Ivanfyodorovich

I love it. I think it’s a great fix. Curious if it assuages @thelee.

I think this is maybe this is the intended use case for Biting Whip (though of course vanilla does a really poor job of this), someone who wants to have a low-micro character (maybe AI coded) that deals higher weapon damage and uses very little focus. Biting Whip + Hammering Thoughts + Borrowed Instinct is 100% makes tacking Cipher onto any martial a huge boost, especially when you want to focus your ability choices on the other class. It's almost certainly suboptimal compared to a build that uses Draining Whip and casts more spells, but the added cost there is the micro to manage the focus and cast those spells. That kind of trade-off seems reasonable. I think Mindstalker might be a good example, where you likely want to spend more time using rogue abilities (though, of course you run out of Guile eventually), and pepper in some cipher stuff when you have the focus. In terms of action economy, you don't necessarily want more focus than what Soul Whip gives.

I like the idea, but yeah, might be really strong. What if it was an activated ability? Dump all your focus into a blast, then get +1 PL for the rest of the encounter? You could also just make it a Crit effect, which keeps the sense of chance, but makes it more predictable. Edit: I just had another thought. You could make the whole Wild Surge effect something you can activate. Get +2PL, chance for Wild Surge. Make it a modal. Then people who really hate random effects can get a bog standard Cipher and still enjoy the dialogue, etc. In that case, I think turning up the % chance would be totally reasonable.

I love that you are revisiting Wild Mind! I did a little draft design on how I would fix it a few weeks ago. This is a great solution that doesn't deviate too much from the current (with the exception of the proc chance). I like correcting the rest of the procs, so that the dice are more strongly weighted in the player's favor. Some are still pretty dangerous (Invisibility proc on a big AoE is really hard to work with), but I think you got it right on these. That said, I don't think weighting the effects is enough here. @thelee has made the case well in a few places that what makes a random effect class like this worth choosing is not a stacked deck of random effects, but a consistent benefit that always applies, e.g. extra spell casts. Given that, I think just adding a decent passive bonus to Wild Mind would really make it more appealing and balanced. Something as simple as +2 PL with Cipher spells is great. It's clear, always applies, and shows the tradeoff clearly. You are an untrained cipher. Your lack of control and training means that you cast with greater power, but wacky stuff can happen when you do. Other options could be Bonus Max Focus, Focus gain on cast, bonus action speed or reduced recovery with Cipher Spells, passive +hit to crit that increases every second until you crit, or a combination of a few of these. As to the change to % chance for Wild Surge, I think that might be a little bit too much. Yes, the effects are more balanced/beneficial now, but the community's dislike of the Subclass is largely the randomness more than any particular effect. Increasing the chance to 25% feels fine, given your changes to the procs, but I wouldn't go much more than that. The thing is, even if that means more awesome procs, players are going to have an outsized memory for the bad ones and still dislike the class. If a player sees the advantage and wants to have more procs, they can self-select for that by increasing casting speed, casting lots of lower cost spells, etc. For those that want to minimize it or the effects, cast fewer spells, more single target, etc.

Yes! I had a fun Savage turret build I was noodling. Barbaric is always nice, if nothing else, to keep Blood Frenzy going. I was imaging using it with a Boreal Dwarf and Aamiina's Legacy (10% crit on graze/hit/crit) w/ Modal and Frenzy. I'm sure you could do fun stuff with Galawain's Harry on St. Omaku's Mercy, too.

I seem to recall @Boeroer noticing similar a while back in a thread about clear out. I'm almost certain the behavior you're noticing has something to do with the weapon having reach (I think maybe WotEP and Citzal's Lance have similar interactions). It could also be about positioning - sometimes you can get Carnage to proc on the primary target, too. I do know that the way it works is it rolls first for a primary attack on the main target (which must hit (maybe graze is ok)), then rolls for the AoE. BPM removed the double attack roll for the AoE and reduced the damage to compensate. Maybe @Elric Galad knows more about the way it's implemented.

Whoops - good catch.

Oh, interesting. In my head, Flanked is the stronger of the two effects (+50% recovery vs. -10 all defenses, -1 AR). I suppose everything follows from that premise for me, e.g. the problem with Persistent Distraction isn’t that it grants an affliction, but that it grants one that is so strong, trivializes Deathblows, etc. I suppose that’s true. Long live Debilitating Strike! Heard. I do think your solution is very nice.

