Loren Tyr

Those effects are quite unclear, yes. Several of them actually have multiple 'charges', which is kind of suggested by the description but never very clearly explained otherwise. For Wizard's Double it really is just a single hit/crit and it's gone, but if you're walking around with +40 Deflection that does get a lot less. Relative to Deflection attacks at least, any hit/crit counts. So it depends a bit on the situation, but especially if you have reasonable Deflection to begin with like your standard sword&board fighter, the effect can last very long. However, Iron Skin has 10 charges, so you get the full bonus until you get hit/critted for the tenth time. Unfortunately there's no counter to tell you how many there are left. Mirrored Image has 5 charges, but the effect also decreases by 5 Deflection (starting from 30) every time you get hit/critted. Those are the main ones, I think. Let me know if you want details on any other ones though (if any).

Josh thinks he's onto something I think he's onto something You don't think so (because you like the game) not a compelling argument either. Also I'm open to counter points beyond "you can't prove that" I'm not saying you can't prove that. I'm saying you haven't, not even by the vaguest of approximations. You're the one making all sorts of claims here, this is your thread. That puts the onus on you to substantiate those claims. This is not about sales numbers, if it was about sales I'd suggest Obs dumb down and consolify their games more but they're already doing that (hello Tyranny). Adding wackiness, quirkiness, whatever you call it, would have been required to make a more traditional RPG, and certainly to make an IE games successor. That's my point. If that's better or not is open to discussion, but as I said if you argue against it you'd have to reconcile the serious business tone of things with the "let's go kill some evul munsters" aspects first. Again, required by whom? What are you basing that on? Because you are strongly suggesting that this is some established fact, rather than just your particular view of things, but are thorougly failing to provide any support for that. Moreover, whether that would be better is certainly open for discussion, you're the one who opened it. Also, where exactly is the difficulty in reconciling a serious tone with rooting out evil? There's no contradiction there. Helps if you spell it right, I suppose. Or for that matter, don't get too caught up in some good vs evil dichotomy, it's more a "shades of grey" kind of thing. Which fits a serious work of fiction rather well, of course.

To be honest, I rather prefer it this way; the banter is much more naturally integrated in the game, they're just snippets of conversation that go on in the background to lend flavour rather than obtrusively triggering dialogue windows for dialogue that the main character isn't even part of. I like the non-party NPC variant of that as well actually, with the sideways comments on quests, tragic knife accidents and other goings on in the background. They should do more of that, frankly. Perhaps also in a more non-verbal sense. Livens up the place.

Could you post a savegame where you have the base accuracies as you described them above? You can use something like https://www.sendspace.com/ to upload it, see here for description of savegame location: https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-175-location-of-save-games/ And could you go to an inn and try out two thing: if you respec your main character Barbarian and get him back to level 1, does the base accuracy go back to 25 or stay at 15? And similarly, if you create a barbarian hireling, does he get the correct base accuracy?

Josh also seems to think that six party members may be too much. That he sees a problem doesn't necessarily mean that there is one, or that his analysis of it is correct. But even if we do posit that there is at least a significant minority of players who found the 'soul' to be lacking in some sense, that doesn't mean that your analysis of it is correct. And frankly, you have yet to provide any compelling argument for your "soul == wackiness" claim. Moreover, even if wackiness is what those players complaining about soul were missing, it doesn't follow that a) adding wackiness would have made for a better game, or b) adding wackiness would have made for a more successful game. If adding soulful wackiness pleases one segment of the audience and disgruntles another segment of the audience in equal measure, it's just a lateral move as far as b) is concerned.

And when, exactly, have I claimed to have no problem with non-casters being overpowered? I like balance and (relative) believability indiscriminately. The casting classes in general, and mages in particular, do tend to be the worst offenders in this regard however. But by all means, blather away. Don't let facts get in the way of your baseless assumptions.

Says you, but you offer very little support for your claim. So either by "role-playing community" you mean the general population of cRPG gamers, in which case it is on you to prove that at least a large majority of them hold to this supposed rather definite concept of a wizard (I'm part of that population and I don't, for one; neither, presumably, are others in this thread arguing for changes). Or, you mean a much more specific subset of this general cRPG population, in which case it is hardly evident that they are the core audience. I want balance among classes because that's what a well-designed game needs: balance between its various elements. That ensures that there is a large number of different viable playing styles. Without such balance, you will either have underpowered classes (relative to the difficulty level) that are frustrating to play because they can't contribute to the party and/or overpowered classes (relative to the difficulty) that take all the challenge out of it. And the same applies to balance among items, stats, spells, etc. I mean, they could give wizard a first level Disintegrate spell that does 1000 raw Foe AOE damage at +100 Accuracy; it would be hideously unbalanced and essentially makes all other spells irrelevant. It would be incredibly bad design, but following your logic it wouldn't matter in a single player game.

