Update on the Update

[Karkarov]

That's not what happened. They're removing DR and keeping DT. Matt516 is not impressed.

Personally it makes more sense this way and was a good change.  There is no need to have two stats about "reducing damage".  Damage Threshold (while I knew what it was and what it did) does also make just as much if not more sense when called Damage Reduction.  If they lower the damage numbers overall corrently this will easily offset the loss of original DR, be easier to figure out for newbies, and simplify the combat process quite a bit.

[Sensuki]

What I meant by that was that Matt wanted percentile armor rather than integer armor. I don't mind the change tbh and Icewind Dale 1 and 2 had integer DR.

[archangel979]

 

I have nothing against integer reduction, I just think it can be a bit strange when bonus damage is handled in percentages. Will require some weird damage values for weapons/spells to be balanced properly. If damage was being handled in integers (+1 damage etc) then there wouldn't be a problem, and it would also be a lot more intuitive.

 

I agree with you. If you're doing flat reduction (which is easy to understand and easy to tweak), you have to be really careful that the damage with all the extras applied doesn't make those DT values meaningless. If I can reliably crit every 3-4 attacks for 100 dmg against a DT of 15, damage types, armor types etc. are rendered meaningless.

 

That could be solved by giving armors two DT values, one for normal attacks and one for critical attacks.

It is reasonable that some armors are better vs attacks coming at critical parts than other armors (lighter armors that don't come with helmets or leg armor should be less resistant to critical hits).

[Shevek]

Archangel: that sounds terrible

[bigsun123]

Personally it makes more sense this way and was a good change.  There is no need to have two stats about "reducing damage".  Damage Threshold (while I knew what it was and what it did) does also make just as much if not more sense when called Damage Reduction.  If they lower the damage numbers overall corrently this will easily offset the loss of original DR, be easier to figure out for newbies, and simplify the combat process quite a bit.

I like this as well, if you've played Fallout New Vegas it basically had weapons that were rapid fire and did less damage per hit but more per second, and weapons that did lots of damage but had a slow rate of fire. You could change your weapons accordingly to fit the enemies. Pretty simple to understand and I could see it applying to the 1h 2h weapons here. I haven't played the beta though, but I feel like the mix of % and integer reduction would be confusing without going to excel sheets, which I'm not really a fan of.

[Osvir]

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/105504146956/whats-the-scoop-on-the-dr-and-dt-changes-in#notes

"A few changes should be in the update tomorrow, but there are many more coming."
Does this mean today (18th)... or tomorrow? (19th)

Twitter says:
21:57 - 17 dec 2014

 

But Tumblr says 18th.... are you a time traveler Josh o.o

*hyped*

Edited December 18, 2014 by Osvir

[Sensuki]

More on the patch from SA

 

There should be a new BB build rolling out soon with a lot of improvements and bugfixes. The character sheet and enemy stat displays have been cleaned up a lot. Many new icons and voice sets. Non-caster classes have more front-loaded options for abilities at levels 3 and 5 (e.g. at 3rd level, all Zealous paladin auras become available). "Old" DR has been removed and DT has been renamed -- check this out -- DR. Base weapon damage values and many spell damage values have been reduced. AoEs don't spam the combat log but present a brief message (e.g. Aloth (Fireball) 2 Crits, 1 Hit, 1 Miss) that can be expanded. Wizard self-buffs are now all (really) 20 frame casts with no recovery. Unarmed attacks are covered under the Peasant group so monks can gain Weapon Focus in it. Complete unarmed fighting is now recognized as dual-wielding. All "fast" weapons, including unarmed attacks, now have Weak Interrupt ratings. Interrupt values are displayed on all relevant attack stat blocks now. There have also been a few additions/modifications to existing Abilities and Talents. E.g. fighters have access to Weapon Mastery to augment Specialization by 10%. The ranger's Defensive Shooting was replaced with Arrow Sense, a passive bonus to Deflection vs. ranged attacks.

 

E: Oh, and monks have more unarmed attack variations.

[archangel979]

Archangel: that sounds terrible

Thank you for that detailed explanation...

