Loren Tyr

But why would you put cheese on potatoes?

It's not a problem of (just) the data being complex and noisy, it's that the underlying reality is. There are generally far too many interacting variables at play to in practice be captured in a single mathematical model to any degree of accuracy. Moreover, the variables and constructs (and whatever they are intended to represent) themselves are generally (and often necessarily) more loosely defined, making it very difficult to define laws even in theory. Frankly, in most fields of science there probably aren't any laws to discover at all; beyond parts physics and maybe chemistry (ie. disciplines studying the more basic aspects of physical reality), I can't imagine there really are any. In any event, for most of science even in an idealised scenario it would be impossible to determine the underlying causal structure (if any) to anything like law-like precision, so it is not relevant to the scientific practice. And while many scientific studies in these branches of science do aim to uncover causal relations (though this is probably still a minority), there isn't a whiff of scientific law to them. Whether scientific laws can be probabilistic (they certainly can't be statistical, I'd say) is presumably a subject of much debate among (some) philosophers of science, though intuitively I'd be inclined to say no. I would say that for something to be a scientific law it would need to capture a causal relation, which becomes problematic if it is non-deterministic (though this quickly veers into the philosophical discussion on causality, of course). Whether quantum mechanics describes anything that is both probabilistic and recognised as a scientific law I don't know, it's hardly my field. Either way though, the point remains that scientific laws are very much the province of a select few branches science and of little direct relevance to the rest.

I don't quite see how one could fail to differentiate them. Philosophy of science has (the practice of) science as it's subject (not to be confused with the sociology of science, which actually studies science as a human activity; though the lines admittedly get blurry sometimes), they're inherently not the same. A very large majority of modern science doesn't really aim to discover or describe laws, actually. To begin with, not all science is quantitative, not much in the way of scientific laws to be had there. But more generally, the kind of rigid (causal) regularity that you could capture in a mathematical formula and can call a law of science... most branches of science simply don't have those and never will. Most (quantitative) science is just varying degrees of statistical regularity buried under piles of noise, and if you're been a real good boy/girl you get to draw some tentative causal inferences from those too (but usually with, like, fifty caveats attached and the predictive accuracy of a blind mongoose). Physics (in a broad sense) is probably one of the few sciences that really gets into the whole business of scientific laws, though even there I rather doubt it's really the core business anymore (but frankly physics is too boring a science to pay much attention to, so who knows what they're up to these days; developing new cat memes, probably). Conversely, philosophy of science is rather broader than you're suggesting, and quite relevant to any branch of science (pretty much by definition, since philosophy purports to cover all the sciences as it's subject, not just the extra-mathy ones). The lines between it and more applied subjects like statistics and scientific methodology are again vague at best (probably not helped by the fact that eg. the philosophy of statistics is part of the philosophy of science; not sure where they're putting the philosophy of philosophy these days). And while it is certainly true that most scientists *don't* pay any attention to philosophy of science, and not overwhelmingly much to methodology and statistics, that doesn't mean they shouldn't. Quite the opposite, scientists could very much stand to pay a lot more attention to either (and while they're philosophizing, maybe throw in a bit of ethics too). They won't though, I have no illusions (but astounding job security) where that's concerned.

Do the wounding shots also multiply their damage by might +dam multiplier? That's the one thing that Enduring Flames does seem to have going for it. The damage is equal to pre-DR damage * 50% * (1+Might Bonus). I've got a Paladin with a 33 might, so it's kind of cool. If you were comfortable with a lower INT on a Paladin, Enduring Flames could be pretty great. I wouldn't personally be comfortable with a low INT Paladin though. They do get improved by might, yes. Though that's the only thing they are affected by in terms of damage bonus, they don't get boosted by Crit etc.; directly anyway, damage bonuses will of course still increase the primary damage the effect is based on in the first place.

5. Char B: Spell impacts Attacks (magical or otherwise) determine their damage and hit roll on impact. Thus, if my Wizard gets hit by an accuracy buff (or debuff) with a Fireball in mid air, this will affect the attack rolls when the Fireball explodes. Which for a spell like Fireball is admittedly a fairly small window, but it can certainly matter for intermittant effects like Chill Fog or Ray of Fire, or slow-moving projectiles like Rolling Flame.

Well, good to hear it's resolved, in any case

Just because a character would strive towards a diplomatic resolution doesn't mean he can make it happen though (see: the real world). So while it would have been a nice addition to be able to try a more peaceful solution, in my view it wouldn't have been very fitting to the situation to be able to actually reach one.

I'd love to see a new steampunk isometric RPG, but Arcanum 2... never gonna happen.

Upon exploding, a new stone flies in a seemingly random direction and also explodes. I can't quite tell what determines that direction, whether it is really random or just unpredictable. I don't think the new stones do path damage, but they definitely do damage upon explosion. Attached a screenshot I just made. The two original explosions are the two in the middle, with two additional ones to each side. In this case the new stones actually crossed, by the way. The left one went right and the right one went left. Probably a good thing these don't do Friendly Fire...

