thelee

I would say though that if you are discussing in terms of balancing, having a feature like Empower where you can refresh abilities gives balancing an added edge, where you can make sure your encounters are a little more difficult, but at the same time make them more approachable for a variety of parties. Serious question is there a game you can think of where you aren't either save spamming or rest spamming? I am more a save spammer ... save spamming is fine so long as this is done in the context of encounters being generally beatable, and the designers didn't design an encounter with a 90% chance of instadeath so you have to reload: however much I love Fallout 1/2, those games are so brutally difficult early on (just down to stupid bad luck, e.g. a lucky critical hit from a venus fly trap plant that knocks you out until you die) that save spamming is a necessity which means they had poor early game encounter balance/design. rest spamming is also fine, but it makes it harder for encounters to be properly balanced, if you want to be a well-tuned game. BG2/IWD2 become a lot easier once you check off "rest party until fully healed" and just rest after each encounter. (though IWD2 on heart of fury mode is hard enough that you can rest-spam and it is still a challenge). If you want resiliently well-balanced encounters, you have to eliminate rest-spamming somehow. PoE1 tried one approach (limit your rests), but failed because I think it wasn't restrictive enough (though I'm sure most players would have hated more restrictive resting). Deadfire is trying another approach (make rests not matter). i think ultimately the "make rests not matter" is probably the best approach (probably not coincidentally a lot of games are converging on this solution, e.g. games like modern Tomb Raider where you heal to full health after a fight is over). some of my favorite tactical RPGs are essentially this (see: Final Fantasy Tactics), since each battle starts with everyone at full resources.

Pets start with 5 AR, and they autoscale from Fine at level 1, to Exceptional at level 9, Superb level 13, and then legendary at level 17 (for +4 at last). Bear gets an additional +1 AR to start. They basically have the equivalent of medium armor which tbh for tanking purposes is not enough on PotD+upscaling (will be decent on lower difficulties, especially without upscaling). With Resilient Companion they get the equivalent of heavy armor, which is better, but you still probably need a paladin aura or a Hardy buff from a priest to really make them soak up any significant enemy hate without dying super fast. Bears do pretty well with Resilient Companion. But yeah, with lack of engagement, it doesn't really matter. Just go charge at a squishy and run away if you can't handle the heat. If you really wanted to be tricky, the lack of engagement means you could keep running your pet out of melee range just as the enemy starts an attack, which will then automatically miss (with "(out of range)" in combat log). Thanks for the feedback. Out of Wolf & Lion, which would you recommend? Wolf, for greater base damage, or Lion for bonus to attack speed, or would you say that it really doesn't make that much of a difference, all things considered? Plugging my gamefaqs guide here briefly https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/-ranger- Wolf basically has +25% damage, Lion has +22% damage, so purely from a damage perspective you should get a wolf. But lion attacks faster, which means this has the effect that they are more responsive in combat (shorter recovery time), which has significant non-quantifiable benefits. I think you should go with whatever playstyle you prefer (or whether you are a dog or cat person), or flip a coin

Maybe I'm in an extreme minority, but I completely agreed with and supported the move to the per-encounter system. I thought the health/endurance system was creative and interesting, but I think saying that it was merely "confusing to new players" undersells just how unintuitive of a mechanic it is; there's virtually nothing like it out there. It also had really weird edge cases, because sometimes you wanted your character to get knocked out instead of healing them, because otherwise they might run out of health instead of running out of endurance, which is the difference between permadeath and a wound. This is something that I frankly noticed in Backer Beta and I guess everyone else just shrugged this obviously broken edge case away (I think I advocated for some sort of enemy coup-de-grace option). Don't mind me, I'm just deliberately not casting Consecrated Ground so that my wizard won't get gibbed in this fight.This also had the probably unintentional effect that sometimes unwinnable fights against enemies could actually become winnable because the health/endurance system meant there was a "cap" to how much health the enemy could heal. With per-rest you can't balance encounters knowing a set amount of player resources... you go for an average case, but it means that rest-spam can completely trivialize it. And objectively, many players were just hauling back and forth to stock up on rest supplies to do almost precisely this (and then complaining about having to do this), because if you told the average player that they could make battles easier by just blowing their entire spell wad in one go and then just resting up for the next fight, that's what they would do. I must've been like the 1% of players who actually treated rest supplies as a strategic constraint and not a tedious "time to go back to town" countdown.To be fair, when Deadfire first came out, it's difficulty curve was so low that it didn't seem like they didn't even balance for a per-encounter system properly (where you can assume player at 100% resources with each fight). With all the PotD re-balancing I think it has become a much better case study of why a per-encounter system is better for game balance. Gorecci Street and Engwithan Dig Site is basically a player sieve now on PotD. If anything, my critique is that they still had some vestiges of a per-rest system (empower, per rest items, powerful food bonuses) while rest was still trivialized by per-encounter, which makes me go ???? at something like "Great Soul" (which grants +1 empower but rest to refresh all your empower is so cheap on anything not Eothas or Rymrgand challenge).

