Delterius
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Posts posted by Delterius
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So I ditched him and took third chanter.
That's what Priests are for, to be honest.
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Lots of buffing = less fun to play as main. Sadly also annoying as npc because it will do its job far less optimal than you can.
You do realize that you can control what all the characters in your party do, right?
I think that he's just saying is that an NPC character won't be custom tailored (attribute wise) for your purposes, while, OTOH, being a main Priest isn't as appealing as other classes.
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so why try?
I'm trying to work as a caster of Wael of sorts. Of course this wouldn't be the only person targeting Will for damage, or debuffing the enemy and whatnot. But it would make more sense to me as a Waelite to use the few CC Illusion spells they give you at PL5+ in conjunction with Shining Beacon, Divine Mark and assorted charms from Cipher than just spaming Mirror Image as a Gish Build of sorts.
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In my opinion that's one of the worst combos you can do with a priest
Do you know of any Priest/Caster combos that might be synergetic?
I'm thinking of trying Priest of Wael / Psion with the upcoming patch and focus on targeting and debuffing enemy Will saves. Seems like something Wael would approve, know what I mean?
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Going by the stickied thread, a spell only gains PEN from power level if it already has Penetration in the first place. Which explains reports of really weak summons, mostly useless Incarnates and confirms my fear that half of Priest's nukes don't actually deal much damage at all.
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As someone's whose favorite character right now is Assassin/Skaen
But this is not exactly news to me or to the OP. The point isn't that Priests aren't effective at what they do. No character is truly ineffective. But rather that we went from a first game where Priest's buffs were mandatory to one where they are less powerful, but also one where you can cherrypicking those few most useful spells from PLs 4 and 5 with a martial class like Rogue and Monk and pretty much have all the usefulness of a Priest without having to do with the full class' pitfalls.
Speaking of understanding the system, I asked for a clarification on Penetration mechanics above. Half of the Priest's damage spells seem to lack it. Shining Beacon and most of their crowning PLs. Am I to understand that all those spells hit with 70% malus against anything more armored than a ghoul?
Just to be clear, when I say the class feels superfluous I mean just that. Not that its useless. I don't think its even possible to create an useless character in a Pillars game. But rather that wherever I look, Priests are a poor man's version of someone with while using some gimmick from PL 4/5 to justify itself. Like the Streetfighter with Arcane Veil or the Ascendant with Salvation of Time. Not exactly what I had in mind for a multiclass character.
I can see why these builds would appeal to some people here, but I don't really plan on playing PoE2 more than once or twice. And I can't see much of a point in not multiclassing Rogue with Wizard or Druid for just about better casting than Priest has
Just to be clear, when I say the class is superfluous I mean just that. Not that its useless. I don't think its even possible to create an useless character in a Pillars game. But rather that wherever I look, Priests are a poor man's version of someone with a Gimmick from PL4/5. There's the Ascendant build that uses Salvation of Time, or the Streetfighter build with Arcane Veil and the like.
I get why those exist and how they can appeal to some people where, but I don't really plan to play this game more than once or twice. And for the life of me I can't understand why I wouldn't play or multiclass with Druid or especially Wizard for better flavor and way better spellcasting.
But I do understand that the answer is to reclass since I don't think anything's been really done about Priest since release.
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Actually some priests are great nukers (Magran's, Berath), especially as single class priests. Also something like Spark the Souls of the Righteous in combination with one (or more) Beckoners and a Pull of Eora in the party is hilarious as damage option.
I don't understand. I read on multiple posts that Summons (and the Incarnate in particular) and about half of all damaging Priest spells have no penetration tied to them. Meaning that something like Spark the Souls should hit for with a 70% damage malus most of the time. I guess you can exploit that spell in particular with a party of Beckoners, yeah, but that's a PL8 that can barely stand on its own.
You said earlier that you never found Priests to be boring. Surely you concede that goes against prevailing wisdom somewhat? The greatest Priest builds seems to amount to being a Rogue with Arcane Veil, or an Ascendant with Salvation of Time. Always a martial class ditching the party priest for one of their 3 broken spells.
