thelee

I actually ended up bookmarking this thread a long time ago until I played the game enough where I internalized it: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98843-level-scaling-difficulty-potdcompilation-thread/page-3 half-way down the page there's a table showing the "target level" for quests, and it's way more useful than skulls/no skulls. (not all no-skull quests are alike on PotD).

skull indicators for quest difficulty still "work" with upscaling enabled (it used to not work at all some patches ago). it can get a bit weird if your mainchar levels up but you haven't leveled them up yet, because encounters scale on your "inherent" level, whether or not you've actually leveled your character up yet. so if your mainchar levels up but you haven't had a chance to click through their character screen yet, you might find a lot of quests suddenly have a skull next to them, because they've all just scaled up a level to match your "inherent" level, but the skull indicator is based on your "actual" level. So, if they do "work", why haven't I had any skulls in my journal since, like, level 8? I remember in my last attempt at a playthrough, before 4.0, when I got the third Eothas quest (He Waits in Fire), it was three red skulls. This time it was nothing. My level was the same, or if there was a difference, it was one level. Also, Beast of Winter has been a no-skulls quest for quite some time, but when I actually sailed to Harbinger's Watch a while back, the location was marked with three red skulls. My sense is that it does work, except in the journal, where the display is just non-functional. I'll have to pay attention the next time I run a party. I started a run with 4.0 and could swear that I saw skull markers for Beast of Winter quest and the series of bounties you get for killing Katrenn and the Dunnage ogre, but I'm at level 15 now so I'm not expecting to see many skulls anymore.

When was the last time you played? I was in the camp a long time ago (post Port Maje rebalance) that though the game was fine up to level 12-13 and dropped off after that because it needed more mid-late game encounters not necessarily because of any scaling problems, and now I have close to zero complaints about difficulty progression. Especially with the option to add in Magran's Fires. (Galawain's can be a doozy... whew, rethink all your strategies when you come across a map full of Unstoppable (no affliction, no interrupt) powerful beasts).

I'm more curious to know why you think the 15% hit to crit can't be used as a worthwhile trade-off to the 10% recovery time penalty? (the two upsides can also be used in tandem with the same weapon depending on the situation) It's a question of what the use case for it needs to be. To minimize the drawback of the speed penalty you need a *lot* of speed modifiers; the hit to crit conversion is most valuable with low accuracy. So ideally you'd want to use it with a hunting bow or single/dual pistols with the modal on - but not pistols because blunted criticals nullifies the advantage of the hit to crit; with the modal off it's pretty hefty damage loss. So call it a hunting bow Specialization. Under ideal conditions (hard to hit target) you can squeeze about 1%, 1.5% more damage out of a sharpshooter. But you can get a bigger damage boost by turning the modal off and taking the free accuracy. With the modal off...base ranger does appreciably more damage. So a good start but not enough on its own. The other part is if you have a low hit rate and consistently under-penetrate. -1 pen doesn't cut it, but at -2 it is interesting. If your crit rate is low enough sharpshooter starts to look good. Until you're down to -4 underpen stepping into close range is preferable, but that isn't always possible. You're also better off swapping to a war bow for the better penetration, but there base ranger will again out-damage a sharpshooter. So on paper the best use case is a sharpshooter / devoted with a hunting bow; I think in that case you can probably squeeze 2, maybe 3% more damage out of it than a base ranger. An easier way to think about it is that 15% hit to crit is generally about as good as 2.5 accuracy. You can twiddle with the other components that make recovery and accuracy more or less valuable, but that is generally not a very exciting trade. Interesting, I don't actually disagree on some of the numbers and use cases, but I come to different conclusions. When I run a bunch of simulations, 15% hit to crit is ~8% net damage increase on average, which is about as good as +4 accuracy. I'd be curious to know how you derive +2.5 accuracy. (I wish I could give you some formula for mine, I literally throw a bunch of stats into hundreds of simulated attacks against various AR and do A-B comparisons.) Anyway the important thing is that when I do my runs on average 15% hit to crit about cancels out +10% recovery time for a faster ranged weapon (no modal) like the hunting bow. It's better for a war bow or rod (which have slower attacks so recovery makes up a smaller percentage of the total action). (Note: let's use the right terminology, it's not a speed penalty, it's a recovery time penalty.) So the 15% hit to crit on non-blunted critical weapons is a "safe" counter to the +10% recovery time, and acts as a bigger PEN boost in cases of severe underpen where the +1 at close range can't claw you up a category (as you say). My thinking is that because it's a "safe" counter to the +10% recovery time penalty in most cases, it's all upside if you can find metagaming opportunities that rely on crits. E.G. Energized inspiration somehow, Stunning Shots, weapon procs. Yeah, it's not like a big transformative subclass like e.g. the trickster or blood mage, it's more like the stalker or unbroken where you get some pretty boring bonuses, but I think it's fine to have subclasses that are more subtly different. Especially in this specific subclass case, if the hit-to-crit component was "bigger" you could end up with a situation where the sharpshooter would be virtually always better than a vanilla ranger for ranged attacking purposes (note: BG2/EE had the archer which meant that if you wanted to do ranged there was literally no gaming reason to not pick the archer over the vanilla ranger). Instead, it's "different", has situational close-range metagaming advantages, and situational long-range metagaming advantages.

