Patch 5.0 introduced a stunningly annoying new bug, oh dear

[xzar_monty]

So, I decided to start a whole new game after 5.0 came out. I just got to level 5, and boy did I notice an annoying bug straight away. It may also prove to be fairly serious in some battles.

 

I'm playing a monk. There's a Power Level 3 ability called Stunning Blow that you can get at level 5. It's a good ability, but with 5.0, it's also bugged. It goes like this:

 

You click on Stunning Blow and choose a target. You also decide on what your other characters should do. Then you wonder why only some of it works. Then you read the combat  log and understand why. Your main character was supposed to use the Stunning Blow, and, say, Aloth was supposed to cast Necrotic Lance. What happens is: both of them appear to try something for a bit, but in the end, neither of them does anything. What the combat log reads is: "Aloth abandoned casting Stunning Blow."

 

Yes, Aloth. Who is a wizard and has no monk abilities. I have seen this with both Aloth and Xoti, neither of whom has any monk abilities, regardless of what the combat log says. My monk does nothing, and the other character, according to the combat log, "abandons casting Stunning Blow".

 

Stuff like this just might make you understand why Deadfire bombed and Obsidian was sold. I mean, this ain't going to be fixed, and I think it's serious, and the game's over a year old now.

[Jayd]

I had this issue but my monk froze up as if he were casting a priest spell. Couldn't cancel the action or do anything. I ended up loading the save. It never happened again, though, so I didn't bother reporting it as I didn't know how to trigger it. I didn't even think it had anything to do with Stunning Blow or the monk class. Have you replicated it often?

Also I find your jab at Obsidian uncalled for. Games are going to have bugs, and these bugs have arrived alongside waves of free content that go well beyond what many other studios would consider. Frustration is no excuse for disrespect.

[Wormerine]

That bug has been present before - a character gets stuck trying to cast not their spell - I run into it before TB was introduced as it was my Barbarian run. I got no clue what triggered it, and was never able to reproduce it reliably. 

[xzar_monty]

8 hours ago, Jayd said:

I had this issue but my monk froze up as if he were casting a priest spell. Couldn't cancel the action or do anything. I ended up loading the save. It never happened again, though, so I didn't bother reporting it as I didn't know how to trigger it. I didn't even think it had anything to do with Stunning Blow or the monk class. Have you replicated it often?

 

I have been at level 5 for a couple of hours (real time), and in that time I have maybe had six (?) battles and seen it twice, once with Aloth and once with Xoti. It may have happened more often, but I couldn't comment on that.

 

You're quite correct: the dig at Obsidian was unnecessary. Apologies for that. Annoyance got the best of me.

Edited May 14, 2019 by xzar_monty

[bringingyouthefuture]

I have had this happen too, but I micromanage a ton, so it is usually pretty easy to jog the character out of it - but the first time it happened it caught me by surprise too. It normally happens after I have been playing a few hours and get into a heavy battle with a lot of enemies.

Pretty minor but annoying if you aren't paying attention I agree. 

[xzar_monty]

I think you can only call it minor because the game is so very forgiving.  In a rougher system, like Pathfinder:Kingmaker, losing 40% of your party like that (if only for one action) could often be fatal.

 

I am somewhat bothered by the fact that I have only just entered level 5 and I have already seen it happen twice. If it keeps coming up this often, I'll probably just quit and forget about Deadfire. Which would be a real shame, because I haven't seen how the game ends.

[Boeroer]

I've experienced this for a long time (since Sept. 2018) and also reported it. But it seems to be difficult to reproduce it. Some playthrough I see it all the time, on the other not at all:

 

[xzar_monty]

Very interesting! I have never had it before 5.0. The bug that I did see, and I have not seen now, was the one where the character did nothing and the combat log had a thousand entries for whichever action he tried to take.

Edited May 14, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Daidre]

I haven't touched Deadfire for months and one of the first things that welcomed me on my new run was the bug that stops characters from drinking any potions in combat with AI on.

Is it a new shiny feature from 5.0 or this one was introduced earlier?

Also, after playing couple of days on my mom's PC (i5 3570k, gtx 770, 16gb RAM) I was surprised how utterly horrible this game runs - fps in combat regularly drops in sub 10 territory, when Pathfinder: Kingmaker runs pretty fine with stable 30-40 fps even in heaviest locations.  I was playing Deadfire on release on literally same PC and it was never this bad. And I definitely hadn't minute+ long loading screens that lead to eventual crashes from time to time.

I cant believe that year ago at release I had high hopes that Obsidian is capable of making this technical failure of the game better. 

But hurrah! they wasted their time to add TB mode.

