thelee

There is a setting you can flip on, istr seeing some sort of “swap hand” option there while looking at all the customization switches to play with.

Like all nerfs on stuff I was using, makes me a little sad but it absolutely makes sense. It was just way too good, too easy to pick up, and outshone the fire and frost ring defense spells that came later, despite them requiring more investment to get. I think it’s still really good for early game PotD, it just no longer crowds out all other defense spells beyond that.

OK, i think i can more precisely describe what's going on. 1. Switch to a loadout grimoire that contains a spell you have an ability point in (in my case I tested with both Arcane Veil and Blizzard each with one ability point). 2. Cast the spell from your grimoire. 3. Note the cooldown of the spell when it finishes, it should have a cooldown reduction. 4. Now cast the same spell from your radial. 5. The spell "remembers" the cooldown duration reduction of the grimoire copy and has a reduced cooldown. Now, try it slightly different: 1. Switch to a loadout with a grimoire as above. 2. Cast the spell from your radial. 3. Note the cooldown of the spell when it finishes, it does not have any cooldown reduction. 4. Now cast the same spell from your grimoire. 5. The spell "remembers" that there was no cooldown reduction from your earlier cast, and the grimoire cooldown bonus is not applied to the grimoire cast. No matter if you keep casting from your grimoire from here on out, you get no cooldown reduction bonus. You have to re-equip or switch loadouts to reset this. This only affects grimoire cooldown. Essence cost reduction appears to work correctly (it correctly applies always to grimoire casts, and correctly never applies to radial casts). Switching loadouts to a different or no grimoire and back again "resets" whatever the game "remembers" the cooldown reduction should be.

ACTUALLY, something else is going on. I bought a grimoire to test with, and all the cooldowns seemed to work with learned spells. I went back to Boethel's, and now Arcane Veil (cast from grimoire) is working just fine with reduced cooldown. Maybe it was some transient glitch that was solved by re-equipping grimoires or swapping loadouts? No idea. disregard

I have Boethel's Grimoire at +3. I have skilled 1 point into Arcane Veil. Both Arcane Veil and Blizzard have 15s cooldown. From the grimoire, I should get a -15% discount on cooldown, so around 13s. When I cast Blizzard (from the grimoire), when the effect ends I get a countdown that starts at ~13s. When I cast Arcane Veil (from the grimoire not from the radial), when the effect ends I get a cooldown that starts at 15s. The only difference is that I have a skill point in Arcane Veil and know it independently compared to Blizzard, which I only know through the grimoire.

ah if that's the case, then maybe it's kinda OK? PotD is not really supposed to be the "f*** around" difficulty, at least without the "and find out" part. still, was a pretty rude shock. the day 1 patch really salvaged my current run.

plain fighter especially. power/inspired strike, inspired discipline, even sundering blows are costed way too expensively that in terms of how you actually play a fighter, an SC fighter doesn't really add that much variety to an MC fighter, you're still mostly a knockdown/mule kick engine.

yeah that would fix the unique system, but i got into my mess because i was upgrading different items, not realizing how rapidly expensive upgrades would become. the upgrade system as it stands right now is surprisingly punishing about not picking one weapon and armor and sticking with it, you basically can't experiment. fine and exceptional gear are also prohibitively expensive. when i was stuck in emerald stair at extreme gear-check levels, i was about to dump my entire net worth (and everything i found so far in dawnshore and early emerald stair) into buying one exceptional bow. because you can only either sell or breakdown most gear, it creates a very scarce economy with the two choices in conflict. while you can respec skills and stats pretty easily, the game being so gear-bound and so gear-scarce actually means you have very little room for experimentation. i wonder if a solution is that in act 1 fine gear is expensive, but then merchants in act 2 sell fine gear for less (and also fine gear in act 1 becomes cheaper), but exceptional is still expensive. at least there's a cheap "floor" for gear in case you go up the wrong path, character-wise. edit: according to the wiki, in early versions of the game you couldn't upgrade mundane items across quality tiers. i wonder if honestly that's a better approach and just make fine and exceptional gear a bit cheaper. upgrading a mundane weapon/armor/shield/grimoire from common +3 -> fine +0 is basically a trap in terms of how ridiculously expensive it is of your upgrade mats.

