thelee

Re: the upgrade targeting multiple corpses. Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pqpsnk3wpbmwhm6/AACzEwsRCgRKZUGS0hf78oola?dl=0 First picture shows how when I do hover over a corpse, multiple corpses highlight with this crazy aoe targeting. Second picture verifies that in combat log I get two separate explosions. Perhaps this is an intentional upgrade, because I notice that "White Wurms" lists an AoE of "target + 2.5m radius", whereas "Their Putrid Stench" lists an AoE of "10m + 2.5m radius". Nothing in the actual upgrade description mentions multiple corpse explosions, though, just the sickened effect. (Tough multiple corpse explosions is cool, too! Just would be nice to make sure this is not a bug.)

Follow up bug 1: So I don't know if it's a bug or intended, but I managed to try this out last night, and I was able to blow up multiple corpses with this. I still have to hover over a corpse, but then other corpses in range also highlight, and they appear to all explode. this is in contrast to the description and the base level ability, which only blows up one corpse. Follow up bug 2: occasionally I try to detonate a corpse, but nothing happens (literally nothing shows up in combat log after activation). For both bugs I'll try to provide more data when I have some time (possibly a video, but also output_logs).

yeah gameplay was frequently just spamming cooldowns. Basically the game combat is all about prep, and then it's just mashing whatever cooldown is ready during combat. I also really hated how willing enemies were to break engagement. I'm sure it made it "harder" but also made tactical engagement more meaningless.

Tyranny is fine as far as setting and story goes (I would say it is the best of the three), but jeez, that power creep that kicks in after Act 1 is horrible. I recently re-picked up Tyranny a little bit and I was actually surprised to re-encounter the level of reactivity and choice in that game. The first time I played it I felt a bit cheated because the game implied a lot more choice and consequence than actually mattered, but after playing lots of PoE1 and Deadfire I think it's still a whole lot. Companions are still sort of an afterthought in Deadfire (even if better than PoE1) compared to Fear/Loyalty actually determining their abilities in Tyranny. Tyranny is still a more mediocre game though (and not just because of post-act 1 creep). Would have to agree with the setting and story being unique. May have also put players off for that; classical bronze age vs iron age technology level is... definitely not orthodox, and I think Obsidian underestimated how much people like being the good guy of the piece.

Wael priest multiclass goes well with basically any martial class, and some caster classes as well. My favorites are where the extra illusion spells help compensate for some potential weakness to enemy heat: helwalker, streetfighter, barbarians (they have low deflection by default, even lower with frenzy; warning that wael won't work too well with mageslayer); I have a guide for the streetfighter+wael variant ("umezawa") Classes that tend to be melee glass cannons but aren't necessarily vulnerable martial classes are still good choices: other rogues, ciphers (esp ascendant; you can use priest's salvation of time to stretch out their ascendant buff, though it takes a while to get to AL6 for the priest multiclass and until then you are kind of a mediocre ascendant). edit - trickster might be overkill on the illusion magic for not much gain. Failing that, like I said any other martial class will be just fine since all the extra illusion magic will help with defenses, and then you get various priest spells to help out more generally. I recently did a devoted+wael that picked up monastic unarmed training to punch enemies to smithereens. if you want to be silly, getting free conjuration/illusion magic as a Waelite means you could theoretically multiclass with a specialist wizard who gives up conjuration or illusion and not miss out as much. i haven't thought through this enough to think of whether this is actually a good idea though. (generally caster/caster multiclasses need to be particularly synergistic to actually be worth missing out on AL8/9 spells for both classes)

enemy AI will frequently target lower health, lower deflection, importantly casters/healers, much like a player would. it's not a preference to go after the player character specifically. if you want to stop enemies in their tracks, you should make sure your mean tanks actually have engagement (unlike PoE1 melee characters don't start with any engagement to begin with).