Sure, but in this case there could be multiple effects that could grant this invisibility, all of which need to expire before you become visible again. So you'd have to enumerate the number of invisibilities at some point anyway (and given how the code is structured, this is probably the best way to do that). As outlined above, in the TeleportAbility you see that going wrong for the nontargetable and nonengageable properties, which *are* boolean and are set to false there even though there could have been other effects that grant those properties still active (currently, this wouldn't be the case in practice because of the call to RemoveInvisibility when the ability gets activated, but relying on that is quite unsafe). So in the context of the current system, the best way to handle it would probably be to make those integers as well, incrementing and decrementing them alongside the invisibilityState. And more generally, to remove them as seperate StatusEffects granted by Shadowing Beyond etc., but incrementing and decrementing them whenever a ModifiedStat.Invisible gets applied or cleared (and having eg. the TeleportAbility use the ClearEffect function rather than doing the decrementing itself). Which isn't to say that I would design the general structure of the code in this way in the first place, for my liking things get pushed down to the level of disconnected StatusEffects far too much, making it difficult to keep track of where they come from and what they are supposed to apply to (this is also why eg. Consecrated Ground + Knockdown is a thing). I'd keep it much more relational. But that's a different (albeit interesting ) discussion.

Doesn't the Win10 update allow for a downgrade to whatever Windows version you upgraded from, though? I seem to recall having seen that promise, before I booted the annoying update reminder tool from my computer. If it's possible, downgrading and then upgrading to 64bit Win10 might be less of a hassle.

Agreed. And it would be nice to extend that at least a bit to the current per-encounter abilities as well. Because they do tend to become a bit spammy, since there is generally no incentive not to use them. They are essentially all upside (exceptions like Frenzy notwithstanding), might be better to have at least some kind of cost attached; so you have to put some more thought in whether and when to use them. More like the modal abilities, essentially (though those could be further improved in this regard as well).

Is Windows Defender also disabled though? That does do active scanning, and is enabled by default (on Windows 8 and up anyway, not sure about Windows 7).

Care to provide some support for those assumptions? It's not much of an argument so far, just a statement of your personal preference. And frankly, if "wacky" is the soul of fantasy, then go Team Soulless! (also: go Team Balanced Game Mechanics!)

Well argued, bravo! Hope your incontinence clears up.

Well, it's an ugly baby anyway, so that's hardly a loss. You seem to be missing the point that what may need changing is "the playstyle". That some undefined "role-playing community" has (according to you) a rather definite concept of what constitutes the 'soul' of the wizard class is good for them, but why would their opinion matter here, or to the PoE 2 devs?

Could you post the save game you have from before Gilded Vale that you can load, and one of the ones from inside Gilded Vale that you can't? Then I can try them out in my installation to see whether the issue is with the savegames (somehow becoming corrupted by a bad file in your installation, for example) or something else. Do you have White March installed, or just the base game? Location of the savegames is described here, by the way: https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-175-location-of-save-games/

I've never been able to confirm it, but, when I look into this issue in an earlier thread I got the distinct impression that it is somehow caused by read errors when trying to access the save game files. This may in turn be the result of for example a virus scanner getting antsy and blocking access to files for long enough that PoE times out and moves to the next file (PoE creates and removes a bunch of temporary files in quick succession when scanning the save games, which might arouse a scanner's suspicion). See this thread/post here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88009-save-games-not-showing-up/?p=1827931. Presumably you have a virus scanner? Would it be possible for you to try starting up the game with the scanner turned off, to see if that makes a difference? Obviously that isn't a solution in itself, but if that does help it would point to the cause of the problem (and subsequent solution).

I'd say the characters in PoE were hardly that gloomy, and many had more light-hearted remarks and such as well (Edér with is animal obsession, for example). And while I would have no problem with some characters being more light-hearted in general (a cheerful Imoen type, say), it does have to fit the tone and theme of the game as a whole, and they do have to remain more or less believable characters. The BG series was never very good at this in my view, personalities were generally quite two-dimensional (or absent altogether, in BG1) and/or completely over the top, with some pantomime villains thrown in for good measure. This can be good for a chuckle (Minsc, Jan Jansen, Edwin), but it is hardly immersive. It comes off more as a sketch, to be honest; for the most part, I never got the feeling there was a genuine personality and story there for many of those NPCs, something to get remotely invested in; just the cardboard cut-out of some particular trope. And that's the kind of thing that 'silly' evokes for me, and it isn't particularly appealing. Morte in PS:T on the other hand, always felt much more like a genuine character. The notion of a sentient floating skull may sound silly out of context, but it fits the game very well, and he was much better developed overall than almost all of the BG1/2 characters (though that applies to the PS:T characters in general, if some more than others). In the strange world of PS:T, he's hardly out of place.

