Ethics Gradient

Your observations are correct. Boon "quality" is not affected by the difficulty at which you play the game. Cards have an equal chance of being found in all difficulty levels. The only thing that "improves" loot quality is the culling system, which thins out Elite and Basic boons as you move up in AD/Tier. Also, keep in mind that things got rearranged a little in Quest mode. For instance: 2 Copies of Haste enter Quest Mode at Tier 3 (normally 2 in AD2) 1 Copy of Wand of Minor Healing at Tier 2 (normally 2 in AD1)

Quest characters and Story Mode characters don't mix by design, and can't be swapped between game modes. The biggest reason is that they have different progression paths: one by XP, and the other by scenario rewards. Silly things would happen if you were able to bring a high-level character over from Quest Mode and get a whole new set of reward feats as they crash their way through Story Mode. A lesser reason is that Quest Mode and Story Mode have slightly different deck lists, and Quest is generally capped at AD4 stuff while Story Mode goes to AD5. The two modes are just just slightly different enough that they aren't meant to be compatible.

Yeah. This has come up before. It seems very likely that the game handles some "automatic recharges" as regular recharges with a successful NULL check.

And now Seoni got a Wand of Enervation as the reward for achieving level 38 (supposed to be an "Arcane Spell") - Can we perhaps keep this bug in the game? I'm starting to love it! Aww. Now you've done it! Haven't you noticed how quickly the beneficial bugs get squashed? Friend, you just condemned it to an imminent patch!

Glad to see you're back! I was beginning to suspect that you were kidnapped by Obsidian and locked in a basement somewhere to manually sort out all the rules interactions.

So you say, but I was listening to it while doing my squats, and around the 1:00 mark I felt like the mother****ing Archon of Iron... Heck yeah! I was fixing some lunch while it was on the loading screen, and I thought: "This must be what it feels like when Kyros makes a sandwich." The title theme has some kind of magic power to make anything feel epic.

It's an issue that Obsidian was made aware of a few weeks ago. We've also got a more recent thread here continuing the discussion. So you're aware, having villains/monsters in your hand won't break the game or anything. The cards are just useless for anything other than taking damage. Best idea is to take that character over to the Village House and banish the card next time you get a chance.

This may be a strange pair of questions, but how many of that card are in your vault, and how many were already in your party? I had that happen with the level 9 Amulet of Fortitude, for which the answers were "1" and "1". Not a glitch like in the top of the thread, this behavior is more of an expected annoyance. Even though the reward seems like it is "giving" you a specific card, it works using the same vault search mechanism. For example, if the search for vault cards matching "Dogslicer +1" comes up empty (because you already have all copies), it will default to a BoTG. Quest rewards are bound by what is available in the vault, and shouldn't give you more of a card than you're supposed to naturally have in that vault.

Cancel the alert. Things will be ok for a while.

Whew! Crisis averted.... for now.

Ran out again... Someone needs to dump a fresh sack of challenges in the challenge grinder.

That's expected behavior when the the server doesn't have any challenges to hand out. The button will reappear next time you're online and the challenges are refreshed on the server. Hopefully it won't take too long to get it sorted out again.

Aaaaand.... we're out of challenges again.

I'd also love to see a "Roll" button as an alternative to the swipe gesture. Even on a theoretically "top-of the-line" iPad Pro, I get a little annoyed when it takes a few swipes to do a check. And then there's the flip-side..., where the gesture recognizer is unexpectedly hyper-sensitive and you roll a check without weapons or blessings or anything because your finger strayed barely north of the character's hand... [insert sad "failed check" noise here]

That would actually be pretty cool (in a truly miserable sort of way). The location card would just need a little bit of extra text like: "You must attempt all checks to acquire boons while at this location" and we wouldn't be having this debate. Instead we'd be having an entirely different debate over on Paizo's forums about how much we absolutely hate the Vault of Greed... and lots of questions about how to replace our torn-up cards.