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but if all you focus is on invocations, then yes, brisk recitation will still be slow because it's still like 20+ seconds before using a super high level invocation. but that's not the right comparison. you're getting those invocations literally 100% faster. and those invocations are potentially extremely powerful anyway and worth waiting for. and if you think brisk recitation is slow, you should really try that AL7 chant that summons a skeleton, with brisk recitation on. you won't think it's very slow after that. Yes I'm playing offensive chanter. I'm focusing mainly on invocations. Correct me if I'm wrong, with brisk recitation each phrase is 3s long? So invocations are basically more expensive (+1 phrase). Since the time for 1 phrase is finite, so to cast just thrice was she wronged, you need basically 12secs or 18secs for seven nights. That's really long just to dish out 1 nuke. And the damage isn't impressive at all. Compared to other classes that can generate resource with damage eg. Ascendant, its really slow for me. I have since now trying evoker. He's fast but he lose out in infinite nukes. Ps. Skald is a nice subclass that suits my playstyle. But gain +1 phrase on crit isn't that good in potd? Especially mobs and bosses have ridiculous defense. chanter is not a nuker, and if you think you can do decent nuking with a chanter, you're going to have a bad time. instead, a chanter is primarily a support member (chants) that occasionally can accent their support with a one-shot invocation. thrice was she wronged is an OK invocation for AL1 or AL3 (if you target a bunch of enemies to maximize the jumps). frankly, even though chanter is awesome at summoning even the summons at AL1 and AL3 are merely OK. It's not until you get to AL4 that you really start getting a bunch of powerful invocations imo, instead of merely OK stuff with a few exceptions (the paralyze invocation is always good).

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but if all you focus is on invocations, then yes, brisk recitation will still be slow because it's still like 20+ seconds before using a super high level invocation. but that's not the right comparison. you're getting those invocations literally 100% faster. and those invocations are potentially extremely powerful anyway and worth waiting for. and if you think brisk recitation is slow, you should really try that AL7 chant that summons a skeleton, with brisk recitation on. you won't think it's very slow after that.

are you trying anything to separate enemies on gorecci street? I've always had to use a trap or sparkcrackers or something to manually separate them before combat starts or else I pull everyone. Can confirm on a post-3.1 update that the training room with various skeleton enemies everyone comes now. Would have been particularly brutal except a different bug meant that I was a higher level before than when I would normally be dealing with the skeletons.

Frankly Serafen is a terrible Cipher IMO. Too bad, as he's one of the coolest companions. If you want a decent Cipher sidekick, your choice is limited to Ydwin. But frankly you won't know Cipher power until you play an Ascendant variant yourself. +100. every time i roll serafen as a cipher or part-cipher I end up regretting it. Maybe on lower difficulties it's more "fun", but on PotD + upscaling + god's challenges, wild mind is basically pure frustrating downside that says "hey every time you use a cipher power, there's a chance that this battle that was kinda going ok will all of a sudden turn into a wipe." Nothing quite like a hard battle that you're finally doing well in, and then you use serafen to try to do Pain Block and instead you trigger a wild mind that does AoE damage to everyone and kills half your party. Or trying to do some enemy debuff, and instead Wild Mind triggers and now they all have Brilliant instead. At least wild mages in BG2/BGEE had ways to game around wild surges and a lot of them were harmless (and the overall difficulty curve was lower, despite what periodic forum comments think, so a cow falling from the sky isn't as catastrophic an outcome as serafen's aoe blasts). He's a decent barbarian though. (Rekke is the best) And his personal sidequest is decent and gets you several great items. TL;DR: wild mind is a garbage subclass.

people hate bugs, but unless they are really bad they don't hurt too bad. F:NV was an incredibly buggy mess at release and I feel like the fan community puts it atop Bethesda's efforts (FO4 at the very least). While my memory of it is a bit dim these days, I seem to recall PoE1 being quite buggy at release. Deadfire was definitely less buggy. I think a critical difference is that PoE1 felt a bit more mechanically stable, whereas Deadfire basically had a day-one nerf/balancing patch, and I feel like the first few patches were just trying to desperately rebalance the game. Anecdotally, before Deadfire I spent 90% of my forum posts just reporting bugs and the nature of bugs I report between PoE1 and Deadfire points into the direction where Deadfire is less overall broken and the stuff I want fixed is much lower priority cosmetic and oddities, instead of complete ability implementation misses and various forms of soft-locking the game (the most major of which at last check never truly got fixed).

