thelee

In practice I find that enemy AI doesn't do this a lot. If you're able to get the enemy AI back onto a tank via some mechanism, it's sticky for a while. I don't know what the internal workings of the AI is, but I have to imagine there's some sort of internal cooldown on changing targets. So there's that. It would be extremely annoying otherwise. On the topic of the enemy AI going after squishy targets - it's a double-edged sword. That's why rogues have so many escape abilities, and also why you can metagame this by taking advantage of this fact. It would be way worse if the AI enemy was actually more like a human, e.g. deliberately avoiding the high-defense riposte or blade turning squishy because they know they'll just get punished. I can see the virtue of the WoW/MMoRPG style aggro system, but it can also be extremely mechanically reductive. In Tyranny some of my parties boil every fight down to "taunt - taunt - taunt" while everyone dps-ses. In this vein, mule kick is better. The "knock up" effect also still works, so you effectively significantly increase the length of the time these uninterruptible enemies are quasi-interrupted. Dorudugan has sky high fortitude defense though, so I would be surprised you could do this consistently even with the -25 from morning star and bonus acc from mule kick. The only other uninterruptible enemy I can think of is the Oracle of Wael and they also can be proned/knocked-up. Must be a weird thing for designers to keep an eye on - no matter the enemy they have to add a prone/standing up animation.

@AlyMintChip sounds rough dude. Might just be some bit of RNG you have to hope goes your way (I mean, it seems rather unlikely to fail so maybe second times a charm?). If it makes you feel any better, Ashen Maw was a major bottleneck point for me as well. @Boeroer's trick could work depending on how quickly you're taking damage. three weapon slots, only two with lethandria's. stay on the third while you take damage and then only periodically turn on the ai script to switch between the other two to rapidly heal and then switch off before the blight can hit you. then you don't have to worry about lethandria's taking much damage (if any)

oh yeah, i was confused - i thought you were talking about one of the fire blights on the bridge, not the one that spawns from self-damage, so I was confused how you'd be able to end the fight just from dealing with one fire blight. is getting rekvu's cloak feasible? requires a detour to the north of the map and requires some hard fights, but once you have that plus one injury you never need to worry about lethandria's regen again IIRC because you'll just heal the fire blight damage. also: what build are you?

yeah, RNG sucks. my big worry was scordeo's breaking, and i had some backup plans in case in case i couldn't proc blade cascade, but there were some places where I just had to hope that scordeo's would proc before breaking. my practice run actually broke scordeo's or had to fall on a backup plan twice, but fortunately that never happened in my real run. (it also happened in one of my planning runs, but that was pretty suboptimal in terms of how I handled proccing - i didn't carry over the buff from fight to fight which meant many more times to buff and many more chances to break scordeo's) how would scrolls of withdraw help with trying over and over again? you can't leave the fight and you can't repair mid-fight. do you just need lethandria's for the regen? are there other sources you could use that doesn't require something that needs repair? edit - silly me, it's probably to heal vela. my bad. worst case you could do something like what armaxy says and just aggressively switch your weapon slots to avoid ever taking damage while having the shield equipped.

that's the reason why i bumped it out of my top five. it seems like a really obvious design oversight, given how much scaffolding and flexibility there is everywhere else.

oh yeah, for barbarians, perception is real important especially since you said you play on harder difficulty. i would actually say it's more important to max perception than might for a barbarian. it's because carnage only triggers on weapon hits (not grazes) and itself needs to at least graze enemies to do anything (and it's considered like a spell, so it doesn't get the same accuracy bonuses as a weapon attack). That essentially means that for a barbarian's main form of damage, each point of perception or accuracy does double-duty - increasing the chance you hit (to trigger carnage), and increasing the chance again that you get good carnage out of it. matters less when you have high chance to hit/graze but (more commonly on PotD) at lower accuracy, you essentially get exponential returns from perception. it also helps that barbarians have an easy way to boost their damage capability (frenzy, one stands alone, blooded) but not their accuracy. so perception seems to matter a lot. edit - actually, because of the above, 1h style might actually be decent for barbarian because of the +12 acc bonus, so long as it's a high-based-damage weapon (like an axe). i haven't run the numbers on this specific scenario before, and i've only played a couple of barbarians so can't say for sure. my hypothesis is that it works out extremely well early on, but might pale in comparison to dual-wielding or 2h by mid-late game (where your accuracy starts getting better and better).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, given that the marketing for the console release is significantly downplaying the pirate/ship-sailing elements of the game, I think it's safe to assume that at least the console port developer agrees with this line of reasoning. (Or as someone else said, this is something they can change at this point in time, so they are.) When I reflect on this, I think this is an area where JE Sawyer has a bit of denial, because he said in post that he didn't really think of Deadfire as a pirate-themed game. But on top of whatever marketing leading up to release, they literally had a couple of small DLC that added various forms of booze, new beards, new sailors, new ships, new ship-gear, and Mirke (literally a drunken pirate) as a sidekick. They were obviously leaning into it pretty hard at first. But in retrospect, it might be telling that when the small DLC evaporated after a few months - they either decided to pivot and focus on the bigger story DLC, and/or maybe they were already realizing that the pirate theme wasn't working out for them. Maybe PoE1 was a better balance in setting? I loved the shift to renaissance era, but the shift was subtle enough that (like you mention) maybe a lot of the more "conservative" players wouldn't have noticed (except for the guns, and even some D&D campaigns had guns). A similar approach would've been to set a lot of Deadfire in a more traditional medieval RPG setting and then have only parts of it in the more polynesian Deadfire. (A home base in Old Vailia and you sail out with the Valian Trading Company, maybe?)

