Balance Polishing Mod Release 1.0

[Elric Galad]

16 hours ago, Malanir said:

Hi everyone,

 

I'm amazed by all the work done here, i'm one of those silent readers that goes through the whole forum for years without posting a thing  

But for once i had to intervene slightly,

One thing that surprises me is that i don't see anything about companions classes. And i did a quick search on nexusmod and i dont find something up to date for them.

Im pretty sure you guys must have a good reason no to implement this (difficulty, coding whatever). 

Pillars is a lot about immersion with your companions and its big part of the fun, and for a "community" patch i am again surprised that nothing is about how to "balance" your companions and for them to fulfill some roles or precious abilities (SoT, Ancient Memory, etc.).

Well, the reasons for this are :

1)  This is a balance mod. Changing Companion subclasses is not tied to balanced since Vanilla Classes are supposed to be as powerful (albeit less specialized) than subclasses. Note that I have tweaked Wildmind and Paladin of the Five Suns since they felt underpowered.

2) You don't need a mod to change subclass. A Console command is sufficient, as described in the link below :

Quote

 

And i'm done here, on your hard and great work i really all thank you for what you have done.

I have one final question as im about to start my final run of PoE2 : does this patch disable steam achievments ? 

I think all mods disable achievements.

EDIT : For some reason, I thought they did, but they don't.
 

14 hours ago, Malanir said:

Ah i have an extra question, can this mod be used via Vortex ? (utility engine for most game mods on Nexusmod). 

Nvm i just finished reading the previous post about your mod and figured it wasnt released on nexus mod yet, only the old community patch.

So here is the question : Will it be possible to use your mod with Vortex once it's released ?  

I plan to release it on Nexus the day after tomorrow.

No idea for Vortex, but I think Community Patch doesn't work with Vortex, so I think my mod won't work either (and I recommend using CP anyway). Maybe @Boeroer can confirm ?

The thing is, this is my first mod ever, so I'm not very experienced with such things. I have very few available time to work on Vortex compatibility (consider I've more or less sacrified actual playing while creating this mod )

14 hours ago, ekt0 said:

I personally do not use mod but I am here to say that I appreciate your work greatly.

I think Pillars of Eternity Deadfire really needs balance patch like the one you are trying to do.

Thank you ! I wasn't much into using mods either since rule changes mods tend to powercreep too much for my test. I was convinced by the CP that some mods could feel legit.

I don't think there will be further patch though, that's also the reason why I felt "I had to do it myself" if you see what I mean  

Edited June 18, 2020 by Elric Galad

[Noqn]

  

7 hours ago, Malanir said:

One thing that surprises me is that i don't see anything about companions classes. And i did a quick search on nexusmod and i dont find something up to date for them.

Here is my suggestions if you have any interest in them : (only those who matters on a RP perspective or which counts to my heart  )

For the reasons @Elric Galad mentioned, won't fit his mod. (But maybe another one )

Nevertheless, I'm up for brainstorming this stuff!

7 hours ago, Malanir said:

Eder : 

Fighter choice : Unbroken, devoted. (doest fit quite much as Eder is the one that sticks to you from PoE 1 ; the two names of those subclasses quite well define his relation towards the Watcher.

Rogue choice : Eder is the kind of guy that travelled a lot and did go through tough situations, ambushes etc, a streetfighter subclass would fit aswell.

And why not a Fighter/cipher (ascendant) subclass, Eder travelled with the Watcher all along ad could have been "touched" by all those things and have some enlightment regarding spirits.

100% agreed on Unbroken and Streetfighter. IIRC when you ask what he's been up to, first thing he mentions is getting into a barfight.

Not sold on Cipher though. Less justifiable than the martial classes, story-wise. You also already have Serafen and Ydwin.

7 hours ago, Malanir said:

Pallegina :

Crusader : Devoted & Tactician, she is damn cold heated at some points and could easyly counted as a tactician and also she is stubborn on others so she could be this kind of monomaniac devoted  

I like these too, fits her personality.

7 hours ago, Malanir said:

Serafen :

Berserker seems a bit obvious according to his wild cipher subclass, and loss of control of himself.

Multi class new option Cipher / Ranger (Stalker, he is in people minds so it could fit). Pets are not something irrelevent for sailors,  crews used to have a lot of cats on board not only for rats but because they were incredibly useful to predict weather, so Serafen could have a panther or something.

Agreed on Berserker.

iirc, someone here wrote about this issue with the Ranger's design; because the animal has to be written into the story, it can only be a Companion class option if its mandatory.

