thelee

My personal point was that it was hard for me to see how @AeonsLegend's changes were better than what's already in place. To me, they all fail in terms of "realism" and it's all just abstraction, and I don't know why one's abstraction is better than the one already in place, especially by certain rules of trying to demurk combat. If you want to pare a proposed change down to just "this weapon will grant you +1 enemies to flank" I mean sure ok, but I don't know why this abstraction is so much better than what's in game that it warrants change. It ultimately just sounds like "I want to leave my mark on this game" which I mean sure go mod it and do it, but it's not like there's some major gameplay flaw in the base system that your'e fixing. There are actual gameplay flaws with flanked, but I haven't seen them mentioned here: 1. Flanked is sometimes a passive, sometimes an active bonus. 2. Perception afflictions shouldn't also provide flanked. (1) is a bug and sometimes means that Flanked stacks with AR reducing effects and sometimes not. It's murky, when the combat system is trying to demurk, and clearly by its arbitrary-seeming effect could not have been intended. (2) is simply because Perception afflictions are the only affliction class that automatically triggers Deathblows. This makes it way too trivial to trigger Deathblows and makes Rogues and Rogue multiclass really effective damage dealers (just by picking up Persistent Distraction for non-debonaires). It also has bad interactions with actual Flanked status and may contribute to (1). If you want to make Flanked weaker, I would argue that at the same time Flanked is weaker, Perception afflictions should get a different non-flanked effect that stacked with actual Flanked.

hm, that is true, but frankly i could go either way on it. Clearly a pistol or blunderbuss is a ranged weapon, but at no point does it make sense to me that even a person at point-blank range can help "flank" a target. what is mechanically different from a pistol/blunderbuss held at 1-2m away, versus a quarterstaff at 1-2m away? i mean this is a bit of a philosophical head-scratcher, but is part and parcel when you scratch at an abstraction too much. I don't know why reach weapons should prevent enemies from getting into range or prevent flanking anymore than their current implementation, it all just seems like different attempts at abstracting something and I'm not sure any way is better than what is already in-game (well ok, i can say that in relation to my earlier post, I'm not keen on making it "easier" to avoid flanking by having some effect that prevents enemies for flanking you; flanking should just be an un-murky, reliable mechanic. I view in the lens of sneak attack or sneak-attack-like effects - when all other afflictions run out or fail, you can at least flank the enemy. keeping enemies at bay is interesting, but is probably way too powerful for a simple weapon effect - you'd outrange most melee enemies in the game)

I don't know if you're aware and this was intentional, but - barbarians can be made harder to flank, and with certain items you can be made harder to flank (the range conferred by quarterstaff and spear also effectively does this). edit - from a game design perspective, flanking seems like a mechanic that should be the default. That is, if there are too many ways to avoid being flanked that are exceptions to the standard "flanking" rule, then it makes it a lot murkier and you can't really rely on it (this is the worst part of galawain's challenge - potentially getting unstoppable on a map full of beasts and having all your rogue and debuff strategy be pointless). It's bad enough that FS has a couple bosses that are immune to flanking and interrupts. I mean, I think it's fair to say that in this RPG mechanic, the abstraction lends itself to the flankee constantly trying to shuffle and divert their attention between the different flankers - hence why it's important that the target is actually "flanked" at approximately 180 degree angles. Simply being engaged by more than one foe from the front won't trigger flanked. Plus, one could argue that within the system, we already cover what you're talking about - typically the person attacking from the front is likely to be engaged, whereas the person behind is not (but only against foes who are properly trained). That is an advantage that the rear flanker has over the front flanker. Depending on the fight, this advantage goes away or reverses - e.g. there are some big beasts where it is actually far more dangerous to be the rear flanker, due to tail lash (some dragon fights, porokoa)

well, if we're going down this hypothetical a) poor scenario design if you actually have toddlers that pose a threat to you, or if for some reason you have 10000 toddlers fighting a dragon (5% of 10k toddlers critically hitting in one combat round could probably take down a dragon ignoring any damage resistance effects like 3e-style 5/+1) [though in the deadfire/poe-style system, 10k toddlers would appropriatley be slaughtered by a dragon without having landed a single blow] b) in practice, toddlers would have like a 1d1 damage die and probably be non-lethal damage and would probably have a crit multiplier for x1, whereas a seasoned battle veteran has multiple levels of fighter, a weapon, and a 2x or 3x multiplier. so no, a seasoned battle veteran and a toddler won't have the same outcome for crits and misses. anyway, back to OP topic, as kaylon said, the main abstraction i've heard about flanking is that it's basically an enemy is distracted by being flanked and yes that constitutes a benefit for everyone else attacking that enemy. i don't find "realism" a useful metric for a game mechanic. I find "does it lend itself to interesting gameplay" a better metric. You're talking about realism in a game when people are able to withstand endless amounts of stabs and gunshots without any healing or first aid, and you don't hobble off to recover for months after a fight in which you've sustained damage. You're talking about realism in a game where people are able to coalesce ambient energy into explosive magic or temporary conjurations - every attempt at casting a spell should instead cause a nuclear explosion. Obviously a lot of the game is abstracted away and fictionalized, so I don't know why flanking in particular is something that needs to be tweaked. edit: boy, ninja'ed by a bunch of other people.

