Body Control, Mental Fortress, & Unstoppable = broken?

[ddillon]

Are Body Control, Mental Fortress, and Unstoppable broken?  Or is the +10 bonus too small to be effective?

 

I selected both Mental Fortress and Body Control for all party members, but my characters *never* seem to save against charmed, confused, frightened, paralyzed, etc effects.

 

Note: These are not min-maxed or otherwise abnormal characters.  Most are Obsidian-made companions, and none of my custom companions has a score under 10 in any attribute, so there shouldn't be any large penalties offsetting the bonus from these talents.

Edited April 17, 2015 by ddillon

[thelee]

I think the problem with those talents isn't that deflection is the most important defensive attribute, it's that their effect is relatively small at +10 considering that you have to invest a talent.

 

But it's interesting to note that they seemingly directly add a bonus when defending against the effect, not just the Will roll.

That should help if the attack targets deflection, too.

That some of the attacks targt deflection directly, rather than the expected Will is still strange, imo, considering one would intuitively increase will rather than deflection against chamr/dominate/confuse attacks.

 

That's not quite the problem. If the effect were bigger, it would have to be sufficiently big to compensate for the relatively smaller impact it has among talents. There, you run the risk of creating a talent that effectively is "become nearly immune to mind-control effects"; I might not actually have a problem with this, but the designers have made it a point to state that they don't like the idea of straight-out immunities (and personally I like the fact that basically every enemy I fight--even Thaos or the Adra Dragon--appear to be equally susceptible to all possible debuffs).

 

So it seems like the best solution is to retweak all the attacks so that Will (and the other defenses) are not second-class citizens when it comes to attacks you really want to guard against.

 

 

 

I think the problem with those talents isn't that deflection is the most important defensive attribute, it's that their effect is relatively small at +10 considering that you have to invest a talent.

 

But it's interesting to note that they seemingly directly add a bonus when defending against the effect, not just the Will roll.

That should help if the attack targets deflection, too.

That some of the attacks targt deflection directly, rather than the expected Will is still strange, imo, considering one would intuitively increase will rather than deflection against chamr/dominate/confuse attacks.

 

Right this is the primary issue the fact that Will defense "doesn't do what it says on the tin." So what tends to happen to unaware players is they spread out their defenses, try to up their will and use talents like mental fortress and items that increase will to shore up that defense only to have it completely ingnored anyway and wonder why the talents aren't helping.

 

Also Khalid I get the point, as I have said YES there are some enemies that don't target deflection, but the earliest enemies you run into (spores) and arguably the most annoying charmers you run into (Fampyrs due to their one track, mage hunting AI) both target deflection. So 2 of the 3 major charm users in the game target deflection. Yes Mental Fortress helps stack vs this but guess what so does superior defleciton (+5 def) AND helps vs 95+% of the attacks you face in the game. You can list mobs til you're blue in the face but to the general populace who weren't aware why their talents and gear weren't helping here's your reason plain as day. You want mental fortress to help? Stack it on top of deflection. And even so you get far more return on talents that stack generic deflection than conditional ones like these since they help vs nearly eveything, not a tiny list comprising of a handful of mobs.

 

 

One nitpick, despite your otherwise very good points: deflection on a person you keep back (like a wizard) is not useful 95+% of the time if they're never getting hit. It is in fact nearly 0% useful. Ideally, the alternate defenses would still be useful because spells and spell-like abilities are more likely to hit your party members who are at distance (either because of area of effect, spell jumps, or because of ranged AI). Of course, this is ideally, so for example the fact that Fampyrs use Deflection for their mage-seeking control ability is a major bummer.

 

Hypothetically it may still be that Fampyr/Spores are sufficiently uncommon that the designers thought that it's not too big of a deal that they attack Deflection, so stacking Will/Reflex/Fort is still useful for the fights that involve enemy ciphers/druids/priests/wizards... though in practice, from my own experience completing Path of the Damned, fights with Fampyrs and Spores are the most problematic fights, right behind Thaos and the Adra Dragon, so even if enemy ciphesr/druid/priest/wizard fights were much more common the importance of those defenses is not so significant because they're not helping me when I need them the most.

[El Zoido]

You wouldn't need to buff it so much that it makes you effectively immune, but with the way the system works (miss/graze/hit/crit), small changes will often only move a few hits into graze territory and vice versa. That is a statistical noteworthy effect, but it's hardly perceptible, since you will still have a lot of attacks causing an effect, only some more will do so at a reduced rate.

 

Btw., I think the other defences would already become more important if more enemies used spells and spell-like abilities, esp. AoE effects and those had both a longer duration and  would be stronger than current effects usually are.

