thelee

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.

Deadfire pathfinding is mostly better than PoE1 except for one very specific "optimization" they made in Deadfire: ignoring perceived spammy clicks. What this means is that if you tell a character to move to the same "spot" (whatever the unit is for pathfinding), they will re-use their existing route if possible without re-processing anything. Why is this annoying? Because if they take a stupid route (because of some temporary obstacle or something) and you want to tell them to stop being stupid, you can't just re-click the same location and expect them to find the better route. You have to completely give them a different destination or press X to cancel all action, and then click for them to find the smarter route.

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.

yet another z-ordering UI issue, this time the glowing eyes on the figure at the bottom of the screen floating above the looting box:

edit - this post has been edited to clarify the nature of this bug. For any devs, please do skim this thread, angry posts aside, due to the many examples being given. there are many interactions with afflictions that appear to be just fundamentally broken now, such as counters, suppression, resistance interaction, or weakness interaction. I do provide a dropbox link and output_save for a specific such case in this post. edit 2 - a more complete summary of the rest of this thread i posted on page three, but i'll re-quote here: original post: I thought this was just limited to Suppress Affliction, but it's not. Just now, Tekehu got hit by a debuff (Putrid Blast) that both sickened and immobilized him. That's fine, his AI script is set up to use his shapeshift (which grants dexterity immunity) when he has a dexterity affliction. It dispelled the immobilized. But he still can't move. In fact, when I try to move, the game erroneously claims that the remaining Sickened affliction is the reason why he can't move: Given that I'm also a software engineer, I try to be patient and understanding about bugs that crop up because I know they're a fact of life, but seriously, what the hell is going on that these kinds of regressions are occurring. This is especially alarming given that the game is pretty much approaching end-of-life for support if not with the next patch to bring turn-based mode out of beta, then soon after that. Dropbox link to output_log and save: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbocdfa6ag9vejf/AAAqIQSwvXVwQ6ktHld7Qzcia?dl=0

One thing you can bear in mind - you can use it to self-damage yourself at the start of combat to trigger Llengarth's Safeguard as well as potentially to get your health low enough to use Potion of Final Stand, both of which you can then extend (along with all other buffs) with Wall of Draining. The trouble with Blood Sacrifice is that if you have cast a few spells from different levels, it's pretty random on which ones it will give back, and you can easily kill yourself spamming it too much unless you have a no-death effect (like Potion of Final Stand). it's also a good synergy with human or death godlike racial passives. multiclassing with priest or having a priest in your party solves the accidental self-knockout problem because unlike potion of final stand you can use barring death's door without needing to be near death first (and if you want to go for this angle, you can follow up with a potion of final stand after you've safely been dropped to near death). mentioned this in messages with steampunkgears but i'll reiterate it here just for anyone else coming to the discussion - blood sacrifice is powerful because you can control what spells you get back, and I suspect the only reason why the entire forum community hasn't come to an agreement that blood mage is like the most powerful subclass ever is because people haven't actually tried to play the blood mage like this, instead just using it as a slower, random form of self-empower for spell cast restore. it's worth "inefficiently" trying to use blood sacrifice at times, just so that it helps restore spells you do want later down the line (like if you opened with a few self-buffs, even though you don't need to restore spells yet you can use blood sacrifice to fill up again so that when you do want to restore spell casts you don't end up restoring spell levels you didn't want). it skews you heavily to AL1-3 and AL4-6 (to a lesser extent) spells, but it's worth it because spells in poe1/deadifre are generally better designed to be good from beginning to end regardless of spell level (unlike BG where frequently lower level spells were just not worth the time late game, hellloooo larloch's minor drain) @thelee I understand the (+7 Accuracy,+15% Damage) near death. but i feel like the +1might and +1res are a waste here. unless you go 9 might as a base stat and put that one point somewhere else like con, same with res i guess. it's actually when bloodied or worse, so it's fairly easy to trigger (death godlike is pretty hard to trigger without barring death's door or potion of the final stand). in the right set up the human racial can way trump anything you get from a more optimal stat distribution. key phrase being "in the right set up"