Strictly speaking, in newer D&Ds this should be a skill or stat check. Attack roll is supposed to abstract all the luck and shuffling around of combat. For hitting a truly inanimate mundane object, you really should just pass a check (which can neither critically fail not succeed). To paraphrase 3e DM guidance I've read, tying your shoe laces is not something that everyone critically fails at 1 out of 20 times, and rocket science is not something an idiot gets right by dumb luck 1 out of 20 times. Edit: from a game design perspective there is a good argument to be made in favor of critical hits and misses. They basically create a min and max capability for everyone. Doesn't sound like much, but in PoE1 I played a virtually untouchable solo character which just grinded out fights, but in IWD2 even with infinite deflection a large band of heart of fury kobolds will eventually kill you so you couldn't neglect damage.

what the-?? this sounds like the rare "item loses all abilities" bug, except affecting an ability? that's insane i wonder if there's some save-file or game-file corruption that can happen

oh man, by analogy i just have to quote the old BG2 sorcerers.net spell reference on zone of sweet air: "Stationary area damage is easily turned against your enemies because of your vastly superior tactical insights... Right? Be grateful when someone casts Cloudkill, do not get rid of it." Slicken is always good. Even if you have troubles with friendly fire AoE, you don't even have to hit your front-line - just toss it at some casters in the back and remove any spellcasting support from your enemies for much of the fight. With spell-shaping, it gets even better, since against bosses (who have a large size) you can shrink the AoE so that it only affects them, even when surrounded by your own party members, with additional +1 PL to boot. With blood mage or brilliant, honestly one of the most powerful things you can do is just spam Slicken every 6 seconds.

first thing i tried, it didn't. i also tried shuffling the character out of the party and back in again. i also tried various self-induced knockouts. i also tried grimoire imprint again, in case if it wore off it would take plague of insects away with it. didn't. it was really permanent. there's an exploit waiting to be found where someone figures out how to reproduce this bug and triggers it whenever they steal a decent spell (maybe even an ultimate challenge option to exploit a permanent, infinitely available Withdraw?)

hey now - maybe this is dumb and obvious to everyone else but does this mean that summons automatically scale with Veteran and POTD? I always recorded summons as having generally 7 PEN, but this only makes sense if they are getting +2 from PotD scaling (and skeletons get a further -1 from poor). They also get +15 accuracy/defense from PotD? Also a health boost?

I'm like 99% positive that against most (if not every) enemy rogue-type (Xaurip Plaguestriker was just a specific example I could immediately think of, instead of random rogue kith #125) that uses Shadowing Beyond, their first attack dispels their visual invisibility, but they remain untargetable until SB naturally wears off. I'm only 99% positive because Xaurip Plaguestrikers have slow attack speeds so it could be related to not having had a second attack roll yet, but I know I have to constantly run my clothlings away from enemy rogue-types because they have no way of interacting with them. It's so consistent that I just assume that I cannot target an enemy rogue that has just used Shadowing Beyond. I'm actually astonished that apparently no one else has noticed. It can't possibly just be me, right?

i remember back in the day when unity console was implicated in a lot of performance and stability bugs, so i'm not touching it.

ok, so upon reflection maybe +50 deflection for lengthy time for 3 guile is reasonable (I just now thought of doing 3x Escapes, which I have definitely done). I do note that as someone who has used arcane veil and escape a lot in his deadfire career, i value escape's unconditional effect a lot. there are a surprising amount of enemy gunfire (along with veil piercing attacks) in deadfire. So I think Arcane Veil is more vulnerable than just "a couple of veil-piercing attacks" and so an unconditional effect should be weighted more expensively. it's ironic because in poe1 arcane veil was a more fundamental ability but enemy gunfire was so rare (and they didn't target wizards opportunistically) that its veil-piercing vulnerability was irrelevant. here in deadfire it feels way more relevant (and the AI punishes glass cannons more), but it's only available to a specific priest subclass and as one out of many AL2 wizard spells.

