Flick of the Wrist / Dozens Luck Attributes

[Jojobobo]

I didn't want to respec (seeing as I'm playing expert mode, seems a little counter-intuitive) so I got my PER up to 19 from base 10 with Lilith's Shawl, Song of the Heavens, the Tower Resting bonus and Aldwyn's prostitute bonus, with DEX at 5 (base 4 with Gloves of Manipulation) and after reloading the save before I entered... success! I'd make sure it's the first thing you do in the Inn, and save-scumming does work.

 

That PER and DEX combo gives a reasonable rate of success with the guidelines I listed earlier (when to aim for ears and when to aim for nose). Three rounds was all that was required. Not sure if it is dependent on your accuracy for you primary weapon, using only Drawn In Spring without a shield/additional weapon mine was 118.

 

Now the dice match doesn't seem as good, so maybe it's slightly dependent on MIG which I had higher last time. I'm sure save-scumming will see me through eventually.

Edited March 8, 2016 by Jojobobo

[Cragen]

 

I never had the patience to get these talents

 

Out of interest, do the bonuses from Flick of the Wrist apply to Soulbound weapons?

Indeed Flick of the Wrist was applied to all soulbound and summoned weapons. I don't know if they changed it in 3.0, but I doubt it.

 

Sadly it doesn't work with all soulbound weapons anymore. Tested it on my Barb with Grey Sleeper and Blade of the Endless paths. Both give me the same amount of acc, but unlabored blade gets the extra 4 acc.

 

So really only worth it if you plan on using daggers.

[Braven]

So really only worth it if you plan on using daggers.

Don't forget, it also applies to stilettos; not just daggers. Though they are less interesting past the early game. Too bad there are no soulbound stilettos.

Edited March 9, 2016 by Braven

[Boeroer]

The Vent Pick is not too bad. When I first found it I didn't realize at once that it's already durgan refined. But still: the FoD Spellchance might be really nice once they fix the bugged proc (or update the description accordingly to 1/encounter).

 

And there are two stilettos that have a spell striking: Azureith's (Jolting Touch) and Bleak Fang (Touch of Rot). If you have both and let them proc once each encounter, that's some nice AoE damage for free. Also Bleak Fang has a DR bypass of 6 by itself and is fast. So I wouldn't say it's only good in early game. It's not the most powerful weapon type atm, but it's viable.

Edited March 9, 2016 by Boeroer

[Doppelschwert]

I can't remember where I read it but there was a post by josh about this game (maybe on the SA forums?).

 

He basically explained the difference about the two options to aim for, but I can't remember if he talked about the influence of attributes (if any) as well. I don't have the link for his post history on SA right now and if I try to find it via the PoE thread, I get locked out because I'm not a member. Maybe someone might want to look it up?

[Jojobobo]

I think Oidhreacht is pretty good just purely because of the endurance restoration, I have thought about enchanting it high late game but might go for something else because it doesn't have too much interesting to offer.

[Ymarsakar]

If there were stilettos with 20% attack speed, it would help out a cipher or rogue. Upping the DR bypass would help as well.

 

As for the game, the bug thread said that you had to have 3 wins more than your losses. So for people who keep losing, it's not merely 3 consecutive wins.

Edited March 9, 2016 by Ymarsakar

[Loren Tyr]

I was interested in how those games worked as well, and found that there wasn't a definitive answer available that I could find. So I dug around in the game source for it, and since others might be interested as well I thought I'd revive this thread for a bit and post it here. 

 

Anyway, the Dozen's dice game really is just that. There are no stats that affect the outcome, it really is just a game of chance with a 50% chance of winning. You need to win three games in total to get the Dozen's Luck feat, so it should just be a matter of trying long enough to get there.

 

The Orlan's Head knife throwing game is more a game of skill however. It essentially does a 1-100 hit roll and adds a bonus based on Perception and Dexterity. A roll of 20 or less is a miss, a roll of more than 100 hits whatever you were aiming for (ear/nose), and anything in between hits different parts of the head (including ear/nose), by the way) at different probabilities (again also depending a bit on what you were aiming for). Perception and Dexterity both contribute equally to the bonus (/penalty) to the roll, at +2 per point of PER/DEX in excess of 10. Andred himself has 15 DEX and 14 PER, so gets a bonus of +18.

 

Winner is the player with the highest score from three throws, or from a tie-breaker as needed. Since I couldn't be bothered to do the math on that (multinomial distributions annoy me), I ran a quick simulation instead to compute the win probability against Andred given a particular DEX/PER bonus. These are shown in the first plot (I'm a statistician, so I'm allowed to do nerdy things like these). As this shows, like in real life you should always be aiming for the nose. This gives a significantly better chance of beating Andred in an individual game (the vertical grey line denotes Andred's bonus of +18; he always aims for the nose as well, by the way).  

 

However, to get the talent you actually have to win at least three times, and you need to have won more often than lost. I've plotted the probability of achieving this after (at most) 5, 10 and 25 games, shown in the second figure. As shown, if you're as good as Andred you have about a 50% chance of getting the feat after (at most) five games, though there is still quite a chance (about 20%) that you're still not there after 25 games. If you have just average DEX/PER you might as well not bother, you'll likely be there forever. 

[Kazuma]

Well that explains why I spent over an hour trying to get the talent from Orlan's Head. Dex 5, PER 13. In the end I ended up save scumming but that still took quite some time because I had been quick saving for a while and would have had to load back too far from a normal save. I think I found a thread somewhere here where a dev confirmed it takes 3 more wins than loses total. So I had a lot of loses to catch up on. I stuck with the nose as soon as I realized how frequently he seemed to hit it and figured that's all he was aiming for. Good to have confirmation on all this though. Next time I'll know to swap in some DEX/PER gear.