skull indicators for quest difficulty still "work" with upscaling enabled (it used to not work at all some patches ago). it can get a bit weird if your mainchar levels up but you haven't leveled them up yet, because encounters scale on your "inherent" level, whether or not you've actually leveled your character up yet. so if your mainchar levels up but you haven't had a chance to click through their character screen yet, you might find a lot of quests suddenly have a skull next to them, because they've all just scaled up a level to match your "inherent" level, but the skull indicator is based on your "actual" level. I put the "work" in quotes though because at least for PotD+upscaling the difficulty has gotten so amped up over time that I find most of the quest difficulty markers pointless. For example, theoretically I could start Beast of Winter at level 12 with no problem ("success is assured"), but in reality unless I have really powergamed party and don't mind lots of hair-pulling I don't start until level 14, two whole levels after all the skulls go away. Same thing with the Old City area and Yser's Tomb, I don't start them until I'm at least one level higher than the "target" quest level. I think you're finding something similar on veteran difficulty. Also: just because the quest is at your target level doesn't exclude the possibility that you'll fight individual enemies or bosses who have skulls.

I'm more curious to know why you think the 15% hit to crit can't be used as a worthwhile trade-off to the 10% recovery time penalty? (the two upsides can also be used in tandem with the same weapon depending on the situation)

Strictly speaking every subclass in the game has both unique benefits and downsides, so with sufficient system mastery you can build a character around those differences and make something that isn't strictly worse than the vanilla class. I think that is an impossible standard for what makes something a trap. "Strict" (strict downgrade, strictly worse, etc.) has a specific meaning everywhere I see it used in math or games chat - where everything about something is at least equal to or worse than than something else. So for example I honestly have no idea how one could claim that the sharpshooter is "strictly worse" than a vanilla ranger. It is a pair of upsides (bonus PEN or bonus hit to crit) traded off with a downside (+10% recovery time and a barely-relevant deflection penalty). That's basically how all subclasses work, as you say, and both the upsides can be easily taken advantage of in exchange for the +10% recovery time. A strictly worse ranger would be a vanilla ranger except with +10% recovery time, that's it no bonuses. If something is strictly worse than something else, there's literally no way to make it better than the vanilla. What constitutes a trap is the ease of building some nonviable or extremely suboptimal. I mean I'm not talking about equipping a wand on a shattered pillar, but requiring an extreme amount of metagame knowledge just to not suck. Most of these are rare because by and large I think the deadfire design crew did a good job so that random Joe Player can roll a corpse eater or black jacket and do OK, and which is why my short list only listed mage slayer and streetfighter as trap classes... and i didn't even say they were bad, just extremely easy to make a bad character. I should also add Forbidden Fist to that, but Forbidden Fist is probably narrow enough that it just straight-up sucks or is fundamentally broken (on my other short list with Stormspeaker, Wild Mind, and Pallegina's paladin subclass).

