Ceranai
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Posts posted by Ceranai
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My playstyle involves sending my tanks in to hold the enemy and then forgetting they exist until they need to reposition. In that context, the Paladin and the Fighter are virtually identical, except that the Paladin provides a party buff and the Fighter has extra engagement. Could I get more performance from my Fighter if I micro'd him a bit? Sure, but I get much more performance by spending that attention on my Cipher or Druid. As it is, I occasionally pop Vigorous Defense on the Fighter if he's taking too much heat, or have the Paladin toss Lay on Hands or a Reinforcing Exhortation on a back-liner taking damage from an archer. Sometimes I like to use Into the Fray just to watch it fail spectacularly because the Fighter is too far away (forcing him to move and break engagements) or because the enemy nicks a hit-box on it's way to the Fighter and breaks free.
so what you are saying is that you are content with paladins as tanks because you only use them as meatshields.
That's fine for you i guess its a SP game play as you want; but by that reasoning is there really much point giving them a weapon at all? Why bother with a paladin at all, why not send a sword and shield barbarian in?
Im quite in the middle of this debate generally as I think paladins are decent support tanks but have a terrible DPS but this is probably the worst defense of a class I've seen. Fighters barely take any microing in the first place for one thing but evaluating how good different classes are based on what happens when you just click attack and leave them at it is a terrible way to talk about the class' potential.
I mean to take it to an extreme that's like saying that priests are a bad class if you just give them a want and get them auto attacking...... Also as for into the fray not working for you im not sure whats going wrong there, ive never had a problem with it.
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Totally avoidable fight with the right dialogue options. The trick with vithrak in general is to burst them down.
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As with all AOE the best way to counter it is to move out of the way. Particuarly nasty spell this one, especialyl with smaller groups bu even so you should be ou of stun long enough to move out of its range assuming you have semi decent reflexes
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No real cheese.... solo..... are you kidding me? Food, potions, beetles. I managed to solo it with a fighter without using anything but the fighter and its abilities, also no pausing. If the video was meant as a demonstration of how much garbage you have to use to be on par with other classes then you have succeeded.
My point exactly
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It depends both on your game mode and what you arefighting. My chanter at max level with the maximimum deflection from gear talents etc (at least i couldnt think of any other ways to edge it higher) had 137 deflection and pretty much EVERYTHING missed me 99% of the time. I mean the only reason i would ever get hit is if i got debuffed.
When i say pretty much everything I mean even those statues you have to kill at the end of the game only hit me like once or twice for the entire boss fight, in fact the only thing i even had to worry about in that fight was that pillar of holy fire
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I didnt even pause the game once with my chanter when i soloed the sky dragon... just sayin
(chanters OP)Also all your DPS here came from summons as far as I could tell? surely all this proves is that any class with the right items can solo?
Dont get me wrong i dont think paladins are terrible, whats in question is if they can do anything useful besides sit there and tank, and compared to other tanky builds (chanter being the one i have most experience with) I just dont think paladins bring much else to the team other than a meatshield, a heal and some average buffs
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Yeah but if you're engaged with one enemy and you want to get to the enemy backline, it might be tactically useful to just swap with one of the enemy ranged attackers. I teleport into enemy backlines quite a bit on my monk, but flaggalent;'s path seems like it's better for that purpose, I was just wondering if it might be possible for a rogue.
Hmmm. Switching places with an far away enemy mage or archer seems like a good tactic. You bring them closer to the frontlines with your Tank. They might even switch to melee weapons.
Do ranged mobs switch to melee weapons when you get close to them?
ive never seen an enemy switch wepons at all, ranged or melee
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1.2x ranged attack speed and 1.2x reload speed. Paladins can increase spell speed, melee speed, ranged speed, and reload speed by 1.2x
This right here sums up an absolute blind bias you're showing:
You are comparing a single target, per rest ability that Paladin gets at level 11 to an AOE ability Chanter gets at level 5 or so that does the exact same thing with any ranged weapons, with demand for guns being especially high.
You cannot possibly be this blind so as to think these two are even remotely similar or that the Paladin wins that out.
It's the same all over, such as with here:
+10 deflection for all allies. Paladins can increase deflection by +15 on the targets that are actually tanking.
And here:
Freigtened debuff. Bleak Walkers can do that when they kill an enemy.
The difference is the same thing I've been talking about to the point that I'm becoming a broken record:
Paladin is too specialized.
