thelee

Among Scion of Flame, Heart of the Storm, and Spirit of Decay for the priest, AFAICT Scion of Flame is the only one that actually has an effect, and even then it doesn't effect all the spells it really should. It effects Shining Beacon and Divine Mark, because those have the "Fire" tag. However, I have a Priest of Wael and just for test I took Heart of the Storm. In retrospect, this was a mistake, because here are the abilities I thought Heart of the Storm would affect: - Spiritual Weapon (Wael version has shock lash) - Warding Seal (does shock damage) In reality, here are the abilities it affects: Nothing. In fact, despite doing shock damage, the fact that the aforementioned abilities don't have "Electrical" tagged on them means they don't get any benefit. In fact, no priest abilities afaict in the BB have the electrical tag. Similarly, Scion of Flame seems like it underperforms for a priest, because Searing Ward has no fire tag. I suspect this is an oversight, and if not I highly urge folks at Obsidian to look at the value of these priest passives a bit closer. Maybe there are some powerful high-level abilities that are Electrical or Acid/Decay-tagged, but then it seems like these passives should be placed higher instead of letting me take an early-game "trap" ability. Attached a save with a priest ready to level up: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mb888m1nzukcs7n/AABcOODjCSNTKVytXrvS4DGca?dl=0 Again, maybe this is fully working as intended (because this is to-the-letter how Heart of the Storm and Spirit of Decay should function). But it seems to me slightly broken that one can pick up a priest passive at level 8 that has literally zero benefit for at least the next few character levels of the game, and another priest passive (spirit of decay) that only appears to have an effect if you are a berathian priest (as otherwise there are 0 acid or decay-tagged spells in the first 10 character levels of the game).

Odd, because in PoE, Wael's element of choice was frost.

I think that's the idea. A few enemies in the beta have abilities which force you to move. Scirocco is devasteting if you stay in place. I did beat it on veteran, by luring titan away. Titan was certainly the biggest danger, and mopping up Blights wasn't much of an issue, though three Greater Blights are a disaster. If this time they will balance game properly, it is possible that veteran will be a challenging but fair difficulty. I didn't feel compelled to try PotD in the Deadfire as of yet, which is a good sign. It is possible that Blights are broken in PotD. On veteran Scirocco is dangerous, but you just need to move out of the way. The problem with Scirocco is that it doesn't give you much response time, unlike say Engwithan Saint's Seal of Pain and that close-range spiky/icy aura. The Seal of Pain gives you a really huge UI effect and a few seconds to run out of it, and the spiky/icy aura thing ticks periodically at close range so you can stay back. Scirocco, by contrast, will lock onto anything that's within the blight's range, and ticks immediately. One greater blight is bad, but when you have ~5 (as on PotD for this fight), even if all you're doing is fleeing, what can happen is a) Scirocco lands, which instantly blinds and briefly stops movement. b) urgently order my party to keep moving c) Other Scirocco from other blights start landing, taking advantage of that brief interruption d) essentially stunlocked and wipe within seconds In the end what I did was send out a lone Mercenary Fighter to do all the kiting himself, stopping every once and a while to deliberately coax Sciroccos out of the blights. He was only able to do this because it was easier to order one PC through all that mess, and he had veteran's recovery and second wind for instant heals. Again, given how many attempts it took me just to deal with the blights alone, how on earth did they think this was a balanced fight with the titans.

There were two things: you can't auto-attack a team member, and this one. Feeling strange about this one ^^ because:- a cap of 100, would achieve the same thing, i.e. prevent "from scaling away into infinity" - in PoE1 we could achieve up to 43 dexterity; although do note: it was not worth it - hard caps do smell bad. Sometimes it's indicative that the game loses it's balance outside of certain range; and that the system can't handle it gracefully itself. No hard cap in PoE1 was a healthy sign in my book, and it was really well handled, as dropping attributes was stinging, while maxing them to the roof was affected by intrinsic diminishing returns; not to mention that there were often wise to smooth the spread a little: think of MIG and DEX both contributing to dps, and at a very simplistic level: 15x15 > 20x10. It's no big deal though) I was a lilttle skeptical of the attribute cap at first but 35 is pretty high -- that's about where the "soft cap" of effectiveness was anyway in the first game. If it were lower I'd have more concern but at 35 it seems almost more like a UI feature -- "it's ok, you can stop bothering now" -- and it might make character planning a little simpler and give the designers more room to play around with weird bonuses (like drugs, etc.) I mean I see where you're coming from and it's definitely the most interesting change listed but it might work out to be a good thing iafter all. I'm almost positive the cap was introduced just as an arbitrary restriction so that Resolve could be allowed to reduce hostile durations meaningfully per point without worrying about degenerative cases of high resolve <snip> I called it: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/172426990256/what-made-you-go-back-on-what-you-said-about-the#notes "What made you go back on what you said about the Resolve changes concerning status ailments?" JE Sawyer: "That’s in the patch notes. We capped Attributes at 35, which prevents percentile reductions from hitting 100%. At 35 Resolve, Hostile Effect Reduction hits 75%."

