Guurzak's page

To the question: "Why should I make the move to PF2?", the answer is: You shouldn't. The game isn't even out yet.

That's an answer in search of a question. Nobody is asking "why should I switch my gaming to a playtest"; people who playtest know why they playtest.

The important question is "why should someone switch to the eventual released version of the game", in other words what gamer niche or market is PF2 being designed to attract? Because a) that strongly informs the kind of feedback we give, and b) it's not clear that the game we've seen so far successfully appeals to *any* market.

This is where I'm stuck too. What is PF2's value proposition to players who might otherwise be playing PF1, or 5e, or 4e, or 13th Age, or Dungeon World, or Blades in the Dark, or Gloomhaven? What kind of player is PF2 looking to attract who is underserved by the current library of games? What will PF2 do better than any of the other options?

I've played a lot of different kinds of games with a lot of different kinds of gamers, and after reading the rulebook, I can't think of a single person I've played with who would say "yes, I'd rather play this than my current favorite game." If Paizo could state a specific design goal that we're trying to make a game that does X better than any other game does or that appeals specifically to Y kind of players, that would help greatly in the community's ability to provide feedback on reaching that goal.

but where there are exceptions, it's not because they're either carebears or murderhobos.

Can I be a murderbear? If I can, then Tink is totally a carehobo.

That's part of it. The biggest part of it is creating a place where PvP-averse players can feel comfortable easing into PvP at their own pace.

PVP-averse players should definitely not be joining a settlement which starts wars over a smallholding placed for PVE purposes and which flatly refuses to commit to any agreements which might prevent such wars. You can't be the most aggressive power on the map and also claim to be protecters of the helpless and innocent.

A player belongs to a settlement which is officially at war with my settlement. He would ordinarily show as red to me. However, he has a high enough bluff skill to successfully conceal his settlement affiliation.

* Should he show as red or white?
* If he shows as white, should I be able to attack him without consequence if I gamble correctly that he's a valid war target?
* Or should character knowledge trump player knowledge and penalize me for attacking someone my character does not have the skill to recognize as an enemy?

I forget who said it, but the standout quote on the topic as far as I'm concerned is "you can't teabag a backpack."

I'm confident that much better tools will appear as the game and community mature. This will do as an MVP until something more advanced comes along.

As expected, the better tool has now appeared: Please use The Goblinary instead.

Stacking Effects: How to connect the DOTs

What are these "stacks" I keep hearing about?

In most games, and for many effects in PFO, buffs and debuffs have a fixed effect and a fixed duration: A DOT that ticks for 30/sec for 10 seconds, or an expose that reduces your armor by 10% for 3 rounds, for example. Hitting the same target with one of these twice in a row typically won't do anything except resetting the duration back to its maximum.

But PFO also has stacking effects, which allow you to build up the effect through multiple applications to both prolong its duration and increase its effectiveness. So you could have multiple players all stacking the same Exhausted effect on their target, which would take away more and more of his stamina as well as lasting longer with each application.

OK, so what are these stacking effects specifically?

There are 9 stacking debuffs, in 3 broad groups.

DOTs

There are 3 Damage Over Time effects. They all do damage as a percentage of the targets MAX hitpoints, and also debuff one of the three defenses. The fact that these are percentage based is significant: as your target's hitpoint pool grows, DOTs become more and more valuable. (Assuming that you're able to land them successfully!)

Afflicted: Damage over time for (stack/10)% per round, and Reflex defense debuff for (stack).
Bleeding: Damage over time for (stack/10)% per round, and Fortitude defense debuff for (stack).
Burning: Damage over time for (stack/10)% per round, and Will defense debuff for (stack).

Effect at 100: Damage = 10% of target's max hit points this round, and -100 to relevant defense.

Attack debuffs

These 3 debuffs all reduce Base Attack, plus other effects. Drained and Frightened have identical effects and magnitude. Reducing someone's attack rating does not mean they will "miss" in the sense of not connecting at all, but they will do much less damage, will not be able to land critical hits, and the non-damage effects of their attacks will be significantly weakened or altogether negated.

