thelee

I agree, and I'm torn about the state of disposition in this game. It generally feels less consequential, both from a RP perspective and for the reasons you gave. I liked how much of in-game incentive priests/paladins in poe1 gave to role-playing properly whereas here it really seems more of an afterthought for the average gameplay experience. Maybe they should bring back Unbroken Faith and then increase the influence of disposition.

While disentangling how priest/paladin disposition works for this post: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/103595-mechanics-priestpaladin-disposition-aka-does-obsidian-even-understand-their-own-math/ I came across several oddities that strike me as potential bugs. 1. The disposition-scaling factor for priest Holy Radiance does not benefit from power level scaling. It is possible that this is intentional, but in case it is not, currently power level scaling only benefits the base 15 healing and base 12 damage from Holy Radiance. 2. The paladin's faith & conviction and deep faith do not have the range that the 1.1 patch notes state they should. Instead of [6, 10] and [5, 15] the range is [8.2, 10] and [10.6, 15]. If this is intentional and the 1.1 patch notes wrong, disregard, but to me it feels like a whole lot of effort for little gain the way disposition scaling is set up particularly for the default faith & conviction (where the difference between a completely neutral paladin and a completely bad paladin in most cases is functionally 0 because it's the difference between 8.9 and 8.2 to defenses and very few effects in the game have fractional accuracy or fractional defense where that .7 difference could matter (if there even any remaining effects at all... pre-1.2 before drugs and potions could give you fractional stats but 1.2 removed this alchemy-based effect scaling, and i don't know what else there is other than deep faith/faith and conviction). To reproduce: start a new game or reload an existing game and hire a new priest or paladin and mess with dispositions and observe the different effects. You can also read my forum post and see if I'm right or wrong (though I have extensively tested in-game and even wrote a little script to ensure I could accurate predict defenses based on some input dispositions).

Updated the OP because while testing something else I discovered that PL scaling is actually a multiplicative bonus with everything else, which makes PL scaling (especially damage scaling) much stronger. This just furthers my pet belief that spells/abilities that don't do damage/healing need stronger PL scaling, because the fact that damage/healing can get both a multiplicative damage/healing boost makes them that much better. I mean, does Obsidian truly think that a multiplicative +10% damage (or worse, a +10% damage and a +5% multiplicative duration for a damage-over-time effect) is equivalent in strength to a multiplicative +5% duration effect? It might be closer to balanced to switch those numbers.

