MountainTiger

After a bit of testing, it seems like offensive chants do not interrupt on crit with Energized up, which takes a lot of spice out of Troubadour as a subclass.

No need to have previously visited the Hall of the Unseen

After some more consideration: how about Troubador/Beguiler? Borrowed Instinct is a +20 accuracy buff, The Empty Soul is another +10 for spells that target Will. Phantom Foes has a huge radius, casts fast (.5s cast, 4s recovery), and targets Will to get that +30 Accuracy; as a Beguiler, it should usually return more focus than it costs. Mind Blades spends focus, benefits from the +2 Pen part of Energized, and gives a lot of chances at crits once you get down to a few enemies. On the Chanter side, offensive chants with Brisk Recitation give a chance for an AOE interrupt every 3s, and you should have plenty of time to throw out other invocations between reupping Energized. Seems like it could be fun, though PL 6 on a multiclass is reasonably late (and you can probably do more straightforwardly powerful things, of course).

Interrupts are great against interruptable bosses. I think the Chanter has issues with getting enough crits to matter; it might be worth multiclassing to a class that can help. But I think you'll struggle to get interrupts compared to a class that can spam active interrupt on hit abilities. My most successful Interrupter is a Tactician (multiclassed with Goldpact in my current build, but that part isn't important for the interrupts) spamming Knock Down/Mule Kick. The interrupts can directly regenerate Discipline, ordinary Interrupt immunity doesn't protect enemies, and the prone/knock up effects breaking engagement can actually be favorable for Tactician (e.g. Neriscyrlas's Persistent Distraction means somebody is always flanked when she is on her feet-but when she goes prone it goes away, triggering the 0s tick of Brilliant, which then resets as soon as she's back on her feet). The other source of Energized I'm aware of is Tenacious plus the Slayer's Claw, which opens up other class options (the Claw only binds to Fighter, Barbarian, and Paladin, though I suppose you could use it unbound if you don't have one of those classes on the character you want to use it with).

I assume the display string is just weird because it's trying to display a situation that shouldn't exist. The game probably does something like $ROLLED_HIT_QUALITY--[$CONVERSION_EFFECT_NAME]-->$FINAL_HIT_QUALITY, but here it's applied two conversions so the final hit quality (Crit) is being displayed on the Aware graze->hit conversion. I'm actually surprised it handled the situation this well considering that the underlying behavior is a bug.

My understanding of hit quality conversions is that only one is supposed to be applied per attack; however, today I saw the screenshotted attack: attack roll of 20 (graze) converted to a hit by Aware and then to a Crit by Paralyzed. I think it's a bug? Not sure if it's turn-based only.

YES!

In PoE1 it was simply OP with a paralyzing AoE. What don't you like about it in Deadfire? Fast cast and ability to paralyze and immobilize tough foes is pretty damn good for a low level spell. Basically what Boeroer said. In POE, Paralyzed was -40 deflection, -40 reflex, and -100 dexterity; even Stuck gave -20 deflection, -20 reflex, and -5 dexterity. This made it an amazing way of debuffing defenses in addition to holding enemies in place. In Deadfire, the only defensive penalties come from -5 dex and 25% hit->crit conversion on the Paralyze target. It's still OK CC, especially if you can chain it, but the afflictions are much weaker. It's really an issue for hard CC across the board in Deadfire. In POE, CC came with huge defensive debuffs that made landing it extremely deadly; Paralyze not only disabled an enemy but also could easily double damage by lowering defenses. In Deadfire, CC is much milder; abilities like weapon modals are much more important when trying to lower defenses. Additionally, tanking and healing are much more effective in Deadfire, making CC less important for reducing incoming damage. The overall effect for me has been a massive deemphasis on CC; it's nice to have but no longer the center of a party the way it was in POE.

I like to RP my Warlock as a Patrick Bateman type. I've been thinking of a Corpse Eater named Hannibal

I've been unimpressed by Mental Binding in Deadfire. It was one of my favorite Cipher spells in the first game, but Paralyze just isn't what it used to be.

Based on SChin's comment yesterday, I think we are likely to get a bugfix patch in the next couple of weeks: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/108063-ultrawide-has-the-letters-rt-cut-off-on-the-left-and-a-red-banner-on-the-right/

In both turn-based and RTWP, the more fundamental issue is neutrals not clearing the scene. Guards sticking to their regular patrol routes when they go through the middle of a fight is inherently immersion breaking; once combat starts neutral NPCs should be running away or watching from a safe distance instead of going about their business.

"Has red skull enemies" isn't really the same as "is not level appropriate". The Katrenn bounty is a good example-she has a bunch of high level constructs who are basically just damage sponges. The Watershapers' Temple is like this in my experience; the Marauders are high level but don't do much damage compared to the lower level enemies with them. Burning down the squishy stuff with them can quickly drop incoming damage and let you beat up the isolated Marauders once everything else is dead. The Temple entrance also benefits a lot from pulling-the enemies start off fairly dispersed, so it's hard to effectively AOE them. They will bunch up on the stairs if you let them, though.

POE's stat system is explicitly designed to contribute to within class build specialization, which it seems mostly successful at. The fluff around Might in particular is a bit weird, given the coexistence of "Might is not Strength" and "Might checks are always Strength checks", but it's beyond strange to me that this is still a major area of contention years after the first game was released.

