thelee

That's a pretty decent solution. But unfortunately considering we still have a combat tooltip screen that can run out of room to display buffs/debuffs I think this might be an extremely lower priority for devs to clarify

my non-expert opinion - the devoted erases in part one of the main advantages of a 2h weapon, which is the +1 PEN over "equivalent" one-handed weapons. i'd go dual-wield.

if I understand #2 correctly, you're talking about doing something like how action speed is translated to tooltips for recovery time, normalizing it to the actual unit in question (in this case radius)? I think this would be hella more confusing for the layperson (there were plenty of bug reports early on about people confused that their dexterity or other such bonus was translating into a weird number for their recovery). I think the simplest fix would be like #1, to change the "area of effect" line in the ability description to something like "targeting" and then have a combat mechanics entry/highlighting the "area of effect" description for intellect or overseeing that describes how it affects abilities that have a listed radius, and how it affects total area done, not directly influencing the radius.

Intellect is still a good stat to push (possibly the best). Also, the line of your reasoning is a bit... not apparent. The area of effect line is giving you the parameters needed to compute the "area of effect." It does not follow at all that you should be increasing those input parameters, because they may be completely orthogonal to an actual "area of effect" (this is emblematic of disagreements I've had with people confused about linear/increasing/diminishing returns).

it might be an extremely rude surprise to you that PoE1 also had a lot of confusing and unintuitive aspects to its systems (the various ways in which different action speed/recovery speed boosts worked was the subject of a gigantic spreadsheet that was posted somewhere). but i guess we didn't have to deal with inversions then. if you can get over the inversions hurdle, i think deadfire is generally more transparent and clear about how things work (especially stacking rules, which mostly work as per general outlines, whereas with poe1 it was frequently mysterious when it came to active effects... suppressing triumph of the crusaders because i drank a minor potion of regeneration?? huh???). boy, the prisoner part of the stronghold--i completely forgot about that, probably because i repressed the memory. i'd say more than half the time i took someone prisoner, they would almost immediately escape! if i was "lucky" an animancer would come by before a jailbreak and i would sell them the prisoner for a paltry amount of pocket change (less than what i think even an exceptional item sells for). in the end i just ended up killing everyone or reporting them to the more proper authorities.

i mean, i'm not going to really defend the tooltips (tooltip summaries for action speed/recovery time are the worst), but the game explicitly calls out intellect/overseeing/etc as +x% area of effect, not radius. (historical lesson is that poe1 used to actually boost radius in early versions and that got changed out to a similar area-based system after everyone realized how silly a decision that was; the wording also changed)

Intellect/overseeing don't boost radius, they boost total area affected (because otherwise you'd have extremely increasing returns, because area is proportional to the square of radius). So really the equation it's solving for is to find r in: (recall that area of a circle is pi*r^2) pi * 2.5^2 * (1 + .85) = pi * r^2 (where .85 is the total area of effect bonus) the pi's cancel out, so you're left with: r^2 = 2.5^2 * 1.85 = 11.56 r = 3.4m

forgot if i already mentioned it, but twin elms: yeah, i remember being disappointed by twin elms. I mean, I guess objectively there's still a lot to do there, but it always felt "thinner" than defiance bay. also there were factions there, but they were even more thinly sketched out than defiance bay and that's saying quite a bit. and ugh, don't remind me about caed nua. that stronghold was just a pointless money sink that was mostly annoying ("you can either stop what you're doing to fight a bunch of low-level skeletons, or let them destroy like five structures") and pretty much bug ridden (at some point in patch history, caed nua vendors stopped restocking, making them pretty useless). ship stronghold is a much better experience and while making it opt-in probably meant that developer time to ship combat got starved, it is way way better than "hey you just finished that last encounter, but your scouts have seen yet another army of skeletons approaching the stronghold, i hope you weren't planning on doing anything interesting in tonight's play session."

nah, you'll only get the higher of phantom foes vs body attunement. still, -2 AR plus +3 PEN basically means no penetration issues, ever. I had a recent run where I had a chanter with The Shield Breaks and combined with casting Champion's Boon or Thunderous Blows (+2 PEN) on important party members the buffed party members rarely ever had PEN issues throughout the game (basically limited to special fights). The +1 PEN might even just be overkill and basically mandate that you use a Sword (and then, wow, you can get another +2 PEN, suddenly Dorudugan doesn't look so tanky to bladed weapons anymore)