This is the constant, fundamental concern that I think a lot of people with "less big-picture" theories are missing. It's one thing if the question was "why did Deadfire sell 5% less than PoE1 instead of exceeding its sales?" At that point, pretty much everyone's theories might be right, even ones that I would consider to be more fringe (e.g. Avellone no longer being on writing staff); I could easily see each critique cumulatively leading up to >50k sales lost (out of a million), along with some other big picture stuff that would have prevented Deadfire from exceeding PoE1's sales as a sequel to an ostensibly-well-received IP. But that's not the question. The question is "why did Deadfire sell a mere fraction of PoE1, and even a fraction of Tyranny?" coupled with the known constraints of positive critical reviews and positive user reviews. There are also related data points! That I'm going to repeat again - Like P:K having worse reviews and bigger stability problems, but selling far better than Deadfire. Tyranny being based on no established IP whatsoever which still outsold Deadfire, though apparently still disappointed. Everyone is going to have their pet gripes about the game. I have my own pet gripes. But it's one thing to have a pet gripe, but if you're going to claim that that pet gripe is the cause of Deadfire's revenue woes, it has to be capable of explaining a massive sales expectation miss and be congruent with the known data points we have out there. For that reason I'm not going to come in here and say "power level scaling is real confusing and murky. that's the reason why Deadfire sold poorly!" even though that is my main gameplay critique of Deadfire. edit - pretty much only one person actually tried to make a case that all the smaller gripes people were talking about added up collectively to explain the massive sales drop, but it's a pretty fairly unconvincing theory (and for kanisatha's accusations about being unwelcome, the person proposing this was way more hostile than anyone else in this thread). For one thing - many of the gripes generally requires people to have played the game, and that would somehow be reflected in user reviews. For another thing - occam's razor. "Big picture" stuff explains why the audience might have shrunk significantly but left a core of enthusiastic, happy players--which explains a massive sales drop but is still consistent with high critical/user reviews--and big picture stuff requires you to assume far less than a collection of smaller picture stuff that requires a lot of scaffolding and rationalizing away of the known data points (such as - users are not actually happy but something about them prevents them posting unhappy reviews... even though for example P:K had plenty of mediocre unhappy reviews but still tons of sales). Occam's razor would suggest you go for the hypothesis that requires you to take the fewest leaps of faith and rationalizations. (Also three: it's unclear that these different smaller theories are independent of each other, which requires even more heroic assumption-making about the impact of any specific gripe since they would have to carry more weight.)

You definitely want to dual-wield, or use 2h weapons. 1h style is very bad for DPS and is only useful for specific niche approaches. I don't have a lot of experience with turn-based, but am actually thinking that a lot of barbarian stuff is not going to be very useful for turn-based, because a lot of it is focused on action speed/recovery (frenzy, bloodlust) and action speed is much less useful in turn-based mode where you all have one turn per round regardless. You might want to focus on the shouts and the straight-up damage and accuracy bonus passives (one stands alone). If you're single-classed, I think the dazing shout path is extremely good - you do a lot of decent area of effect damage and daze the enemies for a long time, which can be a huge survival boost. @Boeroer seems to be the resident barbarian expert here, so I'm paging him.

