thelee

A very curious change that is not a nerf is that at least looking at the priest/wizard ability tree, "prone" in the above-the-fold ability description in Slicken, Pillar of Faith, and Repulsing Seal has been replaced with "interrupt", though the below-the-fold ability description still says "prone." I just tested it out and it is solely a text change - Repulsing Seal, Pillar of Faith, and Slicken all still prone instead of just interrupting. I assume something similar has happened with various other prone abilities like fighter Knock Down. My best guess is that people were getting confused that "prone" is also an interrupt, and can be blocked by concentration. But um, it certainly adds some ambiguity to what abilities actually do...

Controversial opinion: upon reading the 1.1 full patch notes, I fully support this patch.

Here's a quick save to right before I searched the village: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rf7x7m9b22ravi2/Ulysses%20%28911442ef-1177-4df4-ab5a-bf951c5b9370%29%20quicksave.savegame?dl=0

Happened twice in a row. Here's a dropbox link to the crash report folder upon crash to desktop: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/imc25tybg0w5pvn/AABj7cEjPNclhm9YtFT251Ffa?dl=0

I'd like to bump this because I get a blank sailor experience 100% of the time on my PC. Notably, when I play on my macbook pro, this issue does not come up, using the exact same saves. This leads me to believe it's some sort of hardware or graphical setting issue, though I don't have anything wierd about my PC. I'm attaching my DxDiag in case that provides more info for the devs. DxDiag.txt

i've been bit by variants of #2/3 quite a bit, it's quite annoying. easy way to repro: go to The Hole in the gullet. It's because many pirates tehre have persistent distraction. Hit yourself with some sparkcrackers (you'll get a perception affliction and get flanked) and then attack one of the pirates. you'll get persistent distraction on you. immediately notice that the affliction disappears, it basically gets overridden by persistent distraction. now walk away. you no longer have the sparkcrackers affliction, even if you had many, many tens of seconds on it remaining. now imagine this playing out with any combination of perception afflictions and various flanking/engagement states in actual combat. you can get potentially screwed out of many seconds of debuffs when things play out a certain way. EDIT: also note that your example (movement and not triggering disengagement attack) has been listed as a "Known Issue" in the stickied thread in this forum, but I've seen nothing about getting in fixed yet.

Part of this is my own fault because I've been playing without the option to show unqualified interactions (because I find it more of an enjoyable surprise when I do get options). But with high-10s, low-20s in certain non-combat skills, I'm wondering if there are many really high skill check requirements in deadfire at all. I just had a 16 Diplomacy check for the Nemnok the Devourer quest, and it's honestly the first time I've seen such a high check. Which leads me to conclude one of two things: a) deadfire really doesn't have many high skill check requirements, so it's rarely worth it to focus on a specific non-combat skill b) deadfire does have a decent number of high skill check requirements, but i've just been missing them all because i was doing the encounters at too low a level or hadn't invested enough at the time i did them. Anyone with more experience chime in whether it's really that worth it to invest in a single non-combat skill check? NOTE: I am excluding "degenerate" cases where a unique item scales based on a non-combat skill. I'm mostly curious about encounter/dialogue checks.

do you know if warding seal damage is fixed in 1.1? it always seems to do less damage than in its description

disappointing, i was hoping that this was secretly fixed in 1.1.

It's complicated enough that you didn't seem to notice (?) that you can have multiple layers of concentration for example. Or that something like the phrase of a chanter can remove ALL layers at once while a simple interrupt only eats up one layer. Stuff like that seems to make things fairly complicated. Then what does prone do? It's described as "more powerful interrupt"... It also doesn't help that, e.g. Resolute says "gain concentration every 6 seconds" but it seems to only refresh the concentration from resolute and won't do anything if you still already have the concentration from resolute.

on JE Sawyer's blog, he makes it sounds like they have all sorts of docs written down about Eora and how everything works; likely this is the sort of stuff that Chris would have been a part of. We only get a fraction of it, and JE Sawyer recently apologized on his blog about one specific confusion because the original cut of Deadfire had an explanation, but they had cut it because at the time they didn't think it was necessary, and all of them had been so immersed in the lore that they thought it was self-evident. So I wouldn't blame a lack of Chris Avellone here because I would gather a lot has already been written down and just not revealed to us in game or in novellas. I would blame some hasty editorial choices at most. So why not patch said content in? To me this sounds like 'the dog ate my homework'. Why would you cut something from a main quest line that already has very sparse dialog? JE Sawyer said that they would try to bring it back in through in-game means (possibly DLC?) https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/174058952291/so-is-the-idea-that-before-the-wheel

