thelee

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

Where is it documented this "recovery" part of guns? PoE1 had recovery and reload, but AFAICT Deadfire removed all "recovery" for guns to just be "reload." People in other threads have commented that this is likely a bug due to animation cycles (which has no connection to actual game mechanics).

Example 1: have crippling strike. Assign it to a hotkey. Upgrade to debilitating strike. The hotkey is still for crippling strike, even though it is no longer in the character's HUD. You can still use it, though. Example 2: have athletics trained up, so you have second wind. Assign it to a hotkey. Respec and don't train up athletics. You still have a hotkeyed second wind, which you can actually use to heal a tiny amount of health. Here's a dropbox link containing a save game and a output_log for example 2: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w8jqdsw5flgdg1a/AAA604qFbJVH86GbfxCiCs1fa?dl=0 (look at Aloth, he still has a usable second wind even though I removed his athletics ability from a respec)

Had two characters with drug crashes (deadeye and something else). Was about to encounter Tahae, so I rested beforehand. Entered Tahae encounter, noticed I still had drug crash effects (??). I re-loaded, noted that my characters had drug crashes, rested on the map, and checked on character screen for each of them that they still have drug crashes. Meanwhile, if I enter the Tahae encounter and rest there, the drug crashes appropriately get cleared. So something about resting on the world map doesn't clear drug crashes. Here's a dropbox link with a quicksave (and output_log) for the drug crashes right beroe Tahae encounter, not clearing: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y5mhnlb1yheije2/AADoEs5pwQMMsv91AtFI5tR9a?dl=0

I noticed in a recent test that not only is the Warding Seal damage bugged, but it does not appear to get any damage benefit from being empowered. It gains bonus penetration and accuracy from being empowered, but the damage itself is unchanged. something is buggy here. Searing Seal may also be affected by these issues.

I updated my OP with new findings re: explosives and martial abilities. So I did some test and power levels do work with martial abilities, both weapon-based and non-weapon based (thanks Alhoon for the tip-off!). So +x to fire power levels will make flames of devotion stronger (assuming it is appropriately tagged). Lash damage will be boosted insofar as the base damage of the weapon gets adjusted upwards from power-level scaling (or via Empower). However, most lashes I see are pretty low (15-20%) so don't expect too much extra lash damage from even an Empowered ability.

My assumption is that your recovery rate is computed continuously. This was the case in backer beta where I could have a character hit by Blind (-100% recovery penalty then) and they would take FOREVER to get their next action, instead of their current recovery finishing normally and *then* their next recovery being really slow.

And if you have both positive and negative speed modifiers, you will see the negative one higher than in the ability tooltip (I had -33 of the Arquebus modal instead of -25).I don't think this is true. This is why I am pushing the point to MaxQuest that in his OP his statement about double-inversion making maluses overpower bonuses is incorrect. In reality it is because some maluses are phrased in terms of "time" and some bonuses in terms of "speed." In the tooltip, the game is showing you the coefficient normalized for "time." So if arbalest has a -25% speed in the modal description, that actually translates into +33% recovery time penalty in the tooltip (note the distinction between "negative speed" and "positive time" here). It's the same thing mathematically. It has nothing to do with there being a mix of bonuses and maluses. This ongoing confusion between speed and time (including my own until a few posts up) makes me think that this is a really huge systems blunder on Obsidian's part.

I've gotten a decent amount from de-trapping of course, but I've been blowing through them pretty quickly. Wondering if there's a vendor to get more traps from. I've seen the two in Delver's Row, but they don't restock their traps (and I've already cleaned them out). A little disappointed that you can craft basically every other consumable other than traps.

Yes that is correct, all of it. The bonuses are additive with all other sources, if any. I have to change my answer; you actually will likely get more than half a projectile per PL when you empower. I got the "every other" rule from an old backer beta dev post, but testing in game, the two projectile spells I tested actually get more than .5 projectile per PL, and by a variable amount, so we should consider .5 projectile per PL a minimum. PL4 superstar Minoletta's Concussive Missile gets an insane 1 projectile per PL, which is largely why an empowered version is so insanely good.

Actually, power level of attack abilities also increases the base attack damage that is mostly derived from your weapon. I discovered this while testing how Empower affects Flames of Devotion. The increase is very noticeable if you compare base damage (before any bonuses) from combat log between Empowered and non-Empowered attack skills. I also tested whether this is because of Empower or just power level, and modded an equipment to give +10 fire skill power level (Flames of Devotion is tagged as fire skill), and it definitely is power level that boosts base attack damage. Odd, because testing with Knock Down and Crippling Strike I didn't see any boost in damage other than from Overpenetration. great, more things to research. Tbh overwhelming wave in pillars1 was OP. Combined with intellect bonus, that 4s in deadfire can still be not shabby. Empower it and get lasting empower and it's even longer. It wasn't. It had crappy template that was fully friendly-fire, it didn't benefit from radius increaase from INT and it was a stun - an affliction druid had in abundance. It was also slow. I'd rather have something mind-affecting. Stun was also rolled againts Fort, a defense with highest average value. Not sure what was OP in OW but surely not stun. Besides, the point is increase in durations from PL is tiny. Especially on thing with very short base duration like OW. When i saw durations in Tyranny i was surprised they are even shorter than in PoE. Then i realized it is that way because Tyranny is a cooldown rotation game. But no, they did same in PoE2. I'm afraid PoE3 will be MOBA, party size is already at 5 Friendly-fire isn't a downside because it's easy to work around. And the stun had a whopping base of 8s, and stun is very rarely an immunity or resistance for enemies in pillars; even though it targeted fort the duration was so long that even a graze could be absolutely devastating if you had some reflex-targeting stuff to follow up with. The other sources for druid stun were all really short and two of them hooked onto really slow spells (one of which targeted randomly). On POTD, a very slightly buffed druid (for accuracy) can trivialize the llengrath fight because one well-aimed overwhelming wave will stun the dragons and llengrath for a really long time. Each PL point in duration is at least as good as a point in intellect. Possibly the bigger problem is that PL scaling on other things (e.g. projectile count, which I updated) is a little insane OP.

