thelee

In my experience, people overweight probability of success, even when the numbers are right there. I.E. you show someone 50% chance, and even though they intuitively know what a coin flip is, they may still end up disappointed with the results (especially given how prone to apparent "runs" of failures something like that would be). 80% chance of success on a die roll sometimes feels like a near-sure thing, but 1/5 failures is still pretty common and it won't be that uncommon to have runs of failures. Even 95% chance of success... if you ever played Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale those 1/20 chance of critical hits or critical failures come up a lot more than you might intuitively think from such a huge, seemingly-near-100% number. Anyway, don't be like those people on Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft forums who are constantly alleging that the RNG is broken It's a natural tendency to try to find meaning in random patterns, but they're just coincidences

FWIW, I got this bug and continued on with no problems (other than having an extra card in everyone's decks).

With Pillars of Eternity coming to consoles and that small patch we had recently, this gives me hope that there's still some dev time going into pillars. If that's the case, I'm bumping this thread for visibility. It's not a critical stability issue, but it seems to me that it is important mechanically.

Original thread here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/92963-game-got-into-a-broken-state-after-encountering-a-harpy-monk-using-nethys-blessing/ Basically game got into hella broken state when using Nethys, selecting a Harpy Monk to be on top, and then encountering it automatically. I had a similar brokenness occur again just now using Nethys in a Shrine to Lamashtu (take 2 mental damage upon encountering a blessing); used Nethys and ordered a Blessing of Norgorber on top. Encountered it. Then things got really screwy. First of all, I got a damage animation, but didn't have to discard anything. I then got prompted for "Check/Bury?" (since this is a Blessing of Norgorber). I opted to do a check, with my druid, and I got prompted to do a Divine roll. I set it up, and rolled a 17. I then got dealt 17 damage! I had to discard my entire hand (obviously), and then I gained the Blessing of Norgorber. Between the Monk Harpy and the Blessing of Norgorber, I'm going to say that it's probably not a good idea to use the Blessing of Nethys to put anything on top that would trigger an "on encounter" effect.

Deck 4 scenario, the one with the Black Monk and the Harpy Monks, on heroic difficulty. Had druid at Temple. I used the Blessing of Nethys (the one that lets you re-order the top two of location before exploring), I saw a Harpy Monk, and put the Harpy Monk on top. Finished the re-order, and I encountered the Harpy Monk. Boy.... did things get weird after that. The Harpy Monk appeared, and I got the sound effect prompting me for the Wisdom die roll, but no die and no "Wisdom" prompt. I couldn't do anything, so I exited to main menu and did continue (sometimes when things get a little screwy this fixes things). Boy this made it worse. When I continue-ed, I started off on the map view, the Harpy Monk was still being encountered, but I had no idea what I was suppossed to do on this map view. So I exited back to main menu, and then continued. Still map menu. This time I clicked on a location, and my druid suddenly moved there, as if I was in a movement mode.Then the rest of the characters went through their wisdom check, as normal. So I thought things were OK. Up until the game returned to my druid for the actual combat check. My spells/weapons were blocked as if I had failed a wisdom check, but there was no Harpy Monk and there was no way for me to use an item, and there were no dice or checks being prompted. I think the game got really confused because my druid was no longer in the location that the Harpy Monk was. Tried some main menu > continue visits again, but was just stick in this permanently broken state. Ended up having to forfeit the scenario. I don't know how bug reports work for Pathfinder Adventures, but I'd be happy to provide any logs if they exist.

Personally, I like the idea that a legendary item is essentially "unique." Once you get it, you can't get another copy for your current party (that is, if I understand adventure deck construction correctly). (Though you can still get more copies in your "unclaimed" by judiciously buying chests.) If I were to spit-ball a suggestion, it would be to select all treasure cards independent of how many copies you have in your collection. They don't have to be equal weight, but you could be more flexible (fractional) with your weights. Like maybe an uncommon is only twice as likely as a legendary to be picked, instead of potentially 4x, regardless of how many copies of the uncommon you have (even if you have a 1-1 ratio). You still leave the caps in place (4/3/2/1) to limit the number of potential copies that can float in a given party+adventure, which basically acts as a second level to dictate card rarity. This leaves open the possibility that someone with an incomplete collection but good RNG luck at chests may have a better overall treasure card power level than someone with a complete 4/3/2/1 collection. The only way around that I think would be to make it possible to "select" non-existent cards - e.g. if an uncommon is chosen that you don't have a copy of, then the game replaces it with a common of the same type instead (or doesn't include a treasure card at all). But honestly I think this is an edge case that doesn't deserve any attention to fix. If people are worried about their inability to spend lots of treasure chests to get lots of legendaries, that might be an orthogonal problem. Maybe the drop rates of legendaries should be increased, and people can just rely on farming them into their unclaimed?

