thelee

lololol i'm just so curious to know how this was discovered. lover's embrace enchantment?

there's also a healing component that scales. it has a very low base (20 health), though it's not nothing. edit: i said they scale with alchemy, but like any other potion they also benefit from bonus generic PL, just not the caster's (unless it's the caster drinking it)

If you can find me one other individual on the internet complaining about reuse of landscape assets and prove it's not you, I'll eat crow. If you can show me that this led to a steep drop off in sales from PoE1 to Deadfire, not only will I literally eat my own hat, I will petition Obsidian on your behalf to hire you as a PM of some sorts. It is definitely fine to have your pet peeves and things to pay attention to and care about (I would have literally never noticed the reused bog asset in Sayuka before), but it's a pretty far cry to using that as a basis for explaining a major, objectively measurable thing (an order of magnitude drop-off in sales). Strong claims require strong evidence. Frankly, if I had seen even one other person around here or a reviewer somewhere over many years raise it, I'd be a heck of a lot more credulous. There are plenty of outsider theories, debunked or not, that have a more credible basis - pirate theme, nostalgia overload, poor marketing, and yes even "women aren't smiling enough in this game", etc. - than yours

i don't know man, everything you just said here to me justifies the reuse of that bog asset in all those places, or that rocky mountains map. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ oh boy it's another one of these discussions again. i guarantee you almost literally no one other than you cares about a small amount of asset reuse like that. some guy on here once complained that the female portraits in this game didn't have enough smiling, i think that's a more credible theory than yours.

HMMmmmm interesting find. I wonder if something similar happens with Marked Prey?

yeah, nothing. but the potions it creates benefit from alchemy.

dang they are so niche as to be bad, though. i was hoping for a lateral change - doesn't make enemy mobs that much more annoying, but actually gives players some payoff for using them. again, i had a wizard tank multiclass that literally had an AI script that opened every fight with a spell reflection, just to be prepared, and in anticipation that as a tank in the front lines they'd get targeted more. i got so little mileage out of it, and most of it was from FS where there's just tons more spells being tossed around. it's powerful and situational on enemies because you have to kill them, but it's terribly niche for the human because there's no like "spell taunt" or "spell aggro" so that you can get enemies to fizzle their direct spells on you.

i don't know man, unless you have actual major industry experience i am going to be pretty skeptical of some rando internet guy saying "what's so hard about this?" i work at a major global tech company. there's no such thing as a simple change - even if it would've been simpler for a smaller, but still pretty big tech company. so many pipelines, integrations, QA, experiments, etc. even if it remains a technically easy code change, it might be a while before it actually goes out to prod. i'm guessing you get a lot of economies of scale (in terms of production and QA) from asset re-use, whatever shape that takes, and without having the actual obsidian game budget sitting in front of me, i'm going to probably give the ones who barely escaped bankruptcy the benefit of the doubt.

roflmao what a hilarious find

i would actually suggest also giving some spell resistance to the other spells somehow, even with some confusion of layering. as it stands, there's still not really an incentive to use minor or normal arcane reflection, since direct-targeted spells are really uncommon cases. i think currently it just serves to make enemy uses a little bit more tolerable (the minor arcane change) or much more annoying (the llengrath one). not sure i have good ideas since i'm not sure quite what you'd be going for. possible change: minor arcane reflection: 50% spell reflection, 50% spell resistance, with half vanilla cap*? makes it a bit less easily worked around by using indirect spells, and still directly "interactable" by burning through the spell reflection. arcane reflection: 100% spell reflection, 25% spell resistance, with half vanilla cap? better for direct targeting, but not a complete waste of a spell slot in most cases. llengrath would pretty much be fine in your approach, but possibly even shorter duration or else this makes certain enemy fights way much more annoying. The higher, more certain protection trade-off with duration is a nice one i think, reminds me of arcane veil vs weaker, longer-lasting illusion spells. * partial spells are still reflected, right? (e.g. only 1 spell reflection left, but you cast sunlance) upon further consideration, i personally think the idea of a cap in general is a good one, since it gives you a way to actually interact with the reflection, but i think they're just too high to want to interact with right now. arcane reflection at 30 seems way too high (who wants to hit themselves with 30+ spell levels!), and minor arcane reflection feels a bit too high as it stands, but i think it's still important that the player is "trading up" in terms of spell levels. of course, this is complicated by the fact that some spells trigger repeatedly and offer "cheap" ways to eat up spell levels (avenging storm, concelhaut's crushing doom [at least one or two reflections isn't that bad], etc.)

