thelee

where was this mentioned? Obsidian Entertainment's Official Discord. I could upload a screenshot if I really must... But I'm a trustworthy fellow. You can just just take my word for it, right? boy in this day and age i just have to keep creating accounts on so many sites just to keep up with a game i like. i thought it was bad enough i had to sign up for twitch just to get updates via developer streams. *sigh* i'm getting old.

where was this mentioned?

Pretty much everything works better in Deadfire, in my view, although early on there were a few strange moments before coming to term with the changes. Judging by the amount of bugs Ive been finding in my first playthrough, i'd disagree. Of the latest patch of PoE1 I can still literally soft-lock the game if I use consumables ever-so-slightly incorrectly or weirdly. (And it's random). Traps were so bugged, I wrote an entire section in my PoE1 gamefaqs guide imploring people to try to lobby Obsidian to get it fixed. Nothing in Deadfire compares to that. PoE1 also gets bloated and takes forever to save/load the further you get into the game. Deadfire is rock solid there. I pruned up my PoE1 bug-report dropbox folder (hitting dropbox free storage caps) but the size of that folder dwarfed my Deadfire bug-report folder. PoE1 isn't all that stable or intuitive a game (relatively speaking). You're just used to its particular idiosyncracies. Deadfire is way more stable (though with the TB-related patches it has notably regressed a bit). Oh yeah - and interrupt/concentration in PoE1 was pure murk and needed to be fixed mechanically.

really? i just did the engwithan digsite last night with a new party and was able to damage them with my morningstar (crush and pierce). if it was buggy it wouldn't work.

+2 PEN actually, but that aspect has no effect for summoning blight spells.

yeah, I think I have to modify my original post about PoE1 vs Deadfire to more generally say that I think the companions were handled better (I think the affinity system ultimately weakened how much they could do with companion narratives in Deadfire) and not just call out specific PoE1 companions like GM or Hiravias. I would actually disagree re: Xoti and Eder. I found Xoti basically a flat, uninteresting character. Her personal quest she basically has no ounce of personal agency (I mean, granted, this is an RPG so you call the shots regardless) - things are just happening to her all the time. And when she does meet Eothas in person, it basically doesn't even register to her at all what Eothas is saying. Meanwhile, with Eder, you get to see his character reflected in circumstances and those circumstances reflected back onto Eder, even if whatever growth or arc in Deadfire is kind of minimal compared to PoE1. Some nice touches - if you save Bearn Eder has the line of like "hey kid, Eothas owes you an explanation, not vice versa" and while wandering the map Eder can have chatter like "i've been chasing eothas my whole life and he doesn't even know who I am", and then when you meet Eothas, Eothas absolutely does know Eder by name (and calls him out as a exemplar for the kith), and you (and Eder contributes with his own chatter) are able demand an explanation from Eothas. Really helps flesh out Eder as a real character in the world, and even if you get to call all the shots as the player, he seems much more of an active participant in his personal quest as well. edit - one of my favorite narrative tools I've learned (from a Red Letter Media review of Phantom Menace) is to try to describe a character without referencing their appearance, actions in the story, or their job - basically explain the character to someone who has never even gotten near an RPG or Pillars before - and that basically gives you an idea of how well you've developed the character (the review puts this to comical effect by asking people who have seen Star Wars to do this about Han Solo (lots of answers) and then like Queen Amidala (stumped silences)). I think this might be a better test than "does a character change or have an arc" since this is a game where you call the shots and not a novel. I think using this rule, I could tell you all about the different characters in PoE1, but would really struggle with some companions in Deadfire (Maia - she's... a stoic soldier? [buzzer rings, reference to job]); I think I can only comfortably do this test with Tekehu and Eder (Aloth and Pallegina I feel like I have to lean on PoE1 for their characters). Ironically I think I could do way better with some of the sidekicks (Fassina, Vatnir) than with even Maia.