Yeah, it's also a roleplaying GAME, and quite a few people enjoy the complex mechanics of that and like to see it improved; and others enjoy the complex mechanics and think it's fine the way it is, hence the discussion. Just because you play RPGs with a certain mind set, enjoy it in a certain way, doesn't mean that everyone else does as well nor that cRPGs *must* cater specifically to your preferences. There is no objective "how class X is meant to be played", meant by who exactly? And if I'm not mistaken big daddy D&D provides Fighters with quite a few active abilities these days as well, presumably because they recognise that standing around auto-attacking all day is kinda boring. The old casting per rest system may be simple (and may work in P&P), but in cRPGs the 'cost' of having to rest just doesn't work very well. Which is why people are arguing for changing it, into a mechanic (or preferably multiple mechanics, differentiating wizards, priests and druids) that improves upon this. Which does not inherently include either an attrition/across-combat resource system (it can certainly be fun and interesting, but only if done well) or the ability to solo everything (it's a party-based game, I don't see why that should be much of a concern for the developers anyway).

It makes sense in context though, to some degree. Generally, the ModifiedStat.Invisible effects increment the invisibility state by one and decrement by one upon application/removal, such that you only become visible again if all invisibility effects are gone. The problem is that the NonTargetable and NonEngageable effects are separate, rather than being keyed directly into the invisibility, and don't use this increment/decrement approach either. In that regard it is strange that the TeleportAbility does decrement InvisibilityState, because it sets the corresponding non-targetable and non-engageable booleans to false a couple of lines below it. It only works properly now because at present the InvisibilityState is set to zero (by decrements of one ) by the RemoveInvisibility function, since the TeleportAbility derives from GenericAbility.

I'm not sure I see how the PoE stats are less intuitive than those of BG et al. The three physical ones and Intellect are basically the same, Perception and Resolve take the place of Wisdom and Charisma. They're different, but you hardly need have swallowed a dictionary to have a reasonable sense of what it means to be perceptive or lacking in resolve, I'd think. They're hardly more esoteric than being wise or charismatic. And from a mechanical/gameplay perspective you need to know the actual effects they have in either case, that's not something you can really deduce anyway. The main difference is that in PoE the stats are much better balanced, you have no real dumpstats the way you had in BG/IWD. But yeah, in other respects PoE is a more mechanically complex and diverse game. You can't just go on intuition alone, if you want something like that then I suppose an action RPG would be more your thing? Though I don't see how different enemies and armour types having different strengths and weaknesses is such a counter-intuitive thing. Of course mail armour is good against slashing attacks, that's what it's designed for. And warhammers in turn were designed to skip the hassle of having to get through the mail armor and just do damage directly to the squishy meat underneath, the stuff really was historically weaker against that kind of (focused) blunt attack.

Not sure what you're using to edit it, I use the Unity Asset Bundle Extractor: https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?22675-Unity-Assets-Bundle-Extractor. On page one of the thread I linked to Livegood gave a good explanation of how to actually change things in the assets (it's a bit finnicky). See attached screenshot, that's the value that I changed to 0.2. This is in the fighterabilityprogressiontable.unity3d file. Keep in mind though that this is probably only going to make a difference if you take Confident Aim after you have made this change (and saved/reloaded). In existing savegames with Fighters that already have Confident Aim it isn't going to change anything. Though for those, it does work if you respec. I just tried it on Eder with pre-existing Confident Aim. I changed the fighterabilityprogressiontable file, respec'ed Edér, leveled back up to level 3 to take Confident Aim again, quicksave, quickload, damage is precisely in the range it is supposed to be. Fixing the edertable and confidentaim files doesn't appear to be necessary. I expect the first is only used for auto-level, and the second isn't directly used at all (perhaps as a fallback). Enemies with Confident Aim have it embedded in their own asset files, so they presumably don't use the separate confidentaim file either.

I actually put an overview in the casting speed thread earlier today, it should contain all the speed bonus/malus effects (but let me know if I missed any): https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88795-trying-to-figure-out-casting-speed/?p=1837581 Copy-pasting from there, basically the non-stacking ones are these: Swift Aim, Frenzy, Outlander’s Frenzy, Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, Svef, Potion of Power, Their Champion Braved The Horde Alone, Swift Strikes, Time Parasite. These don't stack with each other, only the best one counts. That 'best one' stacks with everything else, though. Just to give an example, suppose you have the four attack speed bonuses Boeroer mentioned above, and attacking with that weapon. The AttackSpeedMult bonus in this case is 1.33 x 1.20 x 1.15 x 1.15 = 2.11, so a combined bonus of +111%. Let's say this is a two-handed weapon, and you're wearing plate armor. The latter gives you a 50% penalty, so you're left with 111-50 = +61% attack speed bonus, and the recovery duration is 100 - 61 = 39% of the base recovery duration. As noted though, dual-wielding makes it much easier to reach zero recovery, because you essentially start with a +50% speed bonus. If you get the Two Weapon Style talent you're already at a +70% bonus, so you'd have only another 30% to go (plus any penalty you get from armour, of course).

