thelee

updated with a fast v slow weapons section.

*COUGH* *COUGH* I guess his simulation result only considered auto-attack? yes, for most scenarios i only roll auto-attack. it basically relies on two major assumptions (among others) 1. PotD difficulty (you'll notice in my original post I make some disclaimers for lower difficulties, like for barbarian carnage) 2. That most fights you'll be in for martial-oriented classes will be long enough that your active martial abilities get dwarfed by the general length of the fight. In my experience with PotD this is generally true except outlier-easy fights. If you do something like using only PL1/1-resource cost abilities at level 20 and are in an encounter you are over-leveled for, this may not be true, but in my experience martial classes can't maintain constant ability spamming. As a result the spike you get from active martial abilities smooths out over time. so therefore when comparing weapons, auto-attack effects dominate (along with persistent passives like sneak attack or carnage).

*COUGH* *COUGH* Literally the next sentence: and then in a follow-up response (bold added to show how my self-quote was literally true): I swear, some people just post in bad faith.

Just to clarify, Rymrgand's challenge makes it so food spoils after a set amount of time when sitting in your inventory. It doesn't change the buffs you get from food. ohhhhh that's different form what i understood from the patch notes. that sounds... interesting (no more hoarding that captain's banquet or hylea's meal)

This. It's also important to note that while dual wielding got nerfed (-35% Damage), it still has a higher DPS when dealing with full attack abilities. The conclusions regarding Might, however, appear to be accurate. i didn't say full attacks between 2h and 2w were equivalent, i merely stated that with the nerf to 2w full attacks the differences in martial builds was diminished. (and truthfully, they missed a few spots where full attacks should've been nerfed, so it's not that much diminished in some cases)

Doesn't give the full picture, it's just weapons in general. But still literally thousands of simulations with all sorts of different stats, armor, bonuses, penalties, etc. But with the full attack nerf, the difference for builds is diminished in weapon styles. Also 42.8% = 1/(1-.3)-1 which is how you convert recovery time bonus to action speed bonus. You should read the action speed mechanics guide as well as my umezawa guide for full details. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's you who don't understand how it works... First, the 42.8% you're talking about is just a coefficient used to calculate the recovery, not an effective reduction. And secondly, the reduction applies only to recovery which is just a part of the total action speed. Example: Weapon with 0.7s attack and 4s recovery, with no other mods involved. With dual wield it becomes 0.7s attack and 2.8s recovery. The recovery was reduced by 1.2 / 4 = 30%. The action speed however was reduced by 1.2 / 4.7 = 25.5% i'm sorry, but it's you who are completely mathematically wrong. you're talking about "the action speed was reduced" when talking about a reduced total action time. it's nonsensical. the action speed is a rate reflecting how quickly, essentially, you progress through frames of animation. the action speed was INCREASED by 42.8% through the recovery (the actual attack itself is unaffected), and that's how you end up with the net 30% reduction in recovery time. action speed bonus is the flip side (almost literally, because it's the inverted version) of a recovery time bonus. a clear example is the streetfighter's -50% recovery time bonus. Without any other mods, it brings a 4s recovery time down to 2s. The only way to accomplish this with action speed is to accumulate +100% action speed in terms of bonus, because then the rate at which you progress through attack frames doubles, therefore halving the time you spend in recovery. 1/(1-.5) = 2. On the left is the reocvery time bonus, on the right is action speed rate incrase. edit: i think you need to spend more time on maxquest's action speed guide and my umezawa guide, because i don't think you're properly accounting for how different "recovery time" and "action speed" are as concepts in deadfire. armor, for example, affects recovery time, whereas dexterity affects action speed. and you can't combine the two for computing net recovery time without converting both into the same unit of measurement (recovery time -> action speed for bonuses). edit2: when you're talking about how much more damage (or more generally, actions) you can accomplish in a given time, recovery time bonuses are not helpful to you. you have to essentially, invert them to account for how many extra actions that reduced recovery time allows for. this not coincidentally is the same thing you need to do to get an action speed bonus, which means a -30% recovery time means both a +42.8% action speed and also a +42.8% dps (for the recovery) edit3: (deep breath). ACTION SPEED BONUSES ARE LINEAR RETURNS!!!! edit4: and actually, you're wrong. in most cases 2h weapons are worse than dual-wielding. they are carried past 2w *on average* because of their +1 PEN. and yes, apparently you do need to make simulations for that, because you were wrong on this count. (this is why i have a note saying the optimal way to play would be to swap between 2h and 2w as pen dictates)

