thelee

I don't have a direct saved game, but this is so consistently repro-able that I'll just find my way to a fight, save the game there, and write down specific steps. I'll have one posted hopefully within a day.

I'm not on my main computer so I can't post a saved game. But despite its buff in a recent patch, goldrot chew appears to be functionally useless. Like most people, I tried using it *after* a character got fatigue, and like most people I was surprised to see that it did nothing for the fatigue debuff. "OK," I thought, "maybe I have to take it pre-emptively." Well, I have a saved game where in the course of a fight, one of my characters gains fatigue. Upon a reload, I tried eating goldrot chew before the fight, but I *still* get fatigued after the fight, even though by some numbers floating around there, -80 to fatigue should keep me in the clear for quite a while!

I've reported this before, but it's still an issue. Simple way to recreate this: hit an enemy with two disabling afflictions with different durations. Good easy example is a fighter's knock down (prone) with a cipher's mental binding (paralyze). If you have a couple of scrolls of paralyze, you can also try using the scroll once, waiting for some time to pass, and then using a second, so you overlap two paralyze durations. When the *first* disabling affliction wears off, movement and action is restored, even though there's still a second disabling affliction with a remaining duration. This results in bizarre situations where you'll see enemies running around and attacking you even though they still have an active "Paralyze" affliction on them. I strongly suspect that whatever boolean used to disable action/movement is being flipped when the first affliction wears off, even though there's still a second affliction active.

Thanks for the pointers, all. I picked up a Fine Warbow that is working aces better than the various reloading weapons I was using before; even if the math means less average focus gain than the reloaders, having a consistent focus gain throughout the fight is working much better than unpredictable bursts. I also think I did some of the early quests in the "wrong" order, at least for a cipher main. I wrote this up after doing the Temple of Eothas in the village, and the many Skuldr Kings/Phantoms/Shades with their high deflection and moderately high every other defense were really giving my cipher a hard time (I managed to finish it after a brutal number of reloads, but it left me really frustrated). Now that I'm doing other early-game quests, I'm soaring through them a lot better. IMO, this is one thing that seriously needs to be considered in terms of progression/balance. The jump in power levels of my wizard/priest/druids when going from level 1 spells per rest to level 1 spells per encounter was insane (level 2 per encounter spells was also great but overkill at that point). Opening every fight with Amplified Wave was still pretty good, though, so at least there's that to look forward to for my Cipher.

I've beaten this game twice before, both on PotD, second time with triple crown solo; I only say this to show that I'm not a complete noob. Still, this time through, I can't help but feel that having my main be a cipher is... woefully underwhelming (I picked up Grieving Mother late in my first run, so I was already pretty high in the power curve and was abusing the Blacsonn+Blunderbuss+Draining Whip loophole). Basically my problems are that: Even when I'm optimizing my powers to target the right defense, it is exceedingly hard to get my powers to consistently land on non-trivial enemies (i.e. enemies other than young wolves, lesser black oozes, etc.) However good mental binding is, it's a bummer if I miss the initial hit, since then the AoE doesn't do anything (same with similar such powers). The high DR and deflection of enemies on PotD means I generate focus at a trickle. And trying to use slow ranged weapons like guns or crossbows means that focus is super-bursty and inconsistent; sometimes I'll be flush, sometimes I'll go an entire fight without generating enough focus to use an extra power. Melee gets me focus a bit more consistently (though mainly if I'm using a single weapon thanks to the accuracy bonus), but on PotD if the enemy turns around and starts attacking my CHARNAME, I'm basically screwed if Eder can't connect a knockdown. The upshot is that in trash fights, I can get off one power at the start and if I'm lucky my alpha strike with a ranged weapon can get me another power (or a higher-level power to start). In harder fights, I can get two and only if I'm lucky with rolls (or there are lots of trash mobs around a harder foe) can I get more. What am I doing wrong here? I realize that the cipher got hit with a few nerfs while I was taking a break/doing triple crown solo, but my impression was that cipher was still pretty solid. Does the cipher just have a really crummy early game? I'm just thinking of Aloth in this run (or my wizard for my first PotD run) and how at low levels, even when out of spells having 2/encounter uses of Arcane Assault helped bring a lot of consistent firepower to fights, whereas I get no such base level of performance with my cipher. (I'm at level 4 right now, for reference.)