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Core priest is still pretty niche. It's not just a Devotion bot; there was a realization that Barring Death's Door prevents knockout now, leaving the target invulnerable at 1 HP, and Salvation of Time extending a wide variety of buffs makes it a nutty combo piece for setting up hyper buffed groups. Brilliant (from a Cipher in the party) plus Salvation of Time can let you maintain all your high value buffs indefinitely, including Barring Death's Door.
Also their level 8 spells are very, very good and a reasonable case to single class a priest (even if the level 9 spells are pretty pathetic).
That is most of what it can do though. It is not a deep class, and most priest builds take Skaen or Wael for the bonus spells, as those unlock a more varied play pattern.
Pretty much. That's how I felt reading posts on Deadfire Priests. You can be a specialist healer/buffer, and you'll do an ok job at tbat even though other classes can avoid afflictions just swell on their own. Or you can use the Priest as an excuse to give The One or Two broken spells to a mostly martial classed character. After all, their PL9 isn't even that interesting so there isn't much to sacrifice either way.
Hopefully, using Priest of Wael for debilitations and Cipher for charms and damage while targeting Will is going to lead to an interesting and thematic caster. I sure wish that Wael didn't give 3 Deflection buffs one after the other, though.
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I chose to quit Deadfire halfway through way back when to wait for all the patches and DLC. Semed like a good choice to let the game age a bit.
Now that we are all getting ready for 4.0, I wonder if I should care to import my Priest character from PoE1. My impression was that the Priest was a broken class in a game where you can only cast two spells from each circle, where you have to pick from a list of situational abilities, where buffs rarely stack and where even the martials can likely buff themselves out of trouble without half a dozen seconds of cast time to boot.
I mean, its all nice and dandy to use Wael as an excuse to give martials Arcane Veil but I really wanted to play as a caster of the God of ???????????. Further, being the Devotions for the Faithful bot doesn't seem very interesting at all.
Lately I've considered making a Priest/Cipher that focuses on targeting and debuffing enemy Will with spells like Shining Beacon, Divine Terror and all the goodies from Ciphers. If the Psion subclass gets some tweaks by next week this could be interesting, even if suboptimal.
TL;DR: should I play a caster Priest or should I just play a Wizard?
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One thing that is valid to remember is that DA:O makes use of level scalling (blergh) and Zathrian's number of adds vary a lot.
I don't really remember Zathrian being particularly lethal, my biggest issue was his Blizzard spell, which would kill my mobility enabling the add's true lethality. That fight was more about keeping him from casting that and Cone of Cold.
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I dunno. It sounds good in theory, but when you place it in a video game, suddenly it becomes a case of getting the best result by taking the risky-but-high-reward outcome and just reloading until it succeeds.
From that perspective, it's not a lot of fun. You're saying 'Save yourself some time and accept the slightly worse results, or reload half a dozen times and guarantee your character a better result'.
Hence my second post in the thread. Even if you're up to accepting whatever plot outcome appears, merely having the spine to accept it isn't as fun as both/all possible outcomes being interesting. That's why I posed the writers may want to avoid straight wins and losses in favour of more interesting twists to either, as a example, the plan described on the OP working well (but with unforeseen consequences) or only partially.
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Sorry, what's your question/point, again?
Its hard to explain and english isn't my native language, so bear with me.
D&D is heroic fantasy, it deals with things fantastic and improbable that you'd see straight out of a novel. Like a supposedly normal person surviving chain lightning and so on. To simulate that, the rules could be either very detailed on the coincidences necessary for a lucky hero to survive improbable odds, which would bad for a PnP game, or very abstract, relieving the players of more complicated math and allowing for creative storytelling - that is, you take the circumstances a kind of damage was dealt, such as a mage casting fire and brimstone, apply the random result of unexpectedly the spell dealing subpar damage at (relatively) ordinary hero and chalk it up to something like miscasting (where other rules apply) or some other coincidence.
Its like reading a LP of Baldur's Gate where the player can freely interprete the dice rolls. If <Fighter character> underperformed in battle, it could be due to anything the player can larp (imagine, interprete) and the story told via the mechanics is only limited to imagination or how much of it the player is willing to apply. Maybe he tripped on the corpses of the skeletons you just killed, he might have a pretty low WIS score after all that pumping of STR.
