JerekKruger

Yeah, Obsidian seem to have changed things up in one of their more recent patches. Regarding the Gloves of Manipulation I found a pair in the Copperlane Catacombs on day 8. I haven't tested to make sure they always appear on day 8, but at the very least they should always be in that loot pool at some point.

Not really, I've had quite a lot of good times running builds that a reliant on specific items Obviously doing so in Deadfire will be less easy with the change to enchanting since said items are likely to have to be late game ones, and thus the build will have to make do without until I reach them, but I'm sure I'll still manage to have fun nonetheless.

I dunno, who's to say we couldn't find a rusted statue for sale in some market somewhere that had been pulled up in some fisherman's net

Okay, I think I understand your point of view illathid, though I still don't agree with it. One thing I will say though is that if, as is the case in PoE, there's a limit on the number of items you can enchant to the highest quality tier then quality is still a factor is decision making. Perhaps that limit was a bit high in PoE (two superb and two legendary) but if in Deadfire you had the ability to upgrade a single weapon to the highest quality, you'd still need to weigh up quality when choosing weapons for the rest of your party. By the way, I'd say the main reason there aren't more builds using Abydon's Hammer as their primary weapon even though it is one of two mythic ones is (a) Durgan's Steel and (b) the +4 Might bonus being arguably better for damage dealing spell casters than melee characters.

My best guess is the explanation for restarting Deadfire at level 1 being Eothas's awakening, not that that's really what the OP said but at least it links "new levelling progression" with "Eothas, who's death was at least associated with Waidwen's Legacy in game".

True, but a truly committed individual could still achieve this aim.

Still, until we know how many points we get and how many points can be invested into each weapon, they're still not something you'll be wanting to misspend. EDIT: I will say, however, that I like this change a lot. No long will my rapier wielding duellist need to take two talents to also be good with the pistol, whilst strangely picking up an aptitude with clubs and maces along the way.

It's not all that difficult to get scurvy, if you really want it

I'd love to see Devil of Caroc's VA return, but ideally I'd like to see this happen with the return of Devil as well (presumably in an expansion). Not that she can't VA more than one companion.

Again, I think the is a problem with the itemisation in Pillars rather than the ability to upgrade the quality enchantment without limit. In vanilla PoE most unique weapons had one or two non-quality enchantments (rarely three) selected from a rather limited set of which a handful were substantially better than the rest, so if you found an item with Wounding, Speed etc. early on then adding a lash and keeping the quality enchantment maxed out made the weapon top tier. The variety of enchantments was improved in the two White March expansions, but because these weren't end game content this resulted in the new weapons being available fairly early on, so it didn't fix the problem. However with Deadfire Obsidian can carefully plan itemisation as I described in my earlier example: Which, I think you'll agree, does provide a meaningful choice even if we're allowed to upgrade the Fine enchantment on the first sword all the way to Legendary (in fact, I'd argue that not allowing us to do so removes an otherwise meaningful choice).

Sadly for us, if these people sufficiently outnumber us then from Obsidian's point of view this isn't something worth preserving, particularly when these people claim that PoE's system ruined their sense of discovery and excitement.

I think a large part of the difference in opinion originates from a difference in the way the two groups play. People like Boeroer like to plan builds ahead of time: looking at the selection of gear available in the game and trying to come up with interesting synergies to design builds around. By reducing the ability to enchant early game weapon's quality enchantments to end game levels, the selection of weapons available for this style of build design is reduced and hence so are the number of interesting builds. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you sound like you prefer a more organic style of build development where you choose abilities and talents based on the current in game situation. You're not looking ahead at a list of items present in the game, so if you find a good weapon early on and you have the ability to enchant it's quality all the way to Legendary you're not likely to switch it out. In some sense you want the game to force you out of the easy choice of sticking with the first good weapon you find. Does that seem accurate? Only if Obsidian make quality enchantments the only thing that differs between early, mid and late game weapons. Consider the following (possible) example: Early game: Sword with Fine and Burning. Late game: Sword with Superb, Corrosive, a corrode based bound spell and an attribute bonus. Even if you allow the early game sword to be upgraded to Legendary, it's not equivalent to the late game sword, but at least doing so allows someone who has designed a fire based, sword wielding Priest of Magran (a pretty natural build from an RP perspective) not to feel like their build is completely unviable in the late game. This sounds pretty horrible to me. I absolutely hate having spent talent points only to find that I'll get no use from them later. If Deadfire has a respec function then, in this situation, I would simply respec and pick the modal for the pollaxe. I agree that Durgan Steel was bad, though more because it made almost every soulbound item worse than using a non-soulbound item which was a shame since soulbound items were a really cool idea and were often quite flavourful. Not really. Let's say the game has 10 early game weapons and 10 late game weapons. Previously this would give a selection of 20 weapons for the final build, but under the new system it results in 10 for the final build. Yes, there are more options on what to wield before getting your final weapon, but this isn't really build diversity.

