Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Does anyone know what level the level-scaling for Act III triggers now?

Wait, I'm confused. I thought interrupting blows just lengthened the duration of interrupts you cause by 15%, and didn't give any other bonus. edit: the wiki article on interrupting, the specific entry for the interrupting blows talent, and every other source I could find on this, including various threads on this forum, each seems to state a slightly different version of exactly how interruption works. I'd really appreciate some clarity.

Has anyone figured out what level triggers the scaling option for Act III?

You probably need to input the beta password, which I believe is "betapassword" (no quote marks). Could be wrong so if that doesn't work search the forum.

Well, your overall build only has a one-point difference in Per from mine =); I just meant you didn't need to max it out. I agree you need some Per -- you want it giving a bonus -- but there are lots of things that give +Accuracy so I don't feel it needs to be a priority like Int or Dex. The real difference stat-wise seems to be that I don't drop Might quite as low and instead take a few points from Resolve. I feel like Deflection is so easily gained from various items, including a shield, it doesn't make sense to penalize Might that heavily (especially given how badly that hurts the moon godlike heal). If you only take your Might down to 7 or 8, it'll still almost always be in positive territory when you frenzy and thus also when Silver Tide procs. I see your point about just going single-weapon with the Vile Loner's lance and I think you're probably right *through act II.* Once you have access to Strike Hard, though, which also has the disorienting debuff and also has an inherent speed buff, I think you'll be far better off going dual-wield -- you can then put Durgan on the strike hard and start really going full windmill, and then late game move to strike hard/godasnthunyr for a true stunlock build. The problem there of course is that Vile Loner's Lance and Strike Hard are in different weapon groups, and Strike Hard doesn't have nearly as nice of an Interrupt bonus. One option would be to respec, of course. You could also try taking Accurate Carnage and Interrupting Blows at lower level and waiting to take your weapon group and weapon style skills till levels 6/8

Would you mind giving a quick build breakdown for this? I'm quite interested in a disabling fire and forget barbarian ;p I'm still developing my version but so far from testing it's max dex and int, rest as you feel comfortable. Personally I take Might to 8 and Res to 7 (i.e., within range of gear buffs to get them back to normal), Con at 10, rest into Perception. You don't need a lot of accuracy you just need to be attacking as fast as you can so you apply the debuff as often as possible. This is especially true because you want to open combat with a Deflection debuff (Cipher's Eyestrike is great for this, or Nature's Mark). The build is even workable at low levels on PotD, though I wouldn't recommend it for solo -- just grab some supporting party members and two spears (Xaurip Champion ones for max comedy) and stabitty-stab-stab, or two hatchets for survivability. You die a lot but you do a lot of damage too -- basically an AoE rogue. Taking Eder's Second Chance armor can be a good idea. That'll get you through to Defiance Bay and the spear, after that it starts to take off. Talents are the standard dual-wielding build talents. The big choice will come at higher levels -- whether to stick with spears, say vile loner's and cladhailath, or shift to warhammers, or use a mix of spears and warhammers (Shatterstar, strike hard, godansthunyr all being decent choices). That's the part I'm still not sure about. If you're playing the new beta branch, the added DR from Survival helps a lot, so I'd recommend slave background for athletics and survival. I think you probably want the +1 dex culture over the +1 int culture, too. I've been using a moon godlike for added survivability during frenzy and max dex/int, but other choices could work too, esp. hearth orlan.

This is only true if you have a high damage output and high DR bypass. The quicker you attack, the more damage you'll lose to your enemies' DR, so you need DR bypass and high damage to punch through as much as possible. IIRC, Matt traced a graph back in the beta days showing the correlation of MIG and DEX to DPS and it was X shaped: Up to a certain point, MIG contributes more to your DPS than DEX; then they "meet" and from that point on, DEX contributes more than MIG. Good point, but my thought process was that all else being equal, there are a lot more ways to either raise damage or raise DR bypass than there are to raise attack animation speed. You can increase your damage three ways -- increasing accuracy, increasing the damage total per attack, or increasing frequency of attacks. Per and Might and help with the first two but there are other ways to accomplish them (accuracy buffs, DR bypass, damage buffs, weapon enchants, etc.). The only way to increase attack animation though is Dex. So, generally speaking, for any given character, you'll get more gain from prioritizing Dex than from anything else, because you have alternative sources of damage and accuracy but no (equivalent) alternative sources of speed. I used to think that this difference was trivial because of human reaction time -- dex can only make so much difference when we're talking frame counts, because people don't click that fast -- but the new AI is actually pretty good and reduces that concern significantly. I frequently find my cipher halfway through casting Eyestrike now right around the time I realize I should be casting it.

