thelee

Dear Sirs, can you please do not copy 'multiple-quote' posts? Thank. https://media.giphy.com/media/10DVcUchEQUdFu/giphy.gif

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing. what's wrong with illusionist/priest of berath? The powerlevel of both classes. My comment about nature godlike powerlevels was in reference to the suggested +1 pl the special class would provide in the scenario the poster imagined in his original quote. Given your lack of reading, I'm not gonna bother responding further. Apparently you lack reading comprehension, because I accounted for that in my response. +1 PL from nature, +1 from that proposed subclass = +2. Not something that can be "replicated" by nature godlike, because class bonuses don't replace anything or get suppressed; they stack additively. The power level of both classes in an illusionist/priest of berath is fine and is no different from any other multiclass. and again, there's no relevant penalties. At this point given your flippant flouncing, I have to assume you actually know very little about what you're talking about.

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing. what's wrong with illusionist/priest of berath? it's probably not super synergistic, but it's also not bad. there are no relevant penalties. (i've contemplated rolling one just as a flavorful lich-type mainchar) edit: and actually, illusionist gives up conjuration and enchantment. priest of berath adds back in buffing and summoned weapons, so in that sense it is at least somewhat synergistic. edit 2: and also while i'm not too keen on debating purely speculative kit ideas, your critiques are almost objectively wrong. +1 bonus PL can't be "replicated" by a nature godlike, because it would stack with any nature godlike, so you could be a nature godlike and this proposed class for +2 PL. Same thing with the recovery time bonus (which I assume was meant to be a -20% recovery time bonus or a +20% action speed bonus; either way it's massive). There's nothing stopping you from having high dex and a casting speed bonus. Incoming damage increase by 5% is frankly puny and way too little for getting such a hugely universal PL bonus and casting speed bonus (and with access to enchantment and illusion you shouldn't be getting hit that much anyway). Spell casting 5% of your max health is a drawback, but one that is pretty easy to trivialize with some metagaming (and can be advantageously taken advantage of in certain setups). Sounds like a completely plausible kit to me. In fact, I would actually say it's too good as it is.

Why? The sub-classes of wizards are bad. You lose access to 2 schools for 2 power levels. If it were +10 PL, i would say ok, but +2 is not enough. That needs a complete rework. +10 PL is way too obscene. The subclasses aren't really that bad. They are more niche. If all you do is focus in on your specialized school, you are strictly better than a normal wizard in every way possible. Try rolling an evoker, transmute, or illusionist. Conjurers and enchanters need some help because PL scaling is really bad for buffs and summons. I haven't tried them personally, but I would think that Illusionists suffer more than Conjurers. The vast majority of illusions just get duration and (for the debuffs) tiny ACC boosts from a higher PL. Conjurers at least have some staple spells that benefit from the PL scaling on Damage and Penetration (NecLance, NoxBurst, the Walls, etc.). Are there even Illusions that do direct damage besides Wall of Many Colors? (That said, the non-spell specialization benefit and excluded schools probably both favor Illusionists.) Concelhaut's Crushing Doom are illusion spell Kalakoth's Freezing Rake is illusion as well. (Noxious Burst is transmutation, not conjuration. and I think only Wall of Force and Draining are conjuration. Flame is evocation, Many Colors is illusion). Also, getting tiny multiplicative debuff duration buffs is not bad if the base durations are short and the effect is powerful. It just is a little worse for many conjuration/enchanting spells because the base durations for many wizard buffs/summons are already soooo long, that an extra +10% on something you already have going for almost a minute is not really that great. Meanwhile, squeaking out an extra second from Gaze of the Adragon (also illusion) or an extra prone from Slicken (transmutation) is really powerful. That being said, both the conjurer and enchanter have semi-decent secondary bonuses (Conjurer especially - their summoned familiar is guaranteed to get you a stacking +1 PL buff on top of +3 to a random stat and some other bonus). Evocation is still king because evocation spells get way too good of a boost from +2 PL (especially multi-projectile spells) and their special wizard subclass bonus (the echo chance) is amazeballs. The echo chance alone would be worth being an evoker, TBH. (Also evokers [and conjurers] get the extra secret buff that the +10% recovery penalty is only half as bad as other specializations because most enchantment spells have no recovery to speak of.)

