thelee

honestly i was expecting rymrgand challenge to be an increasing fatigue system. seemed pretty fitting with entropy/decay portfolio. i would love for a "no stash anywhere" option to come back. i always played poe1 like that and it really made me play more deliberately with my inventory.

Ah, so it's a realistic child simulator. in general i stay away from the beta branch just for my game's stability's sake, but man am i looking forward to trying hylea's challenge. i can't not stop imagining lolololol KEEP SUMMER SAFE-style moments. "GAH VELA NO *casts empowered tornado, end up hostile-ing entire nekataka*"

considering that obsidian is steadily amping up the mid-late game difficulty for PotD i think balance matters more than ever. i had an unoptimized potd party (because after several runs i just wnated to have "fun" insetad of focus on power) and after SSS came out i definitely struggled a lot more than a better party would have. with the oncoming megabosses, it's reasonable for players to be able to expect a wide variety of options to take down the end-game fights (that is, without having to rely on gouging strike cheese). though i disagree with some of the comments. i think druid subclasses are fine (though spiritshift probably needs late game help). though non-berserker barbarian subclasses definitely feel like they need help (and as someone who generally plays priests or casters, i hope it weights more when i think a martial class needs help).

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.

ciphers always have recieved 50% of weapon damage as focus. you may have had drainign whip and/or been an ascendant, which significantly increased the amount of focus you got.

While the word "speed" was improperly used by me, my math was perfectly right. In this particular case (no other bonuses involved) you can talk if you want about +42.8% recovery speed while the action speed increase is only +34% (the action includes the attack and the recovery). At this point I think you're being intentionally slippery, since you seem to be explicitly selectively quoting me to remove important context/qualifiers. And it's not just that your word "speed" was misused, your "perfectly right" math somehow manages to produce two very different answers between this post and the previous which reflects not a misuse of the word, but a misuse or misunderstanding of the basic concept. Not to mention that your "perfectly right" math in your original post was in fact wrong in most of its claims; to repeat: action speed has linear returns, not diminishing returns; and 2h weapons are in fact objectively worse than dual-wielding in most cases, the only reason why they are 10% better on average is because their +1 PEN can have outsize returns in the minority of cases where that will generally matter. No, frankly, you still don't get it. I've tried virtually everywhere (here, and in the umezawa guide, and elsewhere wherever this topic comes up) to qualify what I'm talking about, which you seem to be deliberately ignoring or eliding: skimming back up in my posts, you seem to be ignoring important phrases of "through the recovery" "attack is unaffected." You also seem to be misunderstanding the difference in my post between when I say X does +Y% over Z versus when I'm trying to illustrate the relative impact of specific variables (admittedly there are sometimes bonkers-sounding phrases where I say something "+10% damage => ~+6% damage" which will sound absurd devoid of any context). Action speed has linear returns, discrete recovery time bonuses also have linear returns (because they effectively convert into action speed bonuses), but a single recovery time bonus that grows larger has increasing returns, so a -30% recovery time bonus has a much greater impact than one might intuitively think (e.g. for similar reasons guardian stance's increasing recovery time bonus has increasing returns) and is overweight, and the fact that obsidian designers appeared to have paired a numerically (but not totally) equivalent 30% base damage increase to 2h weapons in an effort to "balance" the two weapon styles illustrates a misunderstanding of how much overweight a -30% recovery time bonus has. Assuming you aren't just ****posting and are truly confused, then I do truly regret being sloppy and quick with my initial post, because people are getting extremely hung up on minor technical analysis, none of which have any impact on the final conclusions--which so far no one has said anything that even begins to make me think could be wrong. I will probably take a pass through the original post and hide much of the technical detail behind spoiler tags and try to be much more rigorous with my wording.

While I haven't tried the encounters, I think I'm loving the willingness to have injury-inducing attacks on PotD. Really adds a parallel technical difficulty to the fights I think. Looking forward to trying Hylea's challenge

I'd be real curious to know how it interacts with something like supprpess affliction or salvation of time which afaict have no PL scaling.

I'm not posting to deceive or undermine you, I apologize if it came off that way. Anyways, back on topic: If the "In a Vacuum" assumption was correct; you posit that all players only roll auto-attack- which would be incorrect and leads to a miscalculation of damage. I'm just saying you should do the calculation with at least full-attack abilities taken into account. For your last point- Even on POTD, most people who complete 50% of the content will find themselves overleveled. There are also things like Ancestor's Memory, resource increasing items, etc. It's not quite "in a vacuum". Honestly i'm a little sloppy with some of what I've been writing (I just wanted to get it out pretty quickly because it was in the middle of a work day ), but my more recent post is more clear about the assumptions that underpin it. I'm not saying that players only auto attack per se, but that most combat is so long that martial abilities basically get dwarfed by passive effects (sneak attack, carnage, weapon enchants, inherent item bonuses of random kinds, stats, etc.). So when I say X does +Y% damage versus Z, it's really saying that X does +Y% sustained damage over Z. I've also been trying to couch things in terms of "average" or making claims to "variances" or "niche" or "general." Deadfire is an extremely complicated game and the only way for me to perfectly make claims is to basically re-simulate Deadfire itself. This is also why I frame things as "rules of thumb." Dexterity isn't always going to be very nearly +3% (sustained) damage, not only because other action speed bonuses and armor can interact with that, but it's a good enough "rule of thumb." Perception isn't always going to be +2% (sustained, mulitplicative) damage (it is more at extremely low accuracy, and much less at extremely high accuracy), but it's good enough of a rule of thumb for general practical cases. And single-weapon style, while objectively worse in general sustained damage than other weapon styles, is going to be infinitely better than any other weapon style for an e.g. interrupt build against an enemy that you normally would have a ~40% chance to hit (and thus would never crit in any other weapon style). Basically what I want people to take away from my post comes down to three things: 1) a simple way to evaluate very vague and ambiguous-sounding buffs and debuffs. For example, a lot of people thought Devotions for the Faithful, once nerfed to -+10 accuracy (from -+20) was going to render priests useless. With our rule of thumb, we can see that a nerfed Devotions--properly targeted--is still ~28% damage increase for your entire party and -28% for any enemies you manage to hit, which is still frankly really good (and should illustrate how absurdly broken it was in Deadfire at -+20 acc, though at that point we're talking so much of an accuracy swing that our rule of thumb starts to break down a bit). Similarly, there's the fast vs slow weapons section which our rule of thumbs helps illustrate that the +5 acc fast weapons is probably better than a lot of people thought. 2) perception is a lot better than probably what many people thought, especially for barbs 3) general guidelines to evaluate the different weapon styles (2h will on average do the most damage, but a lot of the interactions here are PEN-based) People can argue about the details in specific situations because i'm not trying to represent these as absolutes that are true 100% of the time (except the bit about action speed being linear returns). edit1: actually, our rule of thumb still holds up pretty well with the +-20 acc devotions case (actually understates it if anything). i only tested it for a narrow set of starting parameters, but i just wanted to verify the rule of thumb.

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.