thelee

that's a bloody good quote, had to immediately go look it up. Now i have a reading list, thanks!

you should repost this in either the main bug report forum or the turn-based feedback forum, since i don't think this forum is actively monitored unless there is an actual patch on the beta branch being evaluated.

sometimes i find it extremely hard to avoid feeding the trolls. sigh, like moth to a flame...

well, i'm glad you find something that works for you, but I think if you stick with the "cipher suck" attitude you're going to get a lot of push back here also i think Eurhetemec was making that comment of bleakwalker/wizard because I don't think there's many people who would argue that pal/wizard is a particularly notably powerful build but a lot of the fun of the game imo is discovering what works and what doesn't, especially for your own play style. best of luck/fun in your journeys

mate, u straight up failed to comprehend that no one asked u to correct their copy. u might want to work on ur own communication skills before going in studs up on someone else. who cares. a clown wearing a bowtie is still a clown. on that note, uve spelt ur username wrong. its supposed to be 'circus'. Why do people always ask this silly question, "who cares?". Obviously, I care, otherwise I wouldn't have posted what I did. I place a great deal of importance on proper use of the language. If you sent me a cover letter for a job with poor spelling and grammar, I'd toss both the cover letter and the resume straight in the trash basket. And I stand by the comment that proper spelling and grammar are important if you want your opinions to be taken seriously. And lastly, no my username isn't spelled incorrectly. "crucis" a name used in astronomy for some star clusters and star names. Furthermore, it was a name I used in some sci-fi related material, as well as used by friends of mine who used the name in a fictional race in a sci-fi series about 15-20 years ago, and still shows up once in a while when another book in the series is written. It's a name that has some personal history with me, and I've used it (or some derivation thereof) on forums for the past 20 or so years. This said by someone who in these small two paragraphs: - inappropriately did ["who cares?".] when it should have been ["who cares?"] (no full stop after), and many style guides would have probably suggested a colon preceding that quote (e.g. "Why do people always ask this silly question: "who cares?") - random extra spaces - missed commas everywhere, and excessive commas elsewhere - missed capitalizations - missed hyphenizations ("sci-fi-related" not "sci-fi related") - starts sentences with conjunctions - fails to properly use accented e's in "résumé" Get over yourself. forums where people sh*tpost about games they like or dislike are not job applications (and frankly even that hypothetical is moot given that I work in an industry where recruiters and HR folk would happily look over typos and grammar errors in a job application if you can code worth a damn, so your "high standard" would likely get you axed pretty quickly).

yeah, by having less to them, sidekicks are easier to be in to i think (though they get more reactivity in DLCs). companions are probably a matter of taste. as someone who grew up in the american south deep in the bible belt, i found eder and xoti to be really interesting characters (especially the very different ways their characters develop w.r.t. their faiths) anyway it's all moot because Grieving Mother from PoE1 is the best pillars character.

But this is highly subjective and changes a lot from player to player. For you the randomness makes it less boring, for others it's just frustrating. I think some randomness OK, it just depends on the scope and the context. In BG/BG2, most fights were over pretty fast, so if a wizard got off a lucky Hold Person on someone important, or I failed a Touch of Death save it's not expensive to reload. By contrast, PotD fights can be longish (many minutes) and the worst thing to happen in such a context is to have Serafen suddenly pull an aoe blast out of nowhere that causes you to wipe. Wild Mage was a thing in BG2 (and in BGEE) and it was nowhere near as annoying as Serafen's Wild Mind even though I'd hazard the distribution of positive to negative outcomes was way worse for the Wild Mage than for Wild Mind (though there was also a lot more upside potential... so again, it was swingier). similarly this is why graze mechanic works so well in poe/deadfire (and why it sucked when grazes were briefly not a thing in backer beta), because given the general intensity and length of fights in poe/deadfire world, without grazes outcomes just became a little swingy given how long and tough fights were. obsidian said that grazes made CC too good or too consistent, and in my mind that was the whole point - while you could still stack defenses and get lucky about dodging a hit or despite lots of buffs get unlucky and miss a hit, grazes really smoothed that out so it put more onus on straight up skill and strategy than blindly getting a string of lucky rolls.