[Chilloutman]

 

Personally it makes more sense this way and was a good change.  There is no need to have two stats about "reducing damage".  Damage Threshold (while I knew what it was and what it did) does also make just as much if not more sense when called Damage Reduction.  If they lower the damage numbers overall corrently this will easily offset the loss of original DR, be easier to figure out for newbies, and simplify the combat process quite a bit.

I like this as well, if you've played Fallout New Vegas it basically had weapons that were rapid fire and did less damage per hit but more per second, and weapons that did lots of damage but had a slow rate of fire. You could change your weapons accordingly to fit the enemies. Pretty simple to understand and I could see it applying to the 1h 2h weapons here. I haven't played the beta though, but I feel like the mix of % and integer reduction would be confusing without going to excel sheets, which I'm not really a fan of.

 

Not true, because if you got flat reduction even faster weapon doesnt help you overcome what you loose on damage (to point where some weapons may not do any damage)

[bigsun123]

That's actually exactly why you would change strategies, though. Faster weapons do less damage per hit, so switch to a slower weapon that does more per hit. It wouldn't make sense to change to an even faster, weaker weapon would it? If you include % reduction it becomes a little harder to calculate on the fly.

Edited December 18, 2014 by bigsun123

[ctn2003]

Looks like the PE team decided to keep playing through this week

 

brutally murdered by wolves, skuldr, ivory spinners. #rip everyone on the #pillarsofeternity team.

gibbing ppl with a stiletto. lol every tyme. #pillarsofeternity

 

Any word on he update? i dont know exacly but they have been gone for wile now not even respoding to bug reports.

[Leferd]

Adam Brennecke's tweet:

 

@adam_brennecke: We have a new Beta patch landing today for #PillarsOfEternity! As always, has lots of great fixes and new things to check out.

[InsaneCommander]

Adam Brennecke's tweet:

 

@adam_brennecke: We have a new Beta patch landing today for #PillarsOfEternity! As always, has lots of great fixes and new things to check out.

Excellent!

[Doppelschwert]

 

 

So this is like using heaps to find the correct value in the least amount of tests: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_(mathematics) ? Basically, assign extreme values, then cut each new value in half, or double it, as the shortest route to reaching a satisfactory value.

Are you sure the link you posted is the one you meant? Somehow I don't have the feeling that people working on category theory and abstract algebra care much for a technique you learn in the first year of studying math. I may be wrong though, so feel free to write me an elaborate pm with some references if you want, i'm interested.

No, I wasn't sure actually. I also wasn't sure if it was the right method to liken it to, hence my question in the post itself. I'm neither a mathematician, nor a computer scientist. A friend of mine who is both explained heaps to me once, in terms broad enough that I would understand. How about this link: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Heap.html Is it about the same thing? All I remembered was the practical application of heaps for quckly ordering elements by size, if I'm using the correct language.

 

I see, so I was right. Your wikipedia article is about something that probably has no effect on any application of mathematics in our context, so feel free to disregard it. The wolfram article is closer, the corresponding wikipedia article is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_%28data_structure%29

Note that heaps are mainly used to efficiently store and access sorted data, but the process of retrieving data is similiar to how josh searches for balanced values, if you see it from a specific angle.

 

 

More on the patch from SA

 

There should be a new BB build rolling out soon with a lot of improvements and bugfixes. The character sheet and enemy stat displays have been cleaned up a lot. Many new icons and voice sets. Non-caster classes have more front-loaded options for abilities at levels 3 and 5 (e.g. at 3rd level, all Zealous paladin auras become available). "Old" DR has been removed and DT has been renamed -- check this out -- DR. Base weapon damage values and many spell damage values have been reduced. AoEs don't spam the combat log but present a brief message (e.g. Aloth (Fireball) 2 Crits, 1 Hit, 1 Miss) that can be expanded. Wizard self-buffs are now all (really) 20 frame casts with no recovery. Unarmed attacks are covered under the Peasant group so monks can gain Weapon Focus in it. Complete unarmed fighting is now recognized as dual-wielding. All "fast" weapons, including unarmed attacks, now have Weak Interrupt ratings. Interrupt values are displayed on all relevant attack stat blocks now. There have also been a few additions/modifications to existing Abilities and Talents. E.g. fighters have access to Weapon Mastery to augment Specialization by 10%. The ranger's Defensive Shooting was replaced with Arrow Sense, a passive bonus to Deflection vs. ranged attacks.