If you’re talking about poe1/Deadfire sneak attack mechanics, there’s no such equivalent in avowed. im using a bow as my main weapon and it works out pretty well. Them being silent *does* really matter if you one hit kill an enemy from stealth (doesn’t happen too often in PotD but you can ambush weaker mobs in a pack like this); enemies have a much harder time becoming aware in that situation. In some situations I can take out all the weaker enemies in a camp or encounter. Pistols definitely have the versatility advantage though. (I have a pistol in my secondary loadout so I can pair it with a grimoire.) As for dual wielding, you’d have to rely more on dodge or slides for survivability. Both are actually pretty good though blocking is def more reliable and parrying can be more powerful.

where are you people getting these numbers? honest question! i've been scouring around for these numbers, and this is actually the third distinct number i've seen. (poe wiki says 60%. i saw a reply to one of my posts on reddit saying 20%. this is the first time i've seen 35%) i don't see any tooltips in game that illustrate this. (before the day 1 patch i would get really weird tooltips that told me i got 0%) anyway, i think it's clear waht the intent of the unique scaling was (to avoid "wasting" resources on upgrading mundane items only to find a better unique that now you need to invest in), but it's a shame that it's so easily metagamable. my only thought is they should probably make resources a bit more plentiful and that you get back more resources when you break down upgraded items, and then not have uniques scale at all. this issue exists as it does right now because resources for upgrade are surprisingly scarce, even with thorough exploration. it me. before the day 1 patch that adjusted the scaling, i was hitting a lot of hard gear-check encounters. with the new scaling, i can actually progress through skill alone and incremental subtier upgrades.

oddly this is a common criticism that i don't share. perhaps i'm just too used to playing FPS's where you frequently find endless amounts of one of like a handful of enemy types (if you're lucky) [e.g. wolfenstein, far cry series, call of duty series, even like bioshock infinite]. if this were a top-down RPG like poe1/deadfire i'd find it extremely annoying (and did find the lack of enemy variety in Tyranny very annoying) but once i'm in first-person mode my brain suddenly switches and it's no biggie.

honestly you shouldn't, this appears to be microsoft strategy. I paid for the game so I don't have to worry about a subscription, but microsoft is clearly trying to push gamepass subscriptions, and whether or not obsidian gets to make more games like this has more to do with engaged players overall and not just sales data (which apparently is also good, comparable to outer worlds which was a decent hit).

yeah, a nice subtle gameplay distinction is that. back in the previews, i thought builds would be pretty samey because I was under the assumption that to dip into another tree you had to start from the beginning (like Deadfire or TTRPG multiclassing, Diablo 2/Skyrim skill trees, Outer Worlds perks). The fact that you can just jump right into the middle (or end!) of a tree so long as you meet the minimum requirements adds an interesting non-linear dimension to it and some interesting setups you can do.

one thing i miss from deadfire is the auto-generated tooltips that help explain a lot of detailed mechanics. this is the kinda stuff i puzzle about. i'm too focused on finishing the game with my limited time to do much testing (though i did do a few tests on frozen + explosive damage), but maybe someone will do this testing in the near future. (it'd also be great if there was a way to figure this stuff out from the game files... the lack of a combat log really makes it hard to introspect some of this stuff - like i was able to show that shattering frozen enemies with explosion really does a massive boost, but there's no damage numbers or combat log to examine)

progression is simpler than poe1/deadfire, but honestly BG3/5e has extremely simple progression--like literally almost no choices to be made for many classes--and yet there's no shortage of builds. (there are also more classes, but time will tell if we ever get more via DLC) i think there's build variety potential and we could use a forum space.

Have you tried 3rd person mode? That helps my wife.

afaict resources don't respawn, but merchants should generate mats for sale, i think that's an infinite (if slow) source.

