Yosharian

they have bumped up armoured grace to 25% from 16% so it is more powerful then pillars 1 the affliction immuntities are talents to choose from at level up based on how they are inflicted eg dex, resolve ect I believe it was 20% in Pillars of Eternity, not 16%? But I was referring to the way it is implemented in-game rather than the UI numbers. Are they actually immunities? Or just defense boosts?

Is Armored Grace less effective in Deadfire than it was in POE1? > Immunity to affflictions, dex, resolve , might Where does this come from?

> in Deadfire it's the actual area that gets increased, not the radius anymore. And I think this is potentially a mistake because when it comes to area of effect spells, no-one cares about area, what they care about is radius, because they want to hit that dude over there and that dude over there and that's a radius problem, not an area problem.

> If you poop away your defenses > decent tank > can take a few hits It's only Will, a stat that is poor on Fighters anyway, and you could always put it into Resolve instead, which would give you less affliction duration and more deflection. > on account of avoiding disables. It's not clear to me that boosting your Will save by a few points and adding an extra 5 seconds of Vigorous Defense will suddenly result in a character that can 'avoid' disables. In POTD especially, charms and dominates have such high Will save requirements that it is nigh-impossible to avoid them by boosting defences (although I'll grant this is less of a factor on lower difficulties). > Is forgoing cleave I can't comment on Cleave, maybe someone else can offer some insight as to whether it's worth getting and whether lowering Intellect really harms it all that much.

> I’m a back beta tester what does that mean? I mean we play the backer beta and we all help test the game right? but I just mean I have access to backer beta and I don’t agree the comment he made about multclass a. It would be nice if you disagreed by actually facing the opposing arguments with some numbers, facts etc. The guy you disagreed with was just summarizing video by Nerd Commando which was quite in-depth review of the current state of the beta. So what are you precisely disagreeing with? or rather what argument would you bring to the table to face some facts that were shown in the video. I watched that thing in full and he actually show in game, as a fact, the things you disagree with... I would be delighted if you were right, Yosharian, and I also know from long experiencce that Nerd Commando has his own partuclalr slant on all things RPG, but nevertheless, what he deomostrated was concerning and I too would like to hear more detail. As I explained my issue is I plan to play PotD and I need to know how far I should dip into this multi-class thing. I'm not an uber power player by any means, I am roleplayer that has come to enjoy playing on max difficulty in these games and am therefore mixing a bit of judicious min-maxing to expedite that. I don't want to find out mid-game that one or more of my builds sucks big time and have to restart. To put this another way, woth PoE's very traditional and single class approach I knew where I was from long experience with cRPGs. With this I feel completely at sea and riven by indecision, fear, uncertainlty and doubt. I'm getting conflicting messages and have no means to evaluate them since this is such a new system. Ok but you're responding to Phyriel, not me

> tanking my will save and becoming target number one for charm and dominate Does -10 Will Save change you from being pretty resistant to Charm and Dominate, to being extremely vulnerable to Charm and Dominate? It seems that the Fighter has a low Will Save and lowering it even more really doesn't change how the character will respond to incoming Charms and Dominates too much. Maybe they will crit more often, which isn't great, but if your Fighter gets charmed/dominated, then it's either a bad situation that you have to resolve quickly, or a situation you can ignore safely and finish the fight - either way, extra duration on it doesn't change the dynamic too much as far as I can see. > adding those points to Resolve Well, exactly, that's a viable option. Extra deflection and lower negative status durations could be seen as vastly superior to the benefits Intellect gives. > The longer duration lets me use some resources for other abilities rather than needing to save it for a low duration Disciplined Strikes. Are there any other abilities really worth spending resources on? > greatly diminish your Constant Regen. I disagree with 'greatly', but isn't NC's argument that you don't need a huge duration on your CR because the fights don't last that long?

That may be the philosophical heart of PoE but it's buried under SO much dense dialogue/exposition that it barely matters.

I mean, they have one of the most powerful passives in the game in Sneak Attack, and you could just multiclass to those classes to get access to those passives

I don't really understand how the current Disciplined Strike upgrade is still intact and hasn't been utterly nerfed. 50% graze->hit + 50% hit->crit alone is incredible, but with 5 Per (i.e. 5 accuracy) as well? And the alternative is an Intellect boost? This baffles me.