So while a Panther is not a bad solution, I still think it might be a bit awkward to never have it adressed in conversations. Maybe Rogue instead?

7 hours ago, Malanir said:

Aloth :

Subclasses : Trickster could fit him and ofc Tactician could fit him aswell on the fighter side.

Good picks. I'd say Debonaire also fits as his Rogue subclass, considering the undercover operations he has been up to since last you saw him.

I actually expected Aloth to get a Barbarian option thanks to Iselmyr. Furyshaper fits lore-wise with Aloth being Awakened.

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Maybe even priest ? a pact with a God to reach his end why not ?

You could argue for Priest of Woedica or Steel Garrote (which fittingly is an Aedyr-centric faction), if he ended up pro-Leaden Key. Otherwise he'd probably not want anything to do with any God.

7 hours ago, Malanir said:

Maia Rua :

adding a cipher (ascendant) multiclass possibility could be terrific, she speaks about the innate feeling she had on shooting a captain from X yards distance, if thats not some cipher 6th sense, what is ?  

Kinda similar issue as with Edér, though I think it would be a cool parallel to the Cipher Rangas which adds another layer to the absurdity of Maia waging war against her country of birth. (Ok, I'm stretching it.)

This might just be me but I always thought Maia's Gunhawk/Wizard option was out of place. IMO her secondary options should be Gunhawk/Assasssin and Gunhawk/Devoted, for obvious reasons.

[Noqn]

1 hour ago, Elric Galad said:

I think all mods disable achievements.

Wait they do? GOG achievements work for me, only 'iroll20s' disables them.

Edited June 17, 2020 by Noqn

[house2fly]

They don't disable achievements, I've been playing with mods since basically release

[Elric Galad]

4 hours ago, house2fly said:

They don't disable achievements, I've been playing with mods since basically release

My bad, I thought they did.

[Malanir]

20 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Well, the reasons for this are :

1)  This is a balance mod. Changing Companion subclasses is not tied to balanced since Vanilla Classes are supposed to be as powerful (albeit less specialized) than subclasses. Note that I have tweaked Wildmind and Paladin of the Five Suns since they felt underpowered.

2) You don't need a mod to change subclass. A Console command is sufficient, as described in the link below :

Thanks for the answer, i already saw that post recently but it was fairly old and the command to do it mention a "clone", i mean... doest it kill my eder and pops a new one ? 

So i had several doubts about how it can work, i'll look deeply about how to change your companions classes, i may dig something usefull and to be more specific less old and barbaric as cloning your companions ! 

 

20 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

No idea for Vortex, but I think Community Patch doesn't work with Vortex, so I think my mod won't work either (and I recommend using CP anyway). Maybe @Boeroer can confirm ?

The thing is, this is my first mod ever, so I'm not very experienced with such things. I have very few available time to work on Vortex compatibility (consider I've more or less sacrified actual playing while creating this mod )

Haha no worries, it's just that Vortex is a mod manager that is used over 100s of games and is like the way use mods on nexus. 

I have the same mentality as yours about prefering to focus on the content/quality of your mod than compatibility stuff. You didn't need to justify it you are giving the community a lot of your time freely a simple yes/no is more than enough 

[Elric Galad]

And here it is on Nexus :

https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/438

Feel free if you have any comments about this Nexus release !

[draego]

can you change the font color of the nerf ?

 its really hard to read on nexus 

Edited June 19, 2020 by draego

[Elric Galad]

5 hours ago, draego said:

can you change the font color of the nerf ?

 its really hard to read on nexus 

You're right, I've switched to green, it's much better.

[Noqn]

Massive thanks, @Elric Galad, and congratulations!

[ekt0]

@Elric Galad, congrats !

[dunehunter]

@Elric Galad good job thanks!

[Elric Galad]

Just a little message : if you want to support the mod recognition, there's 2 easy things that you can do : download it on Nexus, and (after 15min) endorse it (but only if you actualy used the mod, let's be gentlemen). Please don't feel forced to do so (especially if you don't have a Nexus account) but I would be grateful !

Edit : suddenly realized I had never endorsed CP 

Edited June 22, 2020 by Elric Galad

[garrlik]

First thanks for all your hard work.

New to the game and new to the mods, I just downloaded the community patch and your Polishing Mods. I guess my question is... according to the poll (i guess the original community patch poll?), druids are to get a rank 5 talent for an additional spirit shift, was this not implemented or did I do something wrong? thx

 

poll link: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/109032-deadfire-polishing-poll/

[ThetaTau]

On 5/9/2020 at 5:15 AM, Elric Galad said:

Confounding Strike :
Start at -10 deflection malus, -2 per hit up to a total of -34 (doesn't stack with flanked)
Fix the stacking not working from CP. Thanks @Frykas for pointing it.

