thelee

Example: most built-in scripts have a few basic conditionals and then a long list of abilities, each with carrying "prioritize by". My understanding is that 1. Check conditionals (like "target: in melee range") 2. Use an ability, starting from the top of the list. I don't understand where the "prioritize by" comes into play, especially when different abilities in the list have different priorities. If I have: Conditional: Target: is spellcaster Action: 1. Sap / Prioritize by: nearest 2. Withering Strike / Prioritize by: most damage done If I'm in a fight with two spellcasters, one with 20 armor and at 2m and another with 0 armor at 8m, what will this script do? Relatedly, is "target: is spellcaster" borked? I have aloth set to cast spell reflection buffs under condition 'target: is spellcaster' and he seems to do it in virtually any fight (he just did it in a fight with some beetles).

3s is still way too long for summoned weapons. Even at 0.5s / 0.0s (which is where I've always believed they should be) they would barely be worth it compared to unique weapons that don't require you to spend a precious talent point (and one of two precious casts per encounter of their spell level) to acquire. i think esp for wizard, summoned weapons do enough special stuff that they can warrant a decent cast time - up until i really decked out spellblade-aloth i was still using concelhaut's parasitic staff for self-healing and citzal's lance for group combat into pretty late game. priest summoned weapon is just "do more damage" and depending on whether you're ahead of the scaling curve (which up until superb/legendary--without barely trying in PoTD--I was) and what modals you have, it may not be that much more damage (especially if it's a downgrade to your accuracy). with just a 20% lash the math gets even harder. i might have to do more in game testing, because as it was, je sawyer thought the summoned weapons were pretty good, even lower PL ones (like concelhaut's staff). depending on scaling, maybe an auto-legendary 50% lash weapon might have been too good for a PL2 spell since it's comparable to some of the blander fully upgraded uniques out there (in particular since you can't just puta lash enchantment on any ol' weapon in deadfire). but 20%...

What I never understood was the long cast time. 3 seconds is looooooong. How fast is it, talented? in deadfire, 3s is "fast" (using poe1 terminology). 4.5s is "average" and 6.0s is "slow". and summoned weapons (at least all the ones i can think of) have no recovery, so it is faster than "fast" spell casts (more than 100% faster, in fact). (very fast would be the .5s spell casts) there used to be a time in backer beta where summoning was something like 6-9 seconds. that was long.

say whaaaaaat? they nerfed the lash? at 50% it was only kind of worth the opportunity cost (especially since the relatively slow scaling on summoned weapons means that you could be finding e.g. exceptional weapons and it would only be getting fine-level scaling). first nerf i've heard of so far that sounds confusing to me because i didn't think too many people were using the priest's spiritual weapon much as it was right now. (by contrast, i find the wizard summoning weapons and at least druid/priest's rot skulls to be decent... wonder if they got nerfed.)

I've kind of always had this issue since backer beta. Especially noticeable on my macbook pro, which isn't as pwoerful as my desktop PC. I can play the rest of the game mostly fine (i might have to tune down a setting), but character creation/level up is brutal for my fps.

thanks for the .29 update. any chance that the .23 list will be added on to? there are discussions everywhere about all sorts of balance changes and it'd be good to have some sort of authoritative (even if not comprehensive) list.

AFAICT suppression affliction doesn't tick down the debuff duration; they are merely suspended (and duration frozen) while suppress affliction is on. At least that's how it was in backer beta 4. Thus there is still a good reason to use specific counters over Suppress Affliction, especially for hard CCs like terrified. If this has changed though, I'd be curious to know. Edit: though on pre-1.1 even on POTD some fights can be over fast enough that it doesn't matter that suppress affliction will run out of time.

Yeah, the #1 thing I had to unlearn about Deadfire was that fortitude is not the uberdefense for enemies. It actually seems to follow actual internal stat distributions (whereas in PoE1 even if they did they always seemed to have supernaturally high fortitude). So e.g. priest/wizard types tend to have higher will and low fort, others will have low reflex, and of course the front-line tanks will still have their own high fort. re: Holy Meditation: I mostly see Holy Meditation as a way to get several instances of Concentration or Frightened/Terrified countering, not for the Resolve boost. Resolve is also a bit tricky (deflection is increasing returns) so even at 10s base (up to ~15s with modest intellect investment), +5 deflection can be god-mode in very narrow situations. But yeah, aside from that I think the short duration implies that it is mostly intended as a way to earn a couple Concentration layers or for countering Frightened/Terrified. I mean, that's how I've been using it.

