<- Is surprised he wasn't the Leper!
GasBandit
Staff member
Also, I've figured out what the Man At Arms is good for. When he guards another party member, the ability also buffs his own Prot % by a very non-trivial amount (40% at current)... and it stacks. So as long as he keeps using his guarding ability every turn, within 3 turns he effectively makes half the party completely immune to physical damage. That's really really useful in boss fights.
Your previous patronage allowed them to expand the bar to an entire three stools. But now it seems they will all go to waste![DOUBLEPOST=1493600575,1493600529][/DOUBLEPOST]
You might have been, had one shown up on the stagecoach, and I not been in such dire straits for new tanks
I kinda want to be included now...
GasBandit
Staff member
You're on the list. And at this rate of attrition, you'll more than likely get your chance...
GasBandit
Staff member
Oh, fine, I'll throw you into the jaws of mortal peril as well.[DOUBLEPOST=1493653026,1493652818][/DOUBLEPOST]
Turns out the Leper is a surprisingly awesome front line tank/damage class. He gets good self heals and self buffs (it appears that his affliction has turned him to religious zealotry, you see) and does decent damage... but only to the first two ranks of the enemy formation.
Also, as with all religious characters, he refuses to party with RavenPoe the abomination. I guess the faithful and the were-satanicgoatdemonmonsters just can't get along.
Oh huzzah! I'm sure I'll die faster than Terrik, but, you know.
fade
Staff member
I know, eh? He even included @Neon Ninja before us.
Oh well, now that the original Grue is dead, maybe I'll get my shot.
GasBandit
Staff member
GasBandit
Staff member
Null and PatrThom have actually turned into sleeper tankkillers. When a plague doctor first starts out, he's kind of a crappy healer with a decent offensive buff, some stuns and some afterthought blight-based damage.
But holy shit, get a few levels on the doc, and suddenly that blight damage is doing 5 per tick (when normally I would expect 2-3 for a comparative level bleed dot) and it stacks... high Prot% enemies just fucking melt away. Plus, both Null and Pat have trinkets that boost their chances at applying blight to well over 100%, so even enemies that are supposed to be resistant to blight are catching it like... well, like the plague.
Also, as the challenge increases, the Doc's shitty heal is becoming more and more important because it also cures both blight and bleeding simultaneously. Now that enemies are applying bleed effects that say ridiculous things like "8 dmg x 3 rounds) that crappy 3 point heal that also cures bleed is now a de facto 27 point fucking heal if you get it in early.
But holy shit, get a few levels on the doc, and suddenly that blight damage is doing 5 per tick (when normally I would expect 2-3 for a comparative level bleed dot) and it stacks... high Prot% enemies just fucking melt away. Plus, both Null and Pat have trinkets that boost their chances at applying blight to well over 100%, so even enemies that are supposed to be resistant to blight are catching it like... well, like the plague.
Also, as the challenge increases, the Doc's shitty heal is becoming more and more important because it also cures both blight and bleeding simultaneously. Now that enemies are applying bleed effects that say ridiculous things like "8 dmg x 3 rounds) that crappy 3 point heal that also cures bleed is now a de facto 27 point fucking heal if you get it in early.
GasBandit
Staff member
The highwayman ThatNickGuy joins the motley assortment.
Hrm, THIS can't be right:
Charon, Celt Z, Pez and Dei went after the final Hag boss in the Weald, but got their asses handed to them in the final battle, and barely escaped with their lives. Apparently drinking off the stress of that debacle was the party to end all parties. At least, for Dei.
Hrm, THIS can't be right:
Charon, Celt Z, Pez and Dei went after the final Hag boss in the Weald, but got their asses handed to them in the final battle, and barely escaped with their lives. Apparently drinking off the stress of that debacle was the party to end all parties. At least, for Dei.
New Subnautica update, therefore new playthrough.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm not really a fan of the changes brought by this update. The biggest change for this update is how the Cyclops submarine works. The Cyclops is the biggest sub you can build in the game, and basically works as a mobile base, in that you can build stuff in it for storage space, fabrication, growing food, etc. Previously it was invulnerable to everything except being crushed by water pressure when you went too deep. Now it'll be attacked by predators (even small ones like bonesharks) all of which will do damage to the sub. Take too much damage and fires start breaking out, which you'll need to extinguish by running around with a handheld fire extinguisher. Take further damage after that and you'll have to abandon ship as your hard-won sub sinks to the bottom of the seafloor.
An invincible submarine is pretty unbalanced, so I can understand allowing the Cyclops to take damage. The current implementation is rather wonky though. The Cyclops has absolutely no way to fight back against enemies, it can only run away while deploying decoys to draw their attention. It can defend itself with a 15-second shield, and you can equip the Cyclops with a fire suppression system, but on the whole the Cyclops has been hugely nerfed, and using it feels like a chore.