They don't take up any slot. So far as I can tell, the game isn't currently checking if you have "illegal" cards in your character's deck. It just validates the card types that are supposed to be there (boons). If you have a lv 40 quest character with 19 "normal" cards, you could theoretically have a dozen or so Bunyips in your deck without the game noticing. Your character would be pretty useless, but nearly immortal with a 30-40 card deck.

Yeah, something really screwy has been happening with reward card filters. The devs were made aware a little while back. For whatever reason, sometimes when you are promised a specific sort of card, it will give you one of the traits, and exclude the other. That's how Lini's "Animal Ally" reward is pulling banes; the game is looking for Animal Not-Allies. Whenever you get a card like that, you can just about guarantee that you're getting part of the reward description, and the exact opposite of the other part of the description. If you wind up with a bane in your deck, just banish it next time you come across the Village House. It isn't going to break the game having it, but other than discarding for damage, the card is useless.

Thematically, I see the opposite in the Vault of Greed. The location power is there to punish the "greedy" character by forcing them to banish an item if they want the one they found in the vault. At AD5, with 4 items, there's a decent chance there's something nice inside; but grab it at your own peril. We're not trying to rules-ninja the game here. Passing on boons is explicitly allowed, and a completely valid way to mitigate the Vault of Greed's Location Power.

Until then, hopefully someone's around to keep loading bananas into the system. It would be very silly if we ran out again.

Sorry about that. No offense intended! I only meant that the 'no' was obvious in that any sort of cross-platform hasn't been part of the game since launch. We're all stuck in one app ecosystem or the other since there's no method to link both sides together. The reasons why I assume that "yes" is on the horizon, are less obvious, and come from a couple sources such as a series of vague dev comments, learning the PlayFab API, and poking the app with a pointy stick. I'd say there are reasonable odds that some sort of "Log In with Facebook" button will appear on the main menu in the next major patch or so.

Yup. While the event "feels" like a nested series of encounters, it is actually two separate encounters, and effects from the first shouldn't carry over to the summoned card (unless the card indicates such be the case, e.g. Headless Lord). It might be a different story if Ghoul Bat had "At the end of your turn, bury any card played with the magic trait," but it doesn't, so it saves us all a terrible argument.

Currently, the answer for both of those is obviously 'no.' In the "future", expect them to both flip to 'yes' once the Facebook OAUTH comes to the release build. Yeah, user-land speculation and whatnot, but the game and PlayFab API both support the assumption. This would also include an eventual Steam release. PlayFab technically can use any unique identifier for logins, but it has specific methods to handle Steam IDs. After you purchase some IAP via gold or your platform store (Google Play/iOS App Store), the license is added to your PFID, not your google or apple account. What we have is already a fairly platform-agnostic system; all we're waiting on is some method to bind accounts together. I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but it is pretty deeply ingrained in the PlayFab API, and is a well-documented, least-effort solution.

No, it is not the same, but it is the best advice until the feature gets implemented. The discussion on this goes back to May, and even earlier if you consider the closed beta. Last we heard, it was on the to do list, but it's only been recently that forced rolls for unwanted boons has started having a significant quality-of-life impact.

Thats been my take on things as well. The Pathfinder world had some of the nicest, most laid-back players compared to other RPGs or CCGs. Sometimes it gets lively debating the rules, but frankly, those arguments can usually go either way without drastically changing how enjoyable the game can be. As far as the Tech Support area goes, yes, of course it's not the poster's responsibility to be an unpaid QA intern. But the reality remains that there will always be a lag between discovery and patch. The more we can do to describe and isolate the issue, the better the chance of reducing patch lag, and the better the chance of finding workarounds in the meantime. Users aren't playing forum cop just to ensure proper bug reports get filed; chances are, they're responding because they actually care. That's the camaraderie and community spirit @elcoderdude is talking about. Nobody has to care, but some do. The community doesn't release patches, but there's no reason it can't help find interim ways for users to overcome or avoid the bugs that make the app unenjoyable.

Visibility achieved! We'll make it through the weekend!