It doesn't work that way, if a second target gets damaged by Driving Flight though. And similarly with Concussive Missiles: only works if there's no one in the missile AOE. Bounding Missiles doesn't work at all (unless perhaps there's no second target for it to bounce to at all; will probably work then). Twin Stones + Driving Flight is quite hilarious as well, by the way

Heart of the Storm increases both the lighting and the piercing damage of Stormcaller. Elemental talents affect the damage of both damage types on dual damage weapons provided that the elemental damage is listed first (e.g. corrode/slashing). Pls do not report to the devs They already know, actually. I doubt they'll fix it so the damage bonus (if any) of the damage type actually dealt (for better or worse, that can obviously go both ways) though. Given the way it's implemented that would be quite complicated to do, I can't imagine they'll consider it worth the effort at this late stage.

As an addendum: replacing enchantments only works for the quality ones. With Lash and Slaying enchantments, once you've put one on a weapon you're stuck with it, can't change it to something else.

The distinction is indeed intentional, and makes sense given what it is intended to do. Normal DoT effects specify the base amount of damage they do per tick, and the total damage is then just a function of the number of ticks. But for these Wounding type of effects, the total damage is specified instead (as a percentage of the primary damage source it keys off of) and the damage per tick is then a function of the number of ticks. Though of course it would be nice to scale this total amount by the INT modifier as well as the MIG modifier, because it is indeed a bit counterintuitive that it gets worse with duration (or alternatively, keep the duration fixed, but that is likely more difficult to implement properly). There isn't really a third type of DoT, by the way. There are two separate ModifiedStats for the ApplyOverTime (ie. Wounding-type), one that grabs pre-DR damage and one that grabs post-DR damage to compute their percentage off of. All the Wounding ones use post-DR damage, the only effect that comes to mind that uses the pre-DR one is Enduring Flames. That gets rather more screwed by higher INT though, because not being Raw damage more ticks also means more DR reduction.

Hmm, it should be able to load 2.0 saves though. The Load menu option being greyed out only happens when it either can't find any save games or can't correctly open them or the temporary file it first copies them to. What I'd try for a start is to remove your old saves from the folder first. Then start a new game and save it. Exit and restart the game to make sure you can normally load this new save game. Then exit, copy your old saves to the savegame folder (which should now just contain the new savegame) and restart. It is quite possible that it will now see and be able to read your old saves as well, that it just needed to do an initial new save first to get itself set up properly (so to speak).

You can use something like sendspace to upload savegames, then post the link to it here.

Hmm, might be something wrong with your installation, actually. I just tried them for a bit with Sagani, but they worked fine for me. Takedown is basically like the Knockdown fighter ability (there is no actual rushing involved by the way, it just knocks the target Prone). Master's call essentially teleports the animal companion from wherever it is to the Ranger's side, dealing damage and knocking Prone any enemy in the direct path from original position to new position. And indeed, Play Dead should affect the animal companion (and did, when I tried).

It's not such a little bit though. Let's simplify it to a basic comparison Excluding Sabres, base ranges for normal one-handed weapons are 11-16, versus 14-20 for two-handed. Let's assume no other bonuses or effects except those of the DW / 2H talents respectively. Expected value per hit for the 1H weapons is 13.5 and 17 x 1.15 = 19.6 for 2H weapons, about 45% more. In terms of attack speed, the general formula for the duration of an entire weapon attack cycle is T x (1 + C/0.6) + D. T is the attack animation duration (1.5s for normal/'slow' melee weapons), C is the recovery coefficient, D is a small unscaled constant (mostly; this constant is probably some product of idle/processing time, time step delta, etc.). D is in the order of 0.2 seconds, I'll just ignore it here for simplicity. The C is 0.3 when dual-wielding (with talent) and 1 for other weapon attacks, provided there is no armour penalty. As such, when dual-wielding you get about 1.8 attacks for every 2H/1H attack. This is less when you add in armour penalties, down to about 1.5 (ie. C += 0.5) when wearing Plate Armour. What this means is that the damage output per time unit is proportional to 13.5 x 1.8 = 24.3 (DW) vs 19.6 (2H) when naked, and 13.5 x 1.5 = 20.3 vs 19.6 when in Plate Armour; so a 24% DPS advantage for DW when naked, but only 4% in Plate. However, if we are attacking against 5 DR, this changes to 15.3 vs 14.9 (DW 3% advantage) naked and 12.8 vs 14.9 (2H 16% advantage). Against 10 DR (for simplicity ignoring minimum damage) it becomes 6.3 vs 9.6 (2H 52% advantage) naked and 5.3 vs 9.6 (2H 81% advantage). Now, obviously in practice there will be a whole lot of variables that affect these calculations, some working more in favour of dual-wielding, others more in favour of two-handed fighting. And maybe on average a higher levels with fancy gear this may favour dual-wielding more often than two-handed fighting, it's hard to say. Which is my point: it is not evident, and as the above should show it definitely can go either way. And don't forget one-handed fighting by the way, that's right in the mix as well; in terms of DPS it is a trade-off of more frequent attacks (DW) versus better attacks (2H, 1H). And trading DPS for defense in the case of Sword & Shield, but that is even more difficult to compare meaningfully. More generally, I'd suggest forgetting about exact mathematical optimization (DPS or otherwise). Different fighting styles are all roughly on par, beyond that I'd just pick whatever appeals to you and fits your character, then make that work for you. On a completely unrelated note by the way, I generally wouldn't bother putting Shock-proofing on Plate Armour; you only get +1.5 DR out of it. Plate will always remain quite vulnerable to Shock damage anyway, you're generally better off getting the full +3 DR against some other type (or +3.75 against Slash/Pierce).

