MaxQuest

New post on tumblr: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/170909698336/we-just-saw-that-brandon-adler-is-game-director-of Edit: you ninja Wormerine That's a nice minor QoL improvement. But does this ("on cast or on interrupt") mean that out characters (and enemy casters) won't lose the spell-usage when hard-cc'ed? Is this what he means by: "Paralyze is currently acting as an Interrupt (it is not supposed to)"? The listed weaknesses are absolutely on point, especially the long casting/recovery durations. Glad that casting ciphers might be brought on par with other power builds.

Hmm,.. well I can't name all spells by name either. And in case of invocations, am not even trying) But I kinda remember their effect, and when the situation is right, I know that I have a specific spell for that. Also it probably helps that I'm often checking the wiki. Especially when planning a new party. So am deciding apriori which spells are core on character x, and which gonna be situational. But the great thing is: that you actually have those situational spells at your disposal. As sometimes they provide just the right answer; and it was a great feel that can deal with that boss via tactic A, or tactic B, or tactic C, all with the same party. While if the amount of spells you can learn is limited - you'll be taking mostly core stuff, and approaching majority of encounters in a quite repetitive manner. P.S. I reminds me when Curse of Recklesness and Curse of Idiocy were removed between TBC and WotLK, because "the players don't use them". Well they actually had situational uses, and I had a lot of fun with them... Personally I'm perfectly fine with "selecting" which spells to learn instead of getting them all instantly on level-up (like it was with priest and druid in PoE1). I'd just expect for a level 16 ex-vancian caster to have enough points to get 8 abilities/passives and ~32 spells. And to empower the feel of choice would expect a total pool of 48-96 (rank1-rank8) spells to choose from. And for ciphers and chanters, something along 12 abilities/passives and 18-24 powers/chants+invocations. There, you actually build your characters, and have both a choice and selection, and also: room for core and situational stuff.

I don't. But if I am reading this post right, Josh is speaking of the upcoming changes. And what comes after current beta?) Beta4 P.S. I can substitute that for "Internal Build", if it causes confusion. But internal build is something ongoing, subject to permanent changes. So not really fitting either. How about "preBeta4"? Oho, empower was quite empowered. (for reference: it was +3 to power level during Q&A #4) link

That's interesting. Because it kinda goes against what was written in update #40: The initial idea seemed to be: - multi-classers get flexibility and a higher amount of spells/abilities - single-classers get higher effects due to higher power-level In practice though, physical attacks/abilities had no power-level attached, and phys. multi-classers quickly gone ahead in dps, due to the possibility to take the best out of the low-rank stuff of two classes. If I'm reading it right this change seems to: > shift the current state of things from [mc-phys > sc-phys > mc-caster >> sc-caster] to [mc-phys > sc-phys ~= sc-caster > mc-caster] > and the amount of spells we can learn is: Generally I'm ok with a buff to single-class casters, as they were quite lagging behind. And always like having more learnable spells. Although wasn't expecting the direction taken, because single-class casters are becoming a bit more versatile than multi-class ones. And am wondering: do we even need power level attached to spells and abilities in this case now? P.S. old and new progressions for reference. 100% agreed. That was such a bull$hit complain in the first place... Some people are just lazy to read an extra few spell tooltips/descriptions.

nwn2db is the first thing that came to my mind too. And I am horrified by the amount of (free) time it likely took @Boeroer, it would mean no-gaming for quite looong for me) P.S. nwn2db was made by Mick Hawkins, there is a link in the footer. And nope, he doesn't look to be affiliated to OBS.

^ Initially read as factions too) But he meant fractions. Currently the initial damage roll has decimals. Maybe that's what he is referring too.

Uhm guys, why did a few many weapons dissapear from the list of unique weapons? I am speaking of: - "Sword of Daenysis" rapier - "Cladhaliath" spear - "Unforgiven" flail - "Forgotten Tear of the Belloved" flail - "We Toki" battle axe - "Rimecutter" battle axe - "Edge of Reason" battle axe - "Bittercut" sabre?? and others. Also personally I liked that soulboud weapons were also displayed in that list. It was easier to look at just 1 page when choosing a weapon for the further build. P.S. here's the old archive page I use instead of the current one.

