[MECHANICS] The Summoner's Tables

[thelee]

12 hours ago, Avaritica said:

For example, Priest's spiritual ally has base level of 9. If you summon spiritual ally in an area where +4 level scaling is active, it will scale to level 13 REGARDLESS of caster's level.

sweet jeebus, that might explain why those druid sporelings carried me in that Sealed Fate ambush.

[Avaritica]

8 hours ago, thelee said:

sweet jeebus, that might explain why those druid sporelings carried me in that Sealed Fate ambush.

Most likely. I first noticed the issue on a shrine ambush where Dichotomous Soul summoned by my level 13 monk is over-performing. That was when I checked the log and found out that they became level 17 juggernaut with legendary scaling.

In case anyone is curious, there is a workaround(sort of) for this problem. Deadfire has a scaling table reserved for "NamedCharacter"). It scales characters specified as "IsNamedCharacter=true"(mainly used for boss characters) in characters.gamedatabundle independently of normal scaling rule. The scaling rule is similar to normal scaling but here scaling cap is +6.

So if you are okay with boss characters having same +4 scaling cap as others, you can remove all adjustments from that table, flipped all "IsNamedCharacter=false" and then tagged the summons as "NamedCharacter". This way, summons will not get extra scaling from difficulty and always scale to your level.

Alas, it doesn't work for figurines and summons where creatures summoned used the same data as bestiary enemies. (as this will cause same enemy type to stop scaling)

Edited December 7, 2021 by Avaritica

[Not So Clever Hound]

Thanks for sharing! Very interesting.

I did a couple rounds of testing with my level 20 cantor and Animated Weapons in various places (Uamoru the Pretender, FS Central Stacks, BoW Outcrop on High) with and without scaling enabled. Animated weapons had the same stats in all situations, which compels me to think that once you reach Lvl20 it doesn't matter anymore because your summons cannot go past Lvl20, unlike enemies. Is that fair to say?

The other way around: knowing that Animated Weapons have an intrinsic level of 17, would summoning these as a Lvl13 Chanter in a +4 scaling area push the summons to Lvl20?

[Avaritica]

2 hours ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

Thanks for sharing! Very interesting.

I did a couple rounds of testing with my level 20 cantor and Animated Weapons in various places (Uamoru the Pretender, FS Central Stacks, BoW Outcrop on High) with and without scaling enabled. Animated weapons had the same stats in all situations, which compels me to think that once you reach Lvl20 it doesn't matter anymore because your summons cannot go past Lvl20, unlike enemies. Is that fair to say?

The other way around: knowing that Animated Weapons have an intrinsic level of 17, would summoning these as a Lvl13 Chanter in a +4 scaling area push the summons to Lvl20?

About animated weapon. I checked my characters.gamedatabundle and in it, animated weapon has base level 13. I tested the ability via console and also got level 13 weapons.

So it is either I modded them and forget(I tend to do that as I modded the main game files directly) or previous data were wrong. If it is former, maybe summon can't go past level 20.

[Elric Galad]

On 12/6/2021 at 4:24 PM, Elric Galad said:

Great information.

However, I might consider 2 mitigations :

- Increasing a bit familiar base HP (arnound 50-75-100ish), so it doesn't die to a breeze (can't get too high because of low level, but would hardly be more broken than Ancient Sporelings),

- reducing casting/recovery since the familiar has 0 raw power in actual combat. Maybe to 3s/0s.

OK, just did that. Familiar now has 100 base hp without level progression. So its stats will vary less depending on scaling.

100hp is a bit much at lvl1, but that's still less than what Ancient's 2 sporeling gets cumulatively and the thing has horrible stats (and won't scale)
Also it has 8 CON (so 90hp, or 88hp if you're using BPM +/-6% CON)

It will die super easily, but maybe not when a foe looks in its general direction.