Hey, everyone. I figured I should make an effortpost about Deadfire’s Backer Beta changes involving Might > Strength and Resolve. I want to explain the motivation for the changes as well as known shortcomings and possible deviations in the future.

In my tweet, I briefly stated the motivation for making the Might > Strength / Resolve shift, which was that Resolve is unappealing for caster classes. It was a little unappealing in Pillars 1 and even less appealing in Deadfire because Concentration in Deadfire is a binary thing that’s not associated with Resolve. Either you have Concentration or you don’t. While Concentration is important for casters, because it’s disassociated from Resolve, Resolve drops in importance for those classes. There are ways we could address that, but I’ll get to that later.

Here are things that are not motivations for the shift: to dumb the game down (?), to make the game console friendly (??), to make ciphers bad because I hate ciphers and hate you and want the worst things in life to happen to only you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

Going into this, I knew there were shortcomings. It does mean that for priests and wizards that abstain from weapon-based attacks (i.e. most of them), they can more safely dump Might. In that sense, it doesn’t mean they have more dump stats (since they were dumping Resolve) but it shifts what they dump unless they’re making a weapon-based priest or gish wizard. It also has the side effect of stretching points a little thin for druids (who need Strength for their spiritshift forms) and arguably fighters and/or paladins.

Even knowing those shortcomings, I was surprised at how many people disliked the change, including the renaming of Might to Strength. There seems to be a significant number of people across a variety of communities who really don’t like the shift for a variety of reasons.

We’re going to include this change in the next Backer Beta update, but I’m still working on/thinking through alternative ways to solve the problem.

Of the things that have been discussed, the one I think is most promising involves making Concentration better overall and allowing it to build up over the course of combat at a rate defined by the character’s Resolve.

Currently, Concentration simply acts as a shield against Interrupt. If a character is casting a long cast spell and gets hit with an Interrupt, the cast is canceled and the corresponding resource is lost. If the character has Concentration, the Interrupt’s only effect is to remove Concentration, meaning the ability can only be interrupted by two Interrupts in succession – one to remove Concentration and one to actually Interrupt.

For characters who don’t have long casts (most martial characters), Concentration is of minimal value. While it will stop a knockdown or similar attack from temporarily taking a character out of a fight, it’s not as important. If Concentration had additional inherent effects – increasing effective Power Level, increasing Penetration, etc. – it could be more valuable to characters (and enemies) overall.

If we can get Concentration to a place of widespread value (with an increased emphasis on casters), tying it to Resolve again may be a better solution, but there’s still a lot of thinking and discussion that needs to go into that.

Until then, we appreciate all of the feedback and look forward to seeing how your builds and playstyles change in the next Backer Beta update. Thanks.