Boeroer

Cool. I haven't checked everything but just flew over it - but it looks good. Two things I noticed that aren't quite correct: Gipon Prudensco and Nomand's Brigandine don't give immunity to engagement but instead give immunity to disengagement attacks. This sounds like the same but it isn't: While immunity to engagement prevents enemies from engaging you entirely, immunity to disengagement attacks lets enemies still engage you (and thus you might still profit from stuff like Entonia Signet Ring) and they will also do disengagement attacks if you break engagement - but all those attacks will be turned into misses. This opens up some synergy with abilites like Imagined Pain, Riposte and so on but also with item enchantments or modals like Offensive Parry (Whispers of the Endless Paths) or the small shield modal for example. I could't find Edér's armor in the list (maybe I missed it). It provides immunity vs. Reflex attacks via the enchantment Veteran's Maneuver. This can be used with stuff like Keeper of the Flame + Whispers of the Wind + Imagined Pain (Imagined Pain gives 1 wound per miss against you, the flame AoE of the flail will also hit you but targets reflex so it gets turned into a miss -> +1 wound). --- The pet's name is Ooblit, not Ooblist. I couldn't find Harley (the dog pet). It raises ranged damage by 10% - but actually works with all sorts of damage that's not melee, including spells. Several pets give increased AoE size as secondary, party-wide effect (like Loki does as primary, but to everybody and weaker - I think 5% or so). As I said I just flew over it...

No, it doesn't properly stack it seems. I guess the longer push from Force of Anguish overrides the shorter one from the staff, no idea. At least nothing noteworthy happened when I tested it. Also Clear Out + Ll's Staff doesn't do multi-push it seems. One weird effect I noticed: if you use knock-ups with the staff ( for example Skyward Kick) there will be no knock-up animation: the target will stay targetable, but the knockup "CC" effect will still get applied to the enemy for a few secs (is hard-cc'd then as if prone but really isn't). I guess the push animation overrides the knockup animation. This can prevent the usual problems where allies try to attack the enemy but will miss because it gets knocked up (and becomes untouchable while in the air). I also tried a Rogue with Arterial Strike and pushed the melee enemies away from me. Most of them are stupid enough to try to reach me again... and again.

PS: if you summon an Essential Phantom after you sumoned the staff you can play tennis with the enemies as your ball.

Please report how it went. Funny side effect: if you use the Helm of the White Void then every attack you do with the staff gets +10 accuracy (Rymrgand's Influence) - because the staff causes a hobble effect with every strike. That's a really nice bonus to have.

Hm... not such bad idea imo. That way focus generation (and spell spamming) will stop, but in a different way it's still useful to be a "tanky" Psion in melee then. Stackable bonus defenses are hard to come by and have increasing returns, so they are valuabe. A the same time you can't make full use of your defining ability (to cast cipher powers). I like it!

Called to His Bidding, the Ancient Instrumen of Death

Jut checked the wiki - which also doesn't mention the healing - then checked in the game and it is exactly as you said, @thelee. Maybe the healing was added with a patch, no idea. Anyway - updating the wiki now... https://pillarsofeternity.fandom.com/wiki/Nature's_Bounty_(Deadfire_item)

Huh? Really? I haven't used it for ages and thought it only did said buffing. Good to know it also heals (that's better than I thought).

In this case that "only" means longer duration. The effects (+action speed, +2 MIG and PER) do not scale. Edit: that was partially wrong, it also does +20 health (base) which gets boosted by Alchemy. Thanks @thelee