I have a suggestion for a simpler fix for Persistent Distraction and Blunderbuss/Streetfighter. Change Distracted to be -5 Perception, +50% Recovery penalty. Leave Disoriented and Blind the same. This let’s Persistent Distraction still add 1 Affliction to enable Sneak Attack, and Powder Burns can still be mitigated by Perception Resistance/Immunity. Am I right that this could be implemented somewhat easily, or would you have to edit every single Status Effect one by one?

If you put aside the typical class fantasy reasons to dual wield, the majority of builds recommending two weapons are doing so because of the way two weapons was vastly superior to 2H builds in the early versions of the game. At some point (maybe patch 4.0?) they reduced the damage that full attacks did while wielding two weapons by 35% and added 1 penetration to all 2H weapons. For good or ill, a large amount of the builds out in the wild had already been built, and the players who published them already moved on to other games, so you still see mostly two weapon builds if you search them out (even on these forums, thanks to the inability to edit the stickied posts). @thelee's guide speaks to this, but in all actuality, 2H is probably better in many cases. It certainly simplifies things for a number of builds. As far as the viability of a low Intellect build, Deadfire reversed the mechanics such that Intellect makes % of weapon damage DoTs better. If my memory serves, the advantage In PoE1 was that Tidefall did the same damage over a shorter amount of time, actually increasing DPS the less Int you had, especially because the DoT didn't stack, and that Deep Wounds had similar behavior (correct me if I'm wrong here). Regardless, In Vanilla Deadfire, Deep Wounds deals 10% of the weapon damage dealt per tick (completely base, before any adjustments, it actually does 30% damage total (ticks at 0, 3, and 6 seconds). Deep Wounds is increased by Intellect and Power Level, so you actually do more damage total per hit, if you have more Int. It also stacks with itself, making longer durations viable. There's a Great Sword called Effort that has the same effect as an enchantment (Lacerating) and can be upgraded to 15% per tick. It works exactly the same way as Deep Wounds, though I'm not sure if it stacks. If you wanted to keep the low int part, I'd recommend getting the Community Patch, which changed Deep Wounds to 5% per tick for 4 ticks with a fixed duration, no longer affected by Int or Power Level. You could pair this with a Beam Cipher (as Beams oddly also do not benefit at all from Int or PL). As an additional synergy, there is a ring that lowers your Int by 8, but gives resistance to Perception, Intellect, and Resolve afflictions. The advice already in this thread is solid. Devoted Fighter adds a ton, not the least of which is being the fastest possible Heavy Armor wearer, thanks to Armored Grace. Standard build stacking that with Devil of Caroc Breastplate and a pet that also reduces recovery makes you faster than if you weren't wearing any armor. Paladin has similar synergy to what @thelee was describing with Ring of Focused Flame, in that their signature attack ability is tagged fire (and already gets +10 accuracy base) making it extremely accurate. Paladin also has phenomenal baseline defensive passives, and great party synergy. Barbarian is very fun, similarly sturdy thanks to Thick Skinned and Savage Defiance. A Streetfighter Berserker is a classic "ride the edge" build that has really great synergy for staying bloodied. If you have a party that can provide constant healing (via chanter, paladin, druid, or some combination of those) then you can avoid much of the downsides. No subclass barbarians or Fury Shapers work well, too, and the synergy around killing blows and critical hits is pretty fun. Cipher has a lot of great options. Borrowed Instincts is great on any melee damage dealer, as well as Hammering Thoughts. Those alone would be worth the multi-class. Soul Annihilation is very strong, also.

In doing some Dorudugan research, I found a small bug that I was able to fix for Saint's War Armor and the Veteran's Maneuver upgrade. The short version is that the vanilla enchantment is cleared by friendly spell "hits" making it totally worthless without some very counterintuitive and odd player behavior (definitely not intended by the designer). The fix appears to be a small toggle in the status effect from False to True for ValidateWithAttackFilter in the trigger section. I tested it just now and it no longer clears on friendly buffs. It's possible that there are still odd spells that might still trigger it incorrectly, but for now this seems like an easy enough fix. Here's the file: statuseffects.gamedatabundle

/agree. It's pretty easy to get enough Deflection/Fortitude to avoid being Crit and to push him into constant underpenetration. Nice find! So, I did some more focused testing. I disabled all addons, just in case. As it turns out, Veteran's Maneuver is pretty terribly coded. It is disabled on friendly spell "hits". All you need to clear it is cast 2 buff spells. **Whomp Whomp Sound** However, if for some reason you have a character who will use no buff spells, it does provide immunity to helfire barrage (and I'm assuming helstorm as well). Pretty handy, if a little awkward to use in current implementation. I'll poke around and see if that's easy enough to fix. Maybe @Elric Galad has looked at similar situations with BPM. If we are able to fix it to only count hostile spell hits, it would be a great piece of Dorudugan tech (and likely exploitable in other fun ways). Edit: Update - I was able to fix it pretty easily. It will be added to the next update for BPM.