i only have like ~10 h so far, so this is just based on early impressions and also for general discussion. i find might to be in a similar situation to poe1 and deadfire, a nice to have but not at all critical. it seems like this might be a "either useless or useful" dichotomy of an attribute? It will never ever ever help you survive a hit on PotD if you couldn't, but when you're up to >80 DR, it can mean the difference between taking an additional hit or not. i agree that the design is unintuitive. i think it would help if perception also helped with crit damage, to help with the bow/gun tension of getting auto-crits with weak points, or probably better still let weakpoints and crits be independent things so weakpoints can still crit (currently the fact that guns have a severe crit chance malus is canceled out by anyone with good twitch aiming skills or the ability that slows down time while aiming). i still come into situations where i'm far enough away that damage drops off with a bow or gun, but those situations come up much less frequently, so the returns are extremely diminishing. edit: it would also be more in tune with the poe/design attribute design philosophy of universality if spells could also crit (as far as i can tell they cannot), which would give perception greater overall utility. i think the fact that essence potions and essence foods are overflowing is the main killer here. max essence would still be useful because essence potion regeneration is pegged to your max essence, so the more you have the more you get out of them. but it's hardly a concern right now with my hybrid build because i'm tripping over sources of essence regen (i actually just sold half my essence potions). i don't know if resistances are useful from intellect because at my current modest intellect level it's not enough to prevent from getting basically one shot at times, and i'm not sure i'm willing to invest all the way to 15 to see if that situation changes. not sure what the better situation here would be that wouldn't just involve nerfing the player (like adding a cooldown to essence potions). i think this would be more useful if sprinting required stamina as well, at least in combats. that might be too punishing for lower difficulty. with a ranged hybrid build i'm spending most of combat dodging left and right, and i'm never short of stamina with only like 3 resolve. edit: i don't mind it working with second wind, it's not really a "betting on failing stat" so much as it is a parallel survivability mechanism to health (and both work together, essentially). my problem is that investing in resolve for this is not going to be totally effective because of just how frickin' long the cooldown is, combined with the obscure mechanics means i don't see a way in which this ever triggers more than once in a typical fight regardless of investment, so you get more clear survivability benefits from constitution. so it's not that "betting on failing" it's more like constitution gives you +X health and resolve gives you like +constitution/2 health, so it's always a worse choice if you want the survivability, if that makes sense.

that's actually kind of my point. i'm not saying paladin is bad, or even that druid + paladin in a party is bad, but simply that you don't need to be a druid/paladin multiclass, and in fact may be redundant or less powerful than some other druid or druid multiclass setup that happens to have a paladin or paladin multiclass elsewhere in the party. that's kind of the killer for several paladin multiclass options to me - most of its kit benefits other party members, sometimes exclusively so for exhortations. for example, reinforcing exhortation on a martially-oriented druid (or martially-oriented anything) would be very nice to have, but ironically you cannot do this as a multiclass, you have to have the paladin and druid separate. i said it was fine, but kind of like a meme build situation.

i actually find this a funny point--very different views here, because i generally view Fighter/x as solid (if not necessarily S-tier) shell for any multiclass, fighter/druid included. better support across the board for any kind of druid kit in this case thanks to disciplined barrage+upgrades, armored grace, the stances, rapid recovery, and depending on the build a slew of other passives and even some mobility options. you can add damage, but you can only do it a few times on a few targets, until you upgrade it, and you're basically spending most of your class resources for that +20% additive damage, or else diluting it with very little uptime. speaking of fighter, i would much rather pick up tactical barrage, requires very little class resources spent (one discipline gives you boosts against every target), and gets you way more useful overall bonuses for offense or defense, in addition to protecting you against enemy afflictions. and i really just disagree on the utility of that lash. so much of what the druid does does not benefit from that lash. the lash story is so much better with other offensive casters. you can do those things, i do not say that most of those are great things. ancient has wild growth which can be good because it lasts literally forever (and even then i would only use it selectively) and ancient has the sporelings that have the duration that makes extended survival useful. chanter has chants that recur and benefit party and summons at the same time (and some of those chants are great even on shabby summons, like the silver knight one). expending a lay on hands on most summons doesn't strike me as a good use of it, for example. and more to the point chaospread raised, what makes a multiclass to you "worst?" for me, is it better than other permutations to do the same thing? and also for me the big killer is that for all these things the druid doesn't need to be the paladin. that's the big killer for most paladin multiclassing to me, the paladin itself doesn't need to be on the multiclass itself, and is it really better to be on the multiclass in question? for quite a few classes, no. for druid sure you get a bit higher defenses and sure you can pick up something like righteous soul, but most of the time it seems like you would be better served even with a different multiclass and having a paladin somewhere else in the party (even SC). even the sacred immolation story - having tried this i honestly found it very unimpressive and more like a meme build. you burn down all your zeal to give some oomph to nature's terror and sacred flame, which is... fine i guess, but it also comes in very late, and i'm not sure if it's worth all those resources compared to alternatives (hence me calling it more of a meme build). apart from fighter/druid points i made, rogue/druid is good! i would happily roll a trickster/shifter for shapeshifting mayhem, even-non-trickster/X for firebrand stuff, and even an assassin/X for casting mayhem over any paladin/druid kit.

