Enduin

Great write up and I agree with pretty much all your suggestions and sentiments. I feel like they're on the right track, but there are a few elements that need to be rethought and tweaked a good deal, while most others just need to find that proper balance, which isn't any small task either. I think one of the issues is that the interconnectedness of so much of the combat means that "fixing" or tweaking one area can have large ripple effects elsewhere. Reduce recovery on one area or stats of one weapon set and all of a sudden you've broken or nerfect something other there. So I hope they've already gotten their head around things, or at least are on that path towards that. I will say as much as I agree with the general points of the Miscellaneous section we have to acknowledge that this Beta is most likely an isolated fork of the main build and a drain on Obsidian's time and resources to update and work on. Some bugs, features and the like just aren't worth their time and possible large effort to fix and implement. So for me it's more about the core gameplay mechanics than some UI/QoL features being added or some non-game breaking bugs being fixed. Even with regards to core gameplay Josh's tweet showing the expanded Passive Skills shows the Beta lags a good deal behind the main dev branch even on that front. So I think it's important to continue to give feedback, suggestions and input on all areas, but also be a bit more tempered in our expectations of what we'll actually see get added or changed in the Beta build. Just because we haven't seen it change here in the Beta doesn't mean that hasn't been changed or added in the main build or a test build. I try and take a look at the overall trajectory instead worrying about exact details. Are we heading in the right direction rather than are we on this exact route.

Thanks for the calculator, though I just realized my Nalpazca/Berserker is extremely redundant as Frenzy and Bloodlust suppress Coral Snuff, Potion of Deftness and Swift Strikes. So that's kind of waste. Why not simply reduce each stacked bonuses rather than suppress them outright? Frenzy and Bloodlust would stay at full bonus of +25% & +20% Action Speed respectively, but then divide Potion of Deftness by 2, Coral Snuff by 3 and Swift Strikes by 4 based on largest to smallest bonus. And once Potion of Deftness expires it shifts so Coral Snuff/2 and and Swift Strikes/3. Or some kind of similar calculation that takes Persistent, Temporary and Passive bonuses into account. It gives you increasing diminishing returns for each stacked bonus, but doesn't outright negate things and make certain Multi-classes pointless. Hell even certain single classes are kind of made pointless if this is accurate as even if I was just a Nalpazca Monk it looks like Coral Snuff would suppress Swift Strikes on its own. Acina's Tricorn - Shootist: +5 Ranged Accuracy, +20 Reload Speed

Silver lining for me at least, the current state of things might force me to actually learn to fully incorporate and utilize consumables and niche buffs in my play style, as I currently ignore 80% of it and my general course of action when finding myself in a tough fight is to brute force it with changing my tactics, ability use and enemy priority rather than using any kind of consumable or the like to make up for party deficiencies. I also hope changes to bombs and traps also give me cause to do use those more and to an actual meaningful effect. Purposefully building a Nalpazca type character around the use of potions and drugs and then also needing to use those and other things to help buff up my magic users and in turn use those magic users to further buff my party will be a good learning exercise and kick in the pants to broaden my skill set. I am too reliant on Debuff and straight forward enemy management and dmg dealing than buffing my side.

So am I correct to take away from this that in the main game we might expect Spell times to be diminished greatly based on gear and other buffs we have applied and then the opposite based on whatever Debuffs we or our enemies get hit with? So I should be looking to get Aloth and Xoti hooked on Coral Snuff?

That's one thing I definitely disagree with. I do not like classless systems much at all, at least when it comes to party based games. FO 1/2 I love, but elsewhere like DOS not so much. You lose out on things when you go classes as everything has to work together. You're not going to get class types like Chanter or Cipher or Ranger and Druid and the like, at least not at all to the degree and depth you see here. Classless is a fundamentally different kind of system, to me it's like saying the game should be TB and not RTwP. If they want to explore that in a different game, sure that's fine, but for mainline PoE I like the class system and Multi-class provides me with all the freedom I need, and even that has proven to be difficult in balancing things out, keeping singe class characters interesting and not having outright broken combos.