Thanks. I guess I need to finish my first play through to get a feel of the whole game including DLC before posing such a question. I was really just wondering out loud and it comes down to how much of a difference up scaling really makes... but as I am only level 8 on first play through I have a ways to go to figure it out for myself. My sweet spot is when I am powerful enough that most encounters are fairly easy and then I get lazy and get wiped out because some new, unexpected foe crossed my path that requires me me to refocus and rethink my approaches... until again, I am just cruising along until, bam, something unexpected takes me out. That s why BG and BG2 worked so well for me. By and large it was fun and not too challenging. Until those moments when it was... how did that scrawny mindflayer just kick my party's ass. What new devilry is this!?!? How'd that happen? -- Or should I say "vithrack" : ) From playing PotD+upscaling+challenges and can tell you that upscaling makes a pretty big difference in challenge level. The way it's implemented AFAICT, encounters have a base level set to them, and that's what gets adjusted (a subtle difference) so in some encounters it becomes hard to overlevel enemies (in some cases impossible). So without upscaling, I could fight an encounter at level 8 that has a 3-skull enemy in it (e.g. level 11). If I came back at level 11 that 3-skull enemy would be a normal enemy. With upscaling enabled, if I came back at level 11 that 3-skull enemy would still be a 3-skull enemy. (in other words, upscaling doesn't just help enemies catch up to your level, it helps them stay above your level).

you propose kind of a moving target of a question. a) in both scenarios will provide more of a challenge if you're not doing quests as soon as you are appropriate for them. eventually you will out-level most of the content in the game and trivialize anything without upscaling, so the mid-late game challenge drops off very quickly without upscaling. it sounds like to me veteran with upscaling is probably your best target. the early game is frequently considered the hardest because you have the fewest options; if you got through that and enjoyed the challenge I think the rest of the game will be OK (at the very least you can do a lot of ship bounties and level up if you need), though be warned that some of the DLC can be pretty darn hard compared to the base game.

