IndiraLightfoot

The more I think about it, the more I'm sure it's a pretty big thing, as a matter of fact.

Well, this game whould interest a few of you then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tOaSUsn0D8

If I got upset by computer game stories and plots unfolding in predictable ways, I would not have played more than a dozen PC games in 35+ years.

Yeah. While I really dig the new injury system, there's no need for some artificial character death threshold. Just think of that police officer in Central Park who was hit by lightning like seven times during his career. 4 injuries == recuperating rest at inn, ship medic, healer's care (abbey), mighty priest (temple) - that would be alright, I reckon.

Four injuries == Death is simply silly to me. This waters down the meaning of the different kinds of injuries. It becomes a cold 4-rung death-countdown ladder. I reckon, injuries do the job on their own. Absolutely no need to add an inflexible death ticker to the injury system.

You make solid points, both of you. I'm sure this will be addressed sooner rather than later. Priest needs better tools right now, no doubt about it.

Yeah, plenty of good old CRPGs have this feature, I'd certainly love to see Deadfire sport a similar function.

Nah, it's extremely easy to implement. You just include two versions of the relevant attribute scripts and then have the convo trigger one of them, depending on the input of the player, for this playthrough. You could even go back to the dock and switch it whenever you like. You can have one as default and the other as an alternative (meaning, you have to speak to the convo dummy to change the attribute system.)

I just got this weird idea: How about testing both new attribute changes at the same time? Have an NPC dummy at the dock, where you can make a choice at the start of the game: -Either you pick the new Strength and magic damage+healing on Resolve (the next patch) -Or you pick Might more or less the same, plus Resolve with a new important Concentration boost. This way, it's much easier to compare the two, and it saves time. It shouldn't affect bug reports (extremely marginally so, perhaps - doubt it).

Day or two? With such big change announcements I think it's gonna be awhile until we get next patch. I hope for something in December, but who knows. Ahhh, December is just hours away... I can't stand this long wait anymore. Just give us the darn beta patch already!

Yeah, like I said, Might and all kind of damage on that attribute is somehow part of the PoE DNA. EDIT: if we look upon PoE as a brand, you may say that Josh in this regard takes a risk with their IP and the brand identity, compare it a bit with those consumer outcries (for instance Coca Cola 1985, they had to revert stuff they'd changed.) Never underestimate people's need for comfort zones and appreciation of more of the same, if there is something they liked enough.

Come to think of it, Might is just a label to me, but I do realize that some players regard it as somewhat of an ID marker for Pillars of Eternity, a part of what made the game a bit unique among CRPGs, including the fact that all kinds of damage was pooled there. Perhaps it is too bold of a change to scratch that?

Aw well, I wouldn't mind if Josh came home. He's like a lost son, and this home offers some tough love, but it ain't illwilled, and it doesn't hold grudges for too long.

We now know the following, thanks to Josh and his fab Froghelm Club site: "Going into this, I knew there were shortcomings. It does mean that for priests and wizards that abstain from weapon-based attacks (i.e. most of them), they can more safely dump Might. In that sense, it doesn’t mean they have more dump stats (since they were dumping Resolve) but it shifts what they dump unless they’re making a weapon-based priest or gish wizard. It also has the side effect of stretching points a little thin for druids (who need Strength for their spiritshift forms) and arguably fighters and/or paladins. Even knowing those shortcomings, I was surprised at how many people disliked the change, including the renaming of Might to Strength. There seems to be a significant number of people across a variety of communities who really don’t like the shift for a variety of reasons. We’re going to include this change in the next Backer Beta update, but I’m still working on/thinking through alternative ways to solve the problem. Of the things that have been discussed, the one I think is most promising involves making Concentration better overall and allowing it to build up over the course of combat at a rate defined by the character’s Resolve. Currently, Concentration simply acts as a shield against Interrupt. If a character is casting a long cast spell and gets hit with an Interrupt, the cast is canceled and the corresponding resource is lost. If the character has Concentration, the Interrupt’s only effect is to remove Concentration, meaning the ability can only be interrupted by two Interrupts in succession – one to remove Concentration and one to actually Interrupt. For characters who don’t have long casts (most martial characters), Concentration is of minimal value. While it will stop a knockdown or similar attack from temporarily taking a character out of a fight, it’s not as important. If Concentration had additional inherent effects – increasing effective Power Level, increasing Penetration, etc. – it could be more valuable to characters (and enemies) overall. If we can get Concentration to a place of widespread value (with an increased emphasis on casters), tying it to Resolve again may be a better solution, but there’s still a lot of thinking and discussion that needs to go into that. Until then, we appreciate all of the feedback and look forward to seeing how your builds and playstyles change in the next Backer Beta update. Thanks." So, let's assume that the change isn't very popular, and that it's not really working for a number of cool builds and even classes (like cipher). Here's my take on things then: -Change the name back from Strength to Might, and return all damage Power to that attribute. -Keep healing on Resolve (I find it fitting lore-wise), then make Concentration more bad-ass. It no longer just shields against interrupts, it increases Penetration (This Geronimo-quality would fit Resolve and make for more versatile martial builds, actually. And did I mention that it helps against those hated "No Pen"-blooms for casters as well?).

Yeah, the reactions on these forums are mild compared to that frigging nonsense. I'm not surprised, though. You should have been here during the PoE1 beta. Holy moly! I really hope this doesn't get to Josh too much, and that we get to try out the new changes for a while first. His backup plan for/with Concentration is interesting, but I'm sure there are other ways as well to make it all work.