I compiled such a list of games: Yes, everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Nobody said differently. But it's another thing to assume that just because I feel a certain way a lot of people should share that sentiment. Color me interested. How many? In this forum, on Twitter and on Discord I didn't even read once about this problem. There were many complaints, some occured frequently (loading times, performance, main story arc, nerfs etc.) and some very esoteric ("not enough women smiling" wasn't even the weirdest, we had one guy who wanted a refund because there are naked butts in the game...) - but not one complaint about reused parts of the environment. But maybe I just missed other sources where this was discussed. For example I don't use Reddit or RPGCodex... My personal pet peeve with reusing stuff is that the late introduction of FullVO lead to a lot of voice actors getting "reused" for different characters in the game. Although they tried to alter their voices as best as they could I can tell all VAs who are doing multiple parts because I have good ears and excellent voice recognition. When speaking to Udine after talking to Mad Morena I just cringe, but alas... The only VA who fooled me for some time (from PoE until the Engwithan Digsite in Deadfire) was Matthew Mercer who's doing Aloth AND Edér... But since I didn't read about this "problem" anywhere else I just guessed that I'm pretty alone with that. So I didn't assume that reusing voice actors for multiple chars was a huge problem in general and therefore I didn't assume that many players didn't buy Deadfire - or won't buy upcoming games - because several chars were voiced by he same person (and I can hear it and it bugs me a bit). If reusing parts of the environment or portraits is such an offputting thing that transcends specific groups of players there should be plenty of sources for that, shouldn't it? I went through the thread again and so far it was a respectful and rather carefully worded discussion - especially when considering it's an internet forum with anonymous users. It's not aggression if your claims get challenged - it's just objections. The only (passive-)aggressive part so far was that^ - since it suggests that the participants in this discussion started to behave like fanboys without any objectivity or arguments - which was not the case.

Unfortunately the duration will not change. It is determined at the time you cast the spell. But the healing ticks will indeed rise in potency. This even happens if you change MIG while the spell is active by the way - or if you add any other effect that raises healing during the duration of the HoT spell. For example when a Mercy and Kindness chant kicks in while the HoT is active. Robust's healing (10 base) does scale with PL and MIG etc. if I'm not mistaken. I'm not 100% sure if it will inherit/change with the PL of the Nature's Balm spell. Good question, would need to test this... Nature's Bounty: I guess not - but tbh I didn't really use Nature's Bounty since I usually avoid using consumables.

Until the next rest: I guess so.

It costs time. Time is invaluable once the release date comes near. At least that's the case for regular software development - but I'm fairly confident it's the same with games development. Like how much more do you think it would have cost them to prepare unique items for every passive ability? Doesn't seem much but yet they didn't do it - because something else seemed more important (at least Josh said so when asked about it in a stream). For the Community Patch mod I then created unique icons for all passive abilities - and it took me quite some time not only to draw them (that was the "easy" part), but also to check back with the others to get feedback, then alter the icons, get feedback again - and once they were all considered as good enough they weren't even in the game yet - an atlas had to be made etc., then feedback came in about how the icons looked in the actual game... and so on and so forth. Creating assets for the game and then really putting them there isn't just painting over something. It would be if one would create a game alone I guess. Anyway: if the producer deemed other things more important... then stuff has to be cut out - even if it's easy to do stuff. Nice. I have a diploma in media computer science from a German university. One of my main courses was 3D graphics and animation. I did 3D animations for commercials and presentations for a living when I was younger. The most time was spend in the feedback loop. Also the pay was pretty terrible, hehe...

How are concentration layers removed once the target receives interrupts? Is there no accessible event for that?

It's not unusual to reuse assets. As long as it's not too obvious that's okay. It cuts cost and development time considerably. It's not that easy to spot in 3D games because the environment in 3D games is not made of fixed backgrounds but composed of 3D objects. Anyway, it may well be that Deadfire's release time was approaching fast and level designers realized they didn't have enough time or budget left to create more unique assets. Such constraints may lead to the designers reusing more assets than is optimal. That's not a problem of the engine or the general method of designing the levels though. I'm pretty sure if they have had more time (and money) the artists would't have reused assets a lot. It's way more fun to create unique environments instead of reusing existing parts - but it's also more expensive. Deadfire's budget and development time got bloated a lot during development by Full VO and stuff like ship combat. It might well be that those took away considerable resources from other parts of the game.

