thelee

I don't think all those are different, I think rather that "invisibility" and "stealth" are different things, and there are different rules governing invisibility and governing stealth. From my experience, any action breaks invisibility, whereas only actively hostile ones break stealth. (I was really bummed out when the act of applying a poison on my weapon would break invisibility). There might be something weird going on with drinking potions of invisibility (I've literally never used one), but everything else (Smoke Veil + Shadowing Beyond + Shadow Step + Slippers vs Stealth) seems consistent with the above. Are you really saying Shadowing Beyond twice in a row will result in one of them being a no-op that just dispels invisibility? So ordinarily I would just interpret your example as "smoke veil grants invisibility -> act of drinking potion breaks invisibility and makes you visible to everyone, alerting them -> potion makes you invisible" but I'll admit I haven't used the invisibility abilities enough to really thoroughly have a detailed knowledge of their mechanics. Agreed. I completely underestimated how important the 0 recovery on Shadowing Beyond was compared to Smoke Veil (on top of the extra duration). With my first attempt at an assassin, Smoke Veil turned out to be a real bummer because my recovery and intellect were bad enough that I couldn't do another action before Smoke Veil's invisibility wore off.

For me the fun of Assassin/Skaen comes from the playstyle, not the OPness of the build. I enjoy the challenge of making something that is less powerful like this work without resorting to scrolls and the like except when there is no other option to do so. It's a build that lives or dies by the choices you make and has a lot less to do with the initial build so much as how you choose to approach the game. It's not about backstabbing over and over. If I wanted that I'd get a different build. The axe is a good example. I did play with dot stacking with Magran's Favor and did find it to be strong. The issue is how full attacks behave out of stealth when you dual wield versus when you use a single weapon (2h or 1h). The recovery bonus of stealth gets consumed by the offhand swing of the initial full attack out of stealth. This means when the full attack completes, you eat the full recovery penalty of the offhand swing which in some fights is long enough for you to die. Instead a 2h or a firearm can perform the full attack and gain the recovery bonus or have no recovery at all, allowing you to almost instantly perform a second action (which also has interesting implications to how the AI starts reacting). Furthermore when you have to fight outside of stealth (and you will have to fight outside of stealth), the damage you get from the dot is often not enough to compensate for the reactivity you lose as a result of the malus. Being off by a half second can get you killed. Plus this build doesn't have to be about backstabbing only. You have BDD and Salvation of Time meaning you can Deltro + Maestorm and wipe people out. You can mass spread arterial strike and toxic strike and get the AI to run around non stop and kill itself using mortars. You have strong self buffs and a summon to tank as you need to. Yes there are classes that are specifically tuned for these things that do them more efficiently. I also find those classes are one note and can't do much else besides the one thing they're good at. There are a lot of diverse ways to play the build. Another fun thing to note: Assassin's Slippers gives Shadow Form which is neither Stealth or Invisibility. What I mean by that is you can cast buffs and other specific spells while in Shadow Form and NOT lose the buff. This means your decision tree can change depending on when you time the kill to happen on your approach. It also seems to not break if you one shot your target in question. Using Shadowing Beyond immediately after an initial strike causes the AI to wonk out and behave like the player isn't there even if you are out of stealth and are even in combat. It's not a durable loss of "awareness", but it can be useful to buy time to perform other actions or setup in a different position. There are more little weird corners in the AI behavior that can be exploited to give the game more texture and expand your options. Out of stealth you should use a 1h or 2h for precisely the problem you talk about - blowing your stealth recovery on an underpowered main-hand attack (whether a normal attack or as part of a martial ability with a full attack). With my aborted assassin/skaen, I had different weapon styles for my weapon sets; I would open with a 1h axe hit (this preceded BoW and its 2h axes) and optionally either switch to another weapon set or casting spiritual weapon, depending on the situation, for precisely what you are talking about (rogue full attacks). I don't know if was particularly great way to go about it (essentially I "wasted" my fast recovery so that I could immediately Smoke Veil or Escape and safely change/summon weapons if needed), but that's one way to go about it. If I didn't care about recovery, it did mean that I could sort of "condemn" weaker front-line enemies to death by whacking them with a huge axe hit, whacking them with a smaller axe hit, and then finding a way to go about my business elsewhere with alternate weapons while the two bleeding ticks work their way in to finish them off. I also tried arquebus for reasons mentioned above (either effectively instant reload, or perfectly reactive recovery), but didn't love it (also the blunted critical is a damper on the assassinate accuracy perk). I don't know, maybe this just isn't my play style. Re: the Shadowing Beyond behavior - when enemy rogues use it, I definitely cannot target them even if they've broken their invisibility early. But does it really work when we use it? I seem to remember being disappointed that I didn't get the same privileged untargetability by an early invisibility break with Shadowing Beyond.