Something is not being properly "cleansed" on a quickload. I also still periodically get the daily wages bug, but I also now get a related issue with Rymrgand's challenge, where sometimes upon a quickload I get tons of "food spoiled" indicators. I don't think wages are still being stolen, and I don't think food is spoiling multiple times over; I think it's a display issue. (Last time I got hit with the daily wages bug, it didn't look like I lost that much/any money; and by definition all the food that spoiled for me had already spoiled so I don't know what else could have spoiled). I'll nab an output_log and try to screenshot it next time this happens.

when it comes to pets, the party-wide effect is always weaker than the mainchar-only effect. in this case, nalvi gives you a much smaller improvement to armor recovery than epsilon or pirate cosmo (albeit it gives it to everyone). you can lean that way if you want, but this class is such a glass cannon you really want to be selfish with the armor recovery reduction. also, in more recent versions of the game (due to consumables nerf), we don't actually want too much extra resolve because it hurts our ability to distract ourself (either with powder burns or sparkcrackers). if you're not going that route, then maybe the +1 resolve is decent. 34% for 55% armor just for PC vs 38% for 55% armor for everyone. IF soloi then sure, but with an entire party? I think the latter is preferable. What do you think? Also looking forward to more guides, like Cipher/x Druid/x etc. Great work. Possibly. It really depends on the rest of your party. I tend to value +stride bonuses significantly (Epsilon in current revision of guide is recommended over Cosmo Pirate/Abraham) because of the huge survivability boost they can give your squishies. One thing to be aware of is the difference between nalvi and epsilon's armor recovery when it comes to using miscreant's leather. when you have nalvi equipped the advantage is so slight over just wearing cloth that you might be rather using actual cloth with other bonuses, e.g. vatnir's harbinger robes. (that would make this build even more glass cannon-y) I am curious, do you play with leather/cloth armors? I mostly equip party with plate or some such but there is one really good leather with hit to grazes conversion. My Chanter has lots of crit to hit hit to graze graze to miss, so he's actually hard to take down for many enemies. Absolutely. In most parties I've rolled, light/cloth makes up the majority of my party. I love going fast in combat. How do you survive in POTD with just cloth party? Engagement. Don't let melee enemies get close. Take out ranged enemies fast. (This is why I like stride bonuses)

salted food would be great. i would settle for the food recipes that use salt (or the non-drinks that use alcohol) to have a longer expiration date. in practice, the way rymrgand's challenge plays out for me is this: don't grab "Fresh fruit" and "water" while i'm sailing around unless I need it (sometimes means i make stops on the way back from a bounty on an island i had visited before it means refreshing my supply of fruit and water) when I pick up new food, I immediately put it into food/drink for my ship instead of letting my crew chomp down on water and hardtack start paying more attention to the deadfire merchant ships in case i need more food or some special food that expires quickly and i'm too far away from nekata (mariner's porridge is the big one os i can avoid hangovers) keep track of merchants with specific food typeseggs are a big one because i have a corpse-eater barbarian. kith meat is hard to come by pre-shimmering isles, but you can do corpse loaf which uses vessel flesh (which doesn't expire). sayuka merchant has both aged shark meat and fire kelp for shark soup avoid resting if at all possible, once i have a good set of resting bonuses (especially since with alcohol you get hungover and mariner's porridge is harder to come by and every time i rest i might spoil something else) (probably later on) invest in faster ships so I can cross more of the deadfire in a given amount of time (will be relevant for doing recipes from whale meat since IIRC that most plentifully comes from encounters) the more i play the more i really like this challenge. probably my favorite. definitely going to flip this on again in the future. weird fact: food/drink in your ship management food/drink section that spoils stays there and your sailors will eat it if it's the next thing to eat. they'll lose morale, but it'll fulfill food/water needs. however, once you pick up the spoiled food/drink, you can't put it back into the food/drink slots. i guess the way this translates IRL is: sailor 1: "aw cap, our hearty breakfast went bad!" ...day passes... sailor 2: "they ain't listening to us" sailor 1: "well, i guess we have to eat it" (-1 morale) captain: "what's all this then?" *picks up spoiled food* captain: *examines spoiled food* captain: *tries to put it back down* sailor 1/2: "nonononono take that away"

