thelee

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.

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.