I also changed my vote to a no. Less RNG-exploitation, and the hard cap prevents flooding your collection with junk.

Whew! Thanks for that response. Guess I can go back to buying lots of treasure chests! (Maybe I'll actually get a Paralyze for once for my mental-based Charlatan) (edit: hey whaddya know, after using up all my gold to buy 8 treasure chests, the last one had a paralyze in it. the rng gods are kind today)

I mean, I guess Obsidian probably doesn't want any extreme RNG-gaming, but surely there's a compromise are of some sort? Just a suggestion off the top of my head: when selecting treasure cards for an adventure, card counts are normalized? So a card you have 1 copy of in collection counts as 1 copy, where as a card you have 5 copies of might only count for 2.5 or 3 (depending on granularity), possibly capping out at 3 or using some sort of log-scale normalization such that you asymptotically slow down how much a card copy is worth. (But the "real" count is still used when determining how many copies of a card you're allowed to have in your party.)

I really appreciate the direct response but... I'm honestly astounded. I got the Obsidian Edition, which I understand already unlocks a lot (all?) of loot. I was opening lots of chests to try and get more of the rarer/better ones, but you're telling me instead I'm diluting the chance I'll ever pick up those rarer/better ones in the first place? I guess now I'm juggling between wanting a "complimentary" copy in my unclaimed tab versus the risk of diluting my location decks with lots and lots of Smiths. EDIT: and yep I sent a small note to BAdler

Recently got this on steam. Is there no more an option to salvage cards now that we have the collection? Looking at older threads, it looked like it was an important thing to be able to do for people who wanted to placate the RNG gods for farming for specific cards. Is there any way to do this now? Deliberate change?

Good to know, thanks! Luckily I looked ahead after picking my roles so I didn't "waste" any power/card feats. It is a bummer I won't get to pick up many more power feats, though (though I guess that leads to more replayability if there are more variations I can do on a character).

Picked up the steam version (after playing the android version for a few days after hearing about the PC announcement) and I'm having a blast. Only question: anyone know if there are further adventures going to be added? I briefly saw a 'quest' mode on my tablet, but that appears to have gone away with the new patch. Basically itchin' to pick up more power feats and have more opportunities to grind for Deck 6 cards (instead of just repeatedly doing adventure #6 over and over again).

+100. I ended up loving the guidebook, and reading up on all the lore of the game. I wish I had volume 1 as a hardcover printout.

Huh, you are right: technically it was Black Isle Hey, don't forget about Fallout: New Vegas.

4. i actually thought they had a lot of great light/medium armors, though some of that might be exclusively in WM1/2. 6. +1. I thought this was another area Tyranny did well. Stealth in PoE is for backstabbing or for really esoteric use cases, whereas in Tyranny not only did all your main character's talent trees have some sort of stealth-enabled ability, but some abilities could do very different (powerful) things if you did it from stealth (like Lantry has an attack that does some bonus damage/debuffing, but can paralyze for ~10s if done from stealth).

It could be a net positive however. Smaller party sizes allow for potentially more intimate smaller mob fights and hopefully hopefully more of a focus on micro during fights. Hopefully if anything the smaller party size allows for the game to not follow the formula that so many real time with pause rpgs tend to have, where you merely wait for spells and abilities to be off cool down and just spam them. I sort of understood the reasoning behind Tyranny's shrinking down to a 4-size party to streamline the experience for more people, but at 4 you just had so few tactical/strategic options in combat. 5 might be OK (since I imagine tactical complexity is O(N!) for party size N since you're dealing with permutations/combinations). I still personally think 6 is best, simply because even numbers gives you some symmetry. I definitely think they should take the approach from Tyranny where some fights had a greater focus on reaction/micro and not just strategy/tactics. It's one thing to just make sure the dragon is positioned away from your party so breath attacks don't wipe you out (PoE), it's another thing to be fighting the head of the disfavored or the voices of nerat and you have to be constantly weaving in and out of range to dodge different attacks (tyranny). It reminded me a bit of the sorts of high-level raiding fights in early World of Warcraft, in a good way.

Was just thinking about this, and how quickly you get to even level 3; I think I can get there in 20-30 minutes without trying, and most of that is just running around [to springberry, sparfel, the ruins, valewood, inn, rest, tree, solve the grain issue/save the chef*; and then level 4 is just a couple quests from gilded vale. It's actually kind of a neat trick about how they avoid the power-curve problem of most RPG systems where the first few levels just suck (I remember playing BG1 as a relative newbie and the experience of prolonged level 1-2 party combat being extremely painful). Instead, in PoE it's basically just a slightly extended "tutorial mode" before you have a decent number of abilities. Similar to a suggestion I made upthread, they could probably keep/start with the 1-16 level of range of WM2 (and then add a couple levels on top, either in vanilla PoE2 or in DLC) and just give you larger amounts of experience early on so that you scream through the low experience thresholds of levels 1-6/8. This would be a good "recovering from being almost killed" act and would start people off in the middle of the level curve. * when I think about it, i seem to remember that i used to be able to get to level 3 without having to do any gilded vale quests (i remember Eder automatically joining with Defender). did they scale down experience rewards?