Does this mean if your goal is to reach 0 recovery, 10 dex will work fine? In other words, does this mean that putting points into dex are basically wasted points if this is your goal? Yes, but also no. In practice your goal isn't reaching 0 recovery; your goal is attacking more quickly. And since the animation has two halves -- attack animation and recovery animation -- and dex is the only thing that reduces the attack animation, even if you reduce your recovery animation to zero, you still benefit from dex reducing the attack animation. Second is the amount of effort and stage in the game that you reach 0 recovery. With a starting 20 dex, you can reduce both your attack animation and your recovery animation by 39%, each, as soon as you reach defiance bay (and buy Finreath's Grace for +3 more dex). Presuming an otherwise-naked character, that's a reduction of roughly 28 frames, or the same amount of gain you'd get by reaching 22% recovery if you had 10 base dex -- something you'd only achieve after getting durgan gear etc. Alternatively, look at it like this. Two characters, each with recovery of 0 due to badass gear, but one has 23 dex with gear and one has 10 dex. The 10-dex character is attacking every 34 frames. The 23-dex character is attacking every 22 frames, or roughly 36% faster (I think that math is correct). End of the day I suspect each additional point of dexterity probably does more to increase a given character's DPS than a point of any other stat will (barring unusual setups like a very-high-int character casting per-rest AoE spells over massed enemy groups.) Another way of phrasing this: the more you invest in speed, the larger your fractional gain from each additional point of dex is going to be. Each point of dexterity takes 3% off of a standard 66-frame attack and recovery animation, i.e, roughly two frames. On the other hand, if your recovery is down to 0, it'll take one frame off of a 30 frame animation -- but that one frame reduction is a bigger chunk of 30 than two frames are a chunk of 66 (because the recovery animation has a few extra frames). (all this math done in my head so apologies if I made some errors).

Thread I linked above, few posts down. edit: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72272-combat-mechanics-attack-speed-recovery/?p=1603618

I like that though because it allows for more customizable character builds. For example, the blunderbuss cipher is basically possible because you can grab Leadspitter and keep optimizing it over the course of the game. Lately I've been playing with Carnage barbarians and there are *so many* different builds based on which weapon set you give your barbarian (tall grass for an overbearing barb, tidefall for a tanking barb, strike hard for a debuffing barb, etc). If the game were just "oh, I found a +3 sword, time to ditch my +2 sword" it would lose some of that character- building complexity. Of course the loot items that are for builds you aren't playing, yeah, you end up with a lot of useless-to-you stuff. But almost every unique weapon in the game can have a character built around it. The only thing I don't like is that some builds don't become possible till you get certain enabling weapons and often you don't get those enabling weapons till late in the game (see: Godansthuyr). I hope that we get a PoE II at some point and can import weapons from the first game.

Hah, that's one of the builds I was thinking of testing when I started asking these questions The real question I think is if a version of this build can work at level 6 rather than having to wait till you get to twin elms for Strike Hard. My thought was Shatterstar for its interrupt bonus, paired with Vile Loner's Lance, but maybe it'd be better to pair vile loner's with march steel for the speed bonus and see what happens. What stat distribution did you use? Something like 10/10/15/15/19/8?