The ability is stacking with flanked despite what the patch notes say. So against cre_dummy with 46 Deflection, its going all the way down to 2. For example the dummy is flanked then I use confounding blind and at max stacks it shows -10 from flanked and -34 from blinding, reducing the deflection to 2. If I use confounding blind first before its flanked (because blind causes flanked) it works as the notes say it only goes up to -34 deflection. Am I missing something? I'm loading the mod in the right order and tried removing the community patch and same thing. -44 deflection just seems OP.

[Elric Galad]

On 6/22/2020 at 7:44 PM, garrlik said:

First thanks for all your hard work.

New to the game and new to the mods, I just downloaded the community patch and your Polishing Mods. I guess my question is... according to the poll (i guess the original community patch poll?), druids are to get a rank 5 talent for an additional spirit shift, was this not implemented or did I do something wrong? thx

 

poll link: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/109032-deadfire-polishing-poll/

I never heard of it after the poll.
It seems like a non-trivial change (especially because of shifters), so maybe they had technical feasibility issue, or was simply discarded because of lack of time.

11 hours ago, ThetaTau said:

The ability is stacking with flanked despite what the patch notes say. So against cre_dummy with 46 Deflection, its going all the way down to 2. For example the dummy is flanked then I use confounding blind and at max stacks it shows -10 from flanked and -34 from blinding, reducing the deflection to 2. If I use confounding blind first before its flanked (because blind causes flanked) it works as the notes say it only goes up to -34 deflection. Am I missing something? I'm loading the mod in the right order and tried removing the community patch and same thing. -44 deflection just seems OP.

Maybe be a good old bug. I'll check it with my version.

Maybe Flanked from actual flanking stacks with everything though (sort of passive). We (I and Frykas, who suggested the change) had similar issue with persistent distraction but I tweaked it to avoid it.
EDIT : OK, my intuition was right : actual flanking maluses stack with everything because it counts as passive. Actual flanikng + divine mark = -35 deflection for example.
Confounding blind only cause stacking deflection malus if flanking is applied first by actual flanking (or by Persistent distraction if you don't use the nerf part of my mod). It doesn't work with flanking applied by status, especially the blind from Confounding Blind.

I don't think I can change the stacking of actual flanking since it is most likely hard-coded,. At least my mod does not make things worse than they were. I will simply change the mod notes to precise it doesn't stack with flanking from Blind part of the ability.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Elric Galad

[Elric Galad]

On ‎6‎/‎19‎/‎2020 at 1:30 PM, Elric Galad said:

And here it is on Nexus :

https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/438

Feel free if you have any comments about this Nexus release !

I'm happy to announce that the mod has reached its 100th download (from actually different users) on Nexus. Apparently, it has been "hottest" PoE2 mod from its release (appears first on Nexus for PoE2 because of number of recent download, I suppose). Once again, thank you for your support !

I advertised for it on Steam forum but got a single "I-would-have-done-otherwisish but vague" comment (my favorites ). However, it received a much warmer welcome on reddit. I don't know how much this contributes to diffusion, but I wanted to share this experience.

[dunehunter]

@Elric Galad I know there are some duplicate between community patch and balance polishing mod, are there any install order to make both work?

[Elric Galad]

Polishing mod files should be lower on the list, as described in the installation instructions

[Elric Galad]

Community Patch Poll suggested to make chant scaling with PL. I'm wondering about it.

For version 1.2, I added a PEN scaling to rooting pain. The reason is that passive abilities do not benefit from scaling (they do get bonus PEN based on their ability level, but not through PEN scaling).
I think an ability without scaling PEN is a problem. When it does a fix amount of damages (or Healing ?) the absence of scaling is also a bit meh.
The same could be true for modals.

Duration scaling for passive/modals/chants could also be suggested, but I think it could mess with balance and there are already abilities (rays for example) for which duration doesn't scale.

