Seroster01

In a second note, I haven't given up on the character, but I have basically given up on using a 2h weapon. My favorite character archetype is the old "gish" style character, with a 2h weapon. With the changes to the Chromo staff & WotEP, 2hs might as well not exist for dps purposes. This is essentially what I'm complaining about. Things that were not OP compared to other available options were nerfed, seemingly due to the simple decision to "NERF EVERYTHING!!!" Edit: forgot to mention the 2h hat nerf thrown in on top of the rest. Just unneeded, all of it.

So what you are saying is that you spend weeks looking into one of the most powerful and broken builds and are now disappointed when it is no longer? And without even trying it out and see if it is actually so underpowered against the rest of the game, you are giving up on it? Monks were so overpowered at launch they mad the entire game easy mode. They needed a nerf. Well, I like to min/max down to the minuetea, that's how I enjoy games. And it's not like 2h builds, or anything involving a Cipher, were the most OP thing in the game to begin with. And I agree, there were many aspects of Monks that needed a nerf. But the Cipher changes? And 99.9% of the unique items in the game? Why did all of that need nerfs? That's more my issue.

A few notes in answer to your questions: I have yet to mess around with changing the attack function (full attack to primary, etc.) and looking at the editor briefly I don't see how to do it exactly (I thought you had to add/edit an "effect" that would specify what type of attack it was, since that was basically how it was in POE1). But I don't see that type of thing listed in pre-existing abilities so I have to say I can't help you there. The numerical changes shouldn't be very difficult, as like you said you mostly just need to find the proper entry in the Status Effect game bundle & change some #s. As I kind of mentioned when I talked to you in the other thread, I'm inclined to believe that the Cleaving Stance change is a scripting issue. I looked at every piece of the ability I could locate in the editor, and I couldn't see anything that looked like a "cap" on the # of attacks made by the ability. So my assumption is they changed the script of the ability to throw 1 attack at a target instead of attacks on every target. Someone with more experience editing abilities might look at it & see what they think. The stuff about overriding changes is very simple. You DO have to put an override folder in yourself, it should go in Pillars of Eternity II\\PillarsOfEternityII_Data\override. And as I mentioned previously, anything placed in that folder with the proper file/format will override anything in-game. The way the mod tool works, only the individual parts you change will be exported & put in your override folder. So no you can't accidentally change "All monk/fighter abilities", and yes if it's in the override folder it will not be affected by patches changing the base info for the said ability, unless you re-modify the ability with the new info. In relation to the Cleaving Stance changes I mentioned above, if it really is something that is not in within our ability to mod, having the "old" version in the override folder is likely not going to affect such a change (since we can't override it).

IDK if it's exactly what you're thinking of or not, but you can use the browser's search function to find something in the bundle you're currently editing rather than just trying to scroll through & read. At least, it works in Chrome.

I mean, it's certainly not the end of the world; as has been said, there will be more patches. But I had spent a lot of time & effort combing through the wikis & game files about items/abilities/mechanics and finally decided on a class/build I was happy with and had just started my playthrough. Now both the classes I picked for my Multiclass (Nalpazca/Soul Blade) got significantly nerfed. Along with that, as far as I can determine they nerfed every single item I was going to use (Chromoprismatic staff, 2h helm, etc.). Now, maybe I can beat the whole game before the patch goes live if I un-install the Beta and marathon it? But I don't like feeling rushed in a game, I try to do everything available in a single playthrough. It's pretty disappointing to me personally because I invested a couple of weeks into researching the nitty gritty details of the build I wanted to make, and now it's worse in every aspect I can think of. Shouldn't that feel disappointing? I tend to understand balance patches when they are comprised of give & take, buffing under-performing things & nerfing the over-performing ones. Instead, this patch nerfs everything related to the build I wanted and replaces it with nothing. If that ain't a kick in the nuts, IDK what is.

Title says it all, in POE1 there were penalties for having dispositions that were considered the opposite of your paladin orders' preferred dispositions. There was also a talent available that removed said penalty, which I can't see anywhere in the Deadfire ability tree. Is this mechanic still a thing? Thanks.

Oh I agree, as long as Brilliant grants resource regeneration it's going to be just about impossible to balance. If they want to keep resource regen a part of it, my thoughts are it would need either the regen to have a much longer tic interval (which would make the regen almost pointless) or they add a maximum cap per fight (which would be hard to fit in a tooltip). But that's what I meant by re-balanced, come up with something else for it to do that isn't so OP. T3 inspirations are rare enough (at least for players, IDK what NPCs get) that a lot of them might as well not exist, we don't need one of them functionally removed from the game.

Ah, I remembered one other thing: I can understand (though I don't really agree with) removing Brilliant out of Set to Their Purpose. It was OP, but I'd have preferred some type of re-balancing be done to Brilliant instead of having it effectively removed from the game. But even then, why downgrade it all the way to the T1 Smart? At least give the ability the T2 Accute, the opportunity costs of an ability selection & the additional phrase required to cast after being upgraded are completely not worth a T1 buff.