Great write up and mostly I agree with your assessments. A few areas I want to highlight and expand on though. Overworld map is a mixed bag for me. I like the idea of it but I do not like the execution. Mostly in regards to the movement. I personally would have preferred something closer to what Tyranny did but more robust. The character icon and ship icons just look cheap and the way you control movement and how it looks feels bad. I know they're trying to recreate an actual table top feel with models, but it's just not there. Maybe try and make it a bit more like a pirate map version of Tyranny and Indiana Jones style more fixed movement. I fully agree with the Character Creation and Skill points issue. Don't force me to have a bunch of useless skills that I don't want or need and possibly make me feel obligated to choose a certain background for my character else I will miss out on skills I do want and need. It just game-ifies something that doesn't and shouldn't need to be. Let me RP and choose my skills separately. The current setup didn't provide any actual interesting choices, but only best worst compromises. As for weapon proficiencies and modals I think there should be levels to them rather than being a one and done selection. Maybe two or three ranks. Higher Ranks reward greater benefits and reduced negatives, but obviously limits how many weapons you can be proficient in, of which most people won't need more than two.

A Mage Slayer really should procc with more than just melee, ranged weapons at least. *I'm hoping* Yeah being able to open combat with dual pistols or the like to get a hit on any out of range magic user would be nice. It did feel wrong to have my character not use pistols in a high seas setting. Also looking at things Sabre/War Hammer actually looks to be the better combo than Hatchet/War Hammer, I lose out on +3 deflection by dropping the Hatchet, but my dmg output is a lot stronger with the Sabre.

I've toyed with a number of builds throughout the Beta, mostly before the update, but the two I had the most fun with and completed all the content were: Rogue(Streetfighter)xBarbarian(Mage Slayer) - Crits for days - a bit squishy at times, but smart use of heals/second wind kept me alive the whole time and killing everything Monk(Nalpazka)xBarbarian(Mage Slayer) - coked out on Coral Snuff made this a crazy fast build who could hold their own, quite good but not as great as the other I know Mage Slayer is not well thought of but it served me quite well in the Beta due to Lagufaeth being so magic heavy I'd assume, though I'll probably drop it and go vanilla Barb or Berserker if it's not bolstered by release. 90% sure I'll go with the Marauder build upon release, but not sure about my stat distribution. So far I've gone with 20, 16, 15, 15, 6, 6 which has worked out fine, but with such low Will and Deflection I'm not sure if I should flatten it out a bit more to not be so squishy as damage can really rack up quickly if I'm not careful. And I think I'll go from a Hatchet/Sabre loadout to Hatchet/War Hammer to bring in some diversity of dmg types as only dealing Slash probably isn't the smartest thing.

Kind of went nuts the other night messing with this and made around two dozen of mock ups just to see how easily I could get different portraits to work with this. Results were pretty good. Only a few just flat out did not work or required a lot more time than I was willing to put in. Would definitely go back and spend more time refining and touching up any I might end up using in the game just to make sure they're absolutely perfect, but overall these all turned out quite well. For most of these it took me way more time resizing and saving the image files of those I tested in game to the Deadfire folder than it did actually converting all of them. That said some others did take a very long time due to having very difficult backgrounds to erase and requiring a lot more fine tuning and messing around to get Poster Edges to look right or just OK. The big issue with a lot of these is that their source image will also require a fair bit of editing and touching up to fit the normal portrait aesthetics of the game. It's sadly seems much easier to get any old portrait to look good here with this texture filter for convos than it is to make combat and exploration portraits look good without it. Here are some examples I tested in game and then a link to a gallery with all 18 portraits I did but didn't have the time to resize and copy to the game folder: https://imgur.com/a/7hSL4 Four more ingame tested portraits in the spoiler Miguel Regodon is the artist for most of the portraits I converted. They were an absolute breeze to convert and look super stunning.

Having a bear of time with this portrait due to the background and super wispy hair. Been forever since I cropped and edited images in PS so I'm butchering it in the attempt. Original: Fullsize: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/7d/77/77/7d77777dbc27247bdb08800d202dbfe7.jpg My edits:

Lack of physical space might very well be the biggest issue, yes. So how do we solve this? Increase the range of engagement for Unbroken/Shieldbearers? That would solve the issue of not just being unable to hold all those engagements, but also enemies just walking around the fighter with ease. Any downsides to that, besides it looking silly? Side note, I'm curious what your reason for being so vehemently against taunts is? If everything was exactly the same, but they just threw taunts on top of it, would that be acceptable? Please elaborate if not. A way to make use of all those engagements would be great. Not with the intention of keeping enemies locked down but the ability to dish out massive disengagement attacks to multiple targets. But if the threat of a big hit was enough to keep them engaged that'd be fine as well. This way a Fighter can control the battlespace, it could be their 'thing' My issue with taunts is that it will make the optimal meta to be make a tanky meatbag who needs no offensive abilities and exists to be hard to hit and to attract everything so that the rest of the team rains down AoE safely from a distance. Then when this becomes too strong Fighters get nerfed into oblivion. Look at what happened to Fighters in PoE with the Defender patch. I really dislike games that require the holy trinity style that MMOs tend to use. Well when I suggested taunts I envisioned them as being high cost abilities that you would only realistically be able to use once or twice in a battle. I don't want them to be auto magnets that trap enemies, but simply a too to help at least try to regain engagement as battle progresses. But not a guaranteed one. Otherwise I agree with your fears and concerns with the mechanic. I just think done right it could work without being too OP nor dramatically altering the flow and feel of combat.

