thelee

I've been doing a lot of tests to understand the mechanics of the new subclasses more thoroughly, and, I think there are some possible issues with the chanter. It basically boils down to "why does it matter that the bellower's +PL buff has a duration?" From my testing, virtually no chant gets any PL scaling (I didn't test them all, but I tested a representative slice covering all the different "types" of chants). So the only thing that the bellower's chanter-specific +PL bonus buff actually influences are invocations. And the bellower buff duration is irrelevant for invocations! Because you get the +PL bonus on the invocation you use it with, so the fact that the +PL effect lingers doesn't seem to matter. And as far as I can tell, because chants aren't influenced by PL, and the +PL bonus is keyworded/limited to just chanter effects, it actually doesn't affect anything else in the game (e.g. potions, scrolls, bombs, abilities from a multiclass). Relatedly, chants do get scaling effects, but they seem to be based on a chanter-specific character level-based scaling. E.G. The Dragon Thrashed, or Ancient Memory, etc will all get stronger effects, but the +% bonus on them are based on your character level, not on any PL. Similarly, The Fox chant, the anti-concentration chant, etc all get +1 accuracy per character level above 1. And then just straight-up buff chants get no effect at all. Is this intended? Because if so, it's a very peculiar, chanter-specific type of scaling, and it also means that the bellower's +PL buff has no sway over them. I don't think it's relevant, but in case devs want to look at my test game: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wvsib72ett937vf/AAB7X3XOkz6bPOcIL8Wvk3KJa?dl=0 EDITed to add: it seems like at the very least that chanter chants should scale normally with PL (though this will hurt their accuracy a bit), but this still leaves the bellower buff duration as something of a mystery, because even with a stupidly high intellect, the +PL would only manage to affect two chants. Perhaps the bellower effect should provide +1 PL/phrase on the invocation, and then have its own "linger" that provides a generic +.5 or lower PL/phrase for a short duration. At that point, at least the bellower buff would have multiclassing or consumable utility.

Hi, thanks for the reply. She has a ton of chants stuck in her list and keeps on reverting to the speed chant. She started chanting again, but I have to manually switch her back to it every time I reload and switch to stealth. She starts every fight now with her chant in cooldown... She started chanting again finally, but still reverts to a chant I no longer have as a part of her spec constantly and her list is overloaded with old chants. I tried reloading, respeccing, deleting the chants manually...nothing works. Happened first when I tried to fight "Frightened child" from the forgotten Sanctum DLC. I can't attach a save file because it's too big, so I sent an email to support. Probably most effective way to get it to them is to get Dropbox, upload it to dropbox (or put it in a local dropbox folder), and right-click on it to get a dropbox link and post it here. Emailing support might just put it into a blackhole and not the people who need to see it right here.

Patch notes for 4.0.0 have this tidbit: EDIT: jeez, the forums ate everything I wrote after the quote. Anyway, from playing 4.0, if anything Vela is much more fragile than before, seeming to put to lie what these patch notes say. Anecdotally, it seems like Vela was getting more resilient as I was leveling up. While she couldn't withstand dedicated punishment, I would actually see her go to Bloodied/Near Death, since she had enough health to actually take a few hits. Now, she seems to be one-shot by literally anything. At first I thought my increased difficulty was simply that she wanders around now, meaning she is more likely to be in danger, but literally anything appears to one shot her now. It's such that if I don't have 100% withdraw uptime on her, I'm probably at 2/3 to 3/4 chance that the encounter will game over due to an out-of-nowhere incidental hit that will one shot vela. If anything, I don't think Vela is getting any or only marginal health, since I just did a test and whacked her for 24 damage, which put her at Near Death, which definitely feels way squishier than what she was at 3.1.1. Keep in mind I'm in pretty much the same area as I was in 3.1.1 (BoW DLC). In 3.1.1 if a Frost Shade attacked her, or a rogue targeted her, I would actually have enough time to do something about it (because she could take a bit of punishment at level 15). But with 4.0, like I said, I basically need to have 100% withdraw uptime because if one rogue decides to Escape next to her and hit her, she's basically a goner before I can do anything. Dropbox link to quicksave and (OS X) output log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hbo7uww4hk3vz9z/AADx-wJRWFrhdNEfryzc6XeWa?dl=0

Got it confirmed that this is intended behavior. Whooo this run is going to be a doozy now. I might have to save the other two DLC for a future run.

