Boeroer

Yes, obviously some combos are more potent than others and are breaking the balance more obviously than others. I was speaking more generally about how the balance of any economy breaks down as soon as you turn something that's limited into "unlimited" or "endless". Thus it's not very logical to introduce something like that into a system you want to be balanced. Unless there are other benefits that outweigh breaking the resource economy of course.

Didn't know that. Cool fix!

It can't be done with Megabosses in place because they become nearly impossible to do. Same with the Ultimate. It would have been smart to fix this BEFORE those things came up. It would have been smart AND easy then. Now it's impossible to do without taking Ultimate or Megabosses out. Which is not feasible.

You only need any healing effect over time (like Minor Lay on Hands from Healing Hand gloves) and Wall of Draining + Bloodmage. Then you are already breaking the resource economy badly because your healing will get prolonged - which makes the use of Blood Sacrifice risk-free - which leads to more casts of Wall of Draining. Everything that's turning a limited thing into an infinite one breaks the balance. Like Gouging Strike and Brand Enemy are completely OP if you are only willing to wait. If somebody woul make a mod where you can "wait until" in combat mode (or introducing a superfast combat time lapse option) it would be more obvious that they are broken. Only the tedium of waiting "balances" them.

You get asked a bunch of questions about you choices in PoE (some go into fine detail) and I think it's good enough. That "generator" asks the same things that the import would extract from your PoE-savegame anyway - so I suspect the resulting dataset would even be identical.

That is not logical. Like saying: "Exterminating measles will make chickenpox more deadly". Maybe you mean that if you remove Brilliant's resource replenishment then Bloodmage will be the only thing left that breaks resource economy and thus will have more appeal to powergamers - or something along the lines. Which would be correct. But yeah - Bloodmage + Wall of Draining (you need to combine both things to break the resource economy of a Wizard) is broken as well. A solution would be to only allow Blood Sacrifice a certain number of times per encounter or to alter Wall of Draining so that it's proloning effect has a rel. low cap or gives a flat duration bonus like Salvation of Time. I would prefer the first one. You'll trade the ability to empower spells for Blood Sacrifice which will allow you to refresh resources more often than Empower would (but not infinite times). Megabosses are only a very small (and optional) part of the game and are made for 0.x% of players. Also they're kind of a PR stunt. Same as the Ultimate. This should not be a reason for messing up the resource economy of the game (or for not fixing it) for over 99% of all players. Combining prolonging abilities with endless resources is clearly a broken mechanic. You shouldn't design encounters or challenges to justify that brokenness - but rather fix the break and design encounters accordingly then.

@Rimiu: yes, German expat in Romania. Soon to return to Berlin though (June 15th). I proposed to remove the resource replenishment of Brilliant quite early and instead simply raise the PL bonus. Acute has +1, Brilliant could have get +3. Or increase AoE and durations by 50% (without any further INT bonus). Anything that's not obviously destroying the resource economy. I thought they got it when they started to nerf the Chanter invocation which originally applied Brilliant and now only adds +1 resources instantly (can't prolong that) - but Ancestor's Memory and other sources of Brilliant are still in, so...

I proposed to remove the resource replenishment of Brilliant quite early and instead simply raise the PL bonus. Acute has +1, Brilliant could have get +3. Or increase AoE and durations by 50% (without any further INT bonus). Anything that's not obviously destroying the resource economy. I thought they got it when they started to nerf the Chanter invocation which originally applied Brilliant and now only adds +1 resources instantly (can't prolong that) - but Ancestor's Memory and other sources of Brilliant are still in, so...

Same - except the profanity and ranting and blaming players for sharing stuff. Brilliant is the most broken thing. And if you (as a designer) can't immediately see the gamebreaking combination of Brilliant and any duration boosting ability such as Wall of Draining and Salvation of Time then you have "tomatoes on the eyes" as we Germans say. Wall of Draining itself also broke (even without Brilliant) as soon as the Bloodmage was introduced.

On Ultimate it will not. Also you can just start the encounter with Lover's Embrace - so it won't stop if you become invisible.

I don't think that was the only reason though.

I think they tried to do the "viral" marketing since it's cheaper but can have great effect. That's only my guess though. I mean that's also the publisher's job, isn't it? But somehow it wasn't and the whole campaign never left Twitter as far as I can tell. And you had to follow Obsidian or WorldOfEternity in the first place to even catch that. Maybe also media wasn't as eager to report about it as they were with PoE. And don't underestimate the publicity effect of Kickstarter (compared to other crowdfunding platforms).

