thelee

I'm pretty sure the 2nd selection is a distinct skill from smoke veil that just happens to have smoke veil as a prereq. On the other hand, the 3rd selection is an upgrade to smoke cloud. The same thing also happens with Escape -> Shadowing Beyond or Escape -> Shadow Step (distinct abilities that have Escape as a prereq). AFAICT, obsidian has not made any skills upgrades unless they were strictly better (i.e. better in every way) than the skills that were their prereqs. If it's not strictly better, it is instead a distinct ability. (Example of strictly better upgrade: mule kick upgrades knock down because it does everything knock down but more. Example of different so not an upgrade: Pallegina's sworn enemy is a distinct ability because while it does do more than sworn enemy, it also has double the zeal cost.) Back to the Escape examples, those are new abilities, not upgrades, because while they do everything Escape can do and more, they also cost sigificantly more guile.

imo the effect is not totally obvious, there's no big SFX or anything. I mostly notice because all of a sudden half my party is near dead/bloodied, or they got all their abilities interrupted, or all of a sudden half the enemies i'm fighting are invisible (!!). I don't know what the wild mind roll tables are like, but i'd be curious to know what the weight of good outcomes vs bad outcomes is. If it's completely 50-50, adding more variance in a game where the player is generally expected to win only helps the enemy. The Wild Mage in BG2 (and BGEE) was good not because you could try to cheese casting high-level spells with the level 1 wild magic effect (and it's not too much of a cheese because you still only had a low chance of it working), but because it got the +1 bonus spell per level like a specialist mage but had no restricted school. The wild mage effect was, in practice, its restriction. Even if wildmind is heavily weighted towards good outcomes, they are mostly so subtle that I rarely ever noticed it helping me (I might notice full focus or a lucky aoe that takes out some foes). I did notice the many many times it backfired, because those frequently swung the pace of the battle significantly against me.