Ok, I think I'm starting to understand this. Basically, when dual weilding one-handed normal-speed weapons, you need "200%" bonus speed in order to have 0 recovery, right? Because this is all percents, and speed percentages above 100 are what reduce recovery? So, if wearing normal plate, that bumps your recovery phase up to 150%. SO you then need +150% speed to eliminate that. So, if you're also Frenzied (-1.33%) and using two-weapon fighting skill, that gives you a (roughly) fifty percent bonus to recovery, cancelling out the Plate penalty but not the base penalty. If you're frenzied and using at least one speed-enhanced weapon and using two-weapon fighting, but no durgan, that's going to take you down to roughly 70% of base recovery [ (1.33 * 1.2 + .2 == 1.796), then 2.5-1.796); or if you're frenzied, using two-weapon fighting and a speed enhanced weapon, AND naked, i.e., an actual barbarian, you're down to 2 - 1.796 = .204 recovery? If you durganize your armor and both weapons, then, that's the formula you posted, leaving you with 24% recovery time remaining. And if you then wear the gauntlets of swift action, that zeroes you out. So translating this all back into frames, as per the old formula (is this still correct? http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72272-combat-mechanics-attack-speed-recovery/?p=1603618 )? You'd get, presuming normal speed weapons: At 70% of base recovery, a 25 frame recovery animation with each weapon at 24%, an 8 or 9 frame animation. If you then have a (for example) 17 Dex, you'll take that down further, by 21%, to around 6.8 frames? Or, if you just stay naked, a 20.4% (naked, frenzied, speed weapon), a 6.12 frame animation. Meanwhile, of course Dexterity is also reducing your actual attack animation (which no other speed boosts can do?)(does this game round frames up or down? Are there "break points"?) Similarly, if you're using Fast weapons, with shorter animations, then 70% speed (frenzy, two-weapon, magical speed weapon) == 16 frame recovery, 24% speed (frenzy, two-weapon, magical speed weapon, full durgan) == 5.76 frame recovery? (at which point the Gloves would be redundant because you're at the four frame limit already?) Sorry if I'm breaking this down into baby language, I'm just coming back to this game after a long hiatus and having to re-learn everything.

Fortunately the game allows for easy re-spec so you can always change around. Lots of different weapon choices are viable but it kinda depends on what part of the game you're talking about and, more importantly, what difficulty mode -- a lot changes on PotD. A few good options are here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416939844

Yeah, all the really good barbarian builds seem very item dependent . I was thinking this for a relatively late-game respec build on an adventurer. I *might* try pairing Shatterstar with a March Steel and see if that works as an intermediate version of the build (since Shatterstar apparently has an Interrupt bonus). Or maybe I'll just rush Twin Elms.

WOuldn't you just need a Dex score of 15, for +15% attack speed? 1.76 * 1.15 = 2.024 ? or am I doing this wrong? Trying to figure out the *minimal* necessary investment here (I want to experiment with various interrupting and stunning carnage builds, so stat points are at a premium).

Question then -- Would it be possible to take a barbarian wearing Sanguine Plate to 0% recovery, then? Say if you were dual-wielding the "Strike Hard" warhammer (which has a speed bonus) and something else? If so, what would be the minimum investment to get there? Am I correct in thinking that durgan on the sanguine plate, the Strike Hard's speed enchant, and Frenzy speed bonus would be enough by themselves to get you to 0 recovery, or am I doing that math wrong?

I'm mostly going from memory but from what I remember the Honest trait was very useful. Resolve tends to unlock the best conversation options bit int and per are each almost as good. Story wise Lore unlocks a number of very good conversation options. There are a few points where survival is useful also.

Yeah, but Wizards have a lot of tanking tools Ciphers don't More importantly though I feel like going below 6 Con takes either a lot of reloading or a lot of game knowledge that the average person looking up a guide doesn't have yet (or they wouldn't need to look up a guide!); if nothing else, you need to know which targets are likely to one-shot you and prioritize them, etc. Expert players can probably get away with shaving a point or two more off, sure, but I think in a general guide you want to allow for some wiggle room. Admittedly this is more a matter of personal feel though than anything else -- functionally we're arguing over comma placement.

Good points. I think there is definitely an argument for valuing Dexterity over Int, but it seems like a coinflip and I'm not sure which side of things I come down on. There is also a certain minimum Might necessary just to make sure you can punch past DR, but it's been too long since I played the late-game for me to really pinpoint how much that is. As to Con, you can take it low, but take it to 3 and you're going to get one-shotted every fight on PotD; you need to be able to survive at least one or two hits. It might be worth dropping down to 6 Con and putting those two into Might -- so our hypothetical wood elf would then have 12/6/19/19/19/3 -- but anything lower than that is probably going to require an excessive amount of micromanagement and reloading, at least for me. Maybe less if you managed to grab a +Con or +End item fairly early? If you can get away with taking Con lower than that, you're a better player than I am and don't need this advice As to powers, yeah, a lot of the recommendations above are general ones for people who are new to the class. As you say there are a few powers that really come into their own with specific party makeups (i.e., ciphers and rogues) or once you learn what you're doing (antipathetic field). Some powers --Whisper is a good example here -- are decent but are at the same level as even better powers, while also having alternatives at less congested levels. I also tend to prioritize fast-cast powers, so some things that would be good in the abstract, I never personally use because they take too long (psychovampiric shield). And some of the late-game powers I've just never tried out -- the beta only ran from levels 4-8 and there was no respec option.