Thing is, it's not about there being no "top-tier" choice, it's about appropriate build diversity (i.e. "no trap builds"). The "no trap builds" design philosophy of pillars is very similar to the approach that Wizards of the Coast takes with their tournament-level Magic: The Gathering banning decisions. They know that banning a particularly powerful card or undermining a deck type is just going to produce a new #1 card or top deck type, but what they care about is making sure that no card or deck strategy is particularly dominant. The reason is two-fold: a. players find it boring when there's only one or limited dominant choices in deck types or cards and b. wizards of the coast sees less revenue when players drop out of playing because the metagame is too boring or static. it's win-win for wizards of the coast to prefer some diversity of cards/decks. So if barbarians are the new #1, that's fine, so long as it's not so the #1 that it renders any party without a barbarian a trap build. I'm reserving full judgment until the ramifications of the patch are fully known, but everything so far sounds like a similar thing; obsidian is knocking down dominant (either too-good or too-prevalent) stuff and is doing only incremental improvements to lift stuff up so as to promote viability/diversity of builds (by them not having been overshadowed by some really good stuff). So Whispers of the Endless Paths gets knocked down a bit, but AFAICT any weapon that comes up to take its place isn't there because it got buffed to be #1, it'll just be a little better relatively speaking, so not-gaming your PoE1 history and not-getting Whispers of the Endless Paths if you do great swords is not going to be a trap decision. I thought I chip in on your comment about trap builds. The elimination of trap builds in your analogy of MTG is valid as MTG games are primarily a PvP format. When there is a direct competitive nature in the game play, balance is always important to encourage diversity. However, for single player CRPGs it is less important as there is no direct motivation for classes to outperform each other that is directly linked to nature of game play. Personally, I play builds that have interesting mechanics and interactions and not necessarily because they are top tiered. Have done so in PoE1, will most likely do so in Deadfire. I think the targeted nerfs of the patch are warranted. What I am apprehensive about is the blanket nerfing of most items. Because it is just not well thought through. Even leading to items that were borderline useless to be nerfed to "why bother" level. Using MTG as an analogy, I think that the latest patch is similar to increasing all summoning and activation costs by 1 colourless mana. When you have some choices that are overtly overperforming than other choices, that is not fun for the people like to play those "other choices." So even in a single-player, non-competitive setting, you have a comparison setting. I felt like this was always a major problem with BG/IWD because by the end-game not having a mage in your party was a major trap choice. You could still beat the game just fine without one, but if you saw just how face-melty other people experienced the game when they had an improved alacrity, time stopping, vomit-inducing-flash-of-colors mage clearing everything (with IWD2 it's different because no time stop or improved alacrity but no less insane with spell focused wail of the banshee), that basically says to players who don't like spellcasting "ha ha screw you your game is much harder." Some quality variation is inevitable, because it's probably impossible to create a non-trivial yet perfectly balanced game (and frankly I'm not sure a perfectly balanced game is even desirable since it is fun when there's a particularly good item or spell or ability that players feel they've earned). But we can at least bound that variation to some small degree (such as by nerfing action speed bonuses across the board, or by having smaller magnitude deflection bonuses compared to PoE1). And it's not just me opining about it, the "no trap choices" philosophy is at the heart of what JE Sawyer was doing with the pillars system (there's a 1 hour GDC talk he gave about it). Again, I'm reserving full judgment about 1.1 because what little I know is mostly people complaining about a nerf which is not exactly a neutral patch changelist, but a "blanket" item nerf, if indeed is the case (such as action speed) seems to me the designers thinking that they were just too good to begin with and something they either wanted to change before release but couldn't before code freeze, or only realized when a larger population than just backer betas started drilling into itemization and ability choices. To go back to an MTG analogy that I think would be more appropriate for this scenario, this would be like how countermagic and card draw has gotten more expensive, because they were just too good to begin with, a fact that everyone resisted/hated at the time of transition because they were used to how things were and how powerful they were was only really apparent to the designers because of their own data and the limited design space the undercosted countermagic and card draw enforced. (I.E. a hard counterspell was UU, but now appears to be more fairly costed at ½UU; a mana-leak type effect was 1U and is now more like 2U; there's a lot more conditional counters; card draw is across the board much more expensive and also more conditional--more "looting" effects or scry rather than pure unconditional card draw).