I was starting to get a little bit mystifed just how disposition influenced priest/paladin, and couldn't find any good answer for Deadfire. Instead, I found unanswered questions being asked on reddit or here that posted numbers that made no sense compared to past patch notes. So I decided to do a lot of tests and deconstruct what's happening and oy is it weird. (Someone will probably chime in and say that you could open up some game file and find this all out, but I did it the hard way.) Putting it here so that hopefully people curious about why one bad disposition is so negatively affecting their pally defenses. BACKGROUND priests/paladins have favored/disfavored dispositions. They influence the following things: For priest: Holy Radiance healing, Holy Radiance burn damage, Spiritual Weapon lash For paladin: Faith and Conviction defense bonus, Deep Faith defense bonus In all cases, only a disposition score up to 3 is counted. 4 is counted the same as 3. It's been mentioned in this forum before, but I still see people getting confused about it, but for hired adventurers, they use YOUR current dispositions. This is different from POE1 (where companion paladins scaled by level instead and companion priests not at all). This means that e.g. a priest of skaen recruit is not going to play well with you if you rolled a kind wayfarer main character (which is a perfect overlap between favored dispositions for the paladin and disfavored reputations for the priest). Dispositions are the same as in PoE1 (you can look up on wiki). I don't know what Pallegina's special subclass paladin's dispositions are, the fact that I was testing on a character with crazy reputations and Pallegina still had +8.9 neutral faith and conviction almost makes me think she has none. PRIEST HOLY RADIANCE Holy Radiance heals a base of 15 health. It starts with a base +5 disposition bonus. (So with neutral disposition you will heal 20 health). Each positive disposition gives you a +20%/rank modifier to the disposition bonus. Each negative disposition gives you a -20%/rank modifier to the disposition bonus. So if you are a priest of Wael and have 3 Clever and 3 Shady, you'll get +120% bonus, for a total of +11 disposition bonus. Importantly, like every other penalty in Deadfire, penalties go through an inversion and are treated as a "rate" multiplier, so each individual disfavored disposition will actually outweigh an equivalent-strength favored disposition. Put another way, when you only have one type of negative disposition, it's as it seems (so 3 Honest for Wael would be -60% or a net +2 disposition bonus). But in any other situation, you invert and combine them. So if you have 1 Honest and 1 Clever, your net disposition bonus is actually: +5 * reinvert(.2 clever + 1-1/(1-.2 honest)) => +5 * reinvert(.2 + -.25) => +4.75 (rounds to +4.8 displayed) where "reinvert" is a function that does: reinvert(x) { return x > 0 ? 1 + x : 1/(1/(1-x)) } Note that although a disfavored disposition will outweigh an equivalent-strength favored disposition, this equation does mean that if you only have disfavored dispositions or have more disfavored than favored, the penalty is not as severe as you would otherwise get from a purely additive or multiplicative combination. In fact, even though "15" is the base, you can't actually get this low, the lowest you can get is 15+5 * reinvert(1-1/(1-.6 bad disp) + 1-1/(1-.6 bad disp)= 15.83 (rounding to 15.8 displayed, plus a guaranteed minimum +1.5 from power scaling for 17.3) Holy Radiance is also at PL0 so it has an inherent +10% priest PL scaling to heal effect. Importantly, this and any power level scaling only applies to the base healing of 15 health; the disposition bonus is excluded. But after you apply disposition bonus and power level scaling, you get a subtotal any other modifiers (might, bonus to healing, etc.) are applied this larger subtotal. The same thing applies Holy Radiance's burn damage, except it has a base 12 burn damage, and a +5 base disposition bonus. Again, power level scaling only applies to the base burn damage, but all other modifiers apply to the subtotal you get after applying the disposition bonus and power level scaling. Again, ranks in disfavored dispositions outweigh equivalent-magnitude. The upshot is that the healing scaling is kind of meh; the difference between a blasphemous priest and a devout priest is about 10 points of healing before might and other modifiers. This is not nothing, but is a huge step down from the massive scaling you could get in poe1. On the other hand, scaling for burn damage is still significant, because even though it's still the same +5 base disposition bonus, the damage repeats every few seconds, so the difference between a neutral priest and a devout priest can be a decent chunk of change. If it were up to