Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Just to follow up on this, I'll crosspost something I said on SA:

Hey, that reminds me! So, a pirate walks into a bar with a ship's wheel sticking out the front of his pants. The bartender looks at him and asks, "Hey, do you know you have a steering wheel sticking out of the front of your pants?" Pirate looks back at him and says, "Arrrrgh, and it's driving me nuts!" Anyway. Sure. Fixed it just for you, pal. I suggested a ship's wheel belt buckle item to Sawyer back during the fig campaign. Seriously considered sponsoring it as a custom item but backing at that level was just too expensive.

Doesn't seem to be implemented in Deadfire.

I think the best chance for overpenetrating is to get a critical hit for the +50% penetration. In the case of two handed weapons a Morningstar is crush/pierce and 8 pen while an Estoc is pierce and 9 pen with both doing the same base damage. I think the Morningstar will do better in most circumstances due to the dual damage. Another thing to consider is that basic weapons are only two penetration less than the armor piercing weapons which do less damage. An Estoc does 18 avg damage and a pike does 21. The Estoc does 16.7% less damage and best case the +2 penetration does +50% damage which becomes 33.3% more when the armor = Estoc penetration and +8.3% more damage when armor = Estoc penetration minus one. So basically there are two values of armor where the Estoc does more damage than a Pike, for every other armor value the Pike does better. The variance for two handed are the closest at 16.7%, one handed slow (maces) are 23.1% less than battle axes, and stilettos are 20% less than hatchets. The take away here is that its pretty much always better to just go for the more damaging weapon with the lower penetration rather than going for a lower damage high penetration weapon. If that is available in a dual damage type or it has accuracy so much the better. I'd add that the main way you're going to find yourself "overpenetrating" is on a debuff of enemy armor, and if you debuff enemy armor low enough, you can overpenetrate even with low pen, high damage weapons.

I really wonder if the various boons carry over. You can grab Skaen's boon post-thaos and then immediately betray Skaen, which is hilarious and weird and a free +1 dex (you keep your other boons too now, at least).Oddly when I did this I didn't see the endslide for betraying Skaen either.

It's a decent system. You're kinda conflating two things though: 1) the ship combat minigame, and 2) the boarding combats. The ship combat minigame is good-ish but needs some more polish, which apparenlty it's getting; we know the current implementation includes variable ammo types (chain shot, grapeshot, ball) while the beta version doesn't have that yet. It doesn't really have wind speed or tacking, though, which I'd like to see personally but which might make the minigame too challenging or annoying for most players. The boarding combats are fun and reminiscent of the stronghold defense battles -- it's your ship's party (and any other companions or hired mercenaries you have stashed away in the inn, though you only have direct control of your current party) vs the opposing ship's crew. These are usually mildly challenging but not too bad because you have your extra mercs etc helping.

I've done more testing and it's more complex than that, at least with powder burns. Sometimes, if you powder burns after the Suprress lands, the negative Distract will stick. If you powder burns, then Suppress, that wipes Distract, and if you powder burn again, the distract then doesn't stick. I think it's some sort of interaction between the positive and negative aspect of the PB stacking/not stacking correctly and likely a bug. I can't figure out exactly what's going on.

One further bit of feedback as I mess around further: Armor doesn't seem that useful right now, at least heavy armor doesn't (edit: and the same may be said of high-penetration weapons, like the Arquebus). It feels like simple clothing is the best gear for casters, for example, and even heavy tanks might not want more than scale mail. Heavy armor slows you down so much and the balance is skewed towards penetration anyway, so you're better off using medium to light armor just to prevent *overpenetration*, rather than to force enemies to get the "no pen" message. On a similar note, I hope there is plenty of "fine" and otherwise enchanted/improved quality "clothing" of the various types. The Vailian frock coat especially is boss and I'm gonna want to pimp that coat on the regular,but unlike the prior game, it isn't enchantable.

Technically you could still use Arcane Dampener to remove Inspirations but I agree that the currently implemented system overall seems preferable. I would like to see a few more classes (maybe rogues and paladins?) get Arcane Dampener style remove-all-inspiration effects.

Just to update this: in the current beta at least, contrary to the Sawyer quote, an inspiration will cancel out an affliction in the same state, and vice versa, whichever is cast last wipes the other and both effects are anulled ( but not any other effects from the same spells).