Glad to know I'm not the only one. For whatever reason, whenever Mirrored Image gets cast, everything seizes up for a split second. And I can play Fallout 4 on high settings at 1440p (not quite 4k, but still). That is the nature of software development. Now you know why a patch isn't released the moment an issue is fixed, and instead they take a few weeks to test. Is test-driven development not a thing in the games industry? Where I work and have worked (at various major web/internet companies), unit tests and integration tests are the norm along with QA, so sometimes I find it hard to see how sometimes obvious regressions make their way in.

At +-20, it was definitely 4.5s good, likely even 6.0s good. Sure, you never needed +20 Accuracy that badly, but frankly I didn't need anything after character level 13 that badly because that's what I ended my first run at without much challenge. With a successive run with more thorough exploration, I still don't need most of my abilities because PotD is way too easy. (From the sounds of it, hopefully 1.1 fixes this problem.) This is just to say that "I never needed" isn't a good enough way to evaluate the power level of a spell because right now the high-end of the game is like... completely missing. At +-10, I believe 4.5s is still fair, but definitely not at 6.0s. Triumph of the Crusaders is at the same PL at 3.0s, mostly provides Strong; its healing effect is only sometimes relevant (a harder PotD may make the healing effect stronger); yet Triumph is still a good spell at PL4. Devotions provides almost a Strong inspiration, and also almost a Staggered affliction, and a +-10 accuracy bonus/malus, and the debuffs have decent duration (not all spells with debuffs do). In many situations, just having the might bonus/malus is comparable to Triumph, and then you add on +-10 accuracy which is still very good, if not necessarily as bonkers as +-20 accuracy was. That in my mind earns it a 4.5s over Triumph's 3.0s. Basically, I mentioned a while ago in another thread that as someone who virtually always either rolls a priest or includes a priest in his/her party, in PoE1 I could divide the game into two parts: before Devotions for the Faithful and after Devotions of the Faithful. In small-party PotD runs (less than 6 full members), a challenging run could become trivial once I could cast Devotions for the Faithful. Original PoE Devotions of +-20 was amazing in an environment where shields got +4 deflection per enchantment level, where Crowns for the Faithful gave you a whopping +25 resolve (which is +25 deflection, stacking with other deflection bonuses because it's a resolve boost), blind cost you -25 accuracy and -20 deflection, etc; the fact that you still had +-20 in the world of Deadfire where all accuracy/deflection modifications are much harder to come by (aside from metagaming deflection stacking) is honestly astonishing. If I was being greedy, I'd say it should have been +-15, but likely that number would have been influenced by the fact that I would still love to have a priest with a single-handedly battle-swinging spell, so a more neutral observer (say, the designers at obsidian) would probably find +-10 to be a fairer number.

Thing is, it's not about there being no "top-tier" choice, it's about appropriate build diversity (i.e. "no trap builds"). The "no trap builds" design philosophy of pillars is very similar to the approach that Wizards of the Coast takes with their tournament-level Magic: The Gathering banning decisions. They know that banning a particularly powerful card or undermining a deck type is just going to produce a new #1 card or top deck type, but what they care about is making sure that no card or deck strategy is particularly dominant. The reason is two-fold: a. players find it boring when there's only one or limited dominant choices in deck types or cards and b. wizards of the coast sees less revenue when players drop out of playing because the metagame is too boring or static. it's win-win for wizards of the coast to prefer some diversity of cards/decks. So if barbarians are the new #1, that's fine, so long as it's not so the #1 that it renders any party without a barbarian a trap build. I'm reserving full judgment until the ramifications of the patch are fully known, but everything so far sounds like a similar thing; obsidian is knocking down dominant (either too-good or too-prevalent) stuff and is doing only incremental improvements to lift stuff up so as to promote viability/diversity of builds (by them not having been overshadowed by some really good stuff). So Whispers of the Endless Paths gets knocked down a bit, but AFAICT any weapon that comes up to take its place isn't there because it got buffed to be #1, it'll just be a little better relatively speaking, so not-gaming your PoE1 history and not-getting Whispers of the Endless Paths if you do great swords is not going to be a trap decision. Priest redundancy is somewhat of an issue, but you can always respec (that is, once respec is not so buggy). My view on Spirit/Litany is that you can take the Spirit early on, and either keep it for redundancy later (since you only get 2 casts per PL per encounter), or respec out of the Spirit in favor of the Litany and open up a different choice at that PL. Same thing with e.g. Blessing/Dire Blessing or Holy Power/Triumph. Also I might just be grateful that in Deadfire I don't have to waste a choice at each PL to get "Restore Minor Endurance" "Restore Moderate Endurance" etc like in Pillars. Anyway "one of, if not the defining spells of the class" is a clear sign that it needed to be hammered down aggressively. It's only PL4, it really shouldn't be something that I would personally happily cast before literally any other spell in virtually any situation in literally any build in the priest spellbook (even in PoE1). If the buff is indeed suppressed by Strong, I would be mostly disappointed in that stacking rules are getting even more confusing (because previously my understanding was that afflictions/inspirations were in a completely separate stacking category from direct adjustment buffs/debuffs) and not because the buff itself got comparatively weaker. Frankly, +-10 accuracy, +-might, even if the might is suppressed by affliction/inspirations, is still for me a first pick for PL4. Just a little less obviously so than before and consequently going without it won't be as huge of a power level hit for a priest.