Good point. I am still forgetting that not only bonus damage on crit was decreased; but also bonus duration... Comparing stats, even just MIG vs DEX vs PER, is like comparing watermelon with apples and grapes now. As their damage contribution is intertwined, and diluted by other related modifiers but all in different manner. For example MIG is heavily diluted by maluses, especially grazes and under-penetration, so if you have high MIG, you want to avoid these at all costs. DEX is heavily diluted by bonuses. Also if you have maluses, you don't want to keep it flat. PER is more useful if you have higher MIG. Otherwise it's usually better to put points in DEX. Will have to re-evaluate these latter on. Yeap, it won't be enough. Have been playing with gamedatabundles, changing and basically increasing twice the casting/recovery speed of majority of cipher powers. For some of them it's ok at 5.0/3.0s -> 3.0s/1.5s; but majority of cc stuff, really asks for +10/+15 accuracy bonus. I still think that this might be an oversight. Sure it feels nice. And with low-ranked powers there no big problem balance-wise. But if there was high-ranked big aoe deception.. this could get a bit out of hand. Imagine casting Phantom Foes, and after awhile a 60 focus-costed aoe deception power and hitting 5 targets. That's lose 60, gain 5x60x0.8 = 240 back. Thus OBS will either get limited in their design space (and will have to avoid creating such aoe deceptions) or they will have to limit the gain-back to not exceed the spent power cost. Oh a stealthy change. Changelog only mentions: - (FIXED) Ascendant's Soul Whip does less damage when not at max focus - Ascendant has been redesigned to "Ascend" at maximum focus, which causes all cipher powers to cost 0 focus and gain bonus power level until the effect fades, at which point the cipher will fall to 0 focus. The interesting thing is that I haven't even achieved max focus in a fight yet. Either enemy was already dead, or ascendant was disabled / on the floor...

Potions had 2.3s drinking duration followed by 0s recovery. Or if you used my mod: 1.0s drinking + 0s recovery. While spells had the following casting/recovery durations: Surprise, but they actually did. Unlike in Deadfire (where casting and recovery duration categories can be set separately for each spell), in PoE1 spells had no specific entry for recovery value, and it was calculated based on "attack" animation duration. Although in some cases it was done with a... twist. As you might know, in PoE1 wielding a single weapon (1h or 2h, doesn't matter) was inuring a Single1HWeapRecovFactor penalty of -0.5. And when you are dual-wielding... or casting a spell that penalty was not applied. This was resulting in the following situation: base_recovery_duration = base_attack_duration / 1.2 (for dw and casting) base_recovery_duration = base_attack_duration / 0.6 (for the rest) For example: - casting Devotions for the Faithful: 60 frames casting + 60/1.2 = 50 frames recovery - dual-wielding sabres: 30 frames attack + 30/1.2 = 25 frames recovery - single-wielding sabre: 30 frames attack + 30/0.6 = 50 frames recovery And then there was a twist. A handful of spells, specifically a very few cipher powers had an extra casting animation preceding the usual cycle. You can easily spot them by 0.277s recovery. For example Whisper of Treason. Instead of having 35 frames cast duration followed by 35/1.2 = 29.166 recovery, it had: 74 frames casting followed by 10 frames casting followed by 10/1.2 = 8 frames recovery. Resulting in total 84 frames casting duration + 8 frames recovery; or 2.8s -> 0.277s. And that's why plate armored cipher could chain-cast it almost as fast as a naked one. Another example would be Silent Scream. Instead of having 60 frames casting and 50 frames recovery duration, like other spells marked as "average"; I had same values as WoT: 74+10 casting and 10 recovery. I call these powers: unusual. And they include: WoT, Eyestrike, Silent Scream and Ringleader. Maybe there is 1-2 more, but definitely not on the first 4 ranks, as iirc I checked those. Open the calculator) Recovery of spells was affected by: Armor block, Gloves block, AttackSpeedMult. And in case of ranged spells also by RateOfFireMult. And regarding Penetrating Shot: although it was providing bonus DR bypass for some spells, it wasn't increasing their recovery. Generally you can just select dual-axes (non-durganized, without speed, and without two-weapon-style), and once you get zero-recovery due to various settings, you would get zero-recovery with spells too. The biggest change is that you can't get zero recovery in Deadfire; and as Boeroer mentioned that many effects now started to affect casting/attack phase. Meaning that we'll be able to cast really fast in the late game in Deadfire, provided that we'll have bloodlust and especially high alchemy score. P.S. Fuh, and why do replies tend to end up that long?))

