Loren Tyr

Not sure whether this has been reported yet, but there is a minor bug when using poisons: after you successfully hit, the "poisoned weapon" status effect icon on your character sticks around. It's just a GUI thing as far as I can see though, you don't get additional poison hits out of it. Also, if you use a second poison the first icon is still used. For example, if I apply Stone Joint, successfully hit an enemy with it, then apply Scorching Venom, I'll still see the Stone Joint icon (and tooltip) next to my character (though the duration updates). It will still hit as Scorching Venom as it should. I also wanted to reiterate another poison bug, I mentioned in earlier in 1.1beta but since it's still there I just wanted to make sure: the amount of DoT damage in the attack log for all the poisons is listed as zero. Since the poison description doesn't show any alchemy, power level or might scaling (also not for non-damage effects or accuracy, would be nice to have this changed as well), it can therefore be very difficult to tell how much damage the poison actually does for the elemental damage ones, since those also don't show over the victim's head. Finally, and not sure this is a bug: the Razorgill Dust +5% damage effect does not appear to scale at all. I can't imagine that's supposed to be that way though, because if so it would be incredibly weak compared to other poisons: the 3 base raw damage it does ticks only every six seconds, and scales very slowly (around 28 damage at alchemy 20, whereas eg. Stone Joint would do around 95 damage per three seconds with that); a flat +5% damage doesn't make up for that (and eg. the AR penalty on Fungal Bile does scale), and from the poison's description I would think that that vulnerability was probably intended to scale (also increasing its own damage at higher Alchemy). Edit: actually, it's only Scorching Venom that doesn't show damage ticks, I thought it was all elemental damage ones. Still would be good to have the descriptions (for everything) and log tooltips (for damage) fixed though

If you're going ranged I'd indeed definitely go Assassin, the extra damage received doesn't matter that much and the +25 ACC applies to everything so it is very useful to make a spell or scroll or poison or whatever stick. Especially since it's a passive so it'll stack with everything, and there's a fair number of ways like Smoke Veil or Invisibility Potion to turn yourself invisible as needed after you've broken stealth.

No, it's intended. Active effects do not stack with each other, and all modals are considered active in this regard (they won't stack with eg. the rapier's modal either).

Yeah, Carnage is definitely not as potent as it was in PoE. In part because the range is indeed much smaller; even with reasonably high int the area I think is smaller than the inner circle in your first image. You'll hit enemies standing right next to your target with it, but rarely anyone beyond that. But it's also the damage that's less. The description says something like "33% of base weapon damage", as far as I know none of the damage bonuses on your weapon attack carry over (you get Might bonus of course, but that applies to any attack). It's also damage as Raw now, which is nice in terms of penetration but also means no more Carnage shenanigans with effects applying to the entire AOE and such (though admittedly that's probably for the best). I have no idea whether it might scale with power level though, does anyone know? Sneak attack does, maybe the Carnage area does as well?

No, they're not. I have a certain view of what makes a good game (as I have elaborated on in some detail), and this is ultimately not compatible with for example these per rest style systems. You can disagree with my view on things, but that doesn't make my line of reasoning inconsistent.

No, I just have a different view of what works well in a game, 'dude'.

Yeah, Stone Joint is the crush damage one. But alchemy also scales penetration, so while the base damage at that level/skill should be a 94 DoT, you'd have gotten damage and overpenetration bonus (cause penetration would have been 22) on top of that.

I would say that the point of nerfing specific abilities isn't necessarily / only to make the game harder. Primarily, I should think, it is to balance the abilities against each other (and same for items, etc.). In which case nerfing is indeed the most practical strategy, since the alternative would be to make all other abilities (or at least some relevant subset) stronger. Not that I necessarily agree with all the changes they made, but I do agree with the overall aim (as I understand it) of doing so. Certainly though, improvements and more variation in AI and the builds used by enemies would definitely be a good thing as well. In part to make the game harder, where needed, but in part also simply to make it more varied.