Oblivious: Debuffs Base Attack and Perception for (stack)
Effect at 100: -100 BA, -100 PER

Drained: Debuffs Base Attack and Base Defense for (stack/2)
Frightened: Debuffs Base Attack and Base Defense for (stack/2)
Effect at 100: -50 BA, -50 BD

Other effects

The last 3 effects don't fit as neatly into a box.

Slowed: Reduces movement speed by (stack/2)%. Debuffs Reflex defense by (stack)
Effect at 100: -50% movement speed; -100 Reflex

Exhausted: Reduces max stamina and stamina regen rate by (stack/2)
Effect at 100: -50 Stamina; -50% stamina regen

Razed: Reduces physical resistance by (stack/4)
Effect at 100: -25 PR

Do all of these stacking effects, um, stack?

Yeah, so that's a language issue. In most games, "stacking" means that 2 different effects can both take full effect on the target, for example a poison DOT and a fire DOT. That'll just get confusing here, so let's talk about "collisions" rather than "stacking" when asking whether different effects can both function.

There is a mechanism for 2 effects to collide: they both have to be affecting the same characteristic, and they both have to be on the same channel. Channel is an arbitrary setting for each effect that doesn't do anything except determine collision potential. So, if we have 2 effects on the same channel that do different things, there's no collision. For example, Afflicted and Exhausted are both on the "Weakness" channel, but they do different things so there's no collision. And, if you have two effects that both affect the same attribute but are on different channels, you still have no collision. Slowed and Afflicted both debuff Reflex, but Slowed is on the "Torment" channel so there's no collision; you get the combined effect of both reflex debuffs.

There's only one combination among these 9 stacking effects where you actually get a collision on the same channel AND the same effect: Oblivious and Drained. They're both on the "Weakness" channel and they both debuff Base Attack, so only the larger one of those two attack debuffs is going to be in effect at a time. (The Perception debuff from Oblivious and the Base Defense debuff from Drained don't collide with anything, so those portions of the effects both work fine.) Other than that one combination, all other stacking effects "stack" with each other.

When I explained this for PFU, there was apparently some confusion regarding whether it mattered that attacks target the same or different defenses. For purposes of determining effect collision, it doesn't make any difference at all whether the attacks all go against Reflex or are split among all three of Reflex, Will, and Fortitude: collisions are determined based on the attributes they debuff, not the defense that the attack targets.

One last note on this: The 3 DOTs are all on different channels. If you were somehow able to land Afflicted 100, Bleeding 100, and Burning 100 on the same target at the same time, he'd take 30% of his max health pool in damage in the first round.

What about recovery? How do I get rid of stacks on me?

Everyone has a base recovery of 10 stacks per round for each stacked effect on them. So if you have Afflicted 10, Bleeding 10, and Burning 10 all on you at once, all three of those DOTs are going to be cleared away within 6 seconds. If you have Afflicted 30, it's going to drop to 20, then 10, then clear. This is a big reason why it's better to build up a strong single stack rather than have lots of little ones.

In addition to base recovery, all characters have access to training the Recovery Bonus feat. This adds 1 point to your recovery rate for every rank trained, so if you have Recovery Bonus 5, your standard recovery rate for all stacked debuffs is 15 per round.

And then, every armor feat line provides a recovery bonus to 3 chosen debuffs, and that bonus is equal to the number of matched keywords between your equipped armor and your slotted armor feat. So if you're a mid T2 player with 6 keywords matched, that'll give you +6 to your recovery for whichever 3 debuffs that armor feat benefits.

Fighter armors all provide recovery bonuses vs Afflicted, Bleeding, and Exhausted. Rogue armors all provide recovery bonuses for Afflicted, Bleeding, and Slowed. So, if you're going up against vets with physical roles, you may want to take their improved recovery versus physical DOTs into account when making your attack choices. Burning might be a better choice, if that option is available to you.

Wizard armors all have recovery bonuses for Burning, Exhausted, and Slowed. So, the converse of the physical roles; afflicted and bleeding will both work just fine here.

Clerics and the crafter roles don't have any particular pattern to their recovery bonuses. It's probably worth noticing that Crusader is the only heavy armor feat with a recovery bonus versus Slowed, but other than that it's just going to be a memorization exercise for each individual armor line if you want to go to that trouble.

