thelee

wha---what?

well, i took on the final boss at level 19 and it was certainly very challenging--took several tries at many minutes (up to twenty?) each attempt. again, underoptimized party, and i made some critical errors throughout the fight (biggest of which was getting marux amanth's Worthy Sacrifice interrupted, which would've otherwise instakilled the boss at near death with my entire party still standing), but I had loaded up on all sorts of high level consumables (4x copies of Hand of Wael and Woe and Scroll of Miraculous Healing, for example), everything was as highly enchanted as I could possibly do with my mats (lots of legendary, some superb), and it was still extremely hard. it was literally down to the last possible spell on my last standing guy (Vatnir) as i had utterly exhausted every single ability, empower point, consumable and one by one my characters were falling over and Vatnir was the only one left. Vatnir had all of 3 spell casts left, a PL9 and two PL7s. Used PL9 to do Call of Rymrgand to try to eke out a bit more damage and contain the final guy. The only final option after that I had left was Minor Avatar and priest of Rymrgand's Death Ring bonus spell at PL7. Well, my only out was to get lucky (22% hit chance) with Death Ring, so cast once... miss. Boss hits me, brings Vatnir down to 40 health, basically one last hit before complete wipe. Start casting my absolute last spell on Death Ring again, boss's recovery is finished and he's literally in the middle of what's going to be a fatal attack, just as my second Death Ring goes off and... HITS for instakill and victory. I tell you, nothing was sweeter than that moment right there, not even when I got The Ultimate achievement in POE1. So congrats Obsidian. I will literally never complain about a lack of challenging POTD high level content ever again, and all my future parties I roll I will be less forgiving about the "flavor" vs "power" trade-off. DLC is definitely a lot more about sustain rather than burst damage (the boss and lots of enemies in the survival challenge track have literally thousands of health) which will definitely influence how I build out characters in the future. PS. if there's some technical trick to fighting the final boss, please do share. I'm sure there has to be some trick, because otherwise it isjust an unceasing cascade of dots, crowd control, and interrupts, even though all i had Eder do was mule kicks and had near 100% uptime on potion of impediment on my dual-wielding mainchar. (i also had people guzzling those potions that give you affliction resistance)

I had an underoptimized PotD party sitting at level 18 not doing much and used them to give the DLC a shot. The difficulty seems like a good match, though I've only really been doing the survivor challenge track. I'm not sure how well it would scale upwards if I were level 19 or 20 when I first started, but it seems like a good fit. (The survivor track in particular--unless there's some dumb technical trick to trivialize the fights--last so long that I have to put some serious thought into managing my abilities, items, and empower points.) I wonder if anyone else has been trying the other challenge tracks, at different levels, and what their thoughts on the difficulty are. For me at least, I think this fills a nice hole in higher-level content. (Though I have another, more min-maxed character that I'm ready to roll so I guess I'll see in a couple weeks what I think of it then.)

I wonder if a good compromise between 'cheevers and people who just want to play with the challenge is to let the player "unlock" a challenge to play at any difficulty or setting, but then it doesn't count towards the "Challenges complete 0/10" counter.

jlee, thanks for that clarification! i guess my most recent high-level party not getting an ukaizo fight was intentional then (they did #2). a little disappointing in that context (was hoping for one last good fight before the end), but I guess it's good that there exists a non-violent (or at least less-violent) option for getting into the harbor.

can people confirm that 3.0 in fact fixes the final boss fight so it actually occurs? i've been sitting on a high-level party for a while now waiting for it to be fixed (though I guess I can run them through the new DLC in the meantime).