I was on the train that corpse-eater just sucked sucked sucked (I even made a post about this a while back), but similar to what Boeroer says I think the fact that they get special +PL food helps a great deal and helps paper over their drawback in fights where they can't take advantage of eating bodies. Not completely, but it's at least a bit less painful. This was something I had to play myself to fully appreciate. I still think the mage-slayer is just way too niche and narrowly focused. If there's one class I think needs a buff, it's this one. Not necessarily because "it sucks" but because it's way too easy for some new player to build a mage slayer that will just be awful because of the depth of its drawbacks and the narrowness of its strengths, and pillars otherwise tries real hard to promote maximum viability of playstyles. I get annoyed at people who critique theorycrafting because I like theorycrafting, but it *is* true that sometimes you have to see something in action in good faith to fully appreciate how it works. Relatedly I strongly disagree with people who think priests suck or are lame in Deadfire, as I probably am the flip side to Boeroer except with priests, all but one of my runs have involved a priest mainchar of some sort (the other one was a druid); I think people just see some stuff on paper, don't really see the point, and don't give it a good shot to appreciate how good some stuff is.

1 day. it sucks. as a corpse-eater i have to rely on vessel flesh and eggs to make the alternate version of the pie (and eggs expire in 3 days). i suspect i won't actually be able to take much advantage of kith meat unless i'm actively near the shimmering isle (which has infintie stock of it). fortunately the vessel flesh version is basically as good as the kith meat version where it matters (the +2 PL).

Would be helpful to know if this is an intentional difficulty increase for the challenge, or a bug introduced in 4.0. Basically, in 3.1/3.1.1, with Hylea's Challenge on, if you entered combat, Vela would stay where she was and stay cowering the entire time (with the "Afraid" status). With 4.0, instead she periodically stops cowering, wanders a bit, and then starts cowering again. The net effect of this is that it makes combat much harder (because now I can't pre-position her and have to rely more on 100% withdraw uptime lest she gleefuly runs up next to an enemy). I can provide a save if necessary, but didn't see anything about this aspect of Hylea's challenge mentioned in the 4.0 patch notes so am unclear if this was an intentional change or a bug.

Well holy mother...! A hidden change of 4.0 is that Vela now periodically wanders around the battlefield in addition to cowering, significantly escalating the difficulty of this challenge. I just spent two hours clearing two and then failing to clear a third encounter in the BoW bridge ablaze sequence, because if I don't have Withdraw at 100% uptime, she will wander and she will get one shot by either a burned archer or a burned soldier. I don't know what extra defenses Vela got in the patch, because it sure ain't helping much. Withdraw and/or Beetle Shell are basically mandatory for this challenge.

"See what JE Sawyer thinks about Deadfire ship combat! Fearguses hate this one weird trick!"

thanks for the quick turnaround on this bug I reported. Must've been an easy fix!

Steam client is awful when it comes to DLC. What I do that sometimes work is un-check the DLC, then re-check it. Sometimes that kickstarts steam to start downloading it.

Yeah, it's weird. At no point did he suggest it was actually half-assed so the title is misleading, and this isn't a Kotaku article it's a forum thread. I don't know, the quotes definitely read to me like it was half-assed. There's two possible meanings here: JE Sawyer put half-assed effort into it, or the system itself is half-assed (essentially: half-baked). I don't think the first is justfied, but the second is definitely justified by the quotes. That being said, while ship combat isn't great and has its problems, I also certainly don't think it's actively bad - i think the main problem is that it's strongly wanting in tactics and there's a lot of RNG and murkiness to it (read: what the hell do deckhands actually do?), but as a way to realize the strategic payoff of investing in your ship, it's a fun minor diversion. But if they had the resources to do a major content patch (though from the Forgotten Sanctum twitch streams doesn't sound like they do post-4.0) investing in ship combat would be a wise choice IMO.

"Kaz is much happier and generally more friendly than when you first found him hiding in Hasongo."

