thelee

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.

it's been a while since I tried this, but i think it's like PoE1 where you can have one of both, but putting on on top of/too close to the other will deactivate it.

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) i think the possible problem with trying to extend sparkcrackers "distract" (not distract) duration is that it would require a re-work of the stealth system. if you keep making noise in the same place, i think they might just end up walking into the area of effect and start combat.

for a blood mage i personally find constitution to be more important than virtually any other builds since health becomes a way to regenerate spells, so the extra health cushion can be useful. (But i am playing on potd + skaen/ondra/wael/berath challenge, which means i have no information on my specific health (wael) and also knockouts become lethal after 10 seconds (berath), so the convenience of the extra health cushion for me might be specific to that set of challenges.) might is particularly bad for blood mage since IIRC, might will increase the raw self-damage. as a part rogue you will already have lots of damage boosts for martial sneak attacks (and eventually deathblows) anyway, so balancing that out with perception is more important than having a wee bit more might. move might points elsewhere (but don't go below 10). again keeping in mind that my recommendation for con might be influenced by my challenges, i would personally recommend moving might and possibly even some perception into con (a blood mage can spam eldritch aim as needed if accuracy is a problem). for a simple intro to how a blood mage can play, i would pick up chill fog, eldritch aim, and then at AL2 concelhaut's siphon. overlapping chill fogs to ensure constant blinds (for sneak attack and general debuffing utility), eldritch aim to max accuracy for both sneak attacks and chill fogs, and then concelhaut's siphon spamming to keep your health up should give you a nice preview of how powerful a blood mage can be. If you want an easy time for early potd fights, get slicken instead of chill fog (and just use chill fog when you get a grimoire) and just repeat spam slicken (plus optionally eldritch aim to help land) until everyone who's not a floating creature is constantly tripping and you can just pick them off at your leisure.

I mean, wasn't this the case with PnP or even classic IE? A dagger did 1d4 and you didn't get to go any more often than someone wielding a 2d4 bastard sword. I'm not saying that this was a good thing (I only understood it as a role-playing choice in BG/BG2 to be deliberately suboptimal), but how do newer TB or editions of D&D handle this? In 5E D&D, weapon damage follows a fairly predictable formula. First, there are two tiers of weapons, Simple and Martial; Simple weapons start at 1d6 damage, Martial weapons at 1d8. In addition to damage, weapons have various properties, which can upgrade or downgrade their damage die. While not every weapon has a property, they typically get one beneficial property for free. So longswords (bastard swords are no longer separate) have the Versatile property, meaning they can be used either one or two handed; they're still 1d8 weapons in one hand, but they go up to 1d10 two-handed. The Light property, which allows weapons to be dual wielded by default, and the Finesse property, which allows attackers to use Dexterity instead of Strength for their attack and damage rolls, are particularly relevant to this discussion; these almost always comes with a damage downgrade (the only two Light Martial weapons are also Finesse, and do 1d6 damage instead of 1d8, which is consistent with getting one property for free and losing a die size for the second; one is Finesse only and keeps the 1d8 die size; one has Finesse and Reach and does only 1d4. Simple weapons include four Light weapons that take a damage downgrade to 1d4, including the Sickle and Club which have no other properties, but also the Handaxe, which has an additional property but keeps 1d6 damage). Finesse and Light are both fairly desirable properties in this system in spite of the damage die tradeoff: Dexterity is a better stat than Strength outside of melee offense, so sacrificing a bit of damage on your weapon to be able to focus on a better attribute is a worthwhile tradeoff. Dual wielding is good in action economy terms: it's one of the easiest ways to get a damage dealing Bonus Action (you get one Action and one Bonus Action per turn; non-martial classes never get more than one attack per Action and only high level Fighters get more than two attacks per action, so a Bonus Action attack is a big boost to DPR). Daggers specifically are still bad, but this is mostly because they're Simple weapons and any character that frequently attacks with a weapon will find a way to get a Martial weapon. As Simple weapons go they're arguably above the curve, with three beneficial properties, including Finesse and Light, but only one die size downgrade from the Simple weapon base (though things don't really go below 1d4, so they're at the floor). interesting. in many ways that sounds like how deadfire structures its weapons (e.g. avg 12 dmg for "fast" weapons, 16 dmg for "slow" weapons, with one free weapon trait, and then damage/PEN downgrades as you add on other stuff), just over-optimized for RTwP. would be curious to see what changes (hopefully some) come down the line for TB mode.