Those were fantastic. They could make for some interesting high level abilities for Singe Class Characters. Implementation is quite tough though give the whole multi-class/sub-class and character created party members aspect of the game. Way way more options and factors compared to Tyranny.

Fair points. I definitely thought of that exact issue with regards to Block and Slash, as well as the fact that enemies show ability icons when they're about to use them, but I think if worked out right it could be a decent high risk, high reward ability for one of the Martial classes, which I think the game is lacking and could use more of. Similar to To the Death and Ring of Pain in that regard. Alternatively said Taunts could work so that they only effect enemies already engaged rather than pulling enemies into engagement. Aw, shucks. I like this a lot. Gives you that one option, either at the beginning or halfway through a fight, to save your squishies from being targeted. I think I'd make some changes, though. Make it more like an AoE Into the Fray than forcing enemies to engage you automatically. I find that the AI tends to stick with whatever is pissing them off the most at the given moment, at least for a while, so that could be what makes all the difference. That's not a bad idea. I had a hard time wording that one and coming up with the mechanics for it, as how it works in DAI doesn't really work well with PoEs mechanics, but I think the overall idea behind is solid. Just a matter of getting it to mesh well with PoE. Alternatively it could work like this: Friendly Target Spell; ~15 seconds, enemies engaged with target get -50% to Stride and any enemy that disengages target suffers disengagement attacks for as long as they are within 2 meter radius of target. And maybe the target gets some Inspiration to Might or something.

Reading through various threads there seems to be a general feeling that several classes, if not most, are lacking in active and/or passive choices. And there's already a huge thread in regards to the loss and distribution of PoE's generic talent pool to only certain classes in Deadfire. Which Obsidian already plans to partially address in the next update with extending some of those back to everyone in the Proficiency menu. And it looks likes like Josh posted earlier today on Twitter that the next update will also remove spell restrictions for Priests and give them an extra bonus spell per spell level for even more options, including non-priest spells. With that in mind I was inspired in the Engagement thread to re-familiarize myself with Dragon Age Inquisition's class abilities after someone mentioned one and in doing so more than few stood as being, at least broadly speaking, possibly suitable for Deadfire. So I'm curious what abilities from other RPGs with some re-imagining, or ones you just straight made up even, could fit in well in Deadfire and maybe help round out some of these classes which don't appear at the moment to be as well rounded and supported as they could/should be. So here are a few abilities from DAI that stood out to me which I then gave a quick and dirty retooling/re-imagining to better conform to PoEs style: Payback Strike: A Modal or Passive where a Fighter receives X% chance of returning 150% of the dmg dealt to them by an enemy's melee ability and are Stunned for 6 secs, but enemy melee abilities now do ~20% more damage. Block and Slash: Active, but could be reworked as Modal or Passive, ability where if an enemy attacks you with a melee ability within ~3 seconds of activating block and slash you roll a check against their Reflex and if successful deal 200% of damage they would have dealt to you and Stunning them for 6 sec. Failing the check on Reflex results in them dealing 150% dmg on you and getting Stunned. War Cry: Active CoE that taunts enemies to engage you, check on their Will. For the next 10 seconds you receive 50% dmg bonus to disengagement attacks and X increase to their accuracy. Challenge: Active Ability; taunt one enemy into engaging with your for the next ~15 seconds, check on their Will, if successful they receive a 15% bonus to dmg for the duration. Ring of Pain: Active AoE: For ~15 seconds you deal X% more dmg based on how low your health is, lower your health the more dmg you do, but all enemies within 2.5 meters deal 25% more dmg for the duration. Line in the Sand: Friendly Target Spell; 6 meter radius enemies within range will engage target for the next 15 seconds. Target gains Hardy inspiration(+5 CON & +4 AR) for duration. To the Death: Active Ability. You and single target get locked in engagement with each other till one of you dies, with each getting a 25% increase in recovery and 5% increase in dmg every second.