So after watching NerdCommando's latest video (search for 'NerdCommando' on YouTube), I noticed that he is dump-statting Intellect on some of his characters. As far as I can tell, the reasoning is thus: 1) The duration penalty (something like -35% duration at extremely low Intellect) is negated somewhat by Power Level. A level 7 single-class character has something in the region of +20% duration, which offsets the penalty significantly. A multi-class character at the same level has about +10%. So, for example, Disciplined Strikes lasts between 10-11 seconds for a character with extremely low intellect, as opposed to the 15 second default. 2) A single-class character has enough resources over the course of a single encounter to keep using an ability, which again negates the duration penalty. If you have enough resources to cast an ability several times, you don't necessarily need a long duration on your ability, because you can just recast it - it's a little less efficient, but worth it for the bonuses one can receive with more points in other attributes. (Not to mention, recasting buffs is way easier with the new gambit/tactics system!) We talked briefly about Disciplined Strikes using a single-classed Fighter with 3 Intellect: Now dumping Intellect also harms your Willpower stat and gives you a rather large area of effect penalty, something in the region of -70% for an extremely low Intellect (pretty horrendous for any character that casts an area of effect ability, such as a group buff). However these penalties can be worked around I believe. For example, focusing on abilities which do not use area of effect - rather easy for a Fighter, possibly? In exchange for dumping Intellect, we can boost other attributes like Dexterity, Resolve, Perception and Constitution, which have clear, and in some cases incredibly powerful, benefits. NC touched briefly upon the fact that some of these attributes are multiplicative which means a character benefits enormously from boosting them. So. Thoughts? PS: Obviously, NC is a min-maxer, and thus opts to tune Intellect to an extremely low level in order to maximise the benefits in other attributes. However, you can use the idea of lowering Intellect without going to such extremes, if it offends your role-playing sensibilities (it does mine, somewhat!). For example, you could lower intellect to about 7, thus making your character a little obtuse, but not exactly a dimwit. This would give you more points to spend in other attributes. I guess what I'm saying is, it's unnecessary to respond with 'well I don't care because putting Intellect at 3 is just absurd', because you can simply make the same arguments for lowering Intellect and merely reduce it a little less.

> I’m a back beta tester what does that mean? I mean we play the backer beta and we all help test the game right? but I just mean I have access to backer beta and I don’t agree the comment he made about multclass a. Oh backer. You wrote 'back'.

Aww. I was hoping Fire Godlike at least would be decent. They still get the +armor bonus, right? That seems like it might be useful on a tanky plate-wearer (which is what I'm going for).

> I’m a back beta tester what does that mean?

Absolutely, if the skill trees are structured in such a way that they match Pillars 1's. In Pillars 1 the higher level abilities were often outshined by the mid-level or even early level abilities. However, that's not a given. It may not be the same in Pillars 2. We really can't judge until we are shown the whole game. Another example would be the relative power levels of the base weapons being strongly influenced by the actual weapons we end up getting in the game. If Weapon Type A is stronger than Weapon Type B, but Weapon Type B ends up getting a omgwtfbbq insanely powerful Soulbound weapon available halfway through the game (e.g. Stormcaller from Pillars 1), then that could strongly influence game balance.

NerdCommando's video is a little old now. The game has changed. Let's wait until the game comes out, or the next beta if there is one, before we start slinging around words like balance. NerdCommando's video was released yesterday. I am also concerned about this. The charge is multi-classes have been nerfed so badly they are no longer viable (well more accurately they no longer compette with single cvlasses) because all the good abilities have been moved to higher tiers leaving only dross available in lower tiers early game. Single class characters get to pick from higher tiers much faster so they are now much more powerfull. A second charge is there is no build variety for many single-class characters. There is only one way to build a fighter for example. Leave CON and RES at 10, put INT to 3 and add the rest evenly to STR, DEX and PER since they all conttribute to multiplying up DPS. Then just take Diciplined Strike and the one or two decent passives available at lower levels (can't remember which). This outperforms any multi-class variant of a fighter by a a wide margin it seems. A third charge is that generally the skills and abilities are now mostly extremely weak and underwhelming. Those few that are any good become automatic picks thus squeezing variety out of the game. A lot of this is down to the scarcity of zeal points and the underwhelming bang per zeal point from most abilities. Essentialy this means it's best to buy those few long term buff abilities that are actually any good, particularly tyhose that cost one zeal point (such as aforementioned Diciplined Strike for example) and since there are so few of them they just become auto-picks. Anyway my concern is that I was all set to go largely multi-class (except for offensive casters which were prior to this patch stronger as pure single class) and pretty much had my party figured out. Now all that has gone out of the window and we are back to single classes. But where will we be on release? I guess it means we can't start playing until some people have worked it out and posted the verdict. I mean these sort of balance tweaks are no problem really if you only have single classes, you can adjust as the game progresses and you learn more, but the problem here is you have to be right about which is best from the get go, you can't change later without restarting the whole game (which I don't like doing). At least NerdCommando has determined the best weapon by far in the game is the Hunting Bow (lots of damage, more importantly very fast shot rate). Swords etc have been nerfed to oblivion. Spears are the way to go, or dual wield daggers/hatchets it seems. > A third charge is that generally the skills and abilities are now mostly extremely weak and underwhelming. Those few that are any good become automatic picks thus squeezing variety out of the game. A lot of this is down to the scarcity of zeal points and the underwhelming bang per zeal point from most abilities. Essentialy this means it's best to buy those few long term buff abilities that are actually any good, particularly tyhose that cost one zeal point (such as aforementioned Diciplined Strike for example) and since there are so few of them they just become auto-picks. This was by far the most negative thing that I saw in the 45 mins or so that I watched.

