Sensuki

Tested this out myself, you can in fact disable Penetrating Shot during the animation to avoid the recovery time penalty for a single shot. My understanding is that if Penetrating Shot was active when you fired the shot, it should apply the reduction to recovery time regardless of whether you deactivated the modal or not.

Dual Wielding any of the 1H normal weapons with Vulnerable Attack and Two Weapon Fighting is quite good. It just depends. Personally I like Spears, Maces and Sabres over the others.

I don't know the most about modding Pillars of Eternity, Bester does. My time is best spent on reporting bugs. I was a bit disappointed that a new patch was not released before the weekend because I didn't have anything on this weekend - so we've been doing some modding investigation instead. We may have actually not discovered this issue if a new patch came out ... lol.

Anything that increases durations increases the length of the Chant linger.

Backstab should require you to have Shadowing Beyond first to show in the Talent selection IMO.

For the third time (once stated in the OP, and once above) it was not done to suppress modding. If they wanted to suppress modding - they would obfuscate the game code as it's the game code that allows us to make mods, and allows us to make a Unity Editor to make mods that modify assets (as we need the source code to understand the assets). The reason the file size is smaller is it's because they removed files from the assetbundle, that were required for it to function. Do you really care if your game folder is 100mb smaller? I doubt it. These files are not loaded into the game's memory unless you type in a console command to load the assetbundles. It was most likely an unintended side-effect of optimizing the game's size on disk or a mistake made when optimizing memory usage. Now that we have discovered the issue and made Obsidian aware of it, it is up to them to decide what to do. We have stated our preference - add the files back in at some point.

Oh, right - you can get Backstab at level 2. Yeah that should probably be changed to "until you have Shadowing Beyond". Report it as a bug.

Well it's not useless - it gives you a sneak attack and allows you to escape (I have actually not tried it since it was implemented and didn't work in v364 or whatever). Backstab gives you a pretty huge damage multiplier (x2) - stack a few others on top of that and you might get a 1-hit-kill. Just tried it then - seems pretty good, although I'd prefer it to be 3/rest 2/rest doesn't seem worth it.

Is sneak attack applied when you attack from invisibility ?

Anyone interested in formulas might be interested in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bzc2Dec83wSnNENNWjNsemhDcUU/edit?usp=drive_web Matt516's drive on Pillars of Eternity stuff, *some* of the calculations and/or values are out of date

edit: dw

Some fuel for the fire: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70807-what-have-you-obsidian-done-with-the-assetbundles/

That's old, from 2013 or something. edit: http://eternity.obsidian.net/news/update-70-new-year-project-update It was taken from here, which is from Jan 2014.

Changes to the backer beta reflect changes to the full game. It's got nothing to do with trying to suppress modding in the backer beta. If they wanted to do that they'd obfuscate their code.

Between v392 and v435, Obsidian has removed the 2D textures and sounds from the external assetbundles that we use for modding. We assume that this was done to optimize memory usage. However, the external assetbundles for items and spells are not used by the game by default, and are not loaded into the memory unless the game is told to use those files explicitly. They are duplicates containing most of the necessary files. In previous BB versions, the assetbundles contained almost everything one would need to mod. We only had to export Obsidian's custom shaders and assign them to items and spells. Now, all of the item and spell files are also missing 2D textures and sounds. This effectively takes away our ability to mod, or at least in order to mod, it would take us weeks to repair the damage done to the assetbundle files by this change. (yeah, that's right. I save the files for every BB version) We (Bester and I) are not sure if this was done deliberately to optimize memory or fix a problem, or if it was an unintentional side effect of said optimizations, but we have poured many hours into learning how to mod this game so far, and such a setback is both frustrating and demoralizing. We ask that if possible, that this be rectified by release.

Just did some testing on this topic. There appears to be no *1.4 recovery mult in v435 and dual wielding stilettos is in fact 20 frames + 20 frames = 1.33 sec attack time The recovery for 1H and 2H weapons I was getting 54 frames from my video, but it's probably 60 frames to account for dropped frames. So the attack time is actually 3 seconds. Wow 1H is so bad lol

enable me

Probably because noobs will die without a Fighter I guess, if they don't play a Fighter.

None of your calculations include recovery time though, just some math based off ACC-DEF = 0 Matt516 did some pretty accurate calculations in one of the earlier beta versions that accounted for recovery time at that stage of development - right now we're not sure how the global recovery factor is handled. Dual wielded fast weapons have an animation of 20 frames (0.6667s) and a recovery of 28 frames (20*1.4) (0.9333333s) I'm not sure what the calculation of recovery time is for Two Handed Weapons because I'm not sure if the global recovery mult is additive or multiplicative. It could be 30 * 1.4 * 1.5 or 30 *(1+0.4+0.5) ... I don't know. Attack Time for Dual Wielded fast weapons in no armor with 10 Dexterity is 1.6 seconds Attack Time for Two Handed Weapons in no armor with 10 Dexterity is either 2.9 seconds or 3.1 seconds So Dual Wielding fast weapons is not 3 times faster than a Two Handed Weapon.

Sorry, I was doing 1.5 * 0.73, you're probably right that it would be 0.5 * .73 instead Working as intended

They're not here to answer your question, they're in Boston for PAX East. We have an official statement (and a more recent unofficial one) that they would like to do another one, as the more eyes on the game reporting bugs the better - as it will make it into the Day 0 patch.

The simplest way to do it is just to alter the base damage of the weapons with a formula so that 1H weapons will fall off after a certain DR. I don't think Josh likes to balance things that way though. Seems to prefer doing things by 'feel' instead of by formulas. However, one thing to take into account is DR bypass. Vulnerable Attack gives you 5 DR bypass at the cost of some attack speed. The attack speed cost is not as much for dual wield as it is for 1H single or 2H style, therefore you can attack really fast and do close to full damage with the right weapons - making dual wielding 1H normal style weapons very strong. It's okay with 1H Fast weapons but it's much better for 1H normal IMO. You can also take Two Weapon Style to completely offset that penalty. Whereas for 2H you have x1.1 damage for Two Handed Style. 1H style and fast weapons are still pretty bad, but dual wielding two handed normal weapons is awesome IMO.

Expected Result: Crit damage multiplier should be reduced to 1.095 (1.5 * 0.73), currently it is not working at all.

Yeah although their disable isn't as good as a Druids though IMO. I do like their disable spells. There's a good Paralyze one but I forget what it is. Druids kill things a lot faster though.

Yep. The latest BB patch ... Mind you, Rangers (and animal companions) are still the worst class. Animal Companions have no endurance and go down like a sack of potatoes every encounter.