thelee

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.

I believe this feature was removed from Tyranny and now only knockouts cause wounds. Given that wounds also decreased stats, that was rational change, because otherwise it could send a player who was winning, but not winning by large enough margin, on downwards spiral towards the bitter end. Nope. I loaded up Tyranny again a few days ago and you still get wounds just from being dropped to low health. (Might be limited to PotD-only though.) Wounds used to decrease stats a lot at first, but in more recent versions are a little bit less painful. Actually I'm not sure that's right. Whether or not you damage your own characters, they still have to get through low health, which triggers wounds, and once they do so I don't think they can trigger more wounds by healing up and then falling back down (I could be wrong and if so, this is also a bad mark on Tyranny's approach). Similarly, decoys are not unintuitive, nor is it a perverse incentive. In fact, in many games, it is a great strategy to lure enemies into dangerous situations with a decoy. People do this IRL in wars and stuff. Anyway to reiterate - the fundamental brokenness is the fact that in your basic system (before adding the complexities of one-off effects), healing should always be a good thing, instead of potentially extremely lethal. And not to mention that no one has touched on the fact that health/endurance could lead you to win unwinnable fights or lose unlosable fights because the health effectively meant that healing was capped (because bizarrely aside from Infuse with Vital Essence, all healing only affected endurance.)

Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire - Not So Definitive Edition! =) Pillars of Eternity 1 - Deadfire Edition

I took a look at stats: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106384-mechanics-stats-weapons-and-rules-of-thumb/ TL;DR - like other people said, might is an additive bonus so having other damage bonuses reduces the net impact of might. In addition, due to the way Deadfire handles armor, grazes are particularly punishing for damage bonuses, so might doesn't even come close to adding 3% damage (ignoring all other damage bonuses) on a graze (the gory details: it's a non-linear climb out of the graze penalty). Perception, on the other hand, benefits significantly because it helps you graze less (which as I've said are really bad for damage bonuses), and in cases where you are under penetrating the armor, helps you crit more, and critting gives you +50% PEN, which can move you up penetration categories and give you a huge effective damage boost. On lower difficulties, might and perception are very nearly equal and you should probably balance them. (both provide roughly +2% net damage per point on average) On higher difficulties, you should probably invest in perception first (though dex is still king). (both provide roughly +2% net damage per point, but perception is actually very slightly better due to PEN issues) For healers and defensive characters, accuracy isn't as important so might is more important.

my corpse-eater cares more about being fast. he's also actually a shaman (corpse-eater + priest of skaen), so I have extra heals, enemy accuracy debuffs, and I can Escape to eat corpses for more healing or even just for the temporary +50 deflection boost. Ironically, when I had serafen in my party (who was wearing heavier armor), serafen had much harder time staying alive. rekke is doing fine though (upgraded heavy armor + thick-skinned + armored grace + litany for the body = 25% under pen for many enemies but still fast) Hey now, Wild Mind may be a totally inadequate sidegrade to an inadequate core class, but you need a lot of room on the bottom to distinguish it from the truly bad (Brotherhood of the Five Suns) and figurative tire fires (Sister of the Reaping Moon). ...yeah they really need to do a companion unique subclass balance pass at some point. however much off the other special subclasses might be (and I don't mind Sister of the Reaping Moon at all), serafen's is the only one that has actively caused harm to me. I think the last straw for this paticular run was using Mind Blades and triggering a Wild Mind that made all enemies hit with it invisible. "Welp, time to go get Rekke." Anytime in the future I use serafen it'll be as a pure barb.

no, it doesn't scale with leveling. only damage and accuracy per PL. I think the intention was deliberately to tone down carnage from PoE1. It's not bad, so long as you don't have intellect less than 10. If you manage to hit two other enemies, you're doing pretty well, generally speaking.

Don't know when this got introduced, maybe 3.1, maybe 3.1.1... don't think it was as far back as 3.0. Basically, watch this video of me scrolling through the ship supplier in nekataka: ....yeah... there was actually a real item in the midst of all that but i'd be hardpressed to find it again. I think it's only ship vendors because I don't recall seeing e.g. the Dark Cupboard or the herbalist shop having such a long selling inventory. Dropbox link to output_log and save: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/blz9z6ajm16nadz/AADrvBfhJz_PMnBXVcJHqVuva?dl=0 edit: is it rymrgand's challenge related? I think i've sold some spoiled food to these vendors, maybe something is up.

