thelee

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.

An added wrinkle is that the way the bellower buff works, it appears the moment you start casting an invocation, which technically means that you can cancel your invocation and still benefit from it (though this is irrelevant because only invocations benefit from it currently). But this means that the "linger" effect of a bellower invocation is actually significantly shorter if you use a slower-casting invocation (like a summon) because much of its duration will be wasted while you're busy casting. Why??? What's the intent of all this?

Nice! I remember those boots, the autohobbling was real useful when I had Ydwin set up to Arterial Strike people and just flee until they die

I did a bit of testing through the Engwithan Digsite (level 1-3). The build seems a bit broken still. I might be wrong, but it _feels_ broken - Using FF once means that you have the curse for 10 secs+10*(1 - resolve_bonus), ~18-19 seconds. The raw damage also increases fast with repeated use of FF. - This leads to two things : - Very slow wound generation unless you get other hostile effects on you. Also, even with repeated use of FF while you have the curse, you only get one wound on expiration of curse (level 1-3 tested only). So you have no real reason to stack FF. - You want to keep Clarity of Agony up at all times. Because you want the curse gone ASAP, so you can reuse FF. This leads to a wound starvation unless you use Dance of Death. And that only last until you get hit. So, wound starvation. My impression. FF is only meant to be used with one (maybe two) stack and the curse will stay for ca 18-19 secs without Clarity of Agony. Whereupon you will receive a single wound and some healing. You will be wound starved, unless enemies put short hostile effects on you or you can do Dance of Death. The subclass seems broken, unless wound generation goes up with levelling. Will test a bit more. PS. Did I write that you will be wound starved? You will be wound starved. Starved for wounds. No clarity of agony. No sense going through all the effort to generate wounds and then burn some of it to help generate more wounds. I had limited testing success just with dance of death, mortification, and powder burns from fist/blunderbuss with a high resolve and only modest intellect. It's still extremely wound starved, but not as bad. But any other monk could do the same thing (e.g. dance of death) and do it probably better and I'm not sure a free Forbidden Fist once every 20s is good enough. Edit: I'm pretty sure you have to multiclass it. Maybe multiclass with wizard and stand in a binding web with extremely high resolve? (The catch is that if a debuff refreshes, e.g. repeat chill fog hits, you still only get one wound when it eventually wears off. Binding web at least has short debuff durations, so with high resolve and grazes you could repeatedly trigger wound generation every 3s)

It hasn't been long and it's holiday season. Don't read too much into it. I can already think of plenty of good builds with the new subclasses (except forbidden fist).

My attempt: high tier: tactician, blood mage balanced tier: everyone else wtf tier: forbidden fist like what the heck edit - if anyone has figured out how to metagame the forbidden fist please let me know. i suspect it's mostly just an underpowered monk that can occasionally enfeeble an enemy for free. which i mean sure ok that's alright, but i'd rather just roll a normal-ish monk.

With Deadfire likely hitting end of life soon, I think this really needs to be looked at. Since release, the druid stag form has a "carnage" ability. However it is nothing like the barbarian carnage, or even PoE1 stag carnage. It is a once/encounter ability that attacks once and does a piddling amount of aoe damage on a hit. By contrast a barbarian carnage (in PoE1 and Deadfire) is an always-active ability that triggers on any melee hit. By contrast a PoE1 stag carnage was an ability you used once/encounter to activate an always-active ability that triggered on any melee hit for a short duration. Meanwhile, Deadfire's stag carnage is a single use carnage attack. That's it. No persistent effect. You get one extra attack that does a piddling amount of aoe damage. Surely this is a buggy implementation, because this is so woefully underpowered compared to other druid forms that I can't even.

The incentives get a bit weird with rymyrgand's challenge. food doesn't seem to start rotting until it hits your inventory, so i might just leave food where i find it until i need it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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