Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Is Dex additive with other action speed bonuses? I've been trying to figure out the formula for "how much of a DPS boost does each successive point of Dex give" and it's . . . complicated, even after some very patient people took their time to explain it to me. . As I understand it, all the action speed bonuses stack, but "multiplicative" and "additive" aren't either exactly right because the more you reduce action speed, the closer you approach a theoretical minimum action speed, so it's a curving function, not a linear one. Yeah, this is correct, but it's a limited statement. Multiplicative Might / Str is the best investment for a pure weapon damage character; Might / Res is the best investment for a pure casting damage character. For hybrid characters (i.e., weapon and spell damage, or damage and CC), Dex is probably the best offensive stat investment, then either a split between Str & Res or Perception, with the math on that changing depending on things like what other Accuracy / Dex / Per buffs are available and how the Dex curve shakes out. Given the proposed upcoming graze range of 25-49, and the critical hit damage boost of +25%, as best I can figure out, the damage boost from each additional point of Per is, roughly, [copying from someone else's math here, slightly modified; any mistakes are mine] 50 + (25/2) == 62.5% expected damage on a normal attack vs. equivalent defense, adjusted for accuracy / miss / graze rate 50+ (25/2) + (1*1.25) == 63.75% with an additional point of accuracy (as one miss shifts up to a graze, graze shifts up to a hit, hit shifts up to a crit). So going by that, each additional point of Per will give a roughly 1% damage boost (while also helping spell accuracy, etc.) Once you get up to an accuracy boost over +25 though, if there are lots of Perception or Accuracy buffs available, this of course changes dramatically; changing a hit to a crit is far less dramatic in effect than eliminating a miss. On PoTD or against higher level enemies Per would be more valuable, again because of the importance of reducing the miss rate. Unfortunately I'm not savvy enough to figure out -- or at least I haven't yet -- where the break-point is where additional points of Dex become less valuable than additional points of Str, Res, and/or Per, presuming everything else (weapon, damage, attack speed, opponent's defense, etc.) is being held equal. If the above math is correct, though, it does seem to indicate that a hybrid damage character is better off alternating points in Str and Res, rather than stacking Per; half of a 3%-per-point bonus being preferable to the whole 1% bonus. Per would only really be useful for CC or crit-seeking builds.

Permanent character death *SUCKS*. I think there's a place for it, just not in character based story games, except as part of scripted special encounters. Eder dies as a plot point is one thing, Eder dies as a random accident you just reload.

Wouldn't it be more meaningful if there were an in-game challenge to meet instead of just a reload? "Eder has been knocked out, now you have to get him back to an Inn to recuperate" type thing? Generally speaking, penalties that function in-game are more engaging than ones that kick you out of the game and force a reload. This isn't an arcade; there's no need to force players to insert more quarters. That said, yeah, Ironman etc. is a valid argument for including character death, but that's easily handled with a checkbox.

Oh, I realize it's a bit silly but mechanically it makes sense; everyone reloads deaths anyway, so they functionaly "stop" gameplay; mechanically it's best to either eliminate them or turn them into a "knockout" type situation where you have to go get a special heal or a super rest or whatever. It'd be different if this were Darkest Dungeon and the companions were interchangeable and replaceable but they aren't. Only real argument against from a mechanics perspective is allowing for ironman runs.

Constant Recovery has had a time limit since the big Defender Patch in PoE. In Deadfire it lasts like 45 seconds base and heals 5 per 3 seconds or a total of 75 points of health. Intellect can extend the time and Might can increase the heal amount (soon to be Resolve) That should solve the problem then unless the Shod-in-Faith boots (or any other "healing effect on hit") make a comeback.

Under PoE's rule set no: due to the way the old damage reduction system worked, attacking with multiple weaker attacks was not as good as attacking with fewer strong attacks hence multiplicative Might would definitely have been better there. In Deadfire it's less clear thanks to the changes to the armour/penetration system. Moreover if the action speed system is changed that might make a difference too. Right, that's where I'm going with this argument, basically. Under the old system, additive Might had a few clear advantages over (inherently multiplicative) Dex: it helped punch through DR, and it was "front loaded". Now, with AR/Pen, the "punch through DR" function of Might is gone; effectively, might was nerfed, at least in that regard. It seems like new multiplicative might serves to balance it out vs. multiplicative Dex. Different character builds will have reasons to pick one or the other, but for a lot of builds, they'll be interchangeable, especially given the longer fight durations that seem to be a design goal in Deadfire. It is true that some class combinations can stack Might very high and get very high damage totals now but that seems to me to be more a function of the ready availability of different stacking Might buffs than it does of the background numbers. What would be really interesting would be to see someone calculate the approximate DPS value of Perception under the new system. Without grazing it seemed like a must-buy but with grazing coming back and misses less likely, I suspect that the mathematical value of a point of Perception is going to be less than the value of a point of Might or a point of Dex, and really they should be approximately equal. Conversely, the important thing now isn't a comparison between what Might does now and what it did in the last game, but between what Might does now and what the other damage stats (Dex and Per) do in *this* game. Is multiplicative might better or worse than Dex or Per *in Deadfire*? That's the relevant question. [i *suspect* the graph for might will be linear relationship between points and dps, while the graphs for dex and per will show diminishing returns, but that may not be a big deal depending on the shape of the curves and whether or not the intersection points are above or below the stat totals that can be actually achieved in game).

