thelee

Does taking a bath in the bathhouse clear it? I think it clears "clear on rest" effects.

genius! for megabosses you just need to sub in that blinding shot upgrade that perma-DoTs the enemy. (won't work too well for hauani o whe though, but 3/4 ain't bad)

not to judge - but what is even the point of a build being a glass cannon or not if you just use cheats? just roll 5 blood mages with everything other than con and resolve maxed. you're done. or, roll 5 normal mages and in the end game, just have them all empower Wilting Wind or the AL9 minoletta spell or meteor shower (empower helps with any PEN issues). Don't even need to bother with targeting if you don't need to worry about them dying.

The last game I really saw this at play was Oblivion. Even though FO3 and F:NV had the same engine, they didn't nearly do it in spades or try to plug in as much emergent gameplay. (In Oblivion you could leave a poisoned apple around and put it on top of someone's plate and wait for them to eat it; it was a bit janky, but there's no equivalent in games hence basically. Also in Oblivion, much like the Ultima games of yore, you could follow NPCs around and watch them go about their day. Though you do have to hear their short bark dialogue all the time "HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE HIGH ELVES?" In FO3/NV/Skyrim/FO4, unless they are one of the explicitly-intended-to-be-regional-merchants, they basically do a small orbit in one of a few rooms that may or may not involve a bed.) Like Boeroer says, there's a huge cost component. I would also venture to say the vast, vast, vast majority of players in Oblivion never noticed or took advantage of the "real world" elements of gameplay (as evidenced by how buggy and janky the poisoned apple mechanics could be), so I don't think people really are missing out on anything. Deadfire is more reactive than PoE1 in this respect, and you could tell how far we are from the RPGs of yesteryear by doing a google search for something like "Where is Una in Deadfire?" People just aren't used to the idea that a merchant might actually go to sleep at night. Also, despite the fact that I have nostalgia for Ultima games (though mostly 7 and Underworld), I'm pretty ambivalent about this frankly, even the little bit that is in Deadfire - even though it's just a few button clicks and a short wait, I find it a bit annoying to have to wait for daytime so that some of my vendors appear (anecdotally, my wife--who is really into first person open-world RPGs and never grew up playing the old cRPGs--really hates ever having to wait for anything or trying to remember people's schedules). As another example, rain introduced RNG and almost botched my Ultimate run (and screwed up another; rain causes people to seek shelter; if you're planning on trying to steal or sneak and it's time sensitive, having everyone seek shelter right next to the thing you want to steal is extremely inconvenient). I admit I was a bit surprised by how both PoE1 and Deadfire were generous with quests. You could flat out refuse a quest, and you'd still get a journal entry. But players hate botching quests or missing out on content because they didn't do the right RPG voodoo (either correct dialogue response or right stats). I think this is part of the continuing "streamlining" of game mechanics in an effort to lower barriers and broaden appeal across much of the RPG genre while reducing costs. Unlike the immersive component above, this is one aspect that I am decidedly less ambivalent about and miss more. I think stats and decisions should be meaningful, and that should pertain to more than just combat or ending slides - I want more explicit tradeoffs like the Bardatto vs Valera questline, or hard checks to even get a quest like in Fallout 2.

i have hated games like FO76 and FF8 but I still put tens of hours into them, in the hopes that they would get better or because I just wanted to finish them and be done with it.

what could have helped a lot more if there were some formalized "trusted" feedback people to help filter out the noise. i could imagine as a random obs community manager, trying to find the signal out of the noise of all the feedback (especially when frequently the feedback can be objectively wrong and based on misunderstandings, non-actionable, or reliant on knowledge of how the game is coded) is very hard, and hard too for developers seeking to avoid toxicity. it's not exactly a democratic system, but over time (between poe1 and deadfire) i had a pretty good track record of getting responses to bugs and getting the bugs i reported specifically fixed. i have to imagine that some combination of detailed reporting and helpful analysis/suggestions built up some incremental good-will with whomever was triaging stuff. i have to imagine paying more explicit attention to people like MaxQuest or the modder-types could have helped pre-release and backer beta. i don't know how this would actually work in practice, but it sounds like devs are essentially doing this anyway by relying more on SA or discord than the obs forums.