Of course not, and I did not claim it is. I claimed that: The problem, of assessing effectiveness, is as simple as observing players behavior as players will, if their number is large and number of trials is large enough, always find the most effective ways to use tools available, which is just obvious. As far as the vocal minority, out of the total number of players who play(ed), who post here. First of all, I have to reiterate the question I've been asking since PoE: What is the point of constant tinkering since only minority will experience it? Secondly, unless we will have some data, which we do not, we can only speculate how others who do not post here play their game. What we know is that players, some of them posting here, figured out very quickly what is effective and what not. Beginning with the person who speedran it in 26 mins to players who posted their Fighter/Monk/Paladin builds and we will likely never hear from them again. Lastly, that some people figured out how, in their own words, to cheese by, for example, abusing PL and poison and withdraw should not, in my opinion, be even considered as a matter requiring attention simply because who would play like that? 0.001% of players? It's not worth the time and energy to bother with. This is a game, not a timeless piece of poetry to be cherished by the future generations. I find this perspective inane. The difference between a decent game, and a great game, is that people didn't stop and say "this is good enough for 50.1% of players out there" but rather tinkered until it was the the very best version of itself that it could be. I honestly don't understand how one could love video games and not want video games to be tinkered with so they could be improved. I wish games long gone/abandoned could be tinkered with and have updated balance patches. Also, for your final quip, video games have only been around for a few decades. It hasn't had time to have the legs that poetry has had. But when we talk about board games... chess, go, chinese chess have had longer legs than entire civilizations, to say nothing about the art that those civilizations produced, and a game like chess has been tinkered with over literally centuries (did you know originally the queen moved identically as the king instead of being the most powerful piece on the board?). I don't think many people still play System Shock or System Shock 2 anymore (and the # of people who played them at the time were so low that Looking Glass Studios had to shutter), but virtually every AAA game that is a first-person-shooter with rpg-y-spellcast-y elements, story told by audio logs and an absent narrator, stealthing, with optionally a hacking component owes itself to SS and SS2 and the care and talent that was put into them, and game designers know this because they were the ones playing SS and SS2 at the time (which is why you see the code 0451 or 451 in so many genre-similar games). So let's not be so disingenuously dismissive of something that has been around for less time than, say, film. Well, I guess I am old school. Back in time, a game was released as more or less a final product. It was either a good game or not. No constant tinkering was possible due to several reasons, mainly technological. I do not believe that constant tinkering makes today's games more fun, or better, than games made decades ago. Speaking of System Schock, which is indeed and in my opinion one of the greatest games ever made. How many updates it got? Video games, unlike chess, are heavily reliant on technology which makes them vulnerable to technological progress. Some games do define genres or introduce groundbreaking stuff and such games will probably go to annals of history to be remembered, not played, by the future generations. Pillars of Eternity is not such game. It is a spiritual successor of such game - Baldur's Gate. How many updates Baldur's Gate got? Who cared about "broken" stuff in Baldur's Gate? What made Baldur's Gate so great? When I asked about the reason for constant tinkering in PoE I was told that its to polish the mechanics for future use. Well, from where I sit I did not work out all that well. System Shock got close to zero updates, and its sequel got like two. It's irrelevant though, because what matters is how much care went into the product to begin with based on a given baseline. Deadfire (or any cRPG) is a vastly more complicated product than SS2, and people's expectations are higher (SS2 is nowhere near balanced and can be trivialized even on impossible difficulty by just investing in an assault rifle, but that was fine for 90s) so things are different now. How many updates did Baldur's Gate (I and II) get? Well, it got several patches at the time, and then it got an Enhanced Edition release, and more patches since then. So actually, quite a bit, and that's almost two decades worth of tinkering (fairly continuous, considering that much of the original enhanced edition stuff was incorporating the baldur's gate unofficial fix pack that fans had been working on fairly continuously since original release). As a lineage though, it also got further tinkering in Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II, Planescape: Torment, Pillars of Eternity, and now Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire. Much in the same way that chess in the 7th century is not the same as the chess in the 21st century and is really the continuous evolution of a very narrow, specific genre of board game. But frankly, I'm not here to debate with you whether or not games deserve to be considered a serious media, like poetry or chess. I'm here to basically say that if all you're doing is to come into a thread about people who care about making Deadfire the best it could be and your main contribution is "who cares" then you're not really a productive contributor.

