Zoso der Goldene

@Raven Darkholme Just watched the first couple of episodes of the Bloodmage/Priest of Skaen attempt, nice! But I wonder whether there is a reason not to take Hylea's Boon right away, add the black bird as a pet and do the Helping Hands quest by sneaking through the cave? I costs 2-3 hours tops, you get some more "Deceptive" and "Cruel" options (on deck with the ghost, the other in the cave), and it nets 1484 xp right away. AFAIK food effects last until the next rest, so there's no downside apart from 2-3 hours, but hey, 1484 xp might be worth that. And if it fails for whatever reason - I don't see why it would - it would be so early in that it hardly mattered. Am I missing something (again :)? (To be honest, I TCSed the original game without the DLCs, and now came back for the Ultimate - so I missed the fact that, like PoE1, you can't do DLC content after the main game, silly me:)

So implicitly, it does have a deadline, thanks for the clarification!

Then I don't really understand some of the discussion re: not being able to craft enough Scrolls for most of the bosses - did I miss something?

Does anyone here know whether the "The Ultimate" quest itself is on the Critical Path, i.e. has a due date attached?

That's been the case in PoE all along, both for auto-attacks and full attacks. It's more prominent now, maybe (haven't done the math for Deadfire yet), and there were no weapon modals.

Especially random encounters/auto-generated quests like in Skyrim that break immersion or even the game by accidentally coinciding with other random encounters/quests and story quests. The should stay extra dead. *Sharpens stake*

I don't think it's imbalanced, and you can't really compare on level 20 / PL IX really. They build in a couple of deterrents to multi-classing, and the most powerful is not that you don't get access PL VIII & IX. It's that you get access to PL VII 6 levels later. I think single classes seem under-powered at times because they only use one resource pool, instead of two, so they feel more like one-trick ponies. Some of the classes (like wizard) already work great for both single and multi class play, and the solution for classes that don't is more about tweaking some of the mid-to-higher power levels to make them really attractive. Look what they're doing to Cipher in 1.2. Before that, it was only viable as a multi-class with a martial class for focus generation. Now they speed up things, enhance duration and add some unique things to the list (Brilliant inspiration anyone? That makes deciding between single and multi really hard (which it wasn't for Cipher), and that's how it should be. BTW 2/3rd of playthroughs being attempted with single class characters also seem to indicate that single class is not necessarily underpowered. It's not 100% conclusive, though.

It's about balance in order for the content to be interesting to everyone. That's hard enough to do with the wide range of levels a character might have in any given encounter, especially late- and mid-game.

Completely pointless? Not really, Sacred Immolation just requires high Reflex to work without killing yourself (short of having Sacred Sacrifice or Providence). Weapon and Shield Style, Snake's Reflexes, High Dexterity, High Perception, Equipment, ... all help in that regard - (if that's tanky is another question, but Sacred Immolation is not really "tanky", per se)