Fast cast and long recoveries makes ascended a huge trap option in turn-based for one; by the time you have access to disintegrate, ascending gives you 3 rounds to cast 3 disintegrates (which are slow casts on a class that has basically no way to get concentration outside of Soul Blade melee kills) at +1 PL, the focus cost however would be enough to cast 4-5 of them on another spec. If anything I'd say it doesn't make it a trap option as much as it shows how much of one it already is, it just makes the structural issue of the concept more blatant. That said I realize that you seem to be fine with the fact that cipher's literal only niche is charms, which makes me wonder how did you not see the problem against Intellect immune and resistant enemies. TB-mode is its own balancing problem and I suspect (or hope) that they address the cipher. If we're focusing in on ascendant, a single class ascendant with minimal metagaming can still get huge efficiency out of ascendant status at least in real-time-with-pause. It's not a trap option. (The ascendant also has huge focus generation, so even if you're not gunning for ascendant status and can eat the PL penalty without problem, you get huge quantity over quality) But I disagree with TB just accentuating cipher's structural problems. A cipher gains structural problems because TB mode really upends the action economy, which was fairly carefully balanced over basically many years (including PoE1) and backer betas (Deadfire BB which reduced cipher cast times across the board). Ciphers excel at charms and are literally the only player-accessible class that can dominate, but that is far from their "only niche." Ciphers are not in my top-played class (priest is def #1, probably followed closely by rogue or wizard) but at this even point even I have to ask "bro, do you even cipher?"

in terms of pure damage, i think any rogue will do better than a soulblade due to sneak attack + deathblows. you pick up a cipher to also be able to cast lots of powers.

ironically, this -10% penalty is less severe than when the trickster had much worse bonus spells (and more expensive, to boot). i think this is a rare case of where they overcompensated and tuned something up too much, TBH (trickster did in fact use to have -20% penalty pre-1.2)

I can't speak for turn-based, but in terms of RtWP I fully disagree with this characterization of the cipher. People keep talking about Ryngrim's spell and all that tells me is that that spell is way too good for AL5 (my best guess is that it was a direct import from PoE1 and they forgot that terrified in Deadfire is way more powerful than in PoE1). Ciphers already have pretty fast cast times, btw. It was raised on earlier pages, but my general perspective is "overvalued compared to what?" There's not a lot of ways to boost damage via talents, so much like the relative sparsity of accuracy in Deadfire, the damage boosts become comparatively better. Unconditional (or close to unconditional) damage boosts are extremely uncommon, and you don't need a lot to make a notable difference. I think the trickster "only" giving up 10% is bad not because 10% (unscaling) isn't worth much, but because the trickster gains back way way way way way way more than that in new capabilities or higher sneak attack uptime. Even if the penalty scaled, the trickster would still be utterly worth the trade-off, and heck they could completely lack sneak attack and the trickster would be a viable class. I think I can get on board with the fact that the +5% fighter damage boost is unnecessary. Linear returns means additional same% boosts are worth relatively less, so it really seems like they could have had both talents provide +10% and the "intrinsic diminishing returns" (MaxQuest's turn of phrase) takes care of balancing out the higher-end talent that *requires* this earlier talent to pick up...

pro tip: it's more efficient to just use lay on hands over greater lay on hands. Even with robust, 2 casts of 1 zeal loh gives more healing than 1 cast of 2 zeal gloh. lay on hands healing doesn't stack with itself, so if you need to heal a lot very quickly, then greater lay on hands can save your bacon in a way that 2x lay on hands cannot (especially since robust gives +2 AR and can potentially give you huge damage reduction boost). yeah, my primary use case for greater lay on hands is: on someone who is weakened/enfeebled, or someone who needs emergency help stat.

Weren't you the one suggesting I read descriptions like a lawyer? i was, but it's a rule of thumb, not an absolute rule. most unique weapon effects only apply to the weapon itself, as you're probably figuring out. soulbound weapons sometimes but not always have flexible unlocking requirements. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i merely pointed out the PoE1 comparison because you seem to draw a direct comparison to PoE1 in your other posts, and ISTR soulbound weapons functioning similarly (having unlock requirements that might be met with spells but unlocks effect specific to the weapon)

pernicious cloud, smoke cloud, and smoke grenade have this extremely unique targeting mechanism which is totally and utterly party-unfriendly, with the sole exception that the rogue him/herself is excluded from the targeting. this targeting rule is extremely absolute: if the rogue is confused, they still won't be able to affect themselves (though obviously it doesn't change affecting party members). i'm not sure it's a bug because it's such an awful specific targeting mechanism that it had to have been deliberate, but it does mean that pernicious cloud is only really useful on an extremely mobile rogue who can get to an optimal place to drop it (or you can mitigate the friendly fire)

Why am I able to fulfill the upgrades through spellcasts then? because that's how many soulbound weapons work? this is how it sometimes worked in PoE1, too.

i'm a pretty patient guy, (and have already clocked in 700ish hours on deadfire) and even managed to run through hylea's challenge (a mega escort challenge for Vela) when it was bugged where vela wasn't scaling (read: she would get one shot by anything), but I'm holding off a bit, because if you like to play on harder challenges, the last couple of patches have really busted up how afflictions work (and get countered/dispelled). if you're on lower difficulties or just like to brute force encounters, it may not be a big deal, but it's really just super frustrating to not be able to dispel entire classes of afflictions or even suppress them with suppress affliction.