 

E: Oh, and monks have more unarmed attack variations.

 

 

That sounds pretty sweet. Looks like I'll finally be able to participate in the beta meaningful.

[samm]

I see, so I was right. Your wikipedia article is about something that probably has no effect on any application of mathematics in our context, so feel free to disregard it. The wolfram article is closer, the corresponding wikipedia article is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_%28data_structure%29

Note that heaps are mainly used to efficiently store and access sorted data, but the process of retrieving data is similiar to how josh searches for balanced values, if you see it from a specific angle.

It's just binary search with a first step to set the extremes. May not be the most efficient choice mathematically, but makes sense because it's fast enough and a manual process is needed here. Thus the method of choice should be easy to grasp and apply for humans. As opposed to an automated approach to an optimization problem.

[Doppelschwert]

Josh also said on the SA-forums that no matter how high DT is, 20% of the original damage will always get through. Which means you can have damage values much closer to DT or smaller than max DT and balance around that, avoiding the issue with crits that are way overpowered for a good part.

[Doppelschwert]

 

I see, so I was right. Your wikipedia article is about something that probably has no effect on any application of mathematics in our context, so feel free to disregard it. The wolfram article is closer, the corresponding wikipedia article is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_%28data_structure%29

Note that heaps are mainly used to efficiently store and access sorted data, but the process of retrieving data is similiar to how josh searches for balanced values, if you see it from a specific angle.

It's just binary search with a first step to set the extremes. May not be the most efficient choice mathematically, but makes sense because it's fast enough and a manual process is needed here. Thus the method of choice should be easy to grasp and apply for humans. As opposed to an automated approach to an optimization problem.

 

Yeah, you're right. It's been some years since I took my last course in computer science, thats embarassing. I know that its just binary search but was trying to come up with a connection to heaps, although there actually is none when I reread the definition of binary heaps. Totally agree with what you said - it's fast enough since you're basically halving the error with every iteration if you do stuff right, so it shouldn't take long to get into the right ballpark.

[Yonjuro]

 

...

It's just binary search with a first step to set the extremes. May not be the most efficient choice mathematically, but makes sense because it's fast enough and a manual process is needed here. Thus the method of choice should be easy to grasp and apply for humans. As opposed to an automated approach to an optimization problem.

 

 

 Yes, but it might be a series of steps. If you are looking for the optimal value and you have an upper an lower bound you can use binary search. To find the upper and lower bounds you can search exponentially, that is, try 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc. At some point you will have a value X that is the best so far and 2X which is worse than X. You can then do binary search between 0.5X and 2X to find the optimal value. The complexity (the number of doublings you need to try)  is logarithmic in the size of the optimal value (even though you didn't know the optimal value to begin with) a.k.a very cool.

Edited December 19, 2014 by Yonjuro

[Lephys]

My primitive haven't-used-much-math-in-about-10-years art-kid brain hurts right now... T_____T

 

I understand the concept of what I'm reading, but couldn't really tell you the details, heh.

[Quadrone]

Aaaaany second now....right!? Right? *crickets*

[Gairnulf]

Aaaaany second now....right!? Right? *crickets*

Don't worry guys, they should be ready somewhere before early 2015.

[Karkarov]

Not true, because if you got flat reduction even faster weapon doesnt help you overcome what you loose on damage (to point where some weapons may not do any damage)

Well you have to remember that before you also had original DR which was reducing your damage by a set percent to begin with.  So now even though damage was universally lowered, original DR has also been removed.  This means damage is not as high, but it is also not getting reduced as much as it was previously as well.

[Sensuki]

Must have run into a problem, pretty sure the work day is over now.

[TrueMenace]

This game is never going to come out.

[Sensuki]

7 hours ago

 

We have a new Beta patch landing today for #PillarsOfEternity! As always, has lots of great fixes and new things to check out.

https://twitter.com/adam_brennecke/status/545665642821472256

 

Hmmm