The problem that then arises is that you also wouldn't be able to do anything else in most battles. Ultimately that's an issue with the way they've replaced uses/encounter with resources/encounter - every ability has to be balanced as something repeatable that potentially replaces all preceding abilities, rather than as something that will happen X number of times per encounter. /shrug Why that is an issue? U can choose to use FoD 10 times or use SI x1, Lay on hand x2 FoD x4, it’s more flexible than PoE 1. Yes u can barely do anything if u use your high cost abilities a lot times, but it’s all up to you and in PoE 1 you cannot even do this, can u has SI twice in 1? No. It's so flexible that it can be homogeneous. Let's take the paladin as an example: when I built an FoD-focused paladin in PoE1, they'd have a couple of really impressive alpha strikes to use at advantageous times, and then they'd be doing other stuff (healing, tossing down scrolls/spellbinds, tanking, etc) - throughout the fight, I could realistically expect to do a variety of different things. By contrast, a PoE2 paladin optimized for FoD will just use FoD over and over again, because that's what they're built to do and is, in general, their best option. Of course, that's an exaggeration, and in particular the difference is more limited at early levels when PoE1 characters tended to have only 1-2 abilities available. It's also variable based on class and build, and for characters like Chanters who replenish resources over time, it tends to be untrue. But hopefully it gets across the point I'm trying to make: tying everything to a shared resource pool sounds good in theory, and it can be good in theory, but it can also encourage extreme specialization and one-trick pony builds. It''s also less of an issue for multiclass characters, since those tend to be two or even three-trick ponies just as a result of their two resource pools. Finally, from a design perspective, I'd personally be leery of it because it's really difficult to balance - and this brings us back to cases like Charge. See, if an ability exists in a vacuum, it can be tuned as an isolated function, i.e. "if Charge is usable x times than it should do y damage at level z." The fact that such an instance can be thought of in simple mathematical terms is tremendously valuable with respect to tuning it, because all the designer has to do is consider the context it occurs in, and then make sure the function is appropriate for that context. If there's a problem with Charge, that can be addressed, and then if there's a problem with Knockdown, that can be addressed. The two cases do create context for one another, but it's a limited context because the ability to use one does not come at the direct expense of the other. On the other hand, if all of a character's abilities draw from the same resource pool, a secondary consideration arises: the opportunity cost of using ability A instead of ability B, and more crucially, the player perception of that opportunity cost. In practice, unless fights really do prompt radically different styles of play, players are going to look at the cost of an ability and the effect of an ability and either say, "oh, wow, that's better than what I have right now, I'll use all of my resources on that instead," or, alternately, "oh, wow, that's not as good as what I have right now, I won't use any resources on that." If the developer then tunes it the other way, the player may change their conclusion, but the process of evaluating opportunity cost to determine worth still happens. This is why in games like Path of Exile, functional builds tend to have one skill for AoE, one skill for single-target, and buffs - they all draw from mana, so the only skills worth using are the ones that maximize either defense or DPS. It's not an inherently bad thing, but it is a thing I don't like in Pillars. Hopefully that provides some clarification on my perspective. Thank you for this post! I wondered why playing single-class felt so underwhelming (not from a power level perspective), and that's exactly it! If you have both Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike, you're going to compare both directly, and find that Blinding Strike is by no means twice as good as Blinding Strike, so you're going to use Crippling Strike exclusively. Once you add Gouging Strike, that reverses, and there is no real reason to use Crippling Strike anymore. I'm sure it was designed with the intention of giving players more flexibility, but it does exactly the opposite, at least for me. BTW by extension, it also shows which classes are less desirable. I find my Barbarian/Cipher Serafen constantly end up with 150+ focus because to use all the Barbarian abilities immediately feels superior to using Cipher Powers and waiting for them to take effect. Although on PotD + level scale up, the fight is usually over before I really get to cast anything big (same goes for Meteor Shower etc.)

<Insert obligatory joke equating Josh to Eothas> Hmm, that also includes just tearing it down and having someone else reinvent it.

Have ciphers cast Ectopsychic Echo on the your fighter, or have your priest cast Hand of Weal and Woe before the Charge, and then Charge again.

I'm pretty sure it's not the min/maxing; stats tend to have a lot less influence than people think (especially overvaluing negative numbers, of course). It's more about tactics/preparedness/understanding of the game mechanics/using synergies, and all that comes with experience.

No xp gain xp loss

I experienced the same issue, and I do have patch 1.1 already applied.

I generally agree, but with the backstab nerf, I never bothered to become invisible anymore. It's more efficient to use crippling strike to build focus and then immediately deploy, as the attack build focus that itself goes into the raw damage. When I first made my character, I saw that they'd left Backstab at 150% and thought "That's great, now Backstab is a viable option - it stays at 150% with everything else being toned down!" All my PoE1 playthorughs with Backstab-based rogues were pretty underwhelming, so that was a pleasant surprised. It felt about right, not weak, not OP, as it required a lot of positioning, guile to spend on invisibility (or a potion)... Now with the nerf, no point in using it anymore, apart from the opening attack from stealth

They should just give the players a +x levels slider for PotD. I feel this matters more at the start of the game when there's less stats on your characters. Late game when everyone has 100+ accuracy it doesn't matter if an enemy has 80 or 100 deflection anymore. This has been brought up before in this thread, but mathematically it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters for rolls is the difference between your accuracy and deflection - the absolute values don't matter, just the difference. Each level everyone gains 3 acc/defense, so as long as enemies scale with you, everyone just stays at mathematically equivalent relative stats. But anyway, all this is a sideshow because the reason why it doesn't feel like it matters if an enemy has 80 or 100 deflection in the end-game is because most encounters aren't tuned for very high level fights. Like I said before, even if a xaurip scaled upwards indefinitely to level 20, it would still be a xaurip with lame abilities. It would not be hitting you with meteor shower or protecting itself with minoletta's sigil or cloak of death. As I said before, I continually maintain that the base difficulty in 1.1 is fine, there's just a huge dearth of encounters/quests that target level 14-20; the game is definitely weighted to levels 1-13 heavily. I mean, it makes sense, because I imagine most players will stick to the critical path and a minimal subset of the other quests; and it shows because I think we can all agree that PotD feels decent for that level range (especially on the low end at port maje and shortly after). but for us who want a hard PotD for level 14-20, there's like... some bounties, bekarna's quest, nemnok, and shimmering island and that's pretty much it before ukaizo and half of what i just named you're already over-leveled by like level 15 even if you use scaling. i'm really hoping the DLC can help out here, which it did back in poe1. i just want dedicated islands and quests that are tuned for level 14-23 (yes, 3 levels higher than the player, and i want that to mean enemies with PL10 abilities unavailable to the player even) in the same way that the base deadfire game is tuned for level 1-13. One fact does seem to support the claim that most players finish the critical path and some small subset of quests: For PoE, only ~11% ever finished the game, for Deadfire, it's more than 20%.

