mosspit

It is implied.

It means the actual roll of the proc. If the proc rolls a hit or graze, it will confuse the target. If it rolls a crit, it will Charm the target.

As mentioned, those scenarios can happen when the difference between Acc (Accuracy of your attacks) and the corresponding save for said attack (generally 1 of the 4 saves) is greater than 99. This will mean all instances of said attack will already crit and additional Acc will not change this. Similarly, if the difference is too huge such that additional acc will still result in a difference of < -100, additional acc (which again assuming still keeps the acc low enough) will not help to make the attack qualify for graze. In these fringe cases, acc will not do anything unless the respective threshold can be crossed. But yes in a way, there is some diminishing returns if you compare the gains between a situation where an attack can still qualify for all 4 hit resolution states vs the extreme all crit or all miss situations. However, it is generally uncommon in a non-min/ax scenario.

That statement doesn't make any sense. Accuracy works like this: You either have enough to get a hit or you don't. Having 70 accuracy and hitting an enemy is no different from having 80 and hitting. In no situation does 1 accuracy add 2% dps. The only thing that adds dps is attack speed and actual damage. His quote make sense because he considers attack hit rolls into dps calculation. Not sure 2% increase per 1 acc as there are more factors to consider. The fringe cases are when the bonus acc is huge enough to render the 1d100 roll inconsequential in miss/graze/hit/crit consideration (ie Acc - Save > 99 such that all attack rolls are crits ignoring external conversion effects) or vice versa. With such large rolls it only matters if that particular 1 accuracy would have made a graze a hit and a hit a crit. It has to do with the value towards deflection. There is no direct relation to accuracy affecting dps at all. I believe most here will include hit resolution into dps, and not just consider it in a vacuum where it is "Damage Per Second of when only all grazes/hits/crits have landed".

That statement doesn't make any sense. Accuracy works like this: You either have enough to get a hit or you don't. Having 70 accuracy and hitting an enemy is no different from having 80 and hitting. In no situation does 1 accuracy add 2% dps. The only thing that adds dps is attack speed and actual damage. His quote make sense because he considers attack hit rolls into dps calculation. Not sure 2% increase per 1 acc as there are more factors to consider. The fringe cases are when the bonus acc is huge enough to render the 1d100 roll inconsequential in miss/graze/hit/crit consideration (ie Acc - Save > 99 such that all attack rolls are crits ignoring external conversion effects) or vice versa.

Thanks for the replies.

The choice of using Berath Blessings might mean I can fine-tune the difficulty in other areas. Like self-imposed restrictions of not leveling Alchemy too high or more confidence in taking up Trial of Iron mode. It is another tool to fine-tune my personal enjoyment of the game.

Does the will / reflex lowering gets propagated via Carnage? I assume no, but asking just in case.

One way to nerf consumables tastefully will be what PoE1 did. To make it easy to level initially but to scale the points needed according to the level. Scalar increment is just difficult to balance. But the idea of having more interesting items effects is appealing too. i am actually okay to avoid using OP abilities - I can limit to like maybe level 12 in alchemy? You know, in the same vein of limiting resources akin to solo'ing like what Loren Tyr states. But the thing is when alchemy and explosives are nerfed, they will likely be nerfed to the point where they are useless. So the outcome will be that the option is lost - Either because we choose not to abuse it, or Obs decide it for us. In any case, let's not kid ourselves. The nerfs will come.

Build melee as off tanks, mix in survivability and offense. Or build your melee with escape mechanism. @OP there are games where the tank gives a taunting scream and all nearby enemies will stick to the tank like glue. I assume you prefer those?

The story to be honest is quite disappointing. Maybe I overlooked the story as I wasn't particularly invested, but I think they should expanded more on the part of gods being "man-made". Instead I thought I was on a glorified "follow the breadcrumbs" journey. Also I was wondering if I was the only one that totally had no idea the last boss was the Guardian of Ukazio? I kinda expected to have a go at the BFG. In fact, I did the superb/legendary upgrades after the said fight....

I was extremely disappointed when I learned about this. No weapon procs is just tells me that rather then thinking about how it can be balanced, obs just rather remove the proc propagation and not deal with the situation in the first place... I mean I dont deny that it can potentially be OP. But I'm just bumped that the a layer of interaction or mechanics was entirely removed. In place of that is just controlling the performance of Carnage procs using pre-determined rules and skills. I guess there has to be reason to use WotEP huh?

I definitely agree with the notion of "war of attrition". I can't really complain with the game direction since I didn't participate in the beta phase of Deadfire but I am quite puzzled with the removal of the Endurance design. In whatever state PoE1 was in, the concept of Health barring things like Vital Essence helped to keep encounters "contained". There is a sense that fights can't really go on indefinitely as Health can run out (and it did in some encounters for me) In Deadfire, perpetual healing plus the now increased DR of enemies / increased numbers made it feel more of a slogfest. And I feel that any strategies that can speed things up (which will probably be considered OP) will likely be a target for nerfs in further patches.