Pop quiz: Eder is at 20/120 endurance and is under attack. Should you use a big +60 heal on him? Trick question, because Eder was at 80/600 health. All you've done under constant pressure is turn a knock-out scenario into a permadeath scenario. There is literally no world in which it is intuitive to not heal the person in pain. And it's related to this violating one of the most basic rules of RPG-like mechanics: within your basic systems, a heal should always put you in a better situation. (Yes, you can have trickery like in M:TG where you have effects that turn healing into damage, but that's why it's within your basic system.) The intent of health/endurance was to cause a resource constraint over many fights, despite healing up to full at the end of each fight, but it produces bizarre outcomes and broken incentives. I've literally cast AoE spells to knock Eder out myself instead of letting his Constant Recovery go long enough to restore his endurance to the point that his health = endurance and any future knockout in the current fight instead becomes a ruinous permadeath. That is a fundamentally broken incentive in the system. If they wanted to fix this, any healing should have instead have been implemented as "bonus endurance" basically an endurance shield that doesn't increase your current endurance. That way you avoid these broken situations where healing makes you more vulnerable. But this is probably too complicated for such a fundamental part of your RPG system. A better solution is actually from Tyranny. There they don't have health/endurance, but they have wounds. Unlike in Deadfire, you need 10 wounds before they are fatal, but also unlike in Deadfire you also get wounds for being brought down to low health (in addition to lots of wounds from knockout). This performed a similar function as providing a resource constraint over many fights despite being healed to full each time (because while I've done no-knockout challenges in PoE1, it's extremely hard to avoid getting bloodied in Tyranny to avoid those wounds) without the weird edge cases that health/endurance introduces. Many of those things you suggest are awful or tedious mechanics. Sure they might "balance" per-rest encounters for some definition of "balance," but they are also just extremely not fun and/or unintuitive (e.g. I hated rampant monster spawning in BG). Dynamic scaling is extremely hard to get right, and all you're really doing is opening yourself to weird loophole-y interactions.

I would say though that if you are discussing in terms of balancing, having a feature like Empower where you can refresh abilities gives balancing an added edge, where you can make sure your encounters are a little more difficult, but at the same time make them more approachable for a variety of parties. Serious question is there a game you can think of where you aren't either save spamming or rest spamming? I am more a save spammer ... save spamming is fine so long as this is done in the context of encounters being generally beatable, and the designers didn't design an encounter with a 90% chance of instadeath so you have to reload: however much I love Fallout 1/2, those games are so brutally difficult early on (just down to stupid bad luck, e.g. a lucky critical hit from a venus fly trap plant that knocks you out until you die) that save spamming is a necessity which means they had poor early game encounter balance/design. rest spamming is also fine, but it makes it harder for encounters to be properly balanced, if you want to be a well-tuned game. BG2/IWD2 become a lot easier once you check off "rest party until fully healed" and just rest after each encounter. (though IWD2 on heart of fury mode is hard enough that you can rest-spam and it is still a challenge). If you want resiliently well-balanced encounters, you have to eliminate rest-spamming somehow. PoE1 tried one approach (limit your rests), but failed because I think it wasn't restrictive enough (though I'm sure most players would have hated more restrictive resting). Deadfire is trying another approach (make rests not matter). i think ultimately the "make rests not matter" is probably the best approach (probably not coincidentally a lot of games are converging on this solution, e.g. games like modern Tomb Raider where you heal to full health after a fight is over). some of my favorite tactical RPGs are essentially this (see: Final Fantasy Tactics), since each battle starts with everyone at full resources.

Pets start with 5 AR, and they autoscale from Fine at level 1, to Exceptional at level 9, Superb level 13, and then legendary at level 17 (for +4 at last). Bear gets an additional +1 AR to start. They basically have the equivalent of medium armor which tbh for tanking purposes is not enough on PotD+upscaling (will be decent on lower difficulties, especially without upscaling). With Resilient Companion they get the equivalent of heavy armor, which is better, but you still probably need a paladin aura or a Hardy buff from a priest to really make them soak up any significant enemy hate without dying super fast. Bears do pretty well with Resilient Companion. But yeah, with lack of engagement, it doesn't really matter. Just go charge at a squishy and run away if you can't handle the heat. If you really wanted to be tricky, the lack of engagement means you could keep running your pet out of melee range just as the enemy starts an attack, which will then automatically miss (with "(out of range)" in combat log). Thanks for the feedback. Out of Wolf & Lion, which would you recommend? Wolf, for greater base damage, or Lion for bonus to attack speed, or would you say that it really doesn't make that much of a difference, all things considered? Plugging my gamefaqs guide here briefly https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/-ranger- Wolf basically has +25% damage, Lion has +22% damage, so purely from a damage perspective you should get a wolf. But lion attacks faster, which means this has the effect that they are more responsive in combat (shorter recovery time), which has significant non-quantifiable benefits. I think you should go with whatever playstyle you prefer (or whether you are a dog or cat person), or flip a coin