Why? The sub-classes of wizards are bad. You lose access to 2 schools for 2 power levels. If it were +10 PL, i would say ok, but +2 is not enough. That needs a complete rework. +10 PL is way too obscene. The subclasses aren't really that bad. They are more niche. If all you do is focus in on your specialized school, you are strictly better than a normal wizard in every way possible. Try rolling an evoker, transmute, or illusionist. Conjurers and enchanters need some help because PL scaling is really bad for buffs and summons.

This is what I'm talking about. This is a rationalization that dodges the issue. In the basics of any system, a heal should put you into a better situation than you were in before. (We're not even talking about interactions with other effects or abilities, just simply a heal when you're at low endurance and low health). It is easy to run into situations with the way health/endurance was handled in PoE1 where healing will actually put you in a worse situation. Your response glosses over this. I mean, I feel like this is a trivial statement, but it's really because "a heal should put you into a better situation than you were in before" was so axiomatic in virtually any other RPG system that it feels really headache-y to explicitly have to say this, and it really is a mark on health/endurance that it needs to be made explicitly clear. edit: it's not even a matter of being "not far from resting anyway." with a lot of druid or priest heals and several squishies (including said druid or priest) e.g. a wizard or anyone else with a low health multiplier, all it takes is a few enemy aoes that you heal back from and suddenly you've drained through a huge amount of your health. if you roll a spellblade-y type (wizard with summoning weapons and buffs) it's not uncommon to get to lower health much faster than everyone else in your party.

That's not the scenario though, the scenario is letting a party member go down because if you heal them instead they die.

Oh yeah, I mentioned this in the announcement thread, but Woedica's combined with Rymrgand will be great for anyone who wants really limited rests. Many prepared foods last as little as 1 day, so you could really be out the ability to rest while out wandering. (Not to mention the ingredients needed to prep food spoil as well. Not going to lie probably not going to combine these challenges ever)

JUST when they finally nerfed it, it becomes obscene again

I guess my big question to health/endurance defenders is: what does health/endurance get you that you can't accomplish some other way? To me, it's an overly complicated and unnecessary hack that leads to unintuitive outcomes. You can accomplish the same thing with other mechanisms, and I cited Tyranny as an example of accumulating wounds even when just injured (whereas Deadfire theoretically you can have zero multi-encounter constraints if you never get knocked out, which isn't that hard especially on lower difficulties). You could even do more creative things than that. (it's worth highlighting that health/endurance was even more confusing early in backer beta where isntead of health being a multiplier of endurance, your health = endurance but there was a damage coefficient that reduced weapon damage as it affected your health but affected your endurance at full strength. boy, even though mathematically it was the same as the eventual final system and even though intellectually i understood it, in practice it was a confusing mess in pre-release early PoE1). It just seems like some people are rationalizing health/endurance but not really demonstrating why it's so great compared to actual real alternatives. It smacks to me of a little bit of status quo bias, or preferring it simply because "that's the way PoE1 did it."

Well, to not win or not lose are pretty unsatisfying outcomes. I elaborated more on what I meant in a follow-up post: Basically what I'm saying is that it's purely an artifact of the health/endurance system that you can take on fights that really should be or would be impossible in a "saner" encounter-based system (where encounter-based means enemies are grouped into encounters, which is more the norm these days instead of 90s-era CRPGs of just going from enemy to enemy and being able to cast any spell whenever). This to me illustrates how much of a hack health was for providing a multi-fight resource constraint, because it was completely irrelevant for enemies except in cases where it let you do things you really shouldn't have been able to (or the rare case that happened to me where I had tons of healing but just couldn't kill the enemy fast enough so I ran out of health).