my computer these days is way better than when i first started playing deadfire, and I think what's telling is that the only thing that has really improved performance in deadfire are: SSD or NVME for hard drive instead of a spinning disk faster cores (not even more cores) but with very low elasticity there's some extremely profound inefficiencies in the engine. i can drop resolution completely on my main gaming pc and get no uplift in fps - it's all cpu bound. and i highly doubt deadfire is doing as much cpu work as cities: skylines (which can eventually bring my beefy main gaming pc to a crawl in big cities), it just does it much more inefficiently, with odd I/O or disk read attempts (read: 100% chance of stutter upon certain spells being cast) that cannot be sufficiently be sped up over several generations of AMD CPUs i've had over the course of playing this game. it must be unity, because poe1 had its own problems, but i know obsidian can make games that are much more performant, if they're not unity-based (e.g. outer worlds).

my personal playstyle - early on i just dump spells until i run out (except maybe keep a heal in reserve) and then just shift-melee the rest of the fight. potd fights early on are long enough that this works. not much action economy at this stage. not sure if it's optimal, but the times i've done shfiters like this they've been party damage kings. mid to end game where i have a lot more spells, it basically depends on how many enemies and how effective nature's terror would be. Nature's Terror makes getting up close and personal to enemies really worth it as a shifter, so i'll aggressively shift and leave other spell casting behind if I think I can get good mileage out of a couple casts of the spell. If there's not a lot of enemies and/or they're spread out, i'll still shift because my one-on-one with shifting would be extremely effective still (but maybe i won't bother with nature's terror). If there's a bunch of spread out enemies or it's too dangerous to leap into the middle of things, I stay back and become more of a spell caster until i run out of spells and shift anyway. my stalker/shifter was more aggressive about shapeshifting in all situtations because i could still do things in shifted form, my shifted form was better (e.g. marked prey and stalker's link and hunter's claw), and it was safer (+1 AR especially).

I think you might be undervaluing what Boeroer is saying, which goes to Boeroer's later response: I think it's very easy to get into a trap of missing subtle interactions with a psion, because it's very different than how a normal cipher plays. It's not "a psion plays like a normal cipher except that you instead have this different focus generation," because the psion is different enough that your playstyle will fundamentally change once you've had some time with it and realize what it's doing. Yes, an optimized normal cipher may generate focus faster, but outside of brilliant, they are only doing that while doing something lame for a cipher: attacking with weapons. And, while they're using powers, they are generating 0 focus. And if the cipher is underpenetrating the enemy, that focus generation goes down quite a bit. A psion may overall still have less burst focus generation than an optimized cipher, but a psion will be much more... action-efficient and consistent with how that focus is generated. That has playstyle consequences. This is redundant with what Boeroer has said, but I feel like have to double-underline this: You literally can cast psion powers nonstop with a psion. As a simple, degenerate example: with minimal metagaming, you can literally chain together non-stop Mental Bindings (perma-paralyze), for example. Or non-stop Soul Whips (lock down spellcasters). Like, literally, literally nonstop. Mostother ciphers will have to pause at some point to regenerate focus with lame-o weapon attacks (outside of beguiler interactions). Your skald alternative will still need downtime to generate phrases somehow. A psion can lock down tough enemies at 100% uptime. Another consequence is that when you run low on focus... you can still do stuff. For a normal cipher, they have to start attacking and doing something "lame" by comparison. For a psion, I may just start using cheap powers (Soul Whip remains a highly effective thing to use in tough fights or fights with spellcasters). Esp single class and/or with bonus PL, you can still have a substantial net gain in while using your cheaper powers. And the auto focus generation means it creates an odd reward structure: I don't mind slow casts nearly as much because it means I'm still doing something productive and getting even more focus while I'm doing it. As Boeroer mentions, this is also why psion multiclasses very very well with other casters - a normal cipher still has to grind to a halt and start attacking, whereas a psion can just start casting spells from the other class while generating focus at full blast. (edit: not to mention those cases where you are just shy of being able to use a power. a normal cipher will waste action/recovery to land an attack, or--worst case--self-empower. a psion will probably have enough focus to use that power in the time it takes you to reposition) Personally I think the psion's downside is at an acceptable place, and shouldn't be narrowed. The amount of times my psions have been shut out from doing stuff in a fight is actually quite low. It requires a little bit of skill, but if it's reduced to just weapons, it basically borders on 0 effective downside for most typical psion playstyles.

shifting is much better in deadfire IMO. even if you don't shift much you can just pick cat form for its massive action speed boost. even on my shifting-light druid builds, i'd be using cat form all the way into endgame. with my shifter SC now and actually focusing on shifting, even given action economy constraints of shifting-with-no-casting, shifting is still extremely an effective tool in the druid toolkit. shifter boar form in particular can do a ton of damage on high-health enemies due to a bug in your favor (the shifter boar form's raw dot has a hugely long duration, letting you get high raw damage stack counts).

yeah, for general purpose druid-ing, lifegiver is a pretty safe and strong choice, but i wouldn't go so far as to call it the "correct" choice. everyone but fury also function pretty well as an all-purpose good druid selection, their respective downsides are pretty narrow too.

careful, the imprint spells are enchantment spells and in most of the cases you've replaced them with an excluded school. i think we should try to find something that's still something that enchanters could use. spells are a little tight at the higher tiers, but i would mostly suggest caedebald's, with minoletta's where wilting wind won't work. if it's possible to do an out-of-spell-level choice for balancing tweaks, i might suggest adding call to slumber or capricious hex as 8th level spells in the unique grimoires as appropriate. it would be a bit like how xoti and wael subclss get a few bonus priest spells outside of their normal level, except in these cases it'd give enchantment an extra boost in casting at the higher levels.