me, I'd fix it so that the disposition bonus also scales with power level. PALADIN FAITH & CONVICTION PLUS DEEP FAITH This is where I really tore my hair out. Because the 1.1 patch notes have this: Keep the above in mind, because these numbers have almost nothing to do with how faith & conviction and deep faith actually work and makes me suspect that either whomever wrote these lines had massive typos (likely for the faith & conviction stuff) or even Obsidian doesn't completely understand the ramifications of their double-inversion system (very likely). Basically Paladin defense bonuses work a lot like the priest Holy Radiance stuff, except for Faith & Conviction you have a "base" +8 to all defenses, and then a +.9 neutral defense bonus (you still get 20% modifiers based on your favored/disfavored reputations). Once again, disfavored dispositions outweigh equivalent-magnitude favored dispositions. Note that a ramification of this is that the range for Faith & Conviction is actually 8.2 to 10 (with in-game rounding). I have no idea how any designer at Obsidian who understood their own system thought that you could actually get down to a +6 defense, the penalties just don't work this way. (Confirmed studiously in-game). For Deep Faith, it's similar, except a +10 base to all defenses and a +2.25 neutral defense bonus (with 20% pos/negative modifiers). Once again, I have no idea how Obsidian thinks the range for this is 5-15, because the actual range is 10.6 to 15. (Confirmed studiously in-game). Note that due to the way Faith & Conviction works, disposition barely matters for a normal paladin. The difference between a blasphemous paladin and a devout paladin is 2 defense essentially, and the difference between a blasphemous paladin and a neutral paladin is virtually nothing (it is theoretically .7 defense, but very few effects in the game especially post 1.2 have fractional defense or accuracy so in practice there's hardly ever a difference between 8.2 and 8.9). For Deep Faith it'll matter a bit more, as +5 all defenses can be a significant difference. This is again unfortunately a far cry from poe1. PRIEST SPIRITUAL WEAPON Spiritual weapons use the same equation as other scaling, except it's a base +20% lash, with a +5% neutral disposition bonus, and then the 20% modifier (positive or negative) based on disposition rank. The effect of this is that the range of the spiritual weapon lash is not [20%, 30%] as the patch notes say, instead the range is actually [21.25%, 31%] (it's hard to completely verify this in game because it depends on relying on the combat log which does rounding, but for all intents and purposes I have verified this range in-game via repeated attacks on Aloth). Like the other disposition scaling stuff, negative dispositions outweigh positive dispositions. On the plus side, this range is actually slightly better than promised, a 31% versus a 30% lash is not huge, but it's also not nothing. POSTSCRIPT It's possible that the relatively weaker disposition scaling on these various effects compared to poe1 is intentional, because there's no "Untroubled Faith" equivalent. (In PoE1 there was a talent named Untroubled Faith that would erase the effect of any negative disposition.) Instead, in Deadfire, once you accumulate a disfavored disposition it will permanently negatively affect you. Even if you get a 4 in a favored disposition, the way disposition works is that it counts as a 3; the extra point does not help you offset a disfavored disposition. In a system without Untroubled Faith (which IMO was a really lame talent but apparently people around the internet used in their own games) it becomes less of a big deal if you accumulate some disfavored reputations because the stakes are much lower. Though I suspect some of the scaling with the paladin has to be buggy/unintentional... POSTSCRIPT 2 Now that I've confirmed how Spiritual Weapon's faith attuned lash works, I strongly suspect what's happening here is that there's some scripting function that gets called with two arguments, a base and the neutral modifier. Someone on staff explained it one way while (possibly mistakenly) implementing it another, and now everyone who uses this script call is copy-pasting the same mistaken understanding of the range the script function produces, because I suspect in every place it is used, designers thought it was going to give them a linear range of [15, 25] (healing for Holy Radiance), [12, 22] (damage for Holy Radiance), [6, 10] (faith and conviction), [5, 15] (deep faith), and [20, 30] (spiritual attunement) instead of the non-linear range of [15.8, 21]; [12.8, 23]; [8.2, 10]; [10.6, 15]; and [21.25, 31] respectively. On the plus side, if Obsidian feels like fixing this, it should just involve changing one script function and everything else will get updated.