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance. Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways. Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance? Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe. Wounds added a malus, but you could still play through them. They weren't designed to be super crippling. And the edge cases are *not* "you're in an easy fight after having just rested" but "you've been in a couple fights and now these edge cases are occuring." And yes, for e.g. wizards, it's in fact very very easy to keep healing and blow through x4 endurance. Even with monks and fighters you can (especially with fighters because they can be taking a lot of "invisible" damage e.g. plinking damage that gets healed by constant recovery so your endurance isn't changing much but you're losing health fight over fight). Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism. Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches. Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies. The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources. The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong. That's the whole point of health. It is a fair, and it is literally believable because it happens. It won't happen in "normal" gameplay, but it enables or disables solo encounters (and considering that PoE1 had like four separate achievements for beating the game solo, cheevo hunters would run into this in a way that you couldn't in e.g. Deadfire). It also enables cheese, because you can just range an enemy, kite, and if they disengage, range them again, etc. until even the toughest enemy keels over dead because they regenned through all their health. This is an artifact of the health/endurance system. In "saner" systems like Tyranny, Deadfire, Dragon Age, etc. where enemies are tied to a specific encounter, if you can't outdamage an enemy's heal potential or are just taking potshots and running away, the encounter is fundamentally unbeatable. IN fact, health is mostly just a hack for the player to feel some sort of multi-encounter resource constraint, because it's mostly irrelevant for enemies and the fact that it's mostly irrelevant for enemies except in these weird interactions where it enables you to do things that you really shouldn't demonstrates how much of a hack it is. Similarly, if you have strong regen and are tanking real hard (easily possible with a slightly metagamed build) health/endurance means you can still end up losing the fight even if in the long run you could've won. That's not quite true. With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources. PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too. That's what made them feel like bosses. In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight. Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again. And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy. Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics. With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam. It's not bad form. It's called hyperbole. (The 1% number that is. I would've hoped it would have been painfully obvious that I was using a small number for exaggerated effect.) But objectively, JE Sawyer and co had plenty of feedback about people running back all the time to get more rest supplies and anecdotally the internet/forums were filled with these sort of complaints that it seems completely credible that JE Sawyer and co would think that this was a problem and that relatively few players saw this as a "fun" strategic constraint rather than an encounter-countdown-tedium that they had to fix somehow. There is literally some comment somewhere on the internet, either in the forums, a backer update, or an update video, or his own blog where JE Sawyer cites this as part of the reason to change the system in Deadfire. Also per-rest doesn't change anything about ability variance. E.G. IWD2, I knew several friends who converged on the same "web, then fireball" strategy. Per-rest simply meant that they had to click a rest button every now and then to keep doing it. edit: more specifically, the per-encounter resources numerically are set so that in effect it approximates a partial use of per-rest resources. It doesn't let you spam x3 or x4 top-level spells like you could in PoE1, but it also means that fundamentally there's not much of a distinction between per-rest and per-encounter in terms of whether or not you vary what abilities you use. What does narrow down variability is the ability tree system where priests and druids now have to make explicit spell selections instead of getting a lot of spells for free per spell level and wizards having a very different grimoire mechanic. I would in fact argue in some cases per-encounter system in Deadfire enables much greater variability where martial classes are concerned (e.g. in one fight pallegina can be a lay on hands heal monkey, in another she could mix it up with lots of sworn enemy and flames of devotion, in another she's just reviving and liberating everyone whereas in PoE1 you'd have a hard per-encounter limit on all of those abilities, or possibly even a per-rest limit).

New wizard subclass: Omnispecialist. +2 PL with each spell school, +10% recovery time with each spell school, each spell school banned. ...wait

I wonder how this will work out. I would think the casting resources need to be rebalanced since just turning to per rest would mean you have very few spells across multiple battles. May require a mod to balance something like this. If caster still only have two cast per level that would seem to punishing but would be interesting what community comes up with. Reading the description, i wonder if this mean all per encounter abilities turns to per rest? That is how i am reading it. I would think the part of the community that wanted per rest stuff was only wanting for casters but having for everyone would make a tough challenge. Maybe be fun though it they don't increase class resources, it would mean that you'd have to stock up on prepared foods and also it would shift the balance of power to martial classes, who have a lot more "steady-state" power. i doubt they would do the following (because i think challenges are meant to be strictly harder), but it would help the transition to per-rest if casters got +1 cast at each AL and martial classes got a boost (or were left at per-encounter). i think empower use just to refresh resources becomes more essential.