i think one of the biggest things you could do to improve traps would actually just be to make it so that you could sustainably keep a supply of higher-level ones going (vendors don't stock too many and they tend to stock lame ones). with sufficient scaling, a party of five mid-high level traps is passable mayhem. but definitely not a sustainable practice.

while they don't combo anymore, woedica's fists are still among the best weapons in the game. legendary-scaled monk fists by level 17 with a +31% raw lash (for perfect disposition) is even better than what a monk might be able to accomplish (at least without stacking bonus PL).

I've seen similar lines of argument over at reddit before, but I feel the evidence doesn't support the case. The first game itself would have suffered over time sales-wise if that was the case, but to my understanding it held up in the sales department well after the first few months in release. Moreover the audience reception seems very positive across all platforms if reviews and aggregate ratings are anything to go by, be it GOG, Steam, Amazon, metacritic, etc. Moreover the current completion rate for the first game is at 12.6%, which may not seem like a lot but is higher than Divinity: Original Sin's which is at 8.8% (as per Steam achievements). In theory there could be an abnormally disproportinate opinion in the silent majority but I think it's something of a stretch. by comparison, the Deadfire completion achievement "The End of the Beginning" is at a whopping 19.4%.

I mean, wasn't this the case with PnP or even classic IE? A dagger did 1d4 and you didn't get to go any more often than someone wielding a 2d4 bastard sword. I'm not saying that this was a good thing (I only understood it as a role-playing choice in BG/BG2 to be deliberately suboptimal), but how do newer TB or editions of D&D handle this?

Also, re: moon godlike scaling: Yeah, that's why I want to push for making things more integrated systematically into the game, instead of creating parallel effects. I think Bellower subclass showed just how poorly chanters are integrated into PL scaling to their detriment. If a Moon Godlike can improve their healing with improved might, Prestige, or Potion of Ascension or heck, the Heart-Chime Amulet (+1 PL for moon godlikes at night, seems like a perfect match), that seems to me a better scenario than either their current fixed 10 healing or a separate character-level scaling. Like I said, ideally also chanter chants would also use some sort of PL scaling, so that PL scaling is more impactful for them (as befits a caster) and also doesn't create a weird situation where multiclass chanters can chant just as well as single-class chanters. I'll probably add more responses throughout the day or two, but those are the big ones I wanted to mention real fast.