Yeah - also the bear form/Paladin multiclass (especially Goldpact) has awesome AR (with 0 recovery penalty) and deals good dmg per hit as well - because of the dual lashes on claws (Wildstrike + Eternal Devotion). You can use Hylea's Talons for more lashes. The low recovery penalty also makes casting Inspired Beacon worthwhile (with Sacred Immolation + Nature's Terror).

Doesn't Brilliant Departure also trigger Brilliant Tactician? Like Shadowing Beyond (with a Tactician/Rogue) does?

The setting was brought up a lot as reason why people didn't buy. At least Josh said so. Also a very frequently reply was "wow I missed Deadfire completely - didn't hear about it". Thus those points are further up the list. Deadfire has good reviews and critics - so massive disappointment with plot etc. seems to be unlikely to be THE main reason - also because you need to buy first as was mentioned. As I said above: Deadfire's marketing really seems to have failed completely. The guy responsible for it had to go.

Citzal's Spirit Lance has the same base damage as Parasitic Staff and also Firebrand (all 20-30 - or 25 on average). But Citzal's Spirit Lance comes superb and thus has +15% additive dmg compared to the staff. Which means it causes 3.75 more physical dmg per graze/hit/crit. And then the AoE and the speed indeed. The speed enchantment leads to a lot better dps because not only is it +20% mutiplicative dps (which is to be expected) but in Pillars most speed bonuses stack multiplicatively - so the more of such speed bonuses the higher the return (increasing returns). For example Deletrious Alacrity + Citzal's Spirit Lance stack their speeds multiplicatively. Firebrand comes with Damaging III which is the same as superb (in terms of dmg) and in addition has "Annihilating" which means +50% additive crit damage (+12.5 dmg) - so that's also a higher damage potential than the staff. Also because other classes can use it. But for a lvl-1 spell/weapon Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff is awesome. Helps enormously if you want/need to spare spell uses.

He wasn't saying the PoE world is over. He only said that he wouldn't do a third part of PoE as long as he doesn't know what went wrong with part two. But he also said a few days ago on stream (and several times before that) that nobody would do a third part if "nobody" wanted to play the second. Which is an exaggeration of course - but he still seems to be deeply disappointed. That also didn't indicate that the console sales did superwell. On the other hand there are still a decent amount of players that play Deadfire although it's 2 years old. We even got a new Ultimate run a few days ago. At the same time Feargus still wants to do a first-person RPG on Eora. Josh himself said a week ago or so that a) it's still what Feargus wants to do (and that he usually gets his way as I already said) and b) that he personally would not like to do PoE3 but a Pillars Tactics game. So while we might not see a PoE3 anytime soon we might see some other Pillars/Eora/PoE-world game. PoE3 seems to be off the table for now though, I agree. Maybe one can license the Pillars IP from Microsoft for a small CRPG.

Also: thank you.

Steel Garotte/Trickster does way more damage with Offensive Parry (and the occasional Riposte) but has lower defenses and limited resources. Keep in mind that the Bloodmage can stack Arcane Veil and Llengrath's Safeguard for +70 to deflection (and +20 to the other defenses and +5 AR) which won't get reduced when getting hit and can prolong that stuff endlessly (in theory) with Wall of Draining. You can trigger Safeguard easily with Blood Sacrifice. Also self damaging stuff like Sacred Immolation and Alacrity are no problem when you can prolong Hands of Light and such effects in addition to draining - while the Trickster "only" has a limited supply of +30 deflection from Mirrored Images at best. When I do the same encounter solo against not-too hard melee-foes like tigers - which might represent the common "mob" - the Trickster variant kills them faster. But if the enemies have even more ACC/defenses and/or the fight takes too long he will run out of guile and then die faster. This might be a problem in the later game - for example in DLCs like SSS where fights can take quite a while. The Bloodmage can go on endlessly. Both are vulnerable to Arcane Dampener. They usually have very high Will (due to maxed RES and high INT) but grazes can still occur. The Trickster variant is more fun (in my opinion) if you want less micro. You only need to position the guy somewhere in from of melee enemies, cast Mirrored Images and Inspired Beacon and he'll be like a meat grinder from hell. The Bloodmage variant requires a lot more micromanagement and setup with buffs etc. and takes a longer to finish most fights - but in the end I think it has a lot more potential.