Other priests do get Pull of Rymrgand. Re: the design decision for how AL9 priest spells work, I'm pretty sure it's more of a cost-benefit analysis. Very few players (relatively) will get all the way to AL9, so it's probably not worth investing a lot in developing a crapton of AL9 spells. On top of that, priests are structured to get bonus spells, and that means by default you have to define N AL9 spells, where N is roughly equivalent to the number of priest subclasses, on top of whatever "base" AL9 spells... all for something that even for the relatively few players who do get AL9 spells, they'll only be able to cast one of in any given encounter (unless they raise the level cap, which is highly unlikely). Basically all other spellcasters similarly taper off on the number of spells they get as you get into higher ALs, for similar reasons. (This was also true in the last few IE-style games that JE Sawyer had a hand in, which was PoE1 and Icewind Dale 2; IIRC particularly in IWD2 I think there were only two non-subclass-specific level 9 priest spells.) So anyway, it seems like a compromise to get priest subclasses a unique AL9 spell, give priests general spell selection diversity at AL9, but also not waste a lot of highly-expensive payroll on something that will see little play. Even if what I said is true (Woedica getting unique AL9 needing to be balanced out), losing Incarnate still feels like an oversight. No priest subclass actively removes spells from the priest spell tree. Probably like you said they didn't quite think it all the way through when dropping in the Woedica subclass and don't have the time to create a unique Incarnate. Though at the very least they could use the Skaen incarnate (since the two deities are so closely aligned). They did that for Xoti (she uses the Eothas incarnate since Gaun is just an aspect of Eothas). EDIT: from a lore perspective, PoE1 was all about restoring Woedica, and lorewise Woedica is the Exiled Queen or the Queen That Was, so it could make sense that there's no active incarnate of Woedica because she's out of power. Though Deadfire kind of drops that aspect of Woedica IMO since she's in all the deity sequences and no one seems to care or notice whether or not she is or isn't in power.

I think the mega bosses are there purely as an additional challenge. Though if they all feel like dropping lots of adra ban and emerald for high-level crafting recipes I wouldn't mind (so you can replenish between fights). Objectively - what would be the point if mega bosses dropped sweet lewt? Mega bosses are basically the hard endgame... you're by definition already decked out just to fight them. What do you need that sweet lewt for afterwards? To even more roflstomp the already-incredibly-easy-at-level-20 encounters in Ukaizo? Anyway, the megabosses are the reason why you want the sweet lewt in the first place. Having the megabosses drop sweet lewt themselves seems a bit backwards. I kill the mega bosses only for the loot because I don't like to do things without purpose. If they would drop nothing I would kill them once for fun and then I wouldn't bother with them again. And since I kill them for the loot I feel the rewards are not proportional to the challenge and that's disappointing. PS. Also I would like if you could stop quoting me because it seems you have either a hard way to grasp my ideas, either a tendency of skewing them using false assumptions or flawed logic. Boy you are one hostile person. All I did was probe why one wants big lewt dropped from megabosses, which Gregorovich also probed about "Plus in Deadfire introducing such loot from Mega booses is not interesting, as you will be able to use it only at the final battle or some low-level encounters, like going aboard."

thinking about it a little, while I'm not sure there's a lore-specific reason, from a gameplay perspective Woedicans get a completely unique AL9 spell (which literally no other priest does) - everyone else gets a deity-specific spell that any other priest could pick up. It could be that the "cost" for this, is to give up a unique Symbol spell at AL8, and give up Incarnate at AL9.

they don't? (haven't tried beta) Well, I checked with the beta and no, they don't... shame because Woedica's challenge is already pretty rough with the no healing and only prepared meals counting for camping. so empower is only use for the +5 PL bonus then? interesting decision...

Yeah, I guess I should've said "when it's correct Deadfire is pretty clear." Most stuff is pretty clear, in part because it's auto-generated. Then you have funky stuff with keywording or unclearly auto-generated tooltips (like the withering strike ugprade that does more damage over time).

I think the mega bosses are there purely as an additional challenge. Though if they all feel like dropping lots of adra ban and emerald for high-level crafting recipes I wouldn't mind (so you can replenish between fights). Objectively - what would be the point if mega bosses dropped sweet lewt? Mega bosses are basically the hard endgame... you're by definition already decked out just to fight them. What do you need that sweet lewt for afterwards? To even more roflstomp the already-incredibly-easy-at-level-20 encounters in Ukaizo? Anyway, the megabosses are the reason why you want the sweet lewt in the first place. Having the megabosses drop sweet lewt themselves seems a bit backwards.

Most of Deadfire mechanics are actually quite clear - you just have to read them like a lawyer, paying very close attention to wording, and then you generally won't be surprised. Inversions are probably the main obtuse aspect of PoE.

they don't? (haven't tried beta)

#1 seems like a massive oversight.

I thought it's just the name of status effect - so the player knew where it came from.If that bonus PL affects only chants and invocations... then what's the point of this subclass? (provided that its only +0.5 PL per phrase consumed) Can anyone in beta branch comment on this being generic PL or chanter-specific PL bonus? Having it be chanter-specific PL is dumb but frankly not outside the realm of possibility of something that Obsidian might do, misunderstanding that e.g. chants don't have any PL scaling.

why are people talking about brilliant? did i miss some change? I thought it always get +1 random spell for casters.

What "classical" RPGs have you been playing? I agree. Mage Slayer and Shattered Pillar are still a mess. Mage Slayer and Corpse-Eater. I actually don't think Shattered Pillar is that bad, definitely not as troubled as those two barbarian subclasses.