thelee

I rolled a new character last night and played for ~40m. I didn't run into this issue--alternated weapons normally (had a rapier and a dagger and could tell by damage type in combat log what was happening). Is there something that triggered it for you in beta?

I actually think it's the best way Obsidian could go about it. I just like the power creep I had with the original version i don't think it was the best, but it was certainly the easiest (instead of a more complicated version making higher-level spells recharge slower). 6s is probably "good enough." martial classes don't benefit as much, casters benefit more, just not as obscenely as before... maybe 3 restored spells from Ancestor's Memory instead of 6 for base (and slower shenanigans with Salvation of Time).

it might just be table stakes at this point, but I do have to say Obsidian I really appreciate the ongoing new content and support you give to the game! Looking forward to rolling a Hylea challenge game

i think this would add way too much variance to the game to be a good change. Essentially, con would give you stat that is "% chance not to die." That is a wild swing in outcomes from battle to battle. (And there's a reason why not every AD&D mechanic was implemented in BG/BG2. AD&D--even though it's a system I'm sure many of us are nostalgically fond of--is really just a terribly designed game system. I mean, for crying out loud, if you were playing it correctly, you didn't even get to pick what class you got, it was essentially picked for you by the stats you rolled, which is why all those "minimum" stats things were a thing--however mostly meaningless--in BG/BG2.) Anyway, I'm on the train that if there's any change to con, increasing healing received effectiveness is a good one to have. We already have some stat overlap (intellect influencing durations, resolve also affecting durations), so it's not unprecedented.

is there any special loot you miss out on by doing so? (or did they fix that bug with essence interrupter?)

You're either on iron Man mode or you have a mod. Autosave is table stakes in any game these days.

hey, sorry i missed this post when you first made it. a couple things: the guide already mentioned that abilities get .5 pen per ability level. and i try to be clear between ability level and power level because they're different things. but you're right it's a bit confusing, and i probably could go through the original post with another editing pass. part of the confusion is also because the game itself is inconsistent about calling it "power level" or "ability level" in the combat log, because sometimes things that are very clearly "power level"-based scaling get counted as "ability level." when i have some more time i'll try to make things clearer.

I noticed some weirdness with traps so I did a little bit of research and updated the OP. For those who don't want to dig into the OP just to see what's new, here's what I added:

Yes. dumb thought (haven't tried it even once yet) - is it something where you have to physically lead one ooze away from the other to prevent them rejoining?

Thinking about a ranger build but nowhere near a copy of the game. Was wondering if anyone could confirm or deny whether the acc bonus also helps your pet (also the damage/deflection bonus from the upgrades).

From a mechanics standpoint- sure.But from a roleplaying perspective- how would being of good vitality mitigate Armor Recovery Time? Does constitution also make you quicker, when dexterity essentially does the same thing? I think that the best way to address it is to not necessarily change the mechanics of how constitution works, but rather how healing spells/abilities/potions work. Instead of healing a flat 10 HP, have it heal 25% of max health. A level 1 Fighter with 10 constitution would have 42 HP - Meaning healing at 25% would be 10.5 HP Restored. A level 1 Fighter with 18 constitution would have 58 HP - Meaning healing at 25% would be 14.5 HP Restored. If both of those fighters get hit with an attack that deals 20 damage, the first fighter would heal to 32.5 HP vs the second fighter's 52.5 HP. The second fighter would heal significantly more- making constitution a more worthwhile investment. I doubt that obsidian would make any widespread changes like this of course... At least not until PoE3. I love this idea. I agree that it is unlikely to ever happen, but I love it from a flip angle than what you consider - it makes taking away from constitution more painful. Currently, for anyone who's not expected to actually tank on enemies, constitution (and resolve) are stats you can safely dump, because unlike the other stats these stats only help you if you're actively being hurt (whereas e.g. dexterity is always useful). If instead all healing came in % form, then taking away from con means that when you do get hit, a low con actively makes it harder to recover from those hits (whereas currently as far as e.g. Scroll of Moderate Healing is concerned, it's irrelevant whether your max health is 90 or 300). It's ironic because Tyranny actually does %-based healing. While I didn't like Tyranny nearly as much as PoE1 (or Deadfire), there are aspects of it I really want to be ported to the PoE system, and I think % healing is one of them.