V1 seems like the best solution IMO. Works around the bug without really changing balance issues. a possible alternate idea; tweak enchantment subclass so they get these imprint spells as bonus spells for free (and remove it for everyone else) since bonus PL on enchantment is a bit less good than bonus PL on some other schools. This is if one is fine introducing balance changes as part of the fix.

irritating but a narrow benefit is that my tactician/skaen ultimate run loved this quirk (if there's only one enemy and they get knocked up, that triggers brilliant for a split second [no enemies but still in combat], but a split second brilliant still means a resource restored for each half of the multiclass).

i actually got some mileage out of it in one setup with the instakill effect, because it was on a build that lots of durational, ticking aoes and debuffs. i would proc that instakill not that infrequently. became obsolete in the late game though, with better options and also the 100 health threshold doesn't scale at all to be more generous as you become more damaging and it represents a smaller and smaller % of enemy health.

i suppose it's "optimal" to constantly manage the morningstar/club/flail modals, but it's really unnecessary (and yes, sounds extremely un-fun). in some cases, you might graze or the enemy has enough of a resolve or it's hard enough to hit them that you want them on all the time anyway because the durations won't be as constant. frankly, for morningstar and club (flail less so), i generally leave the modal on constantly so i'm not thinking about needing to do that when i actually need to land a fort/will ability. i happily trade off tens of weapon damage over a fight so that i'm always ready to land a brutal spell.

off topic, but i've literally killed dorudugan like this in a blink of an eye (combined with blade cascade and a few casts of salvation of time). crashed the game the first time i did it (game really does not like having like 80 stacks of something at combat cleanup), worked the second time.

ICYMI: basically an interrupt build using helm of the white void. lot of explosives also benefit from helm of the white void (sparkcrackers, cinder bomb, the acid bomb, the lightning bomb, stun bomb, implosion bomb, imp spray, frost bomb)

Oh yes, I very much like that. Strictly improving spells are not a terribly interesting design space. I dunno, it's always a delicate balance how to work around these combos. But I feel like Wall of Draining (and Salvation of Time) + resource regen is such an inherently broken mechanic that I'm not sure it's worth in this case trying to worry too much about it. Without resource regen, getting some duration extension is powerful, but I think is acceptably powerful for a two/three high-level spell combo, one of which may not actually do anything on its own.

spell reflection is so much more powerful (or at least anti-fun) than partial resistance though, that i think it's worth capping it, for all but Llengrath's. (Isn't that how it works right now?) For the lower versions, in encounters it also provides an active reason for players to actually toss spells directly at the caster and eat the reflection, because otherwise the spell resistance is going to mess up AoE. I think it might make some mid-game encounters a bit harder. Uncapped llengrath's with spell resistance seems closer to appropriate for T9. It's only available to SC wizards, so it's not as easily abusable as if it were uncapped potions of perfect arcane reflection.

if there also gave you some protection from AoE, that'd make them much more worth it. I don't know what is accessible to modding though. (As prior art, antimagic buffs in other games exclude your square from spell AoEs, so it helps you against even not-directly-targeted effects. I don't know why they don't also do partial reflections.) edit: maybe they can be paired with a short duration version of that cipher effect that offers joint defenses, but getting hit knocks you out of it; if it only worked for non-deflection defenses it'd be "spelly" protection. My first encounter with reflection spells back in the BG2 classic days made me convinced these spells were just immensely OP. Then I stopped being an idiot and casting spells directly at the mage. And even with dumb AI back in the day, wizards might just more likely cast their direct-targeted spells at Minsc charging at them than Edwin sitting back bombarding the battlefield behind a spell reflection. I don't understand why so many RPG systems have not innovated past direct-targeted reflection. They are mostly anti-fun in Deadfire, because you have to kill all the enemies (they never surrender, and they don't try to reload their game when things go south ), so all it really means is that you can't use some of your favorite goodies for a while, unless you can cleanse them or suppress the effect. Ideally there'd be a more systematic fix that adds in more of the "wizard battleship" where spell reflection was part of a rock-paper-scissors environment of anti-magic effects (edit: even though it might have annoyed people and had a steep learning curve, I really enjoyed in BG2 keeping various spells in reserve to deal with various spell or magic protections, and vice versa). I've gotten a few fun interactions by having a melee-ing caster that autocasts spell reflection at the start of almost every fight, but "a few fun interactions", heavily biased towards FS, over the course of an entire game, makes for a pretty weak-sauce spell category that I'm not sure is really fixable.