yes, i think it's related to some camera changes they also made with the "smart camera." there's a bit of an "easing in" of the screen scrolling. it took a bit of adjustment (and i had to disable smart camera), but i don't even notice it anymore.

Don't know where to find saved games or output_log.txt on OS X, please let me know so I can file a proper bug report. But basically, I bound Marux Amanth to "Mercenary Rogue", notice that one of the abilities is "Corona of the Soul" which grants . (literally says "Grants ." To unlock next rank I have to do 150 Burn damage. Don't know how I'm supposed to do that, but I assume it's related to the "Corona of the Soul" ability that "Grants .". I was hoping it was just a display error, but after a few fights that 0/150 Burn damage counter hasn't gone up.

Sorry to multipost, but I seriously just have to rag on Obsidian here. Trying to clean up the blights, and seriously: what were they thinking here. Sirococco is not an attack that is easily dodgable (it appears to have unlimited range and center on a specific character, isntead of an area), which means even if all I do is kite, I still almost instantly wipe when 3-4 Sirococcos go off around my fleeing party members. I'm probably eventually going to manage this, but I can't understand how this was suppossed to be a balanced fight when they were a part of the titan fight, given how insane this swarm of blights is on their own.

The fact that swamp_slug also has discovered that the way to deal with the newly upped titan fight is to kite the titan far away from blight spawn point suggests to me that the blight spawning may not be appropriately balanced...

Update, tried it again and succeeded on first try thanks to these two things: a) kiting the titan _really_ far away from where he spawns. kiting him just a screen or two didn't help because as soon as the blights spawned they beelined right twoards me. across the map, however, and they stayed put. b) TIL that unlike PoE1 you can actually run out of range of abilities that have begun targeting. So when I didn't have an interrupt ready I just ran whatever squishy was being targetted by his grab, since the titan drops engagement when he begins charging up with the grab. This wouldn't have helped with the blights but made the titan fight a bit more interactive and less "crap did I miss with my interrupt." I mean, I still have two screens full of blights and greater blights to clear out (and a couple of probably-very-confused scarabs), but it's way better than just instawiping at the titan. EDITed to add: once I accidentally figured out (B) (happened while I was kiting with the "Mercenary Rogue"), I actually really liked how the titan fight went down. Strategic interrupts (after working through his concentration x4), and then tactially moving targetted squishes out of ranges when I didn't have an interrupt ready. It felt like a really technical fight, kind of like classic World of Warcraft raid bosses, and I mean that in a good way (as opposed to like a classic BG2 fight where it's just the enemy and your best mage emptying out your spellbooks as quickly as you can while everyone else is potion-drinking-cannon-fodder). Too bad the sudden, unannounced swarm of blights kind of ruins that.

Has anyone done this? I haven't played the Backer Beta a lot so I am still raw to all these mechanics, but the other PotD fights up until the first Engwithan Titan along the critical path (lagufeth, delemgan encounter, boarding the enemy ship, everything else outside poko kahara) I've done already and they were nicely challenging and totally within normal possibility. In previous BBs, when the Titan gets to a low health, a couple desert scarabs spawn. Surprising, but not too bad. In the current BB, when the Titan gets to low health, not only do a couple desert scarbs spawn, but a crapload of desert blights, including at least three Greater Blights also spawn. The Titan fight is a slow and tedious slog in the best of cases (currently it can one shot any of my non-"Mercenary Fighter" PCs with the grab if I don't have an interrupt ready), so the extra scarabs are a challenging surprise. The army of blights that appear, however, well it's almost literally an instant wipe as soon as they appear. (The titan itself also appears to have gotten a bit harder with the latest BB.) Wondering if anyone else has done this on PotD yet, or if there's something I'm missing with my BB noobness (like some quest that disables the desert blight spawns). Because currently it seems like a complete miss on difficulty balancing and it seems like an impossible encounter, unless I go grind some levels and get much better gear elsewhere somehow. (And this is still the same path I did in previous BBs just fine.) Maybe I should just try to kite the titan far away from that spawn point...