Can I hit the sigil while it still has the globe of invulnerability up? Because I wanna shut it down before it even opens because once it's open it cleanses me immediately, Nope. Only real thing to do is to limit what buffs you rely on until you can DPS down the cleansing sigil.

nice. i played a ranger a long time ago, but i must've missed out on these encounters or skimmed too much. the little touches of class-specific (and sometimes sub-class specific) reactivity are real nice, even if they don't add too much to the game.

yeah, sorry. it was a nerf a few patches ago because the designers didn't like the idea of players leaning too hard on consumables or repeat-use items, so they got rest-limited and game-limited as well.

i know it's not a great solution, but in TB-mode you can also use the classic "hot-seat" style of multiplayer where you just hand the mouse to the next player. obv wouldn't be great if you're not physically in the same location, but I remember playing various worms games in college like this (maybe I'm dating myself now).

they said they are collecting feedback until end of february so i wouldn't expect any major patch related to TB until march. there may be a hotfix patch before then, though, but I doubt it will do much than important bugs.

I only like to argue when I think someone is wrong. I especially argue when someone is wrong and is being unwarrantedly aggressive about it. Hey, you know what? You were probably better than me at PoE1 PotD, because in the early-mid days of PoE1 I found it a hair-pulling frustration at how quickly the spectres in the Caed Nua lobby could get out of control and annihilate me (not to mention all the friggin trash mobs in the Caed Nua yard that I just ended up stealthing past), and I needed that 6th party member. Not to mention the higher level that one could only get by doing all the Act 1 quests. I don't have a problem with saying that. Maybe you're not as good at PotD Deadfire as other people and instead of feeling entitled to be able to beat PotD under whatever constraints with whatever sense of "easiness" you feel you must have, maybe some sense of humility about your limitations is in order. Translation: I shot my mouth off with a smarmy 'false' and can't back it up so now I'll move the goal posts No, your comment was objectively false. See above. You are not required to hire more hirelings, much like you are not required to hire hirelings in PoE1. But you may need to, depending on skill level and your chosen PC. I could probably take most PCs with just Eder and Xoti, but sure it will take many reloads in some cases, and be stupidly easy in others (Debonaire, Blood Mage). It's almost as artificial a constraint and varied an outcome as trying to solo the game because that's not the target balance. But it is objectively false that Gorecci St is just straight up impossible for many PCs. Also "lowering the difficulty" is a real option as part of the game. I'm not going to load up a Civ game on Deity and complain that the only way I can beat the game is by pursuing some specific strategy with some specific civ and everything else I'm going to die horribly and therefore the difficulty sucks. I'm going to lower the difficulty. This quote has been pulled repeatedly, but it needs to be pulled again: 'At this point, if someone is having trouble on a higher-than-Story difficulty level and refuses to turn the difficulty down, the problem can be found in the nearest mirror.' hire a hireling or two. and/or pull+split the encounter. if you refuse, be a little more humble about your own skillset maybe and act less entitled about it. PotD was literally balanced in concert with someone on the Obsidian crew who loves to powergame/min-max, they tuned and tossed him encounters to check for appropriate struggle factor. Therefore, act like someone who likes to powergame/min-max starting with Port Maje, not after. "this is inconvenient for me to consider, so i'll ignore it"

This. A couple red-skull enemies might be an easier encounter than a swarm of no-skull enemies. An encounter might be designed to have one really hard enemy and some weaker complements, or like Katrenn which is just a few enemies which will require some tanking or prolonged picking-away-at to take care of. IIRC, on any difficulty the megabosses will be triple-skulled at level 20. That does not mean they are not level appropriate for a level 20 party (otherwise they would never be level appropriate).

