Matt516

I bet you are in Act 2 and haven't even noticed. I do not believe that you are level 8 in Act 1. Act 1 usually goes to 5 or 6, tops. He could've done a bunch of bounties and Od Nua and gotten that fairly easily. I avoided bounties altogether and only did floors 1-6 of Od Nua and I was 6-6.5 at the start of Act II.

This is the crux of the issue. I'm not an anally optimal player when I'm actually playing PoE. I role play. I have a hell of a lot of fun doing whatever I want. I use Sagani because I think she's an awesome character even though Rangers kinda suck. I have a fun time.... but then again, I'm not all that challenged. I can afford to use bows and put everyone in armor and not block doors constantly and not minmax my stats because the game isn't all that Hard even on Hard. Which is a bit of a shame, because I'd like to have to think a little bit more about how to succeed in encounters. And even in this somewhat more casual run, I'm having to limit myself to keep the game from becoming stupid easy. I'm avoiding bounties. I'm not using figurines. Etc. Because if I did, the game would just become boring because there would be no challenge whatsoever. And from a game design standpoint, if there are exploitable mechanics or content in your game that players have to intentionally avoid taking advantage of in order to have any semblance of challenge (such as bounty XP, OP Estoc, figurines, etc) - your game design is flawed. The lead designer of PoE, Josh Sawyer, recognizes this. That's why he implemented systems to remove infamous exploits from the IE games, such as rest spamming and ludicrous pre-buffing (when the enemies couldn't do the same). And people may disagree on whether those solutions worked as intended (I think they worked out quite well, myself), but the point is that Josh Sawyer agrees that when a game's mechanics lead players who want to play the game well to do the same (often nonsensical from an ingame perspective, such as sleeping every 2 hours) things over and over again... that game's design is flawed. No game is perfect. But the ideal is that the player has meaningful choices to make when faced with ingame challenges - not a handful of OP strategies that trivialize all content that they need to avoid if they want to be challenged in the least. PoE fails in that respect, in some ways. Which is why we provide feedback - to make the game better.

Yup. It's actually one of the worst issues with the attribute system at the moment (that I should've realized and pointed out before now, but oh well) - Dex is actually better for DPS (probably) because it's effectively a multiplier on ALL your damage modifiers instead of just a piddly addition to them. It still makes you more susceptible to DR than Might does, but that's not a big deal as you start to stack up multipliers. What really needs to happen is that Fine/Exceptional/Superb need to change the true base damage of the weapon instead of acting as additive multipliers. Essentially making them multiplicative with all others. Might should also become multiplicative with everything else - so your damage would be: (Modified Base Damage from Quality) * (Might) * (All other multipliers added together). That would make Might at least somewhat significant late game while still mitigating the ludicrous multiplier stacking that was such a big problem in the Beta (before all multipliers were additive). As is, Might kinda sucks. And it isn't gonna get any better as we move into the sequels and the numbers keep getting bigger. Might will just be more and more overshadowed by Dex.

For future games, you might want to avoid bounties entirely. From the numbers I've seen, those can literally take you from 9->12 (or nearly so) by themselves. Waaaay overtuned.

RemoveTalent works for both, I believe. Check this page (number #31): http://rien-ici.com/iemod/console If you're not already using IE mod.... do.

So... how bout that "PotD enemy types and numbers, but no inflated stats" difficulty level? Anyone got the modding chops to pull this off? I say this without having played PotD yet, so take that as you will. Might be that PotD is just the right amount of difficulty for me - though I'll still hate that most things I learned on Hard will be invalid due to the stupidly inflated stats. I'd much rather just have more numerous and more difficult enemies.

Oh of course. At least until 1.05 drops and they (hopefully) reduce the XP gains from those massively. It'd be a shame to not be able to do them at all, as it sounds like they're fairly challenging pieces of content. Not sure how... I'm partway into Act II (haven't done the temple yet but I've done a fair amount of the sidequests) and I've also done floors 1-6 of Od Nua... and I'm only at level 7.5 right now. Not experiencing any of the uber overleveling people have been reporting. Though the combats still aren't that difficult so far even at my reasonably (I assume) well-scaled-to-the-part-of-the-game-I'm-at level.