Just wanted to clarify, is this the intended design? If so, then my personal recommendation is to have the player fight at least some form of the Guardian, it helps to make up for the fact that the player cannot actually fight Eothas. It's a great fight, it would be a shame for players to miss out on it! sounds like someone on the internet pretending to know what they're talking about. patch notes keep talking about the ukaizo fight, and in a bug thread about this an obsidian developer commented on how they're working on a fix for it. so very much sounds like a bug.

for monastic unarmed training, i wouldn't necessarily call it "a little too well." I was thinking about it a bit on the train today, and there are very few ways to actually build a character that can get post-legendary or post-mythic scaling (some combination of nature godlike, death godlike, prestige, Acute inspiration, hot razor skewers, and/or potion of ascension). most everyone will be stuck with post-suberb scaling, and only very nearly end-game at that; for them it's merely just a quirky alternative rather than a powerful/good choice. (this is still way better than poe1 where the equivalent talent there wasn't even remotely good enough to be comparable for 99% of builds.)

Just did a couple quick tests: 1. unfortunately corpse-eater food is class-specific power level bonus, so won't help with monastic unarmed training's PL scaling. looks like potion of ascension is the main option for +2 PL from consumables/active abilities. 2. devoted indeed works with plain fists and monastic unarmed training. extra crit and penetration!

is that really true (aka tested in game)? i seem to recall seeing some bugs posted about devoted getting -10 accuracy penalty with fists. otherwise devoted would be a pretty fun puncher.

yes you have to pay attention to stacking rules, but i think the max you could get is +6 via a single-class. +3 from pallid fate, +1 from prestige (stacks), and then +2 from either food (corpse eater food bonus) or potion (potion of ascension). that's enough to get up past mythic level scaling with monastic unarmed training. without single-class I think the best you can do is +5 (no prestige). pallid fate is a little hard to get consistent uptime for, though, and while getting better-than-mythic 14-19 "fast" weapons is good, i'm not sure it's good enough to warrant keeping a priest around just to BDD + salvation of time to keep your death godlike alive. (though it does mean a single-class priest would have some great 1:1 solo melee potential. a priest of wael would have lots of survivability and you wouldn't be wasting another party slot just to BDD/Salvation of Time your near death experiences.) for multi-class brute it would be easy to get +3 with near 100% uptime (+1 nature godlike and corpseeater food), which is enough to get up to legendary by end game, which is probably "good enough" to make the talent worth it. Edit: would have to pay attention to how corpse eater food implements its PL bonuses. Class-specific PL bonus (like ascendant's +3 when ascended) don't count for fists. So if it's +2 corpse eater PL it wouldn't work. But if it's just generic +2PL that just happens to require corpse eater, then it would.

Thanks, mant2si for testing! When I'm back at my desktop later today ill edit the OP to incorporate your findings.

This might actually mean that a single-class barbarian with monastic unarmed training would be a blast with Carnage. Highest base damage with 3s attack speed for Carnage attacks and with PL boosts you can get legendary/mythic scaling for normal attacks.

Possible theory: way back in the day when consumables erroneously scaled with character level, they used an effective PL-scaling that was equivalent to your single-class character progression even if you were multi-classed. It's possible monastic unarmed training suffers from the same bug and they never fixed it as part of the consumables reset. In this theory, unarmed training fists would get better at every 3 "PLs" (PL3, PL6, PL9, PL12) except you always use the single-classing PL progression rate (and any extra PL buffs from potions or talents would affect this single-classing PL number even if you were multiclassed). So if you can get up to PL15 and get +80% fists with unarmed training that would prove that it's bugged in our favor and is better than what I originally wrote.

You need PL > 10 You also wrote about mystic quality, but mystic quality give you only +18ACC and +5PEN, I don't know what affect Obsidian make this decision but Monk's fists the best weapon in the game, because it has unlimited scaling In fact you can stack 15PL (Pure Monk + Death Godlike + Potion), I will test it and write more info in this post I think you misunderstood what I'm saying. multiclass characters get PLs at a different rate than single-class characters. I don't doubt what you're saying you saw with training, but it's hard to reconcile that with what i saw when i was leveling a multiclass+training and a singleclass+training. At PL3 (level 5) with single class I got better fists. Makes sense, corresponds to a power-level. With multiclass, at level 5, I also got better fists. Makes no sense if this is power-level based because you don't get a power level at level 5 when multiclassing. also, you were right, i misremembered what mythic quality is, i'll fix OP.