Funnily enough I had one of those Benny Hill chases yesterday evening and thought: "Wait - didn't I tell people that this isn't a thing in Deadfire?".

I believe you can tint models even if they are usually not adapting to the char's color scheme. But I'm not 100% sure nor do I remember how. But I think I read something about it in the modding subforum - something about custom godlikes iirc. Edit - found it (may be too complicated): The important part I think:

First of all thanks for the nice feedback. I haven't used Frostseeker that much - but you need lots of crits for it to be great. A Ranger - in my opinion - is mandatory. Not only because of the increased ACC but also because of Driving Flight which doubles your attempts for a critical hit. Every projectile of Frostseeker can trigger the freeze AoE. So without Driving Flight it's 3 attempts per shot, with Driving Flight it's 6. Hard to beat that. I did quite some testing and also found SC Ranger to be viable because of Twinned Shot (=12 attempts). But to be honest I think something like Helwalker/Ranger would be best. Thundering Blows, Enduring Dance + Ranger ACC boosts is great, increased INT via Duality is great (bigger freeze AoE), increased MIG is great for the dmg, it's easy to get refunds for Stunning Surge because of the three projectiles + Driving Flight and so on. Stunning Surge is so good... I think both Ghost Heart and Arcane Archer can be nice. With Ghost Heart you can drop your animal companion right besides the dude you want to primarily hit (to trigger lots of crits) and don't care if it goes down. Arcane Archer can pull enemies together with Pull of Eora and doesn't get ACC malus with Frostseeker for his normal attacks. Also shooting Fireballs while triggering freeze AoEs is silly but fun. Maybe install a mod which fixes the PEN issues of Arcane Archer... I think I personally would pick Ghost Heart. Ranger/Rogue, Ranger/Cipher or Ranger/Devoted (great PENwould also be nice. I only tested those via console and did not do playthroughs with them, so others may have better advice. By the way: Avenging Storm procs also off of the freeze AoE hits. An SC Ranger with Twinned Shot and high Arcana (for the scroll) or Heaven's Cacophony helm can deal deadly AoE damage because he can produce so many hit rolls per shot. Red Hand is nice with any combination of Rogue, Ranger and Chanter. Chanter because of Sure-Handed Ila. Guns profit twice from it: the recover bonus and reload bonus both get applied. Looks like an oversight but leads to 2*-20% reload time which is neat - combined with the double-shot that's crazy fast arquebus shooting. Of course this also works if another char in the party is a Chanter. Doesn't need to be the user of Red Hand. Imagine a Scout with Gunner, Maia's Armor, Acina's Tricorn and all dmg bonuses of the Rogue + a Chanter with Sure-Handed Ila + Mith Fyr in the party: great reload speed and high dmg bonuses shout be impressive. What I think it best about Red Hand is the vessel destroy. So I can also imagine a Paladin or Priest multiclass using it. For RP purposes. Paladin also has FoD of course which is nice with Arquebuses anyway. Also here: I never used this weapon for extended durations but mostly did test runs with it and switch to it against vessel (where it rules). So again others may have better ideas from whole playthroughs with it.

I also thought so. But when I lately tested it a lot I couldn't reproduce the bug. So either it occurs very seldomly or it's truly fixed now.

To be fair they developed Deadfire pretty quickly. Also the whole mechanics got changed from PoE to Deadfire during that rather short period. Maybe that's why some things feel hasted. Potions are no problem as long as you don't use AI or don't drink them manually with AI on. I know: still not ok, but it's a bug that is circumventable. No idea why that's still in though. Seems to have been a difficult fix. Aloth's bug doesn't get encountered often so I guess it had a low priority.

Putting points into Arcana will raise the ACC of the imbue shots and spells. So it helps a lot if you use those a lot. With high Arcana you might want to check out the Arbalest "Spearcaster". It also gets bonus ACC from Arcana and that stacks. The imbue effects (Missiles, Fireball, Web and so on) will NOT proc thrice with Frostseeker (or four times with blunderbuss). As I said earlier multiprojectile weapons count as one in this case (I believe only the first projectile gets evaluated). The only thing that causes those effects to proc more than once are projectile jumps (see Driving Flight, Fire in the Hole, Wild Shot from Kitchen Stove and Waterhaper's Focus).