Wotcha

I wasn't following back then, but the proposal may have foundered if they looked at the same stuff I did and came to the same conclusion that it was fairly difficult to implement. I have distant vague plans of getting something similar to the Community Patch going, but for the more difficult-to-implement stuff that can only be done on the CSharp side. There are some real drawbacks to a CSharp-based thing. I can do those kinds of changes in-place on my own executable by using development tools to edit and recompile the dll (and I've done so, for instance, to allow hiring adventurers equal to the Watcher's level instead of maxing out one level lower), but I would have to figure out how to go about packaging something like that up for release. I know it's POSSIBLE to do, because there are a couple of mods which do it, but the process is SUPER hacky and fragile, and multiple such mods can easily conflict with each other when attempting to patch their changes in. So if it's going to be done, it should be done with a good, solid set of reasonable changes, possibly with exported hooks to allow conventional override mods to enable/disable individual things because otherwise it would be an all-or-nothing deal. The three things off the top of my head that I am certain (or almost certain) would require CSharp changes: - max hired adventurer level - altering max phrase count for Chanters to anything other than "most expensive phrase ability" (like, say, exporting a hook that allows a passive ability to be created which gives the chanter +2 to his max phrase count) - +%healing received per point of Constitution I'm sure there are lots of such things. I had an idea for a cipher spell that caused the enemy target to have +X% incoming miss-to-graze, graze-to-hit, and hit-to-crit, but that's not currently implementable! There is only a tag for enemy hit-to-crit, which is used by the Druid Entropy ability, but the other kinds of hit conversion types are not implemented. Might be possible to implement and export tags that do that, and then override mods could use those tags, but I haven't done the research yet.

Wouldn't surprise me if all +%healing received buffs were multiplicative (or, rather, multiplicative with +%healing done, but additive with +%healing received), because it's very likely it gets applied at a subsequent step after the amount healed is calculated, i.e. at the later step when all the targets are being healed in turn, and the code has a chance to apply the +%healing received bonus. One of my mod ideas was to give Constitution a +healing received bonus, because we all know that Con is pretty crap at its job of making you tougher. The size of your health pool is almost irrelevant! What IS relevant is your resistance to damage (either via straight %damage reduction, AR, or defenses), and the amount of healing that the party can deliver to you. So if Con were to grant +3% healing received per point above 10, I think that would be plenty to make it competitive as a statistic again! Although I'm not sure if "again" is the right word, because I don't know if it has ever been worthwhile as a statistic in Deadfire. Alas, unless I can think of a clever way around the problem, it can only be done as a modification to the CSharp-Assembly.dll- I've looked in the code and have a reasonable idea what to do, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. It might be possible to implement a permanent invisible buff on everybody, which calculates a +%healing buff based on the target's Constitution, but I don't know if that could be made properly dynamic with afflictions/buffs/etc. I guess I'll just throw it on the list of mod ideas, but I really want to get my cipher mod out the door without getting distracted.

Was there any food buff at play? I often use Fresh Fruit as my default food when not going for a specific food buff, and it grants +25% healing received.

Just occurred to me that it's probably possible to use the character export functionality to duplicate Arkemyr's Robe, and then you wouldn't even have to sneak in the back way to steal it. You could just walk in the front door as if you owned the place!

I don't remember offhand, does WoFS replace the base Sworn Enemy, or is it a deal like Escape where the upgrade doesn't replace the original? Because if it DOES replace Sworn Enemy, I think a very modest mod idea would be to change it so that it does NOT replace Sworn Enemy, so you can still use the no-recovery, 1 Zeal "basic" ability when all you want to do is slap the debuff on a target, but still have the upgraded ability for... flavor? I guess? I really don't like it.

It's a completely different situation compared to PoE1, where F&C scaling was excellent, good enough that Obs relented and gave Pallegina some auto-scaling with level so she didn't get entirely stiffed. The benefit of reputation scaling in PoE2 is relatively modest by comparison. I mean, it's a little irritating that you're not getting reputation bonus, but it's hardly the biggest black mark against Pallegina. If I was going to pick something, I'd pick how her Wrath of Five Suns upgrade for Sworn Enemy is pretty much crap compared to either Brand Enemy or Sworn Rival... or even just basic Sworn Enemy for that matter. Again, it's a big change from the excellence of WoFS in PoE1.

I believe that for Pallegina, it has neither positive nor negative scaling with reputation. So Deep Faith is just going to provide an additional +3 to all defences, including Deflection. That's not hugely exciting, but not terrible. The full writeup of all the details can be found in the appropriate section in this excellent guide. Which I believe was written by @thelee? It's advisable to just read that whole guide, it will answer a thousand questions you didn't even realize you wanted to ask.

