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thelee

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Everything posted by thelee

  1. Not arguing with the math, which is sound as an abstract, I do think that by dismissing the environment you present an error about BDD. 1. The counter to healing – damage, is much more common than the counter to BDD – Arcane Dampener. So, in all of the game healing has less weight than BDD in achieving the goal "of staying alive". BDD is more effective (and arguably requires less resources – stats, equipment, e.t.c – from the player). 2. The counter to BDD happens to counter all buffs without specific discrimination. 3. The environment provides ways to exploit BDD – Salvation of Time and Brilliant. One can't make BDD less effective by just giving out Arcane Dampener to every schmuck in every encounter, bosses to be a challenge have to have some form of Arcane Dampener built into them, fun and good buffs get screwed by association, and BDD in it's current form is a pain in the hindquarters from a designers perspective. Point is – you can say, that everything is nice and dandy with being immortal for some time as a general concept, but you can't say the same about the implementation of this concept in Deadfire. I'm not discounting the environment. The math is just to say that BDD is effectively another form of healing. The environment is what makes that "alternate form of healing" from a curiosity into something potentially powerful. If ways to dispel buffs were just as prevalent as damage, no one would be talking about BDD; in fact buffs would be completely useless and we'd just be basically playing a glorified version of dungeon siege 1. For a single character I think it's possible to increase your Will high enough to completely ignore Arcane Dampener. However the attacks reducing the duration of your buffs (like Concussive Tranquilizer) might be harder to avoid. If you multiclass with rogue you can gain various effects that make you "untargetable", which means even if you're inside the AoE of an effect you're not affected. (And anyway once you become untargetable they'll change targets). I think only other class with untargetability is ranger, but it's at AL9. The fact that BDD has a weakness at all (arcane dampener and such) is a necessary thing to keep such an effect in check imo. This really goes for all sorts of powerful buffs.
  2. I am pretty sure they don't, even on potd. The only value affected by higher difficulty is a close to board damage multiplier, which I don't really consider part of ship combat. Maybe their cannoneers have higher level, or you shoot while they move and they only when you stand? Also keep in mind that every ship type has a hidden "Hittability" value (junk 70, galleon/dhow 60, voyager 55, sloop 50, longship 40) I'm pretty sure this is also faulty memory at play. Gamers reasoning about probability tends to be very vulnerable to selective memory, because you don't take notice of all the times when you had 60% accuracy and hit or when the enemy had 15% accuracy and missed; you only remember the times where you miss three times in a row or the enemy his you twice in a row. One of my ship-to-ship approaches was just to stick with the defiant, get some iron thunderers, and stay at 550-600 feet and just jibe back and forth firing at the ship, while sailing forward at full speed while waiting to recovery from the jibe's accuracy penalties. I can tell you from having knocked out literally every enemy ship this way that enemy accuracy on PotD is just fine and doesn't get any kind of insane boost.
  3. I'll be it's some weird internal implementation detail where just to fill out the ability they need to specify a duration, but then it gets overridden by the chant/linger mechanics.
  4. Don't know if this is a bug, but while reading the description for something I wondered if this was intended behavior. Basically - the description implies that any enemies affected by the target you confused with perplexing sap end up becoming confused. However, one of the tricks about confusion is that it makes all targeting affect friend and foe, which includes perplexing sap's effect; this means that anytime I use perplexing sap on like e.g. a wizard or a barbarian, basically everyone (including myself) ends up confused. I thought this was intended (in a sort of The Dark Knight's "some men just want to watch the world burn" kind of battlefield insanity way), but the description makes me think that maybe you folks actually just wanted perplexing sap in such a situation to just affect the enemies. Am not near a gaming PC so cannot provide a save file or output_log, but is easily reproducible with any character with perplexing sap.
  5. You know what, I did notice that I entered the dig-site at level 4 for everyone. I've played the opening act on PotD pre-3.1 enough to know that I should hit the digsite with everyone at level 3, and then I only hit level 4 after clearing the main enemies and killing some skeletons in one of the side-areas (not the main quest dungeon), and then my hirelings don't hit level 4 until after getting to the adra at the dig site. So XP-wise something did get boosted. I don't know how to make sense of the combat log in your screenshot, though.
  6. Brilliant had broken design. It's still broken now, just less so. It also probably took them all of like 5 minutes to talk about and fix. In other words, whynotboth.gif?
  7. I completed Act 1 on PotD (with hylea and rymrgand challenge on) in 3.1 and I can't reproduce #2, 3, and #4. My technique for split-pulling Gorecci Street still works fine (using sparkcrackers or traps)... without them they would pull together but this has always been the case pre-3.1. For digsite, I was able to split pull the boars+wurms and the wurms+panthers+drake just fine (even with an accidental force of anguish knocking a boar back down the stairs after I led it up). I suspect there's no bug and the cases where I did see a huge mass of enemies was an intentional change in the new mid-late PotD rebalancing.
