thelee

is this possibly part of the 3.1 potd rebalancing? i haven't tried end-game stuff but i literally have zero recollection of ciphers ever using something like disintegration there before. it would be consistent with my observations on critical path that enemies appear to use higher-level abilities and more aggressively compared to pre-3.1 edit: also, other possible ways around disintegration if you can't avoid getting hit: priest - minor intercession at AL6 (-5s effects) - light of eothas at AL9 (-10s effects) - withdraw (though you're down a party member) - suppress affliction + salvation of time, only temporary but if you end the fight in the next ~30s it doesn't matter paladin - liberating/remanding exhortation or liberating command, only temporary but lasts a really long time anyone - street sweeper upgraded to -10s harmful effects, attack yourself. - potions of (major) recovery

Possible nit: for spell-like abilities, IIRC PL damage adjustment does show up in combat log. For martial abilities, it does not. (Though it's been a while since I checked so I could be wrong). Any time an ability adds more projectiles, it also still adds more damage, it's not mutually exclusive. In fact, this is why wizard missile spells are really good with PL scaling. However, chanter abilities frequently are set to not have scaling projectile counts. For example, "Rejoice My Comrades!" and its upgrade used to get more projectiles with PL scaling, which in indoor environments made an empowered version extremely good, basically healing everyone to full health and annihilating enemies due to the many bouncing projectils you'd get; but this got fixed in a patch. I expect that that "Thrice was she wronged" is set to be capped at three, since the number of projectiles is similarly part of the ability/description.

Just as an update, when this happens it does trigger prone that many times. The repulsing seal appears to be attempting an interrupt continuously so long as the graphical effect is active. Just now, did it on the drake on the island with the cavern of xaur tuk tuk. The repulsing steal triggered prone on the drake repeatedly, and in fact, the drake stayed on the ground, periodically attempting to get up before bouncing back down again, for very nearly the entire fight before I guess it finally exhausted all the prone effects it needed to go through. I mean, it certainly makes repulsing seal amazing, but I doubt it's intended to trigger this much prone.

I... Don't see how that math works. And it was "125% complete" not "25% complete" What I mean is: is it stating how much of the quest has been completed? For example, speak with an npc and you "finish" 25% of the quest, gaining 25% of the total xp. Go to a location and you go to 50%. Get an item, 75%. Go back to the npc and it's 100%. Otherwise, why even have a % of the complete quest? Maybe it's calculating wrongly, giving you all the xp again? I'm still not following. But regardless of anyone's interpretation, "125%" complete quest seems not correct. Quest completion should stop at 100%. (If you look at my screenshot you can see behind the hover tooltip there's an identical quest experience reward entry a few lines up. That one shoudl say "100% complete")

I... Don't see how that math works. And it was "125% complete" not "25% complete"

Yeah it got hit as part of a consumable-wide nerf in 1.2. Some of the items were frankly too good imo--my quote mentions Potion of Impediment and with a modest alchemy skill you could get >50% interrupt chance, which on a dual-wielder means you could completely lock out an enemy from doing anything relevant for the rest of the fight. Now it's locked at 30% which while not broken is still decent to use in fights.In my opinion, some of the proccing nerfs are really bad up to a point it makes no sense. If the end result is 50% proc chance is still fair. The issue in potd in my example all this stun lock or interrupt lock is non issue. The amount of mobs you face is astounding. Yes even you can stun lock one enemy but you can't stun lock so many. In some fights there are so many mages and couple of priest. All of them hide behind tanks and DPSers. I got status effects like crazy. Arcane dampened, immobilized, skyward kicked, petrified and nuked. Even stun lock applies to carnage is non issue. It seems AI is smart enough to position them so that you hit just a few. And also, most nukers are scattered and positioned far apart even pull off eora doesn't cut it. The map also can be designed so that there are no choke points it was less about general purpose interrupting, it was the fact that with the previous impediment scaling you could consistently interrupt when it really mattered i.e. repeatedly interrupting a boss

To elaborate: what makes me certain there's increased exp gain in 3.1 is the fact that I've played PotD pre-3.1 so many time that I had Act 1 down to a science in terms of exp gain. I'd end up entering Engwithan Dig Site at level 3 (a little lower for the two hirelings I bring along); after clearing out all the creatures on the surface, I'd enter the side training area and kill some skeletons and that would push mainchar, eder, and xoti to level 4. Hirelings would eventually hit level 4 after finding the adra. Instead, post 3.1 I'm already fully at level 4 upon entering dig site (even hirelings).