for the record, you did have a bottleneck starting area in PoE. In Act 1 there are like 4 major quests (get the potion, find the lost supplies, deal with raedric, deal with eothas dungeon[1] and then a minor task to find the cook and resolve the grain dispute and then you're gated by needing to do caed nua. there's literally no way to do anything else until you do that, and you basically need to do those 4 quests/2 tasks to be strong enough to handle maerwald/caed nua. It's not literally an island like Port Maje, but it was for all intents and purposes an island. (in Deadfire the equivalent is resolving the huana/VTC dispute, getting the guy out of jail, dealing with gorecci st guy, kicking the guy out of the inn, and talking to the governor for free crit path experience) you could recruit eder, aloth, kana and durance (though in truth you needed a bit of metagame knowledge to get kana because it basically involved heading straight east past everything to get to caed nua, and then doubling back to do act 1), so if you wanted a full party you did need a hireling. before i got better at PoE1, it meant I always rolled a hireling to get to a full party of 6, more if i didn't want to bother with kana or durance (i found durance as a character to be weak because of his crappy dex). so in this respect it's no different from PotD Deadfire. (if you're going to be cheeky "your argument fails" you should at least be correct) translation: "please post a video of doing gorecci st without doing any of the things that would actually be expected of someone playing on PotD". if you're going to artificially limit yourself, then sure, you're probably going to find certain PCs to be unviable (though a druid will be fine, one of my early PotD runs was a lifegiver). my argument was that given that the encounter is balanced targeting a full party, any PC is casually viable on PotD. even eder isn't a given in terms of recruitability, depending on what events you had in PoE1 set up. I would not expect an arbitrary PC + Xoti-only party to have a fun time at Gorecci St. That's why there's an inn. It's literally part of the game. (also i'm not sure how using sparkcrackers to lure people around is "exploiting" game mechanics. it seems like by its description that's literally its intended purpose. "While they don't cause any damage, they can be used to distract patroling enemies.") [1] The last two of these quests i would potentially as far exceeding gorecci st and digsite as potd challenges; how about a gorecci st fight except an entire castle full of it nonstop? Are you saying that you can take any arbitrary PC through the "kills-everyone" path through raedric's hold and not have to resort to the stealth/dialogue option? (Since you complain about feeling the need to have to use stealth or dialogue through parts of Deadfire PotD). Because I'll happily admit that I can't, my just-for-fun-builds will have to sneak and chat their way through and then grind through an awful throneroom fight with careful pulling rather than charge in guns blazing. (Also I always sneak along the bottom of Caed Nua and avoid all the fights except for the will-o-wisps at the far east of the map.) I'm probably better at Deadfire than I am at PoE1 (though I did do the Ultimate in PoE1 and have no plans to do something similar in Deadfire, though that is more about patience than skill tbh), but I don't see what's problematic about just admitting that one might not be good enough to meet a challenge given whatever constraints (if any) you put on yourself, especially since PotD is not balanced for everyone to beat and is not the only difficulty of the game.

I think I see what you're getting at, and I think this back to a "in the eye of the beholder" situation. If I try to summarize what you're arguing, an analogous situation would be elemental damage types in PoE vs Deadfire. In PoE, the various Scion of Flame, Spirit of Decay talents increased any damage source of the given elemental type. In Deadfire, the damage source has to be explicitly keyworded with corrode, fire, etc. to get +1 PEN. You are arguing that "intuitive" here means the consistent approach of PoE1, where literally any damage source (even if it was a lash) would get boosted if it was the right element (this sounds like the Dark Souls interaciton with int). And you are similarly arguing that Might in PoE/Deadfire is more like the elemental talent approach of Deadfire, where even though it is very explicit and universal in how it works, it defeats the consistent approach because you will do fire damage but not be fire-keyworded and thus not benefit. (Personally I would consider either approach similarly intuitive; they are both pretty consistent but also still both require a "does it really work here?" testing every once and a while *cough* wall of flame *cough*) In that respect, the "eye of beholder" thing comes into play, because I think it matters what gaming context you are coming from. I was less bothered by Deadfire's new spell talent system perhaps because I'm really used to games like M:TG where paying attention like a lawyer to every single keyword is now second nature to me, but I can see how coming from most other RPGs where you expect something to do fire damage to be, well, fire, that that would be extremely unintuitive. Similarly, I'm less attached or fixated on the 1st stat of a 6-stat system being a physical strength stat, so might being a universal damage/healing increase is not really upending my expectations, it's just a new system with new things (and I've spent way too much time playing D3 so i'm used to the oddity of agility boosting how much damage my grenades do). So I find it more intuitive that might has a universal explicit rule rather than that it connects explicitly to how things were done in the past; and even if in the past it was not consistent e.g. throwing weapons and darts in BG in terms of strength but it would inform one's sense of what would be "intuitive" in this respect.

i feel like this passage indicates that you're using a very different definition of what "intuitive" means. When I see the word "intuitive", it means to me that I don't *have* to experiment or work real hard to learn the ins and outs of a system. It just works as apparently as possible. (in this respect, intuition and experimentation are at odds.) In terms of PoE/Deadfire, I would consider "might" extremely intuitive. Virtually anything that does damage will do more damage with might. Virtually anything that does healing will do more healing with might. (In this respect PoE is better than Deadfire because Deadfire carved out a fairly broad set of exceptions with consumables, a design decision they made in like 2.0 that I continue to dislike.) By contrast, in terms of PoE/Deadfire, I would consider stacking rules extremely unintuitive. Even with some general rules you basically have to manually test everything out to see if things interact in the way you expect them to and you can never be sure if the next item, buff, or debuff follows the rules you've tested before.

in terms of naming, they probably didn't do enough to separate from "strength" of D&D yore. Maybe if the stat was called "power" or even just "soul" people wouldn't fall back on old heuristics developed from the days of Baldur's Gate.