it doesn't?? honestly have never paid attention to the scaling before, just assumed it did. the robust inspiration should scale for sure, but i also assumed the healing did, too.

fyi, in case you meant it this way, you can't do anything after you beat the main game - it's complete game over. you do have a save before you go past the "point of no return", but it's just a few encounters after that. BoW is good at level 14, but SSS and FS target much higher level. if you're going to do ashen maw, i'd go ahead and do it now because the DLCs are harder challenges the main quest. doing the expansions basically resigns you to being completely overleveled for the main quest (FS target level is like level 19-20) unless you have downscaling enabled and attempt the DLCs at lower levels.

The bug is actually that you shouldn't be able to stock up more than 17. The neutral merchant ships only have a finite supply of ship supplies (as do certain other vendors), so you are being capped by the available supply. The fact that you can repeatedly get that available supply appears to be the actual bug.

Not that clearly in-game, and even less so in the first game, especially given pain link was at least castable on self (heck you could cast mind wave on yourself in 1), and blood mage's class description clearly states that most scholars don't believe it's supposed to work so clearly one class is allowed to break the game universe's own received wisdom (incidentally blood mage completely, utterly eclipses cipher as anything but a charm stick and soul annihilation battery that also sucks as the spellsword the class is sold as, both of which are unfathomably boring playstyles, a straight barbarian is unironically more fun). Besides "allied target" is generally a bad limitation because it doesn't allow you to target anything that's not a literal party member or a summon; you can't bounce off charmed enemies or non-party allies. blood mage's class description indicates that the received wisdom of how a blood mage thinks they work is not scientifically backed by in-game science, but it does not preclude the blood mage from working. (as a real life example, we don't quite understand how acetomenaphin (tylenol) actually works and we can rule out some past theories, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.) also, the blood mage completely, utterly eclipses basically any caster at any offensive role. that doesn't mean much specifically for the cipher. (also, reading your post, it sounds more like you just have a playstyle that doesn't actually map onto a cipher's competencies - i wouldn't put barbarian or cipher or blood mage as remotely comparable.) i would personally agree with/urge MaxQuest to stick with the game design philosophy of the cipher, which is most certainly not as a primary self-buffer. their buffing is primarily party support, and their need to target actual targets generally other than themself (allied or whatnot) is a game design constraint on their abilities.

this is why I argue that the psion works well for a caster angle. Granted, I haven't rolled many ciphers in Deadfire, but the need to attack with weapons to generate focus automatically pushes you to martial-oriented builds and in a bad multiclass setup gives you huge action economy constraints (personally I abandoned an early attempt at a mystic because it felt real clunky and slow; I ended up with skaen thanks to their fast free abilities and decent spiritual weapon but it still felt a bit clunky--after that I decided that basically only a wael or self-buff-type wizard caster would be able to do particularly well with a cipher because otherwise cast times are just a huge opportunity cost for the cipher part). If you want to go more of a "pure caster" approach, then generating 28 focus (at PL7) while casting a 7s total-action-plus-recovery spell is an extremely good alternative to generating 0, and then having to spend time to do 37 weapon damage (with draining whip, no ascendant) to accomplish the same. yeah, i mean, you're not completely wasting time (you do the weapon damage) but if you want to be tossing powers around instead, it is a waste of time. also, if you're in a situation with poor PEN (e.g. ironclad constructs, dorudugan, or you foolishly only have pistols against risen) the psion gets a huge advantage over any other cipher (though decent metagaming or playing on a lower difficulty mitigates this, obviously). I suspect the "stop on hit/miss/graze" is just to reinforce that this psion is intended to be at range. they didn't want the psion to--as you suggest--be a low DPS tanky type. i don't think there's any real good gameplay balancing reason, just "flavor".

That would be amazing. No way I am going to attempt it either way. Who knows, maybe somebody will find out the best builds/ai settings to do it automatically. It is not like you have much option with Magran's challenge. if this challenge is able to done on TB-mode, then magran's challenge becomes a loooot more palatable (10 seconds to make your action), especially on solo.

...the focus generation scales with cipher power level. "In 4.0 you get access to the psion, who gives up the normal focus generation mechanics of the cipher's Soul Whip (including the extra damage) for an effect that constantly generates 1 focus per second per odd PL (so 1 focus/sec at PL1, a natural cap of 5 focus/sec at PL9, and even more with PL buffs)." https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/cipher you can regenerate enough focus to cast an amplified wave in as little as 10 seconds with single class psion and a bonus +1 PL. a semi-optimized melee cipher without PEN issues will still outperform a psion, but a psion isn't that far behind.