So, that's how recovery is calculated: Base of 10, an additional generic bonus based on your Recovery Bonus feat rank, and then bonuses for recovering from specific effects based the number of keywords match on your slotted armor feat. Aside from passive recovery over time based on that math, the only way to actively clear stacks of debuffs is the Shrug Off effect. This design is still in flux, so just be aware that it exists and is relevant, until we get some clarity on the final design.

Recovery is important. A DOT stack of 100 will do a total of 55% of your total health over 10 rounds, at the base recovery rate of 10. If you get your recovery vs that DOT up to 25, that same DOT is only doing a total of 25% of your health pool, and it's completely cleared after 4 rounds. None of the role promotion feats require you to train recovery bonus, but it should not be overlooked.

How do I use stacks effectively? Which ones are the best?

Because stacking an effect increases both its effect and its duration, higher stacks are much more powerful than little ones. The best stacks to apply are the ones you can stack up the highest- so coordinate with the people you're adventuring with and choose effects that lots of you can help pile up. A single stack of anything at 50 is much, much more useful than 5 different stacks of 10.

With that said, do remember the cap of 100 on stack size: you don't want multiple copies of Blinding Dust (oblivious 100) going off on the same target at once.

What about positive stacks?

There are 2 stacking buffs that have the same basic mechanics as the stacking debuffs: Freedom, and Mind Blank. These buffs are granted by, and improve your defense against, control effects. So whenever someone roots, slows, stuns, or interrupts you, he also gives you stacks of freedom or mind blank, which will help you resist the next attempt to do the same thing. So what we should expect to see is the the first stun attempt on a target will land reliably; the second stun less so, the the third even less, and so on. If your whole group is using stun effects on the same target, he's very rapidly going to build up enough Freedom that any further stuns are completely useless.

There are tokens and other effects which can grant Freedom or Mind Blank stacks. It's important to note that these are not Shrug Off effects- they won't do anything to help clear a root which has already taken effect. All they'll do is help prevent the next controls from landing for as long, or at all. If you're worried that someone is about to use a control on you, you'd need to use the Token of Freedom preemptively, rather than waiting for the control to land and then trying to shake it off.

Buff stacks decay more slowly than debuffs: 5 per round, or 4 per round if you have slotted the Bravery defensive feat. So once you've built up a lot of Freedom, your stun immunity will be pretty high for a while, but it will eventually decay to the point that someone can land another stun (and push your Freedom back up).

Where else can I learn about stacking?

This video has some great stacking demonstrations, and examples of a variety of different options.

I use the GW forums to communicate with devs or to have technical conversations.

The social community of the game is still here, and will continue to be until the GW forums have better tools.

Reading this thread, I've breathed several big sighs of relief that I'm taking a break from caring about the politics of this game. Apathy is much less stressful than whatever y'all are doing here.

Lawful you say? That may be, but it sounds like EBA is starting to wander dangerously close to Lawful-Evil.

The types of action you describe are pretty much spot on for a description of how the Hell Knights operate in the Pathfinder campaigns.

This is actually a fair point. Xeilias may have to update our branding language where we claim to be the largest evil organization in the game.

Still my favorite thread on this board of all time.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The EoX has established our borders, shown on the following map, for resource, escalation, and holding claims. We consider anyone harvesting resources, attacking escalations, or establishing holdings to be hostile, unless given prior permission from EoX leadership. Any non-hostile individuals are free to travel our land, trade, buy/sell at auction houses, as well as bank.

Territory map

You may contact any of the following people for more information about the above statement:

Kobold Cleaver - Agent Provocateur
Barack Obama - POTUS
Bill S. Preston - Esquire
Jessica Rabbit - Pattycake Expert
Andius - Bitter, Bitter Man
Neil deGrasse Tyson - Astrophysicist
Ryan Dancey - Goblinworks CEO

The above post is purely parodic and was made solely for purposes of amusing myself.

"arbitrary and capricious" is a reference to the game's human policy enforcers, not the coded behavior management systems. Nobody is going to try to justify game features which don't reliably do what they're supposed to do.

I hope that on the day a posse comes with a rope for Midnight, that whoever that stranger was fires an arrow that slices the rope, allowing me to escape.

Lyncher: This is a righteous hanging. You cannot think to thwart Iomedae's will.