@MaxQuest (boy this thread is getting hard to quote/parse, so here's some specific responses): Riposte - currently it's 25% on miss, right? I propose something like a 15% chance on miss or graze. I think my original idea of having a separate chance for miss and graze is unnecessarily complicated. But maybe it's unavoidable considering TB's very huge graze range. Sabre/Stiletto - I also strongly disagree with these changes. I also disagree with the assessment that the +50% recovery time penalty is not worth it for damage dealers. It is definitely worth it in most underpenetration changes. But I mostly disagree because not suffering a +50% recovery time penalty was something that was special to swords, and you're taking that away. Perplexing Sap - in case you don't know, the reason why this ability is broken is because "confused" means that you don't distinguish between ally/enemy... including for the perplexing sap ability. So you actually end up basically confusing/hobbling the entire battlefield (yourself included) from this. It's awful and one should never upgrade Sap. That's why I'm proposing leaving Sap alone and re-designing Perplexing Sap to be something less stupid, because even Obsidian has acknowledged that Perplexing Sap is an ability they wanted to revisit. Prone - I mentioned this in passing, but I strongly disagree with lengthening the actual prone-on-ground duration. Prone is not hard CC and we shouldn't blur the line with it. It's a stronger interrupt (+50% interrupt time on a perfect interrupt, can be conditionally much better against fast enemies). The only thing I would change about prone is to make the actual interrupt effect +3s instead of +2s like a standard interrupt (so you're proned for the same duration but the recovery time is now 3s instead of 2s) because it seems like an unnecessary complication/murk about interrupt vs prone. Seals - I really don't think they need adjustment, I think they need bug fixing. By "hack" I mean "a fragile workaround". If hazard effects ever get fully fixed, I think seals become gangbusters (except for repulsing seal) and they definitely don't need a 3s cast time. I could get down with repulsing seal having a 3s cast time though, since the out-of-combat cast is pretty negligible, and the distinction between it and pillar of faith at AL2 is very murky in combat (raise your hands if you knew that repulsing seal prones on graze vs pillar's prone on hit, and hands up if you knew that repulsing seal gets +2 acc/PL instead of +1 acc/PL for pillar of faith) and so it would help differentiate it without being notably that much more powerful. (Note that everything I say about seals also applies to other hazard effects, which include some wizard walls and I think a druid effect or two). Kalakoth - I actually don't think -10 acc and -10 reflex make it that much more usable. Again I reiterate that a stronger single acc debuff (-15 or -20) is more usable for AL1. edit - for that matter priest Barb's is only barely useable and has longer range and is -10 all defenses and wizards really should be better at this kind of effect than priests at this level I think. Resource generation - given that there exists a paladin talent that unconditionally grants +1 resource and that costs an ability point, conditional resource generation seems gamely targeted at 0-2 resources for a typical fight with minor metagaming (hence me sayign so for Virtuous Triumph in a different comment). I would think that the current fighter talent is close to this range--albeit requires particular metagaming so you don't have an anti-synergy going on, and has higher potential upside than Virtuous Triumph. If there's one thing I would fix, it'd be the aforementioned anti-synergy - a Barbarian gets special "on-being-crit" effect because they actually are expected to get lower deflection on top of having low inherent deflection, whereas fighters have inherently high deflection and have a lot of passive boosters. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is a moon godlike-type effect where you get +1 discipline the first time you are dropped a health category. Maybe that's too good, but seems to me you limit the upside (like paladin Virtuous Triumph) and it's a little bit less anti-synergy and also a bit less murky (low probability odds for impactful events strikes me as murky).

Then it's clearly a bug, becose all these abilities have proper keywords (Punishment and Fire/Electricity) in both abilities.gamedatabundle and attacks.gamedatabundle. I guess something in the code prevents game from reading/using these keywords. U can create a topic in Technical support and write about it. If someone haven't done it already... I've reported hazard issues sooooooo many times. And keyword interaction is just one aspect. All hazard effects do less damage than stated in tool-tip (which is odd considering tool-tips are auto-generated), they don't get PL scaling for damage, they don't get empower bonus for damage, etc. Hazards were also extremely weird and buggy in PoE1, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson for Deadfire, but... (From what someone else mentioned in one of my bug reports, it's not that the ability is missing stuff, it's that the ability creates a separate hazard effect, and it's that effect that is missing keywords or stat interactions). yeah, I could be down with something like that. if Obsidian feels like doing some new content...

Something I've learned is that low completion rates is not even close to abnormal. Lots of players just never finish the games they pick up, regardless of the game. It doesn't really have much connection to satisfaction rates. That's the whole reason why Berath's Blessings were introduced in the way they were instead of like an actual "new game+" mode, because they didn't want to gate it behind completing the game.

What did you mean? Hazards aren't consistently affected by many things but the big one is keyword interactions (so wall of fire and warding seal don't benefit from Scion of flame or heart of the storm)

Speaking in a personal capacity, I feel like these changes could make sense but are probably a bit out of scope for a "polish" set of changes since I don't think MaxQuest is looking to get ideas for completely new abilities or passives. Though, it unnerved me to no end in BB and release that Spirit of Decay and Heart of the Storm are in priest talent tree at AL4 but the former has literally 0 effect for anyone not a Berathian, and the latter has 0 effect until AL8 (Spark the Souls of the Righteous) due to broken hazard keyword handling. For a class I generally like and find well-balanced, they are clear trap choice talents. I reported this soooo many times... (I mean it makes as much sense as the ranger getting Scion of Flame and Spirit of Decay just because the arcane archer has an ability or two that benefit)

This is a great gathering of info and suggestions, but the game really needs more things that cares about the priest keywords because otherwise all this hard work is close to a no-op. (This is why I wanted to piggyback on Boeroer's idea of trinkets for items that provide specific effects based on priest keyword.) off the top of my head the most I think I can think of like three items that care about priest-specific keywords (xoti's lantern, mundane shell, and aloth's scepter, and "Cleansing" is never referenced as far as I can tell). druids only fare slightly better item-wise, but their subclasses interact more strongly with their keywords. edit - you left out cleansing i think only cleansing flame, magrans' might, and minor intercession have it.