i'm honestly perplexed by this being the attitude of a self-described social/behavioral scientist. even biased or non-representative samples are useful if you know what the bias is, because you can adjust them with weights. this is what happens all the time with political polling or survey analysis because good luck getting a perfectly representative response rate. with (2) you would have to have a hypothesis that the nonresponse rate for people who did not like the game were different from the nonresponse rate for people who did like the game - and i mean the spectrum of weak to strong feelings; you may argue that people who are weakly negative on a game may be less motivated to write a review, but i don't see why this would be a different phenomenon from people who are weakly positive. frankly, i would be more concerned about user reviews not being representative if they diverged in any significant way from critical reviews, which they don't. hence why a lot of the recurring theories (and je sawyer's own statements to this effect) revolve around the assumption that people who did play deadfire generally really liked it, and so the issue is not really about what's wrong with deadfire per se and more about what would cause the audience to shrink so much (essentially a glorified funnel analysis from PoE1). Hence - things like setting, poor marketing, higher competition, satisfied nostalgia demand, etc. Many of us are trying to answer #1, and you seem to be trying to answer some variation of #2 and trying to rationalize it with a lot of other scaffolding which is honestly rather unconvincing. The theories that keep persisting are the ones that generally require us to do less discounting/rationalization of what data we do have. I mean, for example, P:K has way more mediocre reviews than Deadfire, but sold way better apparently.

The gist is that anything that's a bug or loophole that you take advantage of is fair game, because it was Obsidian's fault that it exists, not yours. (I forgot where this was said, but I think this is straight from JE Sawyer's mouth.) Also, while it wasn't intentional, I did end up having a Hylea + Luminous Adra stacking for part of my run (in fact this is how I discovered the stacking bug) and I ended up using it to pass several encounter checks. Didn't disqualify me. PS. best of luck!

steam should have an option to show FPS in-game. mostly i'm wondering if there's a CPU bottlenecking happen that would show up in a frame rate drop despite low gpu utilization. that's the only thing i can think of causing sound to cut in and out (basically you're struggling to stream in sound data). anecdotally, i have had sound cut in and out before on my beefy gaming cpu, but only once in a while and doesn't seem connected to performance issues, so i'm pretty much grasping at straws here. also try verifying your install.

Alas, no disrespect to Obsidian (this is more a complement to Blizzard), WoW and other blizzard games are designed to be run even on almost literal potatoes, so being able to run WoW just fine is no indication. Haswell is kind of pushing it, but honestly I have a broadwell (only slightly better haswell) with a 1060 and have no problems running at 1080p aside from maybe slightly longer load times and a bit more jitter than my main gaming PC, so i feel like a haswel with 1050ti should be fine. Are you running through Steam? GOG? Any mods? Can you pull up performance numbers (FPS mostly)?

what are the specs for each of those computers? it is a complete cut-out? or does the sound come back? Is it triggered by any kind of recurring event (e.g. how do you reproduce it?)

by the by, some of the constraints we raise, were raised by sawyer himself in a now-ancient tumblr post. Basically, accounting for a) positive critical and user reception b) unprecedentedly huge drop-off in sales c) higher sales for similar projects Sawyer also has more access to internal marketing and sales data than we do along with receiving more direct feedback than us just navel-gazing in forums, e.g. (with emphasis added) https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189033278221/why-blame-the-relative-failure-of-poe2-on-already "However disappointed people were with the story of Deadfire, I don’t think they were so disappointed, collectively, that it contributed to an enormous loss in sales[1]. Also, I think most of the disappointment was with how the story developed, not with the basic premise (at least, this is what feedback generally indicates)." [1] is a recurring theme that any hypothesis has to address. non-self-proclaimed scientists have made the case better way before you that a bunch of small things could collectively lead to a massive drop-off in sales, but it's a pretty brittle hypothesis. of course, the catalyst for a lot of this: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/188915786456/will-there-be-a-pillars-3-that-is-not-something

"I'm unable to make a coherent argument that addresses objectively-verifiable constraints on any theory/hypothesis, and am doing worse at this even compared to a forum poster who is literally perpetually in-character as an ogre mage, but it's clear it's everyone else's fault, not mine. I am a scientist, by the way." bye_felicia.gif