Right. But basically, with multiplicative Might (or Strength/Resolve), it's a build-dependent choice as to which is better; for most damage-focused builds,they're roughly equivalent, and even interchangeable. In some ways it seems like it matters a lot less in Deadfire than in PoE, because in the original game, you needed a certain amount of Might to help punch through DR. Now with the move to Penetration/AR, it seems like they're basically interchangeable, especially the longer the battle lasts, unless your build has something specific in it that makes you prefer one or the other. Counter-intuitively, I also suspect that the move to replace Might with Strength/Resolve actually makes Dexterity the best damage stat for casters. Hear me out: Casters are going to use their weapons a fair bit regardless, and Dex will help with both weapon and spell casting, and will help with non-damage spells also. This also seems like a strong argument for multiplicative Might: if Might isn't multiplicative, Dex is the clearly superior choice, mathematically.

Ok, so am I right in thinking then that multiplicative Might and multiplicative Dex are roughly equivalent in terms of damage bonus given, except that 1) Might will have a slight edge in damage totals due to Dex's irreducible frames, 2) Dex will be better with on-hit effects because they'll proc more often, 3) Dex will also speed up non-damage actions (such as casting a crowd control spell). ?

Suggestion: if they're gonna do this, put a time limit on all healing effects like, a few minutes max duration for constant recovery, etc.

Idea: Eliminate character death entirely. It serves no purpose anyway except forcing a reload. As long as Eder's pipe is the loading screen animation it doesn't really make sense for him to die. New injuries accrue infinitely each time you die, with a minimum health of 1% If you have more than four injuries, you have to rest at an Inn to get down to four injuries, then rest again to remove the remainder. Alternatively, each rest cures four injuries at a go.

One issue with this is that you don't want to "double up" with too many similar effects on the same stat, because then you get a feedback loop type effect going on, where stacking it creates exponential rather than linear effects. Of course maybe that doesn't matter too much given the limited benefit of Constitution regardless. So far my biggest concern with this change is that it could end up making high level fighters permanently invincible. I can remember plenty of fights in PoE where the rest of the party wiped and Eder just kept going and going and going until he ran out of Health. If there's no finite resource he's exhausting, Constant Recovery becomes really really really strong.

If they'd gone with the initial, brief description---without the 5 second schtick---it would be pretty good. Were they adamant about forcing people to actually use the powers? Afraid people would multiclass Ascendant just for Biting Whip? Did they really think the 6 second spells would be too powerful? Cast times and duration aren't even the whole problem. Ironically, presuming they fix cast times, it will be a lot smarter to go Ascendant as a multiclass. Ignore the -1 power level penalty while building up focus with your other class; Once at max focus, unleash powers at a higher level than if you were singleclass.

Thing is, there's also a Coral Naga Bow: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1219352046

Ascendant is . . . painfully bad.

Thanks for spelling that out, just spent a half hour generating all sorts of weird things I suspect the coral sword is a monster item not a "real" item though.

Giving any character base Intelligence resistance probably isn't going to happen, because it would make Berserker the most overpowered thing imaginable. Do I want a huge amout of extra Mig and Con with nearly no appreciable downsides? Why yes, I think I do. Yeah, and if you give anyone Per resist then the blunderbuss becomes amazing. Oh well I'm out of ideas

I think the system would function fine internally, but it may be a muddy system that's difficult for players to understand in practice. Possibly. You could solve that with a "Critical Hit! Interrupted!" popup though (like you currently have for "No Pen!")

You could move Resolve resistance from orlans to Aumau, and then give the Orlans Perception or Intelligence resistance.

Does "occupying space" really make sense? It's not like there's a hard limit on the number of options in each class ability tree. I figure at some point near the end of beta they'll do a general UI revamp anyway. Hopefully by then fighters will have some *new* abilities in their tree as "replacements."

Yeah, the beta isn't worth buying as a game, it's only worth buying into if you want to roleplay an armchair game developer and either do a bunch of bug hunting, tinker around with game mechanics, or shout your Game Opinions into the great maw of the internet. I mean, it's a fun little window into the next game, but that's all it is.