  8. Yeah it got hit as part of a consumable-wide nerf in 1.2. Some of the items were frankly too good imo--my quote mentions Potion of Impediment and with a modest alchemy skill you could get >50% interrupt chance, which on a dual-wielder means you could completely lock out an enemy from doing anything relevant for the rest of the fight. Now it's locked at 30% which while not broken is still decent to use in fights.
  9. to clarify -- the looters can be separated, and if you didn't manually separate them before, you fought them all at once. This was true pre-3.1, and can confirm with my very new run that they can still be separated into separate encounters.
  10. Some more examples added from that thread: 4. The Drake fight at the Engwithan Dig Site. Every creature gets pulled apparently. 5. Old City where the spirits and blights are. Everything gets pulled. "But i was surprised of a specific encounter in the old city (southeast of the map), where i always pulled the group of blights together with all the spectres, shades and skeletons. It wasn't only an unbelievable difficult fight but also a nightmare from the performance perspective."
  11. I filed a bug here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106565-31-enemies-on-potd-are-being-pulled-too-easily/ Please add your comments if you also think it might be buggy.
  12. Even if it is intended, it seems to render Berath's Challenge partly redundant. What does it matter if combat won't end if enemies are still nearby if every enemy and their friend is already charging into your fight.
  13. Yes. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99409-mechanics-power-level-compilation-thread/ "Potions/drugs: are influenced by your Alchemy skill. Like scrolls, if you have any bonus to your power level (from items, potions, or whatnot), those also boost potion/drug power level. Nalpazca monks effectively have +10 PL for drugs, which generally means +50% duration with drugs. Pre-1.2, all potions/drugs got their effect boosted by your alchemy skill, but this scaling has been removed with 1.2. (So no more broken uses of Potion of Impediment.) Might, intellect, and perception have no effect on potions." so potions/drugs get 1 PL bonus scaling (+5% damage/healing, +5% duration mostly) per point of alchemy. Arcana also provides PL scaling to scrolls at half strength, so in addition to helping you meet minimum scroll requirements, it's still worth investing in arcana to make your scrolls all the more powerful. (In fact I would argue that this scaling is slightly broken, because at 15 arcana you are effectively able to cast spells like Tornado or Great Maelstrom with much higher PL scaling than you might otherwise if you were e.g. a druid.)
  14. On 3.1, people are finding it more likely that when you aggro one enemy, you may end up pulling several rooms worth of enemies on PotD: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106547-any-thoughts-on-post-31-potd-balance/page-2?do=findComment&comment=2110445 At first I thought this was part of the mid-late game rebalancing mentioned in the 3.1 patch notes, but the above linked thread talks about this happening in the sea cave at Vilario's Rest, which makes me wonder if this is actually a bug? List of examples from that thread: 1. Fighting beetles in sea cave results in skeletons and other mobs from the far right being pulled in (?? intentional or not??). Used to be distinct encounters. 2. Ashen Maw Jagged Keep (the one where the altar to Magran is), aggroing the first rathun going up the main corridor results in pulling every rathun in that main central corridor in each room. (Whereas pre-3.1, even on Berath's Challenge mode, while I wouldn't leave combat after clearing one room, I had to manually run up into the next room to pull more enemies.) 3. Kapanga Palace Second Floor during "The Final Maneuver"-- every single enemy on this floor gets pulled into the fight. Would be helpful to get a confirmation yay or nay on intended behavior.
  15. I was surprised in the cave in Vilario's Rest, when during the very first fight with two beettles I faced few skeletons, Revenant and Rotghast at the same time (those monsters were guarding that upper platform with the chest in the bottom right corner of the map prior to 3.1). You know what, this happened to me too on a new playthrough. I wonder if this pulling behavior is actually just a bug? Because it seems weird to want to make Vilario's Rest any harder.
  16. Yeah one thing I noticed is that it seemed like enemies seemed real happy go lucky about using their mobility abilities (leap, charge, teleport) to my weaker party members. It might be a coincidence - there's just a lot more of them now so it might just be more noticeable. But certainly means you have to be more present for the fights.
  17. Dont worry, this has been happening as long as I can remember in PotD. Intended behavior for some creatures.
  18. I imagine it doesn't change. Can you keep the Watcher far from the party and come later to join the battle, leaving Vela in a safe place? Yes. In fact with this run I'm just charging into battle a lot, which means Vela stays far back away from the fight.