Everything it does or procs demands a very specific setup, whereas Chanters and Priests can just effect everyone with no hassle whatsoever and they can do so on command. A Paladin meanwhile only hits one target at a time and/or their skills demand a death at the right moment or the like to proc. Why would I micromanage a Paladin to death in order to achieve the exact same thing I can achieve with a Chanter with minimal effort on my part?
And to call Chanter invocations "niche" is absurd. Chanter is there to catch you if **** is hitting the fan. If something's going terribly wrong (big battle where some ranged guys picked off your wiz immediately, or maybe you approached a battle out of formation) and the battle isn't ending quickly as you would like, Chanter can single-handedly turn that around. The summons it gets aswell as some of the spells it gets (AOE Petrify) can singlehandedly turn a battle around.
Chanters dont get an AOE petrify, they get and AOE frighten which is superseeded by a terrify invocation.... lol chanters dont even need an aoe petrify but if they had one you could just break the game lol
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No. I understand what you mean. The problem is the following line:
The only exceptions to this rule are Critical Strikes and talents like Scion of Flame, a talent that increases certain specific damage types (although it is currently bugged and does not affect abilities like Flames of Devotion or weapon enchants).When you look at my logs, what you aren't taking into account is that the pierce damage is calculating damage bonuses from superb enchant(45%), might(39%), crits(40%), and sworn enemy(15%).
The additional +100% burn damage isn't additive with the 45, 39, 40, and 15. Its multiplying the total damage by 2.
Crits are additive and not multiplicative. If you have +200% damage and you crit for another 50%, then your total bonus damage is 250%.
Lashes are multiplicative and not additive. If you have +200% damage and you deal another +100% lash damage, then your total damage is +400%.
Sigh if you want to split hairs, fine. Quality enchants, The Might Attribute and Sworn Enemy are Total Damage Modifiers, not additional effects, no. They specifically state x total damage, same with critical strikes (I quote from the ingame cyclopedia: "increases the total damage done by 50%"), and not +% damage like effect. If it wasn't, if it was additive, other additional damage effects wouldn't be affected other than weapon damage (unless they would make another exception).
Additional critical damage is also additive from that regard, just like Torment's Reach (+50% Crush damage) will be additive with any other ability that adds additional Crush damage. Like I said, there are a small amount of specific traits, like scion of flame, that state "Adds +20% damage to burn damage" while being multiplicative with Burn Damage and not additive, but generally this is not the case. Flames of Devotion adds +50% fire damage and Intense Flames add +25% damage to FoD, to end up with +75% additional fire damage, not 62.5%. If you add your Flame Lash from the enchant to that, that's another additive +25% fire damage. If you add another extra damage effect type to that, it's added to the pile of damage, not multiplied in any way.
And before you might go 'that's not true, it multiplies with your weapon damage!', that's true, but again, I'm talking about (generally) additional effects from the same damage type. Having to specify that total burn damage is multiplicative with your weapon damage is the same as saying it's additive to your weapon damage, so no, I didn't specify that nor should you expect it to be specified.
Crit damage does not multiply total damage by 1.5. Test it out yourself. Give a character 1000 might. Watch how much damage you do with a crit vs. not a crit.
Grazes work the same way. The penalty is subtracted by your damage bonus, rather than multiplying your total by 0.5
At 1000 might, and due to the damage range of weapons, grazes can actually deal more damage than crits.
Bug what bug, i certainly have no idea what you might be refering to
no bugs 'ere move along devs. Chanters are perfectly balanced. Defininitely nothing wrong here. I certainly didnt abuse any bugs in my games! I would never do anything like that, and i wouldnt dream of abusing how stupid the AI is! -
I got bored with my non-iron solo PotD paladin game, but on my playthrough an Aumaua paladin with Bull's Fortitude (and similar things like Deep Faith that OP took) can just pull the Great Hall spirits to the corner and alt+tab. I think my defense against phantom stun was like 122 or something.
122 sounds unlikely, as i had something like 108 level 12 with full gear and bulls fortitude. Granted i was playing chanter but still.
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I have not played monk but my fear is that playing any class that relies on taking damage to perform his / her role in the group will get pwned on PotD when mobs hit rediculously hard. I've heard that a lot of monks run naked to generate wounds faster and attack faster respectively... if this is the case they will get butt-hurt on PotD hardcore... as I stated though, I've never played a monk so maybe these concerts are unfounded due to something I've not thought of.
People who run monks in light/no armor are playing them wrong (at least if they are playing them as an offtank/tank). The trick is to figure out how to balance their wound gain rate with the speed they can offload wounds and as a tank in PoTD (I played one solo to act 3) the real trick is to switch out armor depnding on your fight. I wear heavy plate most of the time and it works great, i gain wounds roughly at the same rate as im able to spam torrents reach, in easier fights i might switch out to medium armor to speed things up but I would almost never consider going with light armor because there is no way you can offload your wounds as fast as you will be gaining them.
