so its quite easy to accidentally misbind, as you click stuff when you want to change other keybinds.

I have GOG version so maybe the issue could be some crucial microsoft visual c++ version or some other piece of software missing. People had at least graphics bugs(like cloaks not animating etc.) in PoE1 caused by not having certain c++ version, but fundamental mechanics not working is quite different. Im not tech savvy enough make make very educated guesses. EDIT: Attacking in combat doesnt actually work for me either even with just one character selected, i just mistook AI attacking after the command to be my command functioning properly.

Seems like we have the same issue as i also cant use the out of combat target attacking. One other weird thing i have is attacking in combat not working properly if i have multiple units selected. Only the first unit will walk to an enemy and attack normally, while the others treat the command as a movement command and walk to their proper spot in the selected formation. If their AI is off they will then stand still and have the "..." -idle mark in the circle that has sword for attacking etc. If their AI is on they still remain stationary but instead will have the cogs symbol which id assume has something to do with AI. Giving attack commands works fine in combat if the character is the only one selected. Do you also have this problem or do your characters fight normally when ordered to attack a foe with everyone selected?

I have the same bug with targeting abilities. Lay on hands, knockdown etc. can be selected but clicking them on enemies or allies does nothing, the left click just isnt registering at all. This is both in and out of combat. Reinstalling didnt help either. The game seems to work fine otherwise but not being able to use targeted abilities is totally gamebreaking.

Just installed IEMod with the deadfire patch and it seems to be working fine.

Now that the game is completed id like to start a final playthrough, but id also like to use IEMOD as it has some really critical options for me like nerfing xp gains so the games difficulty curve wont be messed up. EDIT: By definite edition i meant the deadfire patch.

I know it makes enemies have better defenses and more accuracy, but i was unable to find the actual details and id assume someone here knows more. Seems like there are more enemies in encounters and i remember reading that enemies also do more damage and have extra DR. Is the PotD modifier a buff that is automatically applied to every enemy, or do different enemies have different bonuses? I mostly ask all this just out of curiosity, but also a bit because id like to know if there is a set DR bonus for everything so i know to use stuff like vulnerable attack to keep low dmg weapons from not being useless.

You could only use 4 or 5 people in party at once.

I hope that ends up being enough to not make the game become drastically easier towards the end if one does a lot of quests.

I like the decision to not give xp from grinding battles, but it makes a game like this impossible to balance for both completionist players and the ones who only rush through the critical path. Either the critical path becomes unbearably punishing, or the game ends up being trivially easy for the players who do more side content. While the traditional difficulty options the game has are good, they do nothing to combat this problem of how difficulty scales. It would be really nice to have another difficulty slider that made you require more XP for leveling depending on how much of the game you plan to complete. You can do this in PoE 1 by fiddling with the game files or with tools like IEMod, but methods like that might become unusable with patches and are generally much worse than having that functionality already in game.

You can read the presentation pdf in GDC Vault, but the talk itself is marked as members only content. Talks from that event seem to be public/only for members in seemingly random fashion, so is it possible that we cant ever see the talk without paying the 400+ dollar subscription? I have no idea if GDC Vault has a habit of allowing public to see some of the members only talks later on, or are they truly locked for ever. Id really like to see the talk, but not 400 dollar much.

XP scaling slider separated from difficulty selection. I understand wanting to keep the game from being unreasonably hard for people who only do the critical path, but this means doing a lot of sidequests makes you outscale enemies in a really bad way. Would be nice to not have to rely on tools like IEMod to get good experiences as a players that wants to do most of the content and still have endgame battles be challenging. Unique items being more interesting and strong in other ways than just raw damage/accuracy/DR. Soulbound items were a step in right direction so im kind of hopeful.

Yea, i think there was easily enough comedy. Eder wants to pet all furry things and kana is very happy go lucky guy with puppy like attitude. Zahua is also kind of silly and as much of a joke concept as id like to see in a game like this. I like that the humour is more grounded and comes from different personalities clashing. Pallegina is a very serious character, but has really funny banter with eder because of that.

What i do in my current run is to not use stash for weapons, shields and armors, aka big things. So rings, scrolls and other small/light stuff can go into pockets, but i cant carry thousand chainmails from raedrics hold to become instantly rich. This feels like a reasonable compromise in terms of realism. Im only just starting act 2 but this feels like a good decicion. I can get loot and sell it, but not in ridiculous quantities. Getting 4k gold from raedrics is a nice chunk, but repairing a keep in ruined state is not cheap, nor is aloths wizard college. That tall grass sure is juicy but at this rate it also takes some serious saving. The money rewards from quests always felt meaningless as thousands of xaurip spears passively fulfilled all your monetarily needs, so im kind of joyfully waiting to become broke and have ingame gold rewards actually be useful.

For me the reduced XP is an essential thing. If you do most of the quests the games difficulty curve gets really messed up(way too easy later on) and that bites hard into my enjoyment. PotD feels right until act 2 and id like to keep that tension for the rest of game. I dont want to just plow through everything effortlessly after i have played a bit, i want to have those "NOPE! im outta here until stronger" -moments like the bear cave even later on in the game. Some other options were nice, but the only thing i really care about is XP modifying as it allows the game to remain challenging while using a full party.