In case the irony was lost in the discussion, let me remind you here that this game revolves around a small group of priests blowing up a god with a nuclear weapon. Firstly, nuclear weapons are vastly more powerful than the Godhammer was; they'd be missing a bit more than a bridge if it had been. Secondly, Waidwen's exact status wasn't quite so clear-cut as that. But more to the point, I wouldn't call what they did 'unrealistically overpowered'. They did research, gathered materials, constructed their bomb, laid their trap and succeeded. This was a concerted and time-consuming effort by a larger group of skilled individuals, aided by Magran. There is a gulf of difference with the 'epic' described above, of an individual mage effortlessly defeating dragons and laying waste to whole armies with the flick of a wand (usually also a mage who a surprisingly short time before that was still a laughably weak level 1 mageling).

Not yet as far as I know. To fix it properly requires editing the executable, not sure how straightforward that would be. And since it'll be fixed in the next patch it doesn't seem worth it to figure that out (given that IEMod exists, it must be possible though). I did test a more straightforward work-around editing the asset files, which does more or less work (see here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81559-apparent-bug-ancient-memory-gets-ditched-as-soon-as-you-cast-your-1st-invocation/?p=1834917 )

Just to expand on Boeroer's list a bit more: "attack speed bonus/penalty" effects that affect your recovery actually consists of six different kinds of effects, plus reload speed; and of course Dexterity which affects recovery, reload and the duration of actions/animations themselves. The categories are: - DualWieldAttackSpeedMult (Two Weapon Style) - MeleeAttackSpeedMult (Vulnerable Attack) - RangedAttackSpeedMult (Penetrating Shot) - ArmorSpeedFactorAdj (base armour penalty, Durgan enchantment, Armored Grace, Pilferer's Grip) - RateOfFireMult (Sure-handed Ila, Vicious Aim) - AttackSpeedMult (everything else, see below) - Reload Speed (Swift Aim, Sure-handed Ila, Gunner, Vicious Aim) [sure-Handed Ila suppresses Swift Aim] The total bonus/penalty is first computed per category into a combined percentage, these are then added together for the total attack speed bonus/penalty. This is combined bonus is subtracted from the base percentage, which is 50%. Weapon attacks get an additional penalty of 50% unless you're dual wielding (shield Bash doesn't count). In other words, dual-wielders don't get a bonus, non-dual-wielders get a penalty. As that only applies to weapon attacks, a Deleterious Alacrity of Motion spell/potion is therefore already enough to get zero recovery on spell-casting (provided you have no armour penalty, etc.). All this gets you a final percentage of the base recovery duration. The top three categories and Reload Speed all of course only apply when attacking with weapons (of the appropriate kind/style). RateOfFireMult applies to some spells as well, in particular those that use AttackRanged or AttackAOE as a basis (eg. Missiles, Rolling Flame, Fireball, Fan of Flames, but not Ray of Fire (AttackBeam) or Shocking Grasp (AttackMelee)). The other two apply generally to recovery duration (but not to reload duration). ArmourSpeedFactorAdj is combined additively, the rest is combined multiplicatively; eg. for RateOfFireMult, if you have Sure-handed Ila and Vicious aim the combination is 1.2 * 0.8 = 0.96, so in total you get a 4% speed penalty. Similarly, Deleterious Alacrity + Cautious Attack will net you 0.8 * 1.5 = 1.2, so +20% bonus. The AttackSpeedMult is the biggest category by far, and contains the following: - Swift Aim, Frenzy, Outlander’s Frenzy, Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, Svef, Potion of Power, Their Champion Braved The Horde Alone, Swift Strikes, Time Parasite, Mourning Gloves - Spell Tongue - Cautious Attack - Gauntlets of Swift Action - Bloodlust - Anitlei - Speed enchantment - Durgan enchantment As noted, insofar as these stack they do so multiplicatively. The effects in the first bullet point don't stack with each other, only the best of those is applied. For the rest everything stack, including the Spell Tongue effect (it shouldn't, but it does). Anyway, I think that covers pretty much everything. Seemed like a good idea to put it all into a single post. Let me know if I missed any effects by the way, so I can edit them in. Edit: added Mourning Gloves