i do like deadfire a lot, but it comes from the fact that i believe its stat system is very well-designed. it's not that i like deadfire first and then therefore think its stat system is great. you don't know me and how i evaluate games, there are plenty of games that are "fun" or that are GOTY winners that i think are medicore because when it comes to RPGs I start very systematically bottoms up, and occasionally it bothers me way too much when a game can be narratively very fun but its core mechanics so ridiculously broken (FF6, FF7, FF8, heck most of the FFs). i just thought it was hilariously self-unaware (hence lololol) to think that the most intuitive system is a game that literally did things that are uncommon in RPGs, while arguing that deadfire's system is bad and unintuitive for doing things that are uncommon in RPGs. it's not a slight on dark souls, I am all for pushing the boundaries of game design and finding clever/new ways to use stats and items together. just again, what i thought was hilariously self-unaware. also I backed out of this thread before, because in this thread you have a weird tendency to go off on the warpath over mis-perceived slights (e.g. page 2 or so w.r.t. xzar_monty).

you realize this is all rationalization, right? it completely undermines you argument of "hasn't been done elsewhere" (which is a bad argument anyway). intellect scaling on weapon damage (regardless of the in-game justification, which e.g. poe/deadfire provides a lot of for might) is a relatively uncommon mechanic (similarly, faith, which in most RPGs I've played that has some sort of analogue is a spell-scaling effect exclusively). I don't have a problem with it, but it is pretty conspicuously self-undermining your argument. i also don't see how a game can be more more explicit than "this one stat will always increase damage from anywhere"...

this is just me spitballing (since i don't buy into realism arguments), but higher physical strength lets you deal with kickback and heavy weights. have like a 100-lb weakling fire a shotgun a few times, and then have like a 200-lb marine try the same thing. i think the marine will do a much better job at making sure the shotgun delivers.

erm, actually i would say Deadfire it makes way more sense. From the logic you're using, I don't see why a monk (who literally punches demons to death) in D3 should have no reliance on strength whatsoever, or why their agility allows them to mystically create sigils on the ground that grants massive protection, but their intellect gives them zilcho. in contrast to deadfire, both D3 and DA:I have the flaw that their mainstat-ing system creates a lot of dead stats (before D3 revamped with loot 2.0 this was intentional so players would be forced to auction house and grind a lot for gear that actually worked for their class; god have mercy on your soul if you were a wizard who got an ultra-rare unique but it rolled with +strength on it instead of +intelligence).

Just one? EZ: in Diablo 3, your class has a main stat, and that stat dictates everything you try to do with your abilities, whether that's intelligence, strength, or dexterity; barbarians and crusaders are tied to strength for everything. I'll throw in Dragon Age Inquisition for free, since it does something similar by tying classes to a main stat (warrior-types are bound to strength). I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't know how a mystical hammer or ancient summons or a beam of pure holy light would be literally dependent on your raw physical strength, it's a pure game mechanical convenience. And PoE/Deadfire is more flexible because then you're not bound to a class-specific mainstat that dictates damage (and PoE/Deadfire actually tries to provide an in-game explanation for this interaction with might, though it might not always be consistent in dialogue checks). Also, "it hasn't been done elsewhere" isn't a good enough argument (otherwise you would literally never be able to do anything novel). If anything, more systems should do what poe/deadfire does, because it really opens up character builds. also lolololol: isn't this a game where intellect literally can influence weapon damage? Speaking of uncommon RPG interactions... but I guess introspection/consistency about one's own likes vs dislikes is not a big thing, huh?

I agree. I think appeals to "realism" are ridiculous when it comes to game abstractions; these aren't life simulations we're trying to go for here. Whenever I see a "realism" argument it's almost always an ad-hoc rationalization of something someone likes or dislikes. So long as you aren't completely subverting basic definitions and concepts of reality (like having an "intelligence" stat that in actuality influences how much surface gravity there is in the world, except gravity is a repellant force instead of an attractive force, and also it only works at dusk... actually i would play that game), any game meets its necessary realism bar. The only thing that matters after that is: does it make for a fertile design space?