Discussion started here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106568-was-the-exp-gain-changed-in-31/?p=2111674 I captured a screenshot of some very suspicious exp gain, after noticing that on this run I appear to be gaining levels a little too quickly. Basically, to me it looks like the last bit of quest experience is getting rewarded 2x, so my quest completion here is indicated at "125%". Dropbox link to save and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3059qvcsm4zj6q5/AADbXkUMbvC6XcpIGGF8gG9Ga?dl=0

So I definitely feel like I'm leveling faster, and I think I finally captured a screenshot that explains what's going on: Note how I am "125%" complete with quest. I think some final quest experience is getting rewarded a second time. Going to go report this.

that is true, and in fact i had not considered the specific confounding blind interaction before. i would still consider blunderbuss a niche choice compared to literally any other reloading weapon.

i hate hate hate hate hate hate hate random encounters when i can't avoid them (most jrpgs of a certain age) they are tedious and annoying and can frequently be abused as filler for content (and a way to force you to grind). when i can avoid them (BG, Fallout, IWD), they are basically just moments where I reload the game, because most of the time I don't want them compared to the handful of times I might actually.

objectively, blunderbusses suck. compared to pistols, they barely do more damage, but have less range, -1 PEN, and a whopping -10 acc penalty (~20% damage penalty). their modal is also a double-edged sword possibly boosting your total damage, but self-afflicting you (which can be gamed, but still) and has terrible PEN issues. however, unique blunderbusses do not suck and can be metagamed very well. So to the original question "Is blunderbuss useful?" the answer is really "yes, with an if" or "no, with a but"

this method is weird, because the game doesn't wait for kali to run all the way away before letting you progressing; he just starts running and the game continues with nemnok's dialogue: if you click through dialogue fast enough, even after you successfully pass the intimidate check, kali might not have left the area, and he may go hostile and join the fight. when i do this approach, i now wait for kali to go offscreen and wait ~10 more seconds before i continue any dialogue with nemnok. anyway, NEMNOK NEMNOK NEMNOK

best thread subbing

Only in the most vague sense. In infinity engine land: everyone is on a fixed, 6s round. Even if your characters are standing there, animating with attacks, by default they only get 1 attack that entire round (most of the attacks are just for show). Even though the "speed" of a dagger might be 1 compared to the "speed" of a two-handed sword being like 9 or something, all that means is that the person with the daggers makes their first attack after a .6s delay, and the person with the two-handed sword has to wait 5.4s. After that initial attack, both characters wait a full 6s in between each attack roll. you can only do one spell-like action per round. this means casting a spell, but also includes drinking potions. oh, your wizard just drank a potion of minor healing? now they have to wait until their next "round" to cast a spell not to mention weird interactions with the fact that the round abstraction treated attacks and spell-likes differently ("cast and attack" is a popular thing from BG2 forums and sites of yore) all durations have to be in increments of at least per round In pillars recovery land different weapon speeds means actually being able to attack more or less often no per-round limitation means you can cast spell as fast as your recovery allows no weird conflict between using items and casting spells with awkward indeterminate timing flexible durations for effects while you can try to draw a similarity between the "personal initiative round" of infinity engine games and recovery mechanics in pillars, recovery mechanics are extremely flexible whereas IE rounds are a fixed 6s unit of time (with the sole exception of improved alacrity).

See topic question. Not near a gaming PC to test.

I haven't followed PF:K any, but is it like an infinity engine game? Because I know Pathfinder is similar to D&D in that it's based around turns, so I'm wondering if they would still maintain the IE-style abstraction of "6 second rounds" or something similar. If not, I'd be curious to know how they approach it. IMO one of the best things that Deadfire and PoE did was move away from that weird abstraction and be more of a computer game. While there's something to be said about that "turn-based" abstraction, I like it when a game system does things that its particular medium can excel at, instead of necessarily being beholden to things that don't make sense for it. (For similar reasons I like that in the early drafts of the pen and paper pillars of eternity system, JE Sawyer is creating a pretty wildly different system, albeit with roots in pillars.)