on JE Sawyer's blog, he makes it sounds like they have all sorts of docs written down about Eora and how everything works; likely this is the sort of stuff that Chris would have been a part of. We only get a fraction of it, and JE Sawyer recently apologized on his blog about one specific confusion because the original cut of Deadfire had an explanation, but they had cut it because at the time they didn't think it was necessary, and all of them had been so immersed in the lore that they thought it was self-evident. So I wouldn't blame a lack of Chris Avellone here because I would gather a lot has already been written down and just not revealed to us in game or in novellas. I would blame some hasty editorial choices at most.

you can also use escape [rogue or priest] ability to teleport around with it still on. not sure how serious a min-max strat it is, but when i was playing around with a high-deflection riposte build, it meant i was basically immortal but could still ambush enemies without having to worry about toggling a modal. (And i thought there was some brief delay with modal activation; when i activate a weapon modal it feels like it has to wait until my current recovery finishes) still not totally sure how i feel about the acc vs deflection imbalance, at least based on enchantments. deadfire is in many ways a different beast than pillars, despite sharing a lot of similar mechanics. the shield proficiencies are a huge factor in this, which i had not accounted for in my OP (and i really do like the large shield proficiency; i just wish potd was hard enough that i could get a lot more mileage out of it and medium shield proficiency).

Yeah, that's a good point; weapon and shield style no longer has counterbalancing accuracy. It's still a bit "weird" to me, because this is a one-time bonus that surpasses any weapon enchantment at the time, but then steadily becomes outmatched in the late game. I wonder if this is just intended in deadfire; as you go higher level both you and the enemy are just expected to hit/crit more and survival is weighted less on your deflection and more on your armor rating and health pool.

i didn't know that about the beta 1.1 deflection changes. that's good; it actually makes it more meaningful to enchant shields then. i still think it is a bit odd that there's no longer a symmetry between weapon accuracy bonuses and shield deflection bonuses... maybe there are more secondary deflection boosting items than accuracy ones?

I believe that's the case. I was dead worried about my templar of berath and ran some combats in 1.1beta: every time I used flames of devotion + spiritual weapon on a even armored enemy, corrode damage was higher. At character level 6, power level 2, Corrode lash is doing 30% dmg on normal attacks. Multiplicative. Btw, empower spiritual weapon has no effect on item scaling of spiritual weapon. I think it has always been the case that power level only influences the duration of summoned weapons (and summoned creatures), which is sorta lame. (Shorter durations for more powerful weapons would make pwoer level scaling a bit more relevant)

So are these known issues going to be addressed? I just noticed that there's not much discussion of these specific issues in the 1.1 patch notes.

Of course not, and I did not claim it is. I claimed that: The problem, of assessing effectiveness, is as simple as observing players behavior as players will, if their number is large and number of trials is large enough, always find the most effective ways to use tools available, which is just obvious. As far as the vocal minority, out of the total number of players who play(ed), who post here. First of all, I have to reiterate the question I've been asking since PoE: What is the point of constant tinkering since only minority will experience it? Secondly, unless we will have some data, which we do not, we can only speculate how others who do not post here play their game. What we know is that players, some of them posting here, figured out very quickly what is effective and what not. Beginning with the person who speedran it in 26 mins to players who posted their Fighter/Monk/Paladin builds and we will likely never hear from them again. Lastly, that some people figured out how, in their own words, to cheese by, for example, abusing PL and poison and withdraw should not, in my opinion, be even considered as a matter requiring attention simply because who would play like that? 0.001% of players? It's not worth the time and energy to bother with. This is a game, not a timeless piece of poetry to be cherished by the future generations. I find this perspective inane. The difference between a decent game, and a great game, is that people didn't stop and say "this is good enough for 50.1% of players out there" but rather tinkered until it was the the very best version of itself that it could be. I honestly don't understand how one could love video games and not want video games to be tinkered with so they could be improved. I wish games long gone/abandoned could be tinkered with and have updated balance patches. Also, for your final quip, video games have only been around for a few decades. It hasn't had time to have the legs that poetry has had. But when we talk about board games... chess, go, chinese chess have had longer legs than entire civilizations, to say nothing about the art that those civilizations produced, and a game like chess has been tinkered with over literally centuries (did you know originally the queen moved identically as the king instead of being the most powerful piece on the board?). I don't think many people still play System Shock or System Shock 2 anymore (and the # of people who played them at the time were so low that Looking Glass Studios had to shutter), but virtually every AAA game that is a first-person-shooter with rpg-y-spellcast-y elements, story told by audio logs and an absent narrator, stealthing, with optionally a hacking component owes itself to SS and SS2 and the care and talent that was put into them, and game designers know this because they were the ones playing SS and SS2 at the time (which is why you see the code 0451 or 451 in so many genre-similar games). So let's not be so disingenuously dismissive of something that has been around for less time than, say, film.