let's try to be deliberate about what terms we use, to avoid confusion, and I think you have a typo or two. By "attack time" you really mean "recovery time" because attack time penalties do not exist. But yes, recovery time penalties are trivially linear returns. Attack speed: not quite. The actual attack speed numbers you see are not the returns you get (the returns you get is your DPS essentially). A penalty to attack speed is exactly equivalent to it being inverted and applied as an "attack time" penalty (again such a thing does not actually exist in game just as an illustration), which has trivially verifiable linear returns. A -20% attack speed is exactly equivalent to +25% attack time penalty (like a +25% recovery time penalty that is also applied to the actual attack itself), and any number of -20% attack speed penalties will additively and linearly combine. The fact that two -20% attack speed penalties give you less DPS loss than a single -40% attack speed penalty has very little to do with what type returns you get. It's just a weird unit of measurement, essentially. (Because a -40% attack speed penalty is actually equivalent to a +66.6% attack time penalty, which is much larger than two +25% attack time penalties) That being said, a single attack speed penalty that grows progressively larger has increasing losses, and a single recovery time bonus that grows progressively larger has increasing returns. (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/non-discrete-recovery-time-bonuses-are-increasing-returns) But I do not know of any such attack speed penalties in the game (edit: correciton, dexterity penalties below 10 would actually be a common case of this), and I can only think of one type of recovery time bonus that does that (Mob Stance). PoE1 was relatively easy to understand (but in truth there were actually lots of exceptions to the point that exceptions were more common than the rule), but had flaws by being a largely purely additive system. PoE2 sacrifices some of the intuitiveness so that you can have meaningful penalties in areas that don't get easily trivialized because of being a simple additive system. My take on this follows below: (from https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions) "If I could pinpoint the single-most confusing aspect of Deadfire, it's how negative modifiers are handled. TL;DR: deadfire is an additive system for positive modifiers but gets weird with negative modifiers. Let's say you have a buff and a debuff. The buff gives you +20% damage. The debuff gives you -20% damage. What's the net effect on your damage? Most games do one of two things: an additive combination or a multiplicative combination. Under an additive system, we just combine the two modifiers by addition: +20 + -20 = 0, so no net effect on damage. Under a multiplicative system, we convert the modifiers into multipliers, and multiply them together: so +20% becomes 1.2x and -20% becomes .8x, and then we do 1.2 * .8 = .96, so a -4% net effect on damage. Deadfire does something very different, that we'll call "inversion". It's basically at its heart an additive system, but it treats negative modifiers specially. Sidebar: why inversions? A weakness with additive systems is that negative modifiers are extremely easy to trivialize. This was a problem with PoE1. Grazes in PoE1 were hits made with a -50% modifier to damage. This was appropriately weak early on, but as you got stronger and got better weapons, you would get more and more damage buffs. Eventually, this might altogether erase the impact of a graze, making it relatively less painful than before. Indeed, in PoE1, much of a rogue's power came from their sneak attack essentially making grazes "as good" as a normal hit from anyone else. Another weakness with additive systems is that if you're not careful with designing it, it becomes easy to pile on enough negative modifiers that you end up with 0% net effect on stuff. A plus, however, is that once you know a system is additive it's pretty easy to reason about. You just take every modifier you have and combine them through addition. Really easy for a player to evaluate. Plus, because everything is added together, it's real hard to end up with surprisingly degenerate situations where you can combine buffs and blow out game balance. By contrast, multiplicative systems mean that negative modifiers are always impactful. If Graze was instead .5x damage, then no matter how much base damage you would do, a Graze would always do half damage. Similarly, unless you have a negative modifier that is explicitly -100% damage, it is impossible to combine too many negative modifiers and end up with 0% net effect. However, multiplicative systems suffer from its own weakness: because all buffs multiply with each other, if you're not extremely careful you can have runaway buff-stacking and end up with huge numbers that blows away game balance. It also is in some cases unintuitive to the player; in our earlier example, a player might intuitively think that a +20% buff and a -20% buff will cancel out, but such is not the case in a multiplicative system. You can try to design a combined additive/multiplicative system, but you have to be very careful; probably such a system would mostly have additive effects and only a handful of very special multiplicative effects. Diablo 3, for example, uses both additive and multiplicative modifiers but favors multiplicative multiplier; the end result is that people chase multiplicative modifiers really hard since there are so many that they blow out most additive effects you can find. So it's hard to get right. I believe Deadfire's designers were trying real hard to come up with a system that combined the general intuitive and ease-of-balancing benefits of an additive system but still let negative modifiers be significant without the risk of 0% effects as in a multiplicative system. I think in terms of intuitivity they failed horribly, but if you learn and understand the system, I think there's a lot to be said in favor of it. It's just rather a significant "if."" P.S. Early on I would have suggested to the designers that they should have made it a completely additive system and just had a few multiplicative exceptions for graze and underpenetration, but after lots of playthroughs I can appreciate the game design impact of making any malus more impactful via inversions. It's just a huge mathematical hurdle to get over for literally everyone (including the designers themselves as apparent in the broken way that paladin and priest disposition bonuses scale) and you can't reason about it as easily (though at this point I've done so many inversion calculations that I know a lot of common case inversions off the top of my head, like -15% penalty cancels out almost +18% bonuses).