thelee

i am a bit biased, because i play priests a lot. but i play priests a lot and have a lot of experience with them. so i strongly believe they don't belong at the bottom--as a whole I think they're overall balanced, with some individual subclasses that shoot up the tier (wael, skaen). devotions of the faithful alone is still an amazing general-purpose buff/debuff.

I actually find Rogue not the best. My top four would be chanter, paladin and monk and wizard. oooh yeah, this is what i mean about me being paralyzed... i think it depends on what you're trying to do. i would rate chanter super highly just because they are unparallelled for big long fights (bosses, megabosses), but people who don't care about those fights (or skip a lot of them) might not rate chanter as highly.

I have trouble really coming up with a top 3 because I am paralyzed with being able to see merits in every class, but that being said wizards are definitely powerful and I just have to reiterate how early in the backer beta (and even around release) there were plenty of people who thought casters suck/were super underpowered. I feel like I literally predicted this outcome - every. damn. time people complain that fireballs don't do enough damage but then that's not the only thing wizards do, and nukes are not even the main reason why any caster can be so friggin good.

Simple - Bending Trunk to stay alive and kill as much as possible, then cast Smoke Veil to replenish resources and reset the fight. Come back and repeat until everyone is dead. I didn't think smoke veil would let you drop combat entirely like a Withdrawal does. I guess I'm wrong. I remember mobs still coming after you. Also I would have thought that the damage from all those mobs would eat through Unbending and Gipon Prudensco pretty quick, given he's dual wielding. Again I guess I'll have to go check. Thanks. Smoke Veil gives you invisibility+untargetability, and that's good enough to drop combat if there are no other viable targets. I think literally any invisibility or untargetability effect works like this. Plus, I would generally trust Kaylon to know what works for dropping combat, since Kaylon is a (the?) solo master around these parts. In my experience, solo experiences are only intended for people with a high tolerance for tedium.

Int should have 0 effect on a consumable. The only clues here: -17% is exactly equivalent to a -4 PL deficit and -9% is exactly equivalent to a -2 PL deficit. So it definitely seems like we're looking at something related to PL scaling and an inherent ability level. If you take off everything from each character, do you still get the variations? What passives do they have? Do they have other skills (in case bubbling chalice is looking at something else other than alchemy)? Importantly we'd be looking for something that is different between Eder and Pallegina by two in some way (it could also be a multiple of two) and which Pallegina has more of. edit: also, who was holding it when you took the screenshot for the -13% ?

from a micromanagement perspective, if you're worried about a particular enemy, have you considered pressing "x" to cancel any action by your melee-er just so that you're actively doing nothing until you start seeing an ability being used?

I have played hundreds of hours and have never gotten a baby boar from Chief Echoing-Strike. looking it up now it appears to be a function of me never having hte stealth to sneak closer and observe. looking at it now, the baby boar sounds like an insane pet. Is it a 100% interrupt chance??

Have you considered a blood mage. On top of Thrust at AL1 there's also Slicken, which prones repeatedly for a short duration. Even if the cast time makes it hard to interrupt a specific ability when you see one first being used, the repeated prones means it will very likely keep the enemy locked down and interrupt future ability uses. With a blood mage and some external source of healing, you can basically be a perma-interrupter for important fights. Use Slicken or Thrust, then blood sacrifice you get a guaranteed AL1 cast back. Interrupt again (or cast another overlapping slicken). Blood sacrifice to get a guaranteed AL1 cast back. Repeat until you no longer need to lock down the enemy. No other wizard can do this (at least without a source of Brilliant). Rogues are also very good at interruption because literally every single one of their offensive martial abilities has interrupt on hit. Dual-wield a rogue, use something like Escape or Smoke Veil to hop next to someone you want to interrupt, and make sure they never get anything done ever again. If you get Smoke Cloud and one of its upgrades you can interrupt a huge area in one go. Monks are great interrupters. With passive wound generation (Dance of Death ability, Mortification of the Soul ability, Nazpalca subclass, Shattered Pillar subclass) you can use Efficient Anguish as an infinite source of prones (albeit you have to hit fortitude to do so). They also get Skyward Kick which is a knock up---kind of like an interrupt on steroids. Fighters are also great interrupters. They also get a knock up effect (Mule Kick). You can also use a tactician subclass which will basically grant you infinite resources to be an interrupter.