Dude please you're killing me. You can probably make an educated guess if your Minscs fall in close combat to some tentacle things around vats full of brains, that something might be wrong, just like when something is wrong when fighting vampires in close combat. Even if you don't figure out the INT thing right away (which I figured out by simply checking character sheets after one of the fights first time it happened), you don't need it to defeat these enemies. If you feel like melee doesn't work, you sit back, think for 2 seconds, and try ranged combat/summons because melee doesn't work for you. Even without this knowledge you will come to an effective tactic from a simple realisation that you shouldn't be hit. After this realisation, all the paths are open to you and game gives you tools for this. I'm not really interested in litigating this in detail, but just to highlight a few points: the mind flayers are basically the only thing in the entire BG series that has this alternate death mechanic, the effect is highly temporary, and in the mix of combat and an un-filterable combat log, you might not notice that minsc (or anyone) was still reasonably healthy when they died. By contrast, level drain is fairly common, and the effect of level drain is extremely noticeable ("hey where'd my spells go?") and permanent (so if you win the fight you'll notice what happened, whereas you could win a fight with mind flayers and the effect wears off pretty quickly), and there are many things in the manual (spells mostly) that talk about level drain. Literally nothing talks about intelligence stat hit and 0 stat death. You are arguing against gimmicky fights that can't be won without knowing gimmick by stating multiple and many things in the game that allow you to win these sort of fights right here. Suddenly, Sawyer is wrong that you can't fight without wizards, because traps and scrolls can win against liches. Oops. I mean, I see the fact that traps are viable as a positive thing. You can fight fair, or if you're bad/lack something, use some cheesy traps. Can you use some cool traps in PoE1? I think you can install like 1 and they ****ing suck and do nothing against high level mobs. I'd prefer powerful traps to that. There are gimmicky fights, but that doesn't change the fact that BG/BG2 also has cheese (mostly BG2). The fact that traps are so poorly balanced in BG2 that they are basically an i-win button in almost any fight where combat doesn't start immediately out of dialogue does not erase the fact that there are gimmicky fights. Parenthetically: PoE1 vanilla traps are bugged and suck because they are bugged. PoE1 white march traps are super mega awesome and if each party member sets one (even with 0 mechanics because they all have huge accuracy bonuses beyond what the tool-tip says) you can roflwin any fight in the game. It is the biggest balancing mystery to me that--even if the poe1 vanilla traps weren't bugged--that for the same price point you can get like a super lame sunlance trap that does ~40 single target damage if you're lucky or a wilting wind trap that does 80+likely-crit damage to a huge area. Oh brother. In Deadfire, there is one puzzle dungeon somewhere you get hard game over if you don't have the right stats. There's another encounter where you get a hard party member loss if you don't have the right stats. I'd say the number of times this happening in a cRPG being countable on one hand is enough. I prefer dying in "fair" ways. They could add a magran's challenge mode that turns all sigils of XXXX into sigils of death and you can't get wardstones anymore. Maybe that would satisfy you? (Actually, I would totally play that) Define "gimmicky". Illithid have dominate, are somewhat resistant to magic, and dangerous in melee. If that's "gimmicky" for you, I have bad news - most of D&D bestiary is "gimmicky" then. You don't need to give me that bad news, since after first playing BG/BG2 I enmeshed myself in D&D monster manual (mostly third ed) and yes, much of the notable D&D bestiary is gimmicky. (I remember drooling over the Tarrasque; that's probably the ultimate gimmick fight I can recall off the top of my head, something like bring it down to -30 health then use a wish to keep it dead not to mention all the silly protections it has). Gimmicky fights in and of themselves are not necessarily bad (I love Chrono Trigger, but upon watching my wife try it for the first time a year ago I realized that lit. all of the major boss fights are technical fights to some degree; and it made them interesting). The problem is that people who seem to think about BG or BG2 as having some glorious difficulty curve that PoE/Deadfire has failed to capture seems to be forgetting that the games are not difficult, honestly, at all, not even close to 1.1 deadfire POTD. Whatever difficulty they had was really people learning the gimmicks of each fight, the hard way. Once you've learned that, BG and BG2 are basically roflstomp fests (except early BG or BG2 where you have less means of preventing instadeath and/or (especially low-level BG) you can just get a series of bad rolls, which is not fun). Again, I'm saying that BG or BG2 didn't have some wonderful difficulty curve. Sure, it's a puzzle enemy. It was hard because you were solving a puzzle. Not because it was a great encounter or was a great fight. Don't get me wrong, BG2 and ToB did have some actual decent fights (note that I am excluding BG from this, and I would weight it heavily towards ToB even amidst the inevitable improved alacrity time stop wizard spam), but I would go so far as to say that most of the hard stuff that people remember were just people slamming their heads into a gimmick.

They're-- They're called "mind flayers". It's actually quite a leap to go from "they're called mind flayers" to "they literally do damage to your intellect stat and when your intellect hits 0 you die." That's really only the logic someone who's already played D&D or a D&D-like can possess. A lot of other RPGs let your non-health stats get to 1 or 0 with no repercussions if you get hit again. (poe1 and deadfire are two of them, actually) Some learning and "mystery" is definitely an important factor. You could have a completely symmetric game (by which I mean the enemies and you have all the exact same things available), but that's more in the realm of designing an RTS than a cRPG. The problem is when in like BG2 that "mystery" is where alot of the difficulty is (random luck in failing a save or the enemy succeeding a save takes care of another good chunk of the difficulty). Like the demi-lich has immunity to weapons less than +4 and can cast Wail of the Banshee and occasionally Imprisonment at will. If you have slayer form or even one of the priest kit's starting ability, you've taken care of the +4. There are plenty of ways to get immunity to instadeath or imprisonment (slayer form also does that). Once you have those the fight is stupidly easy. If you don't have any of that, the fight is virtually impossible. That's an extreme example, but is probably the simplest way to demonstrate the difference between "this fight is hard because i don't know the trick" and "this fight is hard because the encounter is challenging." But the demi-lich is a side quest. It's not required to beat the game, it probably wasn't designed thinking the average player would even attempt it on their first playthrough. It also only comes after fighting several other liches, meaning you had a chance to tune up and learn some of the tricks. Yes, the imprisonment is special. I'd also disagree that the fight is trivial once you know how to equip protections and the right weapons. Even if you prep some of the things you need, it's not a fight you can tackle immediately with low level characters. But it's a super bad example. It's a reward specifically designed for completionists, you basically need to explore much of the city to even bring the fight up, unless you engage in the dumb dialogue options initially. So, it's already meant for players who would (at least after the first failure) learn to deal with some of the esoteric demands of the fight. Like I said, it was the simplest and most extreme example I could think of. It is not, by far, the only example. (And you really could tackle it at a relatively low level once you know the game. Traps - so incredibly OP - will get you through all the lich fights leading up to it without any problem. And you can hoard those protection from magic or protection from undead scrolls you periodically find.) I don't see how this follows, other than a general gripe against Dark Souls. HP sponges are not "hard" they are just tedious. It's also "gimmicky" in the way most problematic foes in BG2 are gimmicky. After ToB, Kangaxx isn't even unique (there's a random demlich in some room in that expansion-only dungeon; I remember once just going in solo with either slayer form or a berserk effect and getting rid of it like that.)