I think attack speed has been overhyped a bit, actually. Obviously, all else being equal attacking more often is better, but the math of two-handed vs one-handed vs dual-wield in terms of DPS isn't nearly as one-sided as it is sometimes made out to be, and obviously also depends greatly on weapon side effects and enemy DR. Also keep in mind that two-handed weapons in particular don't just get the +15% bonus, they also have the highest base damage to begin with (Sabres are close of course, but then you're stuck with a very specific subset of weapons and only get Slashing damage (or Bittercut)). This means that in absolute terms (which is what matters relative to DR), two-handers get much more benefit from any +X% damage bonus, not just the inherent +15% one.

Could it be that they were interrupted by an enemy? With scrolls and consumables in particular they tend to then start attacking rather than trying to cast/consume again.

Perception bonus is indeed static, it does not scale with level. You do inherently get +3 ACC per level beyond the first though. Moreover, spells and abilities get an additional +1 ACC per level (including level 1, this time).

Yeah, it's still there. It's been reported in the "3.04 to do" thread, so hopefully it'll still get fixed. See this thread for more details on the bug: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/84465-30-consecrated-ground-triggers-eyestrike-from-elryns-jacket/

How did you test it? I just gave it a try, and it seems to work fine. Keep in mind that it only works in combat mode; outside of combat all movement speeds are the same.

I'm curious why they did it this way ... It probably makes sense then for the description of racial accuracy and the survival bonuses to be updated. Incidentally, this also means that Wood Elf isn't really the de facto race anymore for builds that primarily use AOE spells (e.g. a CC wizard) rather than attacking. Technical reasons, presumably. It's triggered by an EventHandler, and you need the right one for that. It's on OnLaunch now, the only other one that would be a candidate here is the OnAttackFrameHits one, but that was clearly added much later. I'm not sure why it doesn't use the AdjustAccuracy function though, that's what most Accuracy bonuses run through and would work fine here as well. Might just be historic accident though. Keep in mind that this is in the order of 200,000 - 300,000 lines of code, it's quite a complex structure, and the kind of thing that grows rather organically over the course of development. Wood Elf distant enemy bonus does apply to AOE effects though; that runs through the AdjustAccuracy function, which is called when the attack impacts a particular enemy.

I dug around a bit more to get the details of how it works with the Survival accuracy bonus, but basically it works as follows: when an attack is launched, the AccuracyByRace status effect triggers and adds a temporary +X bonus to accuracy if the targeted enemy is of the appropriate type. Key there is "targeted enemy". Since AOE effects like Chants don't actually target anything, the bonus doesn't happen. This applies generally to any Race Accuracy bonus by the way, it's not just the Survival ones (note that Race Damage bonuses are triggered when an attack hits, so those will apply to AOE effects as well). In summary, only anything that target a specific enemy will get the bonus. It will then also apply to secondary attacks off of those, so eg. Fetid Caress will get the bonus for both the primary Paralyze effect and secondary AOE Sicken effect.

Hmm, it's not entirely clear why (annoyingly, there's a bit of likely relevant code I can't get to properly), but it is definitely my good old friend OneHitUse again. Marked Prey triggers one that adds the +20% while the damage is being computed. But multi-projectile attacks only run the clean-up (which removes the OneHitUse effects at the end of an attack) after the last projectile, which means that each time that damage computation is run for a subsequent hit an additional copy of the +20% gets added even though the previous one is still there. Driving Flight adds a Bounce to each attack. The bouncing attack hits later, but is launched during the original attack, before the next projectile hit gets resolved. Apparently the launch somehow ends up cleaning up those OneHitUse effects as well, this is unfortunately in my disassembler blind spot. I saw the same thing as well with a Powder Burns bug though, so I'm fairly certain it's in there somewhere. Gives me an idea though... ... and indeed, Marked Prey + Blunderbuss = $$$. That's obviously also a multi-projectile hit, so the Marked Prey goes all the way to +120% on the sixth pellet (even if some of the ones before them missed). The Marked Prey procs don't get the DR reduction unfortunately (not from Penetrating Shot either), but still quite nice .