That's interesting - I tested unarmed training with both a single class and a multi-class character and got the exact same rate of fists improvement, which was particularly notable because it meant getting improvements to my fists that didn't correspond at all to a power level (for the multi-class). What do you think is happening here?

i actually made a critical timing error and monastic unarmed training is better than i original stated. it's actually .5s/3.0s weapon, not a .7/4.0. i'm about to update the OP with my thoughts and corrections.

I had a character accidentally take Monastic Unarmed Training and was actually surprised what I ended up with, so I dug a bit more. I can't seem to find much around the forums/internet about how monk fists and other weapon scaling works, so decided to create this post. NORMAL SUMMONED WEAPON/ARMOR SCALING are character level based. All summoned weapons/armor (including druid weapons) follow this scaling. They have a base effect, and then automatically get an enchantment based on your character level. levels 1-4: mundane levels 5-8: Fine (+15% damage +4 accuracy or +1 armor rating or +2 shield deflection) levels 9-12: Exceptional levels 13-16: Superb levels 17-20: Legendary Multi-classing doesn't affect this scaling, so a level 17 character summoning a weapon will get a +60% damage/+16 accuracy weapon regardless of whether they are PL8 (single-class) or PL6 (multi-class). MONK FISTS are power level based. They do 14-19 damage, 7 penetration, are effectively single-hand weapons that you dual-wield with by default, and have .5s attack and 3.0s recovery. You start off with +5% damage, +2 accuracy, and +1 penetration, and get an additional +15% damage, +4 accuracy, and +1 penetration every even power level (so PL/2 rounding down). So at PL2 you get +20% damage, +6 accuracy, and +2 penetration. At PL9 with Prestige for effective PL10, you get +80% damage, +22 accuracy, and +6 penetration (basically better-than-mythic quality fists). Notably, if you multi-class a monk your fists will be worse throughout the game because your PL will be lower. Unlike most PL scaling for martial stuff, this is actually a fairly significant PL scaling penalty, and so to get up to legendary level fists you must have some alternate source for +1 PL to jump up from PL7 to PL8 (like nature godlike racial, that amulet that lets you get +1 PL for rest of fight). Or if you're multi-classing you might rather just use weapons. BARE FISTS are crappy and don't scale. Something like 6-9 damage. MONASTIC UNARMED TRAINING are buggily power level based. Upon taking this talent, your fist damage automatically upgrades to monk quality fists of 14-19 damage, 7 pen, .5/3.0s attack/recovery. Then, you get a scaling similar to the monk's version except for two critical differences. First, instead of improving every even power level, it does it at every third power level e.g. PL3, PL6, PL9, etc. Second, it buggily always uses single-class power level scaling progression, even if you're multiclassed. In practice, this means that the scaling is fixed at: levels 1-4 (buggy PL1, 2): +5% damage, +2 accuracy, +1 penetration levels 5-10 (buggy PL3, 4, 5): +20% damage, +6 accuracy, +2 penetration levels 11-18 (buggy PL6, 7, 8 ): +35% damage, +10 accuracy, +3 penetration levels 19-20 (buggy PL9): +50% damage, +14 accuracy, +4 penetration This is different from what this post originally said (special thanks to mant2si