Doesn't give the full picture, it's just weapons in general. But still literally thousands of simulations with all sorts of different stats, armor, bonuses, penalties, etc. But with the full attack nerf, the difference for builds is diminished in weapon styles. Also 42.8% = 1/(1-.3)-1 which is how you convert recovery time bonus to action speed bonus. You should read the action speed mechanics guide as well as my umezawa guide for full details.

was in the 3.1.0 beta patch notes (taht got pulled) rymrgand: food bonuses have a short duration instead of lasting until next rest hylea: vela is in your party, can't attack, doesn't take up a party slot, but if she dies game over.

UPDATE NOTE Some people were getting extremely confused/hung up by some of the technical details, so I've done a lot of rewording and hidden some of the details inside spoiler tags; any time you see spoiler tags, you can expand it to read some nitty technical details--if you're not interested you can just skip it. This is just a note because if you're reading through the immediate replies it might seem like people are quoting random things that don't exist, and this is why. BACKSTORY I was planning on writing up another big combo character build and mechanics guide like I did with my Umezawa write-up, and while doing that I found it difficult to reason about certain interactions purely with simple pen-and-paper math. I ended up writing a script that I could plug in virtually any combination of stats, modifiers, etc. and let it run hundreds of simulations against varying Armor/Deflection situations and do experimental comparisons. I came up with some very interesting outcomes, and rather than wait to put it inside a character build, I'm sharing my findings here. KEY PHRASE - added in update "net damage" <= essentially, the multiplicative increase in sustained damage compared to alternative situations. KEY ASSUMPTIONS/DISCLAIMERS - added in update Statistics is statistics. "Average" doesn't mean "absolute truth." You will absolutely 100% be able to come up with counterexamples, because an average is just an average outcome. Where the variance that underpins that average can have significant impact, I try to make note of them. But just because you can come up with a counterexample or two doesn't mean the "average" case isn't "generally" true. WEAPON STYLES This is purely going to be evaluating the melee offensive styles. In other words, because weapon and shield style accomplishes a very different goal and ranged weapons are so different, I'm not going to talk about it. Most people intuitively think that two weapon style is the best style in Deadfire. And in general, that insight is right. That is, until Obsidian added a change in a patch that added +1 PEN to two handed weapons. This means that they all essentially have a +1 PEN advantage over "equivalent-class" single-handed weapons. Intuitively this means two-handed weapons are better in low-pen or just-on-the-edge-of-overpen situations. Running hundreds of simulations shows that on average, two-handed weapons do about 10% more net damage than dual-wielding. However, because this is a PEN-based interaction, the variance is important: in situations where PEN doesn't matter, two-handed weapons do worse, but the situations where that +1 PEN moves you up a PEN level or gives you OVERPEN heavily, and on PotD there are enough of these situations (mostly early on) that that +1 PEN moves two handed weapons from a crappy almost-trap choice into a viable alternative. You still give up some responsiveness in combat, but seems like a price some people might want to pay for extra damage. (This also means an optimal outcome would be to get both 2w and 2h and switch between the two based on PEN situations. But it does mean you can just wield 2h weapons all day long and still get viable outcomes instead of being stuck with a trap choice.) Enter single-weapon style. It is objectively a worse choice than either two handed and dual-wielding for straight-up damage. I think most people probably intuitively realized this. But mathematically, you have a greater than -10% net damage penalty compared to dual-wielding in most cases. (It varies wildly based on your base accuracy compared to the enemy). Single-weapon style does help you get more crits, so if you are a specifically crit-focused build (i'm thinking of monk, barbarian, or maybe chanter, who can do all sorts of powerful, non-damage-related effects on a crit) or are narrowly focused on a specific weapon that has a crit-based proc single-weapon style can be worth it. But in my mind it's extremely niche and is close to a trap choice for most players. STATS Here's where things get real interesting, because the simulations helped me realize things that weren’t obvious to me through simple calculations. First, let’s start off with some rules of thumb. If you’re trying to evaluate the relative quality of two different stats, how would you quickly reason