I have been out of the pen and paper scene for a while, but ISTR that Pathfinder, D&D, etc. are all "one character round per turn" systems, like Deadfire TB-mode. Can someone explain like I'm dumb what's wrong with Deadfire's approach, because it seems analogous (and is based on an adaptation of the one character round per turn system into real-time via infinity engine)? I'm not saying that continuous turn based or tick system is bad--I loved playing Final Fantasy Tactics and enjoyed HoMM--just wondering what the reason why people feel that Deadfire needs to be like that versus the "once/turn" systems.

The intent of PL bonuses and whatnot are intended as "nudges" to encourage build variety. If priests have half of the possible spells that Wizards have, then each ability selection on level is worth "twice" as much. When a trinket provides a bonus spell, it becomes extremely easy to saturate the mid-higher ability levels, especially for a subclass like eothas who frequently doesn't even get a unique bonus spell. (Notably at AL6 the priest only has 4 different spells; only Wael gets a free fifth everyone else gets one of htose 4 for free which leaves only 3 for selection.) A wizard would only be vulnerable to something similar if they could pick two spells for every one ability point. Instead for wizards their large amount of spells per spell level simultaneously means they have to lean more on grimoires for spell diversity and they are less prone to being "crowded out" by said grimoires (both of which are very class-specific design philosophies). For talk of adding priest build diversity, naively implementing trinkets like you say would actually all but eliminate it for mid-high level priests (and to a lesser extent druids, though they are a bit more insulated by having a wee bit more spells/passives and subclasses with greater differentiation). edit - seriously though, is there really an optimal choice for every priest AL? it's starting to read to me that it's more of a "have a specific baseline play style for my priest that I want and it's too hard to deviate" vs "too many trap choices." Restore at AL1, Dire Blessing at AL3, and Devotions for the Faithful at AL4 are the closest things I can come up with that I would mandate any new priest player to pick up, everything else seems like a viable choice so long as you are flexible with what you think a priest in your party should do. (Except for Hand of Berath. That's probably a trap spell. And Prayer for the Body. That's probably too niche of a spell for general use.) they actually are, though not necessarily sufficiently weaker. A cipher won't be able to spam out AL7-9 effects straight at the start of a fight like any other caster, and a chanter is going to have to do a lot of waiting in between high-level invocations. I don't actually see too much of a balance problem here except in some specific fights (megabosses mostly, but also to a certain extent Porokoa in SSS as well as some challenges in SSS; possibly the dragon in BoW if you aren't able to circumvent llengrath's safeguard) or in specific non-standard technically-leaning challenges (solo mode) edit 2 - i do think martial classes in general are more constrained than caster classes in terms of active abilities and do agree that that is a bit problematic. it makes fighter/paladin regen all the more powerful due to how accessible they are. i'd rather a comprehensive fix for martial classes instead of leaning harder into buffing limited passives that only a couple classes get that are a) strong on their own and b) strong all the more because of a category-wide weakness. (the closest idea i had some time back was letting the first use of any given martial ability cost no class resource, so that it's less constraining to pick up a bunch of active effects in favor of spamming the same low-level one over and over. also some high-level martial abilities are likely overcosted. this is probably not something you could do with mods but has to be an obsidian-level change. also it may add too much complexity to the game.) edit 3 - for your specific example, it's important to note that 1 wound != 1 of any other class resource. wound costs for abilities are a lot more generously expensive because you are expected to generate a lot more over the course of the fight. generally speaking, too, the wound-spending martial abilities are also weaker to compensate for their higher level of use (force of anguish/efficient anguish is just a primary attack and prone (and a push that is a double-edged sword so i'll consider it a neutral effect); fighter knock down/mule kick gets bonus accuracy, bonus damage, a more powerful interrupt, and an affliction; essentially you make up the weakness of the former with sheer quantity). in terms of general balance it feels like the fighter/paladin/barbarian all seem to target generating just 1-2 resources for a typical fight with varying ways to potentially metagame them for more.

