thelee

just to add on to my last post: intellect is all around useful, i consider it an S-tier stat on virtually ever build, but on some classes it's lower and closer to equal footing as dexterity dexterity is a king stat in RTWP. especially for DPS, it's close to a 3% true damage multiplier. even for non-DPS, being responsive in fights is extremely valuable. perception and might are roughly similar in terms of effectiveness for pure offense - they translate to about a 2% true damage multiplier. on lower difficulties, might is more effective. on higher difficulties, perception is more effective. both become less effective as the game goes on, especially perception (eventually when you have 100% chance to hit/crit, the returns are pretty small). (edit: for offensive casters, there are few other damage bonuses, so might's effectiveness doesn't drop off as much as it does for weapon-based classes.) ideally you want to balance these out (for the same reason to the fact that to maximize the area of a quadrangle with a fixed perimeter, you prefer a square instead of a rectangle), but there are some cases where a class might want more of one than the other: for barbarians, because carnage only happens on a hit (not all the time), perception actually gives super-linear returns to barbarians up to a certain point, so barbarians want to invest in perception more rangers already have tons of accuracy bonuses, so perception is less valuable. for healer casters, might is more important for debuff casters, perception is more important etc resolve and constitution both get a bit of the short-shrift because they're defensive stats and defensive isn't how you win fights. resolve has increasing returns so in certain builds can be infinitely powerful. i tend to prefer stealing points out of resolve over stealing points from constitution since on potd i want my squishies to be able to survive incidental spells or hits (i also get frequently get Tough). edit: there are always exceptions/nuances plus the stats aren't strongly thresholded so it's hard to end up with a bad build, so don't feel like these are ironclad rules. for example, some casters might want to do with less dexterity in favor of other stats, since while being responsive (and avoiding interrupts) is good, for some casters all high dexterity means is that you just run out of spells faster, whereas putting those points into might/perception will make those same spells (albeit slower) individually more impactful. at the same time, there are a couple of items that really want you to have 25 might, so if you want to take a particularly item-flavored build, investing heavily in might at teh expense of other stats might make sense to you.

whoa whoa, hold on there. in turn-based mode, many ppl have argued that dex isn't that useful, especially for casters. edit: i haven't done much turn-based so i can't speak it to personally, but it seems like the main advice these days. in real-time mode, dex is still basically a king stat (shared with intellect).

a glass cannon build would be pretty good for staff and pikes, a build i used to do a lot back in the poe1 days. make sure you have a good tank with good engagement and you can reach over their shoulder to safely output a lot damage. drop constitution lower than you'd like without fear and invest in dex, perception. (i'd suggest dropping resolve too but resolve is used for some in-game chat resolutions. though most dialogue checks use your actual passive skills.) rogues in particular do well with this at-distance approach, especially streetfighter, since they can output a lot of damage and they tend not to be very tough. many quarterstaffs do fall into "stat stick" territory and are geared for casters or spellswords, but i like to use street sweeper a lot - the cleansing ability is real nice in harder fights. you can enchant it to only cleanse away buffs, but i frankly find the cleansing of debuffs to also be useful if a party member gets his with something bad, i can whack them a few times. pikes are also good, especially their weapon proficiency modal, which is an easy way to lower deflection. ngati's tusk has a sweeeeet effect (lowers enemy defenses based on your survival). it's part of my anti-megaboss toolkit.

big difference is that every bolt from avenging storm would restore phrases (3 or all). for longer fights, tekehu just becomes a super-machine, whereas revenge is a one-shot. too bad he doesn't get summons.

