Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Ok that's really interesting. One thing that is sortof weird about the beta is that there are a lot of things we haven't seen yet, which could make it not-that-hard to cap out your stats, especially near endgame. For example, if there's a party-wide Dex inspiration buff (like there are for Con, Might, Res, and Per in the beta), then 25 dex is readily achievable, and if you add a +5 Dex item (which isn't unrealistic either given that the last game had +4), then a 30 Dex character becomes fairly feasible. Then add in food and drug bonuses . . . as you say though it's a mistake to balance vs. endgame because most of the game is not endgame, definitionally.

Oh oh oh PoE IV: Souljammer

Yeah, but recovery reduction seems more valuable now -- recovery time is a bigger number, armor recovery penalties are much more severe, etc., so a 30% recovery bonus now nets out to a much bigger effect than a 30% reduction bonus in the prior game, because 30% of 100 is a bigger number than 30% of 10. Said another way, in the first game, a 30% recovery speed boost might mean you get to make four attacks instead of three in a ten-second period; now it might mean you get to make 2 attacks instead of 1. This could be something that goes *poof* due to stacking diminishing returns once the full game is out and there are more recovery-reduction effects, though. I still suspect it's more an armor / recovery time issue than specifically a DW one, though, it's just that the DW benefit is outsize-valuable (at least in the beta).

That's PoE 4. PoE 3 is airships. Yeah, no Windjammers either (best ship name)

Hush! It's a secret ship.... that's been cleverly hidden in official press images. I totally agree with you about crew abstractions. Each crewman in Deadfire represents about 4-6 people on a real ship. But when you scale up to something monstrous like a proper Man-o-war, you'd need 50-100 Deadfire crew if you follow along the same proportions. Would it be cool? Hell yeah! But managing a huge, independent warship like that would be a pretty serious mini-game. Yeah, you'd have to assume that each Deadfire crew represented an exponentially greater number of "real" crew, etc. It'd be doable but outside the scope of the game. Looking at that screenshot more closely, I'm gonna suggest I wish they'd figured out a way to make wind direction more of a thing, but realistic wind would probably drive most players up the wall, to the point that it wouldn't even be worth implementing as a toggle.

are those. . .sealed portholes? Is that a . . . There's a certain amount of abstraction happening with the ships already; even a single cannon took a whole gun crew to manage, four to six crewmen I believe, not just a single individual; and even the Galleon we see in the PC Gamer article only has four cannon on a side, which is relatively dinky. I'm kinda hoping for an expanded ships DLC that adds much more depth, but I'm the sort of geek who re-reads the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin books every few years, so I probably have a much higher tolerance for wind mechanics etc. than the average gamer does. It'd be nice to see a clipper ship, maybe even an ironclad . . . It also bothers me that the Defiant seen in the promos is clearly a caravel, not a sloop

One big question is, how does all this change once you start adding recovery speed reductions in? Armored Grace, weapon enchants, etc.? I know there are now diminshing returns for attack speed bonuses in deadfire but I don't know what those bonuses are. It's possible that DW is better at low levels but two-handers dominate at high levels once the speed advantage from DW gets made up for by other enchants.

I feel like somewhere we've gotten a list of the available ships. I know there's a dhow, a junk, a catamaran, and a galleon. There also are apparently secret ships according to the recent Reddit AMA.

Or more precisely, two-handers have the same recovery as sabres, maces, war hammers, and sceptres. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gsz3Hd_3HPs6RtE5YFTfSUzcPNRUY2h9yy733Jp5_50/edit#gid=0 All the recovery times are a bit long imho for everything (including spells) but that goes back to the D&D convention of the "round" etc.

Are there *any* game effects that will hit "undead" but not "vessels" though? The few lore references to "undead" seem more descriptive than prescriptive, as it were . . . it's not like D&D where there's a separate "category" of undead and certain things effect undead in specific ways (i.e., a priest's Turn Undead, etc.) In Eora, that "category" is "vessels".

Lanterns seem to be classified as small shields, and sickles classified as hatchets (you can generate Lantern shields and Sickle hatchets with the console in the current beta, though both have a lot of missing strings).

your new av freaked me out, boeroer, very scary that said, https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Invoke_Vessels https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Holy_Radiance There's a reason that (for example) St. Ydwin's Redeemer destroys all vessels, not just traditional human undead. In Eora, undead are just flesh golems.

