lMarcusl

Sorry for the necro but just a heads-up, the bug is still present. Started my current playthrough just a few weeks ago (post patch), got the books for the quest today, Tayn does start a dialogue about not trusting Llengrath but my only real outcome is to say I'll have to look for more books (even though I have them all). Speaking to him again shows the standard dialogue options, no mention of the books. I can refuse to give Llengrath the books on my second conversation with her, but Tayn still provides no new options.

Hm, I get why they'd apply this to Firebrand and Minor Blights as these are abilities and not benefitting from PL would not make much sense, and since the whole of the damage consists of that given element and keyword and damage immunity usually go hand in hand, there really wouldn't be an issue there either, anyway. But the rest...I mean, having arrows imbued with some extra Freeze or Shock on top as a lash should not affect the accuracy of the whole attack, and PL, as I understand the concept, shouldn't affect it at all either way. They could just revert the keywording change on these and not much of worth would be lost. Though I guess Arcane Archers wouldn't be happy...but they're Rangers, Rangers are not happy either way XD

Really? Well, that's a load off my chest. Has anyone figured out which those are, specifically? What makes Frostseeker different from, say Magran's Favor or other lash items that don't suffer from this?

Like I said, it's not just about Frostseeker and the associated Frost Shades. It apparently affects all damage lashes, which is a good number of items and an entire Druid subclass (and one Chant). I don't think I need to list all the enemies that have some type of keyword immunity (take the whole damn poison naga class, which constitutes a good portion of SSS content). And it is clearly a bug. X type keyword abilities not applying their status effects onto X keyword immunes is perfectly fine and works as it should, that is the whole reason for the X keyword immunity being in the game, as you say. Y damage-type keyword abilities not applying their Y-type damage, same thing, perfectly fine. But having a Y damage type invalidated because of an X keyword immunity is completely counter to the game's armor system and is obviously the result of the game's keywording mechanics applying where they shouldn't. Damage immunity should apply only to damage of that type (which already works as it should as evidenced by Neriscyrlas and other immunes taking proper damage from other damage types involved in the attack), keyword immunity should apply to non-damaging keyword effects of that type. But, clearly, here we have a keyword immunity applying to all damage, regardless of type, from an attack with that keyword. It is not working as intended, hence, a bug. What they need to do is make keyword immunity not affect damage but only status effects, since any status effects that deal damage (DoTs) will already be covered by damage immunity. Granted, that may not be an easy fix, depending on how it's coded that may require a massive overhaul of the keywording system. But there's no arguing whether this is bugged or not, it clearly is.

Just curious: is this something prevent you from using different weapons? Or you have just lonely Frostcaller in your inventary? Well, there is the small matter of not having infinite Adra Ban to upgrade additional items should the core of the character become unusable for no good reason (seriously, if you have a Pierce/Slash/Freeze damaging weapon, you shouldn't run into a problem of not being able to generate Focus. I don't care about the damage, but my resource generation turning off ain't cool with me). Secondly, there is the limit of item slots. Yeah obviously, if you KNOW beforehand that your three-damage type weapon can't do damage (wat?), you'll settle for something else, even if it isn't legendary. But when you find out in the middle of a pretty tough fight that your primary weapon doesn't work and your only alternative is a defensive melee setup in your other weapon set on a squishy Ascendant, you might not reach for that option too readily. Thirdly and most crucially...how is what you're asking in any way relevant? This is a bug report, not a whine post. The point isn't whether I can or cannot bypass a bug, the point is that there IS a bug to begin with that needs fixing. And it's not an issue that's exclusive to Frostseeker, it affects all (EDIT: well apparently not all) lashing items, hell it probably affects the whole set of Shifter Wildstrikes. Imagine building a Shifter, picking up all the Wildstrike lashes for extra damage,then finding out having one of these lashes turns ALL of your other damage off against certain enemies. Cause that's what I was planning to use for one of my future parties. My next party was going to have a Fire-focused SC Paladin, with fire-lashing weapons and fire-boosting gear and powerful FoD. Now I'm reconsidering that one too cause my character will not just be weaker in terms of damage agianst fire immune enemis, No, it will just stop working completely because the Fire-immune enemy will take no damage from my Slash-damage axe because of the Fire-lash it has on it. It's about a lot more than Frostseeker.