Wild Mind is only good if you liked Wild Mages in BG2 or BG2EE and wish it triggered more often. I think a melee serafen might be better, but with ranged serafen the only wild mind effect that was only really useful was the "full focus". Everything else I got was pretty bad, such as AoE around serafen (caused a party wipe once), making the power target invisible (almost caused another party wipe when a bunch of shades got turned invisible). After the most recent fight on PotD that a victory almost became a defeat, I finished up his quest and benched him and rolled my own custom beguiler.

I did some research and updated the OP to reflect new findings about explosives scaling, and I also added specific effects on alchemy on drugs as well as minimum power levels for each bomb.

Some learning and "mystery" is definitely an important factor. You could have a completely symmetric game (by which I mean the enemies and you have all the exact same things available), but that's more in the realm of designing an RTS than a cRPG. The problem is when in like BG2 that "mystery" is where alot of the difficulty is (random luck in failing a save or the enemy succeeding a save takes care of another good chunk of the difficulty). Like the demi-lich has immunity to weapons less than +4 and can cast Wail of the Banshee and occasionally Imprisonment at will. If you have slayer form or even one of the priest kit's starting ability, you've taken care of the +4. There are plenty of ways to get immunity to instadeath or imprisonment (slayer form also does that). Once you have those the fight is stupidly easy. If you don't have any of that, the fight is virtually impossible. That's an extreme example, but is probably the simplest way to demonstrate the difference between "this fight is hard because i don't know the trick" and "this fight is hard because the encounter is challenging."