My first impressions of this patch are not very good. Mostly because I typically don't agree with sweeping nerfs in any game, and the nerfs in 1.1 are severe & omnipresent. I have consoled in just about every unique item, and almost every one of them has some type of nerf compared to pre-patch. Not all of them are severe, but I'm serious when I say almost every one was noticeably weakened. On top of that, many class abilities (mostly buffs) were nerfed. Why is the Brilliant inspiration even a thing in the game if it is completely inaccessible? That's just silly, and I'm not sure that's the only T3 inspiration that player's don't have access to (I can't find a list of inspiration/affliction sources by type anywhere, I might resort to looking through every ability on Fextralife and put one together myself.) Ciphers seem to have received a pretty raw deal especially. They were already pretty meh, and about the only real reason I would play one now is cause (like Pillars 1) they apparently have an inordinate amount of dialogue options that are unique to their class (it makes sense in-universe, but from a meta perspective it's kinda annoying to have one of the weaker combat classes having the highest RP potential like it is in just about any game). Mind web's beta incarnation is functionally useless on all but the lowest difficulties, and is totally not worth it's cost in Focus. Body Attunement is one where I can understand some type of nerf, but going from 5->2 is way to steep. 3 seems like a better option if devs are reading this & open to feedback. It's one of their few self-buffs, and like their other small number of other self-buffs it requires a hit check to function. I see no reason why it should be such a low value with those things in mind. I think Time Parasite working like POE1 would be a better idea at this point, where the buff/debuff is 50% & bounces stack duration instead of buff magnitude. Either that, or the current incarnation needs a noticeably longer base duration. I'd even prefer 20% with a longer base duration/bounce scaling than the current 25% for 12s, since melee can spend a lot of that time running from mob to mob. I'll preface the next complaint with a caveat: I've never really understood Soul Annihilation's tooltip, since I thought the ability did 1 damage per focus expended, but the tooltip ended up saying something really odd like 1.06 damage per focus (with a big boost from PL & some Might mixed in, that doesn't make a lot of sense.) But with the 1.1 patch installed, the tooltip damage seems about 40% lower than what I remember from the release version. All of this combined is pretty silly for a class that was already mid-to-low tier in usefulness for Dreadfire due to the mix of long-ish attack & recovery times on most of their good spells combining with weaker debuff/CC mechanics than POE1 making a lot of the shorter cast time abilities feel kinda lackluster. I think one of my biggest gripes with this patch is the nerf to many things that improved action speed & recovery time. The combat felt pretty slow to me before, so this for me is a step in the wrong direction. On a kind of positive note, for some reason it looks like Coral Snuff got buffed to almost double it's previous bonus to AS. I'll say I'm not 100% on my memory of this, but I could swear in the release version it was 25-30% AS increase on my Nalpazca. The same character now has the Snuff listed as a 40% bonus to AS. None of the other drug effects look significantly different in their tooltips, so this seems odd. That's most of what I could see from my brief playtime today. Will probably mess around with more class combinations tomorrow.

Also, if you use the editor for the beta patch, you will need to load your local bundles instead of using the pre-populated ones since AFAIK the ones in the editor are still based on live.

I had a longer post written up but my phone freaked out the reply text box somehow & I couldn't scroll anymore. So the short version: AFAIK, adding mods does not disable achievements, as there's not a toggle or anything to turn them on or off. I could be mistaken, however. For the other bit, you should be able to make that specific change if you desire, but I'm not sure if the reverse is possible. It seems like that would likely be a scripting function, and I'm not sure scripts are available to mod. I could be very wrong on this one, but everything I've seen in the asset bundles (what we actually mod) is some type of game "object": abilities, progression tables, items, status effects, etc. So there's a lot of things about the game that can be changed from one thing to another, or added on to & such. But I'm not sure it's possible to change "how things work". IE, you could change the base recovery time of an ability/spell/weapon from 3s to 1s, but I haven't seen anything that would let you change how the recovery formula works to reduce a 3s base recovery time to 1s with 3 DEX, if that makes sense.

There's a tool for modding in this forum (see the Spiritual Successor thread) that functions better than mass-editing via notepad (which is awful), and less likely to result in errors. Especially if you're going to edit a lot of things, I'd strongly suggest using it to prevent errors.

General question now that there's a substantial balance patch incoming: is it possible to open assets that have already been modded? When I tried to use the editor to open a previous mod to look at the changes made, the editor gave me an error. I think it said the file name didn't match? The thought later occurred to me that it might have worked if the mods were the same name as the original file, but I didn't think about that till later. Even if it did, it seems easier to compartmentalize changes (and therefore troubleshoot and customize) if you have differently named files for separate classes or such within a mod folder. I can kinda understand why it doesn't do this currently, since you have the different bundles linked together in order for the changes to propagate across the proper bundles. But it seems like having to re-modify every change after every patch would be frustrating. I don't have a great answer for this, but it's something to think about with the huge numbers of changes coming in 1.1 for balance purposes that people are already saying they want to change/revert.