Like, even with a rank 3/4 surgeon for a lot of injuries it's just faster to sail back to a port to heal up. E.G. 7 days to heal even with a high-ranked surgeon - who actually just sails around and waits that out? IMO crew injuries should either be short enough so that the injury could actually be relevantly healed (maybe balanced out with a higher medicine cost). OR, docking doesn't provide an instaheal.

Actually a Streetfighter with Heating Up or On the Edge is a lot faster then a Barbarian. Just some clarification note here (not saying Haplok and Boeroer got it wrong here, but just for anyone else following who might have missed the subtle differences). Frenzy and bloodlust give you action speed bonuses (additive to be a total of +45% through both your attack and recovery). Streetfighter's Heating Up gives you a recovery time boost of -50%, which is more like a +100% action speed boost for your recovery. As far as melee is concerned, you only spend about 14.5% of your time in the actual attack, so the Heating Up is like a +85.5% action speed boost. So it's almost twice as good as frenzy + bloodlust. So like Haplok said, it's not just faster, it's a lot faster. I don't recall barbarians get anything remotely on the level of the +50% Heating Up dmg boost, the +70% endgame sneak attack boost, or +100% crit damage from being On The Edge (though the uptime is harder to sustain for On The Edge) so I think if the question is about single-target DPS without anything particularly gimmicky, it's not even close. Unfortunately a flanked streetfighter that is at bloodied or lower is way squishier than a barbarian, which makes even a narrow single-target DPS ranking hard to do IMO. for monk/rogue: why bother with riposte when you can just spam blade turning and actually keep yourself alive to do damage. for that matter, i don't think helwalker is the optimal choice here: if we care about sustainability at all, a flanked streetfighter getting +50% damage from enemies is going to die very quickly even with blade turning on (a couple arrows from someone behind enemy lines). as for monk v barbarian, the streetfighter/sneak attack/crit damage bonus is so high that +10 might from helwalker, while good, is not going to be as good as investing more in action speed at that point and while monks get swift strikes barbarians get the aforementioned +45% action speed. plus with berserk and barbaric blow you get massive hit->crit conversion which gets you that sweet on the edge damage bonus (in an aoe even!). even if you stick with monk i think if you pick nazpalca or shattered pillars you can get wounds uptime to spam blade turning without having to actually get hit by potentially scary enemies (with a damage bonus, no less). anyway, I guess this thread is a theorycrafting thread now. Because of spells. Especially highly effective spells like both Rymrgand's or a lvl 1 spell that blinds in a huge AoE named Chillfog... And I think mainly because the dmg spells of Wizards work best with the empower mechanics. Since you can rest nearly whenever you want that's a huge advantage over classes that don't profit from Empower that much. IF you are willing to use Empower of course. If not then the wizard loses power - but only in your game, not in general. Also: Ciphers are dedicated mind controllers - and mind control is the strongest CC effect in Deadfire. I can't see how a Cipher can not be a valuable member in any party. Especially single class Ciphers who can pick the +ACC passive around will-based spells a lot earlier and also can regain focus per crit. Combine that with the Beguiler's special feature of regainig focus with deception spells and you have one of the best CC char in the game - in my opinion. +100. Also I find it hilariously ironic that it felt like in the backer beta people were constantly complaining about how weak wizards were and now wizards are a popular vote for most powerful class. this is also the exact same thing that happened with poe1. i think this may also be related to people undervaluing beguilers; i think most players just severely undervalue CC. wizards can do a stupid amount of damage when geared right with empower; but even though so many people focus on e.g. empowering meteor shower, wizards are also powerful because they also have powerful CC. (seriously, more people needed to have tried the wizard black bow spell before the 1.2 nerf.) like, even PL1 slicken is a prone effect that repeats, and enemy AI casters tend not to be smart enough to stop trying to waste their spells or get out of the area while they keep getting knocked down (it also gets +2 acc/PL for scaling).

you should probably file a new bug; I think Obsidian only rarely re-checks old bugs for new issues.

wat ... Yep :D I agree, because of that I wrote OK - Okay i was more flabbergasted that you wrote "beguiler under-powered." beguiler > other cipher subclasses imo.

In addition, the new injured crew UI does not properly update if you dock at e.g. nekata and have them instantly healed up.

See these screenshots. The "legacy" (top bar) injured crew display is wrong, either in the number it displays or the number it displays on hover. The correct number is in the new injured crew display in the bottom-right, but it would be best if the two were consistent. Dropbox link for save and output_log follows: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jmqwwwfo8ryaefv/AAC3Zgc4bwD5tstsRuiT3ZY5a?dl=0

wat my first attempt at 1.1-level potd I stumbled into it without much of an idea about what to expect, and i'm not going to be embarrassed to say that I was basically carried through most of the game by a random beguiler adventurer I decided to recruit in port maje. i would easily put ciphers in top-3, beguilers specifically maybe even top-2. i think people here focus too much on "can you do a lot of damage" for power level, but e.g. how much single-target DPS you put out is irrelevant if the entire enemy party is busy fighting itself. ciphers in pillars1 were good but were but nowhere near as good due to charmed/dominate being bugged (it would end prematurely if the AI had to change targets or something) and even without them being bugged the duration of those effects are stronger in deadfire (e.g. 50% longer in deadfire for whisper of treason). Add in to the fact that straight-up immunity mind control is much rarer in deadfire than in pillars (there's intellect resistance, but it's still not too common and dominate can still be used to charm; there's even intellect weakness which was never a thing in poe1), and focus regeneration from subclass and the fact that one of the cipher's passives is a bonus to will-targetting attacks (i.e. mind-control and many debuffs) and it's A+. Even with the 1.2 charm nerf, they added back in brilliance on a cipher so I think the cipher power level has gone up even more if anything. EDIT - I mean, erm, OF COURSE beguiler is weak and cipher decidedly middle of the pack. NO NEED TO nerf whisper/puppet master/ring leader and a bunch of cipher abilities. No need to take a second look at the PL7 brilliance inspiration. Move along move along nothing to see here.