I feel like giving front line classes some Taunt like and similar abilities would help with the engagement issue and with some of their rather paltry active ability trees. Fighter could get something like a Taunt cone AoE against Will that causes effect enemies to engage them, then for the next ~10 seconds they get a 50% dmg bonus to disengagement attacks. And/Or a single target Challenge that when successful locks target in engagement with the fighter for ~15 seconds or something like that. Paladin's could also have a modal like Zealous Aura that offers X% increase in maintaining engagement with Y% boost to disengagement attacks. Where one mode has higher % bonus to maintaining engagement but low damage bonus, while the other has lower % bonus to maintaining engagement but a higher damage bonus to disengagement attacks. That and/or have some baked in passives to disengagement attacks or optional passives players can choose that give disengagement attacks an X% chance of cause an enemy to re-engage when hit with a disengagement attack. Or something like abilities/passives that effect enemy stride and then have disengagement attacks occur as long as an enemy is within X meters of character. So you can reduce an enemies movement speed with an ability and if they then try to disengage their slower movement will cause them to be within range of you disengagement attacks longer.

yet another brick in the anti-gun hegemony I feel like guns should do crush damage. Those giant lead balls pancake and mess stuff up big time. They're not exactly modern rifled bullets with jackets. Even if it's only like 50-75% dmg. You get hit with that wearing plate armor and you're going to have a mighty huge crater in that thing even if it doesn't fully penetrate.

I have to say I dislike both bonuses to Culture and Job. I'd rather just get to choose to distribute both points. Like I get why a Job has associated skills, but I still don't like it as it almost always clashes with what I had want my character to be like so I feel like I'm wasting skill points then.

Yeah I had this happen to me once on one of my earlier playthroughs. It looked like the resting menu kept the same foods that I had use before but despite still having those foods in my inventory and them appearing in a few character's slots they did not get healed.

If I'm not mistaken the floor traps in Poko Kahara requires Perception 15 on the first floor and Perception 16 on the second floor to detect them. I think there's some magic traps in a hallway as well which require even higher Perception to detect, but none of my characters had higher than 16, so not sure what the requirement for those are. I feel like having points in Mechanics should also contribute to detection as well. Like every 2 or 3 points of Mechanics is equivalent to an extra point in Perception only for the purposes of detecting Traps. As currently the Perception requirements seem quite high and traps really do a number on you with the instant Injury status.

Such a system would preserve the free-form character building of the first game through the "talent layer" without really touching the multiclassing system; multiclassing would then be an additional way to specialize your character, rather than a replacement for the prior game's freeform character building. The limited number of additional talents would also reduce the balance implications -- you're talking four non-weapon talents total over the life of your character, significantly fewer than in the first game. Edit: I should probably note that each individual class retains a lot of specialization under this system. I haven't looked at each new tree in detail, but nothing in this proposal would (for example) give stances to paladins or let ciphers use Twinned Shot. It would just give players a few tools to shape their characters a bit and wander a little bit "off the rails," which is important for a lot of reasons, not least of them the sense that your character reflects your unique choices. This is kind of what I was imagining with introducing FO style Perks to the system, though you've only focused on returning the PoE General Talents pool. I personally was hoping they could reintroduce those but also come up with some more inventive, high risk/high reward, talents too. Not so much goofy like FO, but similar in the effect they can have on your play style and build. I also would not mind if they brought back Cross-Class Talents as odd as that might seem now given that we have true Multi-classing. But I thought those were interesting options for single class characters and still would be, in some fashion at least, worthwhile to allow people to further augment their single class characters play styles, even if they reduced the bonuses from what they were in PoE. I'd also be in favor of having this upgrade option every 4 levels and not 5.

