Loren Tyr

Hmm, I'm leaning somewhat towards one-handed actually. The +12 ACC by itself translates into quite a bit of additional damage, and within a reasonable range of opposing DEF combines with the conversion bonus into 19.5% higher chance to crit. And indeed, crits add +25 to the interrupt roll (and grazes -25), so that is improved too. Obviously dual-wielders attack more often, but I'm not sure how much higher the DPS will actually be. Taking a very simplified example of a Sabre with no damage modifiers, with ACC - DEF = 0 (not counting the +12 for 1H), expected damage per hit would be 10.8 for dual-wielding and 14.3 for one-handed. This means that DW total attack duration needs to be about 75% of that of one-handed to get the same expected damage per time unit. Now I'm admittedly not fully up on the details of attack duration (so anyone correct me if I'm wildly off base with following), but I believe the pertinent components are roughly as follows: dual wielding itself only affects recovery time, and gives a base recovery time of 2/3 that of non-DW. The figures I came across for Sabres are 30 frames attack and 36 / 54 recovery, or 28.8 / 54 with the -20% bonus on recovery time Two Weapon style gives. So we get 58.8 and 84 frames respectively, which gives an expected damage of 15.4 for dual wielding in the duration of a single one-handed attack. A bit more, but not a massive damage differential. Moreover, that's without DR. If we assume a DR of 4 the expected damage per hit drops to 6.8 (DW) and 10.3 (1H), which translates to 9.7 damage for dual-wielding per 1H attack, giving the advantage now to the one-handers. Clearly this is going to depend massively on any number of other factors as well. Even corrected for number of attacks per time unit one-handed will crit more often (unless ACC >> DEF to begin with), and thus benefits more from on-crit triggers, crit multiplier bonuses, etc. Dual-wielding on the other hand gains more from Full Attack type effects like HoF. But I think in a general sense the conventional wisdom that dual-wielding offers (significantly) higher DPS is perhaps not quite correct. Interestingly, you actually benefit more from attack speed bonuses if you're not dual wielding (again, if I grasp the details of attack duration correctly), because for non-DW the recovery time takes up more of the total attack duration. As far as I know the Two Weapon bonus is additive with all others (though some of those are multiplicative with each other), so if for example there is a combined -80% recovery time bonus from other sources we drop to 30 and 40.8 frames attack duration respectively, and in the above example the DW sabres drop to 14.7 expected damage per 1H Sabre attack.

Did the 'Continue' button also not load to where you left off? It might actually also be a problem with the Steam synching feature by the way, rather than with PoE itself. Which is no less annoying of course, but would be readily solved by turning the synching off. In any case, to find your savegames you could also just search your system for 'Pillars' or '*.savegame' (I'd start by searching from the C:/users/[user name] folder, it's probably in there somewhere). I suspect the 'Saved Games' folder might be Window 8+, and Windows 7 still saves stuff in either My Documents or the appdata folder, probably appdata/local.

I suspected that might be a culprit, good to see it confirmed.

I've seen it happen as well. Usually it clears up after just a reload though, you don't need to restart the game for it.

Wouldn't a (melee) ranger be more suitable for a Jon Snow character by the way? Wolf companion obviously, 2H sword, maybe scale armour (no helmets) and some sort of cloak? Meadow Folk, The White That Wends, maybe dissident or hunter background. Skills in stealth / survival / athletics I'd say; thematically, mechanics probably doesn't fit too well, and lore is of course definitely a no go.

Why? Just because a particular weapon isn't necessarily the most optimized choice doesn't mean it isn't viable. If you want to play a two-handed sword, by all means do so. I'm no expert on PotD (assuming you're starting there; like Clerith says, I'd start with Hard anyway), but as far as I can tell it's not like your character is going to be useless when playing PotD unless you optimize every last stat and metric. Especially if, as I would expect, you're playing with a full party (or not soloing, at any rate). Also keep in mind that the Sabre isn't faster in itself, counterintuitively average and slow melee weapons have the same base speed and recovery. It's just that you can dual-wield Sabres and therefore get more hits in, but that assumes you want a dual-wielding character. Also, Sabres do marginally less damage and are Slashing; personally I do tend to prefer the flexibility of weapons capable of two damage types, like the two-handed sword. Anyway, like I said: my advice would be to start with the type of character you want to play as (eg. a Jon Snow-like beardy two-handed sword wielder with 0 lore), and make that work; the range of viable builds in PoE is very wide, so there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to.

