Loren Tyr

A low-CON barbarian seems like an odd choice from a roleplaying perspective, though. Also doesn't really help his survivability either, of course.

Defiance is closed off at the beginning of Act 3, which you are in now, though it will open back up again later. The "A Call to Court" was added in the 3.0 update, which is presumably why you didn't see it before.

Is Quick Switch + Coil still (extra) exploitable then? Looking at the code, that seems to be fixed. Anyway, not sure why anyone would (deliberately) do this. I mean, if you're going to cheat, why not just set your dexterity to 100 using the console?

Even with the pre-recovery swap exploit (which I agree cannot possibly be intended that way), I can't imagine someone wouldn't notice the effect of Quick Switch. It cuts the extra recovery from 2s to 0.5s, that's a significant reduction in overall recovery duration (and if you are using a gun switching character you're likely to be keeping track).

It doesn't suppress them. I ran a quick test (turns out it doesn't take that much time if you pump dexterity to 300 ). Reflection rate came to 19.2% on 120 attacks, so it's clearly not just a 10% chance (p = 0.0017 ).

The Thrust does punch through high DR more easily, true. It also takes something like 65% to 75% longer to get to an attack cycle though (a bit more if you Durganized the flail to speed it up), so the Thrust does need to trigger sufficiently often to make up for that (the stunning certainly helps in that regard, of course). On the other hand, in combination with a non-bashing shield you would be hitting with the flail a lot more often, making it easier to chain-stun an enemy. Both options have their advantages but I just thought I'd bring it up, since the game doesn't really tell you that the Bashing ability on shields has this downside.

The probability of getting 130 or more 1's in 200 rolls if it really had been a 1 in 6 chance to roll a 1 with it is effectively zero (it's actually 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000226%, but I'm rounding down a bit). The fact that you did get that number fairly definitively proves that for thath die, on that surface, and using your rolling technique, the chance of getting a 1 was significantly in excess of 1 in 6. That's no fault of the statistics. The random number generator in PoE has no such bias though, so if the probability of ranged reflection is really 20% rather than 10% this can reliably be verified given enough data points. That's just a matter of firing arrows and counting, really. The reason I wouldn't use Badgradr's Barricade by the way is that it slows down your main hand attack. The Bash takes time, which means you'll be hitting less frequently with your main hand weapon. Even with the Thrust proc the bashing will generally not do enough damage to compensate in terms of damage output, and the Starcaller proc will also trigger less often.

Penetrating Shot only affects spells which have underlying type AttackRanged actually (which the bonus that Penetrating Shot gives checks for). Beams have their own AttackBeam type, so those don't get the DR reduction.

It's 50.4, actually. It's rounded in the UI, but the underlying values are actually still (floating point) decimals. So you can deal, or be dealt, 0.3 points of damage. This actually applies to many game values by the way, like armour DR. Eg. a suit of mail armour has 9 base DR, 13.5 Slashing DR and 4.5 Crushing DR.

Yeah, that's about right. The CBONUS does need to be in terms of proportion rather than percentage though, ie. CBONUS = 5 x (CON-10) / 100.

I've been digging into it a bit further, I'm more and more convinced that the Consecrated Ground and Black Path issues are the same (which is handy, since it's much less finnicky to test with). Anything that piggybacks on the one does so with the other as well (not surprisingly, the same issue applies to Strange Mercy as well by the way). I though it was just stuff implemented as Afflictions (eg. with Wounding Shot only the Hobbling and not the Wounding carries over), but have now found an exception to that: Sundering Blow also imparts its DR reduction through Black Path and Consecrated Ground, though it is not implemented via the Affliction route. I also confirmed Jojobobo's earlier observation that Black Path benefits from FoD's accuracy bonus as well. Perhaps the Wounding effect actually does carry over as well, but it just has no primary damage component in the Black Path hit to work with and doesn't do anything. The issue seems to be confined to effects of abilities, weapon effects (eg. Disorienting, Vile Loner's Lance) are not transferred. This suggests that the cause lies in the mechanism by which GenericAbilities marked as UsePrimaryAttack or UseFullAttack apply their effects to modify the actual primary/full weapon attack. Somehow Black Path and Consecrated Ground get tagged with the same modifications. In fact, this is starting to sound very much like what happens with Blast as well (though there it seems more like it actually should be happening). This is after all also an AOE effect that triggers off of a regular attack, which also carries over Venomous Strike and Blinding Strike and Wounding Shot (though again, here only the Hobbling part and not the Wounding part), and profits from the accuracy bump of Flames of Devotion. Blast also carries over weapon procs like Dominate on the Soulbound Scepter whereas Black Path does not (I tried), but presumably Blast is tied more directly to the weapon it originated from and can reference its properties. It seems identical in every other respect, though. Edit: ItemMods that improve accuracy also benefit the (normal) Black Path effect so it seems that to some extent at least the Black Path AOE does use weapon-specific StatusEffects. Perhaps the difference with Blast isn't that procs like Dominate don't apply at all, but rather that by lack of a primary damage component they simply can't actually proc in some sense.