Phyllain: Y'all see the orc back there with the really big longbow? I'm not saying you weren't easy to find, but it was kind of out of our way and he didn't wanna come in the first place. Orc's lookin' to kill some folk. So really it's his will y'all should worry about thwarting.

Phyllain: [to Midnight] Gotta say, your talent for alienatin' folks is near miraculous.

Midnight: Yes, I'm very proud.

Phyllain: Cut her down.

Lyncher: The girl is a coal-killer.

Phyllain: Yeah, but she's our coal-killer.

[Swaps to holy symbol and casts Divine Strength]

Phyllain: So cut her the hell down.

It's not just training, though. It's training, and banking, and crafting, and auction houses, and being able to meet the party where they're gathered in front of the bank, and having to chart your course around every settlement along your route instead of running through, and not being able to go AFK next to a Thronguard for protection...

Mechanically, no, it's not an insurmountable problem, but the quality of life impact is significant and effective.

If you assume that your enemy is exploiting by default, then anything they do will look exploitive. That's neither accurate nor productive.

Most of Xeilias's players are actively, deliberately, and legitimately maintaining high reputation. Those few players who have chosen to tank their reputations have suffered for it and complained about it to no end, and will almost certainly choose not to do so again. I haven't heard a single person say "OK, used up my rep, time to play my crafter for a week."

There are definitely bugs in the rep system, which have affected the evil PVPers more than anyone else. When we started taking rep hits in open tower windows, we announced it on the boards and also engaged in careful testing in an effort to replicate the issue; we were unable to do so. There have been a couple of isolated instances of independent griefing in newby towns where somebody would attempt to trick new players into flagging so that they could be attacked freely; those incidents were righteously stepped on and have not continued.

In short: these conversations are far more productive when people stick to describing their own experiences rather than reporting hearsay and inventions as fact.

There are mobs in Crowfall, but as in PFO they're not intended to be the primary content.

The team from Shadowbane watched server after server stagnate after one guild become unassailably dominant, and are deliberately designing Crowfall around the premise that if that's going to happen anyway you need to build the game to account for that tendency. So the reason there are multiple, temporary worlds is so that when one guild or faction wins their server they can blow it away and let everyone start over clean.

On a related note, my biggest concern with PFO from the very beginning has been a worry that the map is too small to prevent this from happening. It doesn't happen in Eve because the map is simply too big for a single alliance to effectively project force everywhere in the universe. That's not the case in PFO, and I don't see any reason why a single group couldn't win the map, nor why we shouldn't expect that it will indeed happen in exactly that way.

Grace, I meant to imply that EBA and Xeilias forces would not use each others' trainers, not that we would not use any trainers. And of course, if there were a huge bug that makes it so Golgotha has the only working X trainer on the server we'd certainly make him available to everyone for the duration of the emergency.

I'll try to lay out some guidelines that I'd ask you to seriously consider.

1. Don't send your warriors into enemy Settlements, because eventually you know those Settlements will have you marked KOS and you wouldn't be able to anyway. (Spies are fine, of course)

2. If someone reacts with obvious emotional distress when you kill them, leave them alone for at least 4 hours to give them a chance to cool down and to give their allies a chance to talk them through the distress and try to teach them how to handle it next time. Maybe even reach out to me and let me know who it was if it was in EBA territory.

With the caveat that I don't unilaterally set policy, I'd certainly be willing to propose to my leadership that we establish a mutual no-banking no-training no-auction posture with EBA. I don't think simply entering a hostile settlement hex should be off limits until we know more about how KOS will actually work once implemented, but I think we can be confident that using infrastructure services will be off the table.

While your second request looks reasonable at first glance, I don't see any way to draw a bright line which couldn't be abused: any such agreement could very easily turn into "throw a tantrum to get a free pass." With that said, we're all very aware of the negative outcomes of the BWG incident and would prefer to avoid repeats. I strongly encourage experienced PVP gamers in every faction to take the time to educate their novice allies on how to cultivate a security mindset and how to properly react to hostile activity.

Crafted camps never get banking. (Some?) player built permanent structures will have storage. We're also supposed to get wilderness caches at some point, which are man-portable temporary storage locations.

With that said, it's going to be hard for any wilderness cache type item to compete with a 1000XP ammo dump character.