Yep, arguing that the BG games were easy compared to PoE is just factually incorrect. PoE and Deadfire have no instant death spells, things like imprison and all the various things that could force you to immediately reload. Not to mention it was much easier to end up at -10 HP than it was to lose all your health in PoE or wound-death in Deadfire. I won't even talk about Deadfire, since we know that's easy. But in the original, even on PotD, you could basically charge into every fight and expect to win so long as you had the right level and didn't make immensely dumb decisions. Aside from maybe immunity to paralysis and charm spells, there were no key spells or key abilities you had to for sure equip in order to take on certain fights. Contrast that with dealing with beholder rays, lich spells, high damage dragon breaths, and the difference is immense. Don't get me wrong, I think the original PoE results in an overall more fun, if easier, combat experience. But you cannot argue that the BG games were in any way easier. I never argued that BG games were easier. But like Shadenuat said, it's also a very tech-y sort of game in a way where you die to instakill spells or monster abilities until you learn the correct buffs to spend minutes applying first (there's something nobody misses) and then you waltz through every encounter of that type by solely having the correct spells memorized. And that is how it goes: once you know how to handle Illithids, every single encounter w/ Illithids is easy and plays out the same. You might die to Demogorgon and have to reload -- sure, I did--but once you know how to kill him, you know how and virtually nothing can go wrong if you pre-buff correctly and have your mages have the right spells in spell trigger. You might be so mad because Kangaxx uses imprison on your entire party but then you remember you have a few freedom scrolls and again a bunch of situational buffs...It is more lethal and you spend dumb amounts of time reloading when you don't know the fights, but yeah once you know the solutions they never seem to fail. I say this as I'm sort of just rolling through BG2 and ToB on ordinary difficulty. It was hard at first; even on normal difficulty I died alot in the first half of my first playthrough. I'll acknowledge that it is harder than POE2 on PotD, which means that even POE's normal difficulty ought to be a lot tougher, forget about path of the damned, which needs to be loads harder, since I assume a lot of the hardcore folks are coming out of the BG series. But I wouldn't want a Pillars hard mode to follow that same model, either -- enemies that instakill you under certain conditions but also have very specific vulnerabilities and countermeasures that prove extremely trivial once you know what to do. Once I went to the second and third Illithid dungeon (in SoA and Tob) I was bored of Illithids; same goes for Beholders, and yeah, so far, dragons. I would probably just want to see PoE2 be generally harder although I don't have any solutions to offer except that on my first totally blind run I thought the dragons needed to hit like, 4x harder and force some desperate heals and wouldn't it be great if there were more fights like the Adra Dragon --although on POE1 that was another boss that resulted in plenty of reloads but that it turned out you could completely annihilate using a few scrolls. I agree with much that is said here, but I categorically disagree that BG/BG2 is harder than PoE2 on PotD. In my mind, there is a difference between "oh I rolled a bad save and insta-died (from a lucky crit on a non-helmet wearer, from a lucky paralyze from a ghast, from one of a million instadeath effects, etc.) but then I reloaded my quicksave and roflstomped the same fight" vs"oh, I am just outmatched in this fight and this fight is challenging." Similarly, there is a difference between "boy these lich fights are hard" and the reality of "boy these lich fights are hard because I don't know what 90% of the things the lich does are." Much of the difficulty in the BG/BG2/ToB world is a function two things that lead to one of those two above situations; 1) like you said, a significant amount of the harder fights are purely technical. And a part of that leads into the 2): AD&D and its Infinity Engine adaptation is extremely obtuse. Like, no where is it documented in-game that Liches are just straight up immune to level 1-5 spells. It's also extremely unobvious that mind flayers are actually attacking your int stat and poor Minsc if unprotected will just die really quickly and mind flayer's psionic attacks only work on sentient beings so some summoned undead can be really useful. And even the stuff that is documented is still obtuse. Like, can anyone off the top of their head tell me precisely what spell protection(s) Secret Word dispels? I eventually had a working knowledge of this stuff, but if I were to go back to BG2:EE right now I'd have to relearn this stuff for the umpteenth time. But like you said once you do learn this stuff, most of the fights in the game become super easy. Get the right item/scroll/spell and roflstomp the fight. The first time is hard, the second time is easy. Meanwhile, I have 1000+ hours clocked on PoE1 and PotD, while I've certainly gotten better at it since 1.0, is legit just challenging (sometimes brutally so, mostly in Act 1 when I'm deliberately using a smaller party) and there's no magic spell/item/trick that you ignored the first time around because you didn't quite grasp its significance but would really trivialize a fight the second time around (well, except for that soulbound great sword that instakills vessels). For Deadfire specifically, I am going to assert and hypothesize that 1.1's PotD is mostly fine and the main reason that people find it lacking at a certain inflection point (varyingly, depending on your level scaling settings) is for the simple reason that there just isn't a lot of high-level content and level-scaling isn't going to be enough to fix that (because a named xaurip that scales +6 levels is still a xaurip with lame xaurip abilities). I'm hoping that DLC can address this. I remember that in PoE1 there was a lack of decent high-level content (plus in 1.0 you could hit level 12--then the cap--way before act 3 thanks to bounties giving you a boatload of xp), and then with White March 1 you had the torn bannermen and concelhaut, and before WM2 introduced higher levels and more power creep I found that to be satisfying high-level content. I'm hoping Obsidian introduces more content targeting levels 14-20 without increasing the level cap. I think that might solve a lot of complaints here.

Hey, I think this is related to the monk's "blade turning" skill. If I try to greater lay on hands when mirke has it activated, nothing happens. If I consciously avoid doing it while she has blade turning activated, I don't seem to run into this issue.