Tekehu SC chanter just suddenly became an S-tier companion

did you free the slaves, or just kill the slavers? did you ever talk to aeldys (before a shrewd proposition)?

i always try to have some sort of fun thematic selection for my mainchar and build around that. frequently I use magic: the gathering color pie and color combos to guide it. a little bit similar to you i end up trying to have 2 front-liners, 1 mixed role (can do melee or ranged), and 2 safe-in-the-back. I slot my protagonist in there; if it's one of the double-roles i pick an NPC to complement any gaps and help flesh out that category. generally i'm not picky about the specific *type* of role (e.g. dd vs cc, off-tank vs melee dps), so long as i have enough damage output that battles don't crawl to a halt. I allow myself one mercenary just so I can get a little bit more fun character planning done in a given run without necessarily blowing out the difficulty by over-min-maxing my entire party. (and also sometimes it's hard to fill out the roles with just obsidian npcs given a particular mainchar. in particular, there's basically no priests, so if i need support i might roll a merc priest or other support char instead of using xoti for the umpteenth time) edit: in the past i've tried mixing up the mix a bit more, e.g. more melee, but in practice i have issues just managing 3 or more melee-ers (incl animal companions from a ranger) with the choke points i like to use in dungeons; invariably one might end up not operating at good efficiency because they can't reach somewhere. though these days i'm much better about investing in things like leap, charge, escape, etc (or using items that grant those abilities) so maybe it's worth mixing it up again...

there are gear and weapons that offer synergies for various casters. have you considered a fury? there's deltro's cage, there's a halberd that gives +storm PL. at high levels, an SC fury (or any druid) could also just do avenging storm with one of the blunderbusses that has a bounce (e.g. kitchen stove with wild shot + avenging storm => damage king thanks to 4x shots bouncing around to three targets, each potentially triggering a bolt. avenging storm should have decent duration on TBM)

you don't have to do an all-MC or all-SC party, you can mix and match. just saying. that being said, I would not read too much into your experience on the first island; on the first island with PotD the battles are extremely hard and a bit overtuned... but in a way where certain builds can absolutely stomp or suffer and it doesn't reflect accurately for the rest of the game, where everyone gets more options and your gear becomes better. for example, an SC druid with charm beasts/hold beasts pretty much wrecks the digsite but that's more an accident of how the encounters in that area are designed and not truly representative of their typical power level (at least until you get greater maelstrom). Similarly, a debonaire will absolutely wreck gorecci st with their charm ability, but that's also not representative of their typical power level.

tbf the shattered pillar wound limit is not a great design imo, if we're talking about balance changes. while there's something to be said about being able to generate wounds without drugs or getting hurt, as a whole package just from being unable to max out the +intellect/lash or +con/ar is a huge penalty to the class.

i feel like there's still a market out there for "isometric" party-based CRPGs, but maybe it's extremely superficial: WOTR & Wasteland 3 [both "nostalgia"-esque continuations] are in full 3D. 2D

to that point, fig backers never recouped their money. when MSFT bought OBS, fig backers got a tiny bit of a final payout as they were basically bought out, but they never got to see the long tail of sales drips that eventually put Deadfire into the black.

I also think MC has a lot more variance in power level. It’s hard to do a bad SC, but I think you could easily build an MC that is a bit confused or suboptimal. But you could also come upon a really synergistic MC that blows the socks off a typical SC. what difficulty did you play on?

This is an interesting and more convincing reframing of some old grouches. What puzzles me though, is that Tyranny outsold Deadfire for quite a while along comparable timelines, and Tyranny is wildly different from the typical CRPG nostalgia path. What do you think might account for the difference?

it's still not fixed because it was introduced in some of the last patches at the end of deadfire's support life cycle. i really hope obsidian got some decent extra sales out of adding turn-based mode for their sake, because it destabilized the game and they didn't leave enough of a support runway afterwards. edit: in PoE, they broke traps fundamentally at some point and it never got fixed. I was doing what you were doing some years back, shouting into the wind and begging for a dev to fix it. Major unpatched bugs are one thing, but it's even worse when it's broken in a way that it can't be modded with a fix.

