thelee

i think that perspective lends better weight to being a "trap" pick, because i think as waski might have unintentionally demonstrated i don't think players are going to be completely aware that uncanny luck is not exactly great for a crit build. (i'm not even sure if it's obvious to players that the 5% "hit to crit" is not like a natural 20, it's much less then that). (edit - waski clarified) but even then in practice you would need a reeeeally high accuracy to not even see a minor benefit in increased crit rate for a crit build, at least from some numbers i just ran (curiously I don't think jayd is that far off, with my numbers even with an average net +30 accuracy against enemies on PotD you still get +14% more crits over the course of the game, though this heavily depends on how decent my estimated distribution of level-scaled enemies is and other assumptions i intially made in my script and am too tired to dig deep and resurface again for now). you have numbers i have numbers and i think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this. i would argue that some of your numbers are context-free. what does dirty fighting (talent I would venture many people would happily take) do? I estimate dirty fighting provides net ~4% increase (along with more crit procs if any). In reasonable cases uncanny luck provides ~2% damage increase (scaling down at high accuracies) and an unconditional 5% resistance (and resistances have increasing returns with a much smoother curve than deflection). Accounting for uncanny luck being a generic talent i think that it is not too far apart from balance to justify a bump up. flat +2/health is basicaly like getting bonus CON, since health bonus from CON is additive. i always interpreted the talent as basically +2-5 CON depending on your class (or effectively letting you trade a future ability point for dumping more con at character creation). i don't see a point getting it for a barbarian, but for a glass cannon type or a blood mage (where +40 health literally means more free spell casts without the need for heals) i don't see why it's bad. (i reason that con is generally bad because in the long run the real constraint on your survival is your heal rate, but for squishy enough characters infinite heal rate won't matter if a bad burst of attacks crit-overpens you down to knockout from full health).

it's not just about spamming slickens at bosses you know. blood mages can also repeatedly cast your favorite evocation spell over and over again (along with other excluded spells). sure they won't be able to one-hit-end-combat in late game like an empowered [insert high-end damage spell] can, but I would argue most of the game is not about ending combat with one super-empowered AL8/9 spell.

best case scenario it's all hands on deck because they're trying to wrap up turn-based mode and do bugfixes so they're so busy fixing and tweaking things they can't log in and respond to forum posts.

Maybe it's cultural difference or whatnot, but I'm truly not trying to act like I'm smarter than anyone and if I seem condescending, sorry I'm not trying to be condescending. I'm putting forth my best arguments, and I expect others to do the same as well. In the process I learn from what other people have to say, and I hope that maybe others can learn from what i have to say as well. "Ideas are the sparks of two swords clashing" or whatnot. I don't pretend to have a "truly objective" perspective, and everything I write should be seen from the perspective that I've laid out what I thought was pretty clearly throughout the course of this polish thread (which is generally skeptical of anything outside pure bugfix mods--I'm mostly interested in better realizing the vanilla vision of what the game designers intended by focusing on developer/designer intent, rather than coming up with a bunch of "house rules"... I was that kind of DM). Even minor cosmetic changes are not very justifiable to me personally, because they don't serve to me as a good case of distilling what that original design intention was, especially if it involves creep. (I've mentioned in other threads--not that I expect people to follow my posting history--that extended play experiences in games like e.g. Diablo 2/3 have really scarred me about out-of-control power levels [even if it occurs incrementally over many patches], enough to make me fairly absolutist about it.) So for me to get on board with increases in power level of anything I feel like it really has to be justified. A minor bump up to 8% hit-to-crit does not strike as a particularly justified increase. edit - anyway, philosophizing aside, like I said, I think there's a *low* bar, not that there's *no* bar for an unconditional damage increase. i also really want to re-emphasize the distinction between generic and class-specific abilities and how comparing them as a justification is not really as meaningful as one would think (relatedly it is my personal pet peeve when in any RPG people complain about a class not doing X as well as another class... well they shouldn't do X as well as the other class, it's not their role!). to use the paladin comparison example, if there was a generic talent that gave you +1 AR, hopefully we could all agree that that would be potentially extremely good---but it's much worse than AL2 paladin aura that gives everyone +1 AR (not to mention potential health regen)! Or similarly a generic passive that gave you +5 accuracy. I'm pretty sure that would be an auto-pick for every single character I roll... but the AL2 zealous focus is just way better as well! so just because a paladin can do something better to more people at lower PLs is not a meaningful basis of comparison, because, well, this is what paladins are supposed to do better than anyone else. edit 2 - this post was too rambly so i trimmed it down quite a bit.

