Spontaneous "downgrade" of difficulty?

[mr_raider]

Is it possible the game automatically lowers the difficulty when you enter an area. I'm playing on PotD and suddenly noticed a Laguafeth get paralyzed. The only way that could happen is if Alia Braccia reflected a a dart. Sure enough the log recorded a missed dart on one character, but the it said something like:

Laguafeth grazes XYZ [Story Time ->] Miss

 

Has my game reverted to story time mode? I thought PotD was unchangeable. I also noticed the defenses were fairly low on the Laguafeth. Usually they are in the 80s or 90s.

[Boeroer]

No. Aila Braccia turns all grazes of ranged attacks into misses (and then reflects them). Wouldn't make much sense to get damaged by a graze and then reflect it (like - did you pull the arrow out of your armor and threw it back? ;)) - so it converts them to misses. Actual misses don't get reflected.

No matter the difficulty. That's why it is the best item against Lagufaeth (and pretty darn good in general - it's like a 100% graze to miss vs. ranged weapons + reflect).

Lagufaeth come in different shapes, forms and stats. It depends on the map. For example the Lagufaeth in Longwatch Falls are much harder than the ones you meet in Russetwood. 

Edited May 2, 2020 by Boeroer

[mr_raider]

So why the "story time" in the log?

[Boeroer]

It may be that Story Time has a an auto graze-to miss conversion for the party (not sure). If that's the case then I suspect that this log-message gets shown accidentially instead of "[Aila Braccia ->]".

There is the same problem in Deadfire where a Debonaire Rogue (who has 100% hit-to-crit conversion on charmed targets) never sees that conversion message like [Deboniare->] in the combat log but instead always [Dirty Fighting->]. So maybe this is a similar problem.

To be sure you'd need to test some more. But the graze-to-miss conversion of Aila Braccia itself is normal behavior on all difficulties.

I never had the difficulty setting accidentially change in PoE ever and also never read about that in the bugs subforum. So I find this unlikely - although not impossible I guess.