Ok so I started watching NC's new video. Things I noticed: 1) He frequently mentioned the icons that are being re-used in the skill tree, but surely Obsi will have different icons for each ability ready for release? Has Josh commented on this? I would be surprised if the icons released like that. 2) When he was comparing the multi-class Fighter/Cipher with the Fighter, he made a big deal of some differences that seemed negligible, and glossed over some differences that seemed important. For example, he pointed out a 1-second duration difference between the two characters' DIsciplined Strikes as if it were a significant advantage for the single-class character. But it's only one second. This doesn't add up. Seems like he had a criticism prepared in his mind that didn't actually match the game statistics. Secondly, he doesn't address the fact that the Fighter/Cipher has an entire spellcasting tree that the Fighter doesn't have. He didn't even mention it. Thirdly, the Fighter/Cipher has a much bigger damage stat but he just glosses over it as if it's not a big deal. It seems important to me. 3) He criticized the Fighter/Cipher's slower gain of abilities, for example not having Armored Grace while the Fighter has it. But, he didn't consider that the full game will have a larger level range, and the Fighter/Cipher will gain those abilities eventually, it'll just take longer. We can't say for sure whether single-class characters are that much stronger than multi-class characters without seeing the end-game abilities that only the single-class character will get access to. And, to be fair, they could be amazingly strong, which would vindicate NC's comments, but we can't know for sure. I haven't watched it all, don't have the time right now. NC's analysis is usually pretty good so maybe he was just not explaining himself really well here, or maybe I misunderstood something.

NerdCommando's video is a little old now. The game has changed. Let's wait until the game comes out, or the next beta if there is one, before we start slinging around words like balance. I agree that it's an extremely difficult proposition to balance it all out but let's at least give Obsi a chance.

This is a good point, even though I liked some of those romances so many bioware romance plots play out like that. Even the whole Viconia thing where she'll have casual sex with you but then end the romance and to be successful u have to refuse the first time has been used again and again by them. Where has that been re-used?

Others can explain better, but basically it works like this. Power level is a component of multiclassing, so I'll use that as an example. Think of a single class Wizard versus a multiclass Wizard/Fighter: 1) The Wizard/Fighter can cast some of the same spells that the Wizard can, but at slightly reduced power (less damage, less duration, less penetration, etc). This power disparity increases slightly as the two characters grow in levels. 2) The Wizard can cast higher level spells earlier than the Wizard/Fighter can. For example, a Wizard would get Level 5 spells faster than the Wizard/Fighter. 3) The Wizard can cast some very high level spells (Level 8 and Level 9) that the Wizard/Fighter will never get access to.

What's wrong with a simple fighter multiclass? If you wanna deal damage with your weapon.. Fighter would emphasise the aspect of your character that wants to deal the most damage with your weapon. Also, tinkering with your armour to make it more graceful in combat. Etc

Battle-forged does 200 damage? That can't be right

Maybe this will interest someone? It caught my eye. The original is high resolution, so you can crop it as you want. Original: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BPlK8 Edit: yikes... https://www.artstation.com/an-helme

The process of transferring your savegame is managed personally by Josh Sawyer, through the medium of interpretive dance

> kind of a joke (Viconia) or... questionable... (Aerie) How dare you.

It's sad to think that we've not even come further than what BG2 achieved in this regard, even if BG2's answer was still extremely linear, at least it caused players to reflect upon what the NPC was saying and consider their answers carefully. As you say, romance in most RPGs nowadays has devolved to 'choose the answer that has the heart next to it and receive instant adoration'. Where there are mechanics that allow the player to build up friendship points or whatever, as a barrier to romance progression, these rarely involve any critical reflection; usually they're just 'give random gifts until this person likes me, then I can **** them'. It's lazy, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and it sickens me.