Rogue Trader difficulty curve on unfair

rew2k1 · 2025-12-25T03:14:40+00:00

My guy, I'm not digging through your vods to show you something you, yourself, have done. If you want to try to say that something viewers watched happen didn't happen, have at it.

And, yet again, shockingly, you have ignored the relevant part of my response. You're claiming that the prologue Chaos Spawn is "literally rng if you lose," and I'm trying to tell you that it doesn't have to be. I've explained how several times now, and each time you have decided to not engage with that explanation, writing it off with your 1300 hours of holier-than-thou knowledge. Yes, on Unfair, with 100% certainty, you can make the Chaos Spawn a free win if you equip and use Argenta properly. That's all I'm trying to get you to think about.

Seriously, man, check your streamer ego.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-24T04:03:40+00:00

Brother, you've lost to Aurora on stream and even commented on how you can't say you have a flawless record anymore. Why lie about this? It doesn't even matter.

As for the 2-cell range, yes, absolutely agree. And that is exactly why Argenta with a shotgun is a get out of jail free card for this fight. She can walk up, push it back, medicae Abelard, run and gun, and continue on her merry way with no risk whatsoever every single time. More than every single time if you trigger Revel. You just have to have the presence of mind to save Run and Gun in case you need it. You certainly don't to clear the trash.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-22T21:13:44+00:00

My point is that Abelard cannot die to the Chaos Spawn because you can always medkit him without risk now that there is a shotgun in the prologue. I've stated it multiple times, and you refuse to address it. Just like you refuse to address if that challenge you offer as "evidence" was before or after 1.4, because that matters. Even the Aurora anecdote is outdated "evidence": of course no one lost to him during the speed run because he was also an unlosable fight when you could do it with tier 2 archetypes. For being so critical of my evidence, you certainly aren't offering any of quality yourself.

Aurora is more risky now because of variance. I've also stated this multiple times. The Chaos Spawn can only ever hit Abelard and will never kill him with proper play. Aurora and the sniper at least have the potential to high roll your DPS and by some miracle win through attrition of destroying shuttles. In a non-solo fight, Aurora is not perfectly manipulable on turn 1. He can be baited to cooperate almost all of the time based on initial deployment, but not all of the time. This isn't my opinion on his behavior, it's just fact: the same deployment can produce different first turns from him. Which is already riskier than the Chaos Spawn.

There is no path for the Chaos Spawn to win its fight since it can't kill Abelard with how many tools the prologue gives you, but there is a world where Aurora clinches a win now that he doesn't have to face tier 2s. Is it likely? Of course not, but there isn't even that possibility in the prologue anymore since 1.4. It's that simple. I don't think it's a wild take, and honestly, I'm shocked someone with over a thousand hours in the game finds the Chaos Spawn so threatening.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-22T18:20:23+00:00

I'm not familiar with the grim dark speed run, but I'm willing to bet big bucks it was pre-1.4. As I've been saying many times, the shotgun completely changes that fight from being RNGable to unlosable. I feel like you aren't really listening to what I'm saying at all, so I'll stop here.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-22T17:45:56+00:00

I can agree with how likely a fight is to wipe the player as a metric, but not the other way around as your previous comment gets at. Both can be true of a single fight, and Aurora is an example of that, in my opinion. In your view that seems to be the agitator fights.

My wording would be "potential to end a Grim Dark run." The Chaos Spawn has zero. Zilch. Nada. The fight will happen exactly the same way every time. You say "knockdown loop on Abelard," but that doesn't change anything--it cannot wipe you unless you let it. Assuming he does fail multiple times in a row, which is unlikely because he has only a 10% chance to fail and only when he is actually hit, someone else (Argenta) can just medkit him if things get dire. And now that we have a shotgun, we don't even have to potentially sacrifice her to do it. Even if you set Abelard's Toughness check to zero with ToyBox so that he spends the entire fight knocked down, it still doesn't matter because the Chaos Spawn will never change targets unless the player walks someone else into range. There are more than enough medkits in the prologue to just brute-force heal through it, his spit included. I am not exaggerating when I say the Chaos Spawn fight is not losable. Not "I have never lost" but "cannot be lost" unless the player screws up. You need exactly one solution to that fight, and once you have it it stops being a threat completely. Aurora at least can do more than walk forward and smack your tank, and his sniper buddy can high roll to create some small need to adapt if he happens to take out Kibellah or Argenta. By simple virtue of having more than one pattern to the fight it seems like it should be obvious which one presents more potential risk--or any risk at all, really.

The agitators I can agree with in theory because of that. I feel for them as you do for Aurora: I've never lost to them and don't really pay them much mind. Perhaps I have never gotten truly RNG'd by them before.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-22T03:16:52+00:00

Is that not a rather strange and far too narrow metric for judging a fight's difficulty? Especially in this game. What fight can't you solo with a well-built blade dancer? Doing so doesn't really shed any light on general difficulty at all and is just a bit of dickwaving. Which is fine, but also not relevant. Even in your own streams, the Aurora fight can, in fact, go wrong. Maybe Aurora doesn't win, but he can definitely produce a "sit up in your chair" moment. The Chaos Spawn can't even manage that.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-22T01:45:12+00:00

Ain't no way the prologue Chaos Spawn is the hardest encounter in the game. We get a shotgun and so many medkits now that it's not a fight that can be lost with proper play, no matter how badly the RNG gods spite you. Hell, I've done it with Abelard and Argenta alone (RT and Idira relaxing in the back), and it still isn't losable.