Pulling is just good sense-lots of encounters start with enemies on favorable terrain, no reason to fight them there if you can fight them somewhere better. There are counterexamples-I've found fighting the Druids on Sayuka easier since I started just using wardstones to neutralize their sigils instead of trying to pull them away-but as a rule I find that I'd rather fight on ground I pick than on ground the enemies pick. Splitting usually seems like more trouble than it's worth. There are encounters with stationary enemies or where two encounters are close enough to trigger if you fight one in place where I find it worthwhile, but the main point of pulling to me is just to control terrain.

Given Rekke's apparent monotheism, "sacrifice more gods to create a bigger God" seems like a plausible goal for the Yehuzans.

If your problem is being -2 on pen, there are a litany of tools to get to even. Off the top of my head: +2 pen weapon modals Expose Vulnerabilities Hel-Hyraf invocation: -2 AR with effectively infinite duration once you get the PL 3 upgrade! This is probably my favorite option here, especially since a lot of high AR enemies seem to have low deflection. +pen martial abilities: Rogues in particular have lots of these, for 1 Guile you can get a +2 Pen full attack at PL 1 Tier 2/3 Might inspirations: Berserkers get one at PL1, single class monks get them by midgame Crits: too many options in terms of boosting accuracy, debuffing defenses, and getting hit->crit conversion to list here Swapping damage types: most enemies have significant variation in slash/crush/pierce AR Hot Razor Skewers: expensive but entirely within reach as soon as you reach Neketaka Combining -1 AR/+1 pen buffs and debuffs: in particular, Flanked is one of the easiest debuffs to apply and gets you -1 AR (plus -10 Deflection, so more crits); lots of things will get you the last point This is just stuff that came to mind while messing around at work and not looking at any references, I'm sure I've missed quite a bit. The penetration system is definitely important on POTD-a lot of people have noted that it is one of the strongest influences on what weapons, classes, and abilities are most useful at that difficulty. But it's a pretty simple system with a lot of options if you actually use them.

For healing: Pallegina in any of her class combinations can combine passive AOE healing with single target burst healing. She's also pretty tanky in all those combinations, so she's viable as a tank/healer hybrid.

Your post is choke full of the "gitgood" elitism that is ruining modern gaming. It was also called Path of the Damned in PoE1 where it was much better balanced. Is single-player gaming supposed to be some kind of elimination contest these days with each new installment being progressively harder until video games are unplayable for everyone but the select few? --- Now for reasonable people: the main issue with PotD in Deadfire is that too many mid-game enemies have 10 or 11 armor when in fact they all should have around 9. Again, I'm talking about regular trash fights, not about bosses. What's funny is that endgame trash rarely has more than 11 armor too and gets completely obliterated. (And before anyone mentions it, no, Grave Calling shouldn't be the "I win" item. Encouraging people to beeline to Crookspur for completely metagaming reasons because other weapons are more or less useless in certain fights is bad design.) I remember POE POTD as harder than Deadfire. Nothing on the early critical path in Deadfire compares to the Caed Nua Throneroom IMO, and in later fights the combination of unlimited healing and resource regeneration means that falling back on attrition is basically always an option, while the dragons and such in POE called for a more aggressive approach that entailed more risk. Deadfire's systems seem to make safe, grindy parties more viable, and the encounter design seems less willing to throw stuff like teleporting enemies that can stunlock squishies at the player.

#TeamRymrgand

All abilities already have variable time increments attached; translating this to AP is fairly straightforward (simplest option: choose a time increment that represents 1 AP, the way 6 seconds currently seems to represent a round in durations; actions get costs based on how long they take, minimum 1. Action and recovery phases complicate this a bit-a simple option is to require enough action points to be available in a round to use an ability and allow recovery points to carry over to future turns). Having action speed be a meaningful mechanic is fine, it is quite important in real time.

Trying to add a bunch of action types between full and free feels like groping towards an action point system to me. This was the solution in the main example (Arcanum) I can think of that tried to have both real time and turn based combat (I say tried to because I found Arcanum's real time combat unplayable for non-trivial fights).

What's strange to me in Deadfire is that this is a change from POE, where inactive companions received fractional XP but would never fall more than 1 level behind the Watcher. Not sure if Josh or somebody else ever publicly discussed this change, but I would be interested in hearing the reasoning (though it's always possible it was not intended but is another example of Obsidian Quality in action).

No idea where this idea about instant death in BG2 is coming from. There are a lot more explicit instant death effects in BG2 than BG1; not only are there still monsters with instant death attacks, save or die spells (and a few that don't allow a save) are staples of high level casters. You do start at a level where getting gibbed by one critical hit is no longer a thing unless you're really trying to build a fragile character, but it counteracts this with things like level drain and attribute drain that bypass normal defenses. BG2 does make death less relevant; whereas a low level BG1 party has to get to a temple and pay what can be a significant amount of money for the early game to get a character raised, BG2 starts you off with a caster who can raise the dead (possibly two if the PC is a Cleric) and quickly provides Rods of Resurrection. Not-technically-death effects like Imprisonment are usually a bit harder to reverse but still don't require much resource expenditure relative to what even an early BG2 party has available. But this just highlights the "no raising Bhaalspawn (except Imoen because shut up)" mechanic, which is questionable but at least not as outright fake as the instant death vs. silver bullet dynamic as a source of difficulty.

I used to be someone who didn't complain about Serafen's Cipher class, until I realized that the Spirit Frenzy stagger hits him every time Wild Mind triggers. Awesome with other casters, though.