[MECHANICS] Various Testing

[Elric Galad]

Interesting discovery :

Ancient Brittle Bones and Yet its Mate are 2 Chanter summon upgrades that will cause your summons to Spawn another summon(s) upon death.
However, I just discovered that the new Summon is technically not summoned by the chanter but by the summon itself. Which means :

1) The Summon Intellect is used to determine the duration of the Summon. Skeletons have 10 INT and Drake has 8 INT, so its not a good news.

2) Since the Summon is not technically summoned by the Chanter, it does not count for the 1 Summoned group limit. This is HUGE for the Drake because when you get the second Enraged Drake, if you can cast another summon, you will still keep the drake. Skeletons have such a low duration that it isn't that useful.

3) The new Summon is not a "Beckoner Summon" even if the original one was. It has full life and duration. You can summon 2 weak Drakes, they get killed easily, and now you have 2 Full Drakes that don't count for summon limit. I haven't actually tested it for the Skeletons, but I guess it works the same (but it matters less).


That makes Drake Summon noticeably better than one might think, especially for Beckoner. They aren't still great IMHO, but I'm still working on Summon balance, so unique features are more important for me than raw power.

Edited April 30, 2020 by Elric Galad

[Boeroer]

Ancient Brittle Bones skeletons from Beckoner are indeed of normal size (not the small ones).

[Elric Galad]

I just checked in-game some stuff about Unbending :

1) Unbending does not benefit from "healing received". That deserves to be noted, especially with a chanter in the party.

2) For some reason (akka bug) Unbending count as Tier 4 instead of 5 for the purpose of PL scaling. I checked in the Gamedata files after spotting it in game, so it seems to be actually a mistake. Basically you get a free +1PL from casting Unbending. I could correct it in my mod... or maybe not  Note that this also applies to both Upgrades.

3) The secondary Unbending beneficial status last for a base 5s and are supposed to give you 25% (/33% for Unbending Trunk) over this duration. INT and PL have a multiplicative effect on this duration, so it is actually 25% * (1 + INT modifier + beneficial effect modifier) *(1+ PL modifier). Each tick gives you 25*3/5% health But this is pretty well known.
What you are not told is the following : if you're not at 100% health when hit, you also get an initial tick of 25*3/5 = 15% health back. For free. Yeah.

So Unbending at PL 5 with 10 INT actually gives you approximately 40% Health back (the approximately comes from point 2) above  ).
The INT/PL scaling does not apply to this initial tick though.

 

So the complete  formula is 15% + [25% * (1 + INT modifier + beneficial effect modifier) *(1+ (PL - 4)) ]

(for unbending trunk, simply replace by 33%)

So it seems possible to target 100% damages restored without Wall of Draining.

[thelee]

23 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

if you're not at 100% health when hit, you also get an initial tick of 25*3/5 = 15% health back. For free. Yeah.

there appears to be a lot of places in game where the designers forgot that over-time effects also apply upon initial application, and not just every tick thereafter. This ends up messing up the calculus for all ApplyOverTime effects (of which I assume Unbending uses). (In particular it means that Disintegrate and Cleansing Flame in particular do way more damage than stated in tooltip.)

edit 2 - fyi in case anyone isn't aware about applyovertime i added a new section summarizing some stuff https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/applyontick-vs-applyovertime

 

edit -

23 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

So it seems possible to target 100% damages restored without Wall of Draining.

i just did a fight the other night in SSS (the "challenge" before you go find artifacts) and the fighter there had unbending. I had to get my characters to stop attacking it because they had accumulated enough stacks of unbending that they were healing literally like ~100+ health per tick (dude surged from near death to healthy while konstanten was trying to gear up his instakill invocation). I didn't think it was possible in typical situations for unbending to heal > 100% of damage dealt like that, but there you go. i suspect something funky might be happening when combining unbending stacks because that in particular seemed outrageous.