Not arguing with the math, which is sound as an abstract, I do think that by dismissing the environment you present an error about BDD. 1. The counter to healing – damage, is much more common than the counter to BDD – Arcane Dampener. So, in all of the game healing has less weight than BDD in achieving the goal "of staying alive". BDD is more effective (and arguably requires less resources – stats, equipment, e.t.c – from the player). 2. The counter to BDD happens to counter all buffs without specific discrimination. 3. The environment provides ways to exploit BDD – Salvation of Time and Brilliant. One can't make BDD less effective by just giving out Arcane Dampener to every schmuck in every encounter, bosses to be a challenge have to have some form of Arcane Dampener built into them, fun and good buffs get screwed by association, and BDD in it's current form is a pain in the hindquarters from a designers perspective. Point is – you can say, that everything is nice and dandy with being immortal for some time as a general concept, but you can't say the same about the implementation of this concept in Deadfire. I'm not discounting the environment. The math is just to say that BDD is effectively another form of healing. The environment is what makes that "alternate form of healing" from a curiosity into something potentially powerful. If ways to dispel buffs were just as prevalent as damage, no one would be talking about BDD; in fact buffs would be completely useless and we'd just be basically playing a glorified version of dungeon siege 1. For a single character I think it's possible to increase your Will high enough to completely ignore Arcane Dampener. However the attacks reducing the duration of your buffs (like Concussive Tranquilizer) might be harder to avoid. If you multiclass with rogue you can gain various effects that make you "untargetable", which means even if you're inside the AoE of an effect you're not affected. (And anyway once you become untargetable they'll change targets). I think only other class with untargetability is ranger, but it's at AL9. The fact that BDD has a weakness at all (arcane dampener and such) is a necessary thing to keep such an effect in check imo. This really goes for all sorts of powerful buffs.

what's the major bug?

I am pretty sure they don't, even on potd. The only value affected by higher difficulty is a close to board damage multiplier, which I don't really consider part of ship combat. Maybe their cannoneers have higher level, or you shoot while they move and they only when you stand? Also keep in mind that every ship type has a hidden "Hittability" value (junk 70, galleon/dhow 60, voyager 55, sloop 50, longship 40) I'm pretty sure this is also faulty memory at play. Gamers reasoning about probability tends to be very vulnerable to selective memory, because you don't take notice of all the times when you had 60% accuracy and hit or when the enemy had 15% accuracy and missed; you only remember the times where you miss three times in a row or the enemy his you twice in a row. One of my ship-to-ship approaches was just to stick with the defiant, get some iron thunderers, and stay at 550-600 feet and just jibe back and forth firing at the ship, while sailing forward at full speed while waiting to recovery from the jibe's accuracy penalties. I can tell you from having knocked out literally every enemy ship this way that enemy accuracy on PotD is just fine and doesn't get any kind of insane boost.

I'll be it's some weird internal implementation detail where just to fill out the ability they need to specify a duration, but then it gets overridden by the chant/linger mechanics.

Don't know if this is a bug, but while reading the description for something I wondered if this was intended behavior. Basically - the description implies that any enemies affected by the target you confused with perplexing sap end up becoming confused. However, one of the tricks about confusion is that it makes all targeting affect friend and foe, which includes perplexing sap's effect; this means that anytime I use perplexing sap on like e.g. a wizard or a barbarian, basically everyone (including myself) ends up confused. I thought this was intended (in a sort of The Dark Knight's "some men just want to watch the world burn" kind of battlefield insanity way), but the description makes me think that maybe you folks actually just wanted perplexing sap in such a situation to just affect the enemies. Am not near a gaming PC so cannot provide a save file or output_log, but is easily reproducible with any character with perplexing sap.

You know what, I did notice that I entered the dig-site at level 4 for everyone. I've played the opening act on PotD pre-3.1 enough to know that I should hit the digsite with everyone at level 3, and then I only hit level 4 after clearing the main enemies and killing some skeletons in one of the side-areas (not the main quest dungeon), and then my hirelings don't hit level 4 until after getting to the adra at the dig site. So XP-wise something did get boosted. I don't know how to make sense of the combat log in your screenshot, though.

Brilliant had broken design. It's still broken now, just less so. It also probably took them all of like 5 minutes to talk about and fix. In other words, whynotboth.gif?

I completed Act 1 on PotD (with hylea and rymrgand challenge on) in 3.1 and I can't reproduce #2, 3, and #4. My technique for split-pulling Gorecci Street still works fine (using sparkcrackers or traps)... without them they would pull together but this has always been the case pre-3.1. For digsite, I was able to split pull the boars+wurms and the wurms+panthers+drake just fine (even with an accidental force of anguish knocking a boar back down the stairs after I led it up). I suspect there's no bug and the cases where I did see a huge mass of enemies was an intentional change in the new mid-late PotD rebalancing.