Bosmer

Yes, the info provided by your guide is where my initial worries came from Thank you, great to hear! This mod is a masterpiece

Does anybody know what the current state of these DoT-bugs is at the moment? For example, disintegration in my tooltip is described like a "normal" ApplyOnTick ability, unfortunately I can't test the ability right now. I see that the community patch (which I have installed) has fixed Cleansing Flame to ApplyOnTick (insteado f ApplyOverTime), but I don't find a similar change to other bugged DoT-effects in the mod description.

I definitely get the idea behind Port Maje as a "tutorial-island", trying to build up the upcoming political conflicts in the area and pushing you towards the main story. That being said, I think it's too rushed in every aspect and that problem also feeds into these early encounter-designs. The bear fight, being only a small sidequest, in POE1 is easy once you gather your buddies, Aloth and Eder, and being a small no-name (farmer, colonist, whatever) at this point you intuitively understand that fighting three bears (on PotD) on your way to town might be too challenging. Unfortunately, in poe2 the setup is completely different: You and your buddy Eder are dyrwood heroes, and while some of this power relied on your awesome weapons (which are now lost) it's hard to understand why you two are so much weaker at this point. For the watcher, one reason could be that he was basically dead and needs to recover the rest of his soul, I see that, but I think if that's the context than the writers should point this out more clearly. For Eder (and later Aloth) there is no real reason.. and I don't think that they've done themselves a favor by introducing these companions so early in the game. (Although it's nice to see Eder caring so much for you!). These "inconsistencies" are then exaggerated by the over the top encounter design in the digsite and gorecci street, throwing too many (in potd) and too powerful enemies at you. I mean on PotD there is suddenly a f****** drake in the digsite and noone mentions it. It might be that these encounters have been changed after the early criticism that the game would be too easy at launch? At the moment I'm running a solo-run on normal difficulty (with berath's blessing) and now everything feels more organic and the enemy strength and group size feel more like challenges a watcher, all alone, would face. But for full-party-runs (where normal is no real option) the encounters on port maje are just over the top. If stealthing is supposed to be the go-to strategy, than the game should tell you that more clearly, since it's still supposed to be the tutorial.

Maybe I could chime in here and promote @Elric Galad's "Balance Polishing Mod" (in combination with the community patch). I think it makes very reasonable adjustments to abilities/subclasses that are generally inferior to other same-tier abilities in the vanilla game. This includes the single-target spell "Fractured Volition" to apply now the enfeebled affliction, allowing you to choose a different monk subclass, if you wanted to, but still benefiting from the nice interaction of enfeebled with many cipher spells. I definitely enjoy it on my current cipher run, without making anything to powerful.

Sounds great, I can't wait to see how it plays out! One concern could be that it might still be the vastly superior strategy to bring a cipher along and stack the brilliant effect with the potion. How do you think about this? Might there be a way to not let these effects stack?

Yes, that's right now that I think of it.. what would speak against a (slow) regeneration rate (for all non-casters atm) that starts after xx seconds in the encounter? Or starts when only remaining with xx resources in encounter? Or maybe replacing "empowering yourself" (I don't know what it's called) to give you a steady, slow resource-regeneration instead of instant-resources... At this point I'm just brainstroming, obviously, but maybe it might be fruitful to start the concept from the simplest/cleanest implementation possible (which might be just using consumables or one tier-0 passive for all) and than move into more complex mechanics.. but you guys are the experts here

I feel @Boeroer's idea (or MaxQuest's) was to implement this tier-0 passive that fits quite naturally into the specific class. This way players wouldn't feel forced to use it, but the new resource points would, slowly but steadily, come in not fully depending on the playstyle or build. Regarding the balance discussion I tend to side with Boeroer. Making some classes more soloable and making some classes more viable for long bossfights are at its core the same challenge: After 30 seconds of fighting some classes don't have _anything_ to do, without brilliant. So its more about bringing these classes on par (not completely of course) with resource regenerating subclasses/classes. Edit: For the moment I feel like the drug / consumable idea might be the easiest way to go.. however the effect of the drug (e.g.) should be balanced around the effect of other drugs... intuitively I think that simply providing (vanilla)brilliant might be too strong. And it shouldn't scale with alchemy, since that would make this skill too powerful.

I think Elric has introduced some changes along these lines in his mod. And I definitely like the idea of more resource generation without brilliant, but I feel these per-kill-resources have the strongest impact in battles where they might not be needed (with many trash-mobs) and they might foster cheesy kill-your-summons strategies (not tested). I follow the different ideas in this thread with great interest, but there seems to be a lot of differing opinions on the real problem that brilliant is causing to the game. Is the problem that brilliant is by far the strongest inspiration or more generally that resources can be regenerated? Or that they can be regenerated so easily (tactician / cipher)? Or that only a few items / classes allow to do so? Personally, I feel Obsidian would have had a far easier time to balance things with a hard cap on the number of resources in each encounter. In combat I like to face meaningful decisions on the optimal actions of my characters and limited resources are one straight forward way to allow this.

I'm so happy to see that you're still working on this mod (and Elric's mod of course) and still finding ways to improve the game. This is the version of deadfire that people should play, thank you so much!!

Yes, that's definitely a cool setup that I want to check out (the char is gonna be soulblade/rogue btw). The thing is, once you gather so many strategic blitz stacks, swinging a two-handed weapon (e.g. Voidwheel or Chromoprismatic Staff) might become even better than attacking with Scordeo's Edge and hoping for the proc. Although a Cipher can obviously also profit from blade cascade with his spells (especially fast ones), so that's another pro!

Ah I see, then the "opportunity costs" of switching weapon sets are even higher! So the probably optimal setting would be to dual wield scordeos edge with a ranged weapon unless you use many full attacks.

Wow, thank you so much Boeroer! I guess there is some weird beauty in not really knowing what the items do before "using them". So, my initial idea was to maximize the gain from blade cascade by (fast) switching through several weapon sets, that in the best case offer debuffs/effects that other weapons could also profit from. However, since blade cascade itself can be reapplied during blade cascade I guess sticking to scordeos edge (one handed) should be the best strategy in most cases.

Ha, I just asked myself the same question about blade cascade and similar weapon-based effects while theorycrafting for my upcoming holiday deadfire session Maybe someone can help me out here: Do hostile/beneficial weapon effects stack (infinitely) if not explicitly stated in the description? E.g. the enchantment of karaboru (bloody mometum) that lowers enemy deflection; bring low from rusts poignard or blood gift from sanguine great sword? Scordeos Trophy for example does apply the effect with each hit again and again. And I see that for some weapons (e.g. Blade of the endless paths) the stacking is explicitly mentioned (with a cap obviously). Is there some general rule for these things?

Sorry! I just checked it again (misread the tooltip the last time): Crits increase the DoT duration (as expected) and critting has no effect on the damage per tick. I guess this is the way it's supposed to be, so everything works fine and I can stay with my build thanks again!

Hey Elric! Thank you for working on this mod, I really enjoyed the changes you made, especially to paladin and cipher! I might have encountered a bug with the new Soul Ignition. It seems that the DoT-duration is not affected by graze/hit/crit and the damage per tick decreases for critting. I'll try to add a screenshot later on!

Thank you so much guys for finishing this great game I hope I can finally give it another try with all your fixes and balance changes! I‘ve been theorycrafting some builds and couldn‘t check it yet myself but did you guys make any changes to soul annihilation or turning the wheel? There seemed to be majorities for some changes in the poll and I don‘t find anything in the changelog. Anyhow thanks again and have a great day