You can stay stealthed until an enemy detects you or you do something that affects an enemy. Because you get a huge -85% recovery time bonus while stealthed, it can be worth keeping buffers stealthed to cast lots of buffs at the start, before they get detected. I tried an assassin/skean focused on backstabbing, and consider me underwhelmed. Stealthing and invisibility is hard to come by "just" to end up whacking someone for large damage a few times, at least on PotD seemed underoptimized to me. Before I abandoned it, I pretty much thought you should instead rely on getting that assassinate bonus on spells (so e.g. priest debuffs or things like Pillar of Holy Fire) to get the most out of it. That being said - no one considers an axe? The bleeding damage dot from the weapon modal triggers off your total weapon damage, which means an initial huge hit pays dividends (and there are even two-handed axes now). Plus, the -85% recovery time bonus means you recover almost instantly from the +50% recovery time penalty from the axe modal (either to immediatley whack again for more bleeding damage, or to do something else).

what difficulty are you playing on?

Screenshot says it all: One Vela is from the normal story, the other Vela (with no nameplate) is the one created by Hylea's challenge. Dropbox link to output_log and autosave: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8meiqthwi3zt6f1/AADKW4quImZUnaaL6QutGKf9a?dl=0

IIRC, lion does in fact have a bigger selection circle.

He is. Endgame spoiler: Don't look at me like that, I'm talking about finishing the game. Staying on topic, right? isn't this more a complement to the engwithan? eothas tried before, and got annihilated (as waidwen). he inhabits the adra statue made by a crazed engwithan king, those engwiths really knew how to make things.

Dear Sirs, can you please do not copy 'multiple-quote' posts? Thank. https://media.giphy.com/media/10DVcUchEQUdFu/giphy.gif

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing. what's wrong with illusionist/priest of berath? The powerlevel of both classes. My comment about nature godlike powerlevels was in reference to the suggested +1 pl the special class would provide in the scenario the poster imagined in his original quote. Given your lack of reading, I'm not gonna bother responding further. Apparently you lack reading comprehension, because I accounted for that in my response. +1 PL from nature, +1 from that proposed subclass = +2. Not something that can be "replicated" by nature godlike, because class bonuses don't replace anything or get suppressed; they stack additively. The power level of both classes in an illusionist/priest of berath is fine and is no different from any other multiclass. and again, there's no relevant penalties. At this point given your flippant flouncing, I have to assume you actually know very little about what you're talking about.

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing. what's wrong with illusionist/priest of berath? it's probably not super synergistic, but it's also not bad. there are no relevant penalties. (i've contemplated rolling one just as a flavorful lich-type mainchar) edit: and actually, illusionist gives up conjuration and enchantment. priest of berath adds back in buffing and summoned weapons, so in that sense it is at least somewhat synergistic. edit 2: and also while i'm not too keen on debating purely speculative kit ideas, your critiques are almost objectively wrong. +1 bonus PL can't be "replicated" by a nature godlike, because it would stack with any nature godlike, so you could be a nature godlike and this proposed class for +2 PL. Same thing with the recovery time bonus (which I assume was meant to be a -20% recovery time bonus or a +20% action speed bonus; either way it's massive). There's nothing stopping you from having high dex and a casting speed bonus. Incoming damage increase by 5% is frankly puny and way too little for getting such a hugely universal PL bonus and casting speed bonus (and with access to enchantment and illusion you shouldn't be getting hit that much anyway). Spell casting 5% of your max health is a drawback, but one that is pretty easy to trivialize with some metagaming (and can be advantageously taken advantage of in certain setups). Sounds like a completely plausible kit to me. In fact, I would actually say it's too good as it is.

