thelee

i think more accurately, that they err on the side of nerfing too much, because they can tune it up without much complaint, which is more pleasant to players than repeated patches of tuning the same thing down.

I suspected that it'd be pretty good but couldn't in early game find a good way to deal with the party-unfriendly AoE, glad to know that someone got good mileage out of it.

you should probably either expand your perspective and/or count your lucky stars that you never played a trap build. JE Sawyer had the personal example (either him or someone else) getting absolutely wrecked in IWD because they made a party of rogues. BG2 had some idiot-proofing in place because you only designed your PC and the rest of your party was designed by Bioware, but there were still plenty of "bad ideas" that only manage to work either because Throne of Bhaal came around and trivialized *everything* or because there were some items that were just so fundementally OP they could make any party work (rods of resurrection acting as an insta-heal on perfectly-alive characters, robe of vecna, staff of the magi, that reflecting cloak, dragon mail armor, the special bardic elven mail, etc.) I chimed in on another thread about BG2's oddities in adapting and expanding the AD&D rules, but single-class druids were almost certainly a trap build in vanilla BG2 because how weird the level cap was implemented/non-implemented in BG2. Being stuck at level 14 while everyone else is getting more spells, lower THAC0, etc. just fundamentally screwed over the druid, and basically required you to dual-class or multiclass (jaheira was a multiclass). It wasn't until ToB arrived and let you hit level 15 that suddenly single-class druids became amazing (getting tons of level 7 divine spells, way more than clerics).

So I'll give an example for the spell that most immediately comes to mind from my first playthrough as something of a "win button" almost, and that is Devotions for the Faithful. In its release state, if I'm not mistaken, the spell would grant a whopping +8 might and +20 accuracy to all allies within the cast area for 30 seconds, and decrease the enemy might and accuracy by the same amount. This is a massive power swing in favour of one party. The spell was obviously nerfed and cut to half of all the buffs and debuffs we see above (+/- 4 MIG, +/- 10 ACC), and it's still a pretty damn powerful spell in its current iteration, or so I find at least. All this for a lvl 4 priest ability, by the way, so it's not like we'd only get to experience it late-game either. I'd just like to chime in an add a *real* case study instead of just the hypothetic algorth is using. Diablo 3. Diablo 3 designers basically made a conscious decision to do exactly what Makumba666 suggested - never nerf, always buff. This creates a perpetual power creep with every single patch. It basically means the story campaign is incredibly trivial to play now because the only way enemies have kept up in power is essentially through uncapped greater rifts (which exponentially increase enemy power into perpetuity), and it also means that if you aren't using a build that is "blessed" by being complemented with specific set gear, there's just basically no way your power level can keep up with all the incremental creep on items, abilities, etc. that over time combined with diablo 3 having lots of multiplicative modifiers resulted in hugely blown out numbers for certain setups. Yeah, people don't get as pissed off every time diablo 3 releases a balancing patch that amps up all damage multipliers--except for the ones being taken down a notch--by 25%... though some people still get annoyed when their favored ability *isn't* the one getting buffed, but it creates a creaking house of cards of a game design and only really still ends up working because so much of the game play is geared towards the uncapped nephalim/greater rift grinding, which deadfire doesn't have (in fact many people here seem to be at best ambivalent to deadfire's closest equivalent: megabosses). Even then, personal accomplishments in earlier "seasons" get trivialized because with each patch people find themselves pushing ever higher greater rifts with the same gear and build. It's not progress, it's a lie. And yes, Diablo 3 counts because since loot 2.0, Diablo 3 is basically a single player game now, that just happens to have a chat room and require an internet connection.

some background in case one wasn't aware - BG2/bioware was completely aware of the level caps, but deliberately chose to ignore them and other AD&D characteristics for BG2 so they could make more high level gameplay but it created some weird artifacts in the game, like: - humans are described as having an advantage of getting to any level, though that's irrelevant - druids have a progression that suddenly stop at level 14 - iirc, in AD&D they had some special RP-related advancement rules (something something grand druid and challenging), but also it was supposed to be less of a downside when most other characters aren't getting to level 19-23 anyway - the hit die +health system making less sense when everyone eventually is mostly levels of just the +health - general multiclass balancing i'm not completely confident I have the details right, outside of BG/BG2/IWD i only really started getting into pnp with 3rd ed, which overhauled and standardized progression.

blind - yes, it triggers flank. captain's eye can help (with disorient) but blind is pretty common so it ain't great. if you multiclass your barb with a fighter, you can get disciplined barrage and upgrades which is an instant-cast, easy spam way to protect against blind or eliminate it. you'll still want captain's eye or other perception resistance because persistent distraction will easily strip you of your disciplined barrage buffs. edit - or what waski said.