why? I personally would have been happy if they just balanced it by increasing the amount off enemies in every encounter and increasing the stats of enemies, That would make the game more difficult (increases the mean difficulty), it does not make all powers more on the same level (reduce the standard deviation of power level, escpecially removing outliers).

What you said makes perfect sense. I would only disagree on this. I believe balance is about fine tuning things. You will change something, look at how it fares for some time, change something else, and go back later to the first one to change it again. I believe balancing such a complex game is not about bringing one, definite solution in a DLC, but more about iterations. That's why it took quite some time to make Pillars 1 better. As a side note, i still fail to understand why people are discussing about PoTD like this. I can't see the point. Unless people assume (once again) that the class/abilities balance changes are only about increasing PotD difficulty. Which would be getting the wrong idea, probably. Obs takes into account the necessary balancing process while reworking PoTD, but they are not doing it BECAUSE of PotD. They probably aim to balance classes in any difficulty level to begin with, PotD or not. I'm pretty sure of that. Why are people complaining that PoTD gets more difficult anyway, granted class/abilties balance has nothing to do with it? The only reason i could see for this is that there are some people here who can't stand not being able to faceroll everything in the highest difficulty mode. If it's not the case, please, consider that the balance changes you are complaining about probably have nothing to do with the increase in difficulty for PotD, and pick another game difficulty to get the appropriate level of challenge for you. And if you can't stand having your character build modified by patches. probably just wait some time until things start to settle balance-wise. In short, please, stop complaining about PoTD when the problems you seem to experience have seemingly nothing to do with it. Besides, i never played PotD (sticking to hard), but i very much understand people who don't want PotD to turn into "Let's go pick Mushrooms in the Forest" difficulty... And I would even agree, accept fine tuning is truly "fine" only during betas. This is exactly what betas are for. Everything that passed beta-test (except obvious bugs) - should stay until huge events like DLCs, because people already bought it the way it was sold and many of those who pay knew exactly what they were buying. You change it mid-use - you change something that was already payed for and considered property of the gamer (not by law, probably, but psychologically). Worse than that - most of the changes were nerfs. Something was taken away from the customers who payed for some fun, were having that payed-for fun - and suddenly lost it. And all because developers can not stop fine-tuning released product! Difficulty is a questionable thing. For me "Classic" is challenging enough to enjoy mechanics too. For others - PotD is laughable. When they say "G, lower the difficulty" I can say the same - "G, increase your difficulty yourself - take the most gimped class and repeat your PotD. If it's not enough, try to play blindfolded or bind your hands behind your back, ffs!". And emotions aside, there was already mentioned at least one modern game (DOS-2) with no balance at all from the start, yet, game was a smashing success. "Balance" is not the reason people buy any game - cool mechanics and interesting stories are. If balance still so much important for Obsidian - fine, but released product is not their own playground anymore, yet they could play and tune DLCs all the way they want, then suggest it to players saying "you thought core game was easy, now try that!". That way those who left for lack of challenge will be lured back, yet, those who enjoy things as they are still can play the way they want. Everybody is happy! Balance helps in coming up with interesting stories for everyone.

It's not necessarily the same people who were complaining about the game being too easy who are complaining about certain abilities being nerfed. Moreover there were plenty of things that were nerfed in the difficulty patch which really didn't need to be (a bunch of items that no one had ever complained about were suddenly nerfed seemingly at random). It's quite possible to both think the game is too easy and not want random abilities to be nerfed. I agree that a few nerfs seem to be pretty random, but I think it's a misconception that the nerfs are intended to increase difficulty. There was both difficulty tuning (encounters, enemy stats) in Veteran and Path of the Damned AND overall balance changes, mostly nerfs (some things were actually improved, like some AoE going from AoE to Foe AoE). Of course, nerfs are important to arrive at a consistent power level across the board if you want to tune difficulty, and that aspect is far more important than any change to difficulty as nerfs also affect enemies, so there Backstab is now less powerful as well.