Don't know where output_log.txt is on OS X. I have a 2017 macbook pro, running game on 1680x1050, and modest settings elsewhere (e.g. MSAA 1x). I can get smooth gameplay when just running around or in combat, but in some menus and screens (most notably character creation) I get extremely poor performance. I don't know if this is just some optimization that still needs to be worked out, but it just strikes me as bizarre that character creation is an excruciating scenario, but combat with lots of VFX is not.

I don't know where to find the output_log.txt on OS X. But this has been an issue for all the OS X backer beta releases and honestly concerns me with release still close. Any attempt to quit Deadfire will result in a hang, and you have to apple-option-ESC to force quit deadfire.

You should see the latest backer beta. I think the resolve-train has left the station Strength is dead, long live might!

There were two things: you can't auto-attack a team member, and this one. Feeling strange about this one ^^ because:- a cap of 100, would achieve the same thing, i.e. prevent "from scaling away into infinity" - in PoE1 we could achieve up to 43 dexterity; although do note: it was not worth it - hard caps do smell bad. Sometimes it's indicative that the game loses it's balance outside of certain range; and that the system can't handle it gracefully itself. No hard cap in PoE1 was a healthy sign in my book, and it was really well handled, as dropping attributes was stinging, while maxing them to the roof was affected by intrinsic diminishing returns; not to mention that there were often wise to smooth the spread a little: think of MIG and DEX both contributing to dps, and at a very simplistic level: 15x15 > 20x10. It's no big deal though) I was a lilttle skeptical of the attribute cap at first but 35 is pretty high -- that's about where the "soft cap" of effectiveness was anyway in the first game. If it were lower I'd have more concern but at 35 it seems almost more like a UI feature -- "it's ok, you can stop bothering now" -- and it might make character planning a little simpler and give the designers more room to play around with weird bonuses (like drugs, etc.) I mean I see where you're coming from and it's definitely the most interesting change listed but it might work out to be a good thing iafter all. I'm almost positive the cap was introduced just as an arbitrary restriction so that Resolve could be allowed to reduce hostile durations meaningfully per point without worrying about degenerative cases of high resolve (which JE Sawyer cited as a reason of why he was hesitant of resolve doing this effect). They could theoretically have gone up to 43 (any more and resolve would give >100% reduction), but i'm guessing the way resolve is implemented there are significant increasing returns (each additional 3% reduction is more of the remaining hostile duration). I haven't tried the new BB yet, so this is an assumption based on how intellect works. EDITed to add: "while maxing them to the roof was affected by intrinsic diminishing returns" Not actually true. By my calculations, while perception had diminishing returns, might, dex, int and con all had linear returns. Resolve actually had increasing returns, because deflection had increasing returns and resolve boosted deflection (similarly all the other stats have slightly increasing returns because they all boost a defense of some sort). As someone who did both triple crown solo and the ultimate achievements, the difference between a 19 resolve and a 20 base resolve can be a run-breaker (more so than 18 vs 19). Now, it is possible that to achieve really high levels in the stats you had to sacrifice a bunch where the net effect was diminishing returns, but the stats do not have "intrinsically" diminishing returns. historical fact: back in the day intellect used to boost radius instead of total area. that was stupidly increasing returns, which they eventually fixed. (hint: area = pi*r^2)

Wowowowowow time to load up the backer beta again. maybe this time it'll be stable enough to actually run on my macbook *crosses fingers*

I feel like if you worked in any major tech enterprise you would know how silly this sentiment is. Just the act of releasing something is a time-suck and a distraction. I work on a team that makes twice-weekly binary pushes (and it's a web app, so no complicated steam/GOG rollouts), and we have dedicated release rotations and testing engineers and infrastructure to make that happen, and even then sometimes we back out on a release if we can't aren't able to get our act together. And I work at a large company; Obsidian is puny by comparison.