Adding these modifiers to the game just makes PoTD as a difficulty level look like a farce. So, now PoTD is not the hardest, but you also would have to activate half a dozen things like reduced gold or something similar to fix the core issues of the game - that it's too XP dependant, too level dependant, AI is not good and encounters and monsters aren't properly hard. This is going to sound pedantic, but we have to better define "the hardest." What's the hardest? Something that only 1% of players can beat? .5%? .1%? I feel like just saying "hardest" is too nebulous because there will always be (an increasingly smaller) fraction of players say "I beat this on blah difficulty without much sweat". I have The Ultimate achievement from poe1 and that's like a .1% clearance rate (possibly even rounding to 0.0%). I could tell you that with the right set up, the ultimate is not that much of a challenge, it's just tedious. But I would be wrong if I in the same breath said that potd needs to be tuned to that level because it's "the hardest." Right now, I think the anecdotal discussion misses something; frankly PotD has a crucible in opening Port Maje stuff that will filter out the vast vast vast vast majority of players, so we have a bit of a survivor bias where only the people good enough to get through Port Maje get to the rest of the game, so we are only going to get people who are already good playing the rest of the game, which is a bit less well-tuned due to the open-ended nature of it (versus Port Maje). This is especially true if you didn't need to hire two hirelings for a five-person party to clear the digsite or gorecci st (or if you only hired one, which I found to still be a decent challenge). I think PotD being a modest challenge for a general population of power gamers with a 5-person party is an OK target, because that's already like a fraction of the entire player base. I think rather than spending lots of time tuning the difficulty of fights to be challenging for a further .1% of hardcore players, the magran's challenges could be a good way to layer on extra challenge rather than a "farce," and it's also something that could also be used to sprinkle in a bit of extra spice for people on veteran or lower. EDIT: also if you haven't tried "level scaling: up only" for potd, you should. adds extra challenge and makes it a little harder to out-level encounters.

Possibly a power-balancing/flavor thing; chanter is more of a summon class than wizard and druid so they get the power advantage of being able to micromanage their summons? I mean, I doubt it's just a simple oversight given how specific some of these 1.1 changes were. Also, as a wizard you can control maura's writhing tentacles.

So far this is my experience. Not sure what other people are doing, but I've been playing with level scaling: all, up only, and 1.1 PotD is a decent challenge. I don't know exactly how level scaling in potd works, but even for areas and quests that themselves have no skull indicators, I may end up fighting enemies that are multi-skulled and they certainly feel it. In the beta 1.1 thread, Camonge made this observation about the Engwithan Digsite fight: So it appears that maybe in PotD in an attempt to help keep the challenge up in level scaling, enemies actually scale more than your gain in levels, up to a certain limit. In the patch notes where they mention that level scaling for un-named enemies went from +-2 to +-4, I wonder if instead of meaning a bigger range of scaling this actually means a faster rate of scaling, so enemies gain or lose 2 levels for every 1 level you do. If this is the case, there is some sense to doing this, because level scaling in poe1 was really ineffective in keeping a challenge, since enemies, even if they got stronger, didn't gain any new abilities or better items so at 1:1 level scaling they still wouldn't keep up with the player's power. It would also explain why my level 19 party post-1.1 faced off with an Ukaizo fight that had three skulls, even though the quest itself is internally level 16; I wonder if the dragon got scaled up from level 16 to level 22, instead of just to level 19 (named enemies scale +-6) But anyway, I have to wonder how much of my personal challenge is just that I'm not pursuing an "optimized" quest path. Ship-to-ship combat, for example, is really easy and doesn't scale at all with potd, so I could just level a bit more (and get more money/better gear) by just doing all the ship bounties and make the other quests a bit easier, whereas I've only done a couple. Because even if enemies gain more than 1 level per my level, they are still capped, and they don't gain any new abilities or items (which is where a good chunk of the power actually comes from).