so i guess this gives me a better hook into your line of thinking. if it were me, i think i'd focus less on direct equivalences with abilities as they are costed now, and go with my "intuitive" sense of 1-common [and basically very few abilities past tier 3 should be a 1 just on a power-level sense], 2-powerful, 3-encounterchanging. for me this gives an immediate sense of what abilities are too expensive or too weak without resorting to cross-class equivalencies. the only pickle is with phrases, wounds, and focus, because they're unique. i honestly have no idea. with wounds you could probably actually try to quantify it based on dance with death, which gives you 1/wound per 3s with a major caveat to work around, so you could frame it as "how often should a vanilla monk be able to do X ability if you're optimized for it" which is still extremely intuitive, but that's what i got. focus a similar logic but based on expected damage output at various points in the game with vanilla weapons (hypothetically scaling similarly to in-game summoned weapons). phrases no idea, i just have an intuitive sense that some invocations are way too expensive for the benefit (like that high-tier dazing shout).* * complete side note, i thought the invocation "his heart did fill with the light of dawn" (+1 class resource in an area) was hopelessly overcosted for its effect, but it wasn't until a recent run where i realized what this really means is that your tier 9 casters can cast 2x (or 3x with empower point) their game-ending tier 9 spells at the start of a fight. in practice it's almost certainly an ability that's only ever meant to be used once, and not in the middle of a fight, so in that sense there's actually no fair cost for it because you automatically have enough phrases to use it instantly.

as @xzar_monty said, we've had this discussion a lot, but if you're really interested in opening this up again one thing i urge all participants in the discussion to do is simple: Any theory that applies to Deadfire should be consistent with other games. For example: Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous are ridiculously un-optimized and buggy games, upon release and even now. However buggy people may have thought PoE or Deadfire are/were, they are nothing compared to P:K or WOTR. This is not fanboy-ism, the game for P:K was fundamentally broken against completion for a while, half a year in and major critical class functionality in WOTR is just completely missing, broken, or non-functional (and still you see advice on reddit/forums to make a hard save before proceeding into the last act because of bugs). They are ridiculously poorly balanced (though this is not totally Owlcat's fault, Pathfinder 1st ed is based on a now-decades-old system and pathfinder 1st ed did not do much to really fix all its shortcomings [in fact, added to it]). This has not stopped P:K/WOTR from being commercial successes. To resurface some old data - JES mentioned that pre-sales for Deadfire exceeded PoE presales, but their general marketing study of consumer sentiment suggested overall less awareness of the product. Sales basically bottomed out after release. One of my pet theories is that Urquhart forcing Deadfire to be funded on Fig was a major business error. To me, a lot of factors point to a failure of marketing. Small indie studies do not have the ability to dominate airwaves like AAA games can. Kickstarter gives you some level of "free" advertisement (in addition to having better mindshare with journalists who want to pay attention to things). Fig - what's that? P:K and WOTR were both Kickstarter projects (on top of being based on a relatively familiar IP, which also probably helps games like them and hurts Deadfire with a less known IP). PoE was a kickstarter project and basically bankrolled Deadfire development. Yet there have been people who've come to these forums who loved PoE and had no idea that Deadfire was a thing that existed. I don't think this singlehandedly explains the drop in sales, but probably contributes to a significant part of it. (The fig funding mechanism also encourages people to be "investors" [lol], which means a significant fraction of people end up having no actual buy-in to the game itself and are just there gambling, which I also suspect hurts emotional investment/word-of-mouth.) edit: maybe also publisher choice. Tyranny had no pre-existing IP, no kickstarter, and yet at similar points in their run Tyranny had outsold Deadfire 2x. Apparently to Paradox it was still a disappointment (I think they were expecting 1m+ sales, not 500k), but it seems to me that maybe Paradox might have carried Tyranny better than Versus Evil carried Deadfire. I mean, frankly, I've heard of Paradox outside of Tyranny. I've never heard of Versus Evil. Allegedly (according to some Chris Avellone-related gossip), Urquhart also burned some bridges with Paradox, which may have contributed to going with a different, possibly-weaker publisher.