for bringing some interactions to my attention and doing some testing), which was that it was fixed based on character level. The difference with the changes here is that things that influence your PL still affect the scaling offered by monastic unarmed training, unlike normal weapon scaling. If you manage to cobble together +3 bonus PL (remember that passives from your skill tree and items stack, active abilities and consumables do not) you'll be able to get better-than-legendary scaling by end-game and speed up how quickly you get other sources of scaling. CLOSING THOUGHTS Monastic unarmed training is a weird talent. When you can first get it (level 2), it basically grants you the best basic weapons available to you at that point in time and for a while. On its own, however, it doesn't scale well (staying at basically the "fine" and "exceptional" equivalent levels waaaay too long) and may not be able to match the legendary items you may find late game or even the legendary scaling that summoned weapons will have. However, with a few sources of bonus PL (at least +3) it actually can still get to legendary (and potentially even mythic) level scaling and solves that long, slow scaling problem. Regardless of whether or not you optimize for the +3 PL, it is viable (whereas the PoE1 version of this talent was extremely niche). A barbarian might get more mileage out of it compared to other classes because its highest base damage (14-19) combines well with the fact that carnage's damage is keyed off solely from base weapon damage. It also helps that this is a "fast" melee weapon (3s recovery) and normally to get close to this level of damage you end up with "slow" weapons (4s recovery). In fact, any class that relies heavily on weapon damage passives might get some mileage out of monastic unarmed training, because while a sabre does the most tool-tip damage of basic weapons, it has a slightly lower base damage (13-19) and gets up to 14-21 via its inherent +10% damage scaling. So e.g. rogues might like having sneak attack/deathblows/backstab/streetfighter damage scale directly off 14-19 rather than 13-19, and all of this on top of being a fast weapon. It is almost as if monastic unarmed training gave you better blunt sabres that also had a huge inherent action speed/recovery time bonus. You also have higher penetration early on (8 vs 7 for a sabre, then 9 vs 8 for a fine sabre). However this extreme early advantage is mitigated over time due to the slow scaling; you might be wielding legendary sabres with all sorts of additional abilities while you are still stuck with +35% dmg/+10 acc/+3 pen fists at which point does it really matter that fists are that fast? So again, to really get the most mileage out of the talent you need to cobble together sources of bonus PL (paying real close attention to stacking rules). For those taking Abydon's Challenge, monastic unarmed training might be more useful even without bonus PL because they are basically decent weapons that you will never have to worry about repairing (and don't need to be summoned). The cost is that without bonus PL you will still be behind the enchantment curve and won't get up to approximately superb or legendary quality (since it straddles the line between them) until extremely late in the game. PS. the sensitivity of monk fists to PL scaling suggests that even something basic like Shaken (-5 resolve, -3 PL) is a good way to weaken enemy monks.