Yeah, da last time Guurzak heerd sum wizurd blahin "Your primitive weapons are no match for my arcane might!" me figgerd owt dat wizurds doan got much arcayn mite wen der heds is bashd flat.

You have been, and will always be, our friend.

right now, nothing can be done about it other than to ask you to show some restraint, and we all know how well that's going to go over.

You might be surprised. Golgothan leadership does not want to see the world burn. If there's a serious argument that what we're doing is bad for the game I'm open to hearing it.

It is absolutely not our intention to drive anyone from the game or from their homes. That would be bad for the game. At the same time, it is not our intention to coddle anyone's misconceptions about the nature or price of safety in the River Kingdoms; that would be equally bad for the game, because they'd just be driven away anyway when the Goons or the Russians or whoever else shows up.

Yes, the gameworld will have more training wheels in the future- new characters will be safer for longer- but the game will never be "safe", and people who are playing under the illusion that safety is the default state are going to learn otherwise sooner or later. I don't think I'm going to be convinced that doing it sooner is bad for the game, but like I said I'd absolutely be willing to have that conversation.

Gatherers are not in this state. They are by nature not as well equipped to handle hostile actions, whether NPC or PC, and so should either accept the risk or go with friends/allies.

You can be a productive gatherer with one week of XP spent. At this point players who started day 1 have 8 weeks of XP. If you chose not to spend any of the other 7 weeks of XP to get yourself combat-ready that's on you.

I disagree on allied support; I think that would trivialize the support model by removing all the hard decisions from the equation. If the town next to you has trainers for everything that you don't train, there's no need for either of you to dedicate small plots to support structures instead of crafting facilities.

I don't think of secondary companies as "allies" since secondary companies cannot have any settlement affiliation. If you're a member of a settlement-agnostic group that supports some of your personal training, that's great for you but doesn't directly play into settlement dynamics as such.

Guurzak jus want ta blah dat me cant wayt fer owtposts so's me kin start bein rayder insted of a bandut. Banduttin aynt rilly Guurzaks ting but its wot us got rite now.

Guurzak bettin deres plenny udders dat feels da saym.

Corse deres plenny dat lubs bandittin too.

I find it hilarious that anybody thought to question Cheatle's statement *chuckles*

There are not one but two important questions to be asked when someone makes a statement of fact: 1) is it true, and 2) how can it be proven. An assertion which happens to be true but is not proven through verifiable public data should be worded quite differently from a conclusion drawn from generally-accessible and trusted information.

"For the record, Michelle is the wealthiest person on the server" implies a level of verified certainty which "TEO believes Michelle to be the wealthiest person on the server" does not. The former suggestion leads immediately to questions of "how do you know", especially when the only plausible answer to that question is "the devs are preferentially giving TEO members strategically valuable information not available to the general playerbase."

If Cheatle meant to present his position as a statement of reasonable belief rather than verified certainty, he worded his post poorly. The words he chose strongly imply the possession of data he should not have.

For being so roleplay heavy, totally didn't use any of my character names, or the actual character in charge of Brighthaven.

For the record, Michelle Wedgewood is the leader of Brighthaven, she is also the wealthiest person on the server, as well as a connoisuer of fine clothes.

This is very clearly not an in-character post. If he had said "wealthiest person in the Echo Woods" there might be an argument that the tone changed between paragraphs from OOC to an in-character Unreliable Narrator, but the claim as stated cannot reasonably be interpreted as anything other than an assertion of game-mechanic fact.

Gushers will change that dynamic.

Ultimately, there's no such thing as a "Crafting/Auction" settlement, as we understand it now, in the post-Catastrophe world. Every settlement will be able to choose to dedicate one of their 3 large plots to an auction house. Most probably will not. Those who do, however, will almost certainly have some combat training buildings as well, rather than filling their whole building plan up with craft huts.

My only fear is that the popular kids will just decide who gets to own what and everything will remain as static and conflict free as they are now.

How can devs thwart players who don't want to fight?

This is only a concern as long as it's possible to get everything you need without depriving someone else of resources they need. If there is meaningful scarcity there will inevitably be conflict.

Right now, there is no meaningful scarcity in the game; it's possible for everyone to have all the resources they can use, so there's nothing to fight over. It'll be interesting to see if tomorrow's patch changes that.