You're right. I just saw the same thing after i used durgan's steel on badgradr's barricade. There is no way to know if there are two 10% chance for the effect to proc or if one suppresses the other. Logically, both should apply, because there shouldn't be any script on shields to suppress enchantments (since they should always apply). But there is no way i know about to test it in game in order to be sure. And i agree. For some reasons, even a guy who don't optimize like me don't want to waste an ingot like this Suppression would occur on the wielder rather than the shield itself, actually. But that would show up as "suppressed" on the character sheets. I expect it's just a UI issue, though it might also be that the two item mods are somehow overwriting each other in some sense (seems unlikely though). Personally I wouldn't use Barricade anyway, but if you want to be sure it's easy enough to test; takes a bit of work to get enough data points for a statistically reliable estimate, though.

Adventures (and several other event types) are created on a timer: the stronghold periodically updates itself and a base adventure event is instantiated at this point if there is no current base adventure event already instantiated, with the adventure set to start a couple of turns later. This is also when the two random integers are generated (these can be considered fully random for all relevant purposes). The type of adventure is determined only when it starts, based on your Prestige at that time. But since the random number part of that equation is set well in advance, reloading to a slightly earlier point will not change the tier of the adventure unless your Prestige changes (sufficiently). The specific adventure within that tier that you get is determined when it starts though.

Good to hear that you managed to reproduce it as well, hopefully it'll be possible to figure out the root cause there. And maybe the Black Path bug helps in that regard, under the presumption that they have the same cause. Consecrated Ground plus Knockdown (or Blinding Strike, etc.) does happen with single weapon as well by the way, though it's indeed trickier to get the timing right. As it happens, after seeing the Black Path bug I was actually trying that out earlier today under the random suspicion that there might be some dual-wielding specificity to it (there isn't). Edit: I also got Consecrated Ground plus Envenomed Strike to work now (was checking if it worked with Primary Attack stuff as well). And Knockdown (as well as Envenomed Strike) plus Black Path, after consoling Black Path onto Eder. Now that I know when it occurs I also found an easy way to get the Black Path issue to manifest: just set Might to 10000 (or something) to vaporize the initial target with one base attack, and watch every other enemy in range disappear in a poisonous mist as well.

Looking into it at the moment, I think there's something else going on (here and with Consecrated Ground). Tall Grass simply has an ItemMod which temporarily activates a StatusEffect on the wielder when attacking, resulting in the possible Prone on the enemy. But Knockdown has a Prone attached as an affliction to the main attack, which gets processed as a secondary attack when the primary attack is processed. There's never a StatusEffect that is active on the wielder in this case, it is essentially confined to the AttackBase object instead. Which makes me wonder how it is actually carrying over to Consecrated Ground at all, since there it really is just a matter of simultaneous occurrence (whereas with Black Path there is at least a triggering effec - triggered effect relation).

I wouldn't say Fighters are limited, they're just more of an allrounder. You can build them across the range from tanky to DPS, and would do fine in a ranged role as well. They just don't really have the same kind of stand-out, 'build-around-able' abilities or characteristics that make for a clearly defined build as such, I think. I mean, with the Constant Recovery and such you can do a troll-like regenerator build, but that's essentially just a way of being extra tank-ish (and it's something any Fighter is always half-way doing by default anyway). So yeah, Fighters don't lend themselves to the uniquest of build in that regard, they're more the bread in the sandwich. Not really the exciting part, but without it you'd just have a pile of meat and condiments on a plate. Survival does affect some spells by the way, but only the ones that are implemented as AttackMelee or AttackRanged (the same spells are also affected by Vulnerable Attack and Penetrating Shot, respectively). This is generally single-target damage stuff like Jolting Touch and Necrotic Lance. Having said that, peeking into the internals of Enigma's Charm this seems for some reason to be implemented as an AttackMelee as well. This suggests that it actually would be able to get a Survival accuracy boost.

That does seem a touch overpowered, yes. Sounds rather similar in a way to the Consecrated Ground bug, where depending on timing of the CG pulse a currently active one-hit status effect from an ability gets tacked onto that as well: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88371-303-issue-with-knock-down-and-necrotic-lance/. Sounds like it's doing that here too.

Hmm, there definitely isn't a reason they should be doing that that I can see, no. It is somewhat reminiscent of this bug, though I don't know whether it related: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/88092-psychic-backlash-bug-cipher-use-it-on-himself-at-the-begining-of-battle/. Did this happen just these two times, or has it happened more regularly? And do you know, was this a regular Arbalest attack, but 'just' targetting himself? Ie. did he go into recovery and reloading afterwards? Anyway, it might just be an issue with a game file in your installation that's off. If you have Steam you could try running the Validate Game Files option. I would also suggest that you repost this / ask a moderator to move this to the main Technical Support forum above this one. This forum is actually just for the patch beta updates, and since there isn't a beta at the moment I don't know how often the devs check here.

Spells and abilities get an additional +1/level accuracy bonus. Your Paladin is level 10, presumably?

That's a general thing, actually. Survival just boosts melee and ranged attacks, not spells. Though some spells are implemented as melee (eg. Jolting Touch) or ranged (eg. Necrotic Lance) attacks (basically, the single-target damage spells).