[thelee]

You wouldn't need to buff it so much that it makes you effectively immune, but with the way the system works (miss/graze/hit/crit), small changes will often only move a few hits into graze territory and vice versa. That is a statistical noteworthy effect, but it's hardly perceptible, since you will still have a lot of attacks causing an effect, only some more will do so at a reduced rate.

 

Btw., I think the other defences would already become more important if more enemies used spells and spell-like abilities, esp. AoE effects and those had both a longer duration and  would be stronger than current effects usually are.

 

I think the issue is that "statistically noteworthy" is more important than "perceptible" from a design perspective.

 

The talents aren't geared towards being "perceptible": a +5 bonus to deflection (or +6 from Weapon and Shield style) amounts to a statistically noteworthy but varyingly perceptible effect. In the neutral case, no human being is going to be able to tell between an enemy's 15/35/50 miss/graze/hit distribution and a 20/35/45 miss/graze/hit distribution over the course of a fight (at least without repeated experimentation and careful data tracking to eliminate the possibility of random chance). However, in the case where you're stacking defenses, then a 95/5/0 miss/graze/hit distribution is going to be much more perceptible compared to a 100/0/0 miss/graze distribution (which brings this back to the increasing returns topic). I think this is what everyone keeps missing; any defense boost is powerful if stacked properly (Dignity has been making this point with regards to focusing on just deflection), so shooting for a goal of "perceptibility" for a talent design is probably not the best.

 

Making them more useful is more important than making them more perceptible, and for this reason I mostly agree with you on your second paragraph; enemy spellcasters just seem a bit too rare (and less threatening than the Deflection-targeting enemies).

[El Zoido]

 

 I think this is what everyone keeps missing; any defense boost is powerful if stacked properly (Dignity has been making this point with regards to focusing on just deflection), so shooting for a goal of "perceptibility" for a talent design is probably not the best.

 

Making them more useful is more important than making them more perceptible, and for this reason I mostly agree with you on your second paragraph; enemy spellcasters just seem a bit too rare (and less threatening than the Deflection-targeting enemies).

 

 

That might actually be true, but (at least up to hard difficulty on which I played) it's rarely necessary to stack several defense buffs  on your party members or debuffs on enemies. In fact it happened to me so rarely that I only distinctly remember the fights with the Adra Dragon and Thaos. It might be that stacking some effects would improve my groups performance during many other fights, but it's hardly ever resulting in such an advantage that I actually did it, let alone considered it necessary.

But this is why I advocate increasing resistances and effects/duration of spells and abilities across the board, at least on Hard and PotD difficulty.

Edited April 24, 2015 by El Zoido

[thelee]

 

 

 I think this is what everyone keeps missing; any defense boost is powerful if stacked properly (Dignity has been making this point with regards to focusing on just deflection), so shooting for a goal of "perceptibility" for a talent design is probably not the best.

 

Making them more useful is more important than making them more perceptible, and for this reason I mostly agree with you on your second paragraph; enemy spellcasters just seem a bit too rare (and less threatening than the Deflection-targeting enemies).

 

 

That might actually be true, but (at least up to hard difficulty on which I played) it's rarely necessary to stack several defense buffs  on your party members or debuffs on enemies. In fact it happened to me so rarely that I only distinctly remember the fights with the Adra Dragon and Thaos. It might be that stacking some effects would improve my groups performance during many other fights, but it's hardly ever resulting in such an advantage that I actually did it, let alone considered it necessary.

But this is why I advocate increasing resistances and effects/duration of spells and abilities across the board, at least on Hard and PotD difficulty.

 

 

To be fair, I think the difficulty could be bumped up across the board as a component to this. I started off on Hard then immediately re-started on PotD because it felt like I didn't need most of the abilities/options available to me to get through fights. (And even on PotD there was a chunk of it after I hit level 10 but long before fighting Thaos that I started just breezing through most fights, especially so after hitting level 12.)

[Dignity]

One nitpick, despite your otherwise very good points: deflection on a person you keep back (like a wizard) is not useful 95+% of the time if they're never getting hit. It is in fact nearly 0% useful. Ideally, the alternate defenses would still be useful because spells and spell-like abilities are more likely to hit your party members who are at distance (either because of area of effect, spell jumps, or because of ranged AI). Of course, this is ideally, so for example the fact that Fampyrs use Deflection for their mage-seeking control ability is a major bummer.