This is a weird hacky corner case. The exact implementation of Tactician is that no allies are flanked, and all enemies are flanked. But if you de-aggro via invisibility, the number of enemies goes to zero, and every one of those zero enemies are flanked! QED!

I have a memory of seeing some ability that didn’t have the Poison keyword, but did have “antidote” as a countering keyword, which I think is the basic mechanism at play for poison-immune targets.

You are correct, and I probably should have been more explicit with the “some” abilities having the Poison keyword. But it’s enough of them to be worth noting clearly to a newcomer asking “hey, what’s good?”, because halfway through the game is the wrong time to be finding out that one little minor detail means that several of your selected spells do absolutely nothing to many enemies.

One thing to be aware of is that several of the Druid DoT spells have the Poison keyword, which means they bounce right off of the several kinds of creatures which have Immunity: Poison. Mask of the Grotto Deep notwithstanding, the Poison keyword is figurative poison to almost any ability, and the ability would become more powerful and generally useful if that keyword weren't there.

If suffering really was an illusion, you’d think such a phantom would be filled to the brim with it. I guess that counts as a firm refutation of Buddhism as far as Eora is concerned.

It’s breathtaking watching Boeroer really get rolling on this.

You could very much be correct regarding CanGraze being an obsolete parameter. I only just started modding the game a few weeks ago, I’m certain there are plenty such little things I don’t know about. My Frac Vol I tacked Daze onto as a third affliction, and I made Haunted Chains give Terrified, Paralyzed, AND Stunned, as a sort of trifecta of hard CC, so unless the target is resistant/immune to all three, it WILL get locked down. And I’m still doubtful either of them are worthwhile even with such boosting. There’s a real high bar to clear for single target debuffs. I agree that Soul Ignition needs some love but haven’t decided what to do about it.

The downside of this schtick is if one of your allies inconveniently tags the target by accident with a stray Carnage, bounced shot, or other hard-to-control source of damage, that's going to be some annoying micromanagement (and potentially lost DPS if you have to significantly suboptimize your party's attacks for fear of eating the Takedown Combo) unless you're doing a solo run. But it's certainly a fun schtick to theorycraft on!

I’m not entirely disagreeing with you, but I don’t find your analysis complete. For debuffing Will, Secret Horrors gets you halfway (debuffing resolve only), does it as an AoE (you want quick affliction spamming? How about something that afflicts half the board in one go!), gives Frightened instead of Shaken (a major upgrade in terms of CC), and Sickened to boot. There just aren’t enough ability points to go around to justify a point spent on Tenuous Grasp when you could get something else more generally useful in the short term and then wait till Secret Horrors. Theres also the problem of your “can opener” vs. Will itself targeting Will, so if you were having problems hitting without it, you will have problems landing the can-opener hit too! I forgot to mention that as a nod to that issue, I modded it to be able to Graze, which I thought was a simple and effective way to improve such an ability for, as you rightfully point out, one of its prime use cases. Anyway, I appreciate the feedback, but it’s a bit of a digression for this thread. I will be starting a thread for my mod when i’m a little further along. I’m sure that many opinions will come up, and I may even listen to some of them!

The slightly sad thing about the 2H Battle Axe variants in the game, is that they didn't also give the weapons another +1 PEN like they did to 2H weapons across the board a while ago. Might be nice to mod that in.

And in the end it’s a very modest difference of scaling. Mule Kick is already an excellent ability, a minor buff in its scaling isn’t going to move the needle that much, except to make a nearly auto-pick ability even more attractive. I can’t speak so much to the upgraded Leaps as I almost never play SC barbarian. The kinds of buffs I’m more interested in are things like trying to bring never-pick abilities up to reasonable par with the usual suspects. This is surprisingly hard to do! Sometimes the structural idea of an ability isn’t worth it, and twiddling the numbers a little bit doesn’t help. Some examples from the cipher mod I’m working on: Antipathetic Field: does anyone take this? It’s entirely useless on single targets, and much more awkward to use compared to Ectopsychic Echo (a near-auto-pick) because you don’t control both ends. I changed it to affect the target as well, which suddenly turns it into something just as worth casting as Ray of Fire. Yes, I know it didn’t affect the target in PoE 1. I didn’t take it back then either. Tenuous Grasp: Confused is probably the least useful affliction on most enemies. If the enemy isn’t using AoE abilities it’s only a minor debuff to durations and to Will. Shaken isn’t terrible, but it’s not that great. And on just one target? It’s not even worth the time spent casting it, never mind the ability slot or the focus. I added Distracted to it, which I’m still not convinced is enough to make it worthwhile, but it potentially has a role in being able to strip up to 3 inspirations from a target, and/or debuff several defenses and ability PLs. And it still might not be worth picking compared to Eyestrike.

