MountainTiger

My favorite part of BG 2 are the demiliches, which swing between "almost impossible" and "completely trivial" depending on whether you know how to get Imprisonment immunity or to use a Protection from Undead scroll. Really emblematic of the game's approach to difficulty.

I, too, complain about being overleveled and about the option for mitigating it.

I definitely found Ukaizo underwhelming, especially the first time when I had allied with the dragon under Neketaka and so didn't have the Guardian fight-walk through a couple of empty areas, turn off the machine, a not particularly hard fight against Furrante, and that was it. Even with the Guardian fight, Ukaizo feels like denouement to a story that climaxes with the choice of faction.

IDK about solo-but Devoted/Monk with the Slayer's Claw is something I've been kicking around. Fighters are pretty good at enabling crits, Monks have lots of goodies to take advantage of them, and the Slayer's Claw comes with nice enchantments beyond enabling Energized. The Claw comes very late, but Amra can also take advantage of high might+a high crit rate (side note: it's really weird that, of five unique or soulbound options in a "one handed" weapon class, one is a backer reward, two are two-handed, and the others are both pretty late acquisitions).

I guess this would answer my question about the upside of using Blood Mage+BDD instead of just giving the Wizard perpetual Brilliant with SoT.

After journeying with the Watcher, Vatnir released a hit in the rare crossover of the hip hop/Rymrgandian devotional genres called "No Kithity"

Hand mortars are the blunderbusses that do AOE damage instead of shooting multiple projectiles. There are two: Serafen starts with one, and you can pick up another one on his questline.

I find the core gameplay in Tyranny incredibly boring, which is a shame, because I like the setting quite a bit. But I didn't see as many obvious bugs as Deadfire, so if you're looking for stability it should be better.

I'm running Goldpact/Tactician right now, and she's a great tank and healer. I'm still at low level (have done a few quests in Neketaka), but I tested the build on endgame content and it was solid there, so I'm confident she will hold up for the full playthrough. I find the playstyle somewhat tedious, though-she doesn't contribute much in terms of DPS or CC, so fights go long. I'm not sure I'll stick with her all the way. War Caller seems good-Brilliant gives you Brisk Recitation level phrase generation without giving up linger (and potentially without the +1 phrase penalty for being a Troubadour), or 50% faster generation for a Troubadour with Brisk Recitation on. Summons are good flankers, available from PL 1, and increasing phrase generation should let you achieve full uptime while also using other invocations. What about Corpse Eater? Corpse Eater food provides +2 PL on Barbarian abilities, Brilliant provides another +1 and mitigates the class's resource problems. Not sure if it's more powerful than other options, but it seems cool to be able to spam boosted Barbaric Blows.

Another piece of practical significance for the math is that defenses are equivalent to multiplicative health and endurance increases (if we care about survivability, not seeing big numbers on a character sheet). But whereas the Con bonus is always 5%, the Deflection bonus increases as your deflection rises.

I'm not sure about the Eternal Flames lash-but the Shared Flames lash seems to apply to party members' spells, so it would make sense for the Eternal Flames lash to work on your spells.

I don't remember exactly what the chief says, but I don't think he means that the storms have constantly been raging for however long (unlike the storms in Ondra's Mortar, which seem to have been going since the Engwithans turned on the machines). I think he's claiming that the Huana know stories of past outbreaks-so they avoid the island out of caution (if the storms were constantly raging, why would they need to explain why to stay away?). But I'll have to pay attention next time I get to the quest.

Both of those are good thoughts-particulary Woedica, if we take her "Exiled Queen" backstory to correspond to real events that damaged/destroyed her body.

On Ukaizo, we see eight massive skeletons in eleven niches-as I understand it these are the remains of the gods' physical bodies. Two of the missing gods seem clear: Abydon (his body is at the Abbey of the Falling Moon) and Wael (his is under the Black Isles). But I don't recall any mention of a third god whose body would be elsewhere-did I miss something, or is this still a mystery?

I'm not a huge fan of the actual high level Paladin abilities, but Flames of Devotion gets amazing scaling-it's a low level ability, so you get a big multiplicative boost to damage from PL, it's fire keyworded, so you can easily stack an additional +5 PL (Magran's Favor, Sun and Moon during the day, Otto Starcat), and it has a lash (two for Bleak Walkers). It also seems like a good fit for Cipher mechanics-it's a great way to get big bursts of damage at the start of a fight or when you need more focus.