Balance and formulas aside, I feel that current combat is a bit... erattic. And am still getting used to it. Everything feels both too slow and too fast at the same time; if it makes any sense. You try to cast a charm or paralyze, and it is soo slow. Non dual-wielding characters often feeling sitting there in a long long recovery. At the same time, there are two lagufaeth wizards standing far on a cliff. Bam, 2 necrotic lances, and your beguiler is on the floor. The running speed in combat is too fast as well. It feels a bit chaotic. And unpredictable. Will my cc hit, or I just wasted 5s on cast, and will have to sit through 2s of recovery before attempting again? Maybe it was just better to build a second auto-attacker? Wait, why is my dps-paladin showing (3 dots) again? I have ordered him to FoD that lizzard, and was expecting that he will continue auto-attacking it. The thing is that PoE1 combat was polished. While Deadfire combat is raw, and there are many little things that break our 'veteran' tactics from PoE1, making reality not matching expectations.

Various thoughts on state of ciphers in beta3: There are several theoretical ways to build a cipher: v1. Pure cipher. When going for pure cipher we should ask what can he do better than other subclasses? Mostly it's echo powers. He starts with a higher focus than soulblade and can toss a rank 1 or 2 cc spell right at the start of combat, and after that build focus for echo. He could single-class if there is some really neat stuff at the higher ranks, but most likely will multi-class in order to get higher focus generation (most notable being multi-classes into: paladin, ranger and devout). In order to stay versatile, he requires: - decent focus generation - relatively fast power casting (otherwise we would be playing soulblade) - and good enough acc, to avoid wasting time on nothing v2. Melee Soulblade. This cipher usually multi-classes since he needs to maximize his focus generation. He is mostly reliant on soul annihilation, with an occasional Mind Wave and Detonate. In order to be effective requires high damage from annihilation, and fast casting on the occasional Mind Waves. v3. Ranged Soulblade. This cipher uses ranged weapons, and spends his focus on ranged shred powers. Mostly low-ranked ones, since the -5 focus cost results in a relatively bigger discount. In order to be effective requires high focus gain and: either ability to quickly unload shred powers; or have shred powers deal really solid damage, and an ability to cover their cast time via some cheap concentration means. v4. Melee Beguiler. The idea behind this cipher is to quickly debuff all enemies with some aoe like Phantom Foes, and after that start benefiting from focus refunds once he continues with other cc powers. In order to be effective he requires reliability (i.e. to completely eliminate misses), decent duration of PF, and a few cc-powers with fast casting times and short recovery (because being a frontliner and thus likely in heavy armor, he can't afford long recovery time) v5. Ranged Beguiler. Basically same as v4, but attacking with ranged weapon and being in lighter armor in order to compensate for the lower base damage. v6. Ascendant. The idea is to max your focus asap, and start dealing mayhem. In order to be efficient, ascendant requires: - really high focus generation. So he will likely want to multiclass. - access to high-cost powers, because he has only 5s of Ascendant state, and there is a limited amount of powers he can cast in that period. This means that if he is going to use powers... he actually wants to singleclass. This rules out the first point, and means he heavily needs the help of his party, specifically stuff like Aefyllath, Shared Flames of Devotion, Zealous Focus, etc. - someone to grant him concentration, right before Ascending. - something to prevent incoming cc; as he can't build focus while incapacitated, and more importantly: it would be a pity to get paralyzed just during those 5s of Ascendant. Btw: during Ascendant state, cipher will either be casting free of cost or dealing phys damage (think of something like Heart of the Storm + temporary increased Soul Whip damage). But the thing is he will lose all his focus after 5s; so it would make sense, to actually lose focus at the start and not at the end of Ascendant state, such that we would be able to continue building focus right away. In theory also, these variants should be somewhat equal in power. In practice though... I've tried v1, v2, v4 and v6 on both Normal and PotD; and only v2 is really viable, as you can just keep auto-attacking and dumping focus on soul annihilation. While those ciphers that attempt to cast something have to face quite an array of problems: - First is the slowliness of power casting, coupled with a bigger window for being interrupted or hard-cc'ed, and lesser time remaining for actually building focus. - Second is unreliability. Even with maxed PER, you are going to miss quite often; and having lower base acc in comparison to PoE1 and MinRollToGraze at 25 only make it harder. - Third is affliction resistances, so if you want to charm through resistance, you have to spend 30 focus instead of 10 (and cast Puppet Master instead of Whisper of Treason). Although by themselves, resistances are ok, as they stimulate the strategy diversification for different encounters. - Fourth is enemy inspirations. In order to cc an inspired enemy you have to cast the same cc twice, i.e. lose twice the amount of time and focus. It would be ok if we could just use another power, but we have now much less of them. In PoE1 at lvl 16 we could have 8 talents and 24 learned powers. In Deadfire a single-class cipher at lvl 16 can have 8 talents and 8 learned powers. Meaning we can't afford much versatility and have to specialize. - Fifth is the lower base focus generation. We get 25 base focus from 100 damage now, compared to 35 in PoE. And the MIG->STR/RES split makes building focus even harder if you are thinking of investing points into RES for dealing spell damage. - Sixth: in PoE1 we would easily lower enemy deflection by 40 via paralyze/petrify, 30 via stuns, and 25/20 via charm/blind. Lowering enemy defenses was resulting in a higher focus gain, as well as a really solid buff to party dps'ers. In deadfire using debuffs in order to secure the following cc; and cc in order to prepare the ground for sunsequent damaging abilities unfortunately is almost non-existant in comparison. All in all I'd say that ciphers still require faster casting; complemented by a hefty accuracy bonus attached to a few of their cc powers.

