Purudaya

One of the great joys of my second playthrough has been hunting down slaver ships for loot, but once Clearing Out Crookspur is completed they of course all disappear from the map, which has been the behavior since 1.0. It's great that the game now populates with expert/master level faction ships as bounties are defeated, but there isn't much incentive to engage with any of them unless I'm running a particularly faction-devoted/faction-antagonistic Watcher. The quest resolution for Clearing Out Crookspur/Fruitful Alliance says that you've dealt a blow to slavery in the Deadfire, not eradicated it. What's the harm in tossing in a few rare master slaver ships for us to hunt once in a while? As it stands, the highest level slaver ship is level 10 and it would be really satisfying to go after some more challenging fare without having to deal with the RP/immersion repercussions of attacking core faction ships without consequence. Whaddaya say? If not, would this be easy enough to mod?

She's also really good with the Red Hand and Essential Phantom - one fires away while the other debuffs the field. Even better once you can get cloak of the phantasm and summon 5 additional Maias; it's like having a 10-shot (20 with driving flight) firing squad that lives on your back line and tears holes through your enemies every ~4 seconds.

Not using Galawain's challenge, still get the drake sound. And yes, it's one of the most annoying sounds ever.

Same thing happens when Llengrath boards your ship. OP, it looks like they're adding a turn-based mode and some UI changes, so I would expect at least one more "big" patch. They still have another god challenge to add as well.

Are you making sure to Hold Position before firing? Taking that extra step will add about 50% to your to-hit percentage. But yeah, naval combat is fairly widely considered to be a weak point. Luckily it's not a huge part of the game and boarding is fun, so I'd recommend skipping it wherever possible if you don't like it. They have made some improvements, though, and future patches seem to hint at at least some improvements, but I wouldn't expect a major overhaul.

Lots of beautifully rendered areas in this game (Onekaza's rooftop court comes to mind). It's a nice change from PoE1's more drab palette, but I suppose both are appropriate to their respective narrative tones.

So, various odd behavior. 1. When a single stealthed character is selected and directed toward a waypoint, s/he moves normally. 2. If the entire party is selected while in stealth, movement speed is increased as if fast mode were enabled. 3. If the entire party is selected while in stealth and fast mode is enabled, speed is increased even further – to a point where the party actually moves slightly faster than the standard fast mode running speed. This only happens outside of combat (although I haven't tested it extensively during encounters).

I preferred Beast of Winter narratively, but FS is pretty close in terms of level design. I do wish Tayn offered a quest resolution option that wasn't so obviously insane, however - the player basically has to choose Llengrath's solution unless they're RPing an outright maniac. The main quest has lots of interesting resolutions though, one in particular that allows you to significantly impact the endgame. If you like dungeoneering, it's a lot of fun.

If you're just coming to the game now, you might not realize that the megabosses were a relatively late addition to provide a special challenge - almost apart from the main game - for the more hardcore optimization player base. They're entirely optional, meant for level 20 parties, and are intentionally kept relatively out of the way of the generic vanilla playthrough. They're also not just HP sponges/meatshields; most have some key weakness that needs to be revealed/capitalized on by a player with thorough knowledge of the combat mechanics. That said, I do agree that they can be a little over the top in terms of difficulty (especially the ooze boss) and wouldn't be opposed to some tweaking to make the fights winnable without a multiple-hour time investment. The world map should also indicate them with a special icon instead of one used for all other bounties/combat encounters. That or work them into some kind of quest so there's at least some narrative payoff.

Not sure if it was intended for this release, but I'm getting the new ship combat UI with missing strings for all of the text.

Watcher: "Kaali, don't do anything foolish now." Zealots: "Nemnok! Nemnok!" Watcher: … "Nemnok! Nemnok!" As for quests, the Burning Bridge is a standout. It's actually somewhat tedious from a level-design perspective, but the art and atmosphere are some of the best I've seen in this type of game.

Come to think of it, I usually follow up with gouging strike and then either toxic strike or stunning surge, so by then the combination of dexterity and perception maluses are probably enough not to need spell support in most cases. Devotions of the Faithful is usually active as well though, so I guess I've been applying the right debuffs organically. Interesting

I mean, sneak attacks already scale and don't trivialize fights at lower levels, but I agree that resource gain (say, for kills made from stealth) would be a good alternative and would go a long way toward making smoke veil/shadowing beyond easier to build around. I'd still advocate for a different, non-percentage based damage implementation for backstab, though; at present I'd wager a dual-wielding no-subclass rogue gets more DPS from autoattacking than an assassin gets from repeatedly trying to set up backstabs. Percentage based damage bonuses work fine as passives for auto/low resource attacks because base damage is usually countered by recovery time. But it falls apart for rare use/one shot abilities like backstab, power strike, etc because base damage becomes much more important than speed and that balance is lost. They should either make some weapons "unfit" for backstabbing the way the infinity games did or find some other way of applying the bonus. A one handed dagger-wielding assassin should not be the worst way to play the subclass.

Stalker's patience has an upgrade that grants 0 recovery on crit 20% of the time, which procs fairly often on its own and even moreso if you build around multiple/bonus primary attacks (clear out, mob stance). It also does bonus damage that scales with stealth and has a nice DoT feature. One handed is still underpowered and needs a buff imo, but that weapon does a pretty good job of making up for the speed drawback.