Yeah, this has been an issue since 1.0 honestly.

i'm running a party with 2x barbarians in 3.1.1. first it was serafen + mainchar(corpse eater), and now it's rekke + mainchar(corpse eater), because serafen's wild mind class is garbage and makes for a terrible witch multiclass. I can confirm carnage works. Remember: carnage only triggers on a weapon hit, so you shouldn't see any carnage attacks on a grazethis has the side effect of making perception way more important than might for a barbarian interested in doing lots of carnage damage. in Deadfire for some inexplicable reason you don't get a yellow targeting circle around enemies you attack for the carnage radius. carnage still works despite this. carnage has a small base radius of 1.5m. It can be boosted by intellect and Rings of Overseeing, etc, but by default it's going to be fairly small (think of how small a priest Repulsing Seal radius is when you try to target it). So unless you are specifically boosting intellect or using equipment to boost radius, enemies have to be basically touching your target to be affected by carnage. (though my mainchar has aloth's armor, two rings of overseeing, high intellect, and gets litany for the spirit cast on him, so he has a decently big carnage radius now and can affect enemies a little further away)

Important to note that combusting wounds damage doesn't show up in the combat log. It sorta "just happens" and all you can really get out of it is that the enemy dies faster (and you maybe see a fire effect trigger). So just because you don't see any damage numbers in the combat log doesn't mean it's not working. It was the same way in PoE1. Made me really surprised when I discovered that a chanter with the level 1 draining chant + wizard with combusting wounds = very dead enemies very quickly.

Pets start with 5 AR, and they autoscale from Fine at level 1, to Exceptional at level 9, Superb level 13, and then legendary at level 17 (for +4 at last). Bear gets an additional +1 AR to start. They basically have the equivalent of medium armor which tbh for tanking purposes is not enough on PotD+upscaling (will be decent on lower difficulties, especially without upscaling). With Resilient Companion they get the equivalent of heavy armor, which is better, but you still probably need a paladin aura or a Hardy buff from a priest to really make them soak up any significant enemy hate without dying super fast. Bears do pretty well with Resilient Companion. But yeah, with lack of engagement, it doesn't really matter. Just go charge at a squishy and run away if you can't handle the heat. If you really wanted to be tricky, the lack of engagement means you could keep running your pet out of melee range just as the enemy starts an attack, which will then automatically miss (with "(out of range)" in combat log).

If you have a ghost heart, tbh it doesn't seem like it matters if they are tanky or not. You should be using the pet to charge directly at squishy enemies and take them down asap, with support from Marked Prey and other things. If you want a tanky pet, then you shouldn't be using a subclass basically built around the idea that your pet is ephemeral (needs to be actively summoned and can't be healed) and designed to be a dive-bomb (no engagement). Animal Companions "don't deal a lot of damage" is true if you consider them in isolation; animal companions do about as much damage as a stiletto (without the PEN bonus), though a wolf and lion do about the same level of increased damage (on par with a dagger), without the benefits of e.g. dual-wielding or single-weapon style. But, they are a huge component of the ranger's total damage capability: neglect the animal companion at your own loss, TBH. Without good investment or micro of your pet, a ranged ranger is only kinda better (if at all) than any other class with a ranged weapon. Also "not a lot of damage"; using a wolf or lion as a base, they eventually scale to legendary weapons, so they would be attacking with the rough equivalent of a legendary dagger with a further +95% in damage bonuses, which actually doesn't compare that badly to a rogue (rogue caps out at +80% sneak attack naturally with Prestige). A non lion/wolf will do a bit worse. True, a rogue has a bunch of other abilities including the ability to dual-wield for more damage, but so do you, as a ranger. That's why you and your pet are a combined team and why your pet isn't taking up a separate party slot. edit: background, i rolled an itinerant on my second play through (ghost heart + priest of berath for dots/buffs). worked pretty well for me (PotD upscaling). like i said, yes, pets are squishy on PotD+upscaling (except for maybe a Bear + Resilient Companion) and need lots of love and support to stay alive, but for a ghost heart if your pet gets knocked out it's more like a shrug followed by re-summoning your pet.