 

on a related note (while we're talking about random mechanics) - refreshing defense and concussive tranquilizier interact in a way that favors refreshing defense. in that same fight, i could not clear the fighter's refreshing defense. concussive tranquilizer nominally clears 30s away, but with maia using a blunderbuss each hit with concussive tranquilizizer added a gigantic amount of time to the refreshing defense duration. mathematically, even if each bullet added 5s to refreshing defense and only the initial bullet cleared 30s of duration away, it still doesn't work out to how it ended up being (should've been a net loss of -10s to the buff). I have no idea how the mechanics of that actually played out. I ended up with like 500s of refreshing defense on that fighter despite all my attempts at trying to use concussive tranquilizer on him. if that's something you can dig into, that would be great

Edited June 24, 2020 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

Was it Scout Maïa ? I suspect deep wounds count as a separate attack. (And possibly other lashes too)

[thelee]

4 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Was it Scout Maïa ? I suspect deep wounds count as a separate attack. (And possibly other lashes too)

nope, geomancer maia. no other spell effects on her.

 

edit - though she was using xefa's empirical explication with all upgrades, and an aefflyth ues mith fyr chant, for a total of 3 lashes on each bullet. if each lash counts, that would definitely explain the huge surge in refreshing defense!

Edited June 25, 2020 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

On 6/24/2020 at 11:16 PM, thelee said:

i just did a fight the other night in SSS (the "challenge" before you go find artifacts) and the fighter there had unbending. I had to get my characters to stop attacking it because they had accumulated enough stacks of unbending that they were healing literally like ~100+ health per tick (dude surged from near death to healthy while konstanten was trying to gear up his instakill invocation). I didn't think it was possible in typical situations for unbending to heal > 100% of damage dealt like that, but there you go. i suspect something funky might be happening when combining unbending stacks because that in particular seemed outrageous.

I think I've figured what is happening.

What remains true :

A) Each tick heals for 15% of received damages (20% for unbending trunk).
B) Each time damages are received, an Unbending charge is added, for base 5s increased by INT and PL.

What I've found :

1) All Unbending charges tick simultanneously.
2) Each time damages are received, a tick happens. (If no additional attack is received, the next tick will happen 3s after)  

Because of 1) + 2), each time damages are received ALL ACTIVE UNBENDING CHARGES HEAL FOR 15% OF THEIR CORRESPONDING DAMAGES. 

That's why when one take of lots of attacks with Unbending active : each attack that doesn't do more damages than 15% of the sum of previous attacks with an active charge (including itself) will heal the Fighter.

As an example, if Unbending charges last 9s, they will heal 15% from original attack + 3x15% for each 3s tick = 60%.
But if the Fighter is attacked every 1s, the Unbending charges will heal 15% from original attack + 9x15% = 150%.
(multiple attacks such as Blunderbuss only count as 1 attack because they are simultaneous and don't proc multiple ticks)

Yeah !



I suspect similar mechanics happen for other DoT / HoT with multiple charges.
For example Bleeding Cuts, Spiritshift boar attacks, or maybe even deep wounds.

I guess it is the reason why the Bleeding Cuts + Blade Cascade combo managed to kill Dorudugan that fast in a video published on this forum.

[thelee]

@Elric Galad excellent find and explanation!

[dunehunter]

Yeah it's true for Bleeding cuts because 1) it's stackable, 2) DoT is triggerd on hit. So if you stack fast enough, every follow-up hit will be more and more devastating.

[Boeroer]

Explains why my SC Furyshaper with Barbaric Retaliation, Blood Ward and Bleeding Cuts becomes more an more crazy the longer the fight lasts. Since Blood Ward drains even from DoT ticks and the Bleeding Cuts' ticks stack in such a way. 

[Elric Galad]

I think the same Mechanics should also be true for Combusting Wounds

[Boeroer]

Saru Sichr, too? Its poison also stacks like Bleeding Cuts. Would make it a good alternative to the Willbreaker for me.