The scripting works but you have to set the triggers appropriately, the default scripts aren't very good. Try setting it to "enemies in melee range". Edit: I apologise I thought this was in the Deadfire forum. New game.has much improved scripting.

He thought it lasted 6 seconds... It isn't listed in the spell description itself from what I recall (and I looked). There are a lot of spells that don't list all their statistics (leave out penetration or duration or whatever).

Combusting wounds doesn't feel nearly as worthwhile as it did in the previous game -- the duration is very, very short compared to other spells. Do you mean the actual spell duration of Combusting Wounds or the DoT it applies on each hit? Good catch, I think I was reading the listed duration for the dot as the duration of the spell. What *is* the duration of the spell itself then?

Combusting wounds doesn't feel nearly as worthwhile as it did in the previous game -- the duration is very, very short compared to other spells.

what I'm gathering from this is that Eothas joins the party

It's weird that Steel Garrote paladins and Priests of Woedica clearly exist in the code (and based on the patch notes for beta 4 are still being actively developed), but aren't player available. Perhaps it's DLC stuff. My guess is NPCs / villains.

That appears to be the case from my testing. I don't think non-"affliction" penalties get wiped though. It only gives you a few shots though because Suppress Affliction has a short duration.

On the other hand, "supress affliction" wipes the negative effects of powder burns / rushed reload, or appears to. So with Suppress Affliction going on you can just repeatedly Powder Burn and no downside. (Rushed Reload is harder to judge esp. since the downside isn't an "affliction".) edit: to be clear I like the "feel" of the currently implemented system, but change could be good too Ah this is interesting, so do you need to cast Suppress Affliction before triggering Powder Burns or after? Powder Burns is very powerful now because each projection will trigger an AOE attack, without that distracted penalty would be nice. it doesn't matter. Suppress Affliction just covers and as long as it's in effect no afflictions of any kind will "stick."

https://i.imgur.com/LJiVE9w.png

Yeah I went and tested and at least in the current BB Sawyer's not correct: On the other hand, "supress affliction" wipes the negative effects of powder burns / rushed reload, or appears to. So with Suppress Affliction going on you can just repeatedly Powder Burn and no downside. (Rushed Reload is harder to judge esp. since the downside isn't an "affliction".) edit: to be clear I like the "feel" of the currently implemented system, but change could be good too

Right right -- I was just mentioning the pistol modal as one that might be situationally useful. For example, if a few more things were scriptable than are currently, you might set it to if (self: has perception inspiration) AND if (self: has Devotion s for the Faithful) then (set buff to On).

If you get a chance, it would make my whole day if you also added sliders for Might and Perception (vs 0 defense) to this calculator. It'd let me solve puzzles like "is it worth it to use a pistol in your off-hand with the speed modal on, instead of a second blunderbuss?" etc.

Start on hard but plan on restarting on potd once you get the hang of things.

What's the ceiling for accuracy? I should have said "soft ceiling". It varies by monster and difficulty level (PotD). Basically, each point of additional accuracy shifts misses to grazes, grazes to hits, hits to crits, etc. Thing is, converting a hit to a crit is just +25% damage, but converting a miss to a graze is +50% damage! So when accuracy is low you're converting a lot of misses to grazes and grazes to hits, which is a big damage boost. Once you have +25 accuracy over target's defenses, though (which isn't hard to hit at all on normal difficulties for most enemies, if you use debuffs), the bonus from Per drops off, and if you get enemy defenses low enough / your Accuracy high enough (remember, Devotions for the Faithful adds 20 by itself!), the relative value of more accuracy keeps going down. There is a theoretical hard ceiling if you were +100 accuracy over target's defenses, where every hit would be a critical and then additional accuracy would do nothing at all, but that actually is pretty hard to reach. To bring this back around to the Pistol modal though, if you've got a priest in the party and they cast Dire Blessing and Devotions for the Faithful, that's +25 accuracy right there, and those are both Beta powers, nothing more. Turn on the pistol rapid fire modal then, and you're still +10 Accuracy above your baseline, not counting Perception etc. or any debuffs on the target. It should be possible to calculate mathematically what the "break point" is for +accuracy where the pistol modal becomes useful (because the increased reload speed gives more of a bonus than you lose from the lost accuracy).

Most are foe-aoe and would be hard to target. You could try Blunderbuss modal but it's a bit buggy.