Wowowow I'm excited for a lot of the 4.0 stuff, including Finally a reason to get that junk/galleon in late game. EDIT: also... those god's challenges wow. rymrgand + woedica = yikes!

*JAW DROP*

In the basic system, it should always be a good thing. It doesn't always always have to be a good thing. (example trope is undead being damaged by healing. other examples include effects in various games and CCGs that trigger bad effects if a player tries to heal, e.g. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=107358 ) In the basic system, why should healing always be a good thing? Because otherwise your basic system is broken and leads to unintuitive outcomes. It's almost axiomatic, because in virtually all other non health/endurance systems, gaining more health just meant gaining more health (up to a maximum) and there was nothing more to it and then you layered complexity and interactions on top of it. It's almost like "why should mathematics define real numbers as an ordered field?" I mean I guess you don't have to, but boy does it make everything else messy real fast. possible alternative fix to health/endurance in PoE1. same thing, except you can always be healed up to your maximum endurance (instead of capped at your health if lower), and you only permadie if both your endurance and health are 0. (if you have endurance > 0 but your health is 0, you're basically in "last stand" mode. if you end up surviving combat you go back up to 1 health). you still need to do something about knockouts being a "safe" alternative to permadeath... maybe a bleedout? or some enemies will keep attacking a knocked out character with some damage multiplier? it's all moot anyway because I doubt we'll see health/endurance come back in any future PoE, if any.

In the basic system, it should always be a good thing. It doesn't always always have to be a good thing. (example trope is undead being damaged by healing. other examples include effects in various games and CCGs that trigger bad effects if a player tries to heal, e.g. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=107358 ) In the basic system, why should healing always be a good thing? Because otherwise your basic system is broken and leads to unintuitive outcomes. It's almost axiomatic, because in virtually all other non health/endurance systems, gaining more health just meant gaining more health (up to a maximum) and there was nothing more to it and then you layered complexity and interactions on top of it. It's almost like "why should mathematics define real numbers as an ordered field?" I mean I guess you don't have to, but boy does it make everything else messy real fast.

I believe this feature was removed from Tyranny and now only knockouts cause wounds. Given that wounds also decreased stats, that was rational change, because otherwise it could send a player who was winning, but not winning by large enough margin, on downwards spiral towards the bitter end. Nope. I loaded up Tyranny again a few days ago and you still get wounds just from being dropped to low health. (Might be limited to PotD-only though.) Wounds used to decrease stats a lot at first, but in more recent versions are a little bit less painful. Actually I'm not sure that's right. Whether or not you damage your own characters, they still have to get through low health, which triggers wounds, and once they do so I don't think they can trigger more wounds by healing up and then falling back down (I could be wrong and if so, this is also a bad mark on Tyranny's approach). Similarly, decoys are not unintuitive, nor is it a perverse incentive. In fact, in many games, it is a great strategy to lure enemies into dangerous situations with a decoy. People do this IRL in wars and stuff. Anyway to reiterate - the fundamental brokenness is the fact that in your basic system (before adding the complexities of one-off effects), healing should always be a good thing, instead of potentially extremely lethal. And not to mention that no one has touched on the fact that health/endurance could lead you to win unwinnable fights or lose unlosable fights because the health effectively meant that healing was capped (because bizarrely aside from Infuse with Vital Essence, all healing only affected endurance.)

Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire - Not So Definitive Edition! =) Pillars of Eternity 1 - Deadfire Edition

I took a look at stats: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106384-mechanics-stats-weapons-and-rules-of-thumb/ TL;DR - like other people said, might is an additive bonus so having other damage bonuses reduces the net impact of might. In addition, due to the way Deadfire handles armor, grazes are particularly punishing for damage bonuses, so might doesn't even come close to adding 3% damage (ignoring all other damage bonuses) on a graze (the gory details: it's a non-linear climb out of the graze penalty). Perception, on the other hand, benefits significantly because it helps you graze less (which as I've said are really bad for damage bonuses), and in cases where you are under penetrating the armor, helps you crit more, and critting gives you +50% PEN, which can move you up penetration categories and give you a huge effective damage boost. On lower difficulties, might and perception are very nearly equal and you should probably balance them. (both provide roughly +2% net damage per point on average) On higher difficulties, you should probably invest in perception first (though dex is still king). (both provide roughly +2% net damage per point, but perception is actually very slightly better due to PEN issues) For healers and defensive characters, accuracy isn't as important so might is more important.

