thelee

??? i'm honestly curious. are you speculating, or do you have access to internal game statistics somehow?

i guess at the end of the day, my argument is that the problem isn't that the car goes down 50mph after one year, it's that the car ever went 150mph to begin with. i don't think the solution is to keep the car going 150mph for the rest of its usable life, it should always have gone 50mph (or 70mph or whatever). you'll never get perfect balance, and part of the enjoyment of these games is finding ways to optimize, but my basic point is that bashing shields just do way too much, especially if they also scale like weapons into the endgame. the way the devs assigned enchanted value to the bashing, it's almost like they treated it extremely minimally. it makes itemization decisions less interesting, especially if they scale. maybe the approach is just to crank down the defensive aspects of bashing shields, so bashing shields have a niche (they give up defense for some offense and combat flexibility) while still giving normal shields breathing room (they are the kings of defense).

big difference is that shield also gets you engagement for free, and the deflection bonus scales really high (early on though dagger or hatchet is good enough for the deflection aspect). a bashing shield just does a lot in current design. that does sound interesting, though it sounds like beyond what a mod could do unfortunately.

i think it's an interesting question. honestly, even a vanilla bashing shield i would still use (so long as i could still enchant the shield deflection). i think the problem is that the current way shield bashing works is just not a great design. because "reduce recovery time a lot" is a benefit that automatically scales way late into the game. it's not even a DPS hit for much of the game, until your main hand weapon is super duper enchanted, or your shield is facing massive underpenetration. but even with a DPS hit, i'm not really doing sword and board for the DPS anyway. (edit: hence why i think scaling would do too much, at that point there's no drop-off point and essentially bashing shields are strictly better than normal shields) in bg3, shield bashing is a reaction (so the effects can be balanced statically around some slight once/turn action economy), and in pf2e shields that can bash are treated as any other kind of weapon and any shield can be augmented to do it, so there's no real tradeoff consideration to make between bashing and non-bashing. i don't know what a deadfire-y RTwP-y better approach to bashing shields would be though.

my thought on this is that there is massive value in simply being able to take advantage of dual-wielding's faster recovery (in addition to the two weapon style extra recovery). shield style is not really supposed to a DPS style, and making shield bashing more weapon-like makes it do too much IMO. I definitely use the bashing shields in all my runs (especially the medium shield fire one, it's so easy to get), and it's frankly very rare that I use anything else. i don't know if it's an oversight, but I prefer the status quo and think the monk shield is overtuned from benefiting from transcendent suffering - it would be a good-enough shield on its own if all it did was shield bashing and benefiting from transcendent suffering, because even with less base damage than monk fists, getting +16 deflection w/ weapon and shield style (up to +20 at mythic) and +1 engagement while still having dual-wielding speed is an interesting and really good trade-off. But Tuolito's Palm does a whole bunch of other stuff as well. (It would still be an interesting and potentially good trade-off if it merely did all the other stuff and didn't benefit from transcendent suffering.)

hey just a friendly nudge that you should post anything useful you find. i think the deadfire fan base is heavily skewed towards RTWP so there's a big knowledge gap with turn-based mode. if you find something that works in TB pretty well, you should post it for the benefit of posterity.

Why voulge? Is it for the engagement? a riposte build might enjoy a two handed axe with the bleeding cuts modal more. also not just raising def, but lowering enemy accuracy helps. Persistent distraction from rogue gets you -5 perception on enemies. You could pair with a priest who can cast Despondent Blows or Devotions for the Faithful, which would stack with perception debuff. A wizard has easy access to blind from Chill Fog and while the perception penalty won’t stack, blind comes with its own additional accuracy penalty.

I'm thinking that it might not have to do with an unused ability, but something special about rain of fire. Rain of Holy Fire spawns in an area of effect that itself ends up spawning new projectiles inside as new spell effects (which is why it triggers Least Unstable Coil a lot), i wonder if this additional level of indirection interacts weirdly with whatever hack they put in place that would force HoW to split if killed while essence interrupter is active. If this is true, then something like Meteor Swarm or Missile Salvo should do something similar.

if you have the wall up before you go invisible, then you'll stay invisible the entire time. the only thing that breaks from hazard effects triggering is normal stealth. turn-based mode makes the mechanical difference more obvious - for normal AoEs you can run in and out of them during your turn without getting hit, regardless of tick frequency or timing. with hazards, you trigger their effects as soon as you enter their zone, and for each step (making wall spells stupidly good in TB mode because the hazard damage is 6x-ed for TB mode adjustment, even for the per-step damage). but it's a very subtle difference in RTwP honestly, I don't imagine many people are optimizing for this difference, and RTwP came first anyway so it's not like they had this in mind.

if i'm not mistaken, in your video, it doesn't even look like a mob spawns after HoW dies?

i watched the video and i'm still not sure what happened. can you spell this out a bit more, because i'm not following your theory?

the wall spells are "hazard" effects, which are real weird. (there are a few other hazard effects--like priest seals [not the symbols]--but the walls are the most obvious) they remember some of your stats and buffs, but not all... and IIRC ring of focused flame is not one of them. in general they remember your stats and your level (for accuracy purposes and i'm somewhat sure for PL scaling purposes), but everything else is a hodge podge that probably doesn't work or partially works. (For example, assassin's assassinate bonus applies the accuracy bonus... but not the crit or PEN bonus. also doesn't break invisibility) edit to add: they also remember being empowered. but because they are disconnected from you, IIRC they don't benefit from the various empower talents, nor do you trigger things like least unstable coil. also, yeah wall of flame is pretty good, much more damage than thorns or force. 5-8 damage every second is 15-24 damage per tick (or 30-48 damage per turn/per step of movement in turn based). not shabby. not a good spell for AI to use against you because it's easy for you to step away, but against enemies taht just stand there in melee engagement, it'll rack up lots of damage.

i was compelled by the possibility, but i regret to inform folks that after some testing, Murderous Intent does not work with Trickster spells.

The best time for the fix was in 2016. The second best time is now

Something is effed up between my iPhone camera -> Google photos -> my gaming PC man, I spent way too much time just trying to not having it on its side (no matter what I did it would end up on left orientation or right orientation, never vertical). I had to do a mix of resizing and file format changes to obliterate whatever metadata was getting confused about photo orientation. I guess I’ll post a bigger one but at least it’s a proof for now in case my letter gets lost in the corporate mailbox