Loren Tyr

Looking into the prefab files, I'm fairly sure that it is indeed an error. For any StatusEffect the core parameters are Value and ExtraValue, the meaning of which varies across different effects. For healing (over time or otherwise), Value is the base amount of endurance (per tick) gained, and ExtraValue is not used. An additional LevelScaling component can be set, to change the effect according to character level (obviously). For Constant Recovery, this has the standard "every three levels starting at 4" settings, but the ValueAdjustment is 0; however, the ExtraValueAdjustment is set to 1.5, even though for a healing effect this is not used. It seems likely that this should have actually been the ValueAdjustment, increasing the base Value of 5 to 12.5 at level 16. For Veteran's Recovery (Value = 3, ValueAdjustment = 1, level 16 => 8 ) and Rapid Recovery (Value = 2, ValueAdjustment = 0.6, level 16 => 5) these are set correctly. Hopefully this can be fixed for 3.04, because it indeed makes no sense that the cross-class version would be better (in the long run). I don't see a problem with the intellect + duration though; as far as I can tell, for both it only affects the duration. Endurance per tick is not affected.

Hmm, might be a bug. It should be just a matter of setting them and having an enemy walk over them. There's some margin there though, they can skate past it without triggering. There does need to be enough overlap for it to trigger; I just tested it a bit, I get the impression that the center of the enemy's selection circle has to hit the trap area (or maybe they have to hit the center of the trap area, but I think it's about their own center point). In the attached example, the trap didn't trigger. If I had the troll walk directly over the trap, it did trigger. Assuming that it's indeed the enemy's center point, that would also explain why it is more noticable for large enemies like trolls. I'll see if I can dig up the exact details from the code later.

No, must be a glitch of some kind. The class bonus is just the base accuracy for that class, it should never change (and is independent of race, etc.) and for Ciphers should indeed be 25. Does it stay like that if you restart the game?

That's backspace, indeed. You can also use the number keys to select individual characters, in the order they are organized at the bottom of the screen. You can reorder them as well by the way, just left-click hold a portrait and drag it left or right. This can be useful when using the standard party formations.

I'd say, just go with what appeals to you. The nice thing is that you can make pretty much any kind of build work reasonably well. Some are obviously more effective than others, but with some work and the right items almost anything is viable (certainly below Path of the Damned difficulty). So I think you can certainly feel free to make decisions based on what appeals to you from a roleplaying perspective or simply what looks coolest (Dandy Hat of the Diseased Yak, obviously), without it gimping your character.

Looks like it. I've been testing it a bit just now for the Paladin and Ranger modals, they actually (mostly) visually cluster in the menu bar according to their group (see attached), which are as follows: 0) Penetrating Shot, Vulnerable Attack, Dangerous Implements, Shadow Step 1a) Zealous Charge, Zealous Endurance, Zealous Focus, (Zealous Barrage) 1b) Gallant's Focus, Swift Aim, Vicious Aim, Twinned Arrows, Powder Burns 2) Cautious Attack, Savage Attack, Defender, Guardian Stance 3) Take The Hit, Duality of Mortal Presence x2 4) Reckless Assault 5) Spiritshift Only one ability can be active per group, with the exception of group 0; those can all be active at the same time. Not sure why Take The Hit, Reckless Assault and Spiritshift aren't in there as well. Groups 1a and 1b are a single group, but split in two for clarity since they don't overlap in practice anyway. Gallant's Focus is obviously a bad pick for a Ranger. I think this is all of the modals, but let me know if I missed any. Then I'll add that too, so we have a complete list.

Yeah, just put an Accurate 1 enchantment on The Disappointer, you can get that very quickly. All the supplies you need can be found in Valewood. Though you do need some Mechanics skill to find the Turquoise, so you may need to grab an NPC and come back to get them if your own character is putting his skill points elsewhere (you probably need to come back anyway unless you have very high Athletics).

Cautious Attack :') But why would that be *instead of* Zealous Endurance? They're not mutually exclusive, you can have both if you want.

Except that if they did stack then presumably everything would stack (I don't see a clear reason to make an exception for DR or for food, at any rate). This would result in smaller active/modal/equipment bonuses indeed becoming more useful, but conversely causing passive and weapon bonuses as well as larger active/modal/equipment bonuses becoming less powerful as well. So no, it probably wouldn't be much better if they stacked.