Well that's exactly it, right? Either learn at level up or hunt down the grimoire. But you can also just go to the inn and learn all the spells you want for a nominal fee. Like I said its not a big deal, but it is an obvious circumvention of the game mechanics. I'm not sure if it's an "obvious circumvention" but rather something that is explicitly available to you, at a cost. There was talk about "unique spells" back in the day. If that ever comes back, then the copy-into-grimoire aspect would be relevant. But as of now, the having-to-learn-spells aspect is mainly just a rate limit to what spells you can cast (rate-limited either in terms of finding grimoires or available money). I don't think you even need the 2 wizards. I kept Aloth in the stronghold and near the end, I really didn't care about what spells to pick for him since my other wizard already knew them all and could transfer them to Aloth at will (for a nominal fee).

OK, I assumed like 10% of my point based on the rest of my experiences, sorry. The remark is over the top since the rest of the post are still relevant and based on actual in-game experience. It's not alliance-switching then, but the alliance-changing nonetheless seriously brikes foe-only and yellow-circle spells (in addition to a few friend-only spells which intuitively should work on confused allies).

You misunderstand? Auto-slow in combat has always existed. I always have it on. The problem is that it was on, and then randomly in combat it disabled (it didn't flip off, the button was still highlighted), and then re-enabled at some point later.

Confusion causes party members and enemies to actually switch alliance for purposes of targeting during its effect. I can understand why this is the case for Charm/Dominate (this is how charm/dominate were implemented in IE). But I still can't understand why it happens for Confusion. This is unprecedented in the spirit of IE games and while I have no problem with breaking from the IE tradition where it makes sense, implementing Confusion with an alliance-switching mechanic results in unintuitive and perceptually buggy behavior: It makes the Prayer Against Bewilderment priest spell largely useless after-the-fact since it won't target confused allies (they are not treated as allies). It makes Suppress Affliction and similar spells pointless, because they are friendly-only and won't target confused allies (since they are treated as allies). With more and more abilities switching over to Foe-only, a spellcaster-heavy party is becoming increasingly *less* effective against confused enemies, because very few spells now target them. There are very bad and unintuitive interactions with many other abilities (abilities that have jump effects or abilities with area of effects such as Carnage). No one intuitively confuses an enemy thinking that all their party buffs will now strengthen these enemies. And even if the alliance-switching makes sense for Charm/Dominate, it doesn't make sense that Prayer Against Treachery has a "reduce duration" effect noted on it when there's no way to apply it to your party members after they've been charmed/dominated (if it works as intended). This has been a general issue since day 1, but it has gotten worse in 1.05 as more spells have switched to Foe-only, which ironically means confused enemies negate an increasing amount of your party's potential. Ideally it seems like of targetting purposes, instead of a check like: if (spell_type == FOE_ONLY && target.alliance != caster.alliance) { /* ... */ } it should be: if (spell_type == FOE_ONLY && target.alliance != caster.alliance && !target.is_confused) { /* now foe-only spells do not target confused allies */ }

Just had this happen in my first post-1.05 fight (Bounty for the Captain Maramar [or whatever]). I have no idea what triggered it, but all of a sudden the entire fight started going in normal speed, even though the half-speed button was enabled. Curiously, the "half speed" text that normally displays had disappeared. I tried toggling the half-speed button to see if that would help, but nope. At some point in the fight, the half speed resumed. I'd provide a save, but I have no idea what happened. My best guess is some spell or effect that I triggered broke half speed mode, and when it wore off half speed resumed. But I can't imagine what that could be? And c'mon, Obsidian. I realize making a game is hard work, but this feels like a pretty weird regression.

after 1.05 to move more wizard abilities to foe-only, i think proper treatment of confused enemies has become more important. it's unlike previous IE games where confused enemies were still enemies; once enemies become confused you actually become less effective against them, since so many abilities now only explicitly target foes.

The having-to-learn-spells is a red herring, since in the end you'll have every wizard spell in the game without trying too hard (though I remember a few spells being found mainly through "unique" spellbooks [ones with special names, like Willbreaker]). The main differentiation is rather wizards have *more* spells per level (about 50% more) and the trade off for *that* is they can only cast 4 at any time without incurring a severe time penalty.

I know that, I'm just not willing to potentially expose myself to game breaking bugs in a beta patch (like the OS X crash bug).

