Loren Tyr

Good to know. Should indeed be essentially the same for Beloved Memory. It's usually the bigger Monoscripts that are of interest, and here there's only a couple, so they're easy to find (try digging through the ingameglobal, though... ).

Barbarian brawler might be nice actually, with his Carnage. The Carnage damage reduction is just a -X% damage modifier, so that wouldn't affect the bonus damage either.

Good to know it's possible. I expect you'd need to separately change Beloved Spirits as well, by the way. How did you change it by the way? Export -> change -> import with the Asset Bundle Extractor?

If anything, the warhammer would probably be more a Human weapon I'd say. Though of the two, it's definitely more a Mountain Dwarf weapon; Boreal Dwarves are more hunter-y types, and that's not really what hammers are made for.

I've never tried that to be honest, so not sure how easy it is to actually modify them. If it is though, I would expect setting the CooldownType on the GenericAbility Monoscript to 0 should do it (it's at 1 now, which means "per encounter"). This would allow it to activate an unlimited number of times per encounter.

That doesn't really compare though. Sure, plenty more people will see the beginning of the game than the end. On the other hand, it's conceptually impossible to not have an end to the game (even if you'd want to). Romances are entirely optional, however. As for the conditional dialogue options, those will indeed be seen by only a subset of players. But these are very minor, they generally add flavour and maybe a small change in gameplay (you resolve a confrontation peacefully instead of fighting, you get an item) but not much else; they're mostly very self-contained, different branches of dialogue will quickly converge back onto a finite set of outcomes. The choices you made in this regard usually have no impact on the rest of the game (except through generic mechanisms like dispositions and reputation and such). This makes them attractive from a development point of view, because the investment is typically just a couple of lines of dialogue being added, some differences in the quest log and whatnot. There will be exceptions to some degree, NPC-specific quests are inherently an example of that as well, but the degree to which such kind of content is included definitely has to be weighed against its cost. And given the sketchy track-record of romances in RPGs and games in general and the fact that its appeal is rather more limited than general NPC quests and content, there are plenty of good arguments against including them. As for player choice, I don't really see how romances in themselves really add to that. They offer the choice of pursuing the romance or not, but then again that applies to any content; I can choose to do the NPC quests or not, I can choose to do any of the optional side-quests or not. It gets you stuff and experience points, but by themselves they can still be entirely linear. Romances in games generally are fairly as well, so in that regard they don't offer a clear added value above more general optional (NPC-specific or otherwise) quests. And of course you can make a more branching romance, but the same applies to any other quest or content as well. They don't have to be about money and business sense alone, in my experience it works out better if the people making it can be creative and put something of themselves into it. But money is the bottom line, it's what makes it possible to make the game in the first place. And in a more general sense, money and successful games are what makes it possible for a compaby to continue to make games. This equation doesn't change because of Kickstarter backing, there is still a finite amount of money which can be converted into a finite amount of game content. It will tend to result in backers influencing that content, but that should only go so far; it's not a democracy, it's up to the developers to make the decisions and try to make it a good game. Besides, I'm not so sure such a large proportion of backers would consider romances all that crucial anyway. Moreover, the equation still doesn't change when a game is being developed by a single individual. It still takes time and money to do so, and it's hardly guaranteed to result in a better game if there's one person making all the decisions for it. It's no different from any other creative medium, most of the things people create are mediocre at best; because it takes talent and imagination and practice and a lot of work to make something that's actually good. A random dude making a game in his spare time having all those qualities... the odds are fairly bleak on that. And even if he does manage to pull it of, what makes you think that game *will* contain extensively branching content (it won't) or romances? I'm also not sure what you're basing the notion on that the dislike of, or opposition to, romances in games/RPGs is due to a prejudice to specific elements of human nature like romance. There are lots of other aspects of human nature that don't get much attention in games either. You don't see a lot of pooing in games either, and I'd say that's far more fundamental to human existence than romance (and far more relevant to warfare as well). Mostly, these are things that are just not very central to the reasons people play the game in the first place, and including them would be more effort than it's worth.