That’s my thinking, too. I can more rigorously test it, but it happened a few times for a ranged character.

Just dropping here for science some things I learned in my recent Dorudugan fights. Dorudugan's Large Shield attack (off-hand shield bash) targets Fortitude. Saint's War Armor with the Veteran's Maneuver upgrade does not provide immunity from Helfire Barrage (not quite sure what's up with this one, but maybe I'm just missing something here)

It is also usagetype NONE

It counts as 0 now. It counted as 2 for Deathblows, and this is considered by many to be an oversight on the part of the designers, or at least not well considered. Rogue gets a ton of buffs in BPM to its other active abilities, some are pretty OP (Strike the Bell upgrade). The nerf to PD makes the class play much more like intended and much more tactical. Definitely stronger class w BPM, just less one note song.

Yeah, stacking is too strong. Your design is the simplest and closest to original.

Great change. Still a few dud results, but worst case (Resolve), you’re still gaining +5 resolve vs Psychovampiric. If you wanted to focus it a little more, making it only body stats (might, constitution, dexterity), would make it always useful, relative to your other abilities. That might make it too strong, with a 66% chance to get Might or Constitution, in which case you could lower it to +/-8.

My understanding is that it applies only the first time you enter a map. At that point, it is locked in for the rest of your playthrough. It's still worth keeping on, though, as there are lots of little one off maps around the world, and the DLC content you haven't done, etc.

It's there in the Community Patch Basic (attached here for reference). Tested. It's not working, for some reason. I've tried a few different ways (included with all the mods, just with Community Patch and Balance Patch, and completely by itself). Just to rule out a different cause, I loaded up the little mod I made with Apotheosis, and it was still working. Attaching that here, also. en.talfor_encounter_level.gamedatabundle worldmap.gamedatabundle

Thanks. That's what I was thinking. No pressure. I was able to mod it successfully on my own, but if you do release a new version one day, it's such a small change with a big impact.

Request for next version: Increase the "encounter" level of the Hanging Sepulchers maps (Area IDs below). This will fix the unintentionally extreme enemy difficulty that this map is notorious for (a similar change was made in the Community Patch to the Talfor Encounter Map). Some details: These maps are currently set at level 6 (likely inherited from the Sacred Stair which is also 6). The challenging Skeleton Enemies inside (Risen Champion, Risen Mage, etc) are all base level 10 enemies, and the Dargul Corpse Eater and Armsman are base level 12. Because of the 4 or 6 level difference between the encounter level and the base enemy level, they will remain 4 or 6 levels higher than your party until you reach level 11 and pass the upscaling cap. Because they are enemies with classes, they gain additional abilities as their level increases, which makes the scaling all the more deadly (e.g. Risen Mage casting Chain Lightning & Wall of Draining). For reference, the Sea Lashed Crypt is set to level 15, meaning the Risen skeletons on those maps are actually weaker at party level 10 than the Hanging Sepulcher ones. The two base game quests for this area (Eulogy for the Dead, and Symbols of Death) are both currently difficulty level 11 quests; however, there's some indication that they were lower at one time (Link). Suggested Fix: Increase the Area Level to 8 or 9. Based on the placement in the Principi quest line, I'd guess it was intended to be completed by a level 8 party, right before or after Hasango (level 8). Blow the Man Down (the previous quest) is intended for level 5ish (Pre-Hasongo) A Shrewd Proposition (the follow up quest) is intended for level 12ish (post Hasongo, pre Magran's Teeth Setting these maps to level 8 would keep the skeletons 2 levels higher and the darguls 4 levels higher until the party reaches level 12. Area IDs: AR_0709_Temple_Sepulchers AR_0707_Temple_Mausole

Yeah - that's my thought, too. Could be a fun mini-game for builders to see how creative they can get and still beat it under certain parameters. Not sure it has much meaning for the rest of the game, though.

This is an interesting idea (though I'm assuming you're mostly kidding). What level for this is "appropriate"? Considering you likely need the XP from this quest to hit level 4 for the Digsite fights, is level 3 right? Similarly, what's the standard party to use? Assume Watcher, Eder, Xoti only? Standard hirelings?

Yes! That mod is so cool. I have it and plan to do some fun party build tests with in. Barring a full play through (which I may still do here), are there any particularly challenging fights in SSS that you think should be included if I don't play through the whole DLC?