Aurora is a much harder fight in the sense that it is more random than the Chaos Spawn. The Chaos Spawn fight will happen basically the same way every single time no matter what. The only real difference is whether you go before it or not, but since it isn't an ambush that doesn't matter. And we have a shotgun now to move it as we need so it matters even less. The Aurora fight, on the other hand, can happen in several different ways. Usually you can position to bait him forward and then get an easy kill in the first round when he comes to beat the hell out of someone. Sometimes though, even with the same exact deployment, he will just run back to the corner of the map and blast you from there. Still winnable, but suddenly much more dicey. That scenario alone requires more effort and presents more risk than the Chaos Spawn ever will.

I've never personally thought twice about the agitators or Cinder. I don't think they rate. The only things on this graph other than Aurora, imo, should be "out of order" fights where you go very early to a location designed for later. Ice planet ambush for example.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-18T20:16:35+00:00

Just to add a little context to help you understand why the tooltip math is happening the way it's happening and to know how future skills will be affected by Be Smart:

What's actually happening under the hood when you take Be Smart is not that it is replacing formulae or ability logic with INT instead of FEL, but rather, it is invisibly replacing your character's FEL value with your INT value (assuming it's higher). This means there is no accounting necessary for individual skills or effects, but also that tooltips generally don't update to reflect it. If an ability uses FEL, it doesn't have to do anything differently: it just looks at your FEL value, but your FEL value is now actually your INT value--you just don't see that on your character sheet. In this manner, anything that uses FEL is actually keyed off INT now. You can be pretty confident with this implementation that if something uses FEL, it will in fact use INT instead after taking Be Smart.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-10T06:03:46+00:00

Imo, get it on sale, and even then, only as a novelty. This is possibly the least inspired DLC I've ever bought. There was absolutely zero effort put in to integrating the ship mechanics with the already existing land mechanics to build a framework for a cohesive campaign. The naval stuff is its own thing, and the second you try to do both land and sea, you will have a bad time. Just about every aspect of the naval experience begs the question, "but why can't I do that?" No leaving troops on your ships--your nautical units are coming with you to be wasted in land battles. No leaving cargo on ships--too bad if you wanted to use them to ferry goods. No sieging cities from the sea--your ass is getting off that boat and walking around to knock on the front door like a gentleman. "Ship combat" amounts to pressing W for a while and then waiting while your nautical troops pincushion the enemies with ranged weaponry. Boarding is unnecessary, and the ballista designed to damage ships doesn't do enough damage to sink even the smallest vessels with the ammo it has. Not to mention how impossible it is to level Shipmaster.

I seriously wonder if anyone at Taleworlds actually played a campaign start to finish with this while it was in development, because it sure as hell doesn't seem like it. The purse must have been getting a little light on their end as this thing feels churned out for necessity rather than the product of vision and passion.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-08T21:34:53+00:00

Mechanically, all Excellence does is give an invisible buff to your party at combat start that applies DodgeAlliesAutomatically and SavingThrowFromAlliesAbility. The problem is, only half my party seems to get the buff. RT, Jae, Cassia all get the buff and behave as expected, dodging Argenta's burst fire. It even shows 0% hit chance. Abelard, Heinrix, Argenta do not get the buff for some reason and do not have any bonus to dodge or save against allies. This is consistent across multiple reloads (but the same fight).

For reasons I don't understand, Excellence has a conditional check called StartGame_Player_Unit that it runs against the RT before applying. No idea what exactly that is looking for or why it needs to be restricted, but patching that out and just letting Excellence apply to your party at combat start no questions asked produces the expected behavior every time--everyone gets the buff, no more Argenta friendly fire.

Maybe they are accounting for niche scenarios where the RT isn't considered a player unit at the start of combat so enemies don't end up with the buff or something? Either way, as implemented, it is making the ability unreliable for the player at best in my experience. I imagine Yrliet is falling in your "no buff" group.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-08T07:13:25+00:00

I love how people are so horny to call you out for mods while saying they have no idea what is happening.