 

Hypothetically it may still be that Fampyr/Spores are sufficiently uncommon that the designers thought that it's not too big of a deal that they attack Deflection, so stacking Will/Reflex/Fort is still useful for the fights that involve enemy ciphers/druids/priests/wizards... though in practice, from my own experience completing Path of the Damned, fights with Fampyrs and Spores are the most problematic fights, right behind Thaos and the Adra Dragon, so even if enemy ciphesr/druid/priest/wizard fights were much more common the importance of those defenses is not so significant because they're not helping me when I need them the most.

 

 

Wonderful points I'll readily concede. To the back line in most nearly every situation deflection is effectively irrelevant since if the player is managing his/her party properly the majority of threats they'll be facing should be from area attacks and incidental splash damage. This of course steers the player (conciously or not) towards doing the "smart" thing which is to focus on defenses that protect them from these effects which are traditionally Reflex and Will, and lo and behold backline types inherently tend to have high Reflex (physical back line) and/or Will (caster types) at least on the premades which reinforces this line of thought further.

 

The monkey wrench in all of this of course (which you point out) is due to the mob compositions in the game this doesn't play out quite this way in practice. True caster types are rare and more importantly behave similar to player characters (they have to deal with cast range, cast times and recovery times). On an even playing field such as this players once familiar with the combat mechanics of PoE easily dominate these fights. Think of which mobs typically give players problems, mobs that break the rules: Spores with their spammable, uniterruptible confusion. Fampyrs with their instant, battle opening, long ranged heat (mage) seeking charms, and Shades/Shadows with their engagement ignoring instant teleports with the same AI tendencies Fampyrs have (straight beeline towards the backline). Coincidentally, or perhaps not, these mobs also happen to exploit deflection and specialize in causing cascade failure scenarios.

 

In the old IE games dangerous mobs would perhaps use the same tactics, but they would pressure you via the Will/Fort/Reflex equivalents (saving throws) not via deflection (armor class)  and casters in general were much more powerful/dangerous in the first place (on both the player and NPC sides). So in a weird way, when you need defense the most in pretty much every situation in this game deflection is what you're looking for. Be it to protect your backline from the specialists that murder them or to protect your front line from their banes (Crystal Eaters, Ogres, etc) and everything else in general (generic mooks).

Edited April 25, 2015 by Dignity

[ddillon]

vithrack dominate- targets will

Vithrack aditional effect on hit(paralyze)-fort

Vithrack(boss only?) aoe stun-will             

adragan petrify- Fort

adragan dominate-will

Swam Spore Dominate-deflection

Dank Spore Confusion-deflection

Whil o whisp additional effect confusion-will

Fampyr Charm-Deflection

Missing one of the big ones:

 

Cean Gwla (AoE Paralyze, AoE Terrify)

 

Also, Drakes and Lions can inflict the Frightened status iirc.

 

Not sure offhand what defense these roll against. Are there any programs/tools for browsing PoE resources? Something similar to NearInfinity?

[Khalid the bear]

tested this with combat log. didnt find any Cean Gwla too look at (dont know if any appear in act 3, but will add if i see)

[El Zoido]

I suspect that AoE attacks and aura-like abilities like the fear effect on Drakes and other enemies correctly target will/reflex/fortitude (whatever applies).

It seems to me that just some of the directed one-char attacks are (erroneously, imho) targeting purely deflection.

It might make sense for the Dank Spores to roll against deflection first - but I think they should then roll against Will or Fortitude (if considered a poison) for the additional effect to keep it consistent.

The ranged Fampyr attacks should imo directly roll against Will.

 

Generally the importance of Will/Fortitude/Reflex would be increased by having more enemies that target those defences with strong effects.

[Khalid the bear]

Cean Gwla vail (paralyze) targets fort, her fear aura targets will

[Guest]

Missing one of the big ones:

Cean Gwla (AoE Paralyze, AoE Terrify)

 

Also, Drakes and Lions can inflict the Frightened status iirc.

 

Not sure offhand what defense these roll against. Are there any programs/tools for browsing PoE resources? Something similar to NearInfinity?

 

Frighten - Will

Paralyze - Fortitude

 

Will have to repost with Terrify later.

[ddillon]

Two more for Khalid's list:

 

Crystal Eater Spider (Petrify)

Dargul (Paralyze)

 

---

 

I've recently fought many Cean Gwla in the Endless Paths (Level 13), and I've checked the combat log to try to get a better idea of what is happening.

 

With the Body Control and Mental Fortress talents and the Priest spell Prayer Against Imprisonment active on all party members, Cean Gwla do miss sometimes, but imo they are still scoring too many grazes and hits (and some crits!) with their Paralyze attack.

 

At the least, I feel like combination of the talent and spell should make characters basically immune to the status effect.  As it stands, I doubt I'd ever choose any of these talents in the future.

Edited May 2, 2015 by ddillon