[Elric Galad]

31 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Saru Sichr, too? Its poison also stacks like Bleeding Cuts. Would make it a good alternative to the Willbreaker for me.

Probably. But anything involving poison is dubious as a main weapon.

[Boeroer]

Anything is dubious as a main weapon.

[Haplok]

Well, I wonder how effective it would make Seekers Fang as a rogue (shadowdancer) weapon. For a cipher it obviously boasts the major disintegration-like DOT on-crit. But it also has the small DOT on-hit for everyone. If a lot of instances of that could be spammed (with Cascade, flurry, drumming), I wonder if it would be effective (compared with other weapons using that combo - obviously everything is strong with Cascade active). 

[Elric Galad]

Okay, it seems that the damages chants (soft winds and dragon trashed) actually do scale with PL.

Apparently, they get +2 Accuracy, +5% damage/healing (estimated) and +0.25 PEN.
Casting Brilliant on the chanter does increase acc, PEN and damages.

The weird thing is that they seem to follow Single Class progression even if multiclassed (this might be due to a wron parameter in gamedata files, but I'm not 100% sure).
Also they scale as if they were both level 1 (which is weird for Dragon Trashed)


Also Fire Keyword added by Community Patch to Dragon Trashed does nothing, not even appearing on Ability tree. I haven't found any apparent cause for this.


For my purpose of modding, I'm probably going to renounce changing this. It's weird, but not too bad for character progression, and seems to be at least partially hard coded.
I might look further about the thing that prevent actual class PL to be applied though.

My only remaning interrogation is : do Dragon Trashed need a bit more PEN because 7 PEN + 2 is lowish at high level is meh.
Setting ts ability level to 5 (since it is wrongly set to 1 in gamedata files) will technically give it +1 PEN (due to how PEN work for spells) while reducing its damages, but it might be the best way to go.

[thelee]

On 7/18/2020 at 7:49 AM, Elric Galad said:

Apparently, they get +2 Accuracy, +5% damage/healing (estimated) and +0.25 PEN.
Casting Brilliant on the chanter does increase acc, PEN and damages.

The weird thing is that they seem to follow Single Class progression even if multiclassed (this might be due to a wron parameter in gamedata files, but I'm not 100% sure).
Also they scale as if they were both level 1 (which is weird for Dragon Trashed)

can you double-check this? when I checked chanter chant scaling for my guide, they scaled independently of power level (at every character level past 1) at a rate of +1 acc per level and +5% damage per odd level (not just using single-class progression). also they didn't benefit from bellower +PL, so I assumed that they didn't benefit from any +PL bonus. it's possible they changed this at some point between 4.0 and 5.0 (i did all this testing as part of trying to understand the bellower) but it's quite the change to make without a patch note.

Edited July 20, 2020 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

45 minutes ago, thelee said:

can you double-check this? when I checked chanter chant scaling for my guide, they scaled independently of power level (at every character level past 1) at a rate of +1 acc per level and +5% damage per odd level (not just using single-class progression).

I can check. But I'm pretty confident that I've seen accuracy (+2/PL, which is interesting to note) and PEN scaling for both abilities in a very PL manner (+0.3PEN doesn't get out from nowhere). Damages is a bit harder to check since it doesn't appear on the ability description and isn't displayed separately on combat logs. If you time you might also double check on your side  

45 minutes ago, thelee said:

also they didn't benefit from bellower +PL, so I assumed that they didn't benefit from any +PL bonus. it's possible they changed this at some point between 4.0 and 5.0 (i did all this testing as part of trying to understand the bellower) but it's quite the change to make without a patch note.

Bellower bonus not working is predictable since these abilities aren't flagged "Chanter". This might be Something interesting to note if they suddenly benefit from chanter. 

[thelee]

13 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

Bellower bonus not working is predictable since these abilities aren't flagged "Chanter". This might be Something interesting to note if they suddenly benefit from chanter. 

chants aren't flagged as "chanter?" what a world!

but at least i'm glad other PL bonuses would work.