Why? The sub-classes of wizards are bad. You lose access to 2 schools for 2 power levels. If it were +10 PL, i would say ok, but +2 is not enough. That needs a complete rework. +10 PL is way too obscene. The subclasses aren't really that bad. They are more niche. If all you do is focus in on your specialized school, you are strictly better than a normal wizard in every way possible. Try rolling an evoker, transmute, or illusionist. Conjurers and enchanters need some help because PL scaling is really bad for buffs and summons. I haven't tried them personally, but I would think that Illusionists suffer more than Conjurers. The vast majority of illusions just get duration and (for the debuffs) tiny ACC boosts from a higher PL. Conjurers at least have some staple spells that benefit from the PL scaling on Damage and Penetration (NecLance, NoxBurst, the Walls, etc.). Are there even Illusions that do direct damage besides Wall of Many Colors? (That said, the non-spell specialization benefit and excluded schools probably both favor Illusionists.) Concelhaut's Crushing Doom are illusion spell Kalakoth's Freezing Rake is illusion as well. (Noxious Burst is transmutation, not conjuration. and I think only Wall of Force and Draining are conjuration. Flame is evocation, Many Colors is illusion). Also, getting tiny multiplicative debuff duration buffs is not bad if the base durations are short and the effect is powerful. It just is a little worse for many conjuration/enchanting spells because the base durations for many wizard buffs/summons are already soooo long, that an extra +10% on something you already have going for almost a minute is not really that great. Meanwhile, squeaking out an extra second from Gaze of the Adragon (also illusion) or an extra prone from Slicken (transmutation) is really powerful. That being said, both the conjurer and enchanter have semi-decent secondary bonuses (Conjurer especially - their summoned familiar is guaranteed to get you a stacking +1 PL buff on top of +3 to a random stat and some other bonus). Evocation is still king because evocation spells get way too good of a boost from +2 PL (especially multi-projectile spells) and their special wizard subclass bonus (the echo chance) is amazeballs. The echo chance alone would be worth being an evoker, TBH. (Also evokers [and conjurers] get the extra secret buff that the +10% recovery penalty is only half as bad as other specializations because most enchantment spells have no recovery to speak of.)

Why? The sub-classes of wizards are bad. You lose access to 2 schools for 2 power levels. If it were +10 PL, i would say ok, but +2 is not enough. That needs a complete rework. +10 PL is way too obscene. The subclasses aren't really that bad. They are more niche. If all you do is focus in on your specialized school, you are strictly better than a normal wizard in every way possible. Try rolling an evoker, transmute, or illusionist. Conjurers and enchanters need some help because PL scaling is really bad for buffs and summons.

This is what I'm talking about. This is a rationalization that dodges the issue. In the basics of any system, a heal should put you into a better situation than you were in before. (We're not even talking about interactions with other effects or abilities, just simply a heal when you're at low endurance and low health). It is easy to run into situations with the way health/endurance was handled in PoE1 where healing will actually put you in a worse situation. Your response glosses over this. I mean, I feel like this is a trivial statement, but it's really because "a heal should put you into a better situation than you were in before" was so axiomatic in virtually any other RPG system that it feels really headache-y to explicitly have to say this, and it really is a mark on health/endurance that it needs to be made explicitly clear. edit: it's not even a matter of being "not far from resting anyway." with a lot of druid or priest heals and several squishies (including said druid or priest) e.g. a wizard or anyone else with a low health multiplier, all it takes is a few enemy aoes that you heal back from and suddenly you've drained through a huge amount of your health. if you roll a spellblade-y type (wizard with summoning weapons and buffs) it's not uncommon to get to lower health much faster than everyone else in your party.

That's not the scenario though, the scenario is letting a party member go down because if you heal them instead they die.