However, if the game systems only elaborate on combat, then there's a disconnect between the player and the virtual reality. I think that if all we have to picture a character are the abstraction of combat, the only way to, say, deduce how physically strong a fighter is is to compare him to another fighter - and the damage each fighter or differing abilities deal to someone else's hitpoint bar. The result is that you can easily tell who's the stronger fighter (it says so in their character sheet) but you can barely connect to a more ample reality.
Or rather, what I'm trying to say is that if the devs elaborate the game's virtual reality beyond simply combat, and integrate those secondary gameplay systems to attributes (such as the inventory system's weight allowance being connected to the attrib. of Strenght), then you get a clearer picture of the character. A character that deals <damage> under <X-Y> rolls may be stronger or weaker than another, but you know a character better is he's as strong as being able to carry XXX pounds.
My question/request and the whole point of the thread is if you can do that to other attributes than strenght. If there's a way to integrate Dex, Con and such to systems other than combat - and if people agree there's really a point for that.
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That's because you can't roleplay 6 characters at once,
Why?
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And here I was hoping to forget this thread existed.
Kinda hard when you bump the thread.
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Just thought of something. Maybe when the outcome is random the writers may want to avoid straight wins and losses, rather making the more 'succesful' and the least succesful outcomes be more different than simply being more and less effective mirrors of each other. So that you can appreciate the story beyond posessing the will of not-reloading and trying again.
Say, the plan could work or fail in part, but each with a twist. Once the fire could preserve the lives of the villagers but sacrifice much of their material wealth, while it could work in part but leaving the villagers with something to survive the next weeks of cold/hunger/whatever.
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A degree of chance to straight dialogue choices? (as in, not skill checks) Its certainly an idea and I don't think I'd oppose it. Though I have a higher priority on more choices, as opposed to developing a single choice (assuming limited resources - that's mere preference mind you).
I'm not surprised the BSN shunned a topic with 'mechanics' on its title, btw. A single one of their romance thread has more posts than the builds and mechanics subforums combined - their priorities lie somewhere else.
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DA's combat was terrible. Between lame abilities, and fighting the same battles over and over again, DA's systems are something I don't want to see in any RPG.
DA's combat system has many things I find disagreeable, but that sounds like a issue of encounter design. There were interesting encounters in DA, some even make good use of misdirection - but the game is still, as always, enlarged by filler combat.
As someone who could survive that filler combat (hardly out of line with some other really good games), I only truly dread DA2's encounter design.
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I think project eternity should ideally work on a proportional ability score system rather than a "to infinity one" where you can end up having 7 points in wisdom and 126 in strength because that just is very very abstract.
Full agreement there, though I think being a clear 'minimum stat' and a clear 'maximum stat' sounds just as important. Systems with never increasing attributes remind me of level scalling and fake progression that kinda mess up storytelling.
I just remembered the one-word descriptions of your attributes from PS:T. Though not as clear as the weight from the inventory system, that was also neat.
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Actually, World of Warcraft is a prime example of how isolating combat balancing doesn't make it any easier. It took them years to make class balance satisfactory, and that with a lot of cost: much creativity in character building was lost and the concerns of class homogenization was and still is ever present in the WoW community.
This may sound like a pointless example, WoW is a multiplayer game where people control a single character after all. But if you look at things from the perspective of a guild leader, who must pick which players (which classes) shall integrate the 10/25 man raids or the PvP community, which selects the 3v3/5v5 teams that work through testing and foreknowledge, you'll see that certain parallels rise.
Except one: as said above, each player only controls a single character - meaning that the issue of class homogenization may not be much of a issue. However, in Eternity we control the entirety of the party, meaning that class homogenization as a whole is a unnecessary sacrifice.
All this coupled with the fact that balance won't ever be reached anyway, means that I don't think the ease of balance matters to anyone but the designer's time and resources. And that's not really something to discuss, I suppose.
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Every choice of playstyle (classes) being equally powerful (and, for the best, mutually exclusive) in combat is better suited for single character combat-centric RPGs. But when a party-based RPG tries to make every class equally powerful in combat, it tends to homogenize classes. Making thieves and fighters equally powerful but in 'different ways' works well in theory, but not in reality because there are so many different ways to apply to a class' design. Especially since J Sawyer also wants multiple builds within a given class.
Party-based RPG class balance, I believe, is best at making every class appealing to the good of the party. And that includes (hopefully) out of combat gameplay, hence my vote.