Ok, a general update for all the various patches, changes, and new information that's come out. The biggest change is obviously that Perception now buffs Accuracy. I went into this review thinking the difference was getting overstated, but it really does make a big difference, especially on PotD. On Normal and Hard difficulty it isn't as big an issue -- you get so many buffs to Accuracy just from weapon enchantments and basic spells, additional boosts are mostly wasted. On PotD, though, monsters get a +15 buff to all defenses, flat, right from the start. That's actually a big deal and means it's a lot harder to hit things on PotD, which in turn means that you get increased return from each additional point of accuracy. This is especially true at the start of the game, when you've got the fewest buffs to Accuracy. This means there's even more of a premium on selecting Wood Elf as your ranged cipher choice. So for initial stat allocation, let's look at what each stat gives. Might gives a boost to your damage, physical and with spells. This boost is actually slightly less than a 3% boost per point, because Might multiplies base damage, not extra damage from Lash type effects, which are calculated separately -- and Soul Whip, which you have right from the start, is a Lash-type effect. The more additional effects like that you gain, the less your marginal DPS increase from each point of Might (relative to what you'd get from boosting other stats instead). You can't neglect this stat, though, even on a pure-controller build, because you still need physical damage to gain focus. Con is still a dump stat but because it now gives or takes 5% per point -- rather than 3% when the initial guide was written -- you can't dump it as hard. This is especially true on PotD where you need more survivability. Dexterity gives a flat 3% boost to your attack speed and casting speed. This is just good with no real drawbacks. Perception is now supremely important. It makes sure everything hits; not just your weapons, but also your Powers. It'll increase chances of critical hits with spells, meaning longer durations. And you'll have fewer missed / wasted powers (which hurt Ciphers more than other classes, since you have to generate the focus again). In mathematical Damage-Per-Second terms, the marginal gain from each additional point of Accuracy is dependent on the opponent's Defense score, but against PotD opponents it seems to generally give an average damage boost comparable to what you'd get from boosting Might (i.e., slightly sub-3%), while also buffing the durations of your Powers (indirectly, through criticals and fewer Grazes), which Might doesn't do. (Admittedly I'm still working out the math here; it kinda needs a chart, graphing expected damage vs. opponent's defense differential). Int remains a very important stat for durations and areas of effect, especially if you're trying to play a controlly cipher. Resolve is your true dump stat because you want to stay out of melee as much as possible. As to weapons I think the Blunderbuss is still a very solid choice. There's a good argument for re-specializing in bows at max level once you get Time Parasite, but at that point, you've played almost the entirety of the game. The Blunderbuss remains the single highest-damage weapon in the game, especially if using Lead Spitter and Penetrating Shot, and Ruffian specialization lets you also use Sabers, which are a very effective and high-damage melee alternative (and they do Slashing damage, useful against Pierce-immune creatures). Bows can give you a more "steady stream" of focus but the first moments of most fights are decisive and there is a big advantage in packing the heaviest alpha strike you can, and a blunderbuss does that. So overall I think the general advice in this build is still good as of this writing, with the caveat that when building your character initially you should emphasize Perception over Might, especially if playing on PotD. Overall, I think the recommended starting stat split is probably something along the lines of 10/8/19/19/19/3 for a wood elf Cipher on PotD. Talents and Powers have been tweaked around slightly (phantom foes isn't quite as bad) but overall the same recommendations seem valid. For talents, one change might be to the *order* you take things in; I'd now recommend taking Draining Whip at level 4 and waiting till level 6 for Ruffian talent, for example, because now that starting focus is lower gaining focus is at a higher premium. Depending on your personal miss rate and what buffs you're getting from the rest of the party, you may want to prioritize Marksman talent as well if playing on PotD. But the basic talent list is still the same. Later in the game, once you've accumulated a lot of accuracy buffs, it may be worthwhile to re-spec, take some points out of Perception, and move them back into Might; if you're always getting critical hits anyway, another point of Perception does nothing for you (for a more mathematical example, moving from +44 to hit to +45 to hit grants only a 0.8% boost in DPS). But that's something i'll have to playtest more. I'll keep updating this thread for any changes in White March II.