The base chanter invocation "White Wurms Writhed in the Bellies of the Dead" only lets you validly target a corpse, and only shows an AoE targeting circle when hovering over a valid corpse. Once you upgrade it with "Their Putrid Stench Wafts Across" the targeting looks broken, it looks like this (one giant aoe that doesn't just target corpses): I don't know if the targeting is completely broken or simply harder, but I haven't been able to see about properly targeting a corpse since the upgrade. I do know that despite the AoE circle, if I use the invocation as thus, nothing happens, so it still appears to require a corpse. Dropbox link to save and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nuyycntspclmjdl/AAAdNEGEgmYMlS9nlnf4uLDXa?dl=0

I think the problem with that is that currently all food of the same type stack, even if they have been picked up at different times and different values. Abydon's challenge works around this but separating stacks of equipment with different enchants is already baked into the game. Rymrgand's challenge would have to upend the inventory system around food, and I doubt Obsidian is interested in doing that kind of legwork just for an optional extra that like 1% of players will use.

Kingmaker has the advantage of piggybacking off of very well-known IP/game system (Pathfinder), whereas PoE even after the success of PoE1 is still a niche system. Where'd you come up with the 14m budget number? Very interesting if true.

when it comes to pets, the party-wide effect is always weaker than the mainchar-only effect. in this case, nalvi gives you a much smaller improvement to armor recovery than epsilon or pirate cosmo (albeit it gives it to everyone). you can lean that way if you want, but this class is such a glass cannon you really want to be selfish with the armor recovery reduction. also, in more recent versions of the game (due to consumables nerf), we don't actually want too much extra resolve because it hurts our ability to distract ourself (either with powder burns or sparkcrackers). if you're not going that route, then maybe the +1 resolve is decent. 34% for 55% armor just for PC vs 38% for 55% armor for everyone. IF soloi then sure, but with an entire party? I think the latter is preferable. What do you think? Also looking forward to more guides, like Cipher/x Druid/x etc. Great work. Possibly. It really depends on the rest of your party. I tend to value +stride bonuses significantly (Epsilon in current revision of guide is recommended over Cosmo Pirate/Abraham) because of the huge survivability boost they can give your squishies. One thing to be aware of is the difference between nalvi and epsilon's armor recovery when it comes to using miscreant's leather. when you have nalvi equipped the advantage is so slight over just wearing cloth that you might be rather using actual cloth with other bonuses, e.g. vatnir's harbinger robes. (that would make this build even more glass cannon-y) I am curious, do you play with leather/cloth armors? I mostly equip party with plate or some such but there is one really good leather with hit to grazes conversion. My Chanter has lots of crit to hit hit to graze graze to miss, so he's actually hard to take down for many enemies. Absolutely. In most parties I've rolled, light/cloth makes up the majority of my party. I love going fast in combat.

Which thread would this actually be? Only thing I've heard is that the Director of Marketing was fired due to sales, this was a clause in his contract even. I mean, given how relatively little buzz there has been about Deadfire, firing the director of marketing seems completely correct.

Just as an update, as of 3.1.1 I also discovered the Chornu and Biakara bounty ship boarding fights suffer from the same issue of having the dialogue incorrectly attributed to mainchar instead of the enemy pirate.