Can anyone in the beta program comment on whether or not confused allies/enemies still flip allegiances for targeting purposes (it could have been one of the minor, unlisted fixes)? Because if they do, then in my mind all the wizard foe-only targeting changes are nerfs. (As I mentioned on the patch notes comment thread itself, my favorite thing to do is to drop non-foe AoE spells--like Freezing Pillar--on confused enemies and watch them die.) EDIT: though maybe I'm alone in thinking that the wizard actually generally did need nerfs rather than buffs (though mostly on the spells that cause confusion/prone)

Also, how does this prevent save scumming? Isn't the game you're loading already saved, so to speak?

I can't tell if this (and other similar changes) are nerfs or buffs. On the one hand, I can see it being easier to use, but on the other my absolute favorite thing to do was drop this on a batch of confused enemies and watch them die, which is no longer possible with foe-only targetting. EDIT: also, increasingly fewer and fewer wizard spells are general AoE spells, which in my mind greatly diminishes some of the tactical flexibility (and challenge) of using them. if these changes were intended to be buffs, they should have been made more directly powerful rather than changing how they work :-/

That might actually be true, but (at least up to hard difficulty on which I played) it's rarely necessary to stack several defense buffs on your party members or debuffs on enemies. In fact it happened to me so rarely that I only distinctly remember the fights with the Adra Dragon and Thaos. It might be that stacking some effects would improve my groups performance during many other fights, but it's hardly ever resulting in such an advantage that I actually did it, let alone considered it necessary. But this is why I advocate increasing resistances and effects/duration of spells and abilities across the board, at least on Hard and PotD difficulty. To be fair, I think the difficulty could be bumped up across the board as a component to this. I started off on Hard then immediately re-started on PotD because it felt like I didn't need most of the abilities/options available to me to get through fights. (And even on PotD there was a chunk of it after I hit level 10 but long before fighting Thaos that I started just breezing through most fights, especially so after hitting level 12.)

I think the issue is that "statistically noteworthy" is more important than "perceptible" from a design perspective. The talents aren't geared towards being "perceptible": a +5 bonus to deflection (or +6 from Weapon and Shield style) amounts to a statistically noteworthy but varyingly perceptible effect. In the neutral case, no human being is going to be able to tell between an enemy's 15/35/50 miss/graze/hit distribution and a 20/35/45 miss/graze/hit distribution over the course of a fight (at least without repeated experimentation and careful data tracking to eliminate the possibility of random chance). However, in the case where you're stacking defenses, then a 95/5/0 miss/graze/hit distribution is going to be much more perceptible compared to a 100/0/0 miss/graze distribution (which brings this back to the increasing returns topic). I think this is what everyone keeps missing; any defense boost is powerful if stacked properly (Dignity has been making this point with regards to focusing on just deflection), so shooting for a goal of "perceptibility" for a talent design is probably not the best. Making them more useful is more important than making them more perceptible, and for this reason I mostly agree with you on your second paragraph; enemy spellcasters just seem a bit too rare (and less threatening than the Deflection-targeting enemies).