Because that would be unbalanced compared to existing talents and is not even comparable. You've basically given everyone blanket copy of Dirty Fighting, and you've created an unconditional version of Spell Resistance. Also any individual increasing resistance bonus is increasing returns, so 10% resistance is much better than simply 2x 5% resistance. It's not a great argument you made here. Taken to an absurd level: one talent that increases damage by 50% and one talent that increase resistance by 50%, but each talent costs 5 ability points. I would still happily save up 5 ability points to take one or the other. Even if the "average" cost would be comparable to uncanny luck, you have to pay more attention than just to the average but also to the actual nature of the distribution: 50% is just extremely good unconditional damage bonus, unmatched anywhere else. This isn't exactly statistics 101, but it is simple statistics, maybe statistics 102. (There's also the joke about the statistician who drowned while trying to cross a river that was only on average 3 feet deep.)

That's not quite the argument that I'm making, though it is roughly similar, if a bit "spiky". By the nature of the game, you are weighted towards passives the further along you go, simply because of action economy and resource constraints. If you pick every active ability or spell, congrats, you wasted like half your ability points on stuff you will almost never use. Because of this, and because (relatively unconditional) damage boosts are generally rare, there's not actually a very high bar for a damage booster to be "relevant," which is why I don't really see the need to boost e.g. improved critical either. And again, the fact that this is a generic talent is relevant. A boost in Uncanny Luck essentially represents a global power creep and it ever-so-slightly crowds out class or subclass specific characteristics. One ability not much, but from a systematic perspective, it seems like you'd have to have an extremely good reason to permit any given creep, because then it makes it easier to justify the next creep, and then the next, until it's really optimal to mostly just be taking generic talents. Uncanny Luck is not an auto-pick, but at least in my calculation it's also not a trap pick, it's more of an accent or niche pick. As a general talent, I think that's OK. And I think you're being a little bit disingenuous with your arguments. Tough, for example, will literally accomplish nothing for dps if you don't need the extra health (though I have taken Tough for offense in streetfighter or other low health builds). Fast Runner may or may not provide a significant dps boost for you, but it depends on the general mobility of the character. And I mean, yes I would and have happily taken Fast Runner in various builds. And again, Uncanny Luck is both a defensive and offensive pick (stronger defensive) which gives it a special significance. I would consider Spell Resistance more of a niche pick than Uncanny Luck even from a defensive angle, simply because of how heavily the game favors offense.

that's weird. it's not on a party member you rotated out or something? you should probably post this in the bug forum along with a save and output_log.

man, just constantly assuming bad faith.... and anyway you can literally change you race and gender on top of your character and starting at level 1. it's more exceptional that you get the gift from the machine/sacrifice buff in the first place rather than that you're missing everything else.

"casters are gods" as both a poe1 plus and minus: so funny and yet so true. edit: also, coors light? what the heck is wrong you.

blood mage and wizards are effectively different playstyles. blood mage is amazing because you can spam the same set of spells way past what any other mage could do. this can be way more powerful than empower. but if you're just going to play a blood mage like any other wizard except with a much slower and random self-empower mechanism, you're probably going to be underwhelmed. also +100. nature godlike is awesome, way worth losing the helm. wizards, druids, monks, barbs, priests all have super trivial ways to trigger the +1 PL it's not even conditional.

my explanation only requires reading comprehension of the what the guy is actually saying. the only clunkiness is the sort of cRPG trope that no game seems to be immune to of "let's do the option of what i was doing anyway, or let's completely change our minds based on a couple sentences from this random NPC who we don't know at all." that's not a bug so much as just forced quest design. people have dissected VO interpretation of specific lines over in other threads, and this doesn't even rise to that level of pedantry tbh.

Yeah, hidden among nonbugs...sounds like a bad idea, especially when you already established that it was expected for them to talk about the fleetmaster when that obviously never happened. It's a bug. You can stop witch-hunting now. it's not a bug. me, earlier: in case you're wondering, people get annoyed at you because you clearly seem to have an extremely bad faith approach to the game. i think your hit rate on actual bugs is less than stellar (though to your credit you do find some interesting bugs or non-obvious interactions) and everything else just seems to be mini-rants on soapboxes.