Note that it is possible to play monks differently but I think they are at their greatest potential as a front line tank with as much damage mitigation as possible. I think the guides are all very misleading in saying you want them to take damage because as a frontline fighter they will be taking damage anyway, you want to slow down that damage as much as possible so you can fully utilize the wounds you gain
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I was curious exactly waht stats you wanted
I only posted the abilities and stats, not gear or anything and gear was very important in my run My bad. I wasnt very specific lol.
Actually what I'm looking for was the Personal Record since it gives specific data on the character itself for endgame.My party was a arty of one so my party record and personal record should be the same
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Which weapon focus talent, if any, would be best for solo play? Or another way of phrasing this would be: are there particular weapons I should be aiming for?
Adventurer for Gaun's Share? Knight for Edge of Reason?
Draining weapons are very overrated IMO, there are lots of ways to keep your endurance up and draining is probably the least effective unless you are doing a LOT of melee dps. Especially for more spell based classes its just not a priority. Like any fights where i knew i would need healing I just gave myself some health pots rather than change weapons to one of my draining weapons (i had all three i just only ever used them briefly to try them out)
TBH I just picked up a hatchet for the deflection bonus and used it for the whole game, enchanting it up when i had the mats.
I changed by shield twice i think from ohld wall to some big one i found in endless pahts to one small one in the adra dragon treasury that had the herald and superb enchantments. for gear i had a standard plate armor-> sanguine plate-> the lore giving plate the vampire in endless paths drops-> the HP regen plate that raedric drops when you kill him the second time.
As far as items go I just mixed and matched to get the highest stats, had the consecrated grounds spellholding boots shod in faith, gloves with 3 minor heal on them and the amulet you get from endless paths level 14.
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I was curious exactly waht stats you wanted
I only posted the abilities and stats, not gear or anything and gear was very important in my run -
I don't even see how people can still be arguing about this. they are a decent tank and useful to have as a support but their damage is terrible. No reason not to stick them on the front lines but if you want to squeeze the most out of your party a monk or barbarian will be more useful as an off tank and a fighter will be able to out tank them. It isn't a huge difference but it is clear that there is a difference.
As to the PoTD solo run with it as has been said viable does not equal good, especially when all your dps relies on item use.
Ps to the poster above if you cipher is getting out dpsed by a paladin you aren't playing her right
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Have you seen how many boss battle guide revolve around using the petrify trap
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btw, here's a paladin, POTD solo... with videos to prove it...
one of the first POTD solos IIRC.
so your contention gets a big fat yawn from me.
This is true but this was also catharsis' second solo run through and he got pretty much all his damage from figurines and items.
Personally I find Paladins to be underwhelming damage dealers in PoTD but they make for good front line support characters, given how hard it is to get accuracy and DR their auras are super powerful, they can tank like a boss and their heal is super powerful early game. (Only one cast but it's per encounter so you don't need to rest as much.
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It could also reward you with intangibles or things that change your power orthogonally. Here are a few possible ideas off the top of my head:
- Being able to directly access the resting option from the travel screen and the travel screen from anywhere in the keep. Possibly ditto for the merchants. This would allow you to skip loading screens, which doesn't effect in game power in the slightest but would be an incredibly nice feature.
- Being able to leave a companion at a structure for a number of quests and respec them (possibly to varying degrees, depending on how long you leave them). This wouldn't change a hypothetical player's power, since they could have theoretically made any of those choices to start with, but it could let them correct early game mistakes or make the game more pleasant. It could also make it easier to try out new builds.
- Move enchantments from one weapon to another or strip enchantments from a weapon and salvage their components. This would let you experiment with enchantments more and put interesting enchantments on weapons you're more likely to use, but it doesn't actually give you anything new.
- Have the merchants take custom orders for a slight markup (I want a weapon with these enchantments and get me these ingredients while you're at it). This could, potentially increase a player's power, but at least they'd be paying to get the things.
- Training room where you can spawn monsters (who would drop no loot and grant no XP) to fight against and test new strategies.
I like the retraining idea to a point, playing hardcore i find it hard to keep the eight companions around when i can custom make my own. so patching up their lore, mechanics and stealth to make them respective members would be nice so i could keep the unique dialogue around
Leaving members at the stronghold should grant incentive or perk. the adventures are awesome but the rewards arent that great. BUT its a reward with no risk. add some risk... death and dismemberment, NOW weve got some RPG going
Some definition to the taxes and day/turn cycle would be awesome. that statue chair broad could be more helpful, or interesting.