Hang on there, what? Devotions is suppressed by inspirations now? How does that even work, since +10 ACC is better than any perception inspiration's bonus? Devotions still stacks with perception inspirations. Sorry I misread the original post. Strong inspirations suppress Devotions? Like, all of it? Or just the +might bonus?

Hang on there, what? Devotions is suppressed by inspirations now? How does that even work, since +10 ACC is better than any perception inspiration's bonus?

I also find tavern mercs immersion breaking and I only ever recruit them in these situations (did it in gilded vale. Searching for Durance and Kana before finishing eothas temple and raedric hold felt metagamey all the same to me). I'm just cool with obsidian making it about available mechanics in this particular instance. PotD is not the "normal" way to play the game. It is intended to be punishing and require metagame knowledge, such as when to recruit companions or where to find specific items. Back in the early days of PoE, the entirety of Act 1 could be really punishing on PotD, and you would have to recruit to max out your 6-person party (because by default you could only get eder, aloth, durance, kana for five, and you had to know in advance where to pick up durance and kana before doing some of the harder act 1 quests) to stand a chance at some of the quest paths (especially storming Raedric Hold's with violence). With successive power creep and players having better strategy/knowledge of the game, you don't need to do this as much anymore, but this just goes to say that I think it's perfectly reasonable that a PotD encounter in Deadfire be overly challenging without some sort of special recruiting or metagame knowledge.

I *just* edited my post to add this "EDIT: you could also buff the under-used ability, but I think it's a philosophical approach, because for all you know the underused ability might be appropriately balanced for the encounters in the game and it's just something about the overused ability that gets teh underused ability un-picked. Personally (and it sounds like JE Sawyer's balancing philosophy is similar) I am way more concerned about power creep by unnecessarily buffing abilities than increased challenge from overly nerfing abilities." That doesn't mean you don't have to also do some buffs to underused abilities, but it just means you have to do them cautiously and with great data. (Like maybe Spirit/Litany usage was at near 0% and it seemed obvious that a relatively safe buff like reduced cast time could help without being too powerful.) To go back to an earlier anecdote, Diablo 3 is a case study in what you do if all you do is basically buff things at various rates. Like I said, I don't think there's nearly as much vitriol about nerf bats, but it really ticks me off the ongoing power creep with each patch (most noticable in how high of a Greater Rift people can clear with less and less effort). Despite best efforts, PoE1 still had some power creep (mostly because of poor level scaling and the wierdness of when to do the White March dlc during your critical path, because this power creep happened even as casters lost all their per-encounter casting capabilities) and I think it suffered from it more than if it had stayed as challenging as it was in PoE1 vanilla. EDIT: it's worth noting that I'm not saying that Blizzard game designers are bad. Diablo 3 allows for a lot of leeway in terms of overbuffing because it has a built-in endless challenge system (you do successively higher Greater Rifts, which have no upper limit and scale infinitely upwards). And their "buff everything" approach does let them do balance changes without provoking as much fan ire when a beloved item or ability gest nerfed. But even an infinite challenge system, power creep means that the sense of accomplishment you got a few months ago disappears when everyone and their neighbor can roflstomp the same greater rift now. With Deadfire, there is no infinite challenge system, and encounters are calibrated with some target party level in mind, so there is a huge downside risk to overbuffing. There's a fine line between "feeling naturally powerful as your levels/items accumulate" and "roflstomping/facemelting everything without much effort or planning" and that fine line is the difference between a great game system and one that can be at best be merely good. I mean, I'm sure there's a good faction of cRPG players who prefer the Final Fantasy VII approach of just facemelting everything including the boss with W-Summon Knights of the Round, but that's not the kind of game I'm looking for in PoE or Deadfire.

