thelee

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.

It really messes up Hard/Path of the Damned where you only have 2 rests and have to be more strategic, though you could handicap yourself and just not go below a certain number (i.e. if you have 11 casts don't go below 7, same diff). For people who said the problem went away - any ideas how you did it? I noticed Hirvas (whatever his name is) actually lost a few spell casts (going from 13 to 11) in between some stronghold chill-out time, and I have no idea what caused it. Would love to do whatever that was over and over again on him, Aloth, and Durance.

I noticed this before, but it didn't really trip me up until the Champion of Berath quest, where I tried to use multiple Scrolls of Paralysis to keep all the supporting Fampyrs locked down. Simply put, repeatedly using Scrolls of Paralysis led to very misleading durations on enemies. Sometimes I see them momentarily unfreeze and begin doing some action before refreezing (and sometimes those actions go off, sometimes they're cancelled). Worst is when enemies that still have "Paralysis" listed as one of their debuffs (with a > 0s duration remaining) are running around and acting normally! See attached screenshot of a very active enemy that nonetheless is listed with a Paralysis debuff. EDIT: for some reason I guess cursors don't show up in screenshots. Anyway, the Fampyr in question is the one with the tooltip, who is obviously in the middle of doing an ability even though >10s remain on his Paralysis debuff. I feel like this must be a general issue with re-casting/refreshing/re-casting debuffs and I just normally don't notice since rarely do I have fights that last long enough that I'm repeatedly trying to debuff an enemy with the same debuff. I feel like while fighting the boss at the bottom of Caed Nua (who, on Path of the Damned, has extremely high stats so I was trying to debuff her repeatedly), I would see her stats jump back up to higher/normal levels even though my repeated debuffs still showed as active (such as Miasma of Dull-Mindedness or Cipher's Borrowed Instinct). If any devs want a case to recreate the issue, this is my saved game from right before finishing the Champion of Berath quest. Just keep trying to Scroll of Paralysis-lock them, you'll run into the issue pretty quickly: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d74eg3ih5e4r8h5/8a09285fa7044c9bbff85e2e949532e3%2017943107%20RaedricsHold.savegame?dl=0

See title. In fact, the only way to get them to show up consistently for me is to switch the event log, scroll all the way down, and then switch back to the outstanding notifications tab. Only then will the item show all the properties. (This could be a red herring and some other unrelated thing--maybe time--causes the item to get its properties). Attached is a screenshot showing a case where the item for sale has no special properties listed.

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.

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.

I've had this crop up. I don't know what caused it. All I know is that my character keeps complaining about being interrupted, (though nothing in the combat log indicates it), and every time I try to attack with an implement no projectile comes out, and every time I try to cast a spell, while the casting animation completes, nothing happens (though thankfully I don't lose a spell cast). I first noticed it after I cast the 3rd level Minor Blights spell, don't know if it's related. I ended up reloading the game and it cleared the issue away, so I don't think a save game would help, unfortunately.

If you think in terms of D&D scale, a +10 bonus is roughly equivalent to a +2 bonus on a d20. I feel like +2 is actually what is used in D&D for feats/items/tricks that boost saves (+2 being the standard number recommended by the Dungeon Master's guide for adjustments), and you'd never see anything like a +5 (which is roughly +25). EDIT: also, even with the graze system, a +10 bonus translates to that much more misses 1-for-1. Just because there are grazes doesn't mean that the bonus is less effective. The only time where +10 doesn't translate into that many more misses is when the enemy accuracy was so high that misses were pushed completely off the hit table, and in that case, a +10 bonus both reduces the crit rate of the enemy and pushes grazes/misses back onto the hit table. Basically, what I'm saying is that it's not the hit/miss/graze system's fault the bonus is not completely obvious. The bonus is intended to be a situational adjustment to your defense that helps a bit in the long run, not an immunity, much like the +2 save feats in D&D.

Note that it's not just resource rings that screw up spell cast limits for companions, those Bonus Level X talents also trigger and screw things up. At least I can mentally keep track of how many spell casts they are actually suppossed to have (i.e. Hiravavawhatever has 13 level 1 spell casts but I know he should only have 5, so I just stop when he gets to 8.)

I also have this bug on my hunter. I think mine also triggered when trying to do a shift-sequence. Reloading/dismissing does not restore the ability.

First time I tried I actually got an error message in the combat log (like, a debug error message it looked). I didn't pay it much heed (I really wish I screencapped it), and then tried again shortly afterward and got granted Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage. Whatever Grimoire Imprint buff I got eventually expired, but the extra spell never went away. Even after I manually learned Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage, it still is there, I now have two copies in my grimoire. It's really weird. See attached screenshot. In the screenshot, I have 0 available 3rd-level spell casts, yet Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage is still available to cast (I didn't actually try to see if I could cast it). What's going on??

See attached screenshot. Prayer Against Imprisonment seemingly shortened/wiped away my CHARNAME's debuff; the debuff no longer appears on the tooltip, _but_ my character is still inactive (and still has a paralyzed icon in the display above him), and stays inactive until what I imagine is the normal duration for the debuff.

well WTF. I rebooted, and everything is working just fine now. GRRRRRRR I'm a software engineer and this kind of stuff makes me insane. Cue requisite IT Crowd "Have you tried turning it off and on" montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8

0. Put game music back at my normal setting (85%; I also tried 100% just in case that mattered, but just made the distortion louder) 1. Verified integrity of game cache. Didn't do anything. 2. Had an nVidia driver update awaiting, since I use its HD Audio, gave that a try. Didn't do anything. 3. don't know how to "attach" dxdiag file, so here is a dropbox share link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rtbtjqmz4mjn4g8/DxDiag.txt?dl=0 4. same thing with output log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5kozs0pyc44misj/output_log.txt?dl=0 Curiously, I tried to use nvidia's shadowplay to record the effect for evidence, but the simple act of running the game with it enabled mitigated it to a large degree (though it still occasionally popped). Turning it back off brought the effect back full force. Could have just been coincidence, but eh... Anyway, back to playing with 0% music.

Nothing changed on my system other than this patch. I played the game just fine yesterday pre-patch. The moment I start it up after patch installed, all sorts of music and sound distortion. Working on verifying game cache and getting dxdiag... EDIT: correction, it's possible that there was a windows system update, since I had to re-log in to my PC which only happens when an automatic reboot happens overnight.

Actually, now that I'm playing the game, normal SFX (speech, sound effects, ambient noise) occasionally surfaces the same problem, little *pops* in the sound, though nothing nearly as bad as what's happening to the music. C'mon guys! What is this??

My music is now heavily distorted and warped after installing the 1.04 patch. Normal SFX appear to be fine. I don't know what to do about this (other than set music volume to 0%). Anyone else have this? I can't imagine I'm the only one with such a severe problem, which makes me wonder how no one had this in QA/Beta. EDIT: the opening music (that starts playing when Obsidian Entertainment shows up) sometimes snaps to and becomes correct after a few seconds, but the main menu music stays bad no matter what. It's hard to describe, it's like static-y, slowed down, and distorted. I'd provide a save game, but it happens right from the get-go. EDIT 2: loaded a game, the music is also broken in game. 0% music volume it is. Please fix!