21 times! Wow, I'm not sure I rest that much in a normal no-challenge run, much less after already having played parts of the game. Seems unusually punishing.

i think this is a good direction though I personally don't have any firm ideas. after I wrote my long posts I was reflecting a bit on what I considered to be "auto-select" priest spells, and the only real one I can think of is Restore at AL1. Almost every single priest I've ever run has picked it up, it's just too important. Whereas even though there are some clearly "more generally useful" priest spells later on, I think at some point I have comfortably not-selected any given spell for some priest build, so I don't think the "clear selection" choice is too much of a problem as Boeroer suggests so much as it's more of a "not enough of a baseline competency" problem for priests (if you have your bases covered you feel more freedom to innovate/take more niche selections). But I think the general thrust of focusing more on priest/druids unique traits rather than making them more wizard-like is a good idea.

You'll be less surprised by game mechanics if you read like a lawyer. Deadfire IME is much closer to a game like M:TG than Baldur's Gate. Too bad there's no helpful "oracle"-style database that offers rules reminders for cards.

Imo the biggest problem with Priests and Druids is their very limited spell portfolio which forces you to forgo the circumstancial spells and always pick the same old spells. Grimoires solve this problem for Wizards - so it's only logical that trinkets that function somewhat similarly will solve that problem for Priests and Druids as well. They can be somewhat different (hence I only added on spell per PL or even a passive and added another bonuses) but in general that's what I think trinkets should be for. It's also nothing new that is difficult to implement/may cause balancing issues that are hard to foresee/easily understandable/uniform with grimoire trinkets. the problem is that wizards have *way* more spells than priest and druids, so if you have trinkets that provide even just 1 bonus spell per level, you are starting to severely crowd out meaningful choices upon level up and make the class/subclass more contingent on metagaming knowledge. Wizards have this problem a bit (more so on later levels), but it would be worse for druids/priests. (Wizards appear to have 2x the spells of priests and 2x to 1.5x the spells of druids, which means at level up a priest or druid spell selection is "worth" up to twice as much. At higher ability levels, priests would be extremely hard to distinguish, which would worsen the "same old spells" problem.) If we're talking about trying to add variability to priest builds while not introducing unknown quantities for balance purposes, then we should bring back a weaker version of the original subclasses with their favored and restricted keywords. E.G. "trinket of wael: +1 condemnation PL. -2 cleansing, -2 restoration PL" or "a different trinket of wael because wael is weird like that: +1 illusion, -2 fire, -2 electricity". (not to be treated as real examples, i haven't thought through the balancing symmetry there) ideally for druids and priests you'd do something like the wizard schools specialization where there's an organized logic to them so it's hard to get a trinket that just boosts the "standard" gameplay. edit - a possible zany idea are that trinkets have a simple +1 PL to some favored keyword (with a -somewhere to counterbalance) and bonus spells only for like ALs 1-3. edit 2 - something that would help the "crowd out" problem which I've long thought was needed for the wizard is that you get some sort of bonus for casting a spell that you both know and is in your grimoire/trinket. A +1 PL maybe.

Re: Boeroer and trinkets - I'd rather any priest or druid trinket have no bonus spell or casting-related extras. It makes the differentiation between druids/priests and wizards weaker. I'd rather the trinkets be more like Xoti's lantern, where they just interact with the various keywords that druids/priests have and which are otherwise extremely rare interacted with (and for priests specifically used to be way more relevant back in the days of the backer beta). Something like "Trinket of the Purifier: 15% chance for Cleansing priest abilities to echo" or "Doohickey of the Damned: chance to restore 1 class resource on critical hit with Condemnation priest ability" or "Twig of the Decrepit: empowered Decay effects restore 1 empower point". edit - looks like you added more about your trinket exampels