in particular spells are frequently balanced by the fact that you are limited to a few tier X casts per encounter. this is an artifact of the conscious decision of trying to make spells of any tier useful throughout the game. (go try a blood mage) from a game design perspective, freedom of choice is not always better. for example, some people like classless designs, some people don't (count me in the latter). "freedom" of any kind is its own game design constraint, even if it seems invisible to you. form a real life perspective, freedom of choice is also not always better, depending on what you define as "better". A good, quick primer on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/149151423X (the canonical example is that a store selling one kind of jam will have more jam sales than a store that sells many many types of jams. poorly handled, choice induces anxiety... call it FOMO or whatnot. it's also probably why trader joe's and costco have such high throughput on sales compared to similar stores (both heavily stock items of one brand, frequently their own))

depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. possible spoilers (all these assume you actually do their quests): 1. Grieving Mother, yes, significantly. 2. Durance, hell yes, significantly. probably no coincidence that both GM and Durance have companion quests that largely run through conversation with them. they're basically short stories. 3. Maneha, yes, but in a "cheat" sense (i.e. basically amnesia) 4. Devil of Caroc, yes 5. Zahua - honestly I didn't even know he had a quest (I thought he was basically a "sidekick") until Deadfire came out and I was building a custom history to import and saw decisions to make about Zahua's fate. whoops. shows how you could play for hundreds of hours and still miss something obvious. 6. Hiravias - yes 7. Kana Rua - eh, not really. this is more of an "ending slides" kind of character arc which is a cheat. 8. Eder - I would actually consider him also a "not really" and more an "ending slides" change. Though in this case I thought the lack of resolution and change in his quest to be the point of his narrative. 9. Sagani - yes, potentially a lot depending on how you resolve her quest 10. Aloth - yes (but also heavily weighted towards ending slides). edit - Yoshimo? Really? He dies! edit 2 - are you talking about "meaningful" from a gameplay perspective (both Viconia and Sarevok can change alignment, so can Anomen (and iirc Anomen can also lose or gain stats)? Then no, unless you count importing effects into Deadfire. Personally I think real gameplay impact from character arcs to be suboptimal, because then that encourages metagaming personal quests for particular outcomes. which doesn't seem great

People don't necessarily change, but characters do. I think it's pretty crucial to see a way in which a character is affected by the decisions we've made and the things they've done through their own personal quests and they way they've interacted with the story and game in general. This is a fundamental aspect in storytelling and character design, whether or not it alligns with psychology studies on real human beings. yeah, like lesson #1 about storytelling is having a character arc. you can try to make a point in a story by having a character with no arc, but that pretty much has to be the point, otherwise it's a story with no meaningful impact or progression. we as real people may change far less than we might hope, but ahem this is why people also like to participate in storytelling and mythmaking.

the invocation adjusts dynamically after it's been used? does that mean the # of jumps can actually be less than what you're promised, or is that locked-in upon invocation?

I think the amount at least was a very conscious decision, given how a dungeon crawl has pretty much become a cliche of the genre. I for one definitely enjoyed the fact that there was no biggie of a dungeon in the game (unless the last DLC contains one -- I haven't visited that area yet). As for the quality, I'm not too sure. I very much enjoyed the Undercity, because some of the encounters there were nicely planned. There's one where you initially come across a set of enemies and then, some time later, additional enemies surface (literally) and attack you. I thought that was a brilliant move and required some off-the-cuff readjustment of my strategy. Od Nua was a lovely idea in PoE, and some of it was really good, but quite frankly there were a couple of levels where you noticed the developers had run out of ideas and just had to come up with something (the one with the spiky floor room, the one with the confusion-inducing critters, at least). Forgotten Sanctum is basically one dungeon crawl. I loved it. It reminds me of the Severed Hand-type dungeon of Icewind Dales 1/2... not quite as big, but full of encounters, traps, but also occasional non-hostile NPCs to interact with. (Also I loved actually being able to sneak around to fulfill a quest objective - sneaking is still woefully undersupported in this game.) Reflecting again, objectively Deadfire didn't have that much less than PoE1 in terms of dungeoneering as PoE1. Poko Kohara, Oathbreaker's Sanctum, Old City were all decent multi-level dungeons; there was also Ashen Maw (though I'm inclined to exclude "dungeons" where you can make/keep everyone friendly). I think my perception is skewed by many of the island encounters where it's just basically one room with a couple encounters. In total I'm sure it's a roughly similar amount of content in total, but you don't really get a chance to really get *into* the dungeoneering experience if you're already out within 30 minutes (like with the many Fampyr/vessel crypt areas).

Are you a wizard?