Real annoying - resting does not clear the perma slog zone. I don't know exactly when/how it happened, so I am including a bunch of saves in my dropbox folder. I suspect some reloading in the first encounter for SSS caused this slog zone because loading hte Pre-DLC save doesn't have any slog zone on anyone, but an autosave immediately after shows characters with slog zone on them. Also, during that first encounter, I was having audio issues - sometimes the muted audio that occurs when you're having one of those "watcher moments" in dialogue doesn't clear away if you're in a dialogue tree that can loop around and repeat the muted audio - the dialogue that opens in SSS encounter can go in a way where you start combat still with muted audio and purple-y VFX if you manage to do the dialogue tree in such a way that Muatu interjects a second time. I no longer have the autosave that started the SSS encounter for either the slog zone or audio issue, but you can load the "PRE-DLC" save and just sail in, then trigger the encounter, and then maybe reload a few times after dialogue ends and combat starts. The only way I appear to be able to clear the perma-slog-zone effect is to actually reload back to the Pre-DLC save (thank god for that auto save) and do the encounter again. As I said before, it doesn't go away on its own and resting does not clear the slog zone. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ybfq2v3swqnau0b/AAD_b4wFijPPnZetxFn2m0Sda?dl=0

given that Deadfire was *so* quickly hit with a massive balancing patch soon after release, it really seems like they *had* to meet a release deadline even though they knew there were still a lot of things to fix. (they had to send out a version for 1.0 production while they were still internally doing the last tweaks) it's easy for me to say since I don't work in the games industry with very fixed budgets and hard-drop deadlines, but it really seems like obsidian could have avoided a lot of grief if they had literally just waited a month for release.

sorry man, but this is objectively false. Deadfire's core rules have essentially never changed. Classes, abilities, and items have been tweaked, but they've generally all kept to their original vision, with few exceptions - pretty much what has really "broken" are arguably unintentionally powerful interactions that were not apparent to the devs when it was just them and their small QA team (the constant rejiggering of empower and brilliant is probably the main thing). The biggest change I can think of was the trickster, which underwent a pretty major transformation in order to be less niche-y. Stuff like tuning paladin resource regen skills or reducing top-end item power level is more akin to baseball (in 2019) tweaking its rules to add a minimum number of batters a pitcher needs to face. ok, dude. even tetris has changed its rules over time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it really just sounds like to me you had some favored ability or item in early deadfire and are mad that you can't use it and don't want to cop to it so you're just making a generalized rant that doesn't seem altogether consistent with how games tend to work in this day and age

I highly doubt Obsidian acts as a democracy and just goes with whatever people are saying. There a whole bunch of game design philosophies (esp w.r.t. balancing), and some people on the forums happen to share similar philosophies with JE Sawyer and co, and just happen to make matching observations. That's a pretty far cry from "X user on the forums complained about an ability, better bring out the nerfhammer"

chess is a funny example because chess *has* changed many times over the course of history - it would probably be unrecognizable today compared to when it was first played. it just happens to have been tuned and balanced in an era where the fastest way to communicate was via horse (if you're rich, walking/trudging for everyone else), basic arithmetic literacy (not to mention normal literacy) was lacking, and really lots of people were a little too busy with subsistence farming to really spend much time thinking about games. chess is pretty complicated, but now we have computers, spreadsheets, economies so productive that people can have entire careers devoted to thinking about games as opposed to harvesting potatoes or wheat, not to mention the fact that those games are now almost arbitrarily more complex than chess. So yes, games are going to iterate a lot more frequently. can understand the annoyance of having to keep up with the changing parameters of a game, but am honestly having a hard time thinking of reasonably sized modern-day games that *aren't* tuned periodically throughout their lifetime, sometimes dramatically. I can open up my steam library, ubisoft library, blizzard library, whatever and every single game in them (even single-player) has pretty much received some sort of tuning patches. i can only assume makumbu666 is really specifically upset about some favored ability having been changed or something, and it's being expressed in a generalized vent/rant. (edit: ok, Thumper in my steam library hasn't received any tuning patches, but am not sure that is "reasonably sized")