One more update (that might be related to Putrid Stench not exploding corpses): very infrequently I find that corpses disappear as targets. I.E. they are valid targets when I queue up Fassina to explode them, but if I retarget the ability later I might sometimes find that the corpses are no longer targetable. It doesn't happen often, but it might be related to Fassina not exploding corpses - perhaps the ability is target and while the ability is being used the corpse somehow goes away on its own. (Between Fassina and my corpse-eater barbarian, I've been paying a lot of attention to dead bodies on this run.)

Litany for the Body is a "Hardy" inspiration, which is +2 AR and +5 CON. What you probably mean is eiterh Champion's Boon (AL5) or Holy Meditation (AL2) both of which provide Resolute, which refreshes a single Concentration every 6s (it refreshes, it doesn't stack; so if you already have Concentration from the Resolute inspiration, you don't get anything). For fool-proof interrupt protection, get Hands of Light on a paladin, which grants Courageous (completely immune to interruptions, still grants a Concentration after 6s). True, but HoL upgrade costs 2 zeal instead of 1 and the duration is very low, esp. when you use a shield or heavy armor, you can get max one additional attack etc. out, b4 it runs out. With a priest and SoT, it would last longer tho. The point is less about how long it lasts so you can do some number of attacks, it's so that you're able to do those attacks in the first place. I.E. at least on PotD there are some encounters where there are so many rogue types where if they gang up on one of my characters, they can crippling/blinding/whatever strike that character to the point that they can't do much of anything (each interrupt adds 2s to current recovery, up to the maximum of your last recovery period), even if I'm careful to avoid using any abilities while they're using those abilities. The 2 Zeal is a situational cost (because otherwise you should just do the 1 Zeal LOH, you have both) to basically say "this character will DEFINITELY be able to do something in the next bit of time", whether that's drink a potion, cast some spells, or even just run away (because while interrupted/prone you can't move). IMO Hands of Light is generally worse than the other upgrade (Greater LOH, which grants Robust), but situationally can be extremely extremely good. Complete immunity to interrupts means that interrupting attacks don't even check any concentration, they just don't happen. So if you have Concentration generated from other sources (including Courageous), they'll all still be around after Courageous wears off.

nicely put

i think it's probably pretty divisive decision, but i would consider this "working as intended."

Also just got a missing string 24 right after making that post, also in sacred stair.

Got a missing string *14* *18* and *7* just walking around Sacred Stair from Animancers and Commoners. Dropbox link to autosave and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vw4aqy3m5g0yt8w/AAA-uEqlzSbZrZ5qjKhsakTTa?dl=0

Re: no explosions, just happened to me. I targeted one of the sea bats, and the radius of the skill was large enough to target both of them. Fassina finished casting it, and nothing happened (see no entry in combat log). Dropbox link to save before fighting Tahae, and output_log just as this happened: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/t6m4sukq6dj8bqw/AADR267ujgsaTEXntMflq5zja?dl=0 edit: curiously, I have a corpse-eater barbarian and I just noticed that after fassina failed to blow up either corpse, my corpse-eater can't use his corpse-eating ability on the sea bat corpses (despite them being beasts). So the invocation did use up the corpses, it just didn't cause any explosions.

Litany for the Body is a "Hardy" inspiration, which is +2 AR and +5 CON. What you probably mean is eiterh Champion's Boon (AL5) or Holy Meditation (AL2) both of which provide Resolute, which refreshes a single Concentration every 6s (it refreshes, it doesn't stack; so if you already have Concentration from the Resolute inspiration, you don't get anything). For fool-proof interrupt protection, get Hands of Light on a paladin, which grants Courageous (completely immune to interruptions, still grants a Concentration after 6s).

