Among Scion of Flame, Heart of the Storm, and Spirit of Decay for the priest, AFAICT Scion of Flame is the only one that actually has an effect, and even then it doesn't effect all the spells it really should. It effects Shining Beacon and Divine Mark, because those have the "Fire" tag.

 

However, I have a Priest of Wael and just for test I took Heart of the Storm. In retrospect, this was a mistake, because here are the abilities I thought Heart of the Storm would affect:

- Spiritual Weapon (Wael version has shock lash)

- Warding Seal (does shock damage)

 

In reality, here are the abilities it affects:

 

Nothing. In fact, despite doing shock damage, the fact that the aforementioned abilities don't have "Electrical" tagged on them means they don't get any benefit. In fact, no priest abilities afaict in the BB have the electrical tag. Similarly, Scion of Flame seems like it underperforms for a priest, because Searing Ward has no fire tag.

 

I suspect this is an oversight, and if not I highly urge folks at Obsidian to look at the value of these priest passives a bit closer. Maybe there are some powerful high-level abilities that are Electrical or Acid/Decay-tagged, but then it seems like these passives should be placed higher instead of letting me take an early-game "trap" ability.

 

Attached a save with a priest ready to level up: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mb888m1nzukcs7n/AABcOODjCSNTKVytXrvS4DGca?dl=0

 

Again, maybe this is fully working as intended (because this is to-the-letter how Heart of the Storm and Spirit of Decay should function). But it seems to me slightly broken that one can pick up a priest passive at level 8 that has literally zero benefit for at least the next few character levels of the game, and another priest passive (spirit of decay) that only appears to have an effect if you are a berathian priest (as otherwise there are 0 acid or decay-tagged spells in the first 10 character levels of the game).

Edited April 2, 20187 yr by thelee

Just put some proper elemental keywords onto some fitting abilities and the problem is solved. For example: why does Noxious Burst does corrode damage but has no Acid keyword?

 

Bleak Walker's FoD has the Fire, Acid keywords and gets +2 PEN (tested!): +1 from Scion and +1 from Spirit of Decay. While that's cool, it shows the pitfalls of this system (which overall is good. I like keywords...).

Edited April 2, 20187 yr by Boeroer

And Priest misses Secret of Rime too!

Subbing.

In the twitch Q&A that happened very recently, someone asked about this and JE Sawyer seemed to suggest that this is definitely a bug. The ability tagging is a little complicated, it sounds like in some cases (like the summoned weapon or warding seal) the ability itself shouldn't be tagged, but the sub-ability effects (the shock lash, or the actual triggered seal damage) should be internally tagged or something.

 

Anyway, I can definitely confirm that there's no "internal tagging" since I tested out these abilities just to make sure they weren't secretly working.

 

But I hope JE Sawyer's answer means that they're aware of this and fixing it, because again to reiterate it seems silly that you can pick up talents that have zero impact on your character.

Edited April 4, 20187 yr by thelee

The example he gave was Firebrand: the spell itself is tagged with Fire, but it just summons a sword that you use. The auto-attacks with this sword don't have any keywords so how can the game know that Scion of FLame applies to attacks with Firebrand?

The example he gave was Firebrand: the spell itself is tagged with Fire, but it just summons a sword that you use. The auto-attacks with this sword don't have any keywords so how can the game know that Scion of FLame applies to attacks with Firebrand?

 

I'd say fire damage should be tagged as fire

Sure, but with summoned weapons the ability itself doesn't do any damage but summons a tool. That seems to be more complicated than tagging Noxious Burst with Acid and so on.

The item should be tagged with the key word.

I don't know if the actual (auto) attack itself will be counted as fire even if the weapon is tagged. Don't know the code...

Well however - they could make a first step and tag the spells appropriately.

Sure, but with summoned weapons the ability itself doesn't do any damage but summons a tool. That seems to be more complicated than tagging Noxious Burst with Acid and so on.

 

The spell needs to display the fire tag so that when people choose it they know what they're getting; the summoned weapon needs to display the fire tag so the fire talent can interact with it.

I don't know if the actual (auto) attack itself will be counted as fire even if the weapon is tagged. Don't know the code...

Well however - they could make a first step and tag the spells appropriately.

 

I think it would be more confusing if they tagged the spells appropriately and they still didn't work properly. At least the way it is now, by and large things work literally. I.E., there are no electrical priest spells in the BB and--perhaps unsurprisingly--Heart of the Storm literally does nothing for a priest.

 

The way JE Sawyer was talking about it, it sounded like there's some mechanism to tag "secondary" effects from a spell with the keyword, current implementation (where that's not happening) is buggy. I hope this is the case, because one surprising thing about the old Heart of the Storm/Scion of Flame/etc from Pillars (and even from IWD/IWD2) is that they affected pretty much all of the matching damage sources, which opened up some interesting possibilities. Making it much more conditional would be a game design regression in my book.

Eh?

The item should be tagged with the key word.

 

"Dearest Obsidian, before release, please get all the tags in order so that they trigger or work the way they should.

  

 Yours faithfully,

 Indira."

QA have eyes on this

Related question --

 

 

What exactly are all these spell tags supposed to do, other than trip the various passive perks? Anything?

 

For example, if I cast Blast of Frost on someone weilding a Firebrand sword, should the sword go *poof* and vanish? What about on someone in a Flame Shield?

 

If there's a Chill Fog in an area and I cast a fireball on the same area, what happens? What about if a character with a Firebrand walks into that area?

 

Or is none of this anything that actually happens and the tags are cosmetic?

I've been wondering the same. I tried putting the question through for the latest QA but it wasn't answered.

I've been wondering the same. I tried putting the question through for the latest QA but it wasn't answered.

 

It could be groundwork for a to be implemented later feature, I suppose. Maybe it's just for scripting in encounters.