about them? Through some simulations, I can tell you that +5 Perception is ~10% net damage, or about 2%/Perception (or per accuracy for that matter). This is not that too big of a surprise for people who follow the forums, since people have been computing this based on some basic assumptions about accuracy and enemy deflection since the backer beta. The real surprise is might. What’s the rule of thumb here? You might intuitively think 3% per might as it states in game but… you’d be wrong. In fact, each +5 might is also very nearly ~10% net damage, so similarly 2%/Might. Except there’s a further tickle here. While the rule of thumb for both perception and might are the same, in practice perception is actually very slightly better than might (it’s more like 11% net damage per +5 Perception). That’s because while in many cases perception performs on par with might, in cases where you are underpenetrating, that extra perception might increase your chance to crit, and critting gives you a +50% boost to your penetration, which means your crit damage might do many times more than your normal hit damage. Dexterity, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward and very nearly 3% net damage per dex. It varies a bit based on what armor you’re wearing and what other action speed bonuses and penalties you have, but this is why this is a rule of thumb and not an absolute truth. So, in terms of dealing damage, the stat order is Dex > Perception > Might. For casters who don’t have great autoattacks and rely more on one-shot spells, the order might be more like Perception > Might > Dex. If you had asked me a week ago, I would have weighted Might higher than Perception and it’s solely because of these simulations that I came away with another answer. For barbarians, perception gets greater weight if you try to make use of carnage at all. Again, here, if you had asked me a week ago I would have significantly weighted Might as best damage stat, due to the fact that carnage only scales with Might and Power Level. In fact, each point of Perception/accuracy gives you basically polynomial returns, because carnage only activates on a hit and carnage itself has to make an attack roll to hit. In fact, you need a very high base chance to hit (as shown by in-game targeting) of ~high 60% (virtually 70% or so) before an additional point of might begins to outweigh an additional point of perception in terms of total barbarian melee damage. On Path of the Damned, this is extremely rare for much of the game (and possible even for the mid-late game depending on how 3.1.0 rebalances the mid-late PotD game) so I feel comfortable advising all carnage-loving barbarians to invest in perception first. On lower difficulties, it might be easier to get to higher base chances to hit at which point might becomes closer to comparable. FAST WEAPONS VS SLOW WEAPONS People love them some sabres, and it's true they have a high inherent damage. Running simulations, though, you may be surprised that a sabre actually gets dwarfed by daggers, clubs, or rapiers. First, comparing equivalent-class fast weapon (.5 attack/3s recovery) and a slow weapon (.7 attack/4s recovery), ignoring weapon-specific bonuses, they are extremely close and comparable; the lower damage of fast weapons is largely cancelled out by the reduced total time spent doing an attack and recovery. (And unlike in PoE1, lower damage weapons aren't "more vulnerable" to armor than higher-damage ones.) The difference basically boils down to that rule of thumb about might and perception further up in the post. Daggers, rapiers, and clubs all get +5 accuracy as their weapon-specific bonus. Sabres get +10% damage. Converting that into stats, +5 accuracy => ~5 perception, or ~10% net damage. Sabres +10% damage => ~3 might or ~6% net damage. And sure enough, in simulations, sabres on average do about ~5% less damage than a dagger, rapier, or club. In fact, the +5 accuracy is good enough that for maximizing damage output the main reason why you'd use any slow weapon is essentially because their weapon modals lets you situationally get +2 PEN (or are a mace, which has inherently high PEN), whereas the stiletto is the only fast weapon that has a weapon modal for bonus PEN (and the stiletto has worse base damage than other fast weapons and in fact performs generally the worst of all weapons except in cases of extreme PEN). Now, to be fair, there are plenty of unique sabers, and one could argue that there are plenty of unique slow weapons with far more powerful effects than unique daggers, rapiers, and clubs. And this is true, and in the end the unique weapons will likely dwarf these differences between vanilla weapons, except in specific niches (e.g. pukestabber, marux amanth's special abilities, extra survival of the rapier with escape). But it does mean that if you've only been using sabres or axes for your characters early on, you should consider also giving the fast +5 acc weapons a shot.