I have more detailed criticisms: - still 99% sure that deckhand rank accomplishes nothing, which to me is a major oversight or bug with system. a random person in the hold will perform just as well as a deckhand for ship events. deckhand rank only appears to matter for world map encounters, and you don't need much to pass them. - no way to more directly try to take out enemy surgeons. In high-level ship combat there's almost no point to use anything other than cannonballs, because injured above-deck sailors get healed so freaking rapidly by their rank 3 or 4 surgeons (same goes for you). you basically end up just having to use cannonballs and only if you get lucky early on taking out their surgeon can you then bother with other types of targeting. - sails generally need to have less health and it should be more punishing if sail health reaches 0. there's no point doing chainshot in almost any fight - on easier ships you can accomplish more (and more punishingly) by using grapeshot and taking out their above-deck crew - once the helmsman and deckhand are taken out the ship can't even turn, much less move. on harder ships, there's so much sail health, that using chainshot is basically wasting your turn when you could have been doing actual hull damage or taking out their crew. even if you reduce sail health to 0 enemy ships can still do half-sail movements. - all close-range fire cannons appear to ignore specific targeting and target randomly, which makes them worse than they should be (because like the point above, every time they hit sails it's essentially a wasted shot) though, still a million% better than random poe1 stronghold fights that you have to stop your dungeon-crawling for just to deal with

That is not correct. You can stack Concentration layers. If you take Combat Focus, use the Upright Captain's Belt and cast Spirit Shield (for example) you'll have three layers of concentration. There's also the Courageous inspiration which gives you a layer every 6 seconds - and so on. There are effects (e.g. a Chanter phrase) that remove Concentration entirely though. You can observe layers of Concentration on several enemies. Neriscyrlas for example has a lot of them once encounter starts. It says something like Concentration: 5 or so. I don't know which spells you are talking about, but in general: Arcane Reflection can only reflect targeted spells. THat means spells taht get cast directly onto you. Usually that means no AoE spells since those are cast on the ground and will not be reflected. Example: Slicken will always interrupt you or take away a layer of Concentration (if you have any) even if you have Arcane Reflection. in addition, many aoe effects might have interrupt on hit or crit, so even if they aren't directly targeting you and aren't even directly related to an interrupt (like slicken), they can still cause an interrupt through indirect targeting. Arcane Reflection's requirement that a spell be directly targeted at you is actually why it kinda sucks for most fights. Enemy spell casters tend to cast their direct spells on nearby foes, not on distant casters. You walk up to the bouncer and ask him to punch you in the face while you are walking past him, trying to remember Goethe's Prometheus. Not right. It's a very simple system: an interrupt will remove a layer of concentration. That's it. Why make it complicated? You will not be very concentrated after the bouncer hit you on the nose. Goethe's Prometheus will be the last thing you remember after that "interrupt". You should be happy that the enemy wasted a precious interrupt on you walking instead of on you casting (and losing the resource). As Boeroer mentioned, you *can* have multiple layers of concentration, so being able to strip concentration even when you're not actively doing anything is fundamental to combat mechanics. Tough enemies (or appropriately setup characters) can have many layers of concentration, and requiring them to actively be doing something before using an interrupt would effectively make them un-interruptible. On top of this, interrupt does stuff even when it doesn't actively "interrupt" an ability - it adds instant recovery (+2s) or prones (knock down for 3s with +2s recovery). So even if you're not doing anything, interrupt can still be punishing and hence why concentration is important even when you're not doing anything. Enemies generating concentration is the main way they can avoid some of my parties perma-interrupt-locking them. I think this part of the mechanics works pretty nicely. There are other things which I believe could be better, but Interrupt vs. Concentration is none of them. Hope I didn't sound douchy - not my intention.