One thing to keep in mind is that POE1 has a lower average sales price by now, thanks to discounting, sales, and such. So even though it has 6x sales of Deadfire so far, it is nowhere near 6x revenue. I feel like in the Fig campaign the numbers they were giving had something like 600k copies sold at 30USD average sale price (lower than MSRP due to promos and bundling and such). If they got to 1.2 million since, it has likely been through even more discounting and promotions, whereas Deadfire has been full MSRP so far. So I wouldn't read too much into the raw sales numbers, though it is clear to me that Deadfire is doing less well than I personally would hope as a fan of the game and the studio. Though what ultimately matters is if Deadfire makes enough money to pay the bills if not being a huge hit. I hope that the case. 200k @ 50$ (subtracting pre-paid backers but adding back in GOG sales and assuming they at least balance out) is 10m$ gross revenue, which may not be bad for an indie title, especially since some of the development cost was funded by fig money, some of which is investment that only needs to be paid out if they hit certain sales milestones so is not a too bad of a liability.

They're not supposed to be comparable to wizards. Wizards do burst damage, a little bit of self-buffing, and some debuffing. Priests are a support class. They can do party-wide buffs and heals (and probably the best set of revive spells in the game) and have only a small amount of burst damage and debuffs (more or less depending on subclass). If anything, I think a lot of the weakness of the vanilla priest has to do with the fact that outside of direct damage and direct heal spells, power level scaling is really lame. +5% base duration per power level is nothing compared to the power level scaling even PL1 Fan of Flames gets. Who empowers a buff? I would venture to say almost literally no one. (I used to empower arcane veil way back in the day with +10PL empower, but even then I quickly realized in such a situation I'm generally way better off self-empowering and just casting arcane veil again.) I occasionally empower a debuff, for the +5 accuracy, and even then it takes Accurate Empower to make it really worth it. IMO if a spell doesn't do damage or healing or need penetration, it should get additional accuracy/duration power level scaling. (They already do this for something like Repulsing Seal and Slicken, which gets +2 accuracy/PL instead of +1 accuracy/PL. They should make this a more general thing for anything that doesn't do damage/healing.) This would also help a bunch of other spells/classes that are lame with PL scaling or with empower (like a lot of wizard enchantment spells).

Noticed that the 1.2 full patch notes had the skaen spiritual weapon added to it. Verified in game. Thanks!

this works in 1.2 now, thanks!

I don't think this was in the patch notes in 1.2, but I just tested and it seems to work now. Thanks!

i see that this is fixed in 1.2. Thanks!

Minor update: I re-tuned the stats after playing around with the early game and late game a bit on a test character. Basically dumping resolve in favor of perception and avoiding a might malus. The overall 1.2 nerf makes this character a little bit more fragile; I even opt against using a Cloak of +7 Deflection mid-late game (preferring Nemnok's Cloak in end-game) just to make it easier to land Sparkcrackers on myself; all this means a net -15 deflection from 1.1 to 1.2 so expect to get hit a lot more. Plus Potions of the Final Stand last for way less time, and Barring Death's Door got hit with a nerfbat. Salvation of Time is still good (probably even better because getting +20s on even-shorter-duration effects is that much stronger). So, a little bit more micromanagement-intensive, but still a fun, proactive way to do a stupid amount of sustained damage.

