thelee

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.

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.

In terms of dumpability, you're also not generally mathematically wrong. For anyone else just listening in: my simulations only took into account stats of 10+ (my omission). I haven't updated for the full range of stats, but because of double-inversion nonsense when you bring might and dex down you need a much larger amount of equivalent damage or action speed boosts to counter that penalty, whereas with perception--even though though the penalties have increasing returns--you can counter accuracy penalties with accuracy bonuses 1:1. Perception had such a minor edge over might on net effects for stats >= 10 that I feel comfortable saying without running more simulations that the double-inversion means that might becomes a more precious stat than perception when deciding what to take below 10. So when it comes to which of might, dex, or perception you can dump, perception is the most dumpable. Though personally to me it doesn't make much sense to dump perception below 10 just to boost might some more (dex though). Double-inversions, boy... nice way to come with situations where 1 + 1 = 3

Xoti's PL1 priest subclass spell is probably one of the best PL1 spells in the game. Virtually I couldn't care less what other subclass bonus spells she got. Though I do agree about monk; don't mind the monk subclass penalty so much because it's easy to build a viable monk character that isn't a huge wounds spender.

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.

Then they missed out on all the dialogue options. I think a lot of people preferred to wreck house in combat instead.

I will be honest Boer I have been less active in the game, it just seems worse. Talk me off the ledge man. Res sucks again not even for lessening debuffs??!?! I think Prince of Lies put it best earlier upthread "suboptimal does not mean unusable." This isn't BG or BG 2 where a bad stat allocation makes for a literally unplayable character. I have made at least two decent characters that valued res and they came out pretty well. It's not useless (*cough* BG/BG2/IWD charisma *cough*), it's just niche. (And those niches can be very, very powerful, since Res gives you deflection which has increasing returns) (one of those characters was a support tank that could get up to 30+ res with very high uptime ~100%, which is some pretty serious debuff reduction; basically meant every hit was turned into a graze, and anything that grazed barely even registered)

bottom line is Perception > Might (but it's close). similarly, +1 acc > +3% damage (but it's close). (though this ranking breaks down at very high accuracies, though that is rare for much of potd) for martial classes, Dexterity > Perception or Might. For casters, it might be closer to Perception > Might > Dexterity depending on your build/playstyle (basically when you have a finite number of spells, getting the most out of each of your spells may be more important than simply emptying your spellbook faster) That's quite counter-intuitive? I thought the conventional thought has been that casters need Dexterity most because of the need to prevent being interrupted and thus cast fast. Like I said, it depends on play style and build. For example: enemy AI is relatively predictable and gameable. If you have suitable engagement and stats/distance, interruption may be less of a concern because you're only taking incidental damage at best. You can also cancel spellcasts before they get interrupted. Another example: if i have a martial/caster multiclass, i might privilege dexterity alot to spend less time casting (and risking interrupts) and more time attacking. but if i'm a safe single-class debuffer, all dexterity lets me do is empty my spellbook faster and then i'm stuck with a relatively crappy autoattack. in such a case it might be more useful to make each spell I do cast much more impactful by increasing perception. (this also depends on difficulty because on PotD with upscaling running out of spells and still having a decent amount of combat left is going to be more common than on, say, story mode)

i get that that's what he was saying, but what was really frustrating me was that i kept on trying to say that that was not what i was saying was the net effect... though kaylon kept pushing it as if that's what i was saying and that this was undermining my conclusions, which it wasn't (and in fact he was selectively quoting me out of context to push his point), and also that's not what i was saying and in fact even if i had said something ridiculous like "the action speed reduction is superliminal and makes you travel back in time" it still wouldn't have affected the results from the simulations. grr anyway don't want to relitigate it. EDIT: in case it isn't clear, what i've been saying repeatedly is that it's a +42.8% through the recovery. maybe my phrasing is just unintuitive or confusing. i've even also said "ignoring the attack" to clarify that i'm talking about the recovery time only (and part of my aggravation earlier was kaylon selectively quoting the part RIGHT before my very very important qualifiers). i'm trying to illustrate how a single, increasing recovery time bonus has outsized importance (increasing returns) because of the inversion to get to the net action speed, which is a more comparable number to damage boosts and such and that failure to account for this on the part of Obsidian's designers is what probably led to the outcome where 2w was just basically the definitive choice for weapons for so long. i edited my OP earlier today to try to make this more clear.

Re: economy. You don't have to spend the money you accumulate on things (even on PotD with upscaling), but the major difference with PoE1 is that you can, and if you choose to you may find yourself constrained. In PoE1, basically once you started fighting enemies that dropped fine equipment, all considerations of cost flew out the window. My take on deadfire: - i don't miss the 6th party member (by the end, I was playing reduced party sizes in poe1 anyway just for the challenge). - i miss the talent system from poe1, but i like the larger build diversity/design space multi-classing has opened up. in the end, thumbs up. - combat feels a lot better. - the main story kind of ends anticlimactically, but the world itself feels much more like a place to explore rather than "ok now here's the next wilderness area". Beast of Winter DLC helps patch in the weakness of the main story (and honestly has a segment that I would consider narratively the best in the entire PoE/PoE2 franchise so far) - factions are much better fleshed out. (Honestly barely even registered the factions in Twin Elms, and it was way too easy to align/piss off factions in Defiance Bay) - there's no equivalent to the 15-level dungeon (closest is probably Old City or Oathkeeper's Sanctum, and both are just 3 maps each), but SSS DLC helps scratch my itch for grindy-combat. I thought PoE1 was the closest to my platonic ideal for a party-based CRPG, but PoE2 has edged that out. PoE1 is dead, long live PoE2!

clarification question: does hylea's challenge somehow automatically enforce that you kept vela for yourself in poe1?

5 priest/druids 2x withdraws per character, 2x beetle shells per character, plus +1/+1 each per empower. boy what a zany challenge this is going to be, i feel.

i had to make some assumptions about your character, but before I talk about what I got from trying it out with some simulations, in general where PotD isn't concerned because per/might are so close you want to balance them as much as possible that being said, you are right that it would be more optimal to distribute the stats like so. 16/16/16 yields more net damage on average, though the difference is really small (a couple percentage points) so it wouldn't make or break your character. as expected, the more you invest in dex (even at the expense of might/perception), the bigger that difference becomes. EDIT: for your follow-up question, i'm not sure I can answer that really well. it requires an amount of active metagame knowledge that I don't have. You should probably invest in stats that will be much harder to boost once you're actually playing the game, which depends also on what party members you have (and what buffs they can provide).

i addressed the ones that were relevant because they themselves were flawed, and the ones i didn't address them it was because they were entirely beside the point themselves, and only serve to demonstrate that you either didn't pay attention to what i said or (at this point i'm convinced, based on your selective quoting of what i said) are intentionally posting in bad faith for whatever reason that escapes me. and yes, i think people are able to judge by themselves at this point.