With that comp, you'll cover most of the bases. I'm a bit concerned about PEN since you're playing on PoTD: you'll probably want to spec Tekehu as a Druid/Chanter for the Hel Hyraf's Invocation (-2 AR) and give Xoti Champion's Boon (+5 MIG, +2 PEN). Later on, when money and resources aren't a big deal, you can also eat Hot Razor Skewers or Crusted Swordfish for PEN bonuses to physical attacks and spells, respectively. On that note, you might get better mileage as an Assassin/Evoker for the +2 PL bonus to Evocation spells. Blood Mages generally have low MIG (for less sacrifice damage) and focus on CC and Afflictions. an assassin/blood mage can learn expose vulnerabilities for -2 AR or any perception affliction for -1 AR. Not quite as good as Hel-Hyraf's upgrade (The Shield Breaks basically has no expiration in any decent fight), but does mean that they don't *need* it enough to roll a theurge. (also a blood mage can keep spamming expose vulnerabilities until it connects) remember that a blood mage with blood sacrifice will almost constnatly have a +1 PL bonus, which is half way to a subclass bonus, except you also have no excluded schools or recovery time penalties. (no echo chance, but i'll take spell regen at-will over random evocation echo)

This sounds like a driver crash. Do you get any other wattman notes? Any custom settings? I have an undervolted/overclocked Vega 64 and on any other game it's fine (my go to examples are maxed out HDR assassin's creed odyssey or 4k high settings shadow of the tomb raider), but until I really amped up the fans *only* in Deadfire would I get "safe temps exceeded" errors in wattman, so "usually does not run into problems" doesn't appear to be a good enough criteria because Deadfire's engine is unusually heavy-hitting.

oh yeah i forgot about ability-level specific bonuses. it would help, but it would still be a nerf without rebalancing, as you mention. also: FoD scales??? this is not counting the +PL% multiplicative damage bonus that martial abilities get to the base weapon damage roll?

Seriously - what boss fights? When Tyranny came along and actually had technical aspects boss fights (e.g. the enemy is signaling that they're about to use some big ability, run away!) it blew my mind since I had gotten so used to the IWD-style combat of PoE1 where "big encounters" are just normal encounters with more stats. Maybe the dragons, but once you've fought one dragon, you've fought them all essentially. Even Thaos the only thing "special" about him is the ability to spam cleansing flame and crowns for the faithful, and if you've fought broodmothers that isn't that special anyway. if anything i wish there were more big fights in Deadfire like in Tyranny or like the small sample we got in the BB with engwithan saints and titan (having to deal with grabs, heavy kicks [titan] or the positional aspects of fighting saints (their frost aoe, seals of pain)); honestly was a bit disappointed that the fights/dungeon of Poko Kohara was the exception, not the norm.

re: disengagement attacks and riposte (btw Taudis, totally didn't know that Gipon Prudensco implements disengagement immunity as 100% miss) - I did find it useful for one of my streetfighter builds to have a melee weapon and a blunderbuss, so in a pinch I could run away just as the enemy wound up an attack, triggering an (out of range) attack which had a small chance of riposte firing my blunderbuss and giving me a free refresh on powder burns. Not generally useful, but was useful for big single-enemy fights where this was easily micromanaged and gave me higher dps than having to constantly stand out of range to reload my blunderbuss every ~15 seconds (instead I would basically get one reload for "free" every four cycles). re: chant scaling - i personally don't even care if duration scales (just let the linger mechanic override it), i just want one less odd scaling exception in the game. you would have to rebalance some chants because right now you get +1 acc per character level, and this would drop down to +9 for a single class chanter+prestige or +6 for a multiclass chanter for an AL1 and then down from there (not to mention losing the damage/healing boost of +5% every odd character level).

unfortunately this got nerfed a bit - sparkcrackers used to trigger two times (for two attack rolls to try to connect) but now (as of like 4.1) only trigger once. still really fun (and probably the most powerful application of sparkcrackers) Ah, that's too bad - is the change a feature or a bug? Hard to tell sometimes with 4.1, I haven't played since AoE weapon afflictions stopped working. very hard to tell. for what it's worth, rokowa's fingers (gloves that provide 2x sparkcrackers effect/day and some stats) still makes multiple checks for each sparkcrackers attempt. it makes me think that it was a deliberate nerfing or bugfixing of the sparkcrackers effect and they forgot about the copy-pasted effect on rokowa's fingers.

afflictions are not properly being dispelled anymore, i don't know about you, but for my play style on potd+challenges+upscaling, this is pretty bad.