What do you guys think about passive/modals/chants scaling ? For my part, I think :
- PEN should always scale. Not scaling PEN is incredibly annoying at high levels. +1 PL -> +0.25 PEN, as for active abilities.
- Fixed damages (such as brutal backlash, rooting pain, dragon trashed, wildstrike) should scale as active abilities. +1 PL -> +5% damages
- Healing effects should scale as fixed damages. This is important to make Come, Come, Soft Winds of Death consistent with its damages part.  +1 PL -> +5% damages. But I have a concerne abou Ancient Memory and Exalted Endurance because they are already quite good.
- Duration should not scale, especially because linger duration scaling would mess with chanter subclasses (and chanters chants are powerful enough as they are)

List of targetted abilities (leaving apart duration) :
- Exalted Endurance
- Providence
- Come Come Soft Winds of Death
- Dragon Trashed (CP rising damages from 4 to 5 per tick could be unnecessary with an added scaling)
- Ancient Memory
- Wildstrike Frenzies (they are high level so don't need scaling that much)
- Rooting Pain
- Brutal Backlash (could also be buffed a bit)
- Unbreakable / Unrelenting
- (I think Constant Recovery already scales)

Am I forgetting anything ?

[Noqn]

Can't do anything but agree your reasoning

What's your opinion on the damage shield of Her Courage Thick as Steel? Scale or nah?

 

[Elric Galad]

30 minutes ago, Noqn said:

Can't do anything but agree your reasoning

What's your opinion on the damage shield of Her Courage Thick as Steel? Scale or nah?

 

Damage shields don't scale for active abilities (Llengrath's Superior Elemental Bulwark, Beetle Shell) so I think it's unecessary. Her Courage is good enough for a brisk Troubadour and Protective Soul is Tier IX so wouldn't scale much. 

[n00biwan]

I played this mod a bit on solo potd and found all mega bosses to be completely impossible unless i use bm and summon 3 flame blights for wod by hitting my own phantoms... this is very tedious and i dont see any other way except using a herald, which is kind of even more tedious...

 

the sot/wod cheese is imo just for the megaboss portion anyways since its so much work to set up and I don't think anyone would use it for the regular encounters

Edited July 8, 2020 by n00biwan

[Elric Galad]

3 hours ago, n00biwan said:

I played this mod a bit on solo potd and found all mega bosses to be completely impossible unless i use bm and summon 3 flame blights for wod by hitting my own phantoms... this is very tedious and i dont see any other way except using a herald, which is kind of even more tedious...

 

the sot/wod cheese is imo just for the megaboss portion anyways since its so much work to set up and I don't think anyone would use it for the regular encounters

Thank you very much for your feedback.

At least this confirms that my mod avoid the usual mod powercreeping tendancy ^^

That said I think that the issue is that PoE2 is a party CRPG and that the rules are overall balanced for playing with a team.

Solo play is a kind of perversion in the freudian sense, a deviation from normality (What is the Ultimate then ?). Of course, it's fun (perversions are fun, nay ?), but the ruleset is not meant to be robust to it. Some classes are better for Solo play, and some just don't fit. Solo play relies quite a lot on various cheesy tactics, and my mod just cuts a lot of them, so it's expected to have more consequences on Solo than Party runs. 

So my question would be : if we leave the question of Megabosses apart, how did Solo feel with the mod ? Is the general experience was better or worse ? If it was worse, I may consider adding a warning about the nerfs package for Solo play. If it was better, then we have to speak about Megaboss.


Megabosses have been discussed a lot for being too different from other encounters. This is not that they are simply harder, it's that they rely too much on sustainable/renewable builds. 
I think it has been said several times on this forum : the ruleset is not very robust to megaboss, since it favors few tactics (and many of them are cheesy and nerfed by my mod).
Also the issue is a lot about Dorudugan itself since it is so hard to beat by conventionnal means AND has no way to dispell gamebreaking combos. Auranic and Hauani O Whe have some dispells and I believe that Belranga is more manageable than Doru.

I know that Phenomenon (one of the author of Community Patch) wanted to tweak Megabosses (maybe not simply nerfing them ? What if Doru could summon fire elementals in exchange for lower HP or less immunities ?).
I think this could be a better solution than de-nerfing broken combo. That's why my question about how the rest of Solo feel is quite important. If it feels good, I would sort of confirm that the problem is about Megabosses.

Edited July 8, 2020 by Elric Galad

[n00biwan]

57 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

So my question would be : if we leave the question of Megabosses apart, how did Solo feel with the mod ? Is the general experience was better or worse ? If it was worse, I may consider adding a warning about the nerfs package for Solo play. If it was better, then we have to speak about Megaboss.
 

I liked almost all the changes, it did not make solo play more or less enjoyable, or easier/harder for that matter. I just found myself using abilities that i never would have otherwise, it brings a fresh experience, however the mega boss portions really deserve to be looked at, for example your idea of adding fire blight spawns for doru is a neat idea!