 

13 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

I can check. But I'm pretty confident that I've seen accuracy (+2/PL, which is interesting to note) and PEN scaling for both abilities in a very PL manner (+0.3PEN doesn't get out from nowhere). Damages is a bit harder to check since it doesn't appear on the ability description and isn't displayed separately on combat logs. If you time you might also double check on your side  

i'll check when I can but it might be delayed.

i think ancient memory tooltip shows scaling over its healing tooltip, either in the ability, or in the character profile showing you effects.

Edited July 20, 2020 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

10 minutes ago, thelee said:

chants aren't flagged as "chanter?" what a world!

but at least i'm glad other PL bonuses would work.

I would try to patch this though.

Quote

i'll check when I can but it might be delayed.

Yeah, me too, that's why I was suggesting it

Quote

i think ancient memory tooltip shows scaling over its healing tooltip, either in the ability, or in the character profile showing you effects.

I haven't check Ancient Memory. I was only refering to Dragon Trashed and Soft Winds. But that's a good point, I have to check Ancient Memory too. I suppose it works the same.

Edited July 20, 2020 by Elric Galad

[thelee]

@Elric Galad i managed to get some time to test chanter chant scaling, and you're right, they scale with power level and seem to be affected by power level adjustments. digging up my old notes i also tested non-bellower PL bonus sources and they didn't work (they definitely do now); i can't say anything about my scaling testing because my notes aren't that detailed for that. my only conclusion is that between 4.0 -> 5.0 there was some combination of bug fixing and/or personal error that led to my currently misleadingfindings. good find! time for another round of updates to my guide.

Edited July 24, 2020 by thelee

[thelee]

@Elric Galadi was doing some testing and got some funky results with wildstrike frenzy - the first kill I'd get +4s as expected, but after repeated kills the amount of time I'd gain on spiritshift would go up to extreme levels (in my limited testing I got up to an extra minute per kill). Anything you've seen in your tweaking that could explain this? This might also affect similar effects like blood storm or that chanter invocation.

[Elric Galad]

18 hours ago, thelee said:

@Elric Galadi was doing some testing and got some funky results with wildstrike frenzy - the first kill I'd get +4s as expected, but after repeated kills the amount of time I'd gain on spiritshift would go up to extreme levels (in my limited testing I got up to an extra minute per kill). Anything you've seen in your tweaking that could explain this? This might also affect similar effects like blood storm or that chanter invocation.

Nope, but I have a Wildstrike Frenzy bug to investigate for next version, so maybe I'll find something.

[Elric Galad]

On 6/24/2020 at 12:28 AM, Elric Galad said:

1) Unbending does not benefit from "healing received". That deserves to be noted, especially with a chanter in the party.

This was wrong.

Unbendin does benefit from "healing received", but not from "healing done"

For some reasons I thouht Mercy and Kindness chant buffed healing received, but it buffs healing done which does not benefit to Unbending.
"healing done" modifiers, positive and negative, alter Unbendin.

[Not So Clever Hound]

1) How did I miss this thread. Your explanation/testing of Unbending in particular is masterful @Elric Galad and answers a few questions I still had after so many hours in the game.

2) So it means that Practiced Healer and Path of Mercy from Footprints of Ahu Taka will NOT increase the potency of Unbending and NOT Might of course. But things like Glazed Chops, Murkbrew etc will help (any other obvious +Healing Received mods I'm missing?). Of course any +INT modifier and +% Beneficial Effect duration (strand of favor, cabalist gambeson, Mari Crudia) will also increase it.

3) I'm curious if you know whether the healing of Unbending is calculated off of the damage received before or after %DMG received modifiers? So to take a concrete example: Assassin takes 15% more DMG as a passive malus. Does Unbending healing take into account this +15% (which would make this malus a total non issue for a properly built Swashbuckler)?

Edited May 28, 2021 by Not So Clever Hound