Actually not. I distinctly remember 1.0 PoE1 and slicken was an absolutely broken level 1 spell, because it was like the Deadfire version except intead of prone being an instant interrupt, it lasted several seconds each time (and in earlier versions of PoE characters didn't try to stand up until the prone effect wore off--whereas later version they would stand up as prone neared its end--so in fact at release the cc duration was longer than the nominal prone duration). I have the digital strat guide (which has the 1.0 version of spells) and can prove it: They nerfed it quickly after to be a one-time prone for 4s and nerfed it further when they made it matter that effects were "ground"-based and some enemies were immune to ground and nerfed it even further when they made characters stand up near the end of a prone and not after the prone, but it was still one of the best wizard spells, period. (EDIT to add: they nerfed it in 1.03) Basically a long way to say that it was hilarious how everyone thought wizards sucked up during the backer beta and then at release the wizard basically had multiple level 1 spells that were basically top-tier all the way to the end of the game. (And this was back when casters got all of their level 1 and 2 spells to go from per-rest to per-encounter at high enough levels... prone-lock thaos anyone?)

I think something similar is going on with priests as has (already) happened with wizards. Both in PoE1/2 backer beta, a lot of people thought wizards were teh suck, and then shortly after release it was like "wow wizards are really powerful" and nerfhammers are falling all over the place. (Remember when back in PoE1 Slicken was an AoE duration repeating prone effect: and not like Deadfire prone; serious, multiple-second crowd control that repeatedly re-triggered over the aoe duration? Pepperidge Farm remembers). I strongly suspect people overvalue instantaneous damage/heal effects and undervalue crowd-control, de/buffs, and support spells, so people have been complaining about weak priests for months after release and it's taking just a bit longer for people to come around to the idea that "yeah, giving everyone in your party Aware for a long time is pretty sweet actually." (Though it doesn't help that Deadfire priest is definitely relatively weaker compared to 3.0 PoE1.)

i was putting together a new build and noticed that a lot of PL scaling has been stealth-nerfed at some point, so I updated the OP. TL;DR: at least the major culprits I checked no longer get more than 1/2 projectile per PL, they all get 1/2 projectile per PL. In addition, universally all damage/heal spells now only get +5% damage/healing per PL. The net effect of this is that PL scaling is less disproportionately in favor of projectile damage spells (though they still get more benefit than e.g. debuffs or buffs).

Yes, this is exactly my point actually (see way, way above). In terms of game systems design or evaluating some metagame/strategy, "healing" in the conventional tool-tip sense is not a useful enough definition, because ultimately what matters is "how long you stay alive." In that sense, BDD and healing accomplish the same goals, but they do so differently by changing which variable they keep fixed to accomplish it (in the mathematical model). Similarly any other buff that does this is also equivalent to healing. How it's actually implemented in-game is not useful from this higher-level perspective because the game designers could implement it as a bunch of monkeys that come to your house and change the bits in computer's memory corresponding to your character's health like an old fashioned NES Game Genie but the math would still work out the same. We don't have to do that, because it turns out we actually agree. if you're talking about the stuff you mentioned about not caring about total health pool, it's because it's not mathematically very interesting a distinction. 1. the abstraction is posited when you're at 1 health and one hit of any kind one would knock you out. in this abstraction, total health is essentially irrelevant. 2. if we want to broaden the abstraction a bit to include total health, it's still not too interesting. i.e. "instantaneous" damage can be thought of as essentially a damage over time effect with an infinitesimal duration. in that sense, "instant" healing can also be thought of as healing over time with an infinitesimal duration. in that sense, the fact that BDD can stop a hit >total health pool is still functionally equivalent to an equivalent heal over the same infinitesimal duration. again this is from the mathematical angle. however game programmers want to implement it is an orthogonal issue.

I think I'm more fully turning to this perspective as well. On the spectrum of all combos that could exist in an RPG, I can survive with a two-person mid-late-game combo to generate immortality on a single character that also requires consistent focus generation on the cipher part of the equation. On the spectrum of systems design, having one busted single tier 3 inspiration that is only player accessible as a PL7 ability on a single class is not bad. In terms of general systems balance/brokenness, Deadfire is way more secure than BG2 could ever even aspire to be. Given that every major patch seems to introduce some sort of major regression in gameplay (I still have some high-level characters waiting to complete Ukaizo normally) I'd rather they spend their finite resources on only extremely major imbalances (which I don't think exist anymore, except maybe slight buffing for barbarian subclasses or the ranger class) or bugs or new DLC content that themselves have no major imbalances or bugs.

You know I also liked the DLC for Fallout: NV more than the base game itself. I suspect it's because for the base game all resources are going to just making the game playable, whereas with DLC--even with a smaller team--everyone is used to how the game tooling works, what the engine is capable of, and so they can focus more on the content.

I think the problem is that several people think the problem is either BDD or Salvation of Time, and not Brilliant. BDD itself is not so OP because it's short duration, and Salvation of Time--while situationally powerful--is arguably not OP because to get a powerful effect you have to couple it with another spell. Brilliant is what lets you chain it all together for arbitrary amounts of time. I don't know how else to compare it; to reiterate it's as if we were in the middle of Magic: The Gathering's affinity winter and people here were arguing that we should ban/fix Ornithopter (a dinky creature with no attack), not the actual affinity mechanic itself.