So I am not imagining that none of the suppressing abilities are working right now? When did this bug enter the game? I don't remember it ever being there. probably with like 4.1.2 or 4.1.1 (they kind of came close together) i've been playing pretty continuously since release and it definitely broke down after one of the post-4.0 patches. it's horrible to say the least. it's not just limited to liberating exhortation and suppress affliction. all sorts of affliction and debuff interactions are just plain busted. as far as I can tell you can still counter afflictions if the debuff is solely the affliction (no extras, no other afflictions on the same debuff), but if there are other effects, even visually dispelling the affliction the effects of the affliction just get carried by the rest of the debuff. and suppress affliction and liberating exhoration--as you've seen--basically don't work at all on hostile effects. not to mention weirdness with affliction resistance/immunity/weakness.

Please accept my deepest condolences. i mean seriously though at high levels what are you going to use those points on? another ability you won't use due to action economy or resource constraints? e.g. for a rogue i wouldn't pick it over dirty fighting, but i'd definitely use it with dirty fighting.

how do you know that "nobody" picks it? only obsidian knows that for sure with their telemetry. also, trivial counterexample - i have and do continue to take uncanny luck in varying builds.

kind of. rogue has a specific combat role. dirty fighting leans into that combat role. uncanny luck is a generic talent. comparing its baseline strength to a talent that is available only to a dps-y glass cannon-y class doesn't seem like an adequate point of comparison.

I had this same thought. I started a game with telemetry on, and while I did experience more stuttering than what I would consider normal, it wasn't game breaking like what I had experienced before. I can confirm that the old broken saves are still broken (on my PC) even though new games are entirely fixed, so it seems whatever is causing the problem is embedded in the old saves prior to the fix. A user on reddit noted that my fixed savegame on their PC ran flawlessly despite the rest of their saves or new games still being broken. They cleared everything related to POE2 on his PC and apparently the game is running better for them. I would be interested in seeing more cases of whether purging all local files related to POE2 and clearing the steam cloud backups (or at least preventing steam from redownloading said backups by running the game directly from the directory with steam closed) and starting a new game would yield the same results as using my save folder. you know what, i've been sitting on the bug forums occasionally trying to chime in and troubleshoot on posts where people have stutter problems, and even when our systems are near-identical i don't have the same kind of stutter problems they do. and this post brings to mind that i don't have steam cloud sync enabled. (i use dropbox+symlinks to sync saves so that I can play across platforms). i wonder if something about steam cloud sync is messing with save data and/or having an expensive extra process in the engine. this seems like a promising lead/root cause here.

if it stacked additively it would have really strong increasing returns though. i think comparison to dirty fighting is a bit unfair though, because dirty fighting is a rogue-specific talent, whereas everyone can get uncanny luck, i think from a mechanics perspective that has to dilute uncanny luck.

I don't think it's really been mentioned that uncanny luck is more than just a 5% hit to crit, it's a 5% resist as well (not even a hit->graze or graze->hit, just an absolute 5% generic resist). I think any considerations of its net effect on damage has to taken into account that it has a strong defensive angle (versus say weapon specialization).

it could be related. i've seen this happen, and it's definitely new behavior from 4.1.2 or 4.1.1

As stated, I did this encounter multiple times, besides the 10% corrode lash (which happened every time) what other corrode damage are you referring to? Why would lash have anything to do with it? if the enemy has 180 health and you hit them for 179 + 18 damage, the corrode lash is what kills them. if in another attempt, you hit them for 181 + 18 damage, the killing bolt is what kills them. the lash is considered a separate attack in some respects (separate PEN check, separate damage modifiers), even though it "rides along" with a base attack. so what i'm suggesting is that maybe you have to kill with the killing bolt itself, and not any add-on lash. edit - easiest way to verify would be if there was a console command that let you dump enemy health information Interesting... but then the lash counts as an empowered ability? The gun still tallied the kill, remember. yeah, my hypothesis is that killing bolt + lash basically functions like a full attack when dual-wielding. empowered full attack: you hit with your main hand (killing bolt), and then your off hand (corrode lash), the corrode lash kills it. the empowered full attack counts for blightheart's purposes, but when separated out like this it becomes much clearer that the killing bolt itself isn't doing the slaying for its own purposes - it checks with the "main hand" attack only and doesn't care what comes after. this is just a hypothesis based on how i've seen lashes function in combat and really would need some testing (ideally with an enemy with known health) to verify. edit - i'm not saying they are completely distinct attacks, but they are distinct enough. i suspect killing bolt is an "atomic" unit that is a package says "do X damage. did I kill it? spawn a spectre" and then adding a lash to that adds an extra sentence that does "do .1x corrode damage". from blightheart's perspective, it's all one empowered package, but from killing bolt's perspective, that corrode damage comes after the killed-by-killing-bolt check. or something like that. edit 2 - another way to verify (without needing to know enemy healthy) would be just to see if you still get random behavior without blightheart. e.g. do a lot of runs without blightheart and killing with ninagauth's. if you never get a flaky kill this way, then it seems much more likely it's the corrode lash that's doing it. edit 3 - this is not to rule out the possibility that this shouldn't be the way killing bolt works. essence interrupter is fairly fool proof, and i suspect it's because it applies a debuff first, and that debuff is further triggered on death. if killing bolt creates a debuff that would on death trigger a spectre spawning, that would be immune to this hypothesized effect. but then again essence interrupter has problems with messing up loot tables, so maybe it's for the best it's not implemented this way...