^ In Deadfire carnage doesn't carry onHit and onCrit effects like in PoE1. But it won't hurt checking anyway. Why didn't you post this yesterday, I would had the time to test it

^ Probably a mask. Although first thought was: fire godlike.

Druid spiritshift forms also appear huge in the inventory screen.

Hah) and thank you for pointing this oversight out) Curiously, looking for attack speed related answers is what brought me to these forums as well. And here we are, 2 years and 1600+ posts later

I second this request. It is a really useful feature to be able to check/open the talent tree of your characters at any moment of time.

- had my character in bear form - clicked on boar form - character suddenly started to be considered by the game as naked and unarmed image1 image2 P.S. this character is an ascendant/shifter. Initially was equipped in plate armor, and dual-wielding sabres.

Happens with my paladin. When I click Flames of Devotion (with Shared Flames) I quite often can't click on enemy any longer for my paladin to attack. Reloading the save helps though.

^ Exactly) The main reason ranger was taken as second class is because of 1 resource Full Attacks and the +1 AR from stalker subclass. Although must say that 7m is really short, and that +1 AR from stalker link doesn't seem to stack with Inspired Defenses. P.S. Kinda fun, but Lay on Hands on the early levels sometimes is better to keep unupgraded, because of the cost increase.

It depends on your party composition, and the amount of cc you have at your disposal. But if you want to make your cipher really shine you have to max his focus generation, and this is done via: - dual-wielding sabres (e.g. Purgatory or Bittercut with Spirit of Decay) - dual-wielding rapiers (e.g. Sword of Daenysis) - taking a good 2H with speed, specifically Blade of the Endless Paths or if you are ranged: - use rain of goddah field or cloudpiercer warbows Also you can use Tidefall before lvl 12, Stormcaller before lvl 8, and Persistence before lvl 8 (sometimes even before 12). And additionally if you want a little focus spike at the start of combat, you can start with 1 Lead Spitter shot, and after that switch to your main weapon set. Of course the proposed dw/2h are more squishy than 1h+shield setup, but you will easily compensate for it with extra cc from another party member. A second cipher works best for this. So if an enemy jumps on cipher1; cipher2 quickly charms or paralyzes him. You might find following threads useful/related to your question: - cipher focus generation - best ranged weapon for focus generation - different ways to build a cipher - early-game survival for melee cipher - good skills for cipher: P.S. Regarding your spread and powers of choice. You seem to be building an auto-attacker focused on self-buffing. It gonna be decent, but generally I'd say ciphers are capable of awesome damage dealing via their aoe and beam damaging powers. In my case spell-damage usually outpaces auto-attacking damage in a 2:1 proportion. Other way is to build a cipher purely focused on cc; in that case you want a good enough focus generation, but you don't really care of what damage he deals, since he keeps enemies chain-disabled while other team members shred them to pieces. You can check the v1-v6 variants described here.

Glad to hear it. Seems that I motivated you to even make first post And thanks for reporting) That was an oversight. Maces and Spears have 30 frames base attack duration, and 50 frames base recovery duration. Fixed and updated the calculator)

^ Welp, at least it was fun for awhile)

Out of curiosity have tried it with bleakwalker/stalker now. Couldn't do it on lvl 6, but it's easy enough on lvl 9 even with AI-autopilot turned on Link to video. Although it took 33s on normal time... Btw, he didn't get increased stats with level-scaling (only-up) on; but yeah he gets +15 to defenses, 20% bonus hp and +4 more PEN from potd difficulty: P.S. Went with exceptional brigandine and exceptional clubs.

Had same happen to me in Poko Kohara. Invisible Sand Grubbing was hitting and killed my Mercenary Wizard.

Hah, cannot unsee it now)