That really sucks dude. I don't have much to say, other than in PoE1 after losing a few runs due to game-breaking bugs, yes, I manually ended up saving and keeping back ups of those saves just to preserve the iron man runs. If Deadfire's not autosaving for ironman, that's even worse than PoE1 (which at the very least did autosave, and made keeping backup saves easier--just alt-tabbing and copying the save file to a backup folder--instead of having to exit completely all the time). Developers really should not be designing game modes that rely on games being crash proof.... ever (I had similar hair-pulling crashes doing Fallout 4 survival mode). But I empathize with you, that sucks.

A long long time ago, various consumables had different "inherent ability level" much in the same way abilities have an inherent ability level. If you had total PL less than this inherent ability level, you would actually get PL scaling penalties (with inversions) instead of PL bonuses. With like patch 2.0 or something, they were supposed to have rebalanced all consumabesl to have an inherent ability level of 0, so you could only get upside scaling from PL. It looks like the bubbling chalice might have a high inherent ability level, and that's why you are seeing negative scaling attributed to "level" ("level" in tooltips encompasses power level scaling [which includes scaling from skill points like alchemy] and character level). Other effect you talk about (bonus or penalty to healing) would not be attributed to "level." Similarly, negative or positive effects from resolve never show up in tooltips, they only show up in combat log implicitly (when the actual duraiton for an effect diverges from the hover-over duration, you can impute the difference due to resolve). I do not know why it would vary from character to character if they are all level 20 and they all have the same alchemy skill. Do they have other PL bonuses? Are some multiclass vs single-class? -13% due to "level" is exactly what you would expect if your total PL was 3 less than the inherent ability level (1-1/1.15)... just as a theory, for example, a multiclass character caps out at exactly 3 less PL than a single-class character with Prestige. Either way, at the very least having a high inherent ability level for a consumable is buggy - it should be tweaked so that internally it is AL0.

both pistols and blunderbusses do less damage than average compared to other ranged weapons on top of having a crappier penetration setup. their main advantage is their single-handedness while also being reloading. have you considered single-weapon styleing a pistol with the rushed reload weapon modal on? probably much better outcome than dual-wielding two pistols (and you don't even need to pick up the weapon style ability to get use out of it, since crits aren't too useful for guns).

depends on if the guns have any special passive bonuses that you can combine, but yes, in general you are correct. in fact, if you have a particular gun or one-handed ranged-weapon that you like to use a lot, it is optimal to wield it with a one-handed melee weapon instead of a lesser second gun, if no full attacks are in play.

oh ok, i missed that you were still talking about full attacks

case 1: i'm not following. are you saying that there's a bug where the +50% recovery penalty is only being applied to the offhand if you have two different modals active? because I surely feel like from my most recent run that this is not the case. as for case 2: the recovery penalty is effectively less, but so is the effective damage bonus, so I don't know what's special about this case.

In fact this is what bothers me in my game, there is no overlap of Chants, when active Brisk Recitation, in practice this is leaving me confused as long as its efficiency remains active Brisk Recitation. I'm sorry, I truly don't think I can help you. I think the language barrier is too great, there's just constant misunderstanding, and I feel like I'm going in circles trying to explain basic stuff.

you're going to have to explain that to me! say what?