yeah, it blew my mind in terms of content that you'd have all this stuff to explore, and then you got to the endgame and there was essentially a whole other city to explore full of stuff. a similar example is FF7. You spend so much time in Midgar, and then you finally get out and there's literally a whole entire world to explore. (I don't put Midgar on any "top cities" list because it really didn't feel like a city so much as a gigantic collection of garbage with a skyscraper at the center)

yeah, i would go on the flip side and say that if something is only useful for e.g. the four megabosses, then that doesn't make it a strength. my easiest example would be chanter. if it was just up to how influential a chanter can be for the hardest fights, i would put troubadour at the top, easy-peasy, and just spam animated weapons all day long while having one of the several sustain-or-sustain-assist chants on all the time. however, that doesn't strike me as very meaningful, because even on PotD most fights simply don't last long enough where such perpeptual sustain and weapon uptime is really that strong of a factor versus the many other factors that might be useful... at which point having to break out by roles and interactions with itemization becomes important. edit - personally, again, it's some "intuitive" system of weighting. i don't completely ignore megaboss fights because i hate switching out party members, but i also don't overoptimize just for the 1% of extremely hard fights. because of this, chanters do get more representation in my parties than i would normally do without megabosses, as do certain items and setups (Marux Amanth has been a staple in most of my runs because of how effective it is at instakilling megabosses when dual-wielded; even these days when I'm not constantlly rolling a priest variant as a main I'm heavily incentivized to bring along a priest anyway just because of weyc's + salvation of time combo because of the few megaboss fights) edit 2 - i guess the problem with my interpretation is that there really is no way to consider classes "in a vacuum" to reason about their strengths. They basically rely on metagame knowledge. Going back to Marux Amanth as example, that item alone upgrades rogue, priest, and paladin because of its existence, but at the same time that upgrade becomes weaker if you flip on a rest-limiting challenge (Eothas and to lesser extents Rymrgand, Woedica). And Marux Amanth is valuable solely because of tanky HP-sponge enemies. If this were PoE1, for example, an item like marux amanth wouldn't be nearly as useful.