Indeed Backstab is an ok pick. Not an auto-pick (even less now with the nerf) but it clearly synergize with subclass like Assassin. On glass cannon build, the gamer would want to disengage using invisibility or enter invisibility to make a beeline to the backline without being engaged along the way. So why not use those invisibility opportunities to add more dmg? Ofc thats the case as mentioned by previous posters that it can be used at least once per fight for an alpha strike. All in all, still an improvement over the PoE1 version in terms of usage. On a side note, i always liked the way games like DAO treated backstabs - triggering based on relative positioning. Was wondering whether it was a framework/engine limitation, or just not something that was coherent with the overall game design.

Hmmm, I am actually thinking that theres no huge benefit to going pure Ciphers I mean which of the PL 8/9 abilities are game changing? Defensive Mindweb is a shadow of its PoE1 predecessor, Time Parasite got nerfed. Maybe TP is still viable, I dont know. But thats a PL8 ability after all. On the other hand as other poster mentioned, there are marital classes that can further improve the Ciphers weapon attacks. That in turn help with Focus generation. Also I don't see too much benefit with getting more Cipher abilities. You can just pick the notable ones like WoT, Echo Beam, Borrowed Instinct, Disintegrate. You will probably just be using those as a pure Cipher after all.

Yes, the 2nd upgrade has no stealth component. Didn't try the 3rd upgrade but it should not have the stealth component too.

Ah crap, turns out I could not complete my current playthrough for the new patch to hit after all I missed the boat on experiencing the imba OSA from PoE1 and I could not be in time for experiencing Brilliant too. For that huge amount of changes in the patch, they decided to roll it live out a little too quickly imo......

I thought I chip in on your comment about trap builds. The elimination of trap builds in your analogy of MTG is valid as MTG games are primarily a PvP format. When there is a direct competitive nature in the game play, balance is always important to encourage diversity. However, for single player CRPGs it is less important as there is no direct motivation for classes to outperform each other that is directly linked to nature of game play. Personally, I play builds that have interesting mechanics and interactions and not necessarily because they are top tiered. Have done so in PoE1, will most likely do so in Deadfire. I think the targeted nerfs of the patch are warranted. What I am apprehensive about is the blanket nerfing of most items. Because it is just not well thought through. Even leading to items that were borderline useless to be nerfed to "why bother" level. Using MTG as an analogy, I think that the latest patch is similar to increasing all summoning and activation costs by 1 colourless mana. When you have some choices that are overtly overperforming than other choices, that is not fun for the people like to play those "other choices." So even in a single-player, non-competitive setting, you have a comparison setting. I felt like this was always a major problem with BG/IWD because by the end-game not having a mage in your party was a major trap choice. You could still beat the game just fine without one, but if you saw just how face-melty other people experienced the game when they had an improved alacrity, time stopping, vomit-inducing-flash-of-colors mage clearing everything (with IWD2 it's different because no time stop or improved alacrity but no less insane with spell focused wail of the banshee), that basically says to players who don't like spellcasting "ha ha screw you your game is much harder." Some quality variation is inevitable, because it's probably impossible to create a non-trivial yet perfectly balanced game (and frankly I'm not sure a perfectly balanced game is even desirable since it is fun when there's a particularly good item or spell or ability that players feel they've earned). But we can at least bound that variation to some small degree (such as by nerfing action speed bonuses across the board, or by having smaller magnitude deflection bonuses compared to PoE1). And it's not just me opining about it, the "no trap choices" philosophy is at the heart of what JE Sawyer was doing with the pillars system (there's a 1 hour GDC talk he gave about it). Again, I'm reserving full judgment about 1.1 because what little I know is mostly people complaining about a nerf which is not exactly a neutral patch changelist, but a "blanket" item nerf, if indeed is the case (such as action speed) seems to me the designers thinking that they were just too good to begin with and something they either wanted to change before release but couldn't before code freeze, or only realized when a larger population than just backer betas started drilling into itemization and ability choices. To go back to an MTG analogy that I think would be more appropriate for this scenario, this would be like how countermagic and card draw has gotten more expensive, because they were just too good to begin with, a fact that everyone resisted/hated at the time of transition because they were used to how things were and how powerful they were was only really apparent to the designers because of their own data and the limited design space the undercosted countermagic and card draw enforced. (I.E. a hard counterspell was UU, but now appears to be more fairly costed at ½UU; a mana-leak type effect was 1U and is now more like 2U; there's a lot more conditional counters; card draw is across the board much more expensive and also more conditional--more "looting" effects or scry rather than pure unconditional card draw). First and foremost, the point of the post is to point out there is a difference in purpose for balance in the context of competitive PVP 1v1 vs single player CRPG. And sorry, but I have to disagree, at least partially, on the part of choices not being fun for builds that are not overperforming. Because I have in reality done so to a certain extent, to avoid using abilities in PoE1 like Relentless Storms and Mind Wave. And am still having fun (fun in itself subjective). I am a firm believer that diversity and difficulty are 2 sides of the coin. By virtue of difficulty would mean that not all builds are capable of passing through content, at least in comparison to the lesser difficulties. But as from my comment that agreeing to some of the nerfs, I believe in balanced design behind abilities and grossly outperforming abilities deserves a second look. But balance is not in the same priority as with competitive settings. Because in 1v1 settings, success is very strongly tied in outperforming opponents and so trap conditions can occur. While in single player games, success is not tied in a build outperforming another build. Rather it is builds outperforming content. While builds does the job with varying effectiveness, balance does not have the same level of importance and motivations as with a competitive setting. Again as I said, I am specifically against blanket nerf as Obs cannot possibly done moderate to in-depth QC on the effects of those nerfs. Well, I guess thats the point of beta test release for gathering the results (yup we are the QC people). But what are the chances of Obs sieving through the feedback and only getting those that are more grounded and also went through entire playthrough(s) before public release? Historically speaking, not high....