That's not quite the problem. If the effect were bigger, it would have to be sufficiently big to compensate for the relatively smaller impact it has among talents. There, you run the risk of creating a talent that effectively is "become nearly immune to mind-control effects"; I might not actually have a problem with this, but the designers have made it a point to state that they don't like the idea of straight-out immunities (and personally I like the fact that basically every enemy I fight--even Thaos or the Adra Dragon--appear to be equally susceptible to all possible debuffs). So it seems like the best solution is to retweak all the attacks so that Will (and the other defenses) are not second-class citizens when it comes to attacks you really want to guard against. Right this is the primary issue the fact that Will defense "doesn't do what it says on the tin." So what tends to happen to unaware players is they spread out their defenses, try to up their will and use talents like mental fortress and items that increase will to shore up that defense only to have it completely ingnored anyway and wonder why the talents aren't helping. Also Khalid I get the point, as I have said YES there are some enemies that don't target deflection, but the earliest enemies you run into (spores) and arguably the most annoying charmers you run into (Fampyrs due to their one track, mage hunting AI) both target deflection. So 2 of the 3 major charm users in the game target deflection. Yes Mental Fortress helps stack vs this but guess what so does superior defleciton (+5 def) AND helps vs 95+% of the attacks you face in the game. You can list mobs til you're blue in the face but to the general populace who weren't aware why their talents and gear weren't helping here's your reason plain as day. You want mental fortress to help? Stack it on top of deflection. And even so you get far more return on talents that stack generic deflection than conditional ones like these since they help vs nearly eveything, not a tiny list comprising of a handful of mobs. One nitpick, despite your otherwise very good points: deflection on a person you keep back (like a wizard) is not useful 95+% of the time if they're never getting hit. It is in fact nearly 0% useful. Ideally, the alternate defenses would still be useful because spells and spell-like abilities are more likely to hit your party members who are at distance (either because of area of effect, spell jumps, or because of ranged AI). Of course, this is ideally, so for example the fact that Fampyrs use Deflection for their mage-seeking control ability is a major bummer. Hypothetically it may still be that Fampyr/Spores are sufficiently uncommon that the designers thought that it's not too big of a deal that they attack Deflection, so stacking Will/Reflex/Fort is still useful for the fights that involve enemy ciphers/druids/priests/wizards... though in practice, from my own experience completing Path of the Damned, fights with Fampyrs and Spores are the most problematic fights, right behind Thaos and the Adra Dragon, so even if enemy ciphesr/druid/priest/wizard fights were much more common the importance of those defenses is not so significant because they're not helping me when I need them the most.

it might be conceivable that it's not a calculation issue, but just a specific case where the game is too-eagerly clearing away movement-impairing effects as you say. like, maybe in my related bug, the Fampyrs are moving around but are still suffering the reflex/deflection/etc penalties of being Paralyzed. Of course, only Obsidian would know, but they're mum about this (it would be nice just to acknowledge that this is in their bug tracker).

Do you know if this applies to _any_ debuff effect or just effects that disable enemy movement? It would be really troublesome if it was any debuff effect as that means Chill Fog's short-duration blind effect may be sapping away alot of other debuff effects.

don't know if bumps are allowed, but i posted this on a weekend and maybe no one saw it. surely i'm not the only one with this?

Are you sure about this? They may use a deflection check to hit, but the proc itself may use a will save (I know fungi strike with an attack roll, i just assumed there was an additional will save or something, a lot like how a rogue's Blind Strike works). The Fampyr stuff is super annoying though. I just now immediately use Durance to put the proper "Protection against" spell immediately on my wizard(s), even if there's no way the Fampyr could see them at the start of combat. At least it casts so quickly that I can generally get it off before the projectile makes its way to the wizard. By the way, @the streaker, I ended up creating a graph anyway because I like graphs (click to enlarge): The above graph shows your "effective total health" based on how many total attacks you can survive (because they are grazes, misses, etc) given any score of Defense. It assumes the attacker has a weapon that does an average of 10 damage and that the attacker has 50 accuracy, and that you have 100 endurance/health (you can adjust these assumptions in the spreadsheet to reflect any given in-game fight you're in). Note that the graph actually understates how extreme it is - at a Defense score just past what it can render, you have infinite effective health because every attack the attacker makes is a miss. This graph doesn't take into account damage reduction, but the underlying principle is the same. As you can see from the graph, though, each additional point in defense results in increasing returns (resulting in what could almost be termed a "hockey stick" graph). You can take a look at the spreadsheet (and make a copy yourself to play with the numbers) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ls3hndHjh2ghYcci7woRAEnhdh63w5uGEf9GZ684Db8/edit?usp=sharing