Just a very fast and dirty response. You are forgetting the key factor. It is a Fighter talent. It only converts grazes to hits, not hits to crits, and the Fighter is one of the highest accuracy characters in the game so already grazes less often than most melee characters to begin with. Is it a dps increase, sure, but it is hardly make or break or this huge must have talent. The fact that in one patch it didn't work period and many players didn't even notice is telling. I'm not forgetting anything. Part of your argument was that if implemented correctly, it is rather a "meh" talent, I was merely outlining why it isn't. Even without the graze to hit conversion it'd still be on par with many of the +X% damage talents, I'd say. Moreover, because it is technically an ability rather than a talent there isn't actually that wide a selection when it becomes available. As alternatives you have the two defensive modals, and the remaining one of Knock Down and Disciplined Barrage. So I'd say there are plenty of reasons why you would normally be wanting to take Confident Aim. On the flip side, in its current bugged state it is seriously overpowered, but this isn't readily apparent from the description or the combat log. You'd have to notice that your fighter is doing an unusually high amount of damage, more than it technically should or could be doing. And even then it isn't evident that Confident Aim is the cause. As far as I can tell I was the first one to report this issue (at least in relation to Confident Aim), though I can hardly have been the only one affected by it. Plenty more people must have been and still must be running around doing way too much damage with their fighter.

I've checked, respeccing to remove Confident Aim from your fighter works as predicted: immediately after respeccing and removing CA your fighter will be at +83.3% damage. Once you save and reload though, minimum damage is back were it's supposed to be. So the slight bit of good news is that your save isn't corrupted in this sense, it really is purely a loading bug. Also checked the graze to crit % on CA by the way, since I was cutting up Aloth anyway: exactly 5 out of 25 grazes converted, so that's fine (normally it isn't that neat either).

Slighty more of them I'd say, since it affects Jolting Touch as well. So generally it should be all the ones affected by Vulnerable Attack as well.

Confident Aim in its current state increases the minimum base damage by 120%, ie. a 10 - 15 Hunting Bow now has a 22 - 15 range. So technically it still only increases the minimum damage, but given the way damage is rolled this is equivalent to a 15 - 22 range. The minimum, average and maximum base damage are thus all increased by about 48% (varies a bit per weapon, obviously). This applies to all hits, not just converted ones. The graze-to-hit percentage is fine as far as I know (didn't check explicitly, but I gave Aloth a very extensive beating testing this with different weapons, so would have noticed if it was considerably off). The reason this happens is that when loading a game the relevant multiplier is initialised to 1. For a Confident Aim'ed Fighter, it is then incremented by 1.2 (where it should be multiplied by 1.2), and as such ends up as 2.2 => +120% minimum damage. I haven't tried respeccing, but given the way it arises it should disappear if you respec.You probably need to save and reload first though, I suspect that directly after respeccing it will end up at 1.83 first. I will test this tonight.

Looks like the same problem as the Hiravias / group change bug. The log file shows errors when loading Litany against Minor Afflictions, which is a level 4 Priest spell from WM2 (which I gather you don't have). It was created in the 3.03 update, hopefully they'll push out a fix for it soon.