we're not talking about useless, we're talking about worst, right? what you just described with righteous soul you can do as a single-class druid even better bc druids get a spell that grants poison immune. you can also use an item that grants poison immune (spider silk robe iirc, though that comes late) or just plain ol' antidotes. and you just burned two zeal on top of that to get 40% bonus damage for like... 3 ticks of damage, which is not a lot, it's not 40% of all venombloom damage (which would be nice), it's 2 zeal to get like a piddling amount of extra damage. i'd rather use the time spent casting inspiring beacon instead on any other damaging spell the druid has. (or on a better multiclass...) is this actually good about a paladin build? paladins get courageous but it costs 2 zeal. combined with the above you are blowing 4 zeal and so much of your action economy to do some bonus venombloom damage. sounds pretty bad to me. and a multiclass paladin will only have enough zeal to do this twice, and do basically nothing else.

bah i should have excluded wiz, i keep forgetting that it can do deranged things with paladin defenses. i argue that you're overrating the burning lash on DD spells. keep in mind you are getting opportunity cost to do 10% x damage on DD spells, which is a better multiclass or single class. And generally a lot of caster builds probably are not focusing too much on might, so you can get basically the same effect with a strength inspiration, except to more types of spells (i would much rather pick up barbarian + caster or monk + caster if i wanted to do more outright damage on my spells. or even chanter, priest or have either in party. even assassin for alphastriking would be better.) same thing with inspired beacon. you have to get very close to enemies, very tight aoe, and the duraiton is very underwhelming (edit: low base and keep in mind in reality you are facing lots of grazes and resolve effects from enemies). and as i mentioned, in particular for druid, paladin has glaring holes that don't impact priest or wizard as much - eternal devotion doesn't do anything for summons, dots, or hazards. (and sworn enemy doesn't do anything for summons or hazards.) and while inspired beacon does a lot for everything, it really should not be on the same class as a caster who wants to take advantage of it - by the time you finish recovering from using it, you've already burnt through a lot of its duration. [a lot of this from first hand experience from tryign to make various paldin/druid options work and in practice how underwhelming the effects frequently are. several abandoned runs from how uninspiring they were] edit to add: also one of the things i tried. goldpact is nice early on, but without the ability to scale up your defenses like a wael priest or most wizards, you just burn through your AR bonus too quickly. you can spike your damage a bit, but pretty much any other shifter/martial will do better more consistently. firebrand is OK for the extra fire synergy so you can be efficient with your talents and items, but even then it's hard to shake the unmistakable feeling of "i could just be a rogue multiclass and have better uptime on my damage"

as someone who once spent a lot of time on priest and now spends a lot of time with druids i will say that in practice the wiz getting lots of fast self-buffs is in fact pretty handy and does synergize pretty well with various priest or druid strategies. i would put these multiclasses in the "actually pretty great" bucket. i personally cast a vote for druid/paladin. i think paladin/[druid, wizard, priest] are all on the weaker side, but druid in particular. druid has a saving grace in that paladin sworn enemy boosts the damage of many effects, but it leaves behind summons, which make up more of a druid's kit than priest or wizard. flames of devotion leaves behind dots and hazards, which again makes up more of a druid's kit than priest and wizard. you get a lot of ally-boosting stuff, but... you don't want to burn it on summons, and you're making your own ally-boosting stuff weaker by being multiclassed (no pollen patch, no revive, much later spells every where else) so it's of dubious benefit. the one good outcome is probably going all-in on fire damage and firebrand and flames of devotion, but you're honestly probably better off just buying and scribing scrolls of firebrand and using a single class paladin or a better multiclass (devoted fighter? rogue?). it's the one druid multiclass i can't get to work in a satisfying way.

i agree, and frankly given all the various RPGs i've played before and since, it's frankly a minor miracle that the tooltips are as accurate as they are in deadfire for those fundamentals.

yeah are you seeing 13s in the tooltip, or 13s on your character in combat? resolve isn't incorporated into the durations of effects until it's actually applied.