Found from this thread: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106473-charge-really-useless-now/?p=2108972 Basically, every single ability and attack has a baseline accuracy of 20, on top of which perception, ability, power level, etc. modifiers are added. For some reason, Charge is missing this. Compare against another attack: Dropbox link to save and output log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hvjjyqkhh29u42w/AAD6rb7Z4YU-bcbCebg3B2tAa?dl=0

there's a couple things going on here. on the plus side: i think archaven actually found a legit bug! first, the UI is inaccurate when it comes to ability accuracy. from the power level guide: charge should inherently have a +6 ability level bonus to ACC, and then each PL you have higher than PL4 should give it another +1 at least. The combat log will show you all the modifiers that actually end up getting used: Eder is a single-class fighter at level 20, so he should get +6 ability level ACC and +5 power level ACC, which he does. The bug appears to be that all abilities should also have a baseline accuracy of 20; this is just the starting accuracy for all characters, and then they get +3 per character level above level 1. For whatever reason, Charge isn't getting this. I'll go report this in the bugs forum.

great research. this is something that i frankly wish was rolled into the base game, because as it is sleight of hand is pretty much a trap choice. that way i can do some slightly more meaningful pick pocket while rolling one of the god challenges.

thanks for that clarification. -5 PL is definitely a more significant trade-off for more aoe. looking forward to playing with it.

Resolve is niche, not bad. The problem with resolve is that gives you a bonus that has increasing returns (deflection), so the difference between a few points of resolve could literally mean infinite survivability. You buff it as a stat and you end up only slightly helping the majority of cases while really making degenerate builds all the more powerful. Con is also pretty niche, though with less dramatic upside than resolve. I don't really think it needs much help. The penalty is large enough that unless you love being targeted by every enemy archer in the fight, you shouldn't really dump it more than a couple points. It is a little lame that healing effects are less effective against high health characters, so I wouldn't say "no" to some sort of buff that linked CON to bonus healing (though penalties would overlap with con afflictions). My bottom line: it's OK if a couple stats are a little more situational than others. I don't think investing in Con or Resolve is a trap choice for most players. If it were, I'd be more concerned about stat imbalance.

This +100. Not only can charisma/speech carry you places in Fallout 1/2, there are very very few forced combat encounters. Planescape: Torment might also need to be on this shortlist of "games where you can talk your way out of things" because I think P:T had even fewer forced combat encounters (a friend mentioned something like counting on one hand the fights you had to do), which was great because I thought P:T really screwed the pooch on infinity engine combat mechanics. PoE/Deadfire's ancestry is with BG and BG2. So it has combat up the wazoo, and very nearly every aspect of its game system is devoted to fighting. Deadfire is a little better with its dedicated talk skills. But both poe/deadfire are still fundamentally fighting games. This is an interesting anecdote because I think Sawyer's first major project was Icewind Dale 2, and if this is the way Sawyer leans then it's reflected even in IWD2, which--despite being a hack-and-slash sequel to a near-100% dungeon crawly game--actually had dedicated "soft" skills to invest in (Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate IIRC; I seem to recall them being somewhat meaningful, but I don't remember).

Then they missed out on all the dialogue options.I think a lot of people preferred to wreck house in combat instead.Which ppl?most of the discussion i was a part of back in the day, resolve was a dump stat. in terms of dialogue options while it did give you a few alternative quest endings, it was only in a few cases. it's nothing like charisma/speech in fallouts 1-NV. https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/raw-numbers-for-poes-dialogue-checks.98722/ Incorrect. Most of those are "flavor" alternate checks... like in Deadfire. Where you say something extra, or learn something extra, but nothing material changes in the dialogue tree or quest. Read the second paragraph in that link: "Mind you, the dialogue unlocked by these checks could still be ****." Meanwhile, in the Fallout series, you could literally convince the final boss to kill themselves just by being charismatic and speechful enough. Entire quest chains could be blocked off from you for having the wrong stats or saying the wrong thing. So you mean like a Resolve check to make the Magma Dragon fly away? Or the multiple checks to have the Dragon fight Rym in the BoW? Like that? You can keep trying to refute but I've provided you evidence and keep talking about Fallout. Don't care about Fallout. Just admit you are wrong- Resolve was an important dialogue attribute in PoE, it did everything you are saying above - changed quests and allowed you to take different routes. So when I say "most of those are flavor checks" you respond with literally two counterexamples and somehow this disputes "most of those are flavor checks?" Not to mention that in Deadfire, most of the important game-changing skill checks aren't even resolve-based (e.g. extremely high intimidate or i think bluff checks for Nemnok; being a priest of magran for the ashen maw); not to mention that we're talking about PoE1 here so drawing counterexamples from Deadfire literally proves nothing. You should go through the game and quick save before each major dialogue and proceed to try every single skill or stat-gated dialogue option; you may find yourself surprised as to how little actually materially changes anything. They may give you some extra lore, but not much else. (Heck in this sense Deadire is worse; even the dialogue options that sound like rejecting a quest may still end up with the question being added to your journal.) In PoE1 I think I count on my hands the number of times a high resolve actually made for a tangibly different outcome (said as someone who has clocked ~1000 steam hours on PoE1). I use fallout as an example because that's a series where the equivalent charisma stat mattered in the sense that you're talking about. PoE1/2 aren't even close; they are certainly better than BG/BG2, but not even remotely close.