I'm going to go out on a limb and say when you sea-lion in and say "Sorry but I think you all are continuing to over-think and over-analyze this question." and keep making appeals to authority (repeatedly saying that you're a scientist) you're going to come off badly. I too also went to grad school in social science and live and breath data science as part of my day job in tech, but I'm not making underlining that fact in every other post except where it's actually relevant (e.g. using industry experience to explain why tool-tip-writing/internationalization can be extremely expensive). It does conflict with known data, in several ways: - it fails to account for the success of other numerically complex systems (not just P:K, but even Tyranny apparently did better than Deadfire) - it fails to make any convincing argument about a massive drop-off in sales from PoE1 to Deadfire; we have plenty of theories that can explain smaller drop-offs, but not something that is closer to an order of magnitude - despite your best efforts, it fails to account for Deadfire being a critical success in terms of both journalistic reviews as well as user reviews despite significant drop-off in sales As a social/behavioral scientist, surely you understand the idea of a lit review, to make sure that your research and findings are part of an ongoing dialogue and not just a non-sequitur or spurious finding. Well, we've been at this for months, and we've exhaustively discussed even points like yours throughout. When people raise issues like setting, marketing, or nostalgia as topics, it's because those are the only ones that have continued to survive exhaustive critical scrutiny. What you're doing is basically barging in without having done the lit review, pointing out something that may be true but with at best a minute effect size, and being surprised that we're not all just automatically deferring to your expertise.

wow i hardly ever use mods, but i might break my rule just for this.

i think this is pretty good insight. i mean, i thought the warning signs were there from the very beginning - because fig had fewer overall backers and half of them were fig shares backers. but i chalked it up to it being fig vs kickstarter. but i guess i was wrong there as well. sorry to keep talking about disco elysium, but it's the recency effect. a game like that definitely shows that there is a market for extremely niche cRPG(though it is much more planescape than it is BG/IWD), and one that breaks a lot of traditions and molds in a more radical way than Deadfire sought to. And I am pretty sure that everyone is getting a nice payday out of it. But you have to be smart and purposeful about it. I'm pretty sure JE Sawyer rues the price paid for full VO and the ship to ship combat alot, and if we were to believe Avellone a lot of blame has to go to Feargus (who pushed for the fig, who also pushed for the ship-to-ship-combat, and also I believe also pushed for full VO). So when are we gonna get Pillars of Eternity Tactics??

well, it's an indier indie game than deadfire. Also they didn't spend money on full VO

From JE Sawyer, the pre-order and day of sales were better than PoE1, but post-launch lagged significantly. They also had trouble getting marketing pieces out, and their market research leading up to launch indicated general awareness of Deadfire was much lower than PoE1. So the picture is more complicated. I don't doubt that PoE1 might have dissatisfied users, but it's hard to extract information out of that based on positive user reviews and how it sold well throughout a long dev support cycle (iirc longer than Deadfire, actually). I think the better explanation is not that it dissatisfied users, but that it satisfied users for a need that isn't very big and it didn't face as much competition for that not-very-big-need versus Deadfire. Coupled with a bunch of other factors (e.g. I still think their marketer sucking was a contributing factor, irrespective of any resistance they might have faced from press. I was a backer for Deadfire and hardly heard any press about it).

that's true, but in general I find Sigilmaster Auranic to be waaaay easier than Hauane O Whe and less needing of explicit equipment gearing. Rest in Konstanten's room, bring along some potions of (improved, if possible) arcane reflection and those potions that give you resolve resistance or svef.

I honestly found it an incredibly underwhelming payoff for such a late game quest so I hardly ever used it, but when I do use it I leave myself to Nonconductive and Suppression. Punishment/Condemnation is quite uncommon in the late game, and rarely ever a big deal and anecdotally I feel like acid damage is rather rare compared to electricity. (Note: answer changes a bit if you're gearing up for a megaboss fight because in that case I think Bronze Core is better against Huane O Whe)

First off, in general, in most developed or developing countries, successive generations are more numerically literate than previous generations. Second off, the kids are alright. Third, doesn't explain why games like P:K do well. If anything, like I brought up in another thread, Deadfire is better than PoE1 here because so much more of the system is rationalized, there's less murk, there's a slower pace to combat, and encounters are less trashy and you have less party members to worry about. So this can't explain a massive sales drop. I think if we want to go down this route, it's not the numeracy, but the fact that (as has been mentioned by some developer--possibly JE Sawyer) that RTSes aren't nearly as prevalent these days as back in the late 90s/early 2000s, so people just aren't used to the style of gameplay that RTwP is, and the context that it lives in makes less sense. But even here it doesn't explain a drop-off from a million+ sales, I think it only serves to explain why it's hard to grow your audience or find a new, less nostalgia-focused audience and therefore makes the case that RTwP is a niche genre now.

This happened to one of my friends. I actually tried to warn them away from PoE1 because I thought it was less accessible for them than Deadfire in terms of gameplay (I strongly believe Deadfire is a less murky and more rational system and that is probably a controversial point to some people who prefer Vancian/PoE1 system), but same thing happened - they basically hit a wall getting into PoE1. At least from Obsidian's perspective, they still get money from the PoE1 sales though, even if there's no follow-through.