yeah, Forgotten Sanctum added a couple of these forced-rest time skips, which is really annoying for a no-rest run or if you have certain challenges enabled. considering that there's a mechanism to force time skips without also forcing a rest (notably all burial sites and stuff used to be forced rests but now are just forced time skips), and it just appears to be designers keep using the wrong one, it makes me go:

so do you think in the end you will have more hours in POE2 then. I too have around 750-1000 hours in POE1 and have not finished POE2 yet. POE2 has not caught me like POE1 although i do enjoy the POE2 updates for the most part. I dont have any major issues with POE2 except maybe the main story. I have my doubt i will replay the game if i finish but i hope once i get more into the game that will change. Going into POE2 i was planning on doing 3 playthroughs. maybe, maybe not. My PoE1 play time was heavily inflated by repeat solo attempts (one to get the Triple Crown Solo achievement, and the other to get Frozen Crown Solo/The Ultimate) - I have a youtube video somewhere where I recorded most of my fight against Llengrath (mostly as a personal souvenier to myself that I actually managed to not die in that fight in case I didn't actually make it to the end after that or the game bugged out and didn't give me the achievement at the end) and it's like a 1 hour video, and that was just one fight. Some of the trash fights were so grindy, probably literally like 30 minutes each just grinding down those damn sirens in White March part 1. I found doing the Ultimate a little too scarring that I'm not so sure I'll attempt it in Deadfire. So in terms of "true engagement" with the game, PoE1 and Deadfire are probably closer to parity for me.

I've still clocked way more hours on PoE1 than Deadfire (1000+ vs ~700) though for me it's no question: Deadfire all the way. Critiques I have about Deadfire are mere quibbles compared to how much of a step up I think Deadfire is over PoE1 in almost every way: music, systems design, environmental design, story, narrative. My main grievance is that I loved Hiravias as a companion and no one in Deadfire fills in his shoes well enough. Also Grieving Mother was extremely well-written and while she wasn't exactly someone I was happy to take all the time in the way Hiravias was, I don't think there is a Deadfire companion that gets the kind of in-depth narrative that GM did. (Though at the same time, I found it a bit annoying on successive play throughs the companion quests that were basically "choose your own adventure" text reads, e.g. Durance especially; it became less about immersing yourself in the narrative than remembering how to trigger the next step and mashing through all the dialogue options.)

Perception has nothing to do with penetration though... does it? I'm not sure this is what wingedchocolatecake meant, but perception does matter because on a crit you get a 1.5x multiplier on your total PEN, and perception improves accuracy and thus chance to crit in some cases. It's because of this that on PotD especially perception is very slightly better than might in terms of net damage for much of the game, because in cases where you are underpenetrating, getting a crit can be a huge multiplier on your damage (going from 25% no pen hit to a full pen crit can be more than a 4x damage increase). However on lower difficulties with sufficient other accuracy bonuses, the impact of this 1.5x PEN multiplier gets muted and might becomes better again. Still, I wouldn't go out of my way to get perception just as a PEN booster, but in terms of damage on PotD it does mean I would (and do) shoot for perception first.

Eh? So I don't have to search through the stash. I only did that to test a theory with whatever this might be but I was wrong anyway and still have no idea what function this serves. The portrait glows when you drag items over indicating this was supposed to do something but I don't imagine deleting your items was supposed to be the outcome. lolololol wow what a bug find. is it only pets? does it require a full inventory for this to happen? because i imagine what should be happening: drag-and-drop -> move item from existing slot to the character's inventory -> character's inventory is full -> move to stash something along the way is getting broken. maybe when trying to move an item from the stash and then back to the stash via drag-and-drop it moves the item to the new location and then deletes the old reference... except because it's in the same place again it just ends up deleting the item altogether. but if it happens with only pets, or happens even when your inventory isn't full, then i don't know.

has this already been reported as a bug? re: the original topic, finishing blow is less useful than you think (at least in my experience having rolled an assassin/priest of skaen a long time ago) because it competes at that level with shining beacon and divine terror, both of which i think are good candidates for assassinate. pillar of holy fire is obviously a good pickup late game and synergizes well with any +fire advantage gear you might have. i forget if searing seal works correctly with assassinate, but for AL5 that's pretty much reserved for two "free" uses of shadowing beyond. Oh so spell casting via stealth gets assassinate? That's very cool and changes the way I'm thinking about this build. not only does spell casting get assassinate bonus, i would say that's basically how you have to play an assassin to get good mileage out of it. a few high-damage weapon hits is not really that great imo - even a single-class assassin would need to use pernicious cloud or vanishing strike or scrolls or even just poisons in order to try to get more than a few extra damaging weapon hits from it.