And then the various Concentration and Interrupt effects could give, say, +5 or +10 Concentration each? Seems like a good idea on paper. I'm not sure how it would play out in practice though. You could end up where casters who didn't make the "concentration threshold" for a particular fight (i.e., the opponent's Per) just got constantly interrupted all battle and could never do anything. At the moment I'm leaning towards something like "critical hits interrupt, Resolve gives incoming Crit to Hit, Per gives outgoing Hit to Crit." Not sure if that would work in practice either.

Forget to mention that Dex has diminishing on DPS because the more you put into it, the less u you get due to how it is calculated. What's the calculation on that? I had thought that each point would be more valuable, as it's a reduction from 100%, and each point reduces by 3% (so if you had it down to 50%, hypothetically, another 3% reduction would be twice as valuable as when it was at 100%). Is it done differently? Yeah I'd like to see the actual math on dexterity in this game before I really commit to a position on Might. If they've fixed the various other issues around attack speed, then Dex might be just as good as multiplicative Might / Strength, except boosting both spell and weapon damage (since action speed passively buffs everything you're doing).

As someone that likes the idea of giving spell damage/healing to Resolve (mostly anyways) while leaving physical damage on Strength, I definitely see the issue with Ciphers more so than any other class. My recommendation is make Soul Whip flat damage instead of a percentage of melee damage. I would have its power scale off of Resolve. Then have the class gain focus based on the damage of Soul Whip. Soul Whip's damage should retain the damage type of the weapon being used. Piercing for Bows, Blunt for fists, etc. You will have to tweak numbers and rebalance the class a bit, and Strengh would be a dump stat, but it would be better for the class with this change IMHO. Now for casters getting the Deflection bonus and Damage bonus with Resolve... I have some issue with. When PoE1's beta started Resolve controlled Duration and AoE size. If I were making this change, I would give Resolve Duration/AoE size and Deflection. Then I would give Intellect the damage/healing bonus for spells. This is because if you are making a Gish you will mostly care about Duration of buffs and Deflecion (Resolve), if you are making a nuker then you would want damage (Intellect), but it would make Intellect a dump stat for pure melee/archer types. As it stands casters will have a definitive dump stat in STR, but many a pure melee have no such luxury. With Resolve covering Deflection it has some value to frontliners, even if marginal. Most will likely dump it or leave it close to 10, but it is what it is. It makes more sense from an RP standpoint because now you would have an excuse to make a stupid Barbarian. That is just my two cents. Anyway. Work has kept me away. I asked during the Fig Campaign if Attributes would stay the same, and I was told they would. LOL. Then when I saw Concentration was removed from resolve... I knew something was going to change or Resolve would be almost pointless. We just need Matt and Sensuki in here to make this just like the old PoE1 attribute threads from the first beta. There have been a few proposals around modifying Soul Whip in one way or another and I'm not sure they really work. For one thing, they'd have secondary effects encouraging people to play particular types of cipher (for example, a flat bonus per hit would encourage fast weapons, etc.) If you're talking moving Soul Whip to an additive rather that multiplicative bonus, that just seems like an outright additional penalty to no purpose. You *could* make it scale with resolve, but then you're forcing ciphers to dump Might routinely -- there's no build for a might-based Cipher. You could also let Ciphers just use the higher of Might or Resolve for all damage checks, but then they're still going to dump one or the other, so they'd have one dump stat regardless, it'd just be an easier choice. I agree that if we stay with Strength, it's too much for Resolve to also get the Deflection bonus -- that would need to move back. My preferred solution though would be a return to Might, and then something new for resolve (either incoming Crit to Hit conversion, or affliction duration reduction, or something new with Concentration / Interrupt). Primarily because Might as the single unified damage stat makes the game dramatically more "hybrid friendly" than other RPGs -- ciphers are the extreme case but it's also true for multiclass characters, and moving away from Might at the same time that multiclass characters are introduced seems like you're heading in two different directions design-wise. Plus, it was one of the really distinctive design features of the first game, to the point that it almost felt like part of the branding. But resolve definitely needs something. And once you make resolve good, you're inherently, passively, nerfing hybrids (who would have dumped Resolve, but no longer can). So one way or another it'll need to be worked out. I'm just holding out hope they get creative.

I like the idea of constitution giving injury "resistance", I,e, percent chance to avoid an injury. May not be necessary though with upcoming changes.

Personally I'm leaning multiplicative because 1) Might has lost its role of "punching through" enemy DR; with the penetration system, big damage numbers are less necessary, making might's bonus less necessary, and 2) Dexterity is multiplicative, so for parallel utility between stats, etc. But I'm open to persuasion. Like, Dex doesn't give a 3% bonus to damage -- it's slightly less because of irreducible frames and so forth. So this makes Might clearly better than Dex, which isn't good either.