More generally, Ancient Memory stops whenever you stop chanting, so also if the chanter switches to another chant or becomes disabled in a way that prohibits chanting. There's also a time limit on it by the way, 45s base. Though that's also in the description when you look in the character sheet (not sure it's in the description of the talent when you take it, though), so this is presumably intentional. Which seems fair enough (Constant Recovery has that as well, after all), but given the above bug (?) you're unlikely to get to that duration (especially since a chanter is likely to have higher intellect as well). Implementationally speaking, I think the reason this happens is because the ability is marked as per encounter. I'd have to delve deeper into the exact mechanics to be sure, but how it seems to work is: the AM ability has a CasterIsChanting prerequisite, once this is met the ability activates and initiates the AttackPulseAOE that actually does the healing. The AM ability keeps checking the CasterIsChanting prerequisite periodically, and when this is not met removes the AttackPulseAOE and deactivates itself. Being a per encounter ability, it will then not activate itself a second time even if the CasterIsChanting prerequisite is again met. To be honest I suspect it isn't really possible to implement it correctly as a GenericAbility (which it is now, almost all abilities are). The finite duration gets in the way, there isn't an obvious way to keep track of the remaining duration across multiple activations, this would require a specialized class (like Carnage, for example). Which to be honest isn't prohibitively complicated in itself, but at this stage in the development/updating lifecycle it probably would be. On the other hand, stripping out the duration and just letting Ancient Memory last the duration of combat should be straightforward. Removing the "per encounter" limitation should do it; I'm not sure the duration can technically be removed, but even if it can't this shouldn't be an issue since it should reset every time it reactivates. Though it would do to make sure either that the duration isn't visible in the description of AM, or that it is clear from the description that it restarts when you start a new chant. Personally, I wouldn't think making the duration unlimited would make it overly powerful, so that would seem a reasonable solution. It certainly seems preferable to leaving it as is, because at the moment it just does too little (without telling the player).

On the main menu screen, bottom left corner. Latest version is 3.03.1047, from the log file it looks like you're indeed up to date; -px1 / -px2 are WM1 and WM2 by the way (but if you're experiencing this bug I'm assuming you don't have those, at least not WM2). Your log file looks to be from some other session though, not from a game were you tried to add Hiravias. The log file overwrites itself when you start a new game, so you need to grab it right after the bug happened for it to show. If other users are any indication though, it should a series of errors ocncerning PX2_form_of_the_delemgan followed by a null pointer exception.

Except that they do, at least for abilities deriving from equipment (unfortunately there is no way to hotkey quick item slots). Look at the screenshot I posted, whenever you hotkey an ability it is added to the second bar shown there, which is visible whenever you have that character selected. In that example I hotkeyed Frenzy, Second Wind, and the healing ability from the Gaun's Pledge ring. So yes, shortcuts do help you remember that you have a certain object (with activated ability) equipped.

Ah yes, I know what's going on then. Since the OP claimed it didn't work on any spells and as usual provided no further information, I only tested it with Minor Missiles and Necrotic Lance, which as you note work fine. But what those two and the other spells you describe have in common (and for example Thrust of Tattered Veils and Jolting Touch as well), is that they are single target damage spells which are implemented in the game using the Ranged Attack. This is also what the regular weapon-based ranged attacks use, which is presumably why only these kinds of spells (any single target direct damage spell should work) get the bonus and the rest don't. I suspect this is not intentional, I would think the skill is meant to affect everything. I doubt it'll still be fixed though (well, presumably in PoE2 it will be, if used there).

And your point...? I'm well aware they changed it. The question was whether it was whether it is possible to make activated equipment abilities permanently visible in the current implementation, which it is (by assigning them to hotkeys, as shown).

I tried it as well, the bug happens for me as well. As far as I can tell the second bash is always aimed at another enemy in the Carnage radius of the first bash. Aside from the bug itself happening in the first place, what's also puzzling is that it happens only once per initial Bash, and doesn't recursively occur on subsequent Bashes either; the second Bash shows up as an attack in the combat log so it's easy to tell, and I've only counted just a second one despite there being plenty more enemies in range. Also confirmed for Dragon's Maw, by the way.

Hmm, if only they had designed it such that the hotkeyed abilities showed up as a separate menu bar... Which admittedly doesn't work for quickslot items, but still.

I'm fairly certain he's talking about the icon on the main screen (when you have a single character selected) containing the quick items as well as activated abilities from equipment and such. Apparently he forgets about them, and they are somehow difficult to access quickly (which seems deeply irrelevant for abiities you've forgotten exist, but never mind that). Why he doesn't just tie those abilities to hotkeys I'm not sure though, seems like a perfectly reasonable solution.

Should you want to make a manual backup of your saves though, their location can be found here: https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-175-location-of-save-games/ (as Xaratas said, they should be unaffected; but if you want to make sure you can put a copy of that folder somewhere).

