Armor & Difficulty Confusion

[zeno_42]

So I've been playing PoE on and off for a few months.  Lots of restarts as I toy with builds.  Never got all the way to Act II.  Mostly waiting for WM2 to start seriously.  I ended up starting a chanter/Hard when Beta 3.0 came out, and continued that game after the official release.  I noticed that everything seemed much, much easier than I remembered it.  Couldn't quite figure out why.

 

Tonight I noticed all my DR values seemed higher than they ought to be.  L8 Pallegina running around in Exceptional Plate with total DR of 25, etc... When I click on the DR for details, I notice the usual 12 plate, 4 exceptional, 3 zealous endurance, 2 survival II.... and a 25% Armor Efficiency bonus.  Not all of my NPCs have it.  My chanter has it at 30%.  Eder is 25% like Palegina.  Aloth doesn't have it at all.

 

So...  I do not remember this bonus from any prior playthroughs.  Any idea where it comes from?

 

Anybody else finding things got startlingly easier in 3.0?  I'm not remotely a min-maxer.  My Chanter doesn't have any stat under 10 and is built for conversation.  NPCs are mostly built for what they look like in my head.  My DPS King by a factor of two is Eder running around with an Estoc.  No custom NPCs.  I've done a number of side-quests, but nowhere near all of those available in Act I.  Haven't touched the Endless Paths or White March at all yet.  Aloth and Durance have cast maybe 10 spells each over the course of the entire game - because I just don't feel threatened enough to bother with anything but the per encounter stuff.

 

Are there any known bugs when upgrading from Beta to release 3.0 that could mess with Difficulty?  I did theoretically revert back to non-beta before installing WM2.

 

 

 

 

[zeno_42]

Just for reference, Party just hit level 8 and we're doing the main quest ruins north of dyrford village. Pretty much just auto-attacking everything without bothering with tactics. Thats not how I remember the last time I was at this stretch. And I've been intentionally holding back on going nuts with sidequests to try not to overlevel stuff too much.

 

I am still set to hard difficulty (theoretically).

[Boeroer]

Armor Efficiency bonus? Never heard of that before...

[zeno_42]

Yeah. All my search-fu isn't turning up a trace of such a thing either. I think I'm going to chalk it up to something funky happening moving from the beta to release and reinstall. Between that and the general difficulty weirdness I think something got messed up.

[zeno_42]

Just figured it out.  "Armor Efficiency" is just the way PoE reports how an armor may be better against some damage types than other.  i.e. +50% vs Blunt or -25% vs Slash.

 

Still leaves me confused about what was going on with the difficulty.  But I've reinstalled and started again with a Cipher and the DLL hack to reduce XP gain.  So maybe that'll sort things out for me.

[Boeroer]

I also realized this after your post. I think this is a new description because I never saw that before. Or maybe I did't hover over that numbers for a looong time.

[Koth]

If it's still too easy then bump it up from hard to path of the damned, definitely more of a challenge, but it's still fair. I love PotD, perfect balance. Makes me use all my skills, spells, consumables and tactics much more. I was trying to take on raederic last night and tried about 8 times each time he wiped the floor with my level 4 party of 6. I was using buff food and potions of stoneskin, everything, nothing worked.

 

Then I just changed tactics, parked all my group in the room with the dead chick on the bed, sent Aloth off to shoot a rolling flame fireball up the steps to tag the group while he hitched up his skirt and high-tailed it back to the camping spot. With the door acting as a bottleneck, I easily wiped the floor with them. The point of the story is that I love that the game made me resort to this kind of tactic to overcome such a difficult battle.