In the long term, I think the plan is that it should be challenging to supply your settlement's bulk resource needs from your own controlled outposts, so outpost raiding for bulks will become an important aspect of economic activity. And that'll lead to frayed tempers and general grumpiness, then fullscale war.

Yer shakin WOT now?

Doan touch dat. Eber.

I wrote this back in June:

Realistically, landed companies should not have to, and are not going to, deploy live defensive troops to their holding to just sit there guarding for the full duration of the PVP window. People want to play the game, not sit around idle. What that means is that the holding needs to have sufficient defenses to resist capture for several minutes while the defenders scramble to stop what they're doing (nearby, of course!) and go join the fight.

A mechanic like DAoC's where an attacker has to spend 10+ minutes battering a gate or two and defeating some NPC guards and a tower lord in order to capture the keep, and where the holding's owners are notified as soon as aggressive contact is made, means that property capture is likely to involve pitched battles and "meaningful human interaction". In contrast, a mechanic where a keep can be captured silently and quickly with no combat mechanic would minimize human interaction and lead either to a dynamic where people sit around bored not having fun to defend their towers, or give that up as a chump's game and just go tag into each other's holdings without ever reliably finding a fight.

I hope we can take this as a lesson learned from WoT and build the conflict systems for Holdings and Outposts with a little more... conflict.

"Holding" wins!

Blog: Territorial Conflict Roadmap

Guurzak has been flagged Heinous for necromancy.

Don't forget that combat role template towns also have crafting facilities. Between any two towns that cover all 4 combat roles you'll also have training for every (with a few tiny exceptions) craft skill.

The real value of crafting towns is their superior queue speed and their auction houses, not any unique training capabilities.

Note that this thread is for questions you woulds like to see answered in developer blogs and videos, not for any random question having anything to do with PFO.

If you have questions about your account, contact customer service.

If you have questions about game details, post them in a different thread.

If you think you have a good topic for a dev to spend a half hour explaining, you could in theory post it here- except that you'd probably get a better response posting that request on the goblinworks forums.

So really, there's not much reason to post anything at all here anymore.

Guurzak just want to blah dat me disavow enny nowlidge or responsabilutty fer da akshunz ub dis crayzee midjit.

Put me in the camp of "not inviting people until the game is at a state of development where they'd be likely to stay."

Also put me in the camp of "telling people they won't be missed doesn't help build numbers".

Or, find a friend to come to your location and transfer all your stuff to him except a newby weapon, and then kill yourself with that.

On a related note, Golgothans who perform idiotic maneuvers worthy of great shame may be ordered to come before an assembly of their peers and club themselves to death as punishment.

Maybe change (some of?) the damage bonus to a snare to let new players fill the tackler role.

I think this may be a "growing pains" problem that fades to irrelevance as the server population ages and grows.

Demand for T1 finished goods will drop sharply as the majority of the server grows into T2.

To the extent that T1 materials are in demand for T2 and T3 production, that'll give new players a good revenue stream to get their careers started.

So effectively four archers shooting at you is the same as one in terms of timing the interrupts. However using interrupt attacks yourself is only useful against a single archer.

My intuition raises no objections to the idea of a 4 on 1 archer battle being awkward for the 1.

I ship it.

I'm perfectly happy to sacrifice any of the hexes near Forgeholm for this exercise.

High-value caravans should indeed be some of most adrenal content outside of settlement-burning sieges.

I think there should be the possibility that some settlement way up North can take War to a settlement way in the South.

And that's the exact opposite of what I think. If everyone on the map can effectively make war with anyone else on the map, then our political dynamic will inevitably collapse into just 2 factions. That's boring and not fun.

Previous discussion here.

You think 70 minutes end to end is "a bit slow"? That's way too fast for my taste. Political and social microclimates will never separate if everyone on the map is effectively neighbors.

Sometimes it's more "Those FOOLS! I'll show them.... I'll show them all."

But that always ends up with heroes wrecking your skull shaped mountain. And those things are expensive, too.

a wizard who runs low on casting ability (memorized spells/charges) and pulls out his trusty dagger is continuing a long and distinguished tradition.

That wizard taking a nice restful nap in a pool of his own blood is part of the same long and distinguished tradition.