Strange dmg!

[Novas]

So I did take a look at the damage and how it works today and this make no sense to me.

How can the dmg be 13.1 ?

(The attack is from Paladin Flames of devotion)

 

[thelee]

It's inversions. Basically - virtually anything in the game with a negative symbol in front of it gets "inverted" and is much stronger than positive values. A full, ugly dissection is here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions

 

For your case, a -35% modifier from dual-wielding is equivalent to a -53.8% additive penalty (1/(1-.35)). Combine that with the other positive additive modifiers, and do any appropriute re-inversions and you end up doing 13.11-ish damage (rounded to 13.1).

 

Inversions are basically the worst part of deadfire's mechanics in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness.

 

edit2: the math is ugly. at this point I've done it enough that a few negative modifers I know exactly how to invert them off the top of my head. But for an approximation, you can say that a single negative modifier is roughly equivalent to it being a single multiplicative penalty, if you want to be able to do calculations yourself. (there are no convenient rules of thumbs for multiple negative modifiers and/or when combined with lots of positive modifiers)

 

edit: when I say "virtually anything" I really do mean anything. Healing modifiers, area of effect modifiers, beneficia/hostile effect durations, health penalties from low con, even paladin and priest disposition scaling. There are many places in the game where you can tell that the designers themselves didn't quite grasp their own inversion system and the balancing is a little screwy.

Edited June 30, 2020 by thelee

[Novas]

10 minutes ago, thelee said:

It's inversions. Basically - virtually anything in the game with a negative symbol in front of it gets "inverted" and is much stronger than positive values. A full, ugly dissection is here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions

 

For your case, a -35% modifier from dual-wielding is equivalent to a -53.8% additive penalty. Combine that with the others, and do any appropriute re-inversions and you end up doing 13.11-ish damage (rounded to 13.1).

 

Inversions are basically the worst part of deadfire's mechanics in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness.

wow, that is a strange thing to have in a game. Thank you for your anwser.

[Boeroer]

Remember remember... the -25% of Blunted Criticals.

[Boeroer]

15 hours ago, Novas said:

wow, that is a strange thing to have in a game. Thank you for your anwser.

Well, mechanically it makes sense and it actually works out quite well (as long as you don't want to know what exactly is going on). The problems are that

a) it's hard to explain,

b) it's unusual,

c) it's complicated and unintuitive,

d) neither the game nor the devs ever even tried to explain what's going on but left players wondering how the tooltip calculations would make any sense mathematically and

e) designers didn't seem to fully understand what the programmers concocted there either.

 

Edited July 1, 2020 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

I'm not entirely sure whether we'd all agree on this, but my sense is that most of us would: point d, especially, is pretty bad and a no-no when it comes to game development.

Again: Deadfire is a great game, but it does have its oddities.

[Boeroer]

I repeat myself but I think both PoE's and Deadfire's biggest flaw is the weak explanations and tooltips.

[xzar_monty]

I pretty much agree. Not knowning Obsidian outside these two games, I don't know if bad explanations are the norm.

[Madscientist]

I think that PoE1+2 are relatively easy to understand, at least the basics.

Lets look at it:

- Hit chance = acc +1d100 - defense for ALL attacks, no matter if physical attack or items.

- passive bonusses stack, active or modal bonusses do not stackif they buff the same stat

- There are 3 tiers of affliction/inspiration for every stat and they cancel each other out ( any affliction of a stat + any inspiration of the same stat = nothing)

- damage done = base damage * sum of all modifiers (but negative modifiers are complicated, more of it later)

Things are more complicated when you look at the details and there are probably some weird exceptions, but understanding those rules is enough to play the game, unless you play on the highest difficulty and maybe even more challenges like solo or no reload. I play many RPGs and I am in several Forums. there are some people who think anything less complex than DnD 3E or its variants (e.g. Pathfinder) is dumped down and not worth playing and they demand more races, more classes and more feats. I think that most players who are not complete nerds will be confused by DnD 3E, it takes a long time to understand the basics and it takes forever to understand the details and many players are scared away from a game that can be great, so its totally fine to have RPGs with a bit less complexity. I think that PoE1+2 is a good start for players who want to get into classic RPGs.

I would say the confusion of many players comes from the detailed tooltips of PoE. Many games just show the final numbers (for damage in this case) but not how they are calculated. Players simply use the weapon that shows the biggest damage number in their status screen. The confusion of many players in PoE is because the game shows all the modifiers that lead to this result, but not the rule that is applied for these modifiers. So PoE gives you more information than most other games, but not ALL information.

PoE1+2 have 2 complicated formulas: Damage calculation and action speed calculation. The speed formula was complicated in PoE1+2 and I admit that I never cared much about it. In PoE1 most things that were called action speed only influenced recovery time and in PoE2 you have to take care if the bonus/penalty influences speed or duration, so it can be hard to say if +20% of something is good or bad. The damage formula for PoE1 was simple. In PoE2 they had the "great" idea to add double inversion. I had to read Thelees guide to understand it. Mathematically its fantastic. But normal players and even some devs have problems to understand it because it is as unintuitive as possible.

solution: Please keep the detailed tooltips but show us the exact formulas for damage and speed in the game, plus an example. The game already has a big in game codex (I have forgotten how it is called in game). Please add the exact formula plus an example to this codex to show players that +20% and -20% do not result in zero.

PS: I have never played a DnD 5E game, but I started to do some reading for the coming BG3. I get the feeling that PoE2 might be inspired a bit by DnD 5E. You roll a hit chance also for spells and afflictions/inspirations aka advantage/disadvantage cancel each other. Maybe some more things, I am a complete noob for 5E and I just read the players handbook twice online.

Edited July 3, 2020 by Madscientist