Huh. Well, that certainly explains the inconsistency. Boy is that a mess. So on one hand they have to have the frost keyword on items and attacks in order for them to properly benefit from +accuracy, +pen bonuses etc., on the other slapping an immunity to the keyword onto a monster reduces an item from 3 damage-type armor cleaver into a 0-damage type waste of an item slot. The keyword immunity is a neat idea but doesn't seem worth the tradeoff.

I don't get why it's not consistent though. I'm damaging Neriscyrlas with Frostseeker just fine with the pierce portion, where all "logic" would dictate that it would be broken there as well. Similarly, some of the spirits in the Drowned Kingdom portion of the Shattered Realm are immune to Freeze, but the Slash portion of the damage (Slash being their lowest armor rating of the three) goes through their armor without issue as it should. So it doesn't seem to be an issue of the "damage bundling" but rather the target's armor system.

Hi, I'm currently going through the Beast of Winter DLC and I noticed that, when using Frostseeker against Frost Shades, my Cipher is doing no damage and generating no Focus. Now, Forst Shades are listed as having immunity to Freeze, while Frosteeker only does Freeze as a lash. There is no Pierce or Slash immunity listed, yet my character's hits (hits as confirmed by the UI) do no damage because "Frost Shade is immune", with the Pierce icon shown afterwards. For some reason, the game bundles the lash that's supposed to result from the bow damage with the bow damage, and the immunity to Freeze applies to both the Slash and the Pierce portion of the attack. Frost Shades do not have this behaviour with non-lashing damage, as my Fighter with Blade of the Endless Paths deals Pierce damage to the Shades as normal. It's just the Freeze and it's not just a UI error, as evidenced by 0 Focus generation. I suspect this issue will occur with other weapons and other types of lash immunities, which breaks lash weapons in some encounters. Update: The problem does not appear to be universal. When fighting against the Dracolich in the same DLC, who is also immune to Cold, the Pierce portion of Frostseeker's damage goes through.

Yeah, resolved it with Animancer's Blade, since I use it on my second weapon set anyway in case my main set can't pen. Still, you essentially have to switch your build to dual-wielding if you want to ever upgrade the weapon, which is far from ideal. Soft Winds of Death would have given me the completion in a single fight (isn't it sad how a tier 1 chant does a better job at doing AoE damage than tier 4 Dragon Thrashed, Dragon Wailed? But I digress).

Just adding to this. On my Howler (Corpse-Eater + Skald), Soft Winds of Death, which deal Raw damage, do not contribute to Soulbound progress either. After running the Spider seeker trial, slaughtering a ton of tiny spiders with both Carnage and Chant, my weapon is still at 0/1000.

Damn, I nearly forgot about that. There were so many occasions where I was faced with a stat check, half the characters would pass it and half would not...and nothing. I get past the scripted event, not even an injury to my name... So what you're saying is, half of my party failed to climb the rope across the chasm due to their lacking athletics...but we all made it to the other side? My athletic characters managed to swim through the flooded tunnel to the other end while the rest didn't make it...but we're all here in the cave. I...o-ok. I'm with ya on that.

That's...exactly what I said. In either system (mine with forced roster rotation and stronghold turns or yours with time requirements), you'd have to have a separate system for the Watcher, cause you cannot afford to cart your main character around with 3 injuries and wait for 9 days before you can finally enter a fight without risking your entire campaign any more than you can realistically put your main character on the bench for 3 stronghold turns and go complete quests with some other main character.

It doesn't have to be an ancient system if they give it meaning and impact like if they adopted the XCOM mechanic of injuries only healing when the character is out of action/out of the party for a mission or two. As it stands though, it might as well not be there. However, I feel there is something to be said for the brutal honesty of the system as it is now. As similarly meaningless as the system was before, in PoE1 they made it such a hassle to go back for camping supplies or inn rest (the load times were awful) that it actually made the player try to do it as little as possible, though in reality they could do it as much as they wanted. Now that the "veil" has been pulled back, and we just rest like it's the snoring olympics, the importance of individual encounters is laid pretty damn bare. Where originally the player had the illusion of being on a long, drawn out campaign where they were saving up resources over a longer series of encounters, in PoE2 the ease of resting smacks you right in the face with how much the emphasis is on one encounter at a time. The interim periods don't matter. Win the fight or lose it, nothing in between is of any consequence. Which, IMO, is the reason why the combat feels so disappointing. It's one thing if combat is easy and you're deceiving yourself into being in it for the long haul. It's another when the game tells you straight to your face that resting is unlimited and injuries don't matter and then throws underpowered trash packs at you until you weep for any semblance of difficulty. With the way the balance currently is, they kinda shot themselves in the foot by making the emphasis on individual encounters instead of whole dungeons so obvious.