At alchemy of about 11, Storm Toxin is also a permanent paralyze by the way (barring effects that shorten duration or clear it of course).

Alas, no. I wasn't sure so I quickly made a level 10 hireling rogue just now, but no joy.

Backstab could definitely use a boost, but I think it's still useful. Of course especially on an Assassin, who'll want to be popping in and out of visibility anyway and the Backstab gives a nice extra bump to the rest of the Assassinate package. Also keep in mind that you can use Escape without (immediately) losing stealth. I tend to start combat with Eder backstabbing someone (I run him as a tankish fighter-rogue). I typically want him to be the immediate focus of attention anyway, and the extra +100% is just a nice bonus. Once combat's on, I'll usually have my own assassin character Escape to something squishy in need of killing. It's never going to be BG2-style backstab (nor should it, frankly), but on the right build it's hardly a waste of a point (and on eg. my Eder build it isn't either; even if at best it's used only once per combat, it's not like there was much useful competition to spend the point on at that stage).

Yeah, whatever. Maybe try again once you've mastered, you know, coherence. I really cannot be bothered with... whatever this is.

Making resting and time progression an actual cost does certainly help (though that rarely happens, artificial restrictions like the camping supplies thing are just a cheap hack; the main cost there is that it's annoying to have to get more), but without actually adding tactical elements over a larger time span it's still not particularly compelling. It also only works in certain areas. Wandering around a city area for example there'd be no natural disincentive not to just unload your big guns on whatever, because there's probably an inn or camping supply store around the corner. Something similar applies out in the open, since probably you're not that far from resting options (often just one loading screen away) and travel time has no cost either. Conversely in dungeons and such you get the original problem of still lacking any predictive information, not knowing how deep that dungeon goes or what's in it. So how frequently you can rest without running out of resting supplies too soon is just a blind guess. And sure, some people may feel satisfaction about using minimal resources, but if that's all there is to it you're essentially just forcing the player to make his own difficulty level. That's not good game design. I imagine I'm not the only one who on the one hand would want to actually make use all their cool goodies and spells and whatnot, cause they're cool and fun to use; but at the same time, doesn't want to accidentally overuse them and make the game too easy, because as it turns out the power level of those things was balanced against a less frequent use. This is a fundamental problem: if the cost of resting / time is at best vaguely defined, balancing anything that relies on that cost to keep it in check is essentially impossible to do properly. Which is why such per rest systems simply cannot be made to work (absent something like a DM). I don't want to have to save my resources on some vague promise that I might get to use them later on a big boss fight at the end (itself a fairly tired trope btw), I want to enjoy using all the various aspects of my character and party and items in the understanding that the game is balanced and designed around me doing just that; that the game organically rewards me for thinking ahead, for making clever use of what's available, for not being wasteful. And I'm not saying that is by any means an easy thing to do, but simple per rest systems certainly don't deliver on this. Ultimately what I would want is to move away from artificial structures like per encounter and per rest, to a much more organic system. Where at least in some basic sense you can apply the same considerations as you would in reality, or some hypothetical version of reality. Wizards can only cast a fixed number of high level spells, why? We can imagine that it takes mental and physical effort to channel the energy needed to do so (and maybe it uses up specific (and scarce) additional resources as well). So instead of artificially restricting it two castings of a particular "spell level" (whatever that's supposed to represent), why not give them the ability to cast however much they want. Make them able to cast a spell with a little energy, with a lot of energy (or whatever); cast it quickly but maybe mangle it or miss, cast it carefully instead. And get exhausted as they do, which can affect them in all sorts of ways. As in reality, doing straining things repeatedly will wear you out; you lose strength, you lose accuracy, you lose focus, you make more mistakes; you might just drop unconscious from strain. And if you're backed into a corner, by all means try a last-ditch fireball at the limits of what you can do; maybe you'll just manage to save yourself, if the thing doesn't misfire and incinerate your arms. Anyway, it's just an example. There's all sorts of ways in which games can be improved, that they give you much more of an impetus to be varied in your strategies, to change and adapt and force you to come up with new solutions on the fly. That at least is my ideal (and yes, not one easily accomplished). And I think an important part is moving away as much as possible from artificial structures like 'per encounter' and 'per rest' (but also 'spell level'); and also, to give game elements just more varied qualities (from the basics up, eg. weapons, shields, armour; now they at heart only have a small number of qualities (AR and action speed penalty, say), given them more and having everything have more strengths and weaknesses provides a far greater incentive to vary things, change gear and strategy).