Was an issue in Backer Beta, is still an issue now. Basically, the priest gets three elemental boosting passives: scion of flame, heart of the storm, and spirit of decay. Unfortunately, two of three are essentially nothingburgers inside the priest's own skill tree. Heart of the storms affects "electricity" spells, but actually has zero effect with Warding Seal (Warding Seal also does less than its stated damage). Wael's version of Spiritual Weapon has a shocking lash, but does not benefit from it. I have not tested Spark the Souls of the Righteous yet, but even if it did get affected, you are taking an ability at Power Level 5 that won't see any benefit until Power Level 8 (which is impossible for multiclass). That seems broken. And don't get me started on Spirit of Decay. It affects "acid" or "decay", but by default a priest has zero acid/decay spells in their skill tree. Only a Berathian priest gets acid/decay spells, which means for all other multiclasses it has no innate value. And if we're really adding a passive that only one multiclass benefits from, then where's Secrets of Rime? Wael gets several frost-damage abilities and the priest has Iconic Projection which if all were tagged with "frost" would be actually more valuable than Spirit of Decay. This seems like gross oversight. At the very least, please ensure that Heart of the Storm benefits Warding Seal and Spark the Souls of the Righteous. I don't know what you'd need to do with Spirit of Decay to make it anything other than a "trap" ability for non-berathian priests. And please consider adding Secrets of Rime and tagging all frost-damage abilities as "frost". And, optionally, please consider making the various Spiritual Weapons tagged appropriately so that there's at least slightly more early game benefit for taking these elemental passives. I don't know if a save is actually necessary here, but here's a dropbox link to a save right before leveling up Xoti. You can take Heart of the Storm and experiment with Warding Seal and note that penetration is unaffected and the damage is bugged. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tvt7p13kxf57kqc/AAByWXDRUsGWOLJtiYhoqe31a?dl=0

This is also consistent for Potions and Drugs. The tooltips describe a "level" modifier, which is sometimes just Power Level (for pure Healing potions), sometimes just Alchemy skill (for magnitude of non-healing effects, such as the Armor bonus from a Potion of Spirit Shield), and sometimes both added together (durations: 5% longer per PL+ALC). I think all alchemical stuff counts as PL1 as the baseline (i.e., you get a bonus for each PL above 1), but I haven't tested this much with higher-level potions, etc. The Nalpazca bonus functions just like an Empower: all drug durations and drug healing effects (Whiteleaf) are boosted by 10 PLs (generally meaning a +50% duration), but buff magnitudes are the same as that for a non-Nalpazca with equivalent Alchemy skill. Alchemy skill for potion/drug purposes is personal-- no bonus from party assist. Your friends can't help you get high. Thanks, Enoch. I added a small note to the OP about PL and drugs/potions.

By "normalize" I mean that everything should be changed, at least to the player, to use the same unit. Right now a lot of the confusion is that some things refer to "speed" and other things refer to "time" which require a lot of care and math for players to understand how they impact and influence your recovery. If obsidian changed it all to be, e.g. "speed" then we could just add things up in our head and be done with it. I think what i'm tripping up here is the technicality that it's not the double-inversion here that matters. It's that you're combining two numbers with the magnitude (25) but they're doing different things, hence why we get a non-obvious result where two 25s combine and give us a -8%. What I was trying to make clear in my earlier post is that double-inversion makes perfect sense if you're talking about adjusting how quickly or slowly a character is advancing through their action frames, which is what dex and gunner did back in pillars1. It is surprising that they have this double-inversion, but then have this alternate way of computing coefficients as well, which leads to very confusing outcomes. Anyway I think we agree that the current system makes less sense than alternatives. This is a good point. Another thing I thought of was that, as a game designer, you may just want an ability that does "X" and not have to figure out the math it takes to accomplish "X" in your system. I.E. if you want to design a buff that halves your recovery time, you probably just want to fill in an input box in some tool that says "-50% time" instead of having to think a bit and put in "+100% speed" instead. I just wish that regardless of what is done behind the scenes or in the .json file, obsidian just gave us a standard, unified, normalized unit (your "speed coefficient" that you talk about in your tool). Stacking rules were complicated even in pillars, which had plenty of exceptions and bugs. Even with the rule in deadfire of "actives don't, passives do" (or is it the other way around? ARGH) I'm sure there's going to be lots of nonobvious, exceptional, and/or buggy cases. But I'm pretty sure effects won't stack with themselves.

This is a great way to put it. At first I was bummed that so many martial abilities saw no PL scaling, but as you put it they already scale because weapons get better and better. Really, spells were just getting a raw deal in pillars1.

Tbh overwhelming wave in pillars1 was OP. Combined with intellect bonus, that 4s in deadfire can still be not shabby. Empower it and get lasting empower and it's even longer.