This was an issue with a separate party that I had run in 3.0/3.0.1, so it's consistent. Basically there's a campfire on the northeastern part of the poko kohara exterior map, and interacting with it would bring up a cutscene involving some spirits. Since at least 3.0, this hasn't been working. Dropbox link to save right before the campsite interaction and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mzuayjls8iwcw02/AACAjuctYwuOMnFKbCZMNmDWa?dl=0

I just want to add an updated note that while the bug fix to prevent music overlap has helped things, Deadfire really needs like one or two other night time songs, or longer periods of silence. Encampment is still just way too ubiquitous a piece of music :/ edit: like literally just now, load a game. encampment plays. i go to a store, don't buy anything after looking for ~30s. head south to leave the map after quick checking my inventory. encampment starts playing again on my way down. that's twice literally within a span of a few minutes.

hoo boy, regular buff cleansing is going to be rough for my preferred playstyle.

Interesting. Personally, given the nature of PL scaling, where party-friendliness is not a concern, it seems like I'd always want a bigger AoE. -1 PL is not that big of a deal compared to +30% aoe (so long as you're actually getting an extra target). (edit: from my power-level scaling guide--unless they tweaked it--one PL will only make a single point difference in accuracy one way or another, unless it's an ability that only has an accuracy roll. so it's extremely minor for most abilities)

the challenges are just to make the game... more... "challenge"-ing the reason why there are no achievements is because a lot of people (including myself) complained about how some stupidly annoying challenges were also achievements in poe1. some people like to get to 100% achievements collected without having to: - triple crown solo - triple crown solo again after the DLC comes out because they added another triple crown solo challenge, but also have to kill all the dragons and bosses - rest less than 10 times. Stupidly annoying or just hard? They can implent a achievement for each challenge done. Even if you complete the game with 1 or 2 challenges, you get the achievement(s), you dont have to TCS with it. both. the pacifism achievement was annoying. The Ultimate was hard and tedious. magran's challenge, for example, is a challenge i never want to play (because I paid hard money to back a real-time-with-pause game, twice, not to play a twitch-click/scripting game). but i'm also a cheevo hunter. so if you made an achievement for magran's challenge i would go insane and have to play it just for the achievement. and there are plenty of people who are cheevo hunters and who may never want to touch magran's fires at all. i think that's why virtually all the achievements in deadfire are story based or simple things like crafting or finding things. It's allready mentionend in a thread, that there are such achievements in the future: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/102955-probable-upcoming-magrans-fires-challenges-game-data-dive/?hl=crown That doesn't actually mean anything about future plans. It just means that there exist basically string entries/string tables for such things. I don't know how common it is in games industry, but the industry I work in it's pretty common to generate text for features that never pan out or you end up not doing. I suspect if those entries ever do get flipped on, it'll be for in-game berath's blessings points, not for e.g. steam achievements.

Then they missed out on all the dialogue options.I think a lot of people preferred to wreck house in combat instead.Which ppl?most of the discussion i was a part of back in the day, resolve was a dump stat. in terms of dialogue options while it did give you a few alternative quest endings, it was only in a few cases. it's nothing like charisma/speech in fallouts 1-NV. https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/raw-numbers-for-poes-dialogue-checks.98722/ Incorrect. Most of those are "flavor" alternate checks... like in Deadfire. Where you say something extra, or learn something extra, but nothing material changes in the dialogue tree or quest. Read the second paragraph in that link: "Mind you, the dialogue unlocked by these checks could still be ****." Meanwhile, in the Fallout series, you could literally convince the final boss to kill themselves just by being charismatic and speechful enough. Entire quest chains could be blocked off from you for having the wrong stats or saying the wrong thing.

Performance issues aren't universal though. I have like a 6 year old processor but an nvidia 1060 (though apparently people are struggling with nvidias) and I have 0 performance issues. What Sorcery is this ;D? I honestly want to see the hanging sepulchers with all those skeletons with a firewall or two on top of that. Not being an **** here, but I'm really, really skeptical about that. stuff like that is why i downgraded from running from 1440p to 1080p. but otherwise i still get smooth play experience with 1080p with all high settings. well, ok, one exception is anytime anyone casts mirror image. that spell, since 1.0, always causes dropped frames for me, no matter what my settings are--I suspect it's CPU-bound, not GPU-bound. but i wouldn't call my experience as being plagued with performance issues just because of that.