thelee

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).

The whole topic is about it. Might. @thelee I'd personally take any other system besides PoE1 or 2. Look at all the useless passive and active skills too. Intuitive in this particular area is in the eye of the beholder. Mechanically, it's the most straight-forward thing you could possibly do. Might - more damage of any kind. How can you get more intuitive than an across-the-board unconditional damage increase? The original point of this thread appears to be that the unintuitiveness comes into how it's used in checks, which is orthogonal to the actual stat system.

false In my mind, people who are stubborn about not using hirelings for Gorecci St or the Engwithan Digsite are making the game harder for themselves, intentionally or not. Those encounters aren't balanced for a party of three (though they are doable with three via pulling and splitting), they are balanced for a party of five. With a party of five, Gorecci St or Engwithan Digsite are challenging, but not really that much more challenging (if at all) than any other PotD encounter. As you seem to be rather good at the game, I'd like to hear your opinion on whether pulling and splitting tends to be rather hard in Deadfire. In my view, the answer is yes. Fights tend to result in mob combats. Sometimes the architecture allows for other possibilities, but often not. Would appreciate your thoughts on this. yeah, AI in Deadfire is a little smarter than in PoE1 so in my experience pulling and splitting is a little harder, or at least a little less obvious. Noisy things that don't leave persistent effects (sparkcrackers mostly) can let you pull off a few enemies and you can use more to keep pulling them forward until they are far enough away that putting them in combat won't automatically pull everyone else in the encounter. Gorecci St and Engwithan Digsite are easier in this respect because the encounters already start off with enemies separated by some physical distance so you don't need to pull them too far to break their "connection" (so even setting a trap to pull them a few feet will work). Outside of taking advantage of loud effects, it is definitely still doable if you have stride speed bonuses and just run for a while, while picking on the enemy you want to keep pulling. Example: I cleared a lot of BoW encounters in an earlier run by having stride bonus paladin aura active and using ydwin to arterial strike an enemy I wanted to keep pulling. At least back when I tried this, it created a weird interaction where the un-hobbled enemies would pass by the hobbled enemy, but then I would run too far away too quickly, so they would hit their "pull" limit and run back, but the hobbled enemy hadn't yet reached their pull distance limit, so they would keep running (hobbling) towards me. If I needed to hit them again to keep them coming, some of the un-hobbled enemies would pull again, but I'd just repeat. Eventually, the hobbled enemy (if they weren't already dead yet from all the raw damage they were taking) would reach their pull distance limit, but then if you just have a party member close enough they'll keep running (like in PoE1). At that point they are too far away from their friends that you can take them out without pulling anyone else. I mostly did this out of laziness because arterial strike works like gangbusters in this kind of situation.

hey waddya know the squeaky wheel got the grease.

false PotD rebalancing was tuned for people who like to powergame. The most trivial part of powergaming is to have a full party of five. A casual PotD-er could get away with just one hireling, but otherwise I would assume from beginning to end that you are expected to have a full party, unless it's physically impossible (i.e. Vilario's Rest where at most you just have Eder). In my mind, people who are stubborn about not using hirelings for Gorecci St or the Engwithan Digsite are making the game harder for themselves, intentionally or not. Those encounters aren't balanced for a party of three (though they are imo easily doable with three via pulling and splitting), they are balanced for a party of five. With a party of five, Gorecci St or Engwithan Digsite are challenging, but not really that much more challenging (if at all) than any other PotD encounter.

I'll take JE Sawyer's stat system over most other stat systems I've ever seen in an RPG. It's not perfect, but very few are good enough to have even what little flaws PoE/Deadfire has.

one of the TB screenshots is a party fighting Dorudugan. Given how much of a grind that fight is in RtWP, I can only imagine what that fight is like in TB mode. JE Sawyer mentioned some encounter rebalancing (I think he explicitly cited some SSS encounters that were specifically designed to be grindy in RtWP), but I guess they didn't do a lot?