Rymrgand challenge sounds lame tbh, a minor adjustment (at best) to the gameplay. My pukestabber usage will basically become obsolete and shark soup strats will be obsoleted too, but other than that... Hylea's challenge, on the other hand. For you rick and morty fans out there, i have three words for you: KEEP VELA SAFE

Beta patch notes mentioned: I'm *really* intrigued by this, and wondering if anyone had a chance to try it before the beta patch got pulled.

Ok, so there's at least an actual scene in the game where the Guardian appears and Scyorielaphas fights it off? It's not just "guardian goes poof" ? I just finished a run where I freed that Scyrioelphas and I mean... it's an interstitial card in the scripted encounter, but if you're quickly skimming or just mashing the "1. Continue" button you might miss it.

The duration of the potion scales only with your alchemy skill and has 6s base duration - it will last 12s with 20 alchemy I think. The spell has 8s duration and scales both with intellect and PL. active skills also scale with PL. essentially means even with the low base duration the potion can potentially get you a long duration...if you invest heavily into alchemy. at ~23 alchemy and a bonus PL or two (potion of ascension, acute, or food) you get 18s, whereas you'd need to max out intellect (or get close and have a bonus PL) to do the same thing with BDD. One of those is easier than the other. edit: IGNORE ME I really messed up some simple math.

Yeah i reported this as a buggy thing in 1.1, and they said they'd look into it, but i think it's just been an extremely low priority thing to investigate. worst case scenario: they nerf it so it only +10s every single time, which I think is too weak for Deadfire's slower combat. best case scenario: it always buffs by 20s. scenario i'd be happy with: they split the difference and go for +15s.

only major downside with that potion is without at least a modest alchemy skill (or salvation of time) the base duration barely lets you recover from using the potion much less do anything else :/ (less of a problem if you have party members to heal you while you recover or something)

There's Potion of the Last Stand which is actually a better effect than Barring Death's Door (also gives you concentration and +25% damage buff), but has a shorter base duration (though with theoretically much better scaling than BDD). Nemnok's Cloak also triggers BDD at near death.

You know, what, seeing this bug thread makes me feel less crazy. I can confirm that I saw this before, but thought that I had just misremembered where the Kapana dropped. And much later, I started getting paranoid and stopped any boarding party attempt. For some reason I assumed that the loot you got for blowing up a ship was programmatically determined from the loot tables of the enemies in the encounter, but this is making me suspect that they are both individually set, so there can be a mismatch. I hope the issue is just limited to the Kapana Taga.