Good question, I'm not sure. There are diminishing returns for accuracy more than +15 above target's defense, but on PotD that's probably not a significant worry. It'd be tempting to to stack might, per, and int, and just play a "dead-shot ****" sort of character; probably wouldn't be perfectly optimal though.

Hah, well, this build is somewhat outdated now due to the patch anyway, but yes, before, Penetrating Shot was the better choice *with blunderbuss* because your goal was to use the blunderbuss to build focus, not so much for damage; the idea was you weren't firing more than once or twice per fight anyway. Silent Scream is decent in my experience but didn't cast as fast as Soul Shock did, and you get it a lot later. Otherwise I'm not sure the choices in this build are "optimal" any more given the recent patches, but I don't think this is a "bad" build either.

^this is not an excuse. In fact, it's the opposite of an excuse. it's a cited development advantage. During the Kickstarter, Tim Cain assured us that creating the world and its ruleset from scratch would be easier than having to implement an existing world and ruleset. he even used that silly Cake analogy ("If you show me a picture of a cake, I can bake one like it, but it'd be much easier if you simply told me to bake you a cake then let me make one however I wished") "Excuse" is the wrong way to look at it. It's got advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that they could do their own thing and for the record I like a lot of what they did; the writing in this game really is quite good, and I like that it explores themes you could never have explored in a licensed title -- abortion, child abuse, etc. I also like a lot of things about the game system. The downside though is that there wasn't ever going to be enough dev time to polish all the rough edges before the release. That's just the tradeoff. You can either accept that tradeoff or not but there wasn't any other realistic option short of buying the Forgotten Realms license and then making Baldur's Gate III (or, well, I guess, Sword Coast Legends). If, ultimately, your complaint is that they didn't just copy all the best parts of the IE games exactly and then "stitch them together", then ultimately, you didn't want them to bake their own cake; you wanted them to copy the picture of the cake in your head. Unfortunately for you, that was never going to happen, because that picture of a cake in your head is copyright TSR, Inc., and if they had just "stitched them together", they'd have gotten sued by Hasbro (just like happened to the Hex TCG people).

BG 1 is a great game but it was building on the prior tradition of the Gold Box games too, not to mention a massive amount of previously playtested game systems and previously written lore; it's not like it sprang fully formed from the head of Gaming Zeus. When BG 1 came out, the AD&D game system had been in use for a couple of decades already and TSR was publishing lord knows how many novels in the Forgotten Realms setting every year. The Obisidian team doesn't have access to the entire body of "copyright TSR, Inc." material for this title; they had to craft their own systems and their own lore and do their own playtesting and so forth (which, for example, is part of why the game is so much better balanced from level 4-8 than level 9-12; 4-8 got heavily playtested).

I don't think that's an acceptable defense. The game was sold as having the best qualities of all of those name-dropped games. They climbed up on that cross, it was theirs to carry. The templates were all but literally there, they merely needed to stitch them together and iron out some kinks. PoE resembles none of them beyond the art and music. The Sawyer departures are glaring and contrary to many of the most poignant strengths that the IE games possessed. From my perspective it does? It has very high quality writing by the standards of CRPG's, which was the main draw. It's not as well-written as Planescape: Torment but nothing is and expecting it to be would have been expecting lightning to strike twice in the same place. And even with that caveat it has moments of real excellence -- Eder's character arc stands up well against any companion storyline in either of the BG games, for example. Game system design is a matter of opinion and personal taaste but overall I think PoE's design is a significant improvement over the IE games. I don't have to spend fifteen minutes in an artificial buffing session before each combat; choke points and positioning actually matters; there's a general move away from per-rest Vancian magic towards more modern game design systems. Which is pretty much exactly what the game was billed as -- in the tradition of the IE games, but a new iteration. I can see how for some players who came from a more RTS background and played the IE games with a lot of kiting this system could be annoying, but for those of us who came to the IE games from the tactical game / wargame / Gold Box / AD&D tabletop tradition, this implementation is significantly closer to those roots. Tabletop had attacks of opportunity (i.e. disengagement attacks) as far back as 1st Edition D&D. it's not an exact clone of the IE engine (which they couldn't have done anyway without running into copyright problems) but what it is is very solid. Is it perfect? No. The story has some holes, there's definitely need for a few more rounds of patching, there are some balance problems they never quite got ironed out. But it's far better than anything we were likely to get any other way. You want a faithful and exact resurrection of the IE games? If you don't like this, go play Sword Coast Legends, because that's the closest you're gonna get outside of Obsidian.