I can now confirm, the abilities are simply missing from the Ability Tree Preview on level up. Kind of an odd deal, but they are all available & shown properly on the level up screen in the main game proper.

So I was fiddling around trying to mod the upgrades to Frenzy (blood frenzy->blood storm & spirit frenzy-> Spirit Tornado) to remove the increased Rage costs (Upgrade turns it from 1->2, trying to put it back to 1), but I can't find them (or even the base Frenzy) in the Abilities section of your mod tool. The effects are there in the attack & effects sections, but I can't change the costs in those bundles, near as I can tell. I opened my local abilities.gamedatabundle & found them there, and seem to have modded them successfully (though in the UI the cost is listed at 2, using it only consumes 1). Is there some reason for this? I know you mentioned it filters out things that shouldn't be modded, but this doesn't seem terribly different from any other ability & seems to have taken the modification properly?

I had a sudden realization when I read the above posts, that I was basing my statement on 2 things: 1.) the Character Creation "Preview Talent Tree" screen 2.) other posts that had reported the issue It came to me then that I hadn't actually gone past character creation as a Berserker bc those abilities were missing & I didn't want to make a Zerker until it had all of it's abilities properly. Thus, I am now going to actually create one & see if it's actually available in game. Will report back shortly with results.

The problem: Choosing the Berserker subclass of Barbarian gives you only 1 available upgrade to the base Frenzy; Blood Frenzy. Choosing No Subclass, or the 2 other subclasses, retains the option of Blood Frenzy, but adds 3 other options: Spirit Frenzy (In the same tier but a 2nd branch option in place of Blood Frenzy), its upgrade Spirit Tornado, and the upgrade of Blood Frenzy-> Blood Storm. The lack of Frenzy upgrade options are not in-game listed as a penalty for choosing Berserker in the subclass details (they are simply missing from the Ability tree), seems backwards considering the Berserker is defined by its unique upgrades the Frenzy ability, and removing whole upgrade trees has no parallel in other martial sub-classes that I have found. I tried searching this forum & there have been a small number of other threads on the topic reporting the issue, and 1 even had a response that the issues in the thread were put on the Bug list. But that thread raised other issues & didn't have any response to whether this issue was intentional or not or that a fix was incoming. It seems like if this was a bug, it would be significant enough to add to a known issue (or at least have some response). If this was done on purpose, it again seems significant enough that the options being removed should be documented somewhere in-game in a future patch. For transparency, it seems like until it is patched in it should be listed somewhere at least on these forums that this is intentional. Thank you.

As people have mentioned, leveling up is the main way, it seems your character gains more resource points every time they reach a new power level. From my experimentation, the Prestige talent also increases your power pool (since it's a permanent +1 power level), but it comes so late as to not be a real factor and may not be worth it anyway depending on the class/build you're using (and just plain isn't available to mult-classed characters). Fighters & paladins also have a passive ability they can select during level up to give +1 to their max power pool. Other classes may have similar but I haven't gone in-depth enough to verify this for any of the others. For non-level related sources, both Monks & Fighters have equipment for the hand slot (bracers/gloves/whatever) that increases their power max pool by 2. Saying this as non-spoilery as possible: there is a breastplate in the game that increase the max for any applicable class by 2, but its availability in-game is based on your world state (POE1 decisions, either from save import or the generic/custom created backgrounds). The only ways to recover class resources in-combat are class abilities, very specific equipment, or the Brilliant Inspiration (+5 Int +1 power level +1 class resource/6? sec). Some classes have passives for it, usually resource generation on kill. Some abilities have resource "refund" baked into them when enhanced, usually with some type of pre-requisite (IE the attack crits, or kills an enemy, etc.) The only item effect I've seen that generates resources is a Soulbound dagger for Paladins/Priests/Rogues that generates them when you use one of it's Soulbind abilities to kill a target. The last one, the Brilliant inspiration, is probably the easiest to gain access to but still requires a moderately high level. This is because, as far as I can determine, the only source of Brilliant available to players is a chanter 7th level invocation: "Set to Their Purpose, They All Knew Their Part". This is the upgrade to a lvl 5 Invocation: "The Bride Caught their Ruse and Set to Make them Pay". Due to the mechanics changes in POE2 you can start every combat with this ability if you want to, since chanter phrases fill to the max available at the start of every combat. Thus, it is available almost on-demand & "all you need" is a chanter of high enough level to cast lvl 7 invocations (13 single class, 19 multi-classed). That's still pretty late in the game, but 13 for a single-class chanter seems early enough to be useful. That's all the things I'm aware of at this point, through digging through wikis, game files, & such.