How many parameters do you want to include? If you know your ACC, base weapon damage, and any modifiers that apply, as well as their DEF and DR I think it's already known, yes? Only thing still being worked out is how exactly DEX and armor affects attack speed. It's the Dex and Armour effects that I specifically want to compare, so yeah it's kinda important What difficulty are you playing on that it actually matters? PotD++? Or is it just for theorycrafting fun? I can understand that. Just theorycrafting. I'm partly curious about how armour penalty and Dex interact with each other. Like if I have a character in full plate using a two handed weapon, what's the effective DPS of going 3 might & 18 dex, compared to 18 might & 3 dex, etc. I really like theoretically optimizations within certain constraints, but you need to know how all those constraints work to do so properly. Even if Dex works in the most advantageous way possible (decreasing both attack and recovery time), it can only provide a DPS increase of 3% per point... but while also adding more attacks per second, which increases the DPS decrease from DR (since that's directly dependent on your attacks per second). Might, on the other hand, is a flat bonus to damage so it is always better......... is what I would have said before I realized that due to the additive multipliers, Might really isn't that good because it's just an additive damage multiplier. Whereas Dex is multiplicative because however much damage you're doing from everything else just gets multiplied by the additional attack speed. It's hard to say one is always better than the other though since Might is better against DR and Dex is better when you have lots of attack modifiers. My hunch is that Dex is actually going to be superior most of the time, since (again), the most Might ever provides you is 3% of your base weapon damage per point, while Dex provides you 3% more speed, which translates to all your attack multipliers (Might included) being multiplied by 1.03. Probably. The DR DPS decrease increase is still a problem for Dex though, which is why I honestly don't know..

I cared more than I usually do with games, so I think it's a you thing honestly. Yea, there are people who develop an intense dislike for something and who then need to have their opinion validated by attacking every aspect of the game. I'll take the PoE story over the paper-thin Baldur's Gate one any day of the week, thank you very much. Baldur's Gate pulled me in for the mystery, and the pacing was amazing, with reveals and hints and so on and so forth. In PoE, I'm really having a hard time feeling just as to why I'm doing what I'm doing. I genuinely wanted to continue and see what was going on in Baldur's Gate, not because of some grand plot or to save myself or someone else, but because I was involved in something somehow for reason I didn't understand, and the breadcrumbs lead me up and down the sword coast. It didn't start as some big conspiracy, or something major at all, it slowly grew into it from personal motivations. I'm not feeling that in PoE at all. Why am I even doing this? Up to Caed Nua, it all made sense to me, I had a clear motivation, I wanted to learn more, but past that it got flimsy and then it decided to just evaporate once I reached Defiance Bay. I'm deliberately trying to avoid spoilers here, I made a post a little bit earlier with spoiler tags, if anything is unclear. So it's hardly just Sensuki. Really wish there was a PotD mode but without the blanket 50% enemy "cheat"-boost. I hate it when the AI cheats, so I really liked the idea of PoE:s difficulties being about the number of opponents and encounter design and such, so that the opponents are actually always the same; lions will always be lions and elder lions always elder lions and so on and so forth. It's dependable and, for lack of a better word, it feels "real", it's consistent. But Hard is really easy and PotD is so much harder because hurrr inflated numbers hurrr. I would love to see another difficulty level that has the additional-er enemies of PotD, but without the stat boost. I'm also a huge fan of "don't just turn the numbers up with difficulty".

Speaking of Tartantyco, I get you and Luckmann confused.. like, all the time. Y'all need to have a fight over who gets the avatar or something.

How many parameters do you want to include? If you know your ACC, base weapon damage, and any modifiers that apply, as well as their DEF and DR I think it's already known, yes? Only thing still being worked out is how exactly DEX and armor affects attack speed. It's the Dex and Armour effects that I specifically want to compare, so yeah it's kinda important What difficulty are you playing on that it actually matters? PotD++? Or is it just for theorycrafting fun? I can understand that.