Happened again, this time on me. Dropbox link to save and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v9e0fqjo7zn2txn/AACRT0XuZlBMaywsitED2XdHa?dl=0

Now, THIS is what I had in mind initially, a wael/conjurer (wael being making up the lost illus.) for melee-ish multi with conjured weapons; but, well, kinda fell apart for obvious reasons. Still okay though, if someone wants to go for a priest/wizard flavored RP run. Wizard for high dps Had a thought while driving around today, and I wonder if a thaumaturge of Enchanter + Wael would be fun. Enchanter gives up Illusion and Transmutation, but you recover a lot of important Illusion magic from the Wael. Both enchantment and wael bonus spells are super fast cast so you don't have much of a problem with action economy. You can summon some decent wizard weapons (Citzal's especially). You get Champion's Boon at AL5 to get +2 PEN on any evocation spells or weapons you use (and having access to those evocation spells in the first place is probably a huge advantage over Conjurer). You also get Litany for the Spirit at AL5 for +1 PL. You have a few extra nukes from the priest at AL6 and AL7. You could also combine Wall of Draining and Barring Death's Door for extreme longevity in some fights. Still not sure if it's particularly good compared to e.g. a spellblade or battlemage, but it would probably be fun to play with. Wizard more for selfbuffs, but otherwhise use great maelstrom scrolls and deltos helm for high dps. all those selfbuffs (well, most of them) are enchanting, so +2 PL for enchanter would make them a bit better.

Victory by default is the best kind of victory (as the great american philosopher Homer Simpson once said: "default! the two sweetest words in the english language! DE FAULT DE FAULT!")

Now, THIS is what I had in mind initially, a wael/conjurer (wael being making up the lost illus.) for melee-ish multi with conjured weapons; but, well, kinda fell apart for obvious reasons. Still okay though, if someone wants to go for a priest/wizard flavored RP run. Wizard for high dps Had a thought while driving around today, and I wonder if a thaumaturge of Enchanter + Wael would be fun. Enchanter gives up Illusion and Transmutation, but you recover a lot of important Illusion magic from the Wael. Both enchantment and wael bonus spells are super fast cast so you don't have much of a problem with action economy. You can summon some decent wizard weapons (Citzal's especially). You get Champion's Boon at AL5 to get +2 PEN on any evocation spells or weapons you use (and having access to those evocation spells in the first place is probably a huge advantage over Conjurer). You also get Litany for the Spirit at AL5 for +1 PL. You have a few extra nukes from the priest at AL6 and AL7. You could also combine Wall of Draining and Barring Death's Door for extreme longevity in some fights. Still not sure if it's particularly good compared to e.g. a spellblade or battlemage, but it would probably be fun to play with.

I played around with several ideas for a celebrant and frankly I don't think it would be a particularly good idea. (I don't think it's necessarily bad, just not good. There's just not enough synergy between a chanter and priest, at least with the lower AL/PL cap.) A much better idea would be to have one party member be a beckoner, and another party member be a priest. Then you could someone six skellies from the beckoner and buff everyone (including the skellies) with Spark the Souls of the Righteous. Doesn't work with a multiclass because Spark the Souls is at AL8.

More on topic - I've played a priest of skaen (multiclass) several times, and it's a very weird roleplaying tension, because cruel is one of your favored dispositions and some of the encounter outcomes are definitely cruel (e.g. oathbinder's sanctum as a skaenite, or the wapau jungle encounter as a skaenite), but the properly skaen-like outcome for some quests is definitively good (if not necessarily benevolent), e.g. helping Biha get on board the ship after Botaro is executed (you get Skaen-specific dialogue options that mentions helping her out). Not sure the writers completely figured out Skaen's portfolio.

Isn't that literally the godlike stereotyping that permeates several characters' negative experiences (esp pallegina and her questline in Deadfire) and is mentioned in character creation as basically the racism that results in the terrible treatment of death godlikes in many cultures (being killed at birth)? You're even given a chance to be godlike-racist in Pallegina's quest line by making a comment about Skaen godlikes (basically as a rationalization for the research being done to identify godlikes preibrth) and you get angry commentary from some members of your party (e.g. serafen).

JE Sawyer has mentioned this was a function of basically overreacting to player/critical feedback from PoE1, wherein the critical path seemed too long, and the final act especially too long. So they course-corrected by focusing more on faction and side quests, and making the final area extremely short. He's acknowledged that they probably went too far in this direction, given the response to Deadfire's critical path.

Hey let's chill out here. I get that you have a stressful/frustrating problem. But we are all just people who play the game here. Developers can't fix bugs on a whim. Due to the relative rarity of the bug (very few of us here are experiencing the same issue), it'll be harder to track down. Even if they could track it down, it takes time to program the fix, to test it, and then to have it roll out in a patch to Steam/GoG (and even then it will need to be beta-ed first for a week or so). And even if they could quickly do all that, they have release schedules, so it might still have to wait a couple weeks to make it into the next release.