 

After Orlan's Head I didn't chance it and save scummed on Dozen's Dice from the get go. I know I'm a horrible person and I'll burn at the effigy.

 

But maybe next game I'll redeem myself by playing it properly - Spamming the 1 key while I watch videos on youtube...

 

Maybe it would have been more interesting if they had given you multiple opponents for each game. Like a mini-tournament with some taunting back and forth. I'm not expecting gwent or anything but give it some flavor next time eh OBS? And why wasn't it called noober's head?

 

"Heya!"

"Whatcha playing?"

"Why're you aiming that dagger at me?"

"Ouch! Can I play too?"

"Heyaaaaaah!"

"Ohh, I missed."

"Heya! Did I tell you about the time my grandma cut herself with a dagger?"

"Actually it was a letter opener..."

"Heya! Why did you stop throwing daggers at me?"

"Heya! Why did you stop?"

"Heya! Have you ever thrown a dagger at a dragon?"

[Loren Tyr]

That dev must've conflated the two conditions for obtaining the feat I think, or they changed it. From the px1_00_cv_andred_knife_toss.conversation file:

<Parameters>  
  <string>n_Andred_games_won</string>
  <string>GreaterThan</string>
  <string>n_Andred_games_lost</string>
</Parameters>

...

<Parameters>
  <string>n_Andred_games_won</string>
  <string>GreaterThanOrEqualTo</string>
  <string>3</string>
</Parameters>

Those are the two checks performed to in order to grant the Flick the Wrist talent.

[Kazuma]

Strange. Wouldn't this mean that whatever node this condition was attached to, would only run or be available if Andred was winning? And only once he had won 3 or more games? Unless they confusingly stored the players wins in a variable with Andred's name? Not that I'm questioning if you're right. The other possibility is that comes to mind is that this is the "Let's play a game (again)" message it will default to until he's losing and then it falls through to a message in which the player is deemed the champ and has the talent added?

 

At any rate I don't doubt the dev could have been mistaken.

 

*edit* Ah, unless internally they called it Andred_games simply because they hadn't decided on a name for the game. So really n_Andred_games_won = n_Orlans_Head_games_won. Or perhaps they've named it so because it's a variable/token attached to Andred, the npc the game is started from.

Edited July 27, 2016 by Kazuma

[Loren Tyr]

Yeah, the 'n_Andred' part is just to designate that it's for the knife throwing game (well, the 'n' is to designate that it's numeric actually). These are global variables accessible from anywhere in the game, so they need to be sufficiently distinctive to make sure their meaning is clear and they don't clash. You also have n_Teal (and b_Teal) variables for the dice game for example. This n_Andred_games_won gets incremented by one whenever you win a game of Orlan's Head. You really just need to have at least three wins and at least one more than Andred, so eg. 3-2 will do.

[Kazuma]

Yeah, I figured the n was for numeric. And if they are globally scoped variables it would make sense that it would include the NPC's name. Seems they settled on "variabletype_Objname_variable_name". My bad for not considering that in the first place.

 

I get a chuckle out of the fact that they don't seem to have something like a b_Durance_is_dead variable or at least don't check it. There's been several times people have talked about Durance as if he were still alive in my game and unfortunately he was killed by a pack of wolves I was kiting near him. In fact I got banter about him when I never even recruited him. Ah, well.

[Mygaffer]

Maybe it would have been more interesting if they had given you multiple opponents for each game. Like a mini-tournament with some taunting back and forth. I'm not expecting gwent or anything but give it some flavor next time eh OBS? And why wasn't it called noober's head?

 

"Heya!"

"Whatcha playing?"

"Why're you aiming that dagger at me?"

"Ouch! Can I play too?"

"Heyaaaaaah!"

"Ohh, I missed."

"Heya! Did I tell you about the time my grandma cut herself with a dagger?"

"Actually it was a letter opener..."

"Heya! Why did you stop throwing daggers at me?"

"Heya! Why did you stop?"

"Heya! Have you ever thrown a dagger at a dragon?"

 

I really liked the idea of the tavern games but the execution was lacking. They were much more flavor/world building than actual mini-games.

[fced]

It appear Athletics give the best reward in that game according to someone from Reddit, I have a high perception and next character, but before I added a +2 athletic I was always missing ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/5be3hr/psa_how_to_be_good_at_orlans_head/

[Wedd]

How to get "Flick of the Wrist"

I know it's long time after the premiere, but still didn't see proper, clear answer for "Flick" bonus so...
After some research I figured out solution:

You need +3 more wins then Your oponent to get this talent.

Examples:
You can win 3 wins in a row from a beginning (3:0)
If You lose X game You have to win X+3 (4:1, 5:2, 6:3, etc.)

Most important stat is ACCURACY - so DEX and PER works a bit.
If having just average ACC You can simply boost it with for example:
-gloves with ACC 2 which gives +5 accuracy
-sword Drawn in Spring with good ACC bonus (from Tcharek in Endless Paths of Od Nua)
-only single 1H weapon with no shield
(that is mentioned in loading screens that using only 1H weapon gives additional ACC bonus)

Using food with bonus ACC helps a bit too. with 97-98 acc as main character mage won 3/4 games, loaded 1 time after 3rd game (loss).