Technically, the Devil of Caroc in the first game is "undead" within the context of the setting; she's a "vessel".

Eothas joins your party *as your ship* He floats on his back and you just attach the sails to his . . . . arm

I'd suggest playing on Veteran until it feels boring / easy, then restarting on PotD. Past that, the two big things are 1) actually reading spell descriptions, 2) reading the bestiary. PotD is about having and applying systems knowledge in a way you don't have to bother with as much on lower difficulties.

I went through and took screenshots of everything, here's the screenshot for the hunting bow: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2435760853731766319/9A6A0F42A20F8F851569B018A31A111B84B56588/ Here's the screenshot for war bow: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2435760853731767001/D98C513B71B708525BFE9057966FA3B14C7D3520/ same character, base 10 might? Maybe it's an error in the game files, or maybe there's something I missed. More likely though it's that War Bow has higher penetration, whereas hunting bow has low pen but higher damage -- like GS vs the Estoc.

Does it generate focus?

Hey we ain't in no rush here! What I'm hoping is that at some point someone (not it) puts together a generalized DPS calculator for Deadfire so that we can plug in various stat setups, weapons, modals, buffs, etc. and have it spit out the DPS with that setup -- basically, taking your work and combining it with MaxQuest's attack speed calculator. The current attack formulae seem . . . non-intuitive . . . and I think if people could just plug stuff in and get a result, we'd get a lot of interesting stuff popping out of the data. Right now it's really hard to know (for example) whether it's better to go single-handed blunderbuss or dual on PotD, or even blunderbuss/pistol with the pistol modal, etc., or how that changes once someone drops Devotions for the Faithful or an Aware inspiration, so forth so on.

I wouldn't exactly cry if they shaved a second of recovery off of everything, but yeah, I *feel*, subjectively, like the root issue is that armor is a bit underbalanced right now. There's very little reason to wear mid-tier armors (scale, chain, bp) because they're easily penetrated by almost all weapons, and plate and brigandine slow you down immensely, to the point that you're far better off wearing lighter gear and using buffs or debuffs for penetration-protection instead. Meanwhile though, if you go the classic RPG route and try to wear heavy plate and throw around a two-hander, you'll be the Molasses Man.

How does this math change when a character is not in heavy armor? i.e., in zero recovery cloth? If you look at just the base weapon data, before recovery, perception, accuracy, etc., two-handers currently have a nontrivial DPS advantage. I suspect part of what you're seeing might be an artifact of over-long armor recovery times, multiplying by overlong two-hander recovery times, giving an outsize result. Part of the fix might be to lower armor recovery times, rather than improving 2H weapon recovery directly. With lower heavy armor recovery times, the weapon recovery on 2-handers is getting multiplied by a smaller percent (say, 135% instead of 155%) and thus the DPS penalty for heavy armor is lessened.

My "feel" is that all the one-handers (except possibly the scepter, war hammer, and mace) should have their Pen lowered by one, leave the two-handers pen values alone, but yeah, increase two-handed style's damage bonus by 5% so it's equivalent with the attack speed reduction from two weapon style. I'm not sure if that would be enough to compensate for the inherent speed bonus of dual-weilding, though.

I find myself agreeing with Gromnir checks pulse well, about penetration anyway I think knocking everything at 7 pen or below down 1 will have a secondary effect on focus anyway.

Maybe a little but there's increased systems knowledge on our part too. I suspect the fights are actually slightly harder -- for example, I find myself pulling around blind corners more, etc. -- but we're all much better PoE players now, and we've improved more than the game has increased in difficulty.

The affliction / inspiration system means you can basically replace a priest with a chanter or a druid or whomever, priests aren't a requirement like they were before. Devotions of the Faithful is still good but it doesnt' stack with other accuracy spell bonuses (i.e., paladin auras, etc.)

Basically all the same things you had to do on poe potd (buffs, debuffs, cc, strategic character building) but also a certain amount of pulling and careful positioning so you're fighting where you want to be not where they want to be. There's more attention paid to encounter design so you have to pay more attention to encounter structure.