absolutely not, because this is a party-based game, and classes by design fulfill different roles. if a given class can't solo very well, that says nothing about it's quality/strength because solo play is essentially a whole other type of game. you can certainly try to rank classes by their strength in their ability to solo, but it's not a general ranking. example 1: in poe1, i completed the ultimate with a high-resolve paladin. i would never ever rate that as a very strong party-based build, because its sole strength was simply the ability to grind out fights via high defenses and sustain; it would basically be useless in any reasonable party because everyone else would DPS the enemy down way before the paladin's tankiness would ever become needed. example 2: tactician/skaen is probably the second best ultimate build, but i would consider it a supremely parasitic build for party-based build, because so much of what makes the class powerful relies solely on the mechanics of solo play and related challenges, and they literally don't work at all in a party-based build (unless everyone else is a */skaen or /*rogue of some sort). combos can certainly elevate the quality of a party-based class, but the more a class relies on that combo to be playable, the worse the class actually is (because maximum viability is a stated goal of the game design). If this were magic: the gathering with perpetual support and more aggressive balancing, wizards of the coast would step in and ban combos that are too good. from a party-based perspective, i think how you assess a class's strength falls into these questions: what is the class's nominal role(s)? (primary weight) how well does the class fulfill this/these role(s)? how necessary are these roles in a party? how well does the class interact with the metagame of equipment and other such (secondary weight)? for combos (and secondarily itemization), how reliant on these combos is a class? how viable are they without? (tertiary weight) for all of the above, is it weighted towards specific levels? (for example, if a class is only good at a role and can metagame well for a specific role by like level 19, this might make the class pretty bad for the role because much of hte game is weighted towards earlier levels and multiclasses may not ever reach the necessary ability level; tertiary weight) in my gamefaqs guide i tried to do #1 with some of the casters. e.g. from the perspective of healing, i'd go lifegiver->kind wayfarer->shieldbearer->other druid->other paladin->priest->troubadour->other chanter->(way way at the bottom)cipher. for resurrection, i'd go priest->troubadour->other chanter->paladin->druid. for party-buffing, i'd go priest->troubadour->shieldbearer->other paladin/chanter->druid. In other words, there's no catchall "best ranking" for classes because needs are different, and there's not even a "best ranking for defense" because there are different aspects to that that classes have varying strengths and weaknesses as part of balancing and diversity. so if you're thinking purely of a 'what is the best support class?' it's not a good enough question. you can probably assign some weights to how much you care about the various aspects of being a support class, but you need to split out their roles. and it becomes more of a question 'for this party, i'm missing healing and don't care about revive capabilities. which class should i put in?' At the same time, the answer to some of these actually change on difficulty. For normal difficulty, for example, i would rate "party buffing" as a very weak and unnecessary part of a party, and consequently any class that relies on fulfilling this role and any slot in your party for this role becomes worse and rankings shift in favor of just brute-force damage. On the other hand, on PotD party buffing and enemy debuffing I find to be much more valuable; consequently such spots in a party become more valuable and classes that are good at buffing or debuffing also become comparatively better. edit: for a combo like brilliant + duration extension, because it is so accessible to any class (all you need is a priest, not even a cipher) it's not actually worth considering as a factor in determining class strength anyway, unless the party role you are trying to fulfill is "i want to extend powerful buffs" at which point the ranking is sc priest->mc priest->(way way way down)non-evocation/transmuter wizard.

it also kinda helps the ghost heart along that the sharpshooter subclass is decidedly niche due to how strong of a downside a categorically universal recovery time penalty is, and the stalker which--while can be strong--arguably requires a lot more micromanagement and really leans further into bonded grief as a mechanic.

just to add, the confusing part about the initial roll-to-hit-an-inanimate-corpse doesn't show up anywhere in the combat log, it's completely invisible. with expert mode off (obviously not a choice in the ultimate challenge), you do actually see the to-graze/hit odds when hovering over a corpse, which is extremely helpful (because sometimes one corpse will be a better choice than another simply because of their defenses... again, don't ask me how an inanimate corpse can dodge a spell)

for casual players - not having to worry about bonded grief i bet. it's a really rough penalty and very few other (sub)classes have something like that where it actively punishes the player for poor micromanagement or metagaming. but that nonengagement is sweet. maia has like the best ranger subclass and pet combo, and ghost heart gets you some of the way there. an itinerant was my second choice for a run-through (after a bunch of nerfing happened) and between speeding my AC past the front line towards squishes and potions of impediment and concussive tranquilizer i was a better mage slayer than the mage slayer subclass.

this got me real down at first (i don't pay attention to backer updates much, so i wasn't aware of all the changes coming down the line) - so the backer beta was a real rough experience for me as a priest-lover (not to mention the loss of interdiction as a global priest talent instead of a generic spell). fortunately the changes they made to the priest subclasses helped placate some of my concerns on spell diversity/selection constraints (for the unaware, priests [and druids] used to not get bonus spells, and priests were even more restricted based on keywords related to their diety... think wizard subclasses but worse, you could basically have like one or two valid selections for a given ability level depending on your diety).

this is sort of my fault. there was inconsistent targeting between the base white wurms, and the upgrade. the base worked like it does now, and the upgrade worked like in poe1 (making it an amazing upgrade). i raised the inconsistent targeting, and they "fixed the glitch" and removed the poe1-style targeting from the upgrade. sorry about the nerf on the flip side, like @Boeroer said, they compensate for it by making the base damage and aoe much, much larger than in poe1.