Nonetheless, that also depends on how much 'out of combat' gameplay there'll be.
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Ideally, experience is given when you roleplay your character. You play to your character's or your party's strenghts in order to complete a certain objective. If quests are generally open-ended or have multiple ways to be finished (as per what strenghts and weaknesses a character/party may have) then awarding experience for objectives sounds like a cheap way to reward the player for playing however he wishes (which, depending on things, might just demand 'roleplaying' as I defined above).
My only fear is that this becomes cheap enough to make the devs 'forget' to add some reactivity to the player's builds in dialogue and quest structure (if said reactivity is part of the project at all). But that's ultimately a silly concern, it seems.
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By that I mean that often what character attributes represent is very abstract. Especially since character attributes are, as with most CRPG mechanics, centered around combat, which (in D&D, I believe) is also mostly about abstracting a large number of things into single coefficients. This isn't a bad thing per-se, but I think that slightly less often, other game mechanics make those attributes more tangible, which can be fun.
Hitpoints are a good example of what I mean. Its best seen as a abstraction of endurance (health), luck and character skill, with a certain amount of hitpoints representing a variable which depends on the maximum amount of hitpoints that character has. Instead of being a fixed amount, '1 hitpoint' mean different things (different qualities of wounds) to different characters - characters of different level and different classes might mean different skill or health.
I don't think I explained it very well, so I'll link to a better article for reference: http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/explaining-hit-points.html
So if Hitpoints themselves are so abstract, observing how strong your character is with combat information alone also becomes abstract. When you have two fighters with different values of Strenght dealing different amounts of hitpoint damage, it becomes very clear who's the physically stronger fighter, it says so in their character sheet, but that's not really tangible.
However, what I think is pretty neat is that the inventory system makes the values of strenght a bit more tangible. Instead of comparing how much damage those two fighters deal, now you can straight up and see how much stuff they can carry around with ease or difficulty.
A similar thing, I believe, happens with spellcasters and their relationship with magic. Though magic doesn't actually exist, the amount of spells a mage can memorize per spell-level depends on the intelligence score, giving a more tangible, if not fantastic, medium of comparison than, say, difficulty checks on your spellcasting.
Which brings me to what the thread's about. I'm hardly the biggest D&D buff out there, my experience with the system limited to the CRPGs. So I wonder if similar examples can be found for the other attributes.
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I think DAO sustained spells and abilities are a great design. You sacrifice a portion of your mana pool (eg 20%) to constantly keep an aura or buff. I don't know what magic system PE will have but I will definitely support "activate and constantly keep at a cost" type of spells.
Magic balance is tricky. In IE games mages are generally the kings of battlefield with other classes being cannon fodder. The infamous mage duels encounters in which the outcome of a fight is decided mostly by spell casters. Personally I find it awesome yet it didn't seem very balanced
Well, since the IE games were a party-based RPG, I'd say that balance is more of a matter of making sure all/most classes have a clear appeal, not that all classes are equally powerful - which would run afoul of homogenizing the classes. When it comes to mage duels, spellcasters are most useful, true, but non-spellcasters aren't exactly helpless (and come to think of it, non-spellcasters are decidedly rare) - especially since they have magic of their own (consummables and such).
Also, a nitpick. DA:O didn't do sustainable auras that way, instead of reserving a percentage of your Mana, there was a fixed value. This may sound minor, but percentages put a cap on the amount of auras you can sustain. Percentages came with DA2.
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That being said, I don't think cha buy should be glued to either wis or int. Why not? Ever met a really adorable kid? Did they act like they had ANY wis or int whatsoever? You don't have to be wise or intelligent to be charismatic. What they should have is NPC's whose reactions adjust based on your wis/int after the initial charisma modifier. Cuteness will only get you so far.
Cute and adorable has nothing to do with charisma. A charismatic person has the ability to get others to follow. Think Thulsa Doom. From a D&D perspective there is a symmetry between the physical and mental stats:
STR = INT
CON = WIS
DEX = CHA
Don't D&D group physical beauty and actual charisma in the CHA stat?
Iconic Projection has no PEN
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted
I can't imagine this was intentional design but Iconic Projection has no baseline penetration for its damage component.