They're active/modal bonuses of the same type, those have always suppressed each other. That doesn't make the aura useless. Even if you didn't mind the tedium of having your entire party chug down a bottle of Ale / White Ynefer every 3 / 2 minutes, there's just not enough of the stuff available to do so.

Probably the major reason the Fighter feels so much more powerful than the Cipher (or anything else), is that he has has Confident Aim. This is unfortunately bugged at the moment, in a way that vastly increases the damage the fighter does. I would strongly suggest not taken that talent until it has been fixed. Which still requires classes to be more or less balanced. Different classes are more or less powerful, more or less viable, compared to each other. Thus, as DreamWayfarer pointed out as well, if one class stands out in terms of power it makes much more sense to remove some of that power than to start buffing all the rest. The overall result in terms of viability is essentially the same, but by making every other class stronger rather than making one of them weaker you're just reducing the difficulty of the game. And that's provided all goes well; the more changes you make, the greater the risk of creating a new imbalance somewhere else. Thankfully, Obsidian does not agree with *your view* of what constitutes elegant and fun, the game would have been much the worse for it.

Sword and Shield talent only. It does not count as dual wielding, so it doesn't get the inherent DW speed up nor does it benefit from the dual wielding talent.

Good question, not sure. The prefabs (Hearth Harvest, certainly) do seem to contain the requisite lash visual FX assets. Maybe they are turned off by default for uniques / when pre-applied, and never turned on? For eg. Durance's staff that would make sense since that has a special lash animation.

Well yes, that was clear already. Doesn't mean it wasn't an oversight, though. As far as I know it was a later change when adding finite duration to it, the way it's implemented now is the simplest way to do that. It is very well possible that the single activation issue hadn't occurred to them, and they didn't test extensively enough to notice. Invocations are plenty powerful on their own without needing additional promotion. The only issue here is with the Ancient Memory (and Beloved Spirits) talent. The elegant solution to that would simply be to remove the "once per encounter" / "finite duration" from it (essentially reverting it to its v1.0 state, if I recall correctly). An intermediate solution would be to remove the "once per encounter" but stretch the finite duration across multiple activations, but that would take considerably more work because the standard GenericAbility implementation does not support it. Absent any changes, the most sensible solution would be to simply not take Ancient Memory unless you're using the kind of tanky, long-phrase chanter Boeroer mentioned.

That probably depends on whether you use auto-leveling. I tested this on Eder and only edited the fighterabilityprogressiontable (I had restored the confidentaim prefab to its original state at this point), but I always have auto-level turned off. But looking at the ederabilityprogressiontable, this also contains Confident Aim, so presumably with auto-level on it'll grab that instead. The fix itself is just a matter of first finding the right Monoscript in the prefab file. Easiest is to go through the Confident Aim GameObject, it's the second component (ie. index 1). This also shows the Path ID to the corresponding Monoscript. In that Monoscript, in the second of the StatusEffects, the Value parameter needs to be changed from 1.2 to 0.2. The CA bug is essentially that for a Value = X = 1.2, on adding the talent the minimum damage multiplier Y initially gets (correctly) set to Y = 1 * X = 1.2; but on load it gets set to Y = 1 + X = 2.2. Therefore, changing it to X = 0.2 gets you an initial Y = 0.2 but Y = 1.2 after save and load. Anyway, the fix isn't perfect, but it does make Confident Aim normally usable again. For enemy fighters with CA it doesn't work of course. I'm assuming that when you first encounter them they are instantiated from the prefab and should have the multiplier given there, so at that moment the correct 1.2. These will presumably be scrambled on reload to 2.2 as well, so it depends on at what point you fight them whether they get a power boost or not. Changing their embedded CA prefab would just reverse that though: they'd initially be underpowered with a multiplier of 0.2 and get the correct 1.2 if any reloading was done. Personally, I'm inclined to wait for 3.04 before implementing these kinds of changes (CA should certainly be fixed then). It's good to know we have the option, though.

Depends on your point of view, I suppose . Personally I don't like to use things like BashCarnage or Confident Aim that are unbalanced like this, others might. I thought I'd point it out though, so people can make an informed decision.