Yeah, it's caused by it being set to "once per encounter". If you stop chanting (due to invocation, being disabled, switching songs) the ability turns of, and won't turn on again that encounter. The reason for this, one assumes, is that it has a finite duration and there isn't a good mechanism (for GenericAbility's) to have a fixed duration across multiple activations. See also my post here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88003-ancient-memory-turning-off-after-spellcasting/?hl=%2Bancient+%2Bmemory

See for yourself; if Savage Attack did apply to the bonus damage that would have been 33 - 39. It's just a 2.4 point difference though.

Why not use some Goldrot Chew, there's a fair amount laying around in the first few areas, and you can buy some off of Ranga as well.

They're uniquely identified (eg. Justice has the internal name great_sword_backer_justice), so that shouldn't be an issue. Not sure why reloading or restarting isn't resolving it though, never seen that happen. I expect you did get the +15% bonus by the way, that is implemented differently. It doesn't show in the combat log though, mostly the damage bonuses don't (stuff like Sneak Attack that does show explicitly are the exception rather than the rule).

The White March adds a talent for non-rogues that gives them a small sneak attack. It's just +15% damage vs +50% for the Rogue though. There are also some weapons that give a sort-of sneak attack (extra damage vs proned, stunned and paralyzed I think), as well as (at least one) that actually does a +25% damage sneak attack. Those still work best with the Rogue of course, though. Edit: I forgot, Skaen Priests also have a talent that gives +20% Sneak Attack damage (and +10 ACC with Stilettos and Clubs). So with the Apprentice's Sneak Attack they can get +35% Sneak Attack damage (at the cost of two talents, though).

It does.

Damage for Novice's Suffering does increase with level, it's actually better than Transcendent Suffering. It's +5 base, +2 every three levels after 1, so it tops out at +15 damage at level 16 (and +20 accuracy). Transcendent Suffering only gets +12 damage and +18 accuracy. Anyway, technically they are implemented slightly differently. Novice's Suffering is a single talent that uses the level-scaling mechanic to get its per-level increase. For Transcendent Suffering though, there are actually 4 talents, Transcendent Suffering 1-4 given out at levels 1, 4, 7, and 10 (and removing the previous one at the same time). You actually see the numbering in the Character Sheet in-game as well. Transcendent Suffering 4 also uses level-scaling to get the last bit to level 16. Presumably this alteration was made with the introduction of White March; the use of separate talents must be a hold-over from very early development. Not that this matters in the slightest in practice, though. All Sufferings use the same BonusUnarmedDamage parameter, so neither gets multipliers (other than might).

Just as a general observation, I would advise against using Blunderbuss with Flames of Devotion. Just like the six pellets themselves, any Lashes on those pellets individually reduced by DR so it suffers much more against high DR targets. Moreover, Lashes don't benefit from DR reduction (either from the weapon itself or from effects like Penetrating Shot or Vulnerable Attack). Arquebus is the best weapon for this, but staying in the Ruffian WF a pistol is also usually a better bet in this regard.

There are similarities, but I suspect that the underlying cause for Torment's Reach is different. What seems to be happening there is that the additional attacks from Torment's Reach also get the Torment's Reach effect applied to them and triggering a cascade through a line of enemies. What they'll probably need to do there to fix it is something like Carnage, which has a specialised implementation (Torment's Reach just uses the standard GenericAbility class) which prevents Carnage from triggering recursively. Iconic Projection doesn't have the same kind of structure, it's not reapplying attacks in some way that could set up this kind of cascade or recursion. What I suspect might be happening is that something goes wrong with the collision detection. It's basically a special slow-moving projectile which triggers an attack / heal effect whenever it intersects with someone. It seems that sometimes this goes wrong and characters are recorded as entering and leaving the projectile area multiple times in a row; perhaps the projectile position is somehow not updating properly and the game sometimes thinks that it is somewhere other than were it's supposed to be (and then when it returns, it perceives this as a new collision with characters it overlaps with). Not sure if it's that exactly of course, but does look like something like that. You can also kind of see it in the screenshots, the progression of hits appears to correspond with the physical position of characters; eg. Shiva does not get hit at first, but only later (I'm assuming this is the one in the wide-brimmed hat) and vice versa for Quincy (bottom of the melee, next to the Lion?) and Vanya (to the right of Quincy; she appears to have been Charmed or Confused as well, it's really not her day). Exactly why this happened quite so spectacularly in Ohmega's game I have no idea. I have seen the same thing a couple of times with Rolling Flame, but that was only in the order of a double hit on a single enemy (and some of that might just have been bounce-related). Never seen it on Cackling Bolt, but that probably just moves too fast for that. In any case, I still suspect it is a glitch of some kind, unlike the Torment's Reach thing it only happens occasionally (and not nearly so much in one go). Which makes it difficult to reproduce and thus to fix, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's more something for PoE 2 (though I fervently hope they do a major overhaul of the code anyway, it's just not very structurally sound as is). Though hopefully they do still fix Torment's Reach, should be much easier to do as well.