I was only being tongue-in-cheek sorry . I tweeted at JE Sawyer because I truly believed Potion of Impediment in particular was horribly broken. Bu yeah, scrolls in particular seemed to me a worst offender (an early potd run I randomly gave pallegina arcana and mid-high end scrolls and proceeded to later drop my jaw when she cleared an entire fight with just like two scrolls; ~ +20PL on already good effects, come on!). I think an interesting thing the nerf revealed is previously to what extent this build leaned on deadeye and potion of deftness for its accuracy bonus, especially for self-sparkcrackers. It's probably for the best that consumables can't be such a crutch now, but it will be an interesting exercise soon to retune the stats on this build a bit (particularly for early game).

Really? I don't know man, sneak attack (and eventually deathblows) gets you pretty far along the power curve imo. Also streetfighter = most fun I've had with a rogue-type in quite a while. Can someone explain to me why Streetfighter is good, or fun even? The downsides seem way too annoying to me. I'm a rogue fanatic and play a ton of rogues in every game, but I don't see why everyone loves Streetfighter. In my Swashbuckler (Rogue/Devoted) playthrough, I was flanked maybe 5 times over 100 hours of playtime, and unless you have a ton of Con (which I don't want) then staying Bloodied for more than a few seconds seems like a death sentence. I'm clearly missing something here but the downsides seemed way too annoying for me to try it. I love the micro of afflicting things and then Sneak Attacking them, but having to constantly micro to put myself in bad positions (flanked) or suffer a slower attack speed doesn't sound the least bit fun to me. Edit: Or is it for like Riposte builds with high Res? A super tanky high-Res rogue also sounds like heresy to me so maybe that's why I'm not into it. Edit 2: So after some reading, high Con, high Res builds with ****ty other stats? That like, literally offends me. That's disgusting, you should all be ashamed, Obsidian most of all for allowing it to happen. Tanky rogues, /vomit. I need a shower. post-1.2 patch, my educational streetfighter/wael build is likely going to be a low con, low res build. streetfighters are fun because they are a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. you're literally "on the edge" to get the most out of a streetfighter, and at least for me it triggers my adrenaline glands when i'm in near-constant dangerous situation but can output a stupid amount of damage.

I actually think priest is not so bad. Vanilla priest (eothas) is weak, but the other subclasses get interesting bonus spells (especially skaen and wael) so I put 4/5 priests in the middle of the pack. Eothas/vanilla priest definitely feels like it needs work, though, both from the perspective of not feeling too great, but more particularly because the eothas-specific subclass only gets one special spell (sunbeam at PL1) and the rest is already in the priest ability tree, so virtually anything the eothas priest does, any other priest can do better. I honestly think ranger is the biggest disappointment (was my vote for weakest). If I multiclass it with something else it gets better, but its main saving grace to me is the Ghost Heart subclass (can be a good disruptor against behind-the-enemy-lines casters and such); I feel like a lot of its active abilities are pretty lame sauce.

I've partially updated this guide for 1.2. Unfortunately the consumables changes for 1.2 has hit this build a bit, as Potion of Deftness, Deadeye, and Potion of Impediment have all gotten weaker by large margins, and Sparkcrackers by a smaller margin. Most of the 1.2 changes this build will take in stride, thanks in part to Salvation of Time (even the nerfed 30% chance of interrupt from Potion of Impediment when you're attacking almost every second is still good), but it does mean that there may be a different optimal stat distribution (e.g. take away the 7 points of resolve and give it to perception). I'll fully update the guide eventually (this is still the most fun I've had with a build), but I'm going to wait for a little bit longer for further balance changes before going with another run of this build. Also, SORRY GUYS. I actually tweeted at Josh Sawyer shortly after 1.1 that they should consider nerfing potion of impediment, and he liked my tweet, so I feel like I am partially responsible for the consumables nerf.

I updated the original post for 1.2, which simplified and nerfed a lot of how consumables do power level scaling.

Wrong. They literally threw up those TCS/Frozen Crown Solo/The Ultimate achievement up there just to see if anyone could do it. They actually got a lot of heat from people who like 100% achievement but don't have the patience/wherewithal to do something that tediously insane, which is why there is no TCS-style achievement in Deadfire.

Hey, I am unable to repro this issue anymore. I guess quitting the game and relaunching it much later cleared whatever transient issue was occurring.