  19. So um... now that this is live, I'm kind of disappointed by it. It looks like they fixed the "issue" was causing Vela to wander around in combat, so it seems that all she does is cower in place wherever she was when combat began... which basically just means I can't retreat is all. Does this change over the course of the challenge? Or is this just the way it is?
  20. to really get mileage out of it you'd need Obsidian to fix their known-issue-since-1.0 that you can't reverse pickpocket onto red-circle NPCs (which is basically the vast majority of NPCs you actually want to reverse pick pocket onto). sigh...
  21. I've noticed this mostly with 3.1, don't know if this has happened before 3.1. Normally not a big deal, and I suspect it's just the interrupt effect that's triggering multiple times (no large amounts of repeated damage for warding seal). It might even just be a display issue in the combat log. So ordinarily I would not have gone through the effort to create this bug. That is, until this happened: I cast this seal and it filled up my combat log with interrupts on this poor xaurip. I don't know if that xuarip was actually being interrupted that many times, but frankly I can't even verify it because I don't even see an associated attack roll from the repulsing seal attack, as I normally do. And this interrupt happened over a short span of time, because it's interspersed with some attack attempts from my characters (all within the span of a half second or so). Anyway, I'm not sure how reproducible it is, but here's a dropbox link to a save and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kpkob7opdsg7o8a/AABdqntr7Pjbpbnd_-q5wpkMa?dl=0
  22. Is Final Maueuver's recommended level really level 14? That doesn't make much sense, given that you are already level 20 if you do all the side-quests. I guess the devs didn't expect folks to do even half of the side-quests? Anyways, I thought the difficulty was slightly increased, and I felt it a bit in early and middle levels; but I cannot make it out what changed. Are there more mobs? Are mob stats changed? Either way, I think the game is still too easy when playing with an optimized party. For instance, the dragons went down so quickly that I didn't get to experience the new injury mechanic tied to the dragons. In fact, I think my main character literally got to swing once and nothing else against one of the dragons. Kind of silly. Yeah. There's a chart here, which pulled up the level used to determine whether or not to upscale/downscale and/or show you skulls: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98843-level-scaling-difficulty-potdcompilation-thread/page-3. Obsidian definitely designed the critical path for a large portion of players who barely do any side quests, so low targeted levels. But with the changes it seems like they're acknowleding people who play on PotD are going to be more completionists, so it seems liek the target level has been bumped up a couple of notches. I didn't get to try the dragons (I was blitzing through critical path so I just chose the non-violent option). But at least for me in Ashen Maw, the Rathun there were more numerous (and pulled each other from other rooms), and this time around I had to be very deliberate in what order I killed them (Flamecallers, then Fanatics, and then Raiders... or else Fanatics spam healing on everyone, or else Flamecallers go crazy with nonstop delayed fireballs). Similar thing with the Kapanga Palace fights; I was fighting triple-red-skulled watershapers at level 15, and if I didn't take them down ASAP (though they go down easy once targeted) they would basically keep the entire enemy party permanently alive with 5-6 gardens of life, and nonstop HoTs. Similarly, every single enemy gets pulled in Kapanga Place second floor, and some extra archers and spearmen spawn (though they're just cannon fodder; once the watershapers go down every one else is a bit easier). Kapanga Palace rooftop had beefed up monks... I don't think I've seen enemy monks that can do Whispers of the Wind before. I could be wrong--I've only done the Rautaui quest line once before, so maybe it was always like this (I really doubt it though). Basically, it seems like extra enemies, enemies with more high-level abilities that they use more aggressively, and it's harder to separate out the enemies into separate encounters. (In fact, when I did Ashen Maw with Berath's challenge enabled, I would clear out a room, but still be in combat, and have to manually run to the next room and pull the next batch of enemies. Post-3.1 without Berath's challenge, I didn't have to do any pulling. I aggro-ed one Rathun, ran back to the entrance, and everyone came.) I think if I was level 16, with average superb gear, the fights would've been speedbumps, but not challenging. So I think it does mean that Obsidian tweaked up the end game a little, but if you're a level 20 with full BoW and SSS completion, you're still going to roflstomp most stuff end game.
  23. Yeah, it's funny. When I first reported this bug in 1.0, I suggested that they should compromise while doing the fix and do +15s for Salvation of Time, my reasoning being that combat in Deadfire is slower than PoE1 and even in PoE1's faster combat +10s was only somewhat worth it. Since then, speaking for myself, I've learned many ways to get a lot of mileage out of +10s. So while this fix certainly nerfed it a bit, it's still one of the most interesting spells even without a buff to +15s. There are just a lot more interesting short-duration effects in Deadfire than in PoE1.
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