Don't know what's going on here. In the middle of combat, it started happening: everytime I have Pallegina use greater lay on hands, there is a significant chance that she goes through her animation, the combat log says "activates greater lay on hands" and then nothing happens. Pallegina just begins her recovery as if she successfully finished it. Attached is a screenshot of pallegina activating lay on hands on mirke, but then nothing happening (various other things happen since): Needless to say, thsi is making the fight significantly harder. Here's a dropbox link to a quicksave before the fight, and the current output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ld4zk88y9tyi38q/AAC_G6HT_SzSsbUw2mDWuNnCa?dl=0

As subject says. I respecced serafen (he still had a pistol equipped during this process). Afterward, I unequipped him, and exited out of hthe inventory with him only wielding his blunderbuss. He had the blunderbuss modal *and* the pistol modal. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of the pistol modal. The solution appears to unequip his pistol first, and then respec him. Then he properly no longer has it. This may be a more general issue with other characters, but I have not seen it before. Dropbox link to save and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/43wqjy2nygmj1x8/AACndGi1Id-EIwcCJmp4A4QZa?dl=0 Screenshot of having the pistol modal while not having a pistol equipped:

I've had this issue with all free DLCs with deadfire on steam. It's very strange. After I click "install" for the free DLC, the game will launch, as previous posters have noticed. However, if you exit out and go back to steam, you will notice that in the DLC section when you click on "deadfire" in the steam library will list a new DLC that you have that is not yet installed, even though box is checked. (see screenshot to know what section i'm talking about: ) what i did was click the checkbox to "uninstall" it (even though it already said "not installed" though the box was checked) and then re-check it. this then caused something in steam to start up something and it downloaded some small data. then i launched the game and the DLC is installed. however, on the main menu in the bottom left if I hover over "current DLC" it still doesn't list them as installed, though in-game I have access to stuff. At some point later, they eventually show that the DLC is installed. Bizarre. I guess something between Steam's DLC API and Deadfire is getting confused.

This is listed as a known issue, but just thought I'd raise this bell again because as it stands I feel like reverse pickpocketing is severely gimped, and by extension stealth. It basically limits this functionality to encounters where you can ambush people and aren't automatically in dialogue with them, but you're boned if they already start off hostile.

Trying Gorecci St for myself, it is certainly a challenge, but it is not so bad once you get over the instinct to just run in. EZ step-by-step guide to clearing Gorecci Street at low levels. 1. get a hireling. i did this with eder, xoti, charname and one hireling. you can always hire a fifth if needed, but four is feasible. 2. stealth to the left. 3. throw some sparkcrackers to draw the left-looters away from the rest. kill them. 4. stealth to the right, as close to the house as you can. 5. brute-force kill them. this part may require a reload or two if you get unlucky with being crit by the gunner, or can't deal with the mage fast enough. i had a streetfighter/wael with escape, so I escape-d out of the water and onto the deck, put on arcane veil, took out the gunner first with help from a ranged eder, and then took out the mage. depending on your hireling or CHARNAME your tactics will differ. i suffered some knockouts in #3 and #5 but basically it's not too bad a fight if you have a hireling and separate the groups. i did blow through quite a bit of potions though.