could you do this drag and drop in combat? because that would affect game balance. if you could use any arbitrary consumable from your inventory, that is much more powerful than only being allowed to use 4-6 consumables. quickslots are a constraint. In BG/BG2, quickslots were a convenience (moreso in traditional BG where opening the inventory didn't pause the game), since the only reason you would need to put an item in a quickslot was if it was not a self-buff (e.g. targeted or a summoning item). Yea but BG didn't have items that lasted for that long. It also didn't have scripted interactions that could be affected by potions or drugs. I think PoE has far too many consumables and most of them stack now in PoEII, makes my character end game with 30 in every stat kinda lame. this leads to a major gripe of mine. deadfire has all these consumables that increase your skills, but you can't actually use these items in world-map or scripted encounters (unless you access them directly from a local map). they are pretty much pointless even if you would have had the metagame knowledge to know when to use them. (also, most local map skill checks are either so low that you don't need to bother, so inconsequential that you don't need to bother [just a bit of extra flavor text in dialogue], or are so high that you should have already been investing them dedicatedly. fallout 1/2/new vegas with their numerous and varied hard checks this is not) i'm constantly limited by what consumables to bring in. it's having maximum freedom. never have to make decisions. if unfettered by combat usage, it's powerful. oh? a xaurip skirmisher coming my way? i didn't need to put antidote in my quickslot, i can just it straight from stash. pull up some potions of might resistance if needed, or intellect resistance against fampyrs. tank being hit too hard, drink potion of spirt shield. ooop, i blew through my stack of 5 potions of minor healing? no problem, i still have lots more in my stash. quickslots force you to make decision pre-combat and punish you for making the wrong decisions. outside of combat, being limited to one drug and a handful of other potions (antidotes, luminous adra) basically means drag and drop doesn't serve as much utility as in poe1.

Every other island isn't structured like this, things are either visibly behind another encounter and blocked off by visible mountains or other environment or not blocked off at all. This island was wide open. I'll continue griping. it's literally wael's island. edit - i mean, didn't you try the shadowed vale encounter? you could result in a fake crewmember death or a real crewmember death (i forget which one). the encounter at the center is literally a maze.

As stated, I did this encounter multiple times, besides the 10% corrode lash (which happened every time) what other corrode damage are you referring to? Why would lash have anything to do with it? if the enemy has 180 health and you hit them for 179 + 18 damage, the corrode lash is what kills them. if in another attempt, you hit them for 181 + 18 damage, the killing bolt is what kills them. the lash is considered a separate attack in some respects (separate PEN check, separate damage modifiers), even though it "rides along" with a base attack. so what i'm suggesting is that maybe you have to kill with the killing bolt itself, and not any add-on lash. edit - easiest way to verify would be if there was a console command that let you dump enemy health information

Glad you were able to beat it but I think an important tip you missed out on was resting in Konstanten's room for +30% spell reflect, along with potions. I mention this because you talk about the difficulty with Obelisk of Wrath but with konstanten's room and those reflect potions, Obelisk of Wrath will literally kill itself in just a few vollies. Obelisk of mystery also takes care of itself though not as fast. Obelisk of force won't take care of itself, unfortunately, it can't PEN it's own AR with the missiles. If you have a persistent source of resolve resistance (for the terrify) the fight is probably the easiest megaboss fight, and even easier than some SSS or FS boss fights.