Josh prefer armor being about reducing damage received instead of being part of the total defense calculation (going by Fallout New Vegas and now POE). Although, technically they could just have a -/+XX% received damage of type Y on the armor and not bother with either AR vs Penetration or DR calculations. It's not a bad goal and one I'd normally be in favor of, but at this point it's starting to feel like maybe it's more trouble than it's worth. DR "worked" in PoE, but as Josh stated too many people incorrectly made assumptions based on DR ratings as it's not always a one to one situation of always attacking the lowest DR. And now the Pen/AR system is more difficult to understand upfront, but should make for better understanding once you do get it. And I get it, but it still seems imperfect and too gamey right now as you're simply min-maxing each encounter by necessity as failing to meet or exceed an enemies AR means you're barely making a dent. Pinning everything to Acc vs Defense might not be as realistic, but it works. And honestly looking at the formulas and everything Pen/AR really just looks like a convoluted means of deriving what is effectively Graze/Hit/Crit, but with an extra layer of confusion added on top. Sure there's a bit more nuance to it than that, but on average it looks like it's basically coming out to the same end result just maybe skewing towards slightly weaker attacks overall with the occasional massive hit. But you could largely achieve that through Acc vs Def anyways if you really wanted to by just tweaking some things. So why go to all that trouble when you can just adjust ARs to simply effect the To-Hit calculation and if totally necessary have certain armors increase the dmg penalty for Grazes or provide their own Crits to Hits and Hits to Graze bonuses? Feels like some variation of Def +/* AR Bonus vs Acc +/* Dmg type Bonus could work out quite well. Just have the AR be associated with certain bonus values. Say have each point of AR provide a flat 5% bonus to Defense and a 1% chance for Crits to Hits/Hits to Grazes or something like that. So someone with 10 AR gets +50% bonus to Defense plus a +10% chance of Crits to Hits/Hits to Grazes. Then for specific Dmg Types ARs for every point below their generic AR they instead incur a defensive penalty of 3x times that of their bonus. So a Scarab with 50 Deflection and 6 AR will have a bonus of 15 Deflection for a total of 65 plus a 6% chance of Hits->Grazes->Miss. You go at them with someone who has 44 Acc with some Daggers or Swords and you're not going to do great. You'll hit but probably more Grazes than Hits. You really won't do well if all you have is Piercing Weapons as they have an AR of 12 vs Piercing, so that would be a Deflection of 80 plus a 12% chance of Hits->Grazes->Miss. Now you're hitting more than you're hitting beetle. But if you go after them with a Mace or Hammer you're going to mess em up real bad as they only have an AR of 3 vs Crush so that Deflection is now only 28 and you now have an effective +9% chance of Miss->Grazes->Hits->Crits. It's effectively the same principle as the current Pen/AR we have now, go after the lower AR, but it cuts out the excess math/confusion that the Pen brings in and let players just focus on the their Acc vs the enemy's effective Defense. And you can still have abilities and spells that effect AR. Some further tweaks might be necessary to health values depending on if this increases/decreases average # of hits, but it shouldn't be that big a change so long as the appropriate AR values are distributed.

What would be the major draw back to simply not having Penetration/Armor Rating or Damage Reduction from PoE and simply just having everything be controlled by Accuracy vs Defense? Armors could still have single digit ARs but behind the scenes that number would represent a fixed bonus to defense against the accuracy of an attack, rather than a check on the damage itself being dealt. So your Acc vs "Defense type X" + AR. You'd still be able to have dmg type based ARs like Crushing, Slashing, Piercing, Freezing, Burning, Shocking and Corrosion. But the final effect would always just be a Miss, Graze, Hit or Crit. And then the same bonuses you might for Graze to Hit, Hit to Crit and vice versa would still apply. Is the task of balancing out Acc across classes and armor types that difficult that it's necessary and worthwhile to have a whole other system to further effect dmg outcomes?

It's even worse considering that it's also visually emphasizing "wound equality" among all builds and classes. Doesn't matter if you're building a battle-hardened, scarred Coastal Aumaua or planning on roleplaying a support class-oriented Orlan who's never been in the thick of battle directly - both will go down when it hits that imaginary fourth red light. I think this is a good instance where having different degrees of severity to Injuries would be beneficial. Certain Classes/Sub-classes could have bonuses to Injuries allowing them to acquire more Injuries or further reducing the change of acquiring a Serious Injury. With your Constitution then being the main determining factor on the threshold required for you to receive a Serious Injury vs a Minor Injury when knocked out and chance of receiving a Minor Injury when struck with a critical attack. In real life, people would just savescum this. The current system just does not work. I'm failing to see how that's a possible greater issue in this instance. The whole point is to reduce the likelihood of the current serious injuries and increase the chances of getting Minor ones that don't come with the same level of penalty, while also taking into account Class and Stat factors that should play into how many Injuries a particular character can sustain and the likelihood they'll get a Serious or Minor one. No significant number of people are going to restart entire battles because they got a Minor Injury from a Crit Hit or were unfortunate enough to get a Serious Injury from a Knockout. They're more likely to just rest and use up some of their food supplies.

I'm kind of surprised Obsidian isn't employing an actual bug tracking website of some kind. I've seen some Early Access games in the past use them and they were quite nice at sorting things out and offering easy searching of already submitted bugs and being able to add comments or just escalate them to show how widespread the issue is. The Forum isn't terrible, but it's going to get pretty messy and redundant as time goes on.