thelee

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.

what is your system? i played with both a 1060 and a 2080 ti and didn't have any issues that severe.

lolol, when i first opened up this thread--despite the fact that i've rolled pretty much every variation of a priest--I was immediately like "oh yeah, a cipher/priest multiclass, i've done that" before reading closer and remembering that that multiclass is a "mystic." totally agree that the names should be switched. (my prior experience in a game with "heirophants" is in Diablo 2 and those are definitely priest-types). this phrase does not compute. psion + blood mage sounds fine in theory (i haven't tried this myself), so long as you test blood sacrifice beforehand and verify that it doesn't interrupt psion's focus generation (also verify that deletrious alacrity of motion does not interrupt focus generation). It's pretty easy to not get hit (relatively speaking) at range, and a blood mage has spells that help you avoid getting hit even more (illusion magic, extra stride and engagement immunity from deleterious alacrity of motion, and even if deleterious alacrity of motion interrupts focus gen, fleet feet can work as well). in fact, i honestly think it would work better for a "caster angle" than some of the other stuff people are proposing here; in my experience, caster + cipher has real action economy issues because you need to be attacking to generate focus, you basically have to end up being a more martial build. for going down the caster path, a psion has no such action economy issues due to their autofocus regen, even if you aren't great at avoiding getting hit. also their extra focus power is pretty decent I think. Even though it has a party-unfriendly push effect, it interrupts on graze and with decent power levels you basically have enough focus gen to spam it over and over. can even be used to help you avoid danger if it manages to push you away from a creature that has gotten into melee range. (though the party-unfriendliness does mean it's hard to use it on an enemy you are surrounding/focusing down)

At least in IWD2, due to how it ended up implementing 3e's scaling xp rewards, by mid-late game you could also be fighting lots of battles and gettnig no rewards for them (it made level-squatting a very effective metagaming strategy).

Wow I never thought to do that! I'm going to be doing that now

Agreed, but does 2 points make a change? And how this falls under your "Bugfixes" definition. mathematically, i think it's closer. I think +7 would be better, mathematically, but i hate odd numbers that aren't multiples of 5 when it comes to accuracy adjustments and I think +6 is too weak, so it's also an aesthetic thing, yeah i'll concede it's partly irrational also, while i wouldn't want to use a non-bugfix exclusive mod, if an effort like this has a lot of sway, I would at least like the balance tweaks to be what I personally think are at least systematic and well-considered with minimal power creep.

frankly i loved the sundial quest. the ukaizo waterfall thing on the other hand...

seems like a real easy fix, even if low priority. please fix!

oh yeah, this has been bothering me forever and i keep forgetting to report it. i guess very few people actually use the voyager. would be nice if they fixed it.

i don't know specifically how the game works undreneath, but my understanding is that creature upscaling happens based on the encounter. so it's possible those skuldraks got upscaled even at level 9 if the encounter itself was a lower level and had a few skuldraks. (this is mostly an educated guess based on what i've seen) also: why would console spawning a creature automatically upscale them?

from what I've heard they add extra time for the DLCs for this new version of the ultimate. (when I did Eothas I could probably have done all the vanilla encounters. you are really time-constrained in act 1, but you can frontload a lot of quests in act 2 (nekataka and dunnage focused) and act 3 (to beat ashen maw) and 4 (to get to ukaizo) give you plenty of time, so long as your'e not randomly wandering on the ocean. so they probably will give you extra time when you start a DLC and the DLCs are pretty well-contained. if they don't add extra time for DLCs... well doing SSS's exploration quests is going to be real rough) and boy oh boy, when I beat the Ultimate for PoE1 I swore off doing it for any other future pillars (I even posted as such here, back when I had only double-digit post count), but if they're handing out patches you bet I'm going to be doing it for Deadfire.

No. It's just a cosmetic changes. Leave it alone. as it stands, accurate empower should be basically the first empower talent that virtually anyone takes because of its superior utility compared to the other empower talents. if one is interested in re-balancing those talents (as MaxQuest signaled the intention), one should focus on reining in accurate empower rather than boosting the others. Because otherwise that's how you get power creep. And I've played D3 long enough to be traumatized by power creep. What about Warhammers and War Bows? They a ok? + I prefer to leave alone stiletto, since it's a fast weapon and Recovery penalty don't hurts bad. yes, warhammers and war bows are ok. I don't know why these changes are being proposed, because mathematically +2 PEN for +50% is a no-brainer tradeoff for any PEN vs situation of -2 to -4. The fact that swords are able to get +2 PEN for no recovery time trade off (similar to Estoc) is an advantage that swords have that is diluted by these changes. So I still think the changes in 7/7b are unnecessary. lololol literally did a spit take laughing Josh, please, log in under your account. EDIT: I wonder again and again about some peoples. Keyword section contains 43+ spell and abilities, and i suggest to add elemental keywords to only 6 of them. Yet, i still reading some complains about "ELEMENTAL KEYWORDS EVERYWHERE! WE ALL GONNA DIE!". it's the difference between a "Bug fix" and a "Balance/gameplay tweak." It might not matter to you, but it is eminently reasonable (even if from a game design perspective, confusing) for spells of an elemental type to lack the specific keyword if you want to bar a specific interaction. Frankly if MaxQuest made a mod right now with all the listed changes, I wouldn't use it, because I like the vanilla experience and am only interested in obvious bug fixing. Riposte being adjusted to counter on graze is to me a bug fix (from a turn-based perspective); obviously enough that I expect Obsidian to fix it themselves in the next patch (or else I will sigh in exasperation). Tweaking weapon modals is not a bug fix. I think keywords are a murkier area, but because they have real gameplay impacts, it's a reasonable perspective to have that adding extra elemental keywords does not qualify as a "Bug fix" and is instead a "balance/gampelay tweak." I think re-adjusting some priest keywords to be more sensical makes sense from a bug fix perspective (and have evidence of developer intent with Blessing with Cdiaz having confirmed it as a bug), but adding extra elemental keywords does not, unless the intent is clear. (For example, Warding Seal already has electric keyword, so its hazard effect should also have the electric keyword--or hazards in general fixed to benefit from keywords. Counter example, Spiritual Weapons do not have keyword on the ability, so it is much less clear whether or not the developers intended for the summoned weapons to benefit from keyword interactions, so adding keywords there is less of a bug fix.) Back in the days of Baldurdash and fan-made BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2 fixes, people there were extremely focused on "developer intention" and would only really include a non-obviously-a-bug fix change if there was clear evidence that this was a correction to make something function more like what the developer intended (either through documentation or emails or direct messages). Not being clear about the bug fix vs balance fix situation is what leads to the Fallout: New Vegas situation where you have different "bugfix mods" and I only find one of them to be a defensible bug fix mod--yukichigai unofficial patch vs e.g. mission mojave--due to the latter's extra gameplay tweaks for non-obviously-broken things with lack of evidence of developer intention.

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?