I think this is good for a couple levels' worth of difference, but in general I found the level scaling to be underwhelming. I think it just boosted enemy stats, it didn't make them have more powerful abilities or have combat include more powerful monsters. When I come back to Act 3 after leveling up in White March, I can barely notice any difference when I have level scaling enabled. There's no way high-level scaling is going to create an equally-balanced experience for a 1 to 12 or 1 to 16 level difference without a lot of manual effort. At that point you might as well just bump the character down to level 1 or start everyone off at high level and save yourself the headache.

level 12 for vanilla. White March I raised it to 14, White March II raised it to 16. I don't know, that still strikes me as quite high to start. I don't particularly care which way a campaign is set (except to note that I thought Throne of Bhaal was awful because its high-level gameplay was extremely poorly conceived/balanced), I just want to be able to feel a reasonable progression/advancement in my character. Even starting at level 12 (instead of 16) puts you pretty close to the top of the power curve. When you're close to casting spells like Wall of Many Colors or Hand of Weal and Woe (both of which can single-handedly win you epic fights on their own), or use an ability like the paladin's Sacred Immolation, or you're already able to cast Gaze of the Adragon, abilities/spells are going to have to start becoming degenerately powerful to keep up a meaningful sense of progression. And like I said, I personally really disliked Throne of Bhaal for precisely this reason: gameplay and whatever class/kit balance and sense of progression pretty much fell apart once you started getting high-level abilities or being able to memorize level 9 spells. To be fair, the D&D versions I've played have never been particularly great at high-levels (much less Bioware's ToB interpretation), and J.E. Sawyer noted this sort of D&D balancing arms-race in his GDC 2016 talk. So Obsidian could do better being aware of the problem, but it still makes me nervous.

I'd like a ship as a new stronghold, or an island. A+ ideas. Especially if I can take that ship and travel with it.

I wonder if they could split the difference, use this kind of approach, but have an accelerated experience gain up until ~level 8-10 so the game still plays like a moderate/high-level campaign. Me neither. Lord knows I've created tons of PoE level 1 characters. Personally, also, I didn't find the keep mechanic that great... I thought Tyranny's was way better. So if they destroy that keep and give us something more like Tyranny's, I'd be down with that.

Just wondering how levels are going to be handled given Pallegina, Eder, and Aloth (and even CHARNAME) are confirmed coming back. BG2 was able to handle this because BG1/ToTSC left off at a modest power level (level 7-8ish for BG, level 10-11ish for ToTSC). By contrast, I feel like the power level at the end of White March part II (level 16) is almost akin to the end of BG2. I mean, no transparently broken spells and items (that wouldn't really happen until Throne of Bhaal... or if you were clever enough to use Simulacrum to get infinite uses of Time Stop), but spells like Wall of Many Colors, Minor Avatar, Hand of Weal and Woe, or Tornado are pretty extremely high up on the power scale. If PoE2 picks up at level 16 (or even level 12), there would have to be extreme power creep (both self and enemies) to give yourself meaningful progression throughout the game (plus any expansions). On the other hand, it would be also extremely weird if your formerly powerful party members and yourself--someone who conquered a keep, defeated dragons, and fended off an invading army both human and eyeless--were reduced to level 1 shadows of your former self. Thoughts? Speculation on possible approaches?

I read about this on a news site that speculated that it is Fallout New Orleans, and used as evidence some forum threads here. In the interest of future journalistic integrity I just want to create this thread to make it perfectly clear to any other journalist digging in this forum that it seems patently obvious that the symbols represent Eder, referencing Eothas, and the quote is even in Eder's speaking style. That is all.

Update: I tested with White March 1 traps, and it appears traps get 2x their *bonuses* too. All White March 1 traps have +10 listed bonus to accuracy, and in practice they get +20. This makes Killing Bolt, Storm of Holy Fire, and Chaotic Orb traps even that much better. Recall that Wilting Wind from White March 2 also gets double bonus to accuracy, but still I can't quite figure out what's up with Freezing Rake and Infestation of Spiders, because Freezing Rake appears to be getting +40 total bonus, and spiders ~+60. The math only seems to work out if the game is only capable of displaying a max of +10 for traps and these two were intended to get +20 and +30 respectively.