However, and I'm not sure if this is just my personal perception or if this has been an actual change, I feel like the aggressiveness of enemies has been ramped up significantly when you're in your PRAWN exosuit. I keep getting killed by Warpers warping me out of my PRAWN and clawing me to bits. The Sea Dragon Leviathan also tends to like to grab my PRAWN and do super effective damage to it (and I can't exactly repair the PRAWN afterwards because there's a Sea Dragon Leviathan chewing on it). I feel like this is the devs trying to force players to use the new Cyclops by making the player's life a living hell in the PRAWN.
Some other minor changes are not great either. The UI has been changed so that you can no longer see the exact numerical percentages for your health, hunger, and thirst. More realistic, perhaps, but definitely less convenient. A lot of resources have new models and images in your inventory, except for some reason the devs have decided to turn them all into slightly different variations of grey metallic blobs. This makes it hard to visually distinguish them in your inventory, unless you mouse over them or memorize their shapes. Spotting them in the gameworld is also harder now, because they're all grey metallic blobs.
Admittedly there are some good changes. New areas have been added, and the recipes for some objects have been changed so silver is no longer the bottleneck it used to be (copper is actually my biggest bottleneck now). But on the whole it feels like some of these changes have made exploration rather less fun.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm not really a fan of the changes brought by this update. The biggest change for this update is how the Cyclops submarine works. The Cyclops is the biggest sub you can build in the game, and basically works as a mobile base, in that you can build stuff in it for storage space, fabrication, growing food, etc. Previously it was invulnerable to everything except being crushed by water pressure when you went too deep. Now it'll be attacked by predators (even small ones like bonesharks) all of which will do damage to the sub. Take too much damage and fires start breaking out, which you'll need to extinguish by running around with a handheld fire extinguisher. Take further damage after that and you'll have to abandon ship as your hard-won sub sinks to the bottom of the seafloor.
An invincible submarine is pretty unbalanced, so I can understand allowing the Cyclops to take damage. The current implementation is rather wonky though. The Cyclops has absolutely no way to fight back against enemies, it can only run away while deploying decoys to draw their attention. It can defend itself with a 15-second shield, and you can equip the Cyclops with a fire suppression system, but on the whole the Cyclops has been hugely nerfed, and using it feels like a chore.
However, and I'm not sure if this is just my personal perception or if this has been an actual change, I feel like the aggressiveness of enemies has been ramped up significantly when you're in your PRAWN exosuit. I keep getting killed by Warpers warping me out of my PRAWN and clawing me to bits. The Sea Dragon Leviathan also tends to like to grab my PRAWN and do super effective damage to it (and I can't exactly repair the PRAWN afterwards because there's a Sea Dragon Leviathan chewing on it). I feel like this is the devs trying to force players to use the new Cyclops by making the player's life a living hell in the PRAWN.
Some other minor changes are not great either. The UI has been changed so that you can no longer see the exact numerical percentages for your health, hunger, and thirst. More realistic, perhaps, but definitely less convenient. A lot of resources have new models and images in your inventory, except for some reason the devs have decided to turn them all into slightly different variations of grey metallic blobs. This makes it hard to visually distinguish them in your inventory, unless you mouse over them or memorize their shapes. Spotting them in the gameworld is also harder now, because they're all grey metallic blobs.
Admittedly there are some good changes. New areas have been added, and the recipes for some objects have been changed so silver is no longer the bottleneck it used to be (copper is actually my biggest bottleneck now). But on the whole it feels like some of these changes have made exploration rather less fun.
GasBandit
Staff member
Ugh, that sucks. Sounds to me like the next meta will be "build a base in every biome." I was already unhappy with what I'd read about the Cyclops nerf, but the PRAWN suit nerf added on top is definitely enough to keep me away from this game until at least the next patch.
Not that they care, they got my money already.
GasBandit
Staff member
Darkest Dungeon (TLDR just mechanics talk) -
Last night I noticed that the monsters on the aforementioned Hag-trip were dodging a ridiculous amount. On inspecting their stats later, I see now that I've been fundamentally mistaken as to how some of the core mechanics of the game work.
Apparently, Dodge is not a D20 roll with modifiers at all. The calculation for every attack's chance to hit is simply (AttackersAccuracy - TargetsDodge). In the beginning of the game, monsters had low accuracy and low dodge, and the unupgraded skills of new party members usually start out at around 90... so in the beginning, monsters dodging attacks is something that happens rather infrequently.
However, at level 5, there are quite a number of monsters that have dodge ratings of 50 or even 70. To compare, I thought my party members with 20 dodge were reliable dodgers and 30 dodge were godly dodgers. However, that's another notion I'm being disabused of, as I had slightly suspected would happen as per my earlier post on the matter. The monsters are getting exponentially tougher while the protagonists are gaining power much more linearly. In fact, just about every offensive skill upgrade is really a glorified boost of 5 accuracy per upgrade - as in, a level 0 hero might have 90 accuracy on a given skill, and by the time they're a fully upgraded level 6 character, that skill will be 110-115 accuracy.