Hey, man, I didn't write the code, all I did was test it. I was suspecting the same thing, that there's some specific rule for self-targeting while invisible, which probably needs to be there for strict self-buffs like Intuitive Strikes or similar, but the mechanism by which they implemented it also allows targeting by AoE buffs. Now that I'm thinking about it, I want to test what happens for damaging AoEs like Fireball. If my guess is correct, a fireball cast by an ally at an area including a friendly invisible target WON'T damage that target, but if the invisible target themselves were to cast that fireball, they WOULD hit themselves. Which is a little bit amusing if that turns out to be how it works.

I just tested it to be sure of it myself. The invisible rogue does NOT get hit by Salvation of Time when the spell is being cast by a different character. You can tell by the rogue's targeting circle not changing to the four-pie-slices symbol indicating that he will be hit by the spell even when clearly in the spell area, and also by seeing the duration not increase when the spell goes off. Where the confusion arises, which I have also just tested, is that an invisible target CAN hit THEMSELVES with Salvation of Time (or other buffs), and again you can verify this by noting that their targeting circle does change to the four-pie-slices and also that durations increase, when they are casting the spell themselves and including themselves in the target area. Although, since invisibility powers other than Vanishing Strike or Arkemyr's Sudden Departure fall off on any action, you can't increase the duration of Shadowing Beyond, Smoke Veil, etc. So in the hypothetical case of a priest/rogue able to cast T8/T9 abilities, yes, this would be basically a one-stop-shop for facerolling pretty much anything solo. Get yourself Brilliant from Wit of Death's Herald, Vanishing Strike, and spam SoT and whatever massively boosted attacks struck your fancy, while everything melts around you. Might be a little tricky solo if you aren't running the Berath challenge because you might awkwardly fall out of combat and suddenly lose the invisibility buff.

It does break in general. But the high-level T9 Rogue ability Vanishing Strike does NOT break on anything except expired duration. So if you could extend that duration indefinitely via Salvation of Time, you would be absolutely invulnerable to everything- your victory would only be a matter of time. And not even a matter of very MUCH time, because you're going to chew everything up fast with backstab/sneak attack/deathblows bonus damage.

Although with a base PEN of 5, its damage is nothing to write home about. Still one of the best spells on the wizard list.

Thanks, Boeroer, for taking the moment to point AddAbility out, because I was being a dumbass and going through a full re-roll and level-up over and over to pick my new/editied abilities as I've been doing my cipher mod testing, which has been a huge waste of time because I could just be hacking each ability onto the test cipher with AddAbilityto test it with instead. I'm perfectly familiar with using the console for testing, but it had just never occurred to me to use that command instead of rerolling.

Essence Interrupter adds 0.25 percent lash per point of Metaphysics, so at 20 Metaphysics you'll get an extra 5% lash (for a total of 10%). The scaling is the same regardless of whether you went with the Shock or the Burn lash choice. That scaling amount (0.25 per point) can be reasonably guessed to be the scaling factor for the vast majority of scales-with-skill enchantments. For exact numbers, the Gamepedia wiki has exact numbers for pretty much every unique item enchant in the game.

Are you using More AI Conditions mod? Because then you could set a conditional of “has Sworn Enemy” and “has an affliction” as conditions for a first rule to use FoD, and then “has Sworn Enemy but no affliction” as a second rule to use Crippling Strike. Then a third rule to put Sworn Enemy on somebody to be the next kill target. That will probably get you pretty close to what you want. Maybe not 100% because the AI really does have issues sometimes sticking to a target. It’d be nice if the game had an enemy marker API so you could manually tag enemies with explicit marks that you could then use in AI rules to direct actions. Damn, that sounds like an awesome mod, now that I think of it. I think it’s even feasible within the existing mod system. I will have to have a look at how More AI Conditions does its magic, because it would be super easy to create some instant-cast infinite-use abilities that did nothing but put a status effect with no game effect on an enemy (or remove the effect if present), and then add AI condition rules which worked on the presence of those status effects to determine targets. Could even attach visual effects to the status effect (maybe there’s even a hovering skull effect which could be used for the kill target!) In the meantime, try More AI Conditions, with the rule order I suggest, and see how that works out for you.