Oh yeah, I mentioned this in the announcement thread, but Woedica's combined with Rymrgand will be great for anyone who wants really limited rests. Many prepared foods last as little as 1 day, so you could really be out the ability to rest while out wandering. (Not to mention the ingredients needed to prep food spoil as well. Not going to lie probably not going to combine these challenges ever)

JUST when they finally nerfed it, it becomes obscene again

I guess my big question to health/endurance defenders is: what does health/endurance get you that you can't accomplish some other way? To me, it's an overly complicated and unnecessary hack that leads to unintuitive outcomes. You can accomplish the same thing with other mechanisms, and I cited Tyranny as an example of accumulating wounds even when just injured (whereas Deadfire theoretically you can have zero multi-encounter constraints if you never get knocked out, which isn't that hard especially on lower difficulties). You could even do more creative things than that. (it's worth highlighting that health/endurance was even more confusing early in backer beta where isntead of health being a multiplier of endurance, your health = endurance but there was a damage coefficient that reduced weapon damage as it affected your health but affected your endurance at full strength. boy, even though mathematically it was the same as the eventual final system and even though intellectually i understood it, in practice it was a confusing mess in pre-release early PoE1). It just seems like some people are rationalizing health/endurance but not really demonstrating why it's so great compared to actual real alternatives. It smacks to me of a little bit of status quo bias, or preferring it simply because "that's the way PoE1 did it."

Well, to not win or not lose are pretty unsatisfying outcomes. I elaborated more on what I meant in a follow-up post: Basically what I'm saying is that it's purely an artifact of the health/endurance system that you can take on fights that really should be or would be impossible in a "saner" encounter-based system (where encounter-based means enemies are grouped into encounters, which is more the norm these days instead of 90s-era CRPGs of just going from enemy to enemy and being able to cast any spell whenever). This to me illustrates how much of a hack health was for providing a multi-fight resource constraint, because it was completely irrelevant for enemies except in cases where it let you do things you really shouldn't have been able to (or the rare case that happened to me where I had tons of healing but just couldn't kill the enemy fast enough so I ran out of health).

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance. Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways. Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance? Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe. Wounds added a malus, but you could still play through them. They weren't designed to be super crippling. And the edge cases are *not* "you're in an easy fight after having just rested" but "you've been in a couple fights and now these edge cases are occuring." And yes, for e.g. wizards, it's in fact very very easy to keep healing and blow through x4 endurance. Even with monks and fighters you can (especially with fighters because they can be taking a lot of "invisible" damage e.g. plinking damage that gets healed by constant recovery so your endurance isn't changing much but you're losing health fight over fight). Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism. Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches. Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies. The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources. The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong. That's the whole point of health. It is a fair, and it is literally believable because it happens. It won't happen in "normal" gameplay, but it enables or disables solo encounters (and considering that PoE1 had like four separate achievements for beating the game solo, cheevo hunters would run into this in a way that you couldn't in e.g. Deadfire). It also enables cheese, because you can just range an enemy, kite, and if they disengage, range them again, etc. until even the toughest enemy keels over dead because they regenned through all their health. This is an artifact of the health/endurance system. In "saner" systems like Tyranny, Deadfire, Dragon Age, etc. where enemies are tied to a specific encounter, if you can't outdamage an enemy's heal potential or are just taking potshots and running away, the encounter is fundamentally unbeatable. IN fact, health is mostly just a hack for the player to feel some sort of multi-encounter resource constraint, because it's mostly irrelevant for enemies and the fact that it's mostly irrelevant for enemies except in these weird interactions where it enables you to do things that you really shouldn't demonstrates how much of a hack it is. Similarly, if you have strong regen and are tanking real hard (easily possible with a slightly metagamed build) health/endurance means you can still end up losing the fight even if in the long run you could've won. That's not quite true. With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources. PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too. That's what made them feel like bosses. In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight. Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again. And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy. Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics. With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam. It's not bad form. It's called hyperbole. (The 1% number that is. I would've hoped it would have been painfully obvious that I was using a small number for exaggerated effect.) But objectively, JE Sawyer and co had plenty of feedback about people running back all the time to get more rest supplies and anecdotally the internet/forums were filled with these sort of complaints that it seems completely credible that JE Sawyer and co would think that this was a problem and that relatively few players saw this as a "fun" strategic constraint rather than an encounter-countdown-tedium that they had to fix somehow. There is literally some comment somewhere on the internet, either in the forums, a backer update, or an update video, or his own blog where JE Sawyer cites this as part of the reason to change the system in Deadfire. Also per-rest doesn't change anything about ability variance. E.G. IWD2, I knew several friends who converged on the same "web, then fireball" strategy. Per-rest simply meant that they had to click a rest button every now and then to keep doing it. edit: more specifically, the per-encounter resources numerically are set so that in effect it approximates a partial use of per-rest resources. It doesn't let you spam x3 or x4 top-level spells like you could in PoE1, but it also means that fundamentally there's not much of a distinction between per-rest and per-encounter in terms of whether or not you vary what abilities you use. What does narrow down variability is the ability tree system where priests and druids now have to make explicit spell selections instead of getting a lot of spells for free per spell level and wizards having a very different grimoire mechanic. I would in fact argue in some cases per-encounter system in Deadfire enables much greater variability where martial classes are concerned (e.g. in one fight pallegina can be a lay on hands heal monkey, in another she could mix it up with lots of sworn enemy and flames of devotion, in another she's just reviving and liberating everyone whereas in PoE1 you'd have a hard per-encounter limit on all of those abilities, or possibly even a per-rest limit).