Nah, he's referring to a very old squabble back when PoE1 was made, years ago, just like Infinitron is doing with his jokingly all-caps "Sawyerism betrayed". Those flames burned hot, but half a decade ago.

Here's the funny thing. though. Precisely nobody over at the backer beta forums had said anything about it, at all. One backer among dozens came with a similar suggestion once in one of the discussion threads, that is all. So, this change has absolutely nada to do with any whining detractors. In fact, all the whining started after it was announced, from peeps displeased with the alteration.

"Paladins are martial zealots, devoted to a god, a ruler, or even a way of life. They can be found in any culture where a fanatical group of like-minded individuals have formed a warrior society dedicated to advancing their cause. Among those aligned to their worldview, paladins are viewed with respect and admiration, if a bit of fear. Many paladins hold leadership positions in armies and mercenary companies, but in the heat of battle their fanaticism often overrules the chain of command - and common sense." "Paladins are extremely devoted, often fanatical, soldiers who have pledged themselves to a chosen cause. They have founded many elite fighting forces." "The Darcozzi Paladin, the oldest known paladin order in the world, was founded as the guards of the Darcozzi Palace in Grand Vailia." Paladins shouldn't *need* to multiclass to have martial training. The whole character archetype of *PALADIN* is "knight". The word "paladin", in *real* life, means "The twelve foremost warriors of Charlemagne's court." Paladins, according to the lore, background, and history of Pillars of Eternity, are *trained, organized warriors*. There is no lore-friendly reason why you should have to train as a fighter to be good with weapons as a Paladin; *PALADINS ARE TRAINED WITH WEAPONS AS THEY ARE FRONTLINE SOLDIERS IN MOST ARMED CONFLICTS IN EORA*. I missed this thread because I was only watching the other one while I was busy over Thanksgiving, and I will finish reading it before commenting further, but I want to reiterate how much I agree with Katarack here, and how incredibly frustrating it is to have KDubya constantly dismiss our perspective about this with "just multi-class, look how fun it is for me to roleplay a multi-class." Good for you. I want my pure Rogue (an agile, tricksy Striker, not a thief or any other archetype) to be specialized in two-weapon fighting, and just as good at two-weapon fighting, as any Fighter. This is not a crazy request, it is completely logical that a character whose entire life has involved fighting with two weapons is just as good at it as a Fighter. I should not have to give up half my damn class just for this small bit of specialization. I don't care if the bonus is 5% or 20%, I care that my Rogue can be just like every other Rogue in every other similar damn game in existence in the last 20 years: a specialist in two-weapon fighting. And if that "dilutes" Fighters then all that means is that Fighters need more interesting abilities. I will say again, if you want a Fighter to feel like an "expert" give him one passive that gives him each of the weapon style bonuses whenever he is using that combination of weapons. Then the rest of us can specialize our non-Fighter characters and Fighters can stil be "experts" in weapon styles if that is really important to you. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I became so irate that I made a whole thread devoted to this kind of arguments a week ago: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/94843-does-deadfire-fail-to-match-classes-with-their-lore-if-so-how-to-fix-it/

Yeah, only broken stuff needs to be fixed, the balance can be pretty rough at the edges.

Well, like Josh wrote on Twitter, the change did address a pretty serious problem with Resolve and some bad balance in the attribute system, so it needed a top-down adjustment. These tiny bottom-up fixes are easier to slip in and adjust as needed, no?

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Thank you. So the stumbling block seems to be a number of hybrids, as well as much of cipher and druid in part? Perhaps you could add a "specific-hybride-unique" talent that you "must" take early on in the hybrids that really got boned this way. Then cipher and druid need to get a few bones thrown at them as well. It wouldn't be that hard to fix, no? I don't see a way to fix it because anything you give single-class ciphers to "Even it out," would end up making multi-class ciphers ridiculously overpowered. For example, if you gave Soul Whip a bunch of extra weapon damage to balance out the Might losses, then melee classes start taking Cipher as a second class just for the soul whip damage boost, and just ignore the cipher damage powers. Aha! But then only have that soul whip damage ability available for single class ciphers. Or for flexibility: Make it half or something, if multi-classed. These things merely require clever tinkering.

Alright, this is great to know. Just for comparison, I'd also like to know which single classes and multiclass combos gained from this. I mean, does it all even out, despite certain classes and hybrids getting the short straw? Or did this change make it all a bit harder? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing? There are good posts breaking this down in the other thread. Basically it's different but not necessarily worse if you're a "pure" class like wizard or fighter, arguably an improvement for Paladins and perhaps to a lesser extent Priests, but it makes it impossible to build a spiritshift druid who is also effective with spells or a Cipher who emphasizes spell damage. Thank you. So the stumbling block seems to be a number of hybrids, as well as much of cipher and druid in part? Perhaps you could add a "specific-hybride-unique" talent that you "must" take early on in the hybrids that really got boned this way. Then cipher and druid need to get a few bones thrown at them as well. It wouldn't be that hard to fix, no?

Alright, this is great to know. Just for comparison, I'd also like to know which single classes and multiclass combos gained from this. I mean, does it all even out, despite certain classes and hybrids getting the short straw? Or did this change make it all a bit harder? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

This isn't "tough choices," it's "can't do the job." Those cases need to be rectified, if that's the case. Can't do the job certainly sucks, like your example elsewhere with ciphers.