What this means is that my effective hit rate has dropped drastically. This game's RNG is absolutely unkind, to put it lightly (I suspect they took the RNG code from Dwarf Fortress, frankly ) So even an effective 40% chance to hit really means "You most likely are going to miss every attack." Now I understand why every teensy 5 point boost to accuracy is worth thousands of gold.
And that's not the only thing I got wrong. Prot % is not using the enemy's attack as a starting point, or that is to say, 15% prot doesn't reduce any given enemy attack by 15%.... but rather, it reduces any direct damage received by that percentage of your character's max HP. So, a character with 50 max HP and 15% prot would reduce all incoming direct damage by 7 points. This explains why it seemed so crappy in the early game - at low levels, heroes might only have 20 or 30 max hp, so the effect of prot is a lot less noticeable.
So, as I suspected might be the case, it looks like dodge is becoming a lot less reliable in the end game, but prot is becoming damn near essential. This means that having a Man-at-arms in the party (a class I previously considered mediocre) is now damn near essential for the endgame, because his guard-a-friend ability buffs his own prot by 40% and stacks. That is a huge amount of potential damage mitigation. Especially in a game where the best single-target heal from the best healing class does a whopping 8-10 hp, and critters are now routinely hitting for 20-30.
Last night I noticed that the monsters on the aforementioned Hag-trip were dodging a ridiculous amount. On inspecting their stats later, I see now that I've been fundamentally mistaken as to how some of the core mechanics of the game work.
Apparently, Dodge is not a D20 roll with modifiers at all. The calculation for every attack's chance to hit is simply (AttackersAccuracy - TargetsDodge). In the beginning of the game, monsters had low accuracy and low dodge, and the unupgraded skills of new party members usually start out at around 90... so in the beginning, monsters dodging attacks is something that happens rather infrequently.
However, at level 5, there are quite a number of monsters that have dodge ratings of 50 or even 70. To compare, I thought my party members with 20 dodge were reliable dodgers and 30 dodge were godly dodgers. However, that's another notion I'm being disabused of, as I had slightly suspected would happen as per my earlier post on the matter. The monsters are getting exponentially tougher while the protagonists are gaining power much more linearly. In fact, just about every offensive skill upgrade is really a glorified boost of 5 accuracy per upgrade - as in, a level 0 hero might have 90 accuracy on a given skill, and by the time they're a fully upgraded level 6 character, that skill will be 110-115 accuracy.
What this means is that my effective hit rate has dropped drastically. This game's RNG is absolutely unkind, to put it lightly (I suspect they took the RNG code from Dwarf Fortress, frankly
) So even an effective 40% chance to hit really means "You most likely are going to miss every attack." Now I understand why every teensy 5 point boost to accuracy is worth thousands of gold.And that's not the only thing I got wrong. Prot % is not using the enemy's attack as a starting point, or that is to say, 15% prot doesn't reduce any given enemy attack by 15%.... but rather, it reduces any direct damage received by that percentage of your character's max HP. So, a character with 50 max HP and 15% prot would reduce all incoming direct damage by 7 points. This explains why it seemed so crappy in the early game - at low levels, heroes might only have 20 or 30 max hp, so the effect of prot is a lot less noticeable.
So, as I suspected might be the case, it looks like dodge is becoming a lot less reliable in the end game, but prot is becoming damn near essential. This means that having a Man-at-arms in the party (a class I previously considered mediocre) is now damn near essential for the endgame, because his guard-a-friend ability buffs his own prot by 40% and stacks. That is a huge amount of potential damage mitigation. Especially in a game where the best single-target heal from the best healing class does a whopping 8-10 hp, and critters are now routinely hitting for 20-30.
GasBandit
Staff member
Hrm. That would be an unacceptable solution to me, and if it were the only way to beat the game, I'd lose interest. I hope it isn't so.
And, it might not be, really. That ill-fated hag mission was done before I had the last upgrade in the guild, so everybody didn't have their final accuracy upgrade, and I STILL managed to get all the way to the hag despite the rampant misses.
I think what I'll have to do is fully upgrade the nomad shop, and start cashing out all my old +dodge and +dmg trinkets and buying up +accuracy trinkets.
Miles yet to go before I actually enter the manor, in any case. I'm wanting to kill all the Weald, Ruins, Warrens and Cove bosses first. And get as many fully decked out level 6s as I can.
GasBandit
Staff member
I did! Got access to sweet grade 5 engine mods, but menus of numbers don't make for great screen shots
... So like KOTOR?