I think performance issues might be CPU related. Even on machines that--relative to PoE--are beasts, sometimes in combat under certain situations I get jittery frame rates. And I have to suspect it's due to some runaway CPU-related computations (probably physics), not graphics, because honestly I don't know what on earth PoE could be throwing at my GPU to bog it down, whereas even today in certain older games I can become CPU-bound (Diablo 3, Starcraft 2) despite being able to run fallout 4 on ultra settings with buttery smooth frame rates.

Problem was that the strat guide for PoE1 had sections that were really poor quality. Lots of typos, errors (probably because the game changed in between strat guide write-up and game launch), mislabeled maps, etc. Beyond that it also only took a few patches for some of the sections (character-building ones) to become really obsolete. I still used it a bit, but I empathize if they wouldn't invest in another personally.

For anyone who doesn't follow JE Sawyer's tumblr, he already commented on why he doesn't like the idea of reduced affliction time for resolve: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/171380084061/one-resolve-suggestion-i-think-you (Sorry if this has already been linked to, haven't read entire thread)

This too is a nice idea, and it would guarantee that Resolve isn't some common "dump stat". I personally really don't like splitting up a different stat (Dexterity in this case) in Deadfire's system. I didn't like it when Might got split into Strength and Resolve, and I'm going to like it even less if Dexterity gets split into Dexterity and Resolve (because Dexterity's effect on your non-recovery action speed has to be bumped up to prevent this from being a stealth nerf to dex, which means combining Dexterity and Resolve becomes very good). At this point, we are so close to release that I actually want Obsidian to be a bit conservative. Maybe, maybe, they can get empowerment to work, and maybe there's some system that doesn't produce the variance complaints that I had in my earlier message. But if they plow on this for a while and still can't get it to work, I'd rather they revert to at least a tweaked version of PoE's system (like I said, maybe +2 deflection instead of +1) rather than introduce a potentially radical new change ahead of release with minimal time to put it through its paces. There'll be plenty of time post-release in patches to really deliberately evaluate the stat, but for launch you don't want to have too big of a moving part.

The thing is, your latter definition of "flexibility" is not the definition of flexibility that PoE shoots for and what I would imagine most players support, which you kind of sort of acknowledge but dance around. Your definition of flexibility appears to be "for any given of stats, there is a supported playstyle and weapon." But, what that is really saying is that "if you want to be a club-wielding fighter, you HAVE to invest in strength/con." That's not flexible. Put another way, my understanding of AD&D is that you rolled stats first and THAT determined your class (which is why fighters were important in having no required stats and why it's kind of insane Paladins had so many and so high). That seems to fall under your definition of "flexible" because for any combination of stats there is a class you could play, but the vast, vast, vast majority of players would not consider that a flexible system. My point was that in PoE1 there was no metagame trap problems (or at least very few) because it was built from the ground up to not have this problem. (JE Sawyer has a game dev conference talk where he goes on this for some length). Your proposed changes for PoE2's system would basically undermine that entirely Plus, if we're talking average players who play on normal, we're talking about a population that is just inherently scared of number vomit and being bombarded with rules; when Fallout: New Vegas was being developed, JE Sawyer had to fight really hard to try to get actual stats into VATS mode (hit points and armor and such) and the eventual compromise was that it would all be hidden behind the Living Anatomy perk so that it would be opt-in. Tossing up all sorts of reasons why a given player is sucking at combat and it turns out that their club uses strength and constitution, which is different from the stats needed to support the sword they had just been using is a lot of unfriendliness and unintuitiveness to toss at players playing on normal difficulty. Remember that intuitiveness is relative. It may be intuitive to you, but it's because you're in your own brain reasoning about weapons in a particular context. I would venture to say that most normal players are playing in a context that is either relatively stat-free (Skyrim or Breath of the Wild essentially) or a context where if there are stats the ones that are related to your build's damage output are limited to maybe one (Diablo 3, Dragon Age, WoW), and having your series of weapon-specific and attack-specific stats would essentially come off as being extremely arbitrary (which I am using distinctly from the word "random"). The thing is, I feel like your thing about rapiers has its roots in other systems (notably Pathfinder/3E D&D) and there it works reasonably because it's a limited narrow exception that is essentially opt-in. And D&D is not exactly well-known for its ability to avoid trap characters and its simplicity anyway. PoE justified having one stat determine all damage by saying that "Might" was in reference essentially to the strength of your soul (important for the lore of PoE). The dialogue didn't always support this (might checks might correspond to traditionally strong-person stuff), but it was the gameplay reasoning why a wizard who is good at fireballs would also be good at whacking with a two-handed sword. You might say this is "unintuitive" but ultimately all game design decisions are a balance between abstraction and "accuracy," and personally speaking having one damage stat was a gameplay abstraction that I <3'ed and that had the side effect of opening up a lot of design space (for example, martial casters are a lot easier to create in PoE1 than in similar systems I would say). Your system basically closes up design space by predetermining what builds could be good at what. See my first comment about your definition of "flexibility" versus general uses of the term. Edited to add: boy that went on for a while, sorry for long reply, just bored at work.