Aside from the Druid poison spells, poisons themselves are of course also strongly buffed by Alchemy (the descriptions don't show it though, those are only base amount for all effects). I don't know all of them off the top of my head, but for example Stone Joint does 9 + PL + 4 x Alchemy (plus bonus from Might, Death Godlike and over-penetration; Alchemy scales the penetration of the poison as well). So if you invest heavily in Alchemy it grows quite quickly. Main obstacle is getting them to stick of course. All poisons target Fortitude except Fugue Spores which targets Will, so always handy to have around for a professional poisoner :-D. I use an Assassin multiclass myself so the +25 ACC boost definitely helps against tricky targets (also: wacking people with morningstars, but that is great fun by itself already #MorningstarsFTW). On the other hand, a graze will do; graze/crit only seems to affect duration, which with high Alchemy is very long anyway. Obviously you do also need to separately hit with your weapon first for the poison attack to happen, though the duration on that is fairly long as well so you can try a couple of times if necessary.

They do translate it, it seems. Just looking through the game files (not Italian, I play the English version as well), and for example Merla! seems to become Fotre! vs All the localization files are in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity II\PillarsOfEternityII_Data\exported\localized by the way (root directory will vary of course, depending on system and such), so you can look at other ones there. A useful source would actually be the cyclopedia.stringtable file in the en\text\game and it\text\game subfolders. At least some of the phrases are explained in the Cyclopedia after all, so you can just find them in the en file, get the ID, then find the translation in the it file. Aimico seems to become Aimic, it turns out.

On the general per rest vs per encounter discussion, I would argue that ultimately the best way would be to get rid of both. Though per encounter does work considerably better than per rest, in my view. I think the problem of the per rest system is that it is a holdover from P&P games that just never really worked in computer games. Generally speaking, neither the resting itself nor time having elapsed has any real cost associated with it, so by itself there is no disincentive to rolling through a dungeon with your band of merry narcoleptics, dozing off at every turn. Whereas in P&P the DM could just sick some ogres on them or whatever, or have all the hard work clearing out monsters be pretty much undone by the time they wake up, because as it turns out reality isn't static when outside the protagonist's view. Of course the resting can be restricted artificially in various ways, which works to some extent but to my mind doesn't really solve the core problem. What (I would argue) makes the need for attrition and resource management and such interesting is that you need to be strategic, tactical. You need to weigh the benefits of using some resources now against possibly needing them later. But for there to be actual strategy and tactical thinking to that, you need at least to some extent to be able to plan ahead, and thus you require information about what may be next. But there is often no organic way to really obtain that. It would require much greater ability to gather relevant information in different ways (which would also greatly increase options for adding valuable non-combat skills to the game), in terms of scouting, scrying, infiltration, studying tracks, what have you. But similarly, it would probably need (and should encourage) much more tactical options for approaching a situation. Preparing an ambush, creating a distraction, but also actually being able to run away (and in the same vein it would be great of course if enemies can actually decide to run away (instead of suicidally keep attacking when it's clearly pointless), surrender, raise an alarm,rather than encounters essentially being in an isolated bubble disconnected from the rest of the world). In other words, make the world potentially more predictable and give the player more options to use information they have gleaned and make resource management and such actually strategic. Because as it is, it comes down much more to metagaming: you can manage your resources because having previously played through the same bit before; or there is a big glowing arrow saying "dungeon boss through this door", and you know you can bust out the big spells now. In that regard, it would also help in another sense to make the world less predictable as well, by making it dynamic; meaningfully changing over time as well as between playthroughs / reloads. Which could also easily make resting much more impactful: the world will have changed around you; the path you cleared behind you may not be clear anymore; you may have been detected and the defenses ahead been shored up, or an ambush may be around the next corner. Anyway, just some meandering thoughts; I just feel that though per encounter approaches clearly have their issues, the old school per rest approach doesn't fix them. And mind you, much of the above in a way can be applied to individual encounters as well. Adding forms of attrition within encounters. Adding more options for strategy, meaningful use of terrain. Making them less predictable (have reinforcements show up, have that fireball knock over a tree and cut off part of your party). In general I think, make things less binary, discrete (would feel much more interesting if there weren't for example fixed numbers of spells to cast, but casting (bigger) spells just makes the mage more exhausted and their subsequent spells less effective in various ways). Though admittedly that is much more difficult to design, but one can dream...