Yup, uses the same ModifiedStat parameter.

They must have changed it then. I took a peek, as it is now the added damage is explicitly excluded from any multipliers other than Might. Quite possibly a balancing issue, a flat damage increase before multipliers would tend to add up very quickly. It's a general bit of code by the way, so the same should be true for any other effect that increases (weapon) damage by a fixed (base) amount.

Yeah, all Carnage abilities invoke the same code; the only thing that varies is duration and the ACC/damage penalty, so there'd be no reason to implement them separately. Special attacks piggy-backing on concurrent AOE effects is a known issue, see here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88492-the-black-path-envenomed-strike-bug-303/ and https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88371-303-issue-with-knock-down-and-necrotic-lance/. The devs are aware of it now though, so hopefully it will be fixed in 3.04.

Agree with Fenixp, it just doesn't justify the resources that need to be put into it. It tends to be rather cringe-inducing as well in terms of quality. Even a large chunk of the players that would be interested in a romantic element may be unsatisfied with it because it will by necessity be restricted to a subset of characters and may therefore not include the character they would want the romance with (especially if the developers are the kind of feeble dolts that don't allow same-sex romances). Aside from that, the protagonist needs to be a blank slate, to be filled in by the player, making it rather difficult to effectively write a romance for him/her. As for the artistic freedom of the writers... seriously, who cares? It's not their individual project. This is a game, it's a collaborative entertainment product, a commercial venture. The aim here isn't to offer a platform to budding new writers; as a rule, it is (in a general sense) to make a good and/or commercially successful game, and the artistic freedom of the people working on it are inherently constrained by that. So whether fulfilling these aims should involve putting in romances, and what the content of them should be, is not up to an indivual writers (if the company has any sense).

Hmm, that's probably not it then. It would have to emanate from the priest for it to happen in the same way, in any case. Oh well... let's just wait to see if it happens again. If it does, it might give some more clues as to why. And if it doesn't, problem solved as well

It works on ranged as well, yes. Gun-paladin is a viable build, certainly. Though you could also go for a mixture, get a third weapon slot and go Arquebus + FoD as an opening volley at the beginning of combat; switch to second Arquebus and fire with FoD; then switch to melee weapon and starting hitting stuff. Arquebus has the highest base damage of all weapons, so it gets you the most out of FoD in that sense. Arquebus is also in the same Weapon Focus group as Greatsword, you could go for those. There is a nice pair of Gloves you can get in act 2 that gives you the Firebrand sword three times per rest, which packs a nice punch. Does fire damage, so you could get Scion of Flame to boost both your FoD and Firebrand damage (and put Fire Lashes on all your weapons, and boost those too).

Just thinking... shouldn't it be "The annoying noob strikes again", rather than "strikes back"?

Hmm, that is weird, usually that clears it up. Whenever I've encountered this issue it was generally confined to a specific weapon though, other of the same type were usually fine, so that's not weird in itself; somehow the game seems to 'forget' for that particular weapon what type it is (or sometimes, that it has a Fine enchantment or something). Anyway, after the restart it is fine now, right?

I tried it out, it seems Minor Blights + Envenomed Strike half works. That is to say, it only attaches to the Blast of the original Blight attack, but not the Blight AOE: everyone within the blast radius of that original attack gets (potentially) hit by Envenomed Strike, but the additional blasts that trigger in the Blight AOE don't result in more Envenomed Strike. So if you have Blights without Blast, only the original target will get hit with the venom.

As a further aid for that, see also attached. Here, I varied Might at the expense of Dexterity (ie. Might + Dexterity was kept constant at 40). This should give some idea of how to balance Dexterity and Might. Though again this will be highly situation specific, so be wary of generalizing).