I especially like this combo (some damage that applies over time, be it a DoT like Plague or some ticking stuff like Relentless Storm or both ;)) when going Barbarian/Shifter. Just because of Blood Thirst. At some point, while you are engaged in melee combat, some weaker enemies will start dying from the spells and then Blood Thirst kicks in and speeds up your slashing considerably which is a lot of fun imo.

Hah, how awesome!

Ouh - nice testing.

That all sounds a little bit too complicated for my taste. So far I would still prefer the crit-based approach of the CP. In addition I would propose that any interrupt (that's not countered by concentration of course) will also pause Soul Mind to tune it down a bit - also fits thematically imo. I don't dare to suggest anything that's solely interrupt based although it would be the "cleanest" solution from a systems standpoint (I would like the mechanics of the Grimpoire of Vaporous Wizardry to be applied to a Psion: damage causes an interrupt - but no pause to focus generation) because of the ability to circumvent that completely with the Fractured Casque or perma-courageous.

I guess the isometric and painted 2D background approach. Obsidian wanted a spiritual successor to IWD/BG and that also meant to somewhat capture the looks of the old infinity engine games (but with more contemporary quality of course) I guess. I don't know if it's the most gorgeous game I've ever played, but I def. like the aesthetics a lot and can't name another CRPG which I liked better in that regard. But yeah: matter of taste.

Presumably one will have more "idle time" (or less stress) when playing TB mode over RTwP (unless you pause every second and check the log - which would be tedious as hell I guess) which might lead to a better understanding of the underlying mechanics. Maybe also because every single decision for action will be more important - so one will make extra sure it's effective which might motivate players to study the mechanics more thorougly. But those are somewhat different mechanics. Everything that's time-based (action speed, recovery time, durations, damage/healing over time etc.) is very different from the RTwP mode. And especially the action speed/recovery time mechanics of the RTwP modus are pretty obscurely implemented so it's extra hard to understand them properly. The TB mode makes that very easy because it's all organized in... well, turns.

That is a matter of taste. I find the visuals of D:OS games to be extremely unappealing. BG3 is better but still not what I would prefer. --- The reason why they took Unity3D was most likely that they crowdfunded PoE as the last straw before going bankrupt. Unity3D is cheap and easy to use. It also allows mixing 2D and 3D content without modding the engine a ton. PoE was done as a spiritual successor of the old infinity engine games. Something like Larian's look amd feel (including rotating camera etc.) wouldn't have achieved that. Then, if you want to make a sequel that doesn't look fundamentally different from the first game you have to stick to the engine I guess. I think most players don't realize what an effort it is to develop an inhouse engine and which immense downsides such an approach has. I'll just name two for starters: - it takes a huge amount of time, know-how and money... while it per se doesn't generate any profit - if you employ new staff you have to school them for your inhouse-tech. This takes time and money again. It may also repell people who'd rather pick a job where they a) can start right with what they know and b) can improve their skills with an engine that other potential employers might be using as well. There's more of course but those two hurt the most imo. Well, having to deal with so many different platforms (Win, Mac, PS, Xbox etc.) is equally painful, bit I never released a game so I can't say for sure if this is a mess that hurts your business equally bad. I only produced "normal" software and even there it was so annoying to tailor your software to all the different platforms, browsers even until frameworks emerged which did all the work for you. I suspect games are no different in this case. The only advantage is that you can build an engine that fits your ideas 100%. But even then I'd argue that you're almost always better off modding an existing one or developing plugins/components. The only case where it might make sense is when you need a near to 100% optimized engine for a super demanding game, like most AAA+ tiles are, and you can't achieve it with existing engines. But games like PoE are not such games. I worked as a programmer, software engineer, project manager and then business owner long enough to have learned the hard way that if somebody suggests new inhouse solutions for stuff that can be done with existing frameworks you must take them to the broom closet and slap them to their senses. Maybe at the time Larian was starting with D:OS there was no engine that fit their special needs. Also they might have had a lot of legacy stuff and know-how from all the games they did, back to the original Divine Divinity - so it might be they didn't start from scratch.