Hmm, looking at the output log it's Hiravias and his (WM2) Form of the Delemgan again. There's nothing very specific to Aloth though, so I think it's actually exactly the same problem as already encountered by others and Aloth is just caught in the crossfire. Probably when Hiravias is added to the party and something goes wrong halfway through, some variables become set to an unusual combination of values that block Aloth (or anyone else, I would expect) from being added again. Regardless, yours is I think at least the fourth report of this same bug, and as far as I can see the only reasonable explanation is that WM2 files or settings got mixed in with the non-WM update, either in the general 3.03 update release or in Steam specifically. That can ultimately only be fixed by Obsidian themselves, so it would be nice to get some input from them. In the meantime I can only suggest avoiding adding Hiravias to your party for now; there's no guarantee that the same issue won't crop up in some other form, but so far he / Form of the Delemgan seems to be the only problematic component.

Could you post the output_log.txt file (default location is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity\PillarsOfEternity_Data). If you could try to add Aloth, and grab the output log file then, it'd be great. It sounds like exactly the same problem, indeed. But because it's (also) Aloth for you where it was primarily Hiravias for others so far, seeing what it records in your output log would likely give more information on what exactly went wrong (beyond the general "wrong files coming through the Steam installer", which seems to be the root cause).

In terms of implementation, all passive and weapon bonuses (and penalties) stack. The whole non-stacking issue only occurs within the "non-weapon/shield equipment effects" and "passive/modal effects". The reason that many weapon bonuses don't affect each other isn't lack of stacking. Rather, as noted above, it's that they simply aren't general bonuses; they're specific to the weapon they're on, and only apply when you attack with that weapon. This distinction may seem pedantic, but it is actually quite important: if it were the case that the weapon bonuses were general but just didn't stack, the result would potentially be quite different. Firstly, the highest bonus would apply: in this scenario, if one weapon had +10 ACC and the other +5 ACC, you would get +10 ACC when attacking with the +5 ACC weapon as well. Secondly, they would apply to spells and spell-like effects as well. Neither is the case, and would also be rather counterintuitive anyway (a weapon being Exceptional should say something about the quality of that weapon; it would be weird if having a very finely made weapon in one hand suddenly improved the plain dagger you have in the other). So generally I would say it is best to think of this in terms of "bonuses to the weapon" and "bonuses to the wielder". Anything that can reasonably thought of as reflecting on the quality of the weapon itself or a specific side effect of attacking with it, is almost certainly going to be specific to that weapon. Anything that makes more sense to think of as a function of whomever is wielding that weapon, is very likely to be a general bonus. These should indeed show up on the character sheet as well (can't think of any exceptions right now, anyway), so that's a handy guide.

Yes. Except the accuracy bonus against specific enemy types you can get from the Survival skill *does* affect spells, it is a general accuracy boost.

It's really not. Unless you think any of the +X% damage talents is "meh", then your standards for "meh" are just vastly different I suppose. Because those generally are in the range of +10% to +20% damage, and conditional on any number of factors (weapon used, type of damage, sneak attack conditions, etc.) and/or with penalties to other stats attached (eg. Savage Attack). By comparison Confident Aim (correctly implemented) increases the mean base damage by about 8% (without conditions, other than using a weapon), and the graze to hit conversion is equivalent to about a 3% damage bonus as well (varies with accuracy, of course). Moreover, because the +8% is on the base damage it scales all regular +X% damage modifiers as well, so a crit effectively adds +54%, Might adds +3.3% per point, etc. That adds up rather quickly. A small downside is that it doesn't increase the maximum damage of course (but it does increase consistency, also valuable) so it isn't fully comparable to +X% damage, but the math very clearly points to it being at least on par with most if not all of the other +damage talents. In the current, bugged implementation, CA gives about a +48% on base damage instead and also vastly increases the maximum damage. So while not game-breaking (though no one claimed it to be, I believe), it makes it vastly overpowered; it's a bit like permanently doing Crit damage, except better because all damage bonuses are scaled up as well and you have an additional +74% damage when you genuinely do Crit.