It's not about that though, it just a simple matter of finite resources: time, money, manpower. Regardless of whether a company is looking for a quick cash grab or is truly dedicated to making great games, they can only expend those resources once. Building two quite different gameplay modes into a game will inherently mean that resources will have to be split between them. Anything spent building one mode cannot be spent building the other, therefore the quality of each mode will almost certainly be less than it would have been had they decided to just implement that mode. And personally, I think a game is much more likely to be great if the developers have a clear focus and vision and just go with that; rather than trying to hedge their bets and make something that appeals to everyone (or to a larger audience, at any rate). Not guaranteed by any means of course, the courage of conviction can just as easily lead to spectacular failure (ahhh, Daikatana...). But going for compromise and mitigating risk, I can't really ever see that going anywhere legendary.

Except that everyone doesn't win, you end up with a compromise. Whichever system you use, you need to balance the game around it. Items, classes, abilities, enemies, other game mechanics, what have you. So if you give an option of two systems to use, you'd need to do that twice. Which costs time and money, which now has to be split. And I expect it also makes design more restrictive in general, since some things would probably only work in one of the two systems. Which means either you have to make certain items or abilities or whatever specific to one system (meaning either more work to get the same number of items, or fewer items per system), or not designing such items in the first place (abandoning a good idea for the sake of compromise). Which is not to say that it cannot or should not be done ever, but there definitely is a cost to it. To give an imperfect comparison, it is a bit like designing a game for both single and multiplayer. It's certainly possible to do so successfully, and to create both a rewarding single- and multiplayer experience. But invariably it does come at a cost, and it is likely that had that game been designed solely or primarily as single- or multiplayer, it would have been better at what it chose to focus on.

I'm not sure what repeating the phrase "toggled-passive" is intended to achieve. The fact that apparently modals are considered as such in some other games does not imply that they are or should be in PoE. Mechanically, there is no general argument to consider them 'active' or 'passive' or something else (if nothing else, since what being considered as such actually means will itself depend on the rest of the game mechanics). To also address your earlier statement: "Players who experience this game, with knowledge of toggled-passive in mind, are to be punished by the game". No, they are not. Players who come to this game expecting things to work in the way they do in some other games may find those expectations being confounded, but that is hardly punishment. If you play a new game and don't bother to learn anything about its mechanics, that's your own responsibility. Things like armour work differently as well; it's actually quite different even going from PoE1 to PoE2. So why would 'stacking' or 'active vs passive effects' be any different in that regard? And frankly, although the game could definitely be much clearer on its mechanics in many respects, the fact that modals are considered active is mentioned explicitly in the in-game Stacking entry. You can disagree with that choice and reasonable arguments can certainly be given against it, but it being done differently in other games is not such an argument. As for your rather bizarre example, I'm not sure what to make of that to be honest. If I had to classify them in terms of game abilities, without question I would consider both laziness and veganism to be passive. They are both more or less persistent and permanent traits/dispositions/convictions of a person. These can change over time of course, but certainly not at will; you cannot start and stop being a vegan at a whim, for example. Whereas you can easily change from one fighting stance to another, which is what those modals represent and how in a general sense it would work in real life (in combat and elsewhere). In combat, I would assume any competent fighter (of whatever kind) is able to adopt different strategies and fighting styles depending on circumstances, on the opponents they're facing and their weapons, etc. What works against a single heavily armoured opponent is wildly different from what works against fighting three unarmoured ones, for example. And by the way, though I care very little for veganism as such I feel I should point out: being a vegan definitely isn't equivalent to "eats only veggies every meal"