I haven't played much deadfire beta (too crashy for me). Is Devotions for the Faithful still an obscenely OP buff/debuff spell? Also everyone saying that priests weren't mandatory in PoE1. I mean, sure, you could play without one (and I have plenty of times). You could also beat the game just solo. That doesn't mean that having a priest was obscenely helpful. I don't understand why people don't think having a random party member who could randomly, instantly counter any affliction in the game (and Suppress anything else) in addition to having unmatched buffs would not make any encounter dramatically easier (plus, past mid-game the priest gets almost as direct damage power as a druid or wizard). Plus, speaking of Devotions, any time I play PotD with reduced party member counts, I can divide the game into two chapters: Before I get Devotions for the Faithful, and After I get Devotions for the Faithful.

Resolve in PE was mediocre, but selectively very good. In the absence of organic concentration/interrupts like in PE1, Resolve would become merely mostly mediocre. Maybe if they bumped it up to +/-2 deflection per point... And anyway, I am also surprised so many people are a fan of the random empower effect. I suggest it might just be people responding positively to a resolve solution that is not the current status quo, which I suspect is fairly unpopular. At which point, people might just be piling on to something in terms of the politician's syllogism instead of any actual merits on the resolve change itself (politician's syllogism: "1. we need to do something. 2. this is something. 3. let's do this") I didn't use empower much early on with Deadfire, but a few recent attempts in between OS X deadfire crashes I've actually used it to empower spells (instead of just getting more casts) and I have to say resolve randomly empowering spells would just be waaaayyy too variant, unless they dramatically change how empower works. Empowering interdiction gives me just some lame accuracy bonus AFAICT, but Empowering minoletta's missiles gives me so many more missiles that I can almost one shot a foe even on Path of the Damned. Not only is it inconsistent across spells, but having my per-encounter-finite spells randomly spike in power sounds to me to be extremely unfun, especially since in PoE stats are symmetric between player and foe (and in my opinion, maintaining the symmetry between the player and foe is an important element of PoE and D&D-like systems). So, I could absolutely crush one encounter by just being lucky with a few consecutive empowered damage spell procs at the start of combat, but I can do the same encounter again and be crushed in turn by getting no procs and the enemies getting a few lucky procs at the start. That is not fun to me. Variance is a natural part of infinity engine/D&D-style games, but that variance has to be in some reasonable bounds. Critical hits and such are fun and fine, and their effects have well-known long-run averages and the individual variance is not too strong. Randomly botching a fight because an important CC doesn't at least graze is an acceptable outcome, especially because such a disastrous outcome will only really happen when I'm doing a fight on the margin of possibility. Constant random empowerment on the other hand...

After watching the lead programmer die to Beetles in POE1, I don't have much faith in the internal team's play-style insights. https://youtu.be/FoyrKRoknp4?t=9m29s There's a difference between being good at a game and good at designing games. Edited to add: otherwise Magic: The Gathering design staff should all be world championship pros at MTG, or all MTG pros should be shoo-ins for new positions at Wizards of the Coast. Or Starcraft 2 players and Blizzard employees. Sometimes there's overlap, but one does not imply the other. Edited further to add: also, early in PoE1 backer beta there was some bug that made those beetles really tough. I remember dying a lot and being extremely disappointed/frustrated but also some later update that fixed it. It could be that's what was happening.

Also, most of the community complaints I've personally seen about Might->Strength is that it hurts flexibility and adds complexity for little gain, and forces some character types to spread their attribute points thinly across Strength and Resolve. (Also, I personally dislike the Tyranny-ification of the stats, and do not like how this change turned resolve from a caster-dump stat into an almost must-have instead of some in-between.) I'm not sure how your suggestion actually addresses community complaints, other than being your own idea.