New wizard subclass: Omnispecialist. +2 PL with each spell school, +10% recovery time with each spell school, each spell school banned. ...wait

I wonder how this will work out. I would think the casting resources need to be rebalanced since just turning to per rest would mean you have very few spells across multiple battles. May require a mod to balance something like this. If caster still only have two cast per level that would seem to punishing but would be interesting what community comes up with. Reading the description, i wonder if this mean all per encounter abilities turns to per rest? That is how i am reading it. I would think the part of the community that wanted per rest stuff was only wanting for casters but having for everyone would make a tough challenge. Maybe be fun though it they don't increase class resources, it would mean that you'd have to stock up on prepared foods and also it would shift the balance of power to martial classes, who have a lot more "steady-state" power. i doubt they would do the following (because i think challenges are meant to be strictly harder), but it would help the transition to per-rest if casters got +1 cast at each AL and martial classes got a boost (or were left at per-encounter). i think empower use just to refresh resources becomes more essential.

Wowowow I'm excited for a lot of the 4.0 stuff, including Finally a reason to get that junk/galleon in late game. EDIT: also... those god's challenges wow. rymrgand + woedica = yikes!

*JAW DROP*

In the basic system, it should always be a good thing. It doesn't always always have to be a good thing. (example trope is undead being damaged by healing. other examples include effects in various games and CCGs that trigger bad effects if a player tries to heal, e.g. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=107358 ) In the basic system, why should healing always be a good thing? Because otherwise your basic system is broken and leads to unintuitive outcomes. It's almost axiomatic, because in virtually all other non health/endurance systems, gaining more health just meant gaining more health (up to a maximum) and there was nothing more to it and then you layered complexity and interactions on top of it. It's almost like "why should mathematics define real numbers as an ordered field?" I mean I guess you don't have to, but boy does it make everything else messy real fast. possible alternative fix to health/endurance in PoE1. same thing, except you can always be healed up to your maximum endurance (instead of capped at your health if lower), and you only permadie if both your endurance and health are 0. (if you have endurance > 0 but your health is 0, you're basically in "last stand" mode. if you end up surviving combat you go back up to 1 health). you still need to do something about knockouts being a "safe" alternative to permadeath... maybe a bleedout? or some enemies will keep attacking a knocked out character with some damage multiplier? it's all moot anyway because I doubt we'll see health/endurance come back in any future PoE, if any.

In the basic system, it should always be a good thing. It doesn't always always have to be a good thing. (example trope is undead being damaged by healing. other examples include effects in various games and CCGs that trigger bad effects if a player tries to heal, e.g. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=107358 ) In the basic system, why should healing always be a good thing? Because otherwise your basic system is broken and leads to unintuitive outcomes. It's almost axiomatic, because in virtually all other non health/endurance systems, gaining more health just meant gaining more health (up to a maximum) and there was nothing more to it and then you layered complexity and interactions on top of it. It's almost like "why should mathematics define real numbers as an ordered field?" I mean I guess you don't have to, but boy does it make everything else messy real fast.