Thing is, it's not about there being no "top-tier" choice, it's about appropriate build diversity (i.e. "no trap builds"). The "no trap builds" design philosophy of pillars is very similar to the approach that Wizards of the Coast takes with their tournament-level Magic: The Gathering banning decisions. They know that banning a particularly powerful card or undermining a deck type is just going to produce a new #1 card or top deck type, but what they care about is making sure that no card or deck strategy is particularly dominant. The reason is two-fold: a. players find it boring when there's only one or limited dominant choices in deck types or cards and b. wizards of the coast sees less revenue when players drop out of playing because the metagame is too boring or static. it's win-win for wizards of the coast to prefer some diversity of cards/decks. So if barbarians are the new #1, that's fine, so long as it's not so the #1 that it renders any party without a barbarian a trap build. I'm reserving full judgment until the ramifications of the patch are fully known, but everything so far sounds like a similar thing; obsidian is knocking down dominant (either too-good or too-prevalent) stuff and is doing only incremental improvements to lift stuff up so as to promote viability/diversity of builds (by them not having been overshadowed by some really good stuff). So Whispers of the Endless Paths gets knocked down a bit, but AFAICT any weapon that comes up to take its place isn't there because it got buffed to be #1, it'll just be a little better relatively speaking, so not-gaming your PoE1 history and not-getting Whispers of the Endless Paths if you do great swords is not going to be a trap decision. I thought I chip in on your comment about trap builds. The elimination of trap builds in your analogy of MTG is valid as MTG games are primarily a PvP format. When there is a direct competitive nature in the game play, balance is always important to encourage diversity. However, for single player CRPGs it is less important as there is no direct motivation for classes to outperform each other that is directly linked to nature of game play. Personally, I play builds that have interesting mechanics and interactions and not necessarily because they are top tiered. Have done so in PoE1, will most likely do so in Deadfire. I think the targeted nerfs of the patch are warranted. What I am apprehensive about is the blanket nerfing of most items. Because it is just not well thought through. Even leading to items that were borderline useless to be nerfed to "why bother" level. Using MTG as an analogy, I think that the latest patch is similar to increasing all summoning and activation costs by 1 colourless mana.

I will be reminded of IWD2 when it is considered safe to rest in the wilderness with an Animate Dead watch over me.

Well having 90 base deflection and deduct 5-10 deflection based on your weapon of choice is actually counter intuitive. A scepter in hand means you actually have a weapon that can deflect something. Is it as effective as a weapon or shield? hell no. Also having 80 deflection instead of 90 deflection has almost 0 effect on your deflection ability on most enemies in the game. This only matters when you're around level 1-10. After that you can go in without weapons/armor and still beat the crap out of enemies. Probably also in PotD. It was done in POEI, I'm sure it's even easier now. Well, at the very least it is heading in a correct direction. Better than nothing in this case. There is a matter in the magnitude of the penalty. It could be a case of -50 instead of -5 with a min of 10(?) A matter of realism - I find it is a grey area of discussing the "battle practicality" when fireballs are shot out from thin air.

In the game's defense, I believe the wands, scepters and rods have a deflection penalty now (now as in compared to PoE1). Which makes sense. So they can maybe extend those to other range weapons.

Because this is a blanket nerf? With this approach all OP abilities get affected, without the need to actually understanding which abilities are in fact OP. I mean does anyone seriously believe that obs actually reviewed all those "1000+" changes individually? But hey, it gets the job done right?

Probably modding will be the best bet in theory. But it is tricky to do that at this stage as I expect obs to be aggressive with patching at the start. Which might mean you have to tune the mods accordingly as the patches come in, which in turn might not be a good experience.

I'm holding off playing until the balance settles somewhat. I don't want to get attached to certain abilities or items then see them get nerfed. Argh... I am hoping to complete my current playthrough before the patch goes live. For the sake of playing on a "clean slate". Might not have the luxury of doing that since time is a little scarce though...