That's more a damning indictment of the state of the various game wikis than it is anything else. Game guides invariably become outdated, that's not unique to this game. In fact, it is a positive thing that the developers are attempting to balance the game. I know that some take the attitude that balancing removes fun, but I don't see the fun in destroying any challenge a game has simply by picking up a broken item. It's fun to create powerful builds, strategies, and so on, but there is absolutely no skill involved in picking up an overpowered weapon and then autoattacking everything to its doom. If there is anything to bemoan, it's the fact that the developers aren't willing to take balancing further. There are many classes and subclasses that have been utter trash since the game was released, and remain so. Which ones do you think have remained so? Conjurer, for example, because you can't choose the pet you get given. Baffling. Transmuter: does anyone use this spell? Corpse-eater is embarrassingly bad. Mage-slayer's penalties are way too severe. Nalpazca is still bugged to **** because of Arcane Dampener. Darcozzi's unique ability is utter rubbish. There are probably others, but those are the ones obvious to me. Illusionist could use a tweak as well, losing access to Conjuration is fine, but Enchanting? **** that noise. Just let us choose our god-damned opposed schools and be done with it, Obsi. Conjurer: not choosing the pet is irrelevant really. The pet's main benefit is +1 PL as a passive bonus (meaning it stacks), which every pet grants. Any other benefit is just icing on the cake. I would consider the conjurer bonus second-best frankly (after evoker). Nazpalca: I wouldn't consider it a bug, frankly. Stock up on drugs. Giving the option to choose your own opposed schools is a bad idea for balance, IMO. (I think it's funny the difference in school specialization between 3.5e d&d and 3e d&d when they finally figured out that not all schools are created equal). I'd rather they make PL scaling more effective and the schools themselves a bit more balanced... right now an evoker and conjurer basically get a "free" school because most enchantment spells have no recovery (so recovery penalty is pointless), and enchanters and conjurers get a bit of the shaft because their +2 PL is on many spells that don't get as much scaling as even a simple AL1 missile spell. Not necessarily utter trash, but generally poor choices (excepting the brand new specializations that haven't seen a pass yet): Corpse Eater: penalties too severe and hard to use for the benefits. Mage Slayer: severe penalties make it often a trap choice. Stormspeaker: not usually mentioned because it's multiclassed, but single class chanter Tekehu is ready bad. Beguiler: worse at its described role than Ascendant with no real upsides. Wild Mind: lololol. Black Jacket: I don't know that it is underpowered given a relatively minor drawback, but the role that this was envisioned to fill was nerfed hard enough that it isn't really attractive anymore. Shattered Pillar: honorable mention. It does have a niche, but has so many drawbacks that even in places where you might otherwise see it vanilla monk is better. Sister of the Reaping Moon: not too bad, but almost a strict downgrade from vanilla monk. Darcozzi Paladini: while every other Paladin order has found a mechanical niche, Darcozzi basically exist as a no frills roleplaying order. Nothing really to advise it here. Brotherhood of the Five Suns: another NPC class - actually worse than a theoretical vanilla paladin with no special benefit. Priest of Eothas: ultra generic spell list makes it's only niche an ultra second class focused multiclass, and I don't think any of those are particularly good. Priest of Berath: similar to the above. Priest of Gaun: a bad version of Eothas. At least Blessed Harvest is good for Maje Isle? Sharpshooter: almost a strict downgrade on vanilla Ranger. Excessive drawbacks for minimal benefits. All wizard specializations except Evoker - penalties are excessive for very minor bonuses. Many of these don't scale appreciably with power level. In addition, rogue and chanter have powerful, generic enough subclasses in trickster and troubadour that their vanilla versions are almost always a poor choice. The only thing I can agree with you on this is probably Stormspeaker (broken design kind of, not that it needs buffing), Wild Mind (wtflol I do not want any subclass that makes me lose fights), and Brotherhood of the Five Suns (pre-4.0 was the only paladin order that doesn't upgrade an existing ability and instead gives you a lame third choice)--Pallegina's subclass is also hurt in that one of the best parts of being a paladin (Deep Faith for +15 all defenses) will never work at full strength because obsidian-designed NPCs have no favored or disfavored reputations. Mage Slayer is easy to make a trap build, but I would actually add Streetfighter for similar reasons, simply because with poor metagaming you could create a really hot mess of a easy to die character. I would not consider mage slayer a poor choice though, more of a "careful choice" similar to streetfighter. Everything else you seem to be describing "this subclass is not a niche I like or fully get" which I mean is fine, but is different from "poor choice." For example, I don't know how sharpshooter constitutes an almost "strict downgrade" on vanilla ranger. Priest of Gaun is not a worse version of Eothas - much better in fact, and like Boeroer says Blessed Harvest scales real well and is arguably the best AL1 spell in the game (how do you like doing 100+ damage on a graze)? Eothas might be generic, but "free spells" is free spells and works real well with multiclassing; it is essentially the vanilla priest. I would also happily pick up most wizard subclasses as is. Evoker is definitely the best due to broken PL scaling issues mentioned above (and a sick subclass bonus), but conjurer gets a great bonus, enchanter has a half-decent bonus and gets access to evocation spells, illusionist has good PL scaling and bonus and evocation magic, and transmuter gets very good PL scaling (bonus accuracy/duration for Slicken or Combusting Wounds alone makes it worth it for much of the game IMO). And of course the Blood Mage which, well, I tried running one in my latest PotD+challenges+upscaling run and the Blood Mage basically completely trivialized Maje so thoroughly that I removed them from my party in favor of a simple Fassina conjurer when I left the island.

IME, there are very few quests where time matters. The Valera and Bardetto quest in particular is kind of "special" to me because of the myraid ways you can subtly screw up outcomes from what you want. It might be the only one where time matters (frankly I didn't even know they would go through with the heist without you). I've parked on pretty much any other quest without consequence. If you turn on Magran's Fire challenges, you can develop other costs to rest under the Eothas or Rymrgand challenges.

i don't make any guarantees about anything, but i'd be interested in a save game just because i want to see what this issue looks like.

