Epsilon Rose

Have they listed what's going to be in the next patch somewhere?

That is a disappointingly short list.

When playing RPGs, I occasionally like to try and recreate characters from other media. Since I recently started watching Slayers, I thought it might be interesting to try and build Lina. Originally, I thought I'd just make her a high Might/Int wizard, because when you think of powerful magics you tend to think of Wizards. However, while wizards do have some blasting, they seem to be mostly CC, which seems out of keeping for Lina, who's mostly blasting with a bit of utility. Now I'm wondering if Cipher or Druid might make more sense. So, I figured I'd ask everyone here: If you were going to remake Lina Inverse, from Slayers, as a character in Pillars of Eternity, how would you do it?

I'd argue that Death godlike should be higher. If you look at most of the ranged characters, and you have proper tanking, I would expect that by the time they get down to <50% endurance, most of the time the situation is unsalvageable or, at least, the small boost from a racial ability won't help. Conversely, every enemy you beat or get close to beating will be at low endurance at some point, meaning their racial will trigger and help you finish off the enemy quicker, either using less resources or letting you move onto the next threat quicker. That said, it depends quite heavily on what is meant by "Low Health."

Oh I didn't think shields affected spell accuracy. I guess enchanted small shields would do. I don't mean to use it to actually try to fight in melee with the wizard, just to be slightly less squishy while casting and for the reflex save bonus. Edit: And yeah all this is for high level when you can cast 1st/2nd level spells per-encounter and shields give bigger bonuses, probaby not worth it early levels at all. I think I heard they use the accuracy from your main weapon. On that note, would a +acc weapon be worth looking at for wizards?

To what? "Restoring Brighthollow will allow you to receive resting bonuses from spending night in Brighthollow" [...] To "Restoring Brighthollow will allow you to rest in Brighthollow. Addittionally, you will receive resting bonuses from spending night in Brighthollow". The wording in the original texts could be interpreted to imply that resting is already possible, and that the restoration would only add resting bonuses. Confusion about that is what brought me to this topic ;-) Actually, I'm not sure it should have the second part or, perhaps, it should read "Additionally, further upgrades will allow you to receive resting bonuses for spending the night in Brighthollow." Do you get any bonuses before you build the other structures?

They said it would be possible to solo the game. They didn't say the game would be fairly balanced for it. Im not saying I like it or dislike it im just throwing facts there. I dont really care about balance, balance is ****in boring. Nowadays it seems all games must be balanced. **** that. If something is op let the people that want the easy stuff play it and be gone with it. Others players will prefer to play with negative handicap if that fits better with his idea of videogames. Idk why a rpg should be balanced. Now THATS an opinion see the difference? Kisses. I don't think you really understand what the word balanced means in the context of a game. It doesn't mean that everything needs to be equal or that it can't be hard. In fact, a well balanced game has the potential to be much harder than a poorly balanced game. All it means is that certain things won't break the game, either making it trivial or unwinnable, and that difficulty functions in a predictable way that the developers were able to tune.

Why would hitting the cap make things harder, other than you just not growing stronger?

You're looking at it all wrong. They actually really love rogues and couldn't bear the thought of one being marred by sub-optimal NPC stat spreads. As such, the only ways to get a rogue are to play one or hire one you build yourself. Why is there a spider jerusalem emote?

I was actually about to ask what twisting was, so, thank you.

Unless I'm missing something, there's not much of a puzzle to it. On a related note, can you actually do anything with that Xorip(?) thing that starts a conversation with you? None of the options seem to really matter.

In the case of 1st and 2nd level spells... that is likely because they do become per encounter once you reach level 9. But for 3rd level and higher? No way. Spamming those would be really make the game too easy. Death Ring and or Adragan's Gaze already end encounters with just one cast. Spamming those would just be ridiculous. So, again, why wouldn't you just re-balance them if you made them per encounter? "X as it currently is would be too powerful if you could use it per encounter" isn't a valid argument when you can also change X to X2.

Part of my problem with the current setup is that it sort-of devalues that chant mechanic and the way you can arrange chants. If you want to use invocations, than the best way to get them quickly seems to be to have 1 phrase chants using first level chants. I could put together longer chants, but they don't seem to have as much effect as my summoning a phantom to wail on things. This is sad, because the whole chant mechanic strikes me as really cool. That part of the problem, at least, seems like it would be really easy to fix by giving 1 point per phrase, not chant.

To be fair, if Druids and Wizards could use their most powerful spells with reckless abandon, every other class would feel weaker in comparison, even including Ciphers. Why poke things with a sword when you can just spam Fireball over and over, knowing you'll get them all back in the next fight? I you made spells per encounter (or gave them a selection of other per encounter abilities), why would you set them to the same balance point as spells that are supposed to be per rest?

Has this been working for you in game? I haven't noticed an increase with 18 int so far. Definitely working. My tank chanter has like 15 or 16 int can't remember at the moment, and the linger is over half of the duration. So running the chant that gives will/fort saves I have almost a constant +20. I'm also not really noticing the problem with how fast chanters get their invocations. Granted I am playing on POTD, but I also wasn't having problems with on Hard either. I wonder if some of you got hit with that difficulty bug unknowingly. On POTD I have noticed however that a tank chanter just cannot soak the damage that even a super sub-optimal fighter tank can. I don't have Eder spec'd for tanking at all, but I am using him as a tank and he has soaked nearly 2x as much endurance damage as my super-duper min-maxed chanter tank. It's ok though! Thematically I love chanters and the utility they bring is insane. There's a difficulty bug? How do you know if you have it? I'm playing a chanter that's not too terribly optimized on normal, which the game describes as fairly difficult, but things just keep exploding on me and I'm having trouble building up to invocations until the very end of fights. That may come down to your armor and the like then, or just not controlling your skills well, I'm still re-learning all this myself :/ Keeping guys knocked down, getting the right armor with good stats. I've going a tank chanter that can take a fair beating, unless everything focuses on him first, then he pops like a cork. Ah. I think you misunderstood. My enemies explode too quickly.