One issue to keep in mind with Barbarian Bashing though: there is a bug with Carnage + Bash, which results in a Barbarian's (auto-)attack with a Bashing shield (with subsequent Carnage) resulting in a second Bash attack right after (with subsequent Carnage) on one of the victims of the initial Carnage. Every Bash thus basically hits twice, making it rather more powerful than it's supposed to be.

I have tested and confirm that Confident Aim can (more or less) be fixed via this route. There is a slight snag though, which applies more generally: editing the confidentaim.unity3d file itself doesn't help; the confidentaim prefab is actually embedded into the fighterabilityprogressiontable prefab, it needs to be changed there. Moreover, the CA prefab is also embedded into fighter NPC prefabs, I don't think the CA prefab file itself is actually directly referenced by the game (can't be sure though, it still might do on some occasions). Obviously this is likely to apply to most other things one might want to edit as well, editing the base file will often not be enough (especially for carrying the changes over to NPCs).

Then again, what kind of movie would Pearl Harbour have been without the love triangle? Including sex and romance doesn't work equally well in every genre, is my point. Not every core aspect of human existence needs to be represented in every work of fiction. If it did, there'd have to be a lot more food and excrement as well; both are far more fundamental than romance, after all.

Don't see how Deep Faith is a problem, actually. Pretty much all the generic defensive talents give +10 to one defense, this gives a total of +11 spread over the different defences. Seems reasonable to me.

If you want a pirate-y background you need Deadfire Archipelago. I wouldn't worry too much about the missed +1 MIG, you can still go for 20 with the Aumaua. Though in terms of flavour the Bleakwalker does seem to fit it more than the Goldpact Knight (you can get a nice fearsome pirate thing going with Black Path as well). Add in a cutlass sabre and some pistols, Robert Newton accent, eyepatch... (there genuinely is an eyepatch you can get, by the way).

Not sure how you got 13 damage there, but the damage is definitely added before DR reduction is applied; the unarmed bonus damage is no exception to that. I also get entirely normal 20% MIN damage when I test it out.

None of them manufacture it as such, but if you get the Merchant Stalls you get access to a general goods merchant that sells camping supplies.

Should be possible to more or less fix Confident Aim in this way as well, by the way (not quite, but it'll do). I think the main risk right now is what would happen when the game gets updated, certainly CA will be fixed in 3.04. For new games it'd make no difference, just a matter of restoring the original .unity3d file (if that doesn't get overridden automatically by the update anyway), but for existing saved games it would be potentially problematic (depending on how they are structured).

Sure, there are plenty of games about all manner of subjects. But those are games *about those subjects*; if you're playing those, then those are part of the central themes and defining features of the game, and we can reasonably assume that they are fairly central to why people play them. Roleplaying games have a very different focus however, and an audience that matches that focus (or vice versa). And that focus, I would argue, does not centrally involve romance. The average fantasy RPG player isn't playing the game for the romance; some will still enjoy it if it's there (though other will abhor it), but it's still a fairly peripheral, and non-essential, aspect of it. I don't see what is unfair about pointing this out. And this is not PoE specific, I would think; it applies generally to this type of game. Yes, as you mention there is certainly a market for all kinds of different themes and gameplay in games, I'm not contesting that. But those audience don't necessarily overlap, it is not evident that there is a market for fantasy RPGs with a strong romantic component (or more generally, that having a romantic component would be a significant selling point for it). And even and to the extent that those audiences do overlap, it is still not a given that they would like the combination. For example, I can certainly appreciate a good Jane Austen movie, and I also enjoy a good action movie; I doubt I would appreciate a movie that combines the two, however (Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was crap anyway, though admittedly anything with zombies in it is bound to). Don't get me wrong, I would love a sprawling large game with all sorts of branching paths, where the outcome and the game world itself significantly changes depending on all the choices that I make while playing. But I'm an analytically inclined pragmatist, and quite aware of the obstacles in accomplishing this. Genuine branching exponentially increases the amount of work that needs to be done to achieve the same average game length. Time and money and other resources are always finite, and it very much in question whether that kind of branching would be worth the cost in that respect.