my corpse-eater cares more about being fast. he's also actually a shaman (corpse-eater + priest of skaen), so I have extra heals, enemy accuracy debuffs, and I can Escape to eat corpses for more healing or even just for the temporary +50 deflection boost. Ironically, when I had serafen in my party (who was wearing heavier armor), serafen had much harder time staying alive. rekke is doing fine though (upgraded heavy armor + thick-skinned + armored grace + litany for the body = 25% under pen for many enemies but still fast) Hey now, Wild Mind may be a totally inadequate sidegrade to an inadequate core class, but you need a lot of room on the bottom to distinguish it from the truly bad (Brotherhood of the Five Suns) and figurative tire fires (Sister of the Reaping Moon). ...yeah they really need to do a companion unique subclass balance pass at some point. however much off the other special subclasses might be (and I don't mind Sister of the Reaping Moon at all), serafen's is the only one that has actively caused harm to me. I think the last straw for this paticular run was using Mind Blades and triggering a Wild Mind that made all enemies hit with it invisible. "Welp, time to go get Rekke." Anytime in the future I use serafen it'll be as a pure barb.

no, it doesn't scale with leveling. only damage and accuracy per PL. I think the intention was deliberately to tone down carnage from PoE1. It's not bad, so long as you don't have intellect less than 10. If you manage to hit two other enemies, you're doing pretty well, generally speaking.

Don't know when this got introduced, maybe 3.1, maybe 3.1.1... don't think it was as far back as 3.0. Basically, watch this video of me scrolling through the ship supplier in nekataka: ....yeah... there was actually a real item in the midst of all that but i'd be hardpressed to find it again. I think it's only ship vendors because I don't recall seeing e.g. the Dark Cupboard or the herbalist shop having such a long selling inventory. Dropbox link to output_log and save: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/blz9z6ajm16nadz/AADrvBfhJz_PMnBXVcJHqVuva?dl=0 edit: is it rymrgand's challenge related? I think i've sold some spoiled food to these vendors, maybe something is up.

Pop quiz: Eder is at 20/120 endurance and is under attack. Should you use a big +60 heal on him? Trick question, because Eder was at 80/600 health. All you've done under constant pressure is turn a knock-out scenario into a permadeath scenario. There is literally no world in which it is intuitive to not heal the person in pain. And it's related to this violating one of the most basic rules of RPG-like mechanics: within your basic systems, a heal should always put you in a better situation. (Yes, you can have trickery like in M:TG where you have effects that turn healing into damage, but that's why it's within your basic system.) The intent of health/endurance was to cause a resource constraint over many fights, despite healing up to full at the end of each fight, but it produces bizarre outcomes and broken incentives. I've literally cast AoE spells to knock Eder out myself instead of letting his Constant Recovery go long enough to restore his endurance to the point that his health = endurance and any future knockout in the current fight instead becomes a ruinous permadeath. That is a fundamentally broken incentive in the system. If they wanted to fix this, any healing should have instead have been implemented as "bonus endurance" basically an endurance shield that doesn't increase your current endurance. That way you avoid these broken situations where healing makes you more vulnerable. But this is probably too complicated for such a fundamental part of your RPG system. A better solution is actually from Tyranny. There they don't have health/endurance, but they have wounds. Unlike in Deadfire, you need 10 wounds before they are fatal, but also unlike in Deadfire you also get wounds for being brought down to low health (in addition to lots of wounds from knockout). This performed a similar function as providing a resource constraint over many fights despite being healed to full each time (because while I've done no-knockout challenges in PoE1, it's extremely hard to avoid getting bloodied in Tyranny to avoid those wounds) without the weird edge cases that health/endurance introduces. Many of those things you suggest are awful or tedious mechanics. Sure they might "balance" per-rest encounters for some definition of "balance," but they are also just extremely not fun and/or unintuitive (e.g. I hated rampant monster spawning in BG). Dynamic scaling is extremely hard to get right, and all you're really doing is opening yourself to weird loophole-y interactions.