I've been experimenting with Interrupt, testing how it works in practice, and I stumbled across a bug. For the most part the attack durations are lengthened by interrupts as they are supposed to be, but if you hit and interrupt a target during the target's attack animation and after that target's hit has landed (ie. the damage number has appeared), the attack duration is actually shortened instead. Eg. in my testing I timed 5 attack cycles (in slow mode) of character B attacking character A at about 21.2 seconds. I repeated this, but now with character C interrupting character B a single time during the recovery phase with a 1s interrupt weapon, which increased the total duration to about 22.8 seconds, consistent with what you would expect (an in-game second taking about 1.5 real seconds in slow mode; there's obviously some measurement noise here, but these times are quite consistent across repeated tests). However, if I time C's attack to land just after B's attack has landed, the total duration actually drops to about 20.2 seconds, the interruption actually speeds the victim up in this case. What seems to be happening is that the interuption stops the attack animation and runs a "getting hit" animation and then goes to recovery. But because the attack animation gets cut short and the "getting hit" animation isn't very long, this means recovery starts earlier than it otherwise would have been. This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that this effect is independent of the interruption strength of the weapon you're using; as well as the fact that it *is* dependent on how far into the attack animation you interrupt. If you wait slightly longer the drop in total duration is smaller, presumably because there is a shorter amount of attack animation that gets cut off (note that if the interruption happens during the attack animation but before B's hit has actually landed, the interrupt does work as it's supposed to). Anyway, this is presumably rather beyond the scope of upcoming PoE patches (if any) to fix, but it still seems worth mention in light of PoE 2.

You do have to pay for them again, yes. Though in my experience you don't generally use all spells in a given playthrough, so you could just stick to the ones you're actually going to use at the time. You don't actually need to equip the Grimoire to edit the spells it contains by the way. You can also right-click it in the Inventory.

It's not *that* bad, really. The code rolls the base weapon damage, adds the relevant damage modifiers, etc., and that's your total weapon damage X. This value X then gets fed into an "AdjustForDR" function, which spits out the effective damage against target Y. Lashes and AttackPlusDOT effects compute their damage from X, PostDtAttackPlusDOT effects like Wounding Shot grab Y instead (which is of course 0 if the target is immune to the primary damage type). ApplyOnTick DOTs like Deep Wounds don't reference either, since they have a predetermined (base) damage. At this stage the damage type of the Lash or DOT isn't relevant, that only gets factored in when the Lash/DOT itself is processed; ie. a Fire Lash will still be processed when attacking a Fire-immune enemy, it just ends up not doing any damage.

I rather doubt that actually. It depends on what kind of of Full Attack abilities you are using. For Full Attacks from Riposte, Bashing inherently offers a significant advantage because those attacks take no time, therefore per Riposte trigger it will do more damage. But this does not interfere with auto-attacking either, it happens concurrently, so it would still need to compensate for the disadvantage of having Bash for non-Riposte attacks. For 'regular' Full Attack abilies like the Rogue Strike abilities, with Barricade you're indeed again at an advantage, though less so. The Bash attack still takes time though its recovery is waived, so you go from the 1:1.5 attack cycle duration ratio (main only : main + bash) to about 1:1.25. So you bump the damage from Bash a bit and improve your chance of hitting/critting with the status effect, and you increase the speed of the Bash and thus of the overall attack cycle (Thrust itself isn't affected by any of it, though). Whether this is enough in practice to overcome the built-in disadvantage of having Bash, I'm still not so sure. The fact still remains that essentially only the main attack is going to improve, the Bash and Thrust aren't, shifting the advantage further and further towards non-bashing shields. Apart from the main weapon damage it may also improve in speed through Speed enchantment or Durganization, which increases the attack cycle ratio directly. It will also likely have some side effects on hit/crit that happen more frequently without Bash. So even when only doing Full Attack abilities, I still doubt Barricade gets you the higher DPS (though I grant that it likely did do so when you played with the double-Thrust Barricade before). On the whole, my conclusion remains that for a defensive rogue (specifically Riposte-oriented or otherwise, though if you go for high deflection on a Rogue it seems silly not to take Riposte) Barricade is far from an automatic choice. It will obviously depend on other factors, but my expectation would be that in more situations than not a shield like Old Gerun's Wall has the edge in DPS (as well as defensive quality). Which isn't to say Barricade is a bad choice, I'd expect the gap (in either direction) between the two setups to be relatively modest across a whole playthrough. As an aside, I think the reason it isn't implemented as dual wielding is that doing so would swing it too much in the other direction; the Bash attack and recovery duration is quite short, it seems to be a bit faster than a fast weapon attack. So enabling dual-wielding with bash would probably end up increasing the main weapon attack rate, which doesn't seem desirable either.

Or pick a different shield, would be my point. If the aim is to maximize DPS on a defensive-minded rogue who's aiming to have high deflection anyway, Riposte certainly seems a good pick. Whether a defensive rogue has better (effective) DPS than an offensive rogue (eg. the usual DW-Sabre or whatever) is a rather more complicated question. Wouldn't entirely surprise me if it did actually, but that would be exceedingly difficult to quantify.