Agreed (and I remember these psychological mechanisms from my studies.) However, one thing is to react negatively to nerfs because they are nerfs—which can certainly happen, but it's not what the majority are doing on these boards AFAIA; another, rightfully pointing out that some abilities were over-nerfed, others (and most items) were nerfed with no need to. Beta patch 1.1 went way overboard with the nerfs, and frankly I don't see the benefit. Sure, I could spend a few hours cherry-picking nerfs I agree with and restoring everything else, but I didn't back this game to be appalled by monkey work. I backed it to have fun, which certainly won't happen for as long as recovery remains as slow as it is (it was barely acceptable in 1.02 already.) YMMV, but me, I'm pretty bummed. Thing is, this is why I was talking about "automatic picks." Obsidian gets telemetry data from players who opt-in. I don't know the full extent of data they get (maybe it is pretty coarse and just about party composition), but I would argue that if e.g. there was some modest ability on PLx that 90% of players picked over other abilities on that same PL, then even if that ability weren't overtly powerful, it would still need to be nerfed or retuned so it is not the obvious selection (because otherwise not picking it is in some way a "trap" choice, which a well-designed game should avoid). To go back to Devotions of the Faithful, it is not overtly OP, but was like the spell you definitely wanted to cast in PoE1 and I would argue the obvious first pick at PL4 in Deadfire. So even though it's not an automatic immortality button, it still needed some nerfing. (Though if it moved to PL7 I would be a little sad because I like the spell for its flavor as well and would like it available for more of the game, even in weaker form.) This is essentially what happened in reverse in PoE1 with summoned weapons. At release, they were basically like summoned weapons in Deadfire: roughly equivalent to normal weapons at the same level, but with a special addon (like draining for Concelhaut's Staff). Clearly, by the fact that we're back to this at square one with Deadfire, and by JE Sawyer's own blog posts, that the design team thinks this is the appropriate balance for them. However, anecdotal usage in PoE1 was so low that they basically buffed them to promote usage, because regardless of their individual merits, players just didn't find them worth it. PoE1 is now at a state where summoned weapons are probably a bit less ignored and players who do use them get a lot of power out of it. With Deadfire they are probably trying to see if players use summoned weapons much before buffing them. So yeah, even if something is not overtly OP, if it is heavily used at the expense of other abilities, there is probably some nerfing or retuning that needs to be done regardless. Same thing flip-wise (like the priest prayers and litany spells, which got a cast reduction that no one was explicitly asking for but is probably designed to promote higher usage). EDIT: you could also buff the under-used ability, but I think it's a philosophical approach, because for all you know the underused ability might be appropriately balanced for the encounters in the game and it's just something about the overused ability that gets teh underused ability un-picked. Personally (and it sounds like JE Sawyer's balancing philosophy is similar) I am way more concerned about power creep by unnecessarily buffing abilities than increased challenge from overly nerfing abilities.

One more thing to add: negative reactions to nerfing is largely psychological. Human beings are more prone to feel strongly about losing something they already have, then gaining something they don't already have. (Simple example: give someone a task and offer them ten dollars. Or, give them ten dollars and threaten to take it away if they don't do something. Mathematically it is the same either way, but people are more prone to respond to the incentive in the latter situation. There are many, many other similar examples/studies/experiments like this.) The alternative is something that I really don't like, which is basically what Blizzard has been doing for Diablo 3 forever. They rarely ever nerf. Instead, they buff everything and buff OP things slightly less (or not at all, or fundamentally change it into something else). This keeps people from (mostly) complaining about nerfs, but the end result is this eternal power creep with every single patch/season. I hate it. I would much rather have aggressive nerf bats. So if you don't like a nerf, what helps me is to reframe it as just another way of doing something I would like: keeping my favorite abilities the same but buffing enemies. Mathematically it's the same, and I just remember that my gut reaction may be mostly a primitive, emotional one.