Is this related to just an urban vs non-urban (suburban, rural) preference? I'll say that I'm unabashedly into urban environments, which colors the fact of why I appreciate some RPG cities so much (esp Fallout 3's DC). If they eliminated a bunch of the quest density, I would still enjoy it on its own merits I think. To reiterate, Athkatla was great because there was just so much discoverability and interactivity. It was just an added layer was that it was a richly realized city environment (bridge district was hella cool when I was a kid, and it blew my mind to learn later that there are actually cities outside the US that have big thick bridges with markets on them). But if they could do the same with a rural environment, it would still be great in its own respect. In that respect, I would agree that Dyrford is pretty great - as far as quest hubs go it was deep, there were nice little narrative easter eggs (such as the tanner opening right into the skaenite dungeon and them having a hidden book on skaen). But cities are still better

Early on I preferred Baldur's Gate (B1) to Athkatla, because it was "seamless", like it was literally one large fort town divided into nine maps, so the city felt "truly" big. Over time, Athkatla has sort of become my gold standard because of how dense each area is - I remember going into random houses and being surprised at interactivity I could find (like that whole Katana sword thing in the Temple District, or the items in one of the random nondescript-yet-heavily-trapped houses in the Bridge District). I don't think any game has met that high bar since; PoE1 and Deadfire were kinda there, but I basically have no incentive to go into random houses in these games, just the ones attached to a task/quest or ones that initiate a task/quest. Though I think Deadfire did the best job (of any of the mentioned games so far) of giving me an incentive to go to random districts, because they didn't concentrate all the best magic items on one vendor. Can be a little annoying, but I like the wandering. Other contenders I'd like to include: Imperial City (Oblivion), really felt legit huge, even though I mostly just spend time where the stores are DC, all of it (Fallout 3). Not just the small pockets of settlers and merchants, but the entire ruins. I thought this was and is an absolute blast to experience. And there's a real "they made art through adversity" feel here, because the game engine couldn't handle large outdoor areas, they had to break up DC by sections of metro tunnels that connected them, but I ended up loving this aspect of it, made it feel like a real city with real transport routes; whereas Boston in FO4's subway stations went nowhere and were just self-contained mini-dungeons, you could actually study the metro map in FO3 and get out at certain points to different parts of DC (or the DC suburbs).

Angband,

literally when I was doing the similar-but-easier Ultimate challenge for PoE1 it was so tedious I started a completely different and parallel game of PoE1 just so I could play the game "for fun" instead of staring at my paladin very slowly grind out enemies for hours at a time (it also proved to be useful in doing advance research of areas, so there was that). Deadfire Ultimate wasn't as tedious, but only because once I got scordeo's edge fights were pretty fast and dynamic... also this time around I had a Netflix subscription so I could watch tv shows while my character was buffing for minutes at a time I actually made it through six seasons of Frasier just from watching it during buffs and rehearsals.

whew! just wanted to confirm that my run finally got validated. i don't know what i'm going to do with the patch... frame it? it's funny, i think obsidian managed to both overestimate the difficulty and underestimate the difficulty at the same time (e.g. staff writing notes to je sawyer that this challenge was fundamentally impossible vs the fact that there are so many patches and entries on their plaque, but i think i'll be merely the fourth to have done it, after six months of the challenge being out).