 

Edited May 14, 2019 by Daidre

[xzar_monty]

So what happens with the potion-drinking bug, then? I always turn AI off, so I have never seen that.

[Insolentius]

46 minutes ago, Daidre said:

I haven't touched Deadfire for months and one of the first things that welcomed me on my new run was the bug that stops characters from drinking any potions in combat with AI on.

Try using 'Defend Self' instead of 'Aggressive' or 'Defensive'. I encountered this exact problem in my current playthouth, and this way you get to keep the AI active while being able to consume potions mid-combat.

[Insolentius]

39 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

So what happens with the potion-drinking bug, then? I always turn AI off, so I have never seen that.

The character completes the drinking animation and goes into recovery without consuming the potion or getting the buff.

[xzar_monty]

D'oh. That's really bad!

 

You know, I just continued my game and decided to pay attention. My very next fight was against a troll. I went forward with my monk and Eder. I set my monk to stun and Eder to do a mule kick. And guess what happened? Well, neither of them happened, because both of them self-interrupted with the combat log saying: "Eder abandoned casting Stunning Blow." Again, remember, Eder is not the monk, my monk is the monk.

 

I'm going to be somewhat uncharitable now and say that this really, and I mean really, sucks.

[Daidre]

32 minutes ago, Insolentius said:

Try using 'Defend Self' instead of 'Aggressive' or 'Defensive'. I encountered this exact problem in my current playthouth, and this way you get to keep the AI active while being able to consume potions mid-combat.

I read you post couple of days ago on reddit and now I have a chance to say thank you :) 

I blamed my low performance in ship battles at first until noticed how consistent it is and googled(

Stumbling upon issues like these after anniversary patch (where Obsidian promotes Iron Man achiev to the boot) makes me harsher about the game that it probably deserves.

At least they fixed MC being invariably in front of party and promptly shot to death in ship battles.

[xzar_monty]

Ha. I just had a really interesting fight. When it began, I set my main character, the monk, to do a stunning blow. That was the last thing she was able to do in the battle: she was stuck in a loop, with "Leyla abandoned casting Stunning Blow" repeating literally hundreds of times in the combat log, i.e. constantly, and she was completely paralyzed by this for the entire duration of the battle. Movement was impossible, everything was impossible. Whenever another one of my characters decided to commit a special action (drinking a potion, a combat move, a spell, whatever), the icon notifying this action also appeared above the monk, who, despite all this, remained paralyzed.

 

This is really quite unacceptable, but we're stuck with this.

[Boeroer]

Not necessarily. They said they will be doing hotfixes and removing game breaking bugs.

Although you seem to be the only one who experiences this weird thing. At least I didn't see it in the technical support forum so far and also didn't see it myself. Maybe it's just some hickup with your current playthrough? Or does this persist when starting a new one?

[Wormerine]

It’s not an isolated problem, I have been encountering it in my second playthrough - character gets stuck not being able to cast ability he doesn’t have. She would “reset” if she got killed. Never reported it, as I never managed to reproduce it reliably. 

If op has a character and save, which does fairly reliably reproduce the issue, he should head over to technical forum:

https://forums.obsidian.net/forum/130-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-technical-support-spoiler-warning/

and report it, sending over the relevant save at: support@obsidian.net.

[Purudaya]

I've had the same problem with stunning blow exactly twice out of around 60 recent combat encounters (I use SSS for build testing) since version 4.0. Loading the most recent save has fixed it both times - if you're able to reproduce this reliably and it's not just a one-off, I'd recommend uploading your save with a bug report.

[bringingyouthefuture]

Did anyone make a big report about this?  I had it lock a character completely, normally I could jog it, but this time it just locked it so I couldn't move at all ... like way back in the days of the Beta ... ??

@xzar_monty did you make a bug report?  If not I think I will

 

[xzar_monty]

Nope, I did not.

[xzar_monty]

Incidentally, I just saw this bug occur in a way that was more severe than before: a character got stuck in a loop so seriously that it was impossible to get them out of it even after combat. Strange. So, it was possible to click that character and they even made a comment, but nothing worked. They didn't move or do anything else.

 

The only thing to do was to load the most recent quicksave, everything else was futile.

[Boeroer]

Something special must trigger this I believe. Some combo of certain things that you don't have with every game instance. Because so far I didn't encounter this.

I have only been doing lots of fights with test chars lately - no complete playthroughs. 

[xzar_monty]

I agree. The bug is so obvious and annoying (and in that last example, debilitating) that if it was common, it would have caused an uproar. It's probably really difficult to pin down the special circumstances needed.