That's a relative statement, and we're talking about the the 110K figure people got when they tried determine Deadfire sales through fig investor dividends incorrectly. 110k is a perfectly valid lower bound, and it has almost no relation to whether or not a game is in steam top 100. Just because a game made it into the top 100 does not contradict fig estimates. let's reiterate some things. 1. this is an objective fact: the fig dividends are paid out by a very specific formula based on gross revenue. There's nothing that anyone can do to futz with this number, or else it's a major SEC violation and we're talking criminal fraud. So we can assume under penalty of criminal prosecution that the fig dividends are paid out exactly as the original SEC filings specified. 2. Given #1, one can conclude very accurately what the gross revenue is. 3. Given #2, one can guesstimate what the total number of unit sales based on average cost. This is where a lot of hand-waving kicks in because only Obsidian knows what the ASP (Average Selling Price) actually is. the low 100k that were tossed around earlier in the thread were based on high ASP, which was using Obsidian's own estimates for when they were selling fig shares and a lack of any noticable discounting. In practice, the ASP is much lower due to international sales (and it makes the original fig shares sales pitch a borderline scam IMO), which means sales are probably much higher due to the same gross revenue but lower per-unit revenue. The only thing that definitively contradicts the original fig estimates is the fact that over the summer there was an actual data leak that listed very accurate active player numbers from steam (which various journalists were able to verify), which pegged Deadfire at ~200k. This includes backer copies and gift copies (some backers got extra copies), so does not represent actual sales, but is at least another (possibly more informed) data point vs the lower bound fig guesstimates of 110-125k. GoG continues to be at best a minor fraction of total sales. Though I'm not going to disagree with you that by now it likely has gross unit sales of >200k. I don't know how closely you've been following this thread, but unofficial grousing from actual Obsidian people (notably JE Sawyer) has confirmed that Deadfire was really expected to be the BG2 to PoE1's BG, that is: be a huge success on top of a cult classic. The fact that they went with full VO (which is extremely expensive for launch and adds huge overhead costs to any future DLC) seems to underlie this assumption. There's a lot of shrugging and half-apologetic quotes from JE Sawyer on other forums (many linked here) talking about all the things they thought they were doing right with Deadfire and how nothing anyone has specified as a criticism can easily explain such a huge sales drop from PoE1 to Deadfire. I think it's pretty clear that Deadfire sales are low and missed expectations, but only Obsidian knows what it's impact on its financials are. But I think it's pretty clear given the fact that PoE1 had almost two years of patching and support whereas it's been less than a year and Deadfire is hitting end-of-life (see some threads where SChin has mentioned this and some twitch streams where devs mention a few more minor patches and content updates in 2019 and not much more past that) that however much love went into Deadfire the financials don't make sense to keep up the high ongoing support.

can't you just delete all the chants you made and remake them from scratch? Nope, that's the problem. I have an entire list of chants that weren't even in her book, multiple A's B's and C's, and she starts every combat with her chant on cooldown which means my entire team gets wrecked. I didn't level my other healers because she was working so well for every other fight, so my options are to: A. Wait for a fix. B. Uninstall and realize Obsidian is now Microsoft, and as such doesn't give a damn. I don't get what you're saying - can't you open up your chant creation book and click on all the chant icons on the right side of the page to empty out your songs? Even when my Tekehu had this issue I could always delete the songs on the right and create new songs from scratch. FWIW, I get this "chanter not chanting" periodically with my troubadour when I'm doing a lot of switching between songs and turning brisk recitation on/off, but the issue either clears if I switch songs/toggle brisk recitation again within combat, or when combat ends.

Have people who think they are lacking random encounters tried this with 4.0.1 or moving further along the critical path? I had a party where I didn't think I was bitten by "no random encounters" issue, but shortly after 4.0 or 4.0.1 dropped I started having something similar to what Ciphys says, where something like the first 3-4 times I tried to leave a Nekataka zone I would get a random encounter. It was like nonstop, and none of my other parties (who have likely not gotten hit by the "no random encounters" issue, since I remember getting things like griffin's blade for them) have ever gotten such a density of random encounters before. So if I was bitten by the no-random-encounters issue, then either a) 4.0 or 4.0.1 fixed it and/or b) I advanced the main critical path at some point and that's what unlocks a bunch of random encounters (possibly in concert with something that changed in 4.0 or 4.0.1). TL;DR: when in doubt, go do Hasongo or Ashen Maw and make sure you are on 4.0.1 or later.

sales-watchers like us should be on the lookout for the updated fig royalty checks this spring (should be every 6 months). also, i don't know how you go from "fig estimates [weren't correct], top 100 sales on steam." top 100 is a fairly low bar, actually; sales rankings will tend to follow a power-curve law where #1 does extremely well, #2 does pretty well, #3 does well, etc and then you got a long tail of all other sales.