The thing about comparing games in the past to games now in terms of sales trajectory is that the past is an extremely different market. You don't actually have to go further than Hollywood to see how the entertainment landscape has changed. Some of the major movies of the 90s made their money over huge timelines, and doing such a slow burn was not that bad of an idea. (Titanic notably didn't sell out at first release, and only after the initial weekend did theaters start selling out, and it actually became more popular over time; its highest grossing week was two months after release. By contrast, the similarly big-revenue movie Avengers: Endgame made 1.2 billion in its opening weekend alone and then trickled in additional sales to slowly hit its record; they even did a marketing blitz just to shove a few more butts into seats near the end of its theatrical run so that it could legitimately claim to break sales records.) I don't doubt that smaller indie productions might have to rely more on the long-tail of sales, especially because they don't have the ability to make as big of a splash as AAA studios. But that doesn't change the basic economics that are at play in the 21st century with multiple million dollar budgets that need to be recouped pretty quickly before moving onto the next big project. I would say small budget PoE3 is the least-risky way to test the waters - try a new setting, keep in TB mode from the start, etc. If that also stays small, then the writing is on the wall for this kind of a niche game and we'll see the IP explore different genres. I like Boroerer's idea of basically a small-scale hackathon using the Deadfire engine, or JE Sawyer's own idea of a Pillars Tactics game.

it's actually extremely weird. The game still tracks the per-second duration under the hood, but then rounds at the very end. all durations less than 6s in RTwP become 1 round all other durations are rounded down to the nearest 6s increment chanter chants are specifically adjusted to have more meaningful durations for TB mode. This means there's a huge range where effects just last 1 round, from 0.1s to 11.9 s. It also means that intellect has non-linear returns. For example, with no PL Scaling, the difference in duration on "Eldritch Aim" between 13 intellect (11.5s innate duration that rounds down to 1 round) and 14 intellect (12s innate duration rounds to 2 rounds) is massive, but then you need a gigantic amount of additional intellect to make a further difference in duration (you would need 26 intellect to get up to 3 rounds, which is possible but not exactly a number a causal build can hit; though with PL scaling a three-round Eldritch Aim is pretty easy to hit, and a four-round Eldritch Aim becomes feasible). I think @Raven Darkholme did some initial numbers in a video somewhere and concluded that 15 intellect is a good "all purpose" target for durations, due to how base durations tend to cluster around multiples of 5. But for great success, you should actually find the abilities and spells you care about the most and do the numbers to see what you need to get an extra round or two of duration (keeping in mind that PL Scaling gives you multiplicative returns). PS. I actually don't know how effects like Wall of Draining or Salvation of Time or Ooblit work in TB mode (I have only slightly played around with TB mode). The game might literally track all effects internally as seconds even in TB mode and so those effects (which give +1s/tick, +10s, and +3s to effects, respectively) might give you partial round durations that can be combined with other partial rounds to give you additional round of duration on things. At least, that would be much better than the possibility that Wall of Draining and Ooblit do nothing whatsoever or that Salvation of Time has "wasted" effect beyond 1 round.

is this tested? I always assumed it was just going to cast the Arcane Veil effect, not be a separately implemented passive item buff. sweeet jebus. could a wizard/priest of wael do arcane veil as well then (they don't clash?) for a stonking +100 deflection? in such a case a conjurer should flee by casting arkemyr's brilliant departure-... oh wait, oh no

don't ask me how a corpse has a functional reflex defense

an alternative to trying to keep your pet alive is to lean into it a bit by using Vengeful Grief (Nimble and Tenacious upon pet knockout). It created some funny incentives in some fights, sorry Ishiza. (Also, if you're keen to micromanage, Ishiza is likely the most tankiest pet, because they are immune to engagement and so therefore can just constantly run out of melee range as the enemy winds up an attack.)

a long long time ago i reproted a bug about white worms not always exploding a corpse, and i finally figured it out while playing with my bellower what exactly was happening: you have to roll to hit the corpse. i don't know when this was added in, but i'm pretty sure it's just a bug we are stuck with. fortunately since 5.0 you can actually see your chance to hit hte corpse (whereas when i first reported it in like 3.0 there was no indication you had to roll to hit). so white worms has a huge aoe, huge base damage, and a hugely long sickened duration (if upgraded)--not to mention on a bellower you get a crapton of PL scaling. but you have to discount it by whatever odds you see over the corpse (so 72% chance to hit is effectively a -27% multiplicative penalty over the long run). it is also secretly a poison/disease attack, so enemies can be immune to it. because of that, revenge can be a much better choice at times during combat.