things i don't understand about this post: 1. there never was a point in heavy armor in potd to begin with because enemy penetration was so low you could get decent protection from a superb/exceptional medium armor. by about half-way through the game in both my potd runs, half my party was in cloth, and my melee was a mix between medium and light and damage was rarely ever a problem. 2. shortly after the 1.1 landed, i resumed my (almost complete) potd run, and really didn't see how some weapons got screwed. my great sword wielder did run into some enemies where she could only do 25% damage, but it's not like all of a sudden she was underpenetrating everything. if anything, this makes the various stuff that grants you penetration actually important, and piercing-only-no-bonus-pen weapons like the pistol or hunting bow interestingly situational (whereas before you could just brute force the hunting bow). 4. you do realize spells are also impacted by penetration/armor mechanics? 5. PotD is supposed to be hard. If you want to roflstomp enemies, go play a lower difficulty. 1) My point was: there is no benefit from heavy armor at all now. If you think that heavy armor was not the optimal choice even in the previous patch, well, maybe you are right. But there is a difference between 'not optimal' and 'completely useless'; 2) It's like we are playing different games. In the game that I play enemies have got 14 armor against slashing/piercing attacks wearing exceptional armor, while my superb sword's got 9 penetration. The weapon with low penetration was already situational, but with this +2 armor bonus it's changed from situatoinal to 'never used'; 4) It does not matter for mages that much. 5) I did not claim that PotD is too hard now, read carefully. The need to switch between different types of weapons all the time does not make the game harder, only less enjoyable. PotD had to be fixed, but not like that. 1. my point is there actually may be benefit from heavy armor now, because enemy penetration is higher. before damage was virtually never an issue. 2. seriously we must be playing different games. like i said, the % of time my great sword wielder gets underpenetration has gone up from like near-0 (a small exaggeration, but close) to a modest chunk of time. i say: great! now, devoted subclass bonus can be very meaningful (instead of only slightly meaningful) for various classes of weapons, and there's greater incentive to mix up your weapons to dodge penetration issues (whereas like I said frequently you could just brute force with e.g. a hunting bow) 4. i literally see underpenetration for my mages with great frequency when targeting various damage spells. for debuffs, no it doesn't matter, but that's sort of orthogonal a point. for like a PL7-9 spell modest underpenetration doesn't matter as much because of the enormous damage you might be dealing (and also they have inherently higher penetration), but it's not like it's a non-factor. again, it's like we're playing completely different games. 5. i actually find the need to switch weapons a significant increase in my enjoyment of the game. This may just be a philosophical/gameplay difference preference, but the change in deadfire to "demurk" armor and elevate the "damage-type matters" aspect has significantly increased my enjoyment of the pillars system. In poe1 it was like, who cares i'll just stick with this one weapon for the rest of the game that i'll just keep enchanting. In deadfire, it matters a lot more, and I find myself actually switching weapons based on tactical situations and even actually putting value on the "arms bearer" talent/ability, whereas in poe1 it was only useful to just fast-switch arquebuses at the start of a fight. I am all for this.

You try to find obscure advantages for empowering melee attacks while carefully avoiding to compare them to what an empowered spell can do. Your argument that it can help sometimes is truly laughable when you look at what difference it makes for spells... The fan of flames example was very obvious because a simple spell, available to any class, from the lowest lvl scroll, is more effective than your "strong" empowered attack - it has nothing to do with class balance. And by the way a wizard can become as tanky as a paladin if not more, melee and also nuke everything - I don't see the balance here. I can understand you don't want casters nerfed, but at least stop talking about balance because it's obvious you don't want it. I literally don't understand where you get the idea that I don't want casters nerfed. If you've followed the 1.1 patch thread at all, I'm all in there hyping up the nerfs, and I've been one of the people ringing the bell about Devotions for the Faithful being OP since like poe1 and deadfire backer beta 1, even though I main-class a priest 80% of the time and include a priest in my party another 10% of the time. You're saying that empowering is only useful for casters. I find that categorically false, and frankly a falsehood to advise other newer players of this. You say that martial abilities ain't worth the empowerment. I also find that false (as I said earlier single-class melee can be more resource-constrained and may find more utility from replenishment rather than single-ability empowerment). In no part of this did I say that empowered spells could not be way better than empowered martial abilities, in fact I've repeatedly mentioned spells can frequently benefit from multiple aspects of power-level scaling and get disproportionate benefit, and indeed I've repeatedly mentioned how a mere PL4 spell (Minoletta's) is basically an auto-win when empowered (though possible less so now that empowerment is only +5 and potd encounters got buffed).