Maybe I'm in an extreme minority, but I completely agreed with and supported the move to the per-encounter system. I thought the health/endurance system was creative and interesting, but I think saying that it was merely "confusing to new players" undersells just how unintuitive of a mechanic it is; there's virtually nothing like it out there. It also had really weird edge cases, because sometimes you wanted your character to get knocked out instead of healing them, because otherwise they might run out of health instead of running out of endurance, which is the difference between permadeath and a wound. This is something that I frankly noticed in Backer Beta and I guess everyone else just shrugged this obviously broken edge case away (I think I advocated for some sort of enemy coup-de-grace option). Don't mind me, I'm just deliberately not casting Consecrated Ground so that my wizard won't get gibbed in this fight.This also had the probably unintentional effect that sometimes unwinnable fights against enemies could actually become winnable because the health/endurance system meant there was a "cap" to how much health the enemy could heal. With per-rest you can't balance encounters knowing a set amount of player resources... you go for an average case, but it means that rest-spam can completely trivialize it. And objectively, many players were just hauling back and forth to stock up on rest supplies to do almost precisely this (and then complaining about having to do this), because if you told the average player that they could make battles easier by just blowing their entire spell wad in one go and then just resting up for the next fight, that's what they would do. I must've been like the 1% of players who actually treated rest supplies as a strategic constraint and not a tedious "time to go back to town" countdown.To be fair, when Deadfire first came out, it's difficulty curve was so low that it didn't seem like they didn't even balance for a per-encounter system properly (where you can assume player at 100% resources with each fight). With all the PotD re-balancing I think it has become a much better case study of why a per-encounter system is better for game balance. Gorecci Street and Engwithan Dig Site is basically a player sieve now on PotD. If anything, my critique is that they still had some vestiges of a per-rest system (empower, per rest items, powerful food bonuses) while rest was still trivialized by per-encounter, which makes me go ???? at something like "Great Soul" (which grants +1 empower but rest to refresh all your empower is so cheap on anything not Eothas or Rymrgand challenge).

Yeah, this has been an issue since 1.0 honestly.

i'm running a party with 2x barbarians in 3.1.1. first it was serafen + mainchar(corpse eater), and now it's rekke + mainchar(corpse eater), because serafen's wild mind class is garbage and makes for a terrible witch multiclass. I can confirm carnage works. Remember: carnage only triggers on a weapon hit, so you shouldn't see any carnage attacks on a grazethis has the side effect of making perception way more important than might for a barbarian interested in doing lots of carnage damage. in Deadfire for some inexplicable reason you don't get a yellow targeting circle around enemies you attack for the carnage radius. carnage still works despite this. carnage has a small base radius of 1.5m. It can be boosted by intellect and Rings of Overseeing, etc, but by default it's going to be fairly small (think of how small a priest Repulsing Seal radius is when you try to target it). So unless you are specifically boosting intellect or using equipment to boost radius, enemies have to be basically touching your target to be affected by carnage. (though my mainchar has aloth's armor, two rings of overseeing, high intellect, and gets litany for the spirit cast on him, so he has a decently big carnage radius now and can affect enemies a little further away)

Important to note that combusting wounds damage doesn't show up in the combat log. It sorta "just happens" and all you can really get out of it is that the enemy dies faster (and you maybe see a fire effect trigger). So just because you don't see any damage numbers in the combat log doesn't mean it's not working. It was the same way in PoE1. Made me really surprised when I discovered that a chanter with the level 1 draining chant + wizard with combusting wounds = very dead enemies very quickly.

Pets start with 5 AR, and they autoscale from Fine at level 1, to Exceptional at level 9, Superb level 13, and then legendary at level 17 (for +4 at last). Bear gets an additional +1 AR to start. They basically have the equivalent of medium armor which tbh for tanking purposes is not enough on PotD+upscaling (will be decent on lower difficulties, especially without upscaling). With Resilient Companion they get the equivalent of heavy armor, which is better, but you still probably need a paladin aura or a Hardy buff from a priest to really make them soak up any significant enemy hate without dying super fast. Bears do pretty well with Resilient Companion. But yeah, with lack of engagement, it doesn't really matter. Just go charge at a squishy and run away if you can't handle the heat. If you really wanted to be tricky, the lack of engagement means you could keep running your pet out of melee range just as the enemy starts an attack, which will then automatically miss (with "(out of range)" in combat log).