The keep has some awesome potential for RPG drama, like trade routes, discontent, famine, plague, WAAARRRRRR! mmm building an army.... that one a**hole hung half his town from a tree, ONE TREE! the most i can do is butcher my people...
i agree it shouldnt be a source of income but definitely an investment for immersion. id pay to have merchants with unique quests for their great gran dads war relic or whatever, their MY towns people, give them some personality! or at least let me hang them... i can buy a tinkerer but wheres my gallows and giant scary executioner???
fixing the battles so they arent inside of my keep would make sense since i built giant walls and towers- could put those to use
thats off the top of my head, feel free to add. man i so want to buy a hanging tree for my town. a burning post. some of those torture racks would keep the public in line...
A number of great points here and any number of these changes would have made the stronghold more useful.the loading screen rubbish being my fav by far. I think that whoever decided that to rest in your own ****ing castle you have to go through four loading screens was indeed.. How did that other guy put it? A blind labotimized monkey...
If the stronghold had any of these features I might actually use it,I still think all they really had to do was make it feel less like a graveyard. Like just add some NPCs ffs like add some scholars to the forum, an innkeeper to the inn, some militia to the training grounds etc etc.honestly I walk around my fully upgraded fortress and think what a graveyard
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Great thread, I loved Ceranai's blow-by-blow of the Adra dragon battle. I'm just finishing a Hard mode regular game with a party of 6, after this I'm switching to solo PoTD.
My version of the game came from Gog so sadly I don't have anything to track achievements
Thanks, would have posted a video but it would have been the longest most boring video out there.
I think it would have been better if I had tried to get more wall of fires and come back later as theta casually did the bulk of the damage, the worms just finishing him of reeeeeeaaaaalllllllyyyyy slowly. I reckon with 15 scrolls of fire you could kill him every time
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Pull the trolls into the bandits, they will kill the bandits for you in the blacksmiths quest, with this method you can do this quest solo with any class
Card nua you can pull the phantoms to the entrace gateway and kill them quite easily that way. The most decisive combat factor after spells and abilities in this game is usually positioning, if you remember that you should find most fights easy enough, the goal being to always try to be the one with the number advantage even if they outnumber you ( ie fight them at choke points in a way that you whole party can hit them but they have to come at you one at a time
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Also, stop acting like Path of the Damned is the correct way to play the game. I'd say it's the opposite - it's a rushed, least tested difficulty setting to keep min-maxers occupied. Difficulty levels like that are known for being exclusive. Rather than requiring more tactics and creativity, they just limit the number of abilities you can use effectively. The most common sin is very high monster resistances, which is a hard blow to any class that relies on debuffing, but a blessing to those who buff themselves.
Path of the Damned is a limited subset of Pillars of Eternity. Blaming paladins for PotD quirks is intellectually dishonest.
But then its a symptom of a greater problem. We want a greater challenge out of the game but dont want to play a class that feels gimped, and while i consider myself a min-maxer I would also say that even with totally random stats the game is too easy. I guess my problem might be that i came here from the paradox games series which were RP heavy but also very big on the strategy side of things. This game is hevay on the RP but the strategy is abysmal. I guess you could say its my fault for playing the wrong game but i think that a bit more strategy really wouldnt have hurt this game.
Different genres of games entirely. Games like Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis are strictly strategy games with 4x and RPG elements.
PoE is in the same genre as games like Fallout 1/2, Arcanum, BG 1/2, IWD 1/2, etc. Comparing apples to mongooses here.
I guess i wasnt trying to make a direct comparison I was just trying to get across that when i play a game its not so much for the immersion factor its more for the challenge. I love the feeling f beating a game. I mean i enjoyed this game either way but the challenge factor was certainly lacking and PoTD felt like it tried to add a challenge factor just by changing the numbers around, kind of liek when i used to play WoW and they just kept adding 'new' monsters that were basically old monsters reskinned and resized
I totally get that. Most of the thing about RPGs is the experience is about having an experience. Enjoying the story, plot elements, character development (in a literary sense). It's important to have mechanical achievement and challenge present, but they're not the focal point of the experience.