Patch notes are never going to be comprehensive. Sometimes some bugs get fixed and don't get written up formally enough to be included. Other times a bug was a side effect of something else and gets fixed indirectly. And no one is going to be able to tell you for sure because I don't think many people had this no-encounter problem. The only way you'll be able to know for sure is to start a new game yourself. I mean... are you even sure it was a bug? And not that some of these random encounters are gated by other in-game triggers that you may or may not have flipped?

ranger has concussive tranquilizer that really eats up beneficial durations (-30). priest has cleansing flame and magran's fire which removes a little duration at each tick. there's also street sweeper, which shaves off -5s and can be upgraded to only target beneficial effects at -10. but wizard is by far the best. that is one of their core competencies (arcane dampener, wall of draining, arcane cleanse)

I am seeing this issue as well after I recruited a Bleak Walker as a test. Watch is Kind Wayfarer and 15; Shieldbearer is around 12; and the Bleak Walker I just recruited is 10. So your Disposition choices now affect companions as well? If so, then I guess I have to scrap ever playing a Kind Wayfarer together with Bleak Walker! Yeah, I researched this a while ago (I probably should consolidate all this stuff somewhere so it doesn't disappear on the Nth page of forums).

So from what you guys are saying, there is no direct "silence" spell or attack that works reliably. Instead, I have to get it as an indirect effect through a more comprehensive shutdown attacks such as stun, paralyze, frighten, etc. frighten isn't a "complete shutdown" effect like terrify. it literally just prevents enemies from using "offensive" abilities/spells (in addition to reducing resolve by 5 and reducing power level by 3). highly effective against things like wizards and ciphers (and even like sirens or wraiths) but much less effective against priests and druids for example. n.b. i feel like i've seen that if you cast frighten while an enemy has an offensive ability queued up, they still end up using it, though they won't do anything after that. maybe someone can verify if frighten works 100% correctly.

It's supposed to completely remove recovery, but I think there's a bug with guns where there's always a minimum reloading time. I feel like there was a general issue like this a while ago, but I thought minimum reload times was fixed. I expect Bullet-Time to act more like how The Red Hand works, which fires twice in a row without any reloading break. So I would expect Bullet-Time to let me fire continuously for ~5-6 seconds. Instead, it acts merely as if I am very, very fast, which while still an upgrade is not quite as good as being able to fire repeatedly without pause. Here's a youtube video that I uploaded demonstrating how even with "0.0" reloading time I am still reloading for a decent amount of time in between each shot (albeit still pretty fast). The duration on Bullet-Time is extremely long because I hit myself with Salvation of Time to test the effectiveness of this combo . (Note that in fact, on my first test run of this I barely even noticed Bullet-Time was triggering because with Rapid Reload enabled on a dual-wielding character my reload time is already pretty low.) In the first bit of the video I show that I have a bullet-time buff active, then I show that my reloading time is 0.0 and then rest of it is my hireling repeatedly shooting at poor Birna with reloads. Related, secondary bug: Bullet-Time has no displayed effect next to a character portrait or in combat tool-tip. I mean, neither do some other effects but it seems like it would be nice to see it triggered so even in the ~5-6s (up to 35s from two casts of Salvation of Time), I can respond appropriately (disabling rapid reload and enabling the imbued ammuniation modal for example). Dropbox link to a save where I'm testing this, along with output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/s49gbpstwnwjurp/AAD4uol_4-4UA2GP3mBJ4cV9a?dl=0

hence trickster a rogue can still equip shield and get weapon and shield proficiency, however blasphemous that might sound for a "striker" class. you can also lean on an ally (priest, paladin for +25 and to a lesser extent chanter for +10 and cipher for mindweb). it is a party game, after all, even though a lot of us like to talk builds that are "self-contained" even though most of them would probably likely flop for an actual solo attempt.

To add on to what's been said: Riposte is not junk. Its power level is roughly in line with most other passives in the game or in the rogue tree. But unlike most of those other passives, Riposte has really high upside if you multi-class, are a trickster, or are otherwise able to even get your deflection up even modestly (frankly just even using Escape every now and then gives you high Riposte upside). And in certain set ups Riposte can be a huge DPS increase even considering a lowish proc rate. Sometimes I think people on the forums are like "this isn't as easily abusable as in PoE1 or as I initially thought. Therefore it must suck because those two extremes are the only options."

I haven't had the time to attempt Belranga, but is the gist of all successful strategies: block the big spider off with little spiders that are tanked and then range the big spider to death?