IDK how much I'd think about those numbers in particular, but you probably do need to be taking a big chunk out of the enemy's hit range before the deflection is more valuable than the health/endurance. The overall takeaway is that defenses have increasing returns and health/endurance constant returns in terms of how many attacks you can tank. For a Dragon Thrashed chanter, I think putting some effort into deflection makes sense-you do loads of damage without needing to devote many item slots or ability picks to offense, so you can afford to really stack your defenses. Debuffing accuracy helps here, too, and Chanters have some tools you can mix in. But if a beefy Chanter who gets hit a lot and patches up his wounds to keep going is what seems fun, I'd go with that.

I'm mostly confused that people are ignoring the severe discrimination against Dwarves. Of course they should be the best Might race in the game, but Obsidian has somehow failed to notice that, being all-around superior, they should be the best at the other stats, too. Yet somehow I have to take a Dexterity penalty, as though the glorious Dwarf is not the most graceful of all Eora's creatures!

If you don't have any other health/endurance modifiers, a 35% increase is about equal to a 26% decrease in incoming damage (in terms of how many attacks you can tank). You would need to be pretty high on deflection to get there-in an unrealistically simple example with a single attacker, no other damage modifications, and no damage reduction, I think you need to go from 40 more than the enemy to 47 more to achieve it (basically: at 40 more, 35% of attacks graze and 10% hit, doing 27.5% of the average damage roll per attack; at 47 more, 35% graze and 3% hit, doing 20.5% of the average roll; 20.5/27.5 is about 75%). This is pretty high, though it probably exaggerates what you need because of damage reduction. Let's say the attack's average damage is 40 and you have 10 DR. Now hits do 30 damage and grazes do 10-so grazes are doing only 1/3 the damage of hits instead of 1/2. Now, average damage at 40 more deflection is 6.5/attack, and at 47 it's 4.4, so the increase has reduced damage by more than 30%. At 33 more deflection you would be taking 8.6/attack; pushing that up to 40 is a bit under 25% reduction. So a bit of DR has dropped our target by several points. The real game is obviously a lot more complex-but the basic principles are the same.

It's quite likely a bug, but I think the balance is better this way. Terrified is the weakest hard CC affliction, it's fine to give it a minor buff.

Terrified behavior seems to have been changed recently-I've definitely been seeing disengagement attacks from it as well (though the engagement indicators disappear).

A few thoughts: FoD, Turning Wheel, and Lightning Strikes are all lashes-so they're multiplicative with other bonuses, not additive. On the rogue side, you're moving from a class focused on damage to one focused on defense; the offensive contribution from that side is naturally going to decline. On the other side, you're moving from a class specializing in big up-front hits to one focused on action speed and sustaining resources over long fights, and then you're comparing an active ability to autoattacks. Again, you should see a drop in paper max damage. The monk gets you a few things: you can shift attributes from Might to other stats (a Helwalker can hit the cap from 20 passive Might; if you're building a Watcher with Berath's Blessings and Gift from the Machine, you only need 17 from gear and character creation options), so you can invest more in other stats without sacrificing damage. Helwalkers have unrivaled access to stat boosts; on the topic of tanking remember that +15 Might, +5 Dex, +10 Int from Monk abilities mean +30 Fort, +10 Reflex, and +20 Will in addition to the offensive boosts. Monks also have access to one of the best defensive items in the game in Tuotilo's Palm. With a full stack of wounds, it provides more deflection than a large shield without an accuracy penalty and counting as an offhand weapon that scales with Transcendent Suffering. It has crappy base damage, so it's not as good for DPS as a real weapon, but it has solid accuracy and penetration and weapons don't provide +28 Deflection and Reflex (when fully enchanted and using weapon and shield style).

Feature Request

I haven't done any real testing, was just pleasantly surprised to see Brilliant toggling during the fight. My assumption is that it wouldn't work with Phantom Foes or Perception afflictions with a duration. But it should work with Persistent Distraction. In terms of immunities, apparently Interrupt immunity isn't good enough (the Memory Hoarder has that), but there are probably immunes somewhere. Thinking about it now, I'm a bit surprised that it worked given that Mule Kick applies Disoriented. But I guess the knock up effect (breaking targeting, including sandwich flanking) and Disoriented are applied sequentially. Disoriented also should limit how often you can get the effect-but it has a pretty short duration (8s base), and for a lot of characters stealing a tick every 2-3 cycles should be enough to bottleneck them on resource spending. But you probably can't do the multiple Tacticians in a circle thing.

This may be obvious to others, but I didn't think about it until I saw it: Mule Kick breaks Flanked. So against big single enemies (I was fighting the Memory Hoarder), you can get pretty quick Brilliant toggling by just spamming that (my script is just Intellect inspiration+at least 5 Discipline).

Galawain referred to a POE 2 choice in my most recent SSS run, with a character who pledged and honored in POE, but he didn't mention POE. The POE 2 choice might overwrite POE reactivity, though.