He probably meant Fugue Spores poison which we can craft. P.S. I've tried that poison on Giant Cave Grub right now. In my case Confusion effect gets upgraded (as intended) (see screenshot). But the Grub doesn't get charmed. Although that's most likely due to Charm being removed by friendly fire damage now. And perhaps the DoT ticks qualify as such? P.P.S. Just in case: here's the save file. (v4.1.2.0047) I don't have any mods. the DoT instantly dispelling charm may be what's happening (but man, that seems like a broken interaction that a weakness to intellect actually makes the poison worse because then you don't even get the confusion), but I would swear 100% for all time, that my combat log said "resisted" not "strengthened". Either MaxQuest has a special mod to clarify that interaction in the combat log, or I fell into a weird edge-case (possibly on Wael's mode something weird happens). I've been busy so have not been able to go back into my older games, but is SChin saying that even my original OP with the putrid blast is not reproducible? what about the cases where resistance causes the resisted afflictions to have no listed durations (same thing with weakness iirc)?

I really hate this argument. I don't know how to appeal to people who make this argument, because I think fundamentally they just want something different out of a game. When FF7 gameplay devolved into W-Summon Knights of the Round, I got bored as hell. A lot of people seemed to like it. Some people like to turn on god mode when playing offline FPS games. i find it boring as hell. Games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey or Division 2 have "choice" in their progression system, but have uncapped levels or some such that eventually everyone has every skill possible and individual character choice leveling up is obliterated. Some people like not having to make decisions, I find it nihilistic and empty (though tbf games like division 2 end up focusing more on loot for differentiation). Even "better" game systems may still be un-capped and effectivley punish long-term players by making all their characters increasingly more same-y (Fallout 4, Prey, Skyrim). I want a game where there is no obvious "I-win" button, and part of the challenge of playing the game is assembling the pieces together and doing so requires making meaningful trade-offs and choices. Feeling powerful is a natural element of RPG progression, but within reason. There was no point to any character developing decisions in FF8 because once you could spam Renzozuken nothing else mattered. Even in RPG action games like New Vegas, without JE Sawyer's mod by the time you are level 50 (or even a fraction of that) it really doesn't matter what your character is because you can one shot most things in VATS. It's not about whether something is an MMO/multiplayer experience or an offline experience. It's about creating an emergent, diverse-build-enabling system.

oh boy, i forgot about inversions. edit - the max hp loss is a constant amount, despite boeroer's 10 CON or 20 CON (-29, or more realistically 29.5 with some hidden rounding or truncation, which is 25% of the base 118). this means that con-based health reductions don't undergo inversions? you would also have to make sure it works with boeroer's second example. i had a lot of promising equations that just couldn't work simultaneously for both the 10 CON and 20 CON case.

the moment i saw empower as a mechanic in BB (before even all the per-rest items), i was immediately like "what??"

after they released the patch that addressed this issue i never had the crash ever again

you're talking as if most players actually rationed about abilities in per-rest mode on top of the rest limitation, but both from stuff on PoE1 gameplay discussion and Obsidian's own study of the issue, a lot of players just rested constantly, effectively turning everything into per-encounter except encounters were not tuned for it and also players were complaining about limited rest supplies. i mean i get it, i played PoE1 apparently the "correct" way on potd (treating rest supplies as a strategic resource and constraint, rationing out abilities), but a lot of players did not. you can go back in time in these very forums and see all the people complaining about rest limitations becuase people would just spam rest all the time and then be annoyed at having to take trips back to town. this reminds me of a complaint some friends had back in the day with IWD2, where they complained of battles being same-y, which baffled me. when i watched them play, they had "rest until healed" on, rested after every fight, and did the exact same thing every fight - lots of web, stinking cloud, and spamming aoe. anyway, the point is that my first couple paragraphs is the logic obsidian used to move everything to a predominantly per-encounter system, but it seems like an occasionally recurring complaint is the third paragraph. personally, i would have changed poe1's rest system such that rest supplies never replenished in vendors so that it became a fixed strategic asset, but i think most everyone would have hated that. i thought the per-encounter shift made sense in that context. though i don't know what to say about people resorting to same-y tactics. i mean, in FFT it could get really boring if every fight you just had a calculator who calculated some Holies to nuke everyone at the start of every fight, or in FF7 if you W-summoned knights of the round in every fight, but people still did it :/ maybe more immunities, but people have already complained about e.g. dorudugan having interrupt immunities or other bosses having some standard resists/immunities.