Whelp, this is it y'all. The final nail to the coffin. I don't think Micro$oft will ever waste their budget by allowing Obsidian to create another niche, top-down crpg. However, there is some light in the other side of the tunnel since Obsidian's finally gonna have the financial support needed for another AAA rpg. I just hope Micro$oft doesn't screw them over again... MSFT like any business is in the industry for getting as much returns off of their investment. Small, niche RPGS can provide outsize returns on top of helping their business strategy by providing incentives for platform lock-in via exclusives. As a plus, they have the resources to properly market and focus test a product (which sounds like Deadfire could really have benefited from). MSFT also has the resources to back a huge AAA game. With Obsidian a part of MSFT, the likelihood we'll ever see another Fallout: New Vegas type game has gone to zero (albeit from infinitesimal low odds to start), but at least now we have a chance for a F:NV-like AAA game in the future. I was around the 90s to know MSFT at the peak of its bureaucratic acqui-existinguish model, the MSFT under current CEO seems to be a bit better. I'll start getting worried if we start seeing an outflux of talent, though tbh with JE Sawyer semi-retired I'm already a little bit skeptical of game design going forward.

1. Have a quicksave before a ship fight. 2. Do ship fight. 3. Quickload in the middle of the fight. 4. Repeat N times. 5. Finally beat the ship. 6. Get N +10 morale bonuses in the top-right corner. Something is clearly not being reset correctly on a quickload. Dropbox link to a quicksave before a ship fight, plus output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jjdf9q96utop3rz/AACVe7t8pcj85UZB44wUPBiEa?dl=0

Back on topic, my 2c about latest god challenges after playing with them a bit. Hylea's: mentioned in the Vela thread that I like this a bit more now that I've played the game more. My only fault for it is that it doesn't change the core gameplay enough. It makes enemy rogues, bounce spells, reckless aoe more dangerous, makes it harder to reposition, and makes withdraw MVP, but i also wish vela did a little more child-like things during combat (maybe occasionally running around and not just cowering) for the extra heat. I do like the extra chatter she adds from time to time. Rymrgand: actually like this quite a bit. sort of helps deal away with the rest spamming problem because the really valuable foodstuff doesn't last long so you really want to avoid resting once you get some good rest bonuses. i like how alcohol lasts a really long time (14 days), gives it extra value over similar foods at the cost of hangovers (also nice immersive touch since sailors loved carrying some grog/rum on board). i also like how salt and spices have no expiration, nice immersive touch. also makes finding fresh fruit and water while out and about more valuable since each instance of food you find is time-tracked distinctly. i might find this more annoying in the late game (when it becomes harder to keep all ingredients fresh enough to craft shark soup for example) or in certain setups (kith meat is very rare until shimmering isle which means corpse-eater really has to hoard that rest bonus). the one thing i really wish was the ability to ---> rest and eat food anywhere <--- because sometimes i want to buy some nice ingredients which only last 1 day, but i have to leave town before i can set up camp and make use of them, which is a slightly annoying extra step. the fact that i can't hoard food anymore meant that I actually had to somewhat map out my act 1 adventures so i could make sure i could get to port maje and get some hirelings and eat food before my captain's banquet from the start of the game all expired, which was an interesting logistical challenge (basically no rest, beeline straight for port maje skipping the dawnstars encounter until after resting). all things being said, I put this on my "more fun that I thought"/"pleasant surprise" along with skaen's challenge, and i feel like both this and skaen i'd probably flip on more often than not in any future runs.

makes sense; i'm pretty sure this played a huge factor in the lack of buzz around Deadfire. It's also I think a main contributor to why Avellone is grousing about mismanagement for Deadfire sales. (Feargus is both Obsidian head and Fig boardperson and probably pushed Deadfire to crowdfund on Fig instead of Kickstarter)

The 1.2m comes from a data leak from steam -- you can google around for some articles (it was talked about on arstechnica in july) and download the linked .csv dump and look up numbers yourselves. It's not completely accurate, because it excludes console sales and GoG sales and free gift copies that backers had, but it's at least a good approximation (arstechnica vetted some of the numbers they could to verify the relative accuracy). In the SEC filings (which are completely accurate under penalty of fraud), as of dec 2017 they had ~960k unique sales (they don't count console sales; they just get licensing fees iiuc). It doesn't seem unlikely to me that in seven months (which included several big promos as well as Deadfire launch for renewed interest) they might have gotten some number shy of 200k, plus backers, to get the 1.2m steam number.