By the way, the reason why your experience is like this is because these types of talents are most effective on characters who already have high defense. Basically, defense has increasing returns (i.e. going from 0-10 defense is not nearly as good as going from 140-150). I guess in this sense these are "trap" talents because you could be picking them up sub-optimally. And anyway, a graze is still way better than a full hit, especially when it comes to something like paralyze or domination. Why do you say that? The accuracy roll is 1-100, so a +10 defense shifts everything up by 10%. You have to roll 10 less to miss, 10 less to hit, 10 less to crit. Everything on the scale shifts up. I see it as linear benefit, unless your defense is either incredibly low as to always get hit, or incredibly high as to aways miss. Most challenging fights, you'll be somewhere in the middle. Look at this way. Let's say your defense is such that there is a 50% chance to miss. If you get a +25 defense bonus, you halved the amount of damage/attacks that are going to hit you (50% of the attacks that will hit you versus 25%). By contrast, if you have a defense such that there is a 90% chance to miss, then you only need an additional +5 more defense to halve the amount of damage/attacks that are going to hit you (10% of the attacks that will hit you versus 5%). At 98% chance to miss, you only need +1 more defense, etc. Just because the numbers in question are purely additive does not mean that the effect is therefore linear. Quite the contrary, in fact. EDIT: my numbers might look insanely hypothetical, but in Path of the Damned some enemies have huge defenses. Against an enemy with e.g. 120 deflection, getting that deflection debuffed down by the first 20 is more important than the next 20. (Imagine a character with 40 accuracy and examine why). That's not to say that more isn't always better, it's just that non-linear scaling means that each point has a different additive value. Your numbers aren't wrong, but that's a convoluted way of interpreting them. Yes, at 90% chance to miss, a 5 defense bonus halves your chance to get hit, but that statistic isn't very meaningful. A 5 defense bonus shifts the accuracy rolls up by 5 points, wherever it's added. If you compare it to damage, an increase of 10 damage per hit to a base of 10 damage is 100% increase, whereas an increase of 10 damage to a base of 20 damage is 50% increase. That doesn't make the 10 damage per hit any less valuable when added to the higher base damage weapon (assuming equal attack speeds), even though judging purely based on percentages would suggest that it's half as valuable. 10 more damage per hit is 10 more damage per hit, wherever it's added. Yes, it's the same absolute change, but each point has different net worth. An extra 10 damage on top of someone doing only 10 damage is worth much more than an extra 10 damage on top of someone doing 100 damage. In my hypothetical path of the damned example, without debuffing the enemy at all, your attacks will connect 1/20 times; at that rate, your party is pretty much screwed and the enemy is pretty much untouchable. With a debuff of -20, your attacks will connect with that enemy 1/4 times. Now that fight is possible. With a further debuff of -20, you'll now connect ~1/2 times. It makes the fight a little easier and that -20 debuff is still useful, but the leap in fight feasibility is much less dramatic than the first -20 debuff. If you still don't understand why these are non-linear returns, let me try some other explanations. It's the reason why some games like World of Warcraft have really weird, non-intuitive equations that map defense/armor to a % damage reduced, it's so that each additional point produces linear returns, i.e. each additional point in armor results in the same net damage decrease, no matter what your starting value is; some people incorrectly assume that these are diminishing returns, but this is wrong. If you're still not getting it, here are two more examples: a) In calculus terms it's whether dx/dy (or the first derivative of a function f() called f'()) for a given function of x is 0 (linear) or not (non-linear). If I use my Path of the Damned example and define a function f(x) = y where x is a defense rating and y is how many expected total attacks you can survive against an enemy, then if you've ever taken calculus you could hopefully see that f'(x) is > 0 (hint, at a certain value of x f(x) goes to infinite [because every attack now misses], whereas even the value of f(x - 1) would have been finite), which subsequently proves that defense has increasing returns. b) Economics also has this core notion, it's all about the marginal utility of each additional point. If each point gives the same benefit as the point preceding it, then it's linear; if it's more (like in most PnP-style RPG systems) then its increasing, if it's less (some RPG systems do this) it's diminishing. Like, $1000 is worth a lot to a person who only makes $10,000/year, but $1000 is not worth very much to a person who makes $1billion/year. This is a case where the same absolute value of money has diminishing returns. You can say it's the same value, but it's not terribly meaningful to make that observation. And if you disagree, well, you'll have to first dive deep and understand why virtually every developed (and many developing) countries have progressive tax systems, they're all predicated on the notion that money had diminishing returns for any given individual, even though we're taking numbers that could be the same between different individuals (and why many economists think flat tax systems are sub-optimal sine flat tax assumes linear returns in utility for additional money). EDIT: if you're not still clear on how defense provides increasing returns, I can provide a graph which hopefully will illustrate it a bit more clearly.

Saw this thread get bumped and was just about to suggest the same thing. And just to chime in -- it has nothing to do with debuff priorities or stronger debuffs overpowering weaker debuffs. My issue, for example, is literally the exact same debuff re-applied over and over. People can use my saved game and try it out, you'll see enemies running around with Paralyzed debuff remaining.