One also has to consider that Deadfire was released a whole four and a half months earlier than Pathfinder, during the quietest month of the year while Pathfinder was released in the busiest month of the year. I also bought Pathfinder on GOG, and I noticed GOG promoted Pathfinder for like 3 months before finally removing it from their front store. One can argue how much GOG actually matters, though. Deadfire definitely got a bump over the winter, with people waiting for sales/all DLC to be released. Though it rather saddens me to know that PoE's status as a series is basically 'don't buy day 1, wait until the game is finished/wait for a sale', which is something that doesn't look good to developers/publishers. It seems cRPGs as a whole are sliding into that category, now that I think about it. It works the other way, too. Deadfire was released in a time where not many people are out looking for games, whereas Pathfinder gets released in advance of a heavy sales season. It's not like a movie released in December is going to do worse in same-year box office success than a movie released in February (the exact opposite in fact). Personally I just enjoy the schadenfreude of some people complaining about the bugginess and load times of Deadfire sucking it up and dealing with extreme bugginess and load times of Pathfinder. GoG matters little. I know steam-haters and DRM-haters are going to looooove GoG super hard, but time and time again any objective data shows that GoG still has just a mere fraction of steam sales. Don't get me wrong, I want more viable competition to steam, but GoG ain't there yet (if ever, now that Epic is doing its own thing and has serious money backing it). Anecdotally, Deadfire definitely seems to have gotten a bump over the winter. A couple friends who had been PoE1 backers and played it day one but had not backed or bought Deadfire actually did end up buying it over the holiday season. My own gamefaqs guide has gotten a bump in sustained usage over the past few weeks (is now actually my #2 guide in daily users). But yeah, this is why you want to have low-bug releases, because then people don't buy your game day 1, when it is arguably the most important time for your company's health that they buy. I think it also raises the question of Deadfire's model of updates, because the nature of the game and the nature of the updates arguably suppressed continual engagement (all the new magran's fires required you to start new games to take advantage of them; even though i loved the game i ended up putting it aside for a few weeks because i just got tired of trying to rush through the game to keep on top of the new challenges as they got released).

Is that true? If so, I’ll have to update my post on stacking rules. When I tested them, those debuffs stacked with -deflection debuffs. I don’t think I tested reflex specifically. Of course, it’s very possible that things have changed. are we talking about the same thing? i'm saying that if you have a debuff that adds -15 penalty to all defenses, and a -20 deflection penalty (somehow), you'll end up with a character with -20 deflection and -15 everything else (not that the entire defense penalty gets suppressed by the deflection penalty, just the specific stat). i haven't tested it thoroughly, but this is how buffs work (e.g. circle of protection plus some specific defense buff) and the narrow amount of debuffs i looked at at in passing in combat log also seemed to work like this.