My thoughts on some questions raised in this thread: 1. Why don't more people care about the gods not being real in Deadfire? Apart from Xoti/Teheru (which I also found a bit incongruous that I could never tell them about the nature of the gods), it just doesn't seem a relevant topic as part of the Deadfire conflict. A gigantic titan is threatening to upend anything, does it really matter if he is a real divine being or something manufactured by an ancient civilization? 2. Why does the Leaden Key need to exist if people don't care? I think that people "not caring" is mostly a temporary phenomenon of there being a gigantic titan crashing through their country. Animancy is still around, and its research still threatens the underpinnings of religious belief and the gods and is the largest present-day threat to the Leaden Key's mission. The Leaden Key is also an arm of Woedica's power, and so even aside from animancy it would still exist to expand Woedica's power. (though, see footnote) 3. On what gods can or can't do Clearly, in the past gods could do a lot (but maybe not at first when they were first getting started re: iovara), but in-game dialogue in poe1 implies that the gods werent happy with their meddling. so it's not that they can't do stuff, it's that they have a gentleman's agreement not to, even as it concerns woedica and thaos. Eothas is a whole other thing, as both times he was seeking to undermine the very foundation of their power, not to mention he breaks the gentleman's agreement first both times (by embodiying waidwen and then by embodying a titan), so all bets go off so as to stop eothas. Footnote/new question: one thing that confuses me is that in poe1 lore, woedica is this absent god (even her in-game book talks about lookin forward to the day when she rules again); in fact in her abscence skaen is her representative at the very end of poe1. Part of Thaos's mission was to restore woedica. Patently, he fails. Unless you also choose to empower woedica in poe1, it is mysterious to me why in deadfire she is suddenly popping up everywhere.

Deadfire does have telemetry data reported back (i think you're prompted to opt-in at the start), and they definitely get some meaningful playstyle data out of it (they were able to tell how/when empower was being used during backer beta), so it is possible (maybe even probable) that they have specific ability usage data as well. Anecdotally, it does not seem like many people are using spiritual weapon, but who knows maybe everyone outside of these forums has been roflstomping the game with a +50% slash lash from xoti's spiritual weapon.

In Deadfire, you get +4/8/12 accuracy for fine/exceptional/superb enchantment. In PoE1, such a scaling made sense because you also got +4/8/12 deflection for fine/exceptional/superb shield enchants. Games like Pillars have always had a relative offense/defense symmetry (recall: a long sword +1 would be somewhat balanced out by someone wearing a leather armor +1). In Deadfire, though, you only get +1/2/3 for fine/exceptional/superb shield enchants. This means offense is heavily favored. Should this be the case, or should accuracy bonuses for enchantments get scaled down? (Lest you think I'm calling for a nerf, keep in mind that enemies also benefit from this; they also get +4/8/12 for fine/exceptional/superb for weapons while your tanks only get +1/2/3 deflection for shields. It would just rebalance things in favor of defense.)

Is it true that there is no holy radiance scaling with disposition? The base amount is 15 healing, but my MC priest gets more than that (removing power level scaling and might bonus, it is closer to a base of ~23), and I have 4 stoic/3 rational as a priest of berath, which seems to imply something like ~2.6666 per disposition if it's capped at 3 per reputation like in poe1 (which is small, but frankly the disposition scaling in poe1 was utterly OP). I feel like I definitely didn't have that extra base healing when I first started out with my priest.

attack animation how long would it take say i have like DEX 20? It should all be in your tool-tip. There's a time for recovery and a time listed for attack.

So in my OP example: it'll start with "sap" then find the nearest target? In such a script, when would "withering strike" ever get used, so long as I have sap?