I guess so. The mechanics of Soul Mind don't sound very impressive and it's difficult to deduce its usefulness from the description alone - and I suspect not many had done a whole playthrough with a Psion when the CP was created. The description of the original Soul Mind were like "on getting damaged" and CP changed that to "on receiving a critical hit". So in theory getting crit by CC/affliction wouldn't pause Soul Mind in the vanilla game because there's no damage involved - while the CP version would stop, right? If that's correct then maybe the CP version isn't really a buff but just shifts it from damage to crirital hits.

The thing in PoE that was better about shifting was that the natural weapons scaled their base damage with level which lead to really high numbers per hit at some point. In combination with Avenging Storm that lead to the highest melee damage output in the game against single targets, even higher than Rogue's. In Deadfire that's not the case anymore. Single class Druid doesn't do the amount of shifted melee dmg as in PoE. But instead you have multiclassing which can produce very good results when combining Spiritshift with some other cool abilities of other classes. One example I particularly like: Goldpact Knight + Bear Spiritshift gives you an absurd amount of armor while not slowing you down at all. Meanwhile Flames of Devotion in combination with Wild Strike and also Nature's Terror + Sacred Immolation (use Lay on Hands and Nature's Bounty on yourself to not die) are great tools for dealing damage in melee range. Very fun and rounded combo imo. Just an example though.

56 focus every 14 secs would mean you only get 4 focus per second. But Soul Mind scales with universal Power Level. That means stuff like Acute, Stone of Power, potions etc. may lift you to 5 or even more focus per second. You cannot speed up the phrase generation of Skalds with Power Levels. Another difference is that chanting stops after an invocation is cast - and as you said once you suffer hard CC and so on. Soul Mind never stops (besides the pause after getting damaged/ getting a crit). Keep in mind that Skald only has favorable invocation costs for offensive invocations while the others are more expansive. This limits his versatility. Psion doesn't have those limitations. Comparing the costs of the PL1 stuff of Skald with PL 3 stuff of Psion is not fair, is it? If we compared PL1 stuff of Skald with PL1 stuff of Psion then at higher Power Levels the Psion could dish out his spells a lot faster than the Skald - even if we included the phrases he would get on melee crits. Psion could generate the 10 focus for Soul Shock every 2 secs for example - while the Skald would be stuck at a Her Revenge every 14 secs (with a crit in between maybe halved every now an then). Her Revenge my be the stronger spell in general, but I'm just using the spells here to compare the resource generation/spell cost of the power levels. If we compared PL3 stuff of the Skald with PL3 stuff of the Psion: the Psion could cast a PL3 spell every 10 secs while the Skald could only cast an offensive PL3 invocation every 22 secs if I'm not mistaken (maybe every 16 if he gets a crit refund in between). Skald needs a lot more micromanagement/his harder to script than Psion. For a caster Psion is very easy to script - especially if you only use a few abilities (like in my case Puppet Master and Mental Binding as backup). That's no advantage for a player char of course but it's very nice for a hireling. Of course Psion has no chant aura with useful effects. But then: why handle them as opposites? The best use of a Psion so far was it to pair it with a Chanter actually. I prefer Troubadour (bc. of Brisk Recitation). Other casters also work. It's just insane to use the "action time + recovery of one class" to generate resources for the other. With Psion/Troub this works in both ways: resources will almost never be zero - while it's an incredibly versatile combination. Also lots of fun to play imo. Anyway: I was also very skeptic with the Psion at the start until I actually played one (or two now: Psion/Troub: and now lately SC Psion). There's something to it that only unlocks if you actually play it rather than theorycraft it. Maybe the game mechanics with RTwP are just too complex to relaly predict how every combo will play out in the end. It's just so that even the SC Psion* really suprised me with how effective it was. I ddidn't mean to say it was super strong - jsut that it is way, way better than I anticipated. Together with Beguiler my favorite Cipher subclass now. Maybe even better than Beguiler because I played the heck out of Beguiler in the past. )* which I only included because I did an "SC only/refreshing resources/maximum AI!"run - and I thought SC Psion would be supereasy to script