If you have a ghost heart, tbh it doesn't seem like it matters if they are tanky or not. You should be using the pet to charge directly at squishy enemies and take them down asap, with support from Marked Prey and other things. If you want a tanky pet, then you shouldn't be using a subclass basically built around the idea that your pet is ephemeral (needs to be actively summoned and can't be healed) and designed to be a dive-bomb (no engagement). Animal Companions "don't deal a lot of damage" is true if you consider them in isolation; animal companions do about as much damage as a stiletto (without the PEN bonus), though a wolf and lion do about the same level of increased damage (on par with a dagger), without the benefits of e.g. dual-wielding or single-weapon style. But, they are a huge component of the ranger's total damage capability: neglect the animal companion at your own loss, TBH. Without good investment or micro of your pet, a ranged ranger is only kinda better (if at all) than any other class with a ranged weapon. Also "not a lot of damage"; using a wolf or lion as a base, they eventually scale to legendary weapons, so they would be attacking with the rough equivalent of a legendary dagger with a further +95% in damage bonuses, which actually doesn't compare that badly to a rogue (rogue caps out at +80% sneak attack naturally with Prestige). A non lion/wolf will do a bit worse. True, a rogue has a bunch of other abilities including the ability to dual-wield for more damage, but so do you, as a ranger. That's why you and your pet are a combined team and why your pet isn't taking up a separate party slot. edit: background, i rolled an itinerant on my second play through (ghost heart + priest of berath for dots/buffs). worked pretty well for me (PotD upscaling). like i said, yes, pets are squishy on PotD+upscaling (except for maybe a Bear + Resilient Companion) and need lots of love and support to stay alive, but for a ghost heart if your pet gets knocked out it's more like a shrug followed by re-summoning your pet.

One more update (that might be related to Putrid Stench not exploding corpses): very infrequently I find that corpses disappear as targets. I.E. they are valid targets when I queue up Fassina to explode them, but if I retarget the ability later I might sometimes find that the corpses are no longer targetable. It doesn't happen often, but it might be related to Fassina not exploding corpses - perhaps the ability is target and while the ability is being used the corpse somehow goes away on its own. (Between Fassina and my corpse-eater barbarian, I've been paying a lot of attention to dead bodies on this run.)

Litany for the Body is a "Hardy" inspiration, which is +2 AR and +5 CON. What you probably mean is eiterh Champion's Boon (AL5) or Holy Meditation (AL2) both of which provide Resolute, which refreshes a single Concentration every 6s (it refreshes, it doesn't stack; so if you already have Concentration from the Resolute inspiration, you don't get anything). For fool-proof interrupt protection, get Hands of Light on a paladin, which grants Courageous (completely immune to interruptions, still grants a Concentration after 6s). True, but HoL upgrade costs 2 zeal instead of 1 and the duration is very low, esp. when you use a shield or heavy armor, you can get max one additional attack etc. out, b4 it runs out. With a priest and SoT, it would last longer tho. The point is less about how long it lasts so you can do some number of attacks, it's so that you're able to do those attacks in the first place. I.E. at least on PotD there are some encounters where there are so many rogue types where if they gang up on one of my characters, they can crippling/blinding/whatever strike that character to the point that they can't do much of anything (each interrupt adds 2s to current recovery, up to the maximum of your last recovery period), even if I'm careful to avoid using any abilities while they're using those abilities. The 2 Zeal is a situational cost (because otherwise you should just do the 1 Zeal LOH, you have both) to basically say "this character will DEFINITELY be able to do something in the next bit of time", whether that's drink a potion, cast some spells, or even just run away (because while interrupted/prone you can't move). IMO Hands of Light is generally worse than the other upgrade (Greater LOH, which grants Robust), but situationally can be extremely extremely good. Complete immunity to interrupts means that interrupting attacks don't even check any concentration, they just don't happen. So if you have Concentration generated from other sources (including Courageous), they'll all still be around after Courageous wears off.

nicely put

i think it's probably pretty divisive decision, but i would consider this "working as intended."

Also just got a missing string 24 right after making that post, also in sacred stair.

Got a missing string *14* *18* and *7* just walking around Sacred Stair from Animancers and Commoners. Dropbox link to autosave and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vw4aqy3m5g0yt8w/AAA-uEqlzSbZrZ5qjKhsakTTa?dl=0