I don't know where you read this stuff, but I definitely use Brisk Recitation a lot, especially in boss fights. While by default it's nice to have overlap with no effort, if you don't use Brisk Recitation advantageously, you are throwing away half of the troubadour's strengths, because otherwise they are just much worse at invocations. But if I keep active 'Brisk Recitation', does the linger go to 0? and even with + x1.5, does not get smaller than those of an ordinary Chanter? Note: On Google, I'll see what they say. I think you're misunderstanding something about Brisk Recitation. I don't know what you mean by "smaller" because Brisk Recitation has no effect on area. Yes, Brisk Recitation means linger goes to 0, but that's the whole point - sometimes it is worth trading off linger to get invocations faster, and both Boeroer and I have mentioned cases where losing linger is actually not much of a drawback because the faster chant interacts advantageously with itself.

+3 PEN would probably do it. covers most of the underpen cases, which is probably when you'd want it to be used.

Aren't these modals worth it only between -4 to -2 PEN ? This is exactly the same range unless I miss something... No. In general, the modals are worth it from -4 to -2 (even -3 to -2 for maces), -3 to -1, -2 to 0. In terms of PEN only time they are not worth it, is trying to go from normal to overpenetration, or from -1 to normal.

Setting aside my actual thoughts on this kind of rebalancing, concerns I have: 1. Did you rebalance raw damage? They always do full damage, which means in your rebalancing where you need to basically overpenetrate to do 100% damage, all sources of raw damage got a buff. 2. Did you rebalance weapon modals? With the current numbers, +2 PEN for +50% recovery time is basically only worth it for -5 PEN to -3 PEN, which is much narrower than in vanilla.

I don't know where you read this stuff, but I definitely use Brisk Recitation a lot, especially in boss fights. While by default it's nice to have overlap with no effort, if you don't use Brisk Recitation advantageously, you are throwing away half of the troubadour's strengths, because otherwise they are just much worse at invocations.

noooooooooooooo down with sawyer, forever nemnok! NEMNOK, NEMNOK

If it really is just an implementation detail to get the bonus PL to the active invocation, then the subclass description should be adjusted so that it doesn't mention that the PL bonus lasts for a while, because that strongly implies it's something you can use with something else or is mechanically relevant somehow. I agree with Frak that without that clarification, it itches my brain a bit like a splinter, like the designers wanted it to do something but they messed it up.

If PoE3 is TB-only then I will not touch it, not because I won't play any TB game but because I will consider it to be Obsidian throwing us RTwP fans under the bus. Mostly I won't touch it because I don't like TB-only experiences (ironic because back in the 90s I loved TB games like Fallout, FFT, whatnot). This is not meant to be spiteful, just not my cup of tea. Who knows, maybe some higher-up at Obsidian is making some cold calculus about whether or not the # of RtwP fans they would lose would be made up for by the # of TB fans they gain. I hope not, because I like PoE as a world and would be sad if I missed out on it because they decided to lean into a game mechanic I didn't like.

Came here from the forbidden fist bug thread. Honestly I think you're overstating the severity of the problem. While it is true that it is a slightly weird interaction that self-harm effects scale with both int (in the maleficent direction) and resolve (in the beneficent direction) this is a case where the game design benefits from the simplicity of being consistent with the existing rules of how intellect and resolve work. In addition, in many cases it can serve as a fun extra design space, where intellect and resolve act as an interesting tension for abilities that give you self-harm in exchange for longer or shorter benefits. Carving out exceptions for self-harm duration while retaining self-harm damage scaling just adds more cognitive load for people to try to have to pay attention to for such a limited/narrow set of cases and also pre-eliminates a possible design space. I think it's bad enough that Obsidian removed perception, intellect, and might influences on consumables (doing so creates odd interactions already), I would really hate for yet another set of carve out exceptions. The issue with forbidden fist is that it's just a broken ability top to bottom, doing way too much damage (even without scaling) and having a flat +10s duration mechanic that ignoring any duration scaling is way too punishing for such a narrow benefit (on top of the class not having good way of generating wounds). It's independent of whether it disadvantageously "benefits" from intellect.