tbf, there are probably tons more easier ways for a tactician to restore discipline with spells (e.g. slicken)

interesting post. i don't think i've ever really tried to quantify how i or the game value resources, but i have an intuitive sense of what resources "ought" to be. i think you're probably right in terms of how the game values it, but in terms of "ought" (since the topic of balancing is brough tup): i think of costs more intuitively where 1 martial resource = "cantrip/plentiful", 2 martial resource = "sparing and powerful", 3 martial resource = "rare and encounter-changing." i call them cantrips because by mid game encounters, just using 1-cost martial abilities pretty much last you the encounter for regular (non-spammy) use, like frenzy, disciplined barrage, barbarian yell, crippling strike. 2 martial resources eat up your resources twice as fast and suffer from significant opportunity cost as a result, so they should be used sparingly but should have major impact. 3 martial resources should be very very powerful to be worth the cost. so, i guess my equivalency probably views tiers 1-3 as "ought" to be 1, and then 4-9 as "ought" to be 2, and only special exceptions for 3. in this respect i find a lot of abilities stupidly overcosted (barbarian blow doesn't seem like a powerful-enough ability, paladin light of pure zeal at 5 lolwtf*, barbarian's robust at 3 not worth it until you can bring the cost down, rogue ring the bell doesn't earn its 2, the imbue: missiles at 2, etc.) there are occasional undercosted abilities, especially with how one upgrades martial abilities (if i paid 3 for dazing shout i'd probably still be happy). this also effects how casters compare and their resource equivalency - most of their spells i would consider to be equivalent to 2, with exceptions for a few spells at 3 (some tier 8/9 spells). i don't know if that really adds much to the discussion, but just my .02 * i think the game designers also tried for consideration to consider uses/encounter, and is the only reason i can think of that ability being so expensive, so that you're limited to twice/encounter. but unlike poe's per-encounter abilities, there's a huge opportunity cost, so in practice it just seems like a lot to give up.

the mechanics may be more "user friendly" to you, which is a reasonable opinion (but c'mon, THAC0 is not user friendly), but here I wonder if there's just some confusion around engagement mechanics? Like someone else said, in practice engagement is almost never broken by AI, it's almost too rigid. The main exceptions appear to be fampyrs and rogue-like enemies, who will use their abilities specifically designed to break engagement (like Escape, Shadowing Beyond, Defensive Roll)and in rare cases just eat a disengagement attack to strike someone squishy. The big thing is that unlike PoE, in Deadfire melee-ers do not start with any engagement slots. You have to at least use a shield. Also unlike PoE, it is much easier to lose engagement, via afflictions, or even an interrupt. TBF, megabosses really should be broadcast in-game as completely optional, only do this if you like smashing your head on the wall challenges. They are not meant for diversified parties. They are puzzles, that can only be solved by a combination of extreme metagaming and cheese. They don't even give you good rewards. As well, SSS definitely does have some imbalanced fights, especially for certain party compositions. Even though FS is harder, SSS definitely feels a lot more unforgiving in that it pushes towards megaboss-style metagaming and cheese. In particular, if you go down the survivor's path, the battles can be extremely tedious slogs that are rudely surprising in how many extra enemies keep spawning. Even though it's against flavor, even just having a progress bar showing "enemies remaining" or a more clear indication on the enemies themselves what wave they are would help. Anyway, I think these are pretty fair criticisms, in particular because the system prides itself on "viability". If you have crit-path DLC encounters or main-map (mega)bosses that are significantly harder to do with a reasonable subset of parties, then the encounter design needs a bit of a pass or better scaffolding needs to be done around those fights.

no worries, my non-english skills are terrible. take it as a complement - the interaction you found with hemorrhaging seems so potentially zany, that i had a real hard time believing it at first, at least the way i was beginning to understand it

Sorry I just need to double-clarify this, I think it might be a slight language issue. Based on what Boeroer says, do you mean "transforms everything that crit into a melee attack?" So, if I have Effort and enchant with Hemmoraging, if I crit with Dancing Bolts spell, those Dancing Bolt crits will also trigger Hemmoraging, which will then trigger Avenging Storm bolts? Just want to make sure I got this right, because if so, this sounds potentially crazy.

i'm not sure i'm completely following - what does Effort do in these situations? Does it just provide an additional (on-crit only) effect that can trigger an Avenging Storm bolt?

Yeah I discovered this with blunderbuss. A moderate amount of self-lightning damage to absolutely strip away reflection is a nice trade off. i think it helps that even though each individual bolt doesn’t do much it still counts as 8 spell levels per bolt

ah yes, that's probably true. tbh i mostly either consume rum, rymsjodda lager, koiki fruit, or brew battered ysae. i care alot about speed/recovery timing on my casters.