Devotions in version < 1.1 is a PL-4 spell, not PL 7. That's char lvl 7 as a single class and char level 10 on a multiclass character. Can anyone with beta patch confirm whether or not this was a typo in the OP or has devotions been moved to a PL7 spell in 1.1? Deflection is broken in POE and POEII, I don't think it's fixable. The fact that you don't need a shield to deflect damage I don't understand. The fact that a person carrying a bow can be more effective in deflecting a shot or two handed sword than a person carrying a shield and sword because he is "higher level" is beyond me. The only way to make shields effective is to give shields and weapons delfection stats and remove the deflection stat from characters themselves. The main issue in this game is one that plagues D&D as well. People go for the "My Deflection is higher than your max accuracy" sweetspot making your character invulnerable. I think it is far better to make your character more relyant on the type of equipment and have your character focus on a specific fighting style rather than just boosting stats. The fundamental problem with deflection is that it is the only "main" stat that has increasing returns. This means for balancing purposes, it sits in an awkward place where it is garbage for most characters, but can also be overly OP for others. (This is sort of the flip side to perception, which had diminishing returns and so it is useful on the low end but much less useful on the high end... though with Deadfire's numerous "crit matters" stuff, I'm not as sure if perception has notably diminishing returns.) Deadfire tried to cope with deflection being increasing returns by reducing the magnitude of many deflection-boosting items and buffs (can you imagine if a superb large shield still got like +12 bonus deflection on top of its +12 base deflection)? But there's enough items and spells out there that it can still be super OP if you have enough metagame knowledge to get specific items (like that ring with the stacking deflection bonus based on engagement), and I'm not sure there's a good way to really fix this without fundamentally changing how accuracy rolls work in this game. If they e.g. nerf things like Arcane Veil or Mirrored Image, all they do is make it garbage for more characters and just incrementally harder to get infinite% returns from deflection for the min-maxed characters. Personally, so far from what I heard, I like the shape of this patch. My only beef is that, like others have expressed, they didn't fix the brilliant inspiration, they just removed it (from the player). It definitely needs to be fixed. Ideally the chanter invocation would still have brilliant on it, except brilliant is something that isn't just an "i-win" buff for virtually any fight in any party. People complaining about the nerf bat should really consider that if there's an ability or item that is a "no-brainer" decision, it is likely too good, regardless of your personal emotional attachment to it. I mean, I love Devotions of the Faithful, but the fact that it is essentially an automatic pick for any and all priests who don't want to self-gimp since the beginning of Pillars of Eternity 1 means that it needed to be nerfbatted pretty hard, even though for much of the pillars franchise it's just been flying under the radar compared to more overtly OP spells/abilities/items. So far, I feel the same way about most things people are complaining about here. Rarely form the stuff that I've seen has something actually gotten crappy post-nerf; it's just not as automatic a pick for parties/characters as it was before, it is either still good or just not as obscenely good.

Yeah, Xoti does. Sounds like the exact issue. thanks!

Bizarrely, my character (itinerant: berath priest and ghost heart) will "resist rot skulls" when casting it (rot skulls from the berath subclass). Attached is a screenshot pointing to this combat event. Here is a dropbox link containing an autosave to just before this battle, along with the output_log shortly after this happened: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4diawxq76dnwr24/AAAcS6knMTgK_21-auBeVVGja?dl=0 It does not happen all the time.

PoE1 wouldn't have been so bad if they just had come up with a single, standard way to stack modifiers. Instead you have to keep track of which modifiers are in which group. It got pretty close though, because for the most part most modifiers in PoE1 were additive. But then instead of getting simpler Deadfire is introducing this whole "time vs speed" nonsense. I'm no game designer, but I truly don't understand why rules simplicity ends up getting sacrificed.

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.

Your OP said that PL provides accuracy bonuses. So does power level affect the accuracy for debuff spells / abilities or not? Yeah, this is wrong. The tooltip won't show you accuracy bonuses from power level, but when you actually use an ability and check the combat log you will see power level bonuses for accuracy, And for alchemy, power level will also increase the magnitude of buffs, not just duration, though the full details are still pending.

Despite being tagged as "fire", Searing Seal does not appear to benefit from Scion of Flame. It also does not appear to do correct damage; empowering a searing seal suggests a much higher damage than it actually does when triggered (and the SHIFT tooltip does not show any power-level related boost). This is a similar issue to Warding Seal not doing the correct damage and not benefiting from Heart of the Storm: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99293-warding-seal-not-doing-correct-damage/ and https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99945-10102-priest-scion-of-storms-and-spirit-of-decay-passives-are-no-ops/ I suspected that Searing Seal would be similarly affected, but this is an official player confirmation of it. Linked is a dropbox folder containing a quicksave with Xoti with both Searing Seal and Scion of Flame selected in a room I was attacking NPCs with to test the damage/penetration numbers: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/i6dopp2ywfmh65h/AAB6UVb96z8TfvKDfwb7N6Tra?dl=0