See, here's the thing: that's exactly the experience that I'm having. I think part of the problem is that people are having *very* different experiences on different difficulty levels, and many of the "solutions" that people are offering are very general game changes that would effect *every* difficulty level. Well, it might also be the consequence of the game's more open world. Areas no longer follow up on one another in a chessboard-like fashion, so you can end up in vastly different areas at completely different times than other players. Estimating and balancing for such massive disparities is essentially only possible if you just flip on the Scale All switch (with down option active as well) so that you don't end up in ****'s creek without a paddle. I ended up on the side of the spectrum where I smeared my facial area against the wall for a few hours and then completed a massive series of non-combat quests. From that point on, everything was way too easy. Except for the final Eothas fight. That didn't go too well for me.

I think there is a middle ground to be found between per rest's "I never use any of my per rest abilities unless I have to or until I have Masteries" and per encounter's "I got a full per encounter arsenal ****ed and ready, let's go blow up planets". Every player is different and everyone tackles each system in their own way, but I'm one of the guys who, even with decent amount of experience in PoE1 still barely ever uses per rest abilities because "what if". What if a fight gives me more trouble than expected and I don't have a full arsenal ready to go? Is it going to happen? Likely not, I know the given area decently well and I'm at the right level for it. But I still can't make myself use that stuff. Cause what if... On the other hand, having a 5 spell queue already set up for all characters on the first unpause every encounter is about as engaging as autoattack fights. Well, it's a bit more flashy but yeah, gets repetitive after a while and it takes acquiring a new level for things to change. Funnily enough, I don't feel the same way in ARPGs even though most of the game my character has access to the exact same arsenal that they can liberally use. But the difference is, things are very dynamic in ARPGs, they change, you have to react to them, enemies are varied in abilities, resistances, quantities...so even if you are doing mostly the same stuff, putting the stuff in different contexts makes all the difference. If you throw a spanner in the works, make the player change up the routine, per encounter can be much better than per rest because your characters and their abilities aren't a hindrance (or time sink for repeated camping), they're an asset, as they should be. But that requires a much deeper, varied encounter design, more pronounced strengths and weaknesses and tactics (charging your backline, teleporting, cc, flat out immunities or extreme resistances, etc.). What we got, though, is pretty much what we had in PoE1. That would have been fine for PoE1's systems. It's not fine for per encounter. I guess what I'm saying, to get back on topic, is that forced camping by ability restriction or health limitations was, in its consequences, actually significantly worse than the current injury system, as it was similarly meaningless for the survival of the characters in reality. It doesn't matter if you consume plentiful food to heal or consume cheap and plentiful camping supplies to heal and recover abilities, you have unlimited access to both camping resources, per rest just makes people be more careful because it wastes time to restock, not because the system itself is good, the incentive for resting as little as possible is twisted. But per rest had the added effect of causing certain types of players to engage with the combat system way less than was actually necessary in reality. It required the player to estimate just how little they should indulge in their abilities, which requires either guesswork or prior experience. Per encounter does away with that, and could, in theory, still put just as much emphasis on the player using their abilities in a judicious manner, if only combat encounters were more varied (to force you to use different abilities than your routine), lengthy (to create situations where you run out and start wishing you saved a particular spell tier for later) and challenging (so that which decisions you do and do not make in a given encounter actually even matters). It would matter, then, that my Templar has already used two of his level x Priest spells and can no longer, say, Resurrect or suspend hostile effects, etc. But the circumstances in which that would matter are never there in the first place, because combat is too easy. As is usually the case, the abilities, characteristics, specific behaviours and resistances of enemies only matter when they're threatening. When everything is easy, they might as well be interchangeable. At that point, which meaningless resting system of the two is being used to replenish your resources is an afterthought, as neither can make up for lacking encounter design. Both per rest and per encounter require their own approach to combat, and what we got was a per encounter game but with per rest encounters.