You say that he was in Chain Mail, and survived fine, and that Plate Armour would've reduced his DPS. Fair enough. And then you say that that reduction would be for nothing, just for a few extra points of DR that he doesn't really need. The issue with the No Armour/Full Armour dichotomy of the system is exactly that. If you did fine with Chain Mail, you would probably have done fine with Clothing, and the trade-off is not worth it. The difference between Chain Mail and Full Plate is not worth it. And the difference between Cloth and Chain Mail is not worth it. Say what? If my two hand fighter did well with DR in the teens he would've done fine with no DR? That has literally no logical basis. He did fine as in he was able to take a beating, get his endurance fairly low and then recover himself or get some healing. With no armor he would've been dropped over and over again. The point is that I found the balance between DPS and DR that felt right. Your notion that cloth would've worked on him because chain mail worked on him makes absolutely no sense. Yeah... if you don't use some kind of "only one person ever takes damage ever" strategy (which shouldn't really be possible without some extreme door cheesing due to the sheer number of enemies in some encounters and the existence of AoE attacks), the best strategy is to find what playstyle you like for each character, then put them in the lightest armor they can afford while remaining conscious in that playstyle. So for the tank, that's plate since you're deliberately getting him beat on. For the tanky dps (like my barbarian) that's something like Hide or Leather, so they can take on a few enemies by themselves without going down instantly. And for the backliners, I still find that a little protection (usually robes) is good since every once in a while they'll get targeted in spite of your best efforts. Even speaking from an optimal perspective, the optimal usage of resources is actually to have everyone's health depleting at roughly an equal rate (percentage of full, not values) so that when you finally rest, almost everyone is dead and you know you've squeezed everything out of party health that you can. If only the tank is ever losing health, you're actually playing suboptimally because you're wasting resources that are available to you (again, if you want to be anal about that sort of thing). Not that that much optimality is necessary, of course... but there is support for a variety of armors, even when looking at things from an optimal perspective. I think Sagani is the only character I've got in plain clothing due to her being so far from the fight that she doesn't get targeted by more than 1 ranged enemy usually. But Aloth and Kana and Durance all have their share of close calls, so I'm generally thankful they've got at least a little bit of protection.

IE mod, y'all. It's basically essential IMO. I've used it to correct the companions' stats to the new ones post-patch (since they didn't make the patch retroactive) and to remove "lightning strikes" from my Monk in lieu of another ability since it's currently bugged and completely useless. Of course you can cheat with it (like that's a problem in a single-player game ) but in general, just having access to all sorts of console commands is a huge boon even if you want to play the game legit. Only thing I've done that I'd call "cheating" is to switch "Barbaric Yell" out for another ability since I didn't realize the watcher [MINOR spoiler] gets an ability that causes AoE fear that's better in almost every way. So anyway.... yeah. IE mod. Lets you turn PotD on and off in the middle of the game. Would you say that turning it on in the middle would keep the difficulty comparable to "early game Hard" in lategame? Or should I just avoid bounties like the plague (already planning on it) to avoid overleveling (until they tone the XP rewards down, anyway).

Oh, I still need to try that!

So I've read a lot about how easy the game is supposed to get around Act II. I've been playing on Hard, using story companions (including Sagani because she's awesome and I don't care if its suboptimal) and playing well but without a few things I view as a bit OP at the moment (summoning figurines, Estocs, etc). Having a great time. Should I think about turning PotD on sometime in Act II? Would that result in the rest of my game keeping roughly the same level of challenge as the game has had up to this point?

How many parameters do you want to include? If you know your ACC, base weapon damage, and any modifiers that apply, as well as their DEF and DR I think it's already known, yes? Only thing still being worked out is how exactly DEX and armor affects attack speed.

It is known. There is little incentive to use anything between basic clothing and full plate armour. Brigandine is no exception. I wouldn't agree with that - even if I did that's a separate issue. The problem with Bridgandine is worse than the (not quite settled, IMO) issue where you either go all-in or not-at-all with armor. At least the other armors grow in durability somewhat proportionally to the mobility penalty, letting players choose exactly where they want their characters to fall on the tankiness/speed spectrum. That's something that can be tweaked a bit (though I personally find it quite alright as is). Brigandine, though... has the same speed penalty as Plate and **** for DR in comparison. A wee bit more crushing resistance and you lose the shock weakness... but your slashing/piercing DR is pretty much cut in half. It's just terrible compared to plate - gripes about the global system notwithstanding. Wonderful idea. I wouldn't tune it down quite that much if it were me, but I love the concept and it'd be a fantastic addition to the inevitable "PoE rebalanced" mod. I'd probably do Robes/Padded/Hide/Leather/Scale/Mail/Brigandine/Plate as 6%/12%/18%/24%/30%/36%/42%/50%, or something like that. Note that Brigandine and Plate are now on separate tiers, because of course they are.