Does mind wave actually knock down the target, or just the things behind them?

By all acounts, it actually gets worse. Higher level chants take longer to speak and higher level invocations take more chants to cast.

I'd argue that ambush is a bit of an odd concept in this game, since you can't use a lot of your abilities until after the combat has already started and, at that piont, the enemies already know you're there and are in the process of reacting.

This seems to come up every time there's a thread about resting and I don't get how it's a valid response. If a game has a mechanic that requires you to intentionally limit yourself inorder to function, then it's not a well designed mechanic. If the only thing stopping me from having infinite resources (in the form of health, stamina, and per rest abilities) is my desire to not rest constantly and the tedium of going back to town, then those resources are not well implemented and might as well not be there. They might as well be per encounter resources and you could say "Roleplaing is what keeps you from just spamming them all every encounter." It would be a valid response then and it isn't one now.

I would challenge you to play a game of Legend (with a competent DM) and still say that. Per encounter, or even at will, abilities don't necessarily cheapen your tactical options or make the game like an MMO.

The fact that the visuals are boring is important. Just look at FPSs with guns that have weaksounding reports; even though they might be statistically powerful, they still won't feel satisfying. The same is true for the wizard aoe. However, on the balance side, it's a realatively small AoE that does relatively little damage twice. There's also little tactical choice in when to use it no meaningful choices regarding it. That is, you are always better off using both uses in an encounter (assuming the fight lasts long enough), you are always better off trying to hit as many targets as possibly (but they tend to cluster together, so that's not too big of an issue), and it will always just be a small amount of damage + daze on a small burst at close range. It can't be a cone that does slow, a touch attack that hits a single target for lots of damage, a bolt or anything else.

The problem with that is their per encounter options are really lack luster and auto-attacks are incredbly boaring and, kind-of, anti-thetical to the concept behind the class.

Wellcome to any classic rpg ever. And yet this is a problem that more modern RPGs have fixed. You give them the per day spells, but you also give them a buch of per encounter or at will abilities, so they're not useless after for most of the fight. I don't think anyone is arguing that the spells themselves are too weak (as a group), but that the class to which they are attached is poorly designed such that it feels too weak during most fights.

I would like to make two, apparently, contradictory observations and then resolve that contradiction. First, the idea that per rest spells works as a limiting resource and forces tactical and strategic planning is flawed. In order to reasonably plan how to spread your spells over a rest, you need to have, at least, a rough idea of the composition of the encounters you will face before the next rest. A "difficult" encounter is a relative thing and without knowing the degree or frequency of the upper end of the set, it's impossible to know how many and what level of spells you should actually spend on an encounter; so the safe thing to do is spend none, that way you'll have them available for and, hypothetically, more difficult future encounters. That really isn't strategic thought. It's a lot closer to playing roulette or, maybe, betting on horse races (I don't know how predictable those actually are, I don't follow them). In order to raise it to the level of strategic planning, one of three things would need to happen: You'd need an efficient form of scouting, the monsters would need to respawn in fixed positions (ala the souls series), or the game would need to tell you outright (ala a tower defense game). While, some of those are less terrible than others, I can't see any of them happening. Second, problem is that you don't tend to need spells for a lot of fights, so you have tons of spells available for the fights where you do need them. So far, I've found that I can easily destroy most of the encounters, so it's pretty easy to figure out that I don't need to spend spells on them. It's also fairly easy to figure out when I've run into a difficult encounter and should start spamming. No real strategic thought needs to go into either decision. I have also found that I am liable to take a good amount of HP damage in such encounters and, as such, I'm only going to want to go through a small number of them. The per rest limitation isn't relevant for the first type of encounter, because I'm simply not using spells. The limitation is also not particularly relevant to the second type, because I will be resting in short order (usually do to HP damage) anyways and won't actually be without those spells. These two observations might sound contradictory, since the first is close to "I don't have enough spells" and the second is, essentially, "I have to many spells", but the root cause of both problems is that the per rest mechanic isn't working as an effective limiter. Instead, it just encourages novaing. There's also a related issue with how the wizard plays. Namely, when a wizard isn't casting spells, they're really, really, boring. They basically come down to Auto-Attack or use a really visually and statistically unimpressive AoE twice. This is a problem, since they won't be constantly casting spells. To fix all of this, I'd do the following. First, give wizards far fewer spells. Second, modify their spells so the buffs have rest long duration, the sustained effects (like wall of fire or frozen mist) last for the whole encounter, and the instant spells (be they things like stun or just pure damage) are worth it (most are probably close to that anyways). Finally, give them a second set of abilities that are much weaker than spells, but also per encounter, so they'll have something to do when they're not casting spells. There's actually a PnP game called Legend that did this really well and the mages ended up a lot more balanced for it.

I wonder if it's subject to DR? I know I get a lot of pauses/pop-ups for ineffective hits from my chanter, even when his weapon seems to be hitting fine, particularly when he's not actually swinging. Either there's a bug on reporting, or the chant is getting resisted; which would be silly, since it only does for damage per tick (or is that total)?