One thing you can bear in mind - you can use it to self-damage yourself at the start of combat to trigger Llengarth's Safeguard as well as potentially to get your health low enough to use Potion of Final Stand, both of which you can then extend (along with all other buffs) with Wall of Draining. The trouble with Blood Sacrifice is that if you have cast a few spells from different levels, it's pretty random on which ones it will give back, and you can easily kill yourself spamming it too much unless you have a no-death effect (like Potion of Final Stand). it's also a good synergy with human or death godlike racial passives. multiclassing with priest or having a priest in your party solves the accidental self-knockout problem because unlike potion of final stand you can use barring death's door without needing to be near death first (and if you want to go for this angle, you can follow up with a potion of final stand after you've safely been dropped to near death). mentioned this in messages with steampunkgears but i'll reiterate it here just for anyone else coming to the discussion - blood sacrifice is powerful because you can control what spells you get back, and I suspect the only reason why the entire forum community hasn't come to an agreement that blood mage is like the most powerful subclass ever is because people haven't actually tried to play the blood mage like this, instead just using it as a slower, random form of self-empower for spell cast restore. it's worth "inefficiently" trying to use blood sacrifice at times, just so that it helps restore spells you do want later down the line (like if you opened with a few self-buffs, even though you don't need to restore spells yet you can use blood sacrifice to fill up again so that when you do want to restore spell casts you don't end up restoring spell levels you didn't want). it skews you heavily to AL1-3 and AL4-6 (to a lesser extent) spells, but it's worth it because spells in poe1/deadifre are generally better designed to be good from beginning to end regardless of spell level (unlike BG where frequently lower level spells were just not worth the time late game, hellloooo larloch's minor drain)

FYI - do people remember baldurdash? there were tons of fan-made bug fixes for BG and BG2. (there was also a fan-made patch for Fallout 2, which is extra hard considering that I think that required actually hex/binary editing of .dlls since it wasn't as open to modding as the infinity engine.) games are definitely more complex these days and likely more prone to bugs, but it's not like the 90s-early2000s were some gloriously bug-free zone of gaming. I just really hope that Obsidian has a few more patch fix cycles after TB-mode gets out of beta, because these regressions are frustrating.

you know what, what really doesn't make sense though is that in PoE1 traps were super lame (and extremely bugged, even now) but then they added new traps in White March I/II that were every bit as powerful as the best traps in BG2. so i literally have no idea what went on in obsidian's balancing brain for PoE1. I was just happy that traps weren't altogether bugged in Deadfire like they were in PoE1. I just wish they scaled a bit better into late game - traps mostly just become useful for their debuffs and you still need lots of mechanics.

For some reason I thought this got fed through the same double inversion as everything else. Of course it doesn't, and 3% is what you want in that case. Ugh, what bad design for the stat to have increasing returns on both effects. Resolve does get fed into the double-inversion system, but probably not in the way you were anticipating. If you have a -% bonus on hostile durations due to having resolve greater than 10, that gets inverted to cancel out much more +% duration effects (so a resolve of 20 would get you -30% hostile durations, which when inverted can cancel out up to +42.8% worth of duration bonuses, e.g. from intellect). You might have been thinking that each point of resolve gives you a separate -3% bonus, which when inverted can make it impossible to get up to -100% or more duration (which would be absurd), but no stat works like this, they all sum up their effects first before being tossed into the inversion grinder. and yes, it is unfortunate that it has increasing returns on both effects. at least increasing returns means that high-end resolve can be extremely powerful, whereas Con is just forever kind of a lame stat right now.

i feel like obsidian must have PTSD from how stupidly powerful traps were in BG2 and Throne of Bhaal. You could beat the demogorgon in a split second with enough spike traps.

Hard not to feel really frustrated at these seemingly glaringly simple UI errors being introduced almost a year after release. To reproduce: 1. Select save game from menu 2. Click on an empty save or existing save to rename and create a selection box. 3. Scroll away 4. Notice that the selection box alone continues to scroll, instead of being clipped within the bounds of the save/load menu. This is pretty low priority UI polish, but I can't help but feel that it is a "code smell" of other z-ordering or UI problems (including the floating text that persists between screens that is still an issue). There's no dropbox link or output_log or save, because this issue is not linked to a game state.

check combat log (hover/shift over some aoe damage to see all modifiers)? the right-click menu on abilities is both more comprehensive (notably damage PL scaling) but also less comprehensive (conditional effects, etc.) when it comes to modifiers than the combat log.

This is my dropbox folder for just deadfire bugs. And this is after I culled it for all the issues I reported pre 1.2 and issues that had been clearly fixed and weren't getting any further views. edit - also, even if nethack is complex, there's a difference in types of complexity. netflix is mechanically complex, sure. but it's at its heart a very simple program. you don't have to worry about shaders or threading in nethack coding. edit 2 - I had to cull in the first place because I was hitting the Dropbox free storage limit. Keep in mind that I only use Dropbox to store but reports for PoE1 and Deadfire.