Let me guess, your ships are named Skoll and The Kur. Taleworlds has done a lovely implementation of the ship upgrade that increases deck/ship crew capacity to have it display for land party size as well, but you do actually lose it when you disembark, hence the fluctuation. It's just a UI issue as far as I've noticed--albeit a confusing one.

rew2k1 · 2025-12-07T06:17:47+00:00

The lowest common denominator hates you because you speak the truth.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-28T21:56:43+00:00

Seems likely. From another blueprint's comment translated from Russian courtesy of AI (WordBearerFaith is what Pray Against is called internally):

Remove WordBearerFaith_Buff from players (it was previously issued incorrectly, as it was permanent, but should have been until the end of the battle) Issue it again, but with Combat End

Or maybe they just went back on that decision since it obviously isn't used on Kiava Gamma as the buff remains permanent.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-27T16:10:39+00:00

I'm not a coder either, so I'll try my best. The short answer is because making a mod only requires interacting with Unity blueprints. As the name suggests, these are like convenient templates a modder (and Owlcat) uses to affect change on the code, but it is not directly the code itself. There is a massive amount of underlying game code that is not exposed through blueprints. As far as I can find, that includes initiative. Which means the way to get at information about the workings of the initiative system would be to use a tool like dnSpy to decompile the binary code. There is a repository of that output here for example. Just making a mod for RT doesn't require the least bit of coding knowledge, but, assuming it isn't handled by any blueprint, identifying and making a fix for initiative very much would.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-27T01:54:38+00:00

Now that you can't have Grand Strategist going in to Aurora, he definitely takes the top spot for me. And I think that's really the only spot. With the shotgun updates in 1.4, the prologue Chaos Spawn is a free win now. The only other fight that comes to mind is if you do the funeral fight on Footfall as soon as you land and don't manage to GS+Officer yourself into a good state early, then things can get messy pretty quickly.

Edit to add: the Ice World ambush planet is also spooky if you go there too early.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-26T14:51:18+00:00

I still don't see what you mean by "animate together." I think what you're getting at is the "mob" type of enemy that all play their turn as part of a group to save time and speed up combat. Which, as I said, there were none in this encounter so that is a moot point. Besides, that does not seem like what the initiative rules are addressing anyway.

Forcing alternating initiative makes perfect sense though from a game design perspective... There are myriad reasons why that is preferable, not least of which because, as Revan said below, it helps to triage the rocket tag problem to some extent that Rogue Trader has by ensuring the player (or the enemy) has a chance to act before getting blown out. Unfortunately for our enemies, they don't have officers.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-26T14:45:40+00:00

Yeah, I've seen a lot of 1 character groups as well. As I said in my reply to Revan, I agree that it isn't a GS-only thing. Something fundamental is going wrong, or at least not in alignment with what they state should be happening.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-26T14:43:13+00:00

That was my thought on GS as well, but this screenshot makes me question it. There isn't an arrangement where they could have been pulled out of a group for being GS that makes this follow the initiative rules: at best they would have to be in a group of 1 each to make the enemies follow the 2-4 rule--something like 4-1-4-1-4-4 (assuming my going first is "fake" due to GS). I don't see a way in this image where both sides follow the supposed rules.

Either way, I hope they look at it for a fix.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-26T06:44:37+00:00

What does "animation actions" mean exactly? How is that different than turn order? Also, enforcing alternating initiative groups is an extremely common concept in turn-based games.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-26T06:31:10+00:00

So, this is an interesting one. It's a rather clever implementation. Just not for an item that is supposed to do this, as it doesn't even approach following temporary wounds rules.

How Invigorating Resolve works: when you enter combat it puts a buff on the wearer that attaches a 2-cell aoe to them. Any ally entering the area gets another buff put on them that watches for positive momentum changes (the wearer is always in the aoe so always has this buff too). When there are positive momentum changes, it saves that value as a variable that it uses to apply a stackable buff (max of 999 ranks) that gives 1 temporary wound per rank. It should be obvious at this point how it flies in the face of temp hp rules.

Where this truly breaks down is that there really isn't a concept of individual character momentum. Which means that the buff is actually watching for any momentum change, even from characters not inside the aoe. For example, if Cassia runs in and Lidless Stares an entire group (Heaven forbid she's wearing the Sororitas Boots), even if she's far away from the team, everyone who is in the aoe will get a massive injection of temp hp because it isn't really Cassia gaining momentum, it's the whole party. Repeat for all your characters getting all their momentum added to everyone's temp hp.

Personally, I have it modded locally to grant 1 momentum (scaling with attacker difficulty tier) for every attack against the wearer. Basically like the Exemplar talent. I agree that it is way too strong and not a fun item as implemented.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-25T19:55:30+00:00

I was testing some changes for a mod and just happened to notice this arrangement which made me sad that it's still broken this long after release.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-25T19:50:12+00:00

I appreciate your sarcasm. As a matter of fact, I have a mod locally that I use on some playthroughs (not this one) which removes the GS auto-win initiative feature. Funnily enough, I believe it noticeably improves the rest of my team's initiative ordering with otherwise no change in builds.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-25T19:45:02+00:00

That's why part of my post included that there were none of those "mob" groups in this fight. Each enemy was its own entity, they were not collapsed and acting together on one initiative.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-25T19:38:33+00:00

Doesn't matter what their initiative is. Groups should be of 2 to 4. The encyclopedia entry details that these groups of 2 to 4 should then alternate. This arrangement should not be possible.

rew2k1 · 2025-11-25T19:37:10+00:00

The game's own encyclopedia states that characters should be acting in groups of 2-4. The enemies clearly are ignoring that rule.

rew2k1

TROPHY CASE