Yea i guess it would be better if I had enjoyed the plot more, or if i felt like my actions had any impact at all. I was a big BG1 fan when i was younger and it always felt like my choices mattered. I feel like in trying to make all builds viable this game has made all my choices meaningless. Like in my first attempt through I paid very close attention to everythin but by act two i had rerolled my character and i made a point of chosing different options and they had 0 impact on my game. By the time i started my STC run I chose my options pretty randomly and felt like it had no impact on my play at all, like my personality was all over the place. By the time i got to the final act i pretty much skipped through the plot to the extent that i couldnt really tell you what it was all about
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Also, stop acting like Path of the Damned is the correct way to play the game. I'd say it's the opposite - it's a rushed, least tested difficulty setting to keep min-maxers occupied. Difficulty levels like that are known for being exclusive. Rather than requiring more tactics and creativity, they just limit the number of abilities you can use effectively. The most common sin is very high monster resistances, which is a hard blow to any class that relies on debuffing, but a blessing to those who buff themselves.
Path of the Damned is a limited subset of Pillars of Eternity. Blaming paladins for PotD quirks is intellectually dishonest.
But then its a symptom of a greater problem. We want a greater challenge out of the game but dont want to play a class that feels gimped, and while i consider myself a min-maxer I would also say that even with totally random stats the game is too easy. I guess my problem might be that i came here from the paradox games series which were RP heavy but also very big on the strategy side of things. This game is hevay on the RP but the strategy is abysmal. I guess you could say its my fault for playing the wrong game but i think that a bit more strategy really wouldnt have hurt this game.
Different genres of games entirely. Games like Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis are strictly strategy games with 4x and RPG elements.
PoE is in the same genre as games like Fallout 1/2, Arcanum, BG 1/2, IWD 1/2, etc. Comparing apples to mongooses here.
I guess i wasnt trying to make a direct comparison I was just trying to get across that when i play a game its not so much for the immersion factor its more for the challenge. I love the feeling f beating a game. I mean i enjoyed this game either way but the challenge factor was certainly lacking and PoTD felt like it tried to add a challenge factor just by changing the numbers around, kind of liek when i used to play WoW and they just kept adding 'new' monsters that were basically old monsters reskinned and resized
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Lies, agrogans still chase you to the treasury.
If you pretend you are going to help the dragon, then run to the treasury the dragon and the xuatrips follow you but the adragans dont. The xuatrip skirmishers are ranged and the passage to the treasury is narrow, if you make the skirmishers follow you in the middle of the passage they block the dragon from attacking you because its large character model cant squeeze past the archers model.
Perma stunning/interrupting/petrifying Adrogans disagree with you.
No it isnt. You can also cheese ai pathing and kill in from range without getting hit once by it.Well gaze its the only way to beat the adra dragon, the other way is numerous save-reloads until all the dominatings/paralizes etc will proc.
This is how I soloed the dragon with my chanter on PoTD. Note you still have to kill the adragans afterwards for the encounter to end but you can pull them individually and they arent so tough by themselves if you burst them down.
Besides, what makes the dragon to not use its breath? It has an awefull range, like half of the screen.
I can not tell a lie
, i did this many times and the adragans never chased me. like even after i killed the drake their agro range was pretty small, small enough that i could only pull them to the edge of the tunnel before they started losing interestHis range on breath is what makes the fight really fiddly, you have to be juuuuuust at the edge of vision with him to stop him casting it because even if he misses you he kills the archer and can then move in to closer range. This fight took forver because my wurms only had a 3/100 chance of hitting him but im sure a different class/build could do the same thing faster if they had higher accuracy.
These are his stats on PoTD, reflexes was juuuust low enough and luckily my wurms target reflex.
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Wizards ARE experts at killing things. Not so much at surviving things, but with the right spells and abilities that is also not much of a problem. Their performance is not as stable as chanters, so they are riskier for Ironman, but they are still one of the better classes to do this. Later on you can get enough accuracy to have 100% hit rate with appropriate spells, so luck reliance is negated too for the most part.
Fair enough. I am curious to play a wizard at level 12 but i wanted to play him as a battlemage and looking at the classes side by side i think chanters are much better for front line spellcasters
(chanters OP)
I only posted the abilities and stats, not gear or anything and gear was very important in my run 
Deflection - what is enough?
in Pillars of Eternity: Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
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I like to enchant for piercing/slashing as these types of damage crop up most often, if Im going into a fight where i know there is lots of shock dmg (i wear plate) ill switch to a different set of armor. Still thats just my preference.
I used to support stat dumping but now im quite against it. Little things always pop up that make me think dang wish I hadnt dumped that stat.
One thing Id quite like to see is a fully defensive fighter as im pretty sure you could get your deflection to a level that you would NEVER get hit bt melee attacks