you're implying that your current health is set to equal whatever is the same relative % health level as before the health adjustment (that would be a logical thing to do), but boeroer's data shows that that is not the case. (boeroer - i have to assume that you have something that grants you +15 health and that you are a cipher or wizard at level 10 because that's the main way i can make sense that you have an odd amount of health at 10 con) i still can't really make sense of the data (and haven't had time to do tests myself) because boeroer is getting back the full +29 health that a +5 CON boost implies the first time the con affliction wears off (i think there's some rounding involved), despite being at less than full health. At some point he starts getting back less and less. edit - the only thing i can really figure out is that the lower your current health, the lower your health back. but it's not in a way that keeps your current health % at the same proportional level, as maxquest implies. example - when enfeeble wears off the first time in boeroer's first post, current health goes from 72/104 to 101/133 - if it was purely proportional it should be 92/133 (i tried permuting the implied +15 health in some way but can't get a satisfactory equation). my best guess is that there's some linear relationship between current health to max health and how much of the maximum health gain you get to your current health, and there's a threshold where you still get the full max health, and a minimum where you always get a small amount of current health gain.

it really depends on the ability (unfortunately). deep wounds i'm pretty sure is the total damage you dealt spread out over the default duration (so intellect bonus and malus can improve or worsen it appropriately). meanwhile, while not a dot, carnage is raw damage that is % of your main hand weapon's base damage. i seem to recall that wounding shot is something super crappy. disintegrate is some funky formula that does damage over duration, but isn't correctly adjusted by might (though it is correctly adjusted by PL and intellect). cleansing flame uses this same formula, though isn't raw damage. (you can tell if it uses this weird formula if instead of telling you damage per tick it gives you a huge number and a duration). none of this is in the combat log unfortunatley, you just have to look at the red numbers appearing over head regularly.

Could you elaborate? actually I don't know how to make sense of dunehunter's equation. also it's slightly wrong: constitution grants 5% health/point, not 3%. boeroer's in-game example just raises questions that I don't know how to answer with just a few minutes of thinking. Judging from boeroer's empirical example, what appears to be happening is that when you lose CON the game reduces your current health by the ratio of your new max health to your old max health. But when you gain CON, the game is doing something else; it works correctly after the first hit (giving boeroer's char 29 current health, the exact amount of max health being restored), but does something weird after the second hit (only giving him 18 current health). there must be some arithmetic error somewhere in-game where the health gain you get from CON gains is not being calculated correctly at lower health levels. this has important ramifications for con inspirations, which up to this point I had thought could make for potentially semi-decent instant heals late game (since the "healing" scales with your base health, which goes up every level), because if you're getting less than you're owed at lower health then it screws that over. maybe if i knew how much con boeroer's health had that could clarify some things.

i'm not sure i'm understanding how the math is being done in-game, based on what you and dunehunter are saying. how much con does this character have? dunehunter's equation implies that enemies with high con (s.t. they still have a bonus even after the affliction) which actually take less damage than stated

i forget - didn't dominate/charm effects eventually get special treatment in PoE1 so that you could use prayer against treachery and suppress affliction to get rid of it?

I did some testing a while ago and I'm pretty sure might adjustments are dynamic to basically everything that is affected by might. Intellect is a harder pickle and one I haven't tested thoroughly. I believe durations and aoe are set in stone at cast-resolution-time for persistent hazards and most other effects. Paladin auras do dynamically adjust to intellect. Do note that they are not technically "passive," they are active. Call them persistent or something if you will, but active vs passive has specific meaning w.r.t to stacking rules and they are all definitely active for that purpose. The remaining slice that I'm unsure about are the chant and aura-equivalents (e.g. Spark the Souls of the Righteous, Nature's Terror) as you mention. I'm 90% sure that their AoEs are set-in-stone at cast time so later intellect adjustments will do nothing. I'm 90% sure that chant aoes are set-in-stone at chant time. Testing with chant would be easy - have an ally stand right outside the chant radius, then buff the chanter with an intellect inspiration and see if the party member gets the chant immediately or upon the next song - I'm fairly positive you have to wait for the next song. I vaguely suspect that effects like Spark the Souls, Nature's Terror, and Relentless Storm are similar in that they are set at cast-time, even though they follow you around. In this respect I think auras are "special" in having their radius checked repeatedly.