This is subjective AF. Who are you to tell someone how to have fun and what's fun for him? The whole point of an RPG game is to play however you want to, because someone's game does not affect yours AT ALL. How do you define challenge? If I take 5 minutes hitting an iron construct because his defenses are sky-high, was that a challenge or just poor design? Making player's characters weaker and enemies stronger just means that fights take longer to end, because you run out of resources and have to watch as your group autoattacks **** to death with Grazes. This isn't Dark Souls where you actually have to be skilled to finish the game. How do you define that in Pillars? Making the game about a war of attrition sounds more like a snorefest than fun. And this is the only way they can "balance" the game without completely reworking the mechanics or the AI, both of which cost too much to do post-launch. I just finished the game on POTD and have to say there is some truth to that. It's not caused by balancing, but rather by a conceptual issue: If you want to avoid giving players the potential to one-shot bosses on a regular basis - and that's a good idea -, that is going to protract some fights, especially boss fights. And that fact doesn't play well with the per encounter resource pool. Why? It makes the resource cost of an ability one of the, if not the the single most important consideration in most cases. Where it isn't, the more expensive ability is usually overpowered or close to. Compare Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike. Blinding Strike is twice expensive as Crippling Strike, but is it twice as powerful? Definitely not, so you're never going to use Blinding Strike. I would very much want to have a hard time deciding between the two, that would be the challenge I'd like to see (at least in PotD). But with attrition, not challenge, this is a no-brainer. On the other hand, the upgrade to Blinding Strike, Gouging Strike, is so powerful that again, it's again a no-brainer. I know this is not exactly easy - how do you design abilities that are roughly twice as powerful (3x, 4x) as other abilities? Making characters' power levels comparable, and providing a consistent experience as you level up? (You have to pay twice for an ability, once when you level up, once every time you use it. I'm not sure whether complicating things by introducing variable resource pool costs for all classes was a good idea. It was already an issue with Cipher, but this resource pool was theoretically infinitely refilling, so it became more a matter of how you want to spend your time (manifest 7 small powers, or one big one and then refill?). With limited resource pools, that's no longer the case.

And that would work better with - wait for it - accuracy! Patience works as well, but protracted fights increase the risk of getting fataly wounded.

I would argue that you don't need Deep Pockets ever, even when soloing on an Ultimate run. I can't remember ever having used more then 2 or three slots. Even if you argue you don't know what you're going to need and should best be prepared, I had scrolls of Moonwell and figurines in there - and that's it. Do you think that's class dependent? I'm about midway through an Ultimate run with a solo fighter, and I have a hard time imagining getting through some of the fights I've done without having figurines, scrolls, and potions. Although I suppose I don't have great gear at the moment, and I didn't have to do those fights as soon as I have... Yes, class plays a role here, My Ultimate experience is mainly with Wizard, Chanter, and Rogue, and with the latter, I would say it's likely you need more than 4 quick items, as opposed to the other two. The only fight I absolutely needed a figurine to guarantee success was the Caed Nua hall. Sold everything including Gaun's Share and my armor up front to Heodan (he pays 5 times normal normal price) to be able to afford Adra Animat. Race is also important. If you're not a Moon Goodlike, chances are you're going to rely on potions or scrolls for healing to some extent.

Fully modded game with SCS had lots of tough fights. Maybe I'm a bad player, but some of them took me very long, or at least felt like they did. A fight that I remember that was part of the original game was of course Kangaxx. That took always very long and I had to reload a lot. That's because there's one item in the game that makes it really easy to survive for some time (Scroll of Protection from Magic), and only 2 or three weapons that could hit him. Without the Scroll, it was possible, but highly unlikely to defeat Kangaxx. With the Scroll, the fight was over in < 30s.

Especially on PotD, it helps to look at the tasks of the other companions in the group and look for synergies. A good example would be Curse of the Blackened Sight, Phantom Foes, or Eyestrike and a Rogue's Sneak Attack/Deathblows. As an extension of that idea, try to avoid tactics that contradict each other to a degree, e.g. locking down enemies with two tanks, casting Chill Fog on them and then sending in the melee Rogue is maybe not the brightest idea if that means you're going to be hit by your own Chill Fog a lot . Basically think about how the team works together.