Huh, you learn something new every day. My streetfighter/helwalker has been blowing through crowds of enemies with just the crippling strike opener for a debuff; will be fun to see how much more effective it can be.

Have you looked into getting some sail, hull, wheel, anchor, and lantern upgrades? I'm playing a fully upgraded dhow with double bronzers and can take out galleons and junks pretty regularly. Upgrades really help with your combat speed as well.

Does hand mortar target reflex? I thought it was just accuracy vs. deflection in an aoe, no need to set it up

So here's how scaling supposedly works: every encounter has a base level that can be scaled by a maximum of -4/+4 levels to match where the character is currently at. With upscaling only on, a level 8 encounter reached by a level 14 party will scale up to level 12, etc. So it's still very possible to be overleveled for certain encounters by the time you reach 16-20, even on PotD (Old City is a classic example - it's very challenging at level 8 but a total cakewalk at around level 12+). Also note that, when changing difficulty scaling mid-game, the changes will only affect areas you haven't visited yet. I really wish quests would just tooltip a suggested level (or even better, "base level") rather than depending on the unreliable skull metric.

The game has tons of possible combinations of classes, if you deem something broken, you can safely avoid it and use any of the other 50 possibilities. Not surprising that there aren't many new builds posted, imagine you discover some fun combination of classes or item synergy, share it, and two patches later it gets nerfed because someone cried that it touches him in the wrong place. Would you share a build under these circumstances? I wouldn't. This again. Given how niche the audience for this game is, there are actually a *lot* of builds out there. Have you checked YouTube? There's at least one for virtually every combination, several of which were added post 4.0. As for balance (which you will hereafter refer to as "balunz" in a tired attempt to mock the concept), I can't see anyone seriously preferring 1.0 to 4.0 outside of the click-to-win crowd, and there's already story mode for that. What is the appeal of playing a class that can't be killed or that can effortlessly kill everything? Who, outside of a child, would want that? If I were to draw a Venn diagram of players who complete multiple playthroughs and players who enjoy optimizing their builds as much as possible, you would likely have a high degree of overlap. And people in that overlap are not going to play a Jester in a game that offers multiple Kensai/Mages, etc. So what those of us who remain are generally looking for is a roster where as many classes as possible can be played - with the right arrangement of stats and gear - in a way that can be just as satisfying from an optimization standpoint as (most) any other class. It's not fun playing a melee assassin right now knowing what a melee streetfighter can do. And that's not because streetfighter is "broken," it's because assassin needs to be improved. You talk about balance like it's just a series of overwrought nerfs from a fun-hating Obsidian, but post 1.0 trickster, cipher, and ranger players would likely disagree with you.

I'm genuinely surprised that people are still upset about the obviously necessary balance changes between 1.0 and 4.0. Charge + mob stance + swift flurry nuking entire encounters with one mouse click stopped being fun for most players after the 2nd or 3rd go. Inb4 'single player game;' some of us like to do multiple playthroughs and a degree of equity between builds helps sustain variety. As for classes that need help, I wish people would pay more attention to the assassin. It's fine for an evoker multi, but it's pretty garbage as a martial melee class and slinging fireballs from stealth or backstabbing with a greatsword isn't exactly what comes to mind when you're wanting to play a cloak-and-dagger type with solid burst dps. Just changing backstab to a fixed (and ideally progressive\scaling) bonus instead of a percentage based one would be a big help.

Still encountering this bug as well. Both Nungata and Una are missing.

A dual mortar thread should almost be stickied at this point. OP, a streetfighter/monk (I would go helwalker) will absolutely melt through tight clusters of enemies spamming crippling strike, lightning strikes, turning wheel, and thunderous blows. It also creates a cost-effective use for toxic strike since you can apply it to multiple enemies for some excellent DoT. Remember also that gouging strike is guaranteed death for enemies if at least one of your characters can remain standing, so the ability to spread that around as much of the battlefield as possible is really useful. Better yet with a single class monk and whispers of the wind, which will make a full attack (both mortars) against each of 5 enemies. With the AoE splash followed by resonant touch, it makes most fights trivial.

As per title - there was a similar problem in previous versions where the damage or healing numbers that appeared above characters during combat would remain stuck on screen until save and reload. This has mostly been fixed, but it looks like health regained from rings of regeneration still tends to get stuck on screen (primarily on the bottom, just above the action bar or other UI elements). I can't say for sure, but this seems to be especially prevalent when making area transitions while a character is still regenerating - there will usually be a small cluster of stuck "1"s when the new map is loaded, requiring a save and reload. Not a major issue, but it is mildly annoying and it would be nice to see the last of this long-standing bug finally polished out.

Fassina and Konstanten actually have a pretty cute little romance if you take them both along for SSS. Although now that the DLC is out their dialogues might eventually trigger anywhere, not sure.

The game will never register a disposition change without showing you. I actually kind of wish they implemented it with theft, though - Xoti constantly rolls her eyes at my "skullduggery" in conversations, but has no problem with me robbing the temple of Gaun blind moments later. Probably some limitation with the game mechanics.