bullet sponge bosses can be problematic, but only if they are fairly common, which they aren't. you can actually bypass most of them and still beat the critical path, at least. contrast with heart of fury on IWD2 where burst damage spellcasters became very very poor because enemy health pools were so vast so the game heavily skewed towards casters who could cast Wail of the Banshee or tanky classes with huge amounts of sustain damage. chanter in particular does real well in drawn-out fights, but that's part of the chanter's strength. if the game was nothing but bullet sponges that would be a problem because then only a beckoner or something would do real well, but it's not the case. even if you just made every enemy smarter, i think it's inevitable that the higher a difficulty, the narrow the path of "viability" in terms of what you can choose to do. Even in a completely "fair" (no artificial benefit to enemy), encounters are varied and asymmetric with your party, and the harder they are the more you have to rely on metagaming them. To wit, part of the skill of playing deadfire is knowing how to assemble a balanced, capable party, and it's pretty forgiving on lower difficulties but you can still mess up (moreso than on poe1 because subclasses and multiclasses open up avenues for more nonviability), and if PotD makes it completely unviable to make a party of i don't know 5x mage slayer barbarians, i'm fine with that. (if the enemy AI was even slightly smart right now PotD would be brutal, because right now enemy casters/archers/gunners don't know how to focus-fire. for example, in the bridge ablaze part of BoW dlc, every single enemy archer is deathblows-powered and abuses confounding blind. if they even had the slightest inkling on how to focus fire and prioritize certain classes, they could wipe you out in a matter of seconds. instead, they attack different targets, and they have an artifical AI-script-enforced pause between successive uses of confounding blind, whereas a human could spam it nonstop. be careful what you wish for... this would thin out party viability way worse than anything currently in place or proposed) frankly, the only time i actually find enemy AR relevant is on PotD with upscaling. I actually feel like the designers are doing the PEN/AR mechanic a disservice by not increasing it across the board on lower difficulties and upscaling it. increasing enemy PEN i'm a little more ambivalent about, since it basically has meant in PotD that only heavy armor will consistently provide damage reduction and the faster armors (even breastplate) basically just amount to avoiding overpen (and very occasionally spell damage interactions). re: the last point - this is already true? At least for the damage bonus I don't think it's universal, but I remember seeing some sort of PotD-specific damage bonus added to some enemies (i believe mostly ranged). Also with the nid-late encounter rebalance that occured some patches ago, enemies do use more varied abilities (a lesson I learned when I had members of my party disintegrated in the Old City, which I don't ever recall happening before). anyway, tl;dr: there's no "safe" way to increase difficulty and maximize viability when you have a finite number of patches and developer hours available to you to constantly retweak things. i actually find some of the suggestions to be horrendously worse ideas whan anything PoE or Deadfire has done. even something as seemingly "safe" as more across-the-board damage upgrades, people suggesting that should go play IWD2 on heart of fury mode and see how thoroughly consistently boosted enemy damage eliminates so many classes and builds from viable contention (e.g. Deadfire potd metagame could devolve into exclusively high-deflection builds, which is basically the IWD2 heart of fury metagame).

I think rebalancing the scaling rules would be more productive. I think the problem is the scaling is stuck at bumping things up a maximum of 4 levels, so a level 8 creature bumps up to a maximum of 12. If the maximum scaling was something like 9 then that level 8 can now go as high as 17, preserving some of the difficulty all the way to level 20. Both the XP gain rate and level scaling cap are issues fixed by the Deadly Deadfire mod. I highly recommend it. level scaling and ptod should also stop give ar and pen buff to ai it just doesn't make sense why doesn't it make sense? potd is supposed to be hard and imbalanced against the player: the net effect of the buff is that all the enemies are inherently tougher. this is kind of like in BG/BG2 where the harder difficulties just straight up multiplied enemy damage against you (except better, because acc, defense, AR, PEN buffs are more interactable then a straight up multiplier)

can't you just delete all the chants you made and remake them from scratch?

buhhh please report this bug. yikes 6.67% every tick is a rounding error amount of low damage

just wanted to confirm some stacking rules: direct PER/DEX adjustments suppress each other (including afflictions). direct reflex adjustments suppress each other, but are considered a separate debuff from PER/DEX adjustments. direct "defense adjustments" (shining beacon, extra effect from reny daret invocation upgrade) get suppressed by direct reflex adjustments. so the best you could do is probably: flail debuff (-25) plus arkemyr's wondrous torment or miasma (up to -20 depending on innate PER) plus dex affliction (-10) for a total of -55 reflex reducing the enemy reflex is only one part of the equation, though. you can also increase your accuracy.

my one thought with that is that it's a little suboptimal, because the recovery bonus doesn't help spellcasting as much (because relatively speaking you spend so much time just casting instead of recovering). streetfighter works real well for martial-oriented builds or combined with explosives and scrolls, because a -50% recovery time when your action is mostly recovery is really great. a great streetfighter/caster i suspect will be casting spells that are "cheap" to use (e.g. enchantment school spells that feature 0 recovery and very fast cast, or spells with short cast times and longer recovery) because the opportunity cost of not just deathblows + sneak attacking all the time becomes really huge with a streetfighter.

yeah, bellower can be condtiionally pretty good (that eld nary twister invocation with +7 PL is pretty baller). it's just that the linger effect of the bellower buff makes no sense in its current form - it literally does nothing.