I dunno... I don't think this is really a valid argument to make. Anything that the game mechanics allow or tacitly encourage you to do is fair game for criticism. It doesn't make sense to criticise PoE for having abusable mechanics (like engagement in some cases) but give the IE games a pass. You're never "supposed" to do abusable things, that's why we label them abusable. Any time the player has to place a self-restriction on themselves in order to have a fun and challenging experience (such as not rest-spamming in BG or not exclusively blocking doors with tanks in PoE), you're looking at flawed game design. Not that any game will ever be perfect - but I think trying to argue that PoE is somehow more abusable than the IE games is quite difficult to do. Both games are abusable, just in different ways. Now, I won't disagree with you that PoE could use some more depth - I'd like to see creatures with more specific resistances beyond just high saves, for example. I'd also agree that the combat systems could use more polish. But the IE games are not a bastion of balanced gameplay - they have just as many abusable mechanics as PoE.

Brigandine is pretty much vastly inferior to Plate, yes. It is known.

Dunno if this is "fan club" by your definition (whatever that means), but Sensuki isn't a D&D devotee, he's an IE devotee. AoO wasn't in IE, he likes IE combat, so he doesn't like engagement. I'm a big fan of engagement, myself, so this isn't some sort of dogpile of the anti-engagementers... but you're mistaken about where he's coming from. It's not a D&D thing, it's an IE thing. (Sensuki, correct me if I'm wrong).

Hmmmm. You don't hear people talking in the background in Defiance Bay? You shouldn't be able understand them, but you should be able to hear what sounds like lots of people talking in a city... If you turn the music off, is it silent? Maybe you've encountered a bug? I've been playing Defiance Bay for a bit, and I don't recall any hustle/bustle noises. No weird audio settings on my end. I'll listen again next time I play and report back if it is indeed missing. While we're at it, how about some hustle/bustle for the stronghold as well? Would need a few NPCs standing around for that to make sense of course, but the audio could really address the "dead" feeling the stronghold has right now.

BG1 CNPC:s had loads of personality, and it conveyed those personalities largely without talky talky talky talky talk talk, which is a feat in itself. I'd take Xan over Aloth or Edwin over Pallegina any day of the week. To be fair, Aloth and Pallegina are some of the least interesting companions in PoE. Eder, Sagani, and (of course) Durance are all pretty great. BG1 still had somewhat more flamboyantly interesting companions though to be sure. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is probably largely personal preference. I see merit in both styles, tbh - BG1's were more larger-than-life and ridiculous in an extremely entertaining way, whereas PoE's are a bit more focused on believability, which means that they're naturally a bit drier.

Re: recovery time and such... have you all seen this? This is a graphic Josh Sawyer posted during the Beta, and to my knowledge things haven't changed much (if at all) since then. It won't answer your questions about stacking and such, but it should give you a good idea as to how the system is "supposed" to work. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzc2Dec83wSnY2F4WjgzaHhXVnM/view?usp=sharing EDIT: It's in seconds, not frames - but you get the idea. EDIT 2: Just from looking at the graphic again, I have a few observations... it looks like weapons have a base recovery time, and then single 1H weapons (or with shield) or 2H weapons have an additional penalty. The interesting thing is that it doesn't look like the armor recovery penalty actually applies to this additional "single weapon" penalty - only to the base weapon penalty. This would mean that armor actually slows dual wielders down comparatively more than it slows single weapon wielders. Does this jive with what you've observed in your tests?

To be fair, nothing ever adds to the base damage ever. Weapon enhancements (fine, exceptional, superb as well as damaging) change the displayed base damage of the weapon, but the internal base damage for the purpose of calculating how much damage the additive percentage boni give remains the same no matter what. So monks aren't at all particularly inconvenienced by this. They do get ****-tons more damage on their fist attacks than anyone can ever get on any other 2H fast weapons though, so there's that.