Yes, you can consider Empower being basically a caster ability. This is not totally right. Empower does boost even weapon-based martial abilities, ~ 50% to the base damage (so it is multiplicative with other bonuses). People just notice spells a lot more because there are degenerate cases where empowering a damage spell is basically super overpowered (Minoletta's Crushing Missiles is my go-to autowin button on POTD, but e.g. Josh Sawyer pointed out how broken high-PL spells can be when empowered [imho in part because in "normal" gameplay, they never really get much PL-based scaling because they are already high-level, such as meteor shower or cleansing flame, so empowering them puts them way over the top]). But there are also martial abilities that can be really good when empowered. The special two-handed whispers of the endless paths great sword, when used on an empowered flames of devotion can be really good (boosted base damage, boosted flames damage, boosted penetration, boosted accuracy [increased chance for crit for even more damage], and then again for the whispers of the endless paths' aoe effect). Similarly, while there are plenty of martial abilities that are underwhelming when empowered, there are plenty of spells where empowering them is really underwhelming. Try empowering Confusion or Repulsing Seal or Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff. Yes, in theory it can be used for melee too, however it's useless most of the time. Doing 50% more damage to a single target is maybe good for an assassin once in a while, otherwise it makes no difference in a fight. The only utility for melee is to replenish their resources from time to time and not for damage, but for buffs/heals. Whispers of the endless paths is a joke now - even empowered with the laughable 20% lash is not even close to a simple fan of flames. No, ALL empowered martial abilities are underwhelming compared to what is available to casters. The fact that are also a few spells which don't benefit too much from empower is irrelevant - even if there's only a single spell which can make a big difference in a fight it's more than enough. It's possible that for single-class melee, empower is better used for replenishing. But at least for my experience, with multi-class melee (which has ~ 2x resources), thanks to the action economy (you can only do so much), I find myself regularly empowering specific martial abilities, and rarely ever buffs. Even with the nerf, I still empower whispers of the endless paths flames of devotion to good effect in end-game PotD. Plus, 50% bonus base damage, with bonus accuracy, and bonus penetration on certain martial abilities can be the difference between a dead enemy character and one that is bloodied/near death. In some fights, a dead enemy NOW (or an interrupted enemy NOW if you're trying to land an interrupt) is much more important than being able to replenish your resources later. And directly comparing whispers of the endless paths on a martial ability to a fan of flames--trying to be charitable here--kind of demonstrates how little you might understand about class balance, because it is much more holistic then that. E.G. a paladin could nuke as well as a wizard, it would be OP, because unlike a wizard, the paladin has a lot more built-in durability. Plus, unlike martial abilities and attacks, spells are counterbalanced by cast times.

things i don't understand about this post: 1. there never was a point in heavy armor in potd to begin with because enemy penetration was so low you could get decent protection from a superb/exceptional medium armor. by about half-way through the game in both my potd runs, half my party was in cloth, and my melee was a mix between medium and light and damage was rarely ever a problem. (now heavy armor might actually matter) 2. shortly after the 1.1 landed, i resumed my (almost complete) potd run, and really didn't see how some weapons got screwed. my great sword wielder did run into some enemies where she could only do 25% damage, but it's not like all of a sudden she was underpenetrating everything. if anything, this makes the various stuff that grants you penetration actually important, and piercing-only-no-bonus-pen weapons like the pistol or hunting bow interestingly situational (whereas before you could just brute force the hunting bow). 4. you do realize spells are also impacted by penetration/armor mechanics? 5. PotD is supposed to be hard. If you want to roflstomp enemies, go play a lower difficulty.

I was in the middle of a POTD game right before hitting ukaizo, so got to experience the new difficult boss fight. To my surprise it was actually sort of a challenge, even at level 19, whereas my first run I facemelted it at level 13 (and it probably would have been way more of a challenge if I weren't cheesing Potion of Impediment on a dual-wielder to basically interrupt-lock the dragon 90% of the time). Looking forward to doing a third run on POTD with the new difficulty all the way from the start. I anticipate as we all get better at the game, the challenge will still melt away, but then I guess I'll start running smaller parties like I did in poe1.

made some quick edits from 1.1 (empower is only 5, explosives may no longer get its weird, character-level based scaling), and also added a section on reverse pickpocketing.

I assume what the patch note actually means is that now explosives only scale with the power level granted by explosives. They used to also have some weird, additional scaling based on character level (and not your power level, since it was the same between multiclass and singleclass). I documented it in this power level thread here (which i'll have to update for 1.1): https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99409-mechanics-power-level-compilation-thread/

Also, an unlisted change appears to be a severe reduction in the number of empowers available.