It also works on DoTs by the way, once the victim gets to Near Death the DoT will start getting the +20%.

On average they would to actually. Perhaps not the subset of those who started playing already, but presumably the majority of players who will end up playing only once will start their playthrough in version 1.1 or later. So they get a more balanced game without having potentially been disappointed by their character having changed on them. Obviously there will be a 1.2 with further changes later (and so on), but presumably the relative changes will tend to be smaller compared to earlier updates (and for single run players, it'd also only matter if it gets updated mid-game and it affects specific game elements they strongly rely on in some fashion). So definitely, I think developers continuing to maintain and improve (not that I necessarily see all changes as improvements, but it is clearly their intent to make the game better as they see it) their games after release is a very good thing.

I definitely agree that the mechanics in both PoE and PoE2 are just not adequately explained (though Obsidian is hardly the only studio guilty of this unfortunately *glares at Fallout 4*). However, I don't see how (@Crumbleton) modals are "clearly passive in nature". Mechanically, it's something you have to turn on; for some of the modals you may just want to turn them on and leave them there (which arguably means they're badly designed; if pretty much always you'd want them on they probably shouldn't have been modal), but it still is something you have to choose to do and can change at any moment. Similarly, conceptually, the modal can be seen as a particular fighting stance or whatever that the character chooses to adopt at a particular moment. Taking a more aggressive or defensive posture, prioritising specific strikes, etc. So from the perspective of the character this is also a decision being actively made. Whereas the passive abilities tend to be things that are either some skill that has simply improved (eg. weapon style abilities) or an attribute that has been honed, or they are more reactive / conditional skills (which in part you can perhaps also see as a general skill, eg. sneak attack reflecting a rogue's ability to see opportunities to take advantage of an enemy being distracted etc.). So both conceptually and mechanically, to me it does feel more natural to classify modals as active rather than passive. At least given the need to do so at all of course. Because personally I probably would prefer them to just be lump modals into their own category for stacking purposes, don't have them stack with each other but do stack them with active. Maybe some might need to be toned slightly in that case, but for the most part that's hardly going to be game breaking (and eg. Warrior Stance definitely could do with being able to stack with actives).

You couldn't have given off a more neckbeardish vibe if you tried. Such a great orator you are! To be fair to you though, your ability to so engagingly undermine your own position really impressed me. You're a hair's breadth away from a well-argued point on the one hand and demented ranting on the other, being able to maintain that fine balance is a rare feat indeed. I certainly wouldn't be able to match it.

Reading comprehension is not your strong suit I see. I shall reiterate using small words and sentences for your benefit: I did read the thread. I grasp the points made in it. I see merit in your core point. I agree with it in part. Your skill at making this point is atrociously bad.

Very much this, the alchemy skill is awesome. And I just want to reiterate my endorsement of poisons, with high alchemy those get really fun. Even at only 5 alchemy (and not counting Might bonus or overpenetration), something like Stone Joint will already lay a DoT of 31 damage (scales slighly with PL too, but not much) that lasts pretty much until the victim is dead. And with Stone Joint in particular, even if they do switch target and try to attack you they'll be so slow you can just lazily saunter away and watch them crawl after you in pursuit