what does the imp get? so when those xaurip plaguestrikers go invisible, they use the identical ability as player-created rogues? continues to be a mystery

since you're finding weird internal mechanics, maybe you could solve a riddle for me. Invisibility/untargetability for Shadowing Beyond/Enduring Shadows seems to break upon first action, right? Yet when enemies use it, it really seems like their untargetability lasts until the end of the innate duration--if enemies attack me in the middle of their shadowing beyond, they are visible to me, yet I literally can't target them with anything, so I just have to run away until their Shadowing Beyond/Enduring Shadows buff goes away. Do AI-controlled rogues/rogue-types have their own Shadowing Beyond/Enduring Shadows that is different from humans'? What's going on here? edit - it is utterly inscrutable to me what the intent of the deflection bonus is for shadowing beyond/enduring shadows. Long time ago, I thought it was so that any attacks that were still mid-flight could miss, but this was before I figured out that invisibility means absolute untargetability. It seems like it would be way too good if +50 deflection lasted the entire 10/20 seconds [though it is a 3 guile ability], but any other effect in between seems weird.

i literally have no idea how it happened - i suspect it had something to do with being knocked out or something, like some cleanup trigger didn't activate (maybe the druid i stole it from got annihilated by a crit - that tends to have odd interactions with other effects that rely on an "alive" target). it was actually rather annoying since i like my games to be "legitimate" challenges, and having unlimited access to plagues of insects--even if i could just refrain from using it--with no way to get rid of it was not ideal.

depends on the ability. abilities that can interrupt specify whether they interrupt on crit, hit, or graze, though due to the mechanics of some abilities the tooltip is wrong.[1] (enemy) rogues are the worst for this, since all their abilities interrupt at least on hit. late game (especially in forgotten sanctum), enemy monks are super annoying because their AI seems to love using skyward kick and that both knocks up and interrupts on a graze (so not only would you lose an item, but if someone was trying to cast a heal on the victim, the heal is wasted because the victim was temporarily untargetable; requires some quick micromanagement to cancel/reuse the effect). [1] magran's fire (the top-level priest spell) is one i can think of off the top of my head. it says it interrupts on crit, but the way it works is that it creates a tiny area that drops fire nukes into it (like a tiny meteor swarm or rain of holy fire), and each of those nukes interrupt on hit. You can literally interrupt-lock extremely tough enemies like this because of how quickly they are hit with these fire projectiles.

konstanten is a literally dumb character--i believe he has 10 or 9 intellect. this is obviously very bad for a chanter, but unfortunately that's what you're stuck with if you're using konstanten. pick up some rings of overseeing and intellect buffs (priest has several good ones). tekehu, vatnir, fassina, and even pallegina iirc can make for "better" chanters, though a skald is a pretty decent subclass and konstanten has the advantage that he and tekehu are the only ones that could theoretically single-class it [at least without rolling your own].

in fact, if interrupted, you actually lose the item anyway as if you used it. as far as i'm concerned, it's the main argument for concentration on front-line melee-ers.

yeah, i made sure to have a hotkey for the AI toggle, so whenever i need to use a potion i quickly disable, and then i just have to remember to listen to the "potion drunk" sound to turn it back on again. really annoying bug, a shame that it got introduced

oh sorry, i got my replies mixed up - i thought you were referring to the consumable usage bug, not the "stuck doing nothing" bug. my bad. yeah i very occasionally get the "stuck doing nothing" bug and x-cancelling does fix it.

i think it depends on your AI setttings and scripting. on some of my more aggressively scripted characters and/or with autoattack enabled in a situation where they want to auto-attack (e.g. aggressive, or defensive and being attacked), x-cancelling never works for getting consumables used.

i do not recall her coming aboard with dragons in the runs where i used that history, so no. in fact, i think the only indication you get that something happens is a mysterious earthquake/wave from the direction of the black isles.

wow i literally never noticed this before! i've been missing out an enchanting ingredient for god knows how long. that's because you must be using a poe1 history in which you did not kill llengrath. (she/he/it was a human in poe1. if you kill her she comes back in deadfire as an orlan)

that's because this was a bug introduced extremely late, unfortunately, like one of the last 4.0s or maybe even 5.0. it really ticked me off, because it was something they obviously broke with turn-based mode and never fixed - before using consumables was a rock-solid operation which was a huge improvement from poe1 where i have literally soft-locked the game via consumable usage.

i've had on occasion very odd bugs with companion skills - i've never paid much close enough attention to it to really figure out, but i suspect that it is a problem with auto-leveling (do you have auto-level on)? i think some companions have incorrect skills specified for a level or something. generally respeccing or waiting to a higher level resolves funkiness.