This is low. And it doesn't help your reasoning. yeah, 1. English is not everyone's first language on these boards, so one should make allowances. 2. All you're demonstrating about affect and effect is that you're fully capable of parsing the pragmatics of a sentence, but you're choosing not to because you want to be an annoying pedant about the semantics. moving on...

level scaling is limited to plus or minus 4 levels. so while it will bring down or uplift encounters to try to make things easier or make things harder, it will only do so to a point. i think in part this is because level scaling can only do so much (even if a tiny xaurip could upscale all the way to level 20 it'd still have extremely lame abilities and be easy to deal with).

parenthetically, the difference between just the base invocation and the upgrade is one of the hugest such differences in the game in my opinion. By itself it's an alright ability, with the upgrade, I would put it as one of the best abilities in the game. Effectively infinite, blanket -2 AR is just so universally good.

I'd like you to meet my friend Scroll of Paralysis. I mean, that exists in Deadfire too and is still pretty good and easier to get (craft). I'd like you to meet my friend Scroll of Gaze of the Adragan? For your complaint specifically: I'd like you meet my friend "using the weapon modals that grant +2 PEN because that's the entire point of many slow weapons" ? I'd like you to meet my friend Scroll of Expose Vulnerabilities? edit: whoops, got ninja'ed by MountainTiger

it sounds like the OP is saying that even primary attacks also get the -35% damage penalty, which is clearly a bug. it should only apply to dual-wielded full attacks. Should it? actually i don't know Turn-based kind of messes up my ideas of deadfire balance.

Your post is choke full of the "gitgood" elitism that is ruining modern gaming. It was also called Path of the Damned in PoE1 where it was much better balanced. Is single-player gaming supposed to be some kind of elimination contest these days with each new installment being progressively harder until video games are unplayable for everyone but the select few? Ehhh, like MountainTiger said, I would actually consider PotD on PoE1 incredibly brutal early on, moreso than Deadfire. The Eothas dungeon or the throne room in Raedric (god help you if you don't take a stealthy way in) or even Caed Nua getting to Maerwald are all things that can very quickly obliterate a suboptimal party or under-skilled player (hell, even the cave bears can wreck a suboptimal or underskilled player). And unlike Deadfire you really have no choice to get around most of these - that's pretty much all you can do in Act I, whereas in Deadfire you can skip some of the harder fights (Gorecci St, the risen skeletons at the dig site) and once you get your boat fixed you have the flexibility to do all sorts of things to build up your levels. Eventually I got gud enough to do Act 1 in PoE1 pretty easily with a five (instead of six) person party that is not completely optimized, but it took a while to get there. maybe actually try working with the PEN and AR system...? Also over hundreds of hours in and I've never needed to metagame to get to Grave Calling, early PotD is eminently doable without it. edit: also, there are other difficulty levels than PotD. Expecting everyone to be able to do PotD is a) not the balancing goal of PotD and b) ...entitled? It would be less entitled if people were more willing to admit "maybe I'm not good enough to beat PotD." I mean... what's wrong with admitting that? I will never beat the hardest AI in SC2 much less stand much of a chance on ladder, I'm not going to be great at Overwatch, and I'm really never going to be able to invest the time to do the hardest few difficulties of any of the modern Civs (if I even had the potential to do e.g. Deity)

light of the dawnstar scales with religion at like 5 +.25% per religion and it rounds. I think I've gotten up to 11% with xoti putting everything into religion (as recently as 4.1.1). it's very slow scaling. re: mirrorback, if you have console enabled, can you create/equip a Pearlescent Rhomboid Helstone https://pillarsofeternity2.wiki.fextralife.com/Pearlescent+Rhomboid+Helstone and see if it shows up in character screen? That definitely works with spell reflect (I had Eder use it to get enemy mages to kill themselves with minoletta's sigil a few patches ago), so if it doesn't show up in character screen then the fact that Mirrorback doesn't show doesn't mean it doesn't work. also, not every item shows its effect on the character screen, especially conditional ones. for gambeson, the best way to test would be to just sit there with aloth or a mage spamming missiles at someone equipping the gambeson. that'll give you a quick answer whether or not it works (if you reflect a spell with it, it should attribute the effect to the item itself). funnily enough, i had a very similar set up to you in my last run (xoti with light of the dawnstar, spell resistance, mirrorback, and then gambeson until i replaced it with weyc). i'd be interested to know if any of that is actually broken.