Why not go with the simpler solution of calculating the potential damage for both sources then using the higher of the two? I can (almost*) guarantee it will have no noticeable affect on performance and it ensures that the weapon does what it's described as doing i.e. using whichever damage type is the best. Assuming you intend your method to be used in combination with a change making talents like Scion of Flame apply only when the weapon uses it's burn damage, your solution will sometimes cause the weapon to use the damage type that is weaker. For damage, the vast majority of +X% damage bonuses work as an additive multiplier of the base damage of the weapon/ability/spell you're using. By "additive multiplier" I mean that if you have several such bonuses, you first add them together and then multiply your base damage by the total (rather than multiplying by each bonus in turn). The only exception I can think of off the top of my head would be Lashes, don't add directly to the +X% damage modifier of the weapon, but instead take the final damage, multiply it by 0.25 (or 0.3 if you have the appropriate elemental talent) and do that much damage against the enemy (reduced by 0.25 of the enemy's DR). As such Lashes are essentially pure multipliers. For other bonuses I am less certain. For example, I don't know whether a 15 Intellect Paladin wearing the Boots of Zealous Command would have a 1.35 (1 + 0.2 + 0.15) multiplier on their Zealous Auras or a 1.38 multiplier (1.2*1.15). I suspect that it is the former, but have never tested it directly. *It definitely shouldn't, but depending on exactly how Obsidian have coded it I guess it could, though I really doubt it.

I don't think that's the case. I am fairly certain most flamboyant armour we have preserved in museums is simple the armour of rich and important individuals who, even on the battlefield wanted, to make sure everyone knew how rich and important they were; or even said armours were not intended to see battle (see the armour linked by Voices of Nerat above). I don't buy the intimidation idea because: I don't actually think it would work in most cases, and protection is always going to be much more important than such an intimidation factor.

That's true, but perhaps for the noble background you could have a noble react in a pompous manner, but have an gated dialogue option for your character to say something that makes it clear that they have a noble background and have the noble react surprised, and maybe apologetic (or maybe critical of how you've fallen).

That might be the case, but it really shouldn't be. Performing simple calculations like this takes a computer an incredibly small amount of time, and there aren't actually all that many to do in combat. Of course for each such roll the game has to look up various values in various locations (character stats, monster stats, ability modifiers etc.) and that might be a bottleneck, but I don't think it should be.

This would be very easy to solve though: when you attack with a dual damage weapon the game should make its roll, then check how much damage this would result in for both damage types (factoring in all modifiers and the enemy's DR), then resolve at whichever came out higher.

I'd like to see some of this, though as Sedrefilos says it shouldn't be universal*. Add to this additional reactions based on the Watcher's background e.g. a pompous noble being slightly less so if your character had the noble background. *Though I'd argue that beggars are more likely to be meek at least since they are relying on the kindness of others.

Huh, I guess the description should have given it away, but it never occurred to me that the steal would vary depending on whether the target had buffs or not. A Fighter with those buffs was one of the ideas I had had. I also wondered whether a Mage might be able to make good use of it, but I suspect that too many of a Mage's good buffs are fairly short duration and pausing to cast would quickly see them fall off.

Yeah, I assume the way dual damage works is a quirk of how the game is programmed. There are also some situations where the weapon will use it's first damage type even when it would do more damage with it's second damage type (I can't remember the details, but it has to do with DR being fairly close). As for not raising the base damage: that's how all + damage things work. It's why changing Sabres from 13-19 to 11-16 +20% was a nerf, even though (11-16)*1.2 = 13-19 (near enough).

I've been mulling a few ideas for builds using Spelltongue but I'm not sure whether it can be relied upon to proc Time Siphon regularly enough to keep buffs up permanently. Other than for Barbarians, where Carnage multiplies the number of procs of Time Siphon, how viable is Spelltongue for building builds around?

I'm fairly certain that's wrong. First, as I understand it, Soul Whip acts like other +X% damage bonuses in that it is an additive multiplier of weapon's base damage, so you're right that Soul Whip doesn't benefit from Might. However Lash's essentially act as a second multiplier, since they take the damage done by the weapon after all other modifiers have been added, multiply that by 25% and do that much extra damage of the appropriate elemental type. As such Lash's do benefit from Might, and in fact also benefit from the bonus damage of things like Soul Whip and Sneak Attack. I don't know whether Soul Whip is technically a lash, or what that would mean if it was.

A while back someone wrote a list of all enemy attacks that count as poison or disease (the point being to determine how good the Mountain Dwarf racial is) but annoyingly I can't find it now. The list was surprisingly long.

Why dislike? If I am understanding Max's post - "And envenom was applied." - it works.

So in general crush immunity won't provide envenomed strike immunity?