aimlessgun

And I think that has a good chance of continuing, except under worse conditions, if the VTC or Rautai gain the upper hand. Colonial powers generally have to co-opt existing power structures to get and maintain control. The idea that the Rautai can somehow usher in some kind of superior, more egalitarian society across all of the Deadfire seems naive. The colonial powers will likely combine the worst of the Hauna with some extra oppression, murder and exploitation on top. It's possible, if the Rautai are truly committed, that after generations of war, blood and atrocity, that the Deadfire will be fully assimilated to a 'superior' society (though I'm sure Rautai has plenty of it's own problems which we don't get to see). But it's also possible that an independent Huana society will evolve for the better due to it's contact with the outside world. If I'm rolling the dice either way, I'd prefer the path with less atrocities and more self-determination.

I think the order you do stuff in Neketaka in is pretty fluid, though obviously if the enemies are too high level you should go back later. If you sail all over the place to towns where you don't have a quest yet, or focus too much on one faction and ignore the others, apparently stuff can break or make much less sense, but I don't know if theres any sort of guide to help with that. Definitely avoid following the main quest to Magran's teeth for as long as possible as that start forcing you to commit to or reject factions.

Got quite a few results now and RDC is still very unpopular. I guess assassination is generally frowned upon :D Not surprised pirates are so low, especially since in the midst of their questline it becomes pretty obvious you can just take the Fonferrus to Ukaizo without their help.

If you want to argue against the Kahanga in favor of Rautai or VTC, you have to successfully argue that colonialism isn't terrible. Which would be pretty difficult to argue given how badly it has usually turned out historically, leading to widespread oppression, exploitation, murder, discrimination, and leaving long term scars even after the colonial powers leave. The historically demonstrated evils of colonialism are far worse than the deficits of Huana society. And there is plenty of evidence in game that the Rautai and VTC will be just as bad as real world colonial powers. However if someone wants to make a case that the Indian caste system is worse than things like the British causing or amplifying famines leading to the deaths of millions, that would at least be a pretty interesting argument! EDIT: To address the title of the thread, no I don't think the Kahango are 'good' for the Deadfire, just not as bad as the other two (this is ignoring the main plot, VTC Castol (animancy research) and Rautai (overall organization) could possibly be better at dealing with the wheel-smashing crisis).

Yeah the entire main story (such as it was) and especially the very end was a bit of a letdown. I agree with criticisms already levied: lack of thematic unity with rest of game main character motivation did not really resonate. I guess Eothas destroyed my keep and killed my people but for some reason I don't feel an emotional connection to that, maybe relying too much on borrowing emotions from a game I played years ago. If they'd started with you ingame tending to your keep and such it would have been more upsetting. lack of important info about pre-Engwith soul system, or even acknowledgement that such info could exist (I guess confirmed to be cut dialogue by devs) Last section felt very rushed. Straight to a boss battle without much buildup, and the fight itself was quite boring, boss hardly did anything except summon some adds.

I have a question: when you don't choose a faction, why do you have to randomly fight one of them after turning off the storm? What even selects who shows up for that? In my game the Rautai showed up, didn't acknowledge the fact that I was on extremely good terms with them, and for some reason felt we had to fight because....why? I wasn't claiming the island for any other faction, just there to deal with Eothas. Seems like there should have been a dialogue like "ok good job winning the free for all and making it here, do your thing, I'll be over here talking to the giant adra statue who may be about to end the world" Is that what people are talking about when they refer to a 'bad' or 'downer' ending? I was confused because there was nothing in the loner ending which seemed 'bad' caused by you going alone. Factions fighting is like a neutral ending, if you don't personally step in and murder some of the factions of course they will fight.

Yeah personally I think this is the most stylish way to do it

I think so. Soul Whip damage increase is less valuable because you are already stacking so much +%damage from Rogue. Multiclass, non-Ascendant Cipher spells won't do all that much damage with low power levels. On bosses Recall Agony and Disintegrate might shine but I think generally it will be a significant damage loss (obviously charm and Pain Block will greatly help your party in other ways though).

Yeah the whole bounty system is sort of weird that way. As long as someone's paying you to murder, it's totally ok. Not just killing people in the streets and homes of Neketaka but like, "Oh you sunk a ship of my faction, but some shady person in Dunnage gave you a job to do it? Well then it's A OK with me, no faction rep loss." I like bounty hunting from a gameplay standpoint but maybe some more convincing ingame reasoning could have been offered.

Difficult to say when Resolve >= Con because presumably you'll be healing and increase your HP pool in that manner much more than Con ever can. However in a naive comparison you could say that at Deflection being 55 over enemy accuracy, they only hit you 20% of the time (all graze), 1 more deflection takes that to 19% of the time, so you've increased your EHP by ~5%. Though when you're removing the last of the enemy Hit rolls (from deflection +49 to +50) it's also approaching a 5% EHP increase. However if you're in this range the gains quickly ramp up from there, at the extreme going from Deflection +74 to +75 you become unhittable and gain infinite EHP

For focus on 'autoattack' and single target damage I think it's pretty hard to beat Ranger/Rogue, not too hard to always be Sneak Attacking for ~50% dmg, Deep Wounds is more dmg, at very high level you get another 50% from Deathblows, Debilitating Strike lets you proc sneak attack/deep wounds on your own and adds penetration for only 1 resource, being able to Blinding Strike casters from huge range is great, Devastating Blow finishes stuff. Ranger you get accuracy, Driving Flight is amazing, and another spammable 1 resource attack in Wounding Shot, and the pet is ok. It's not literally an auto-attack build but it's very easy to setup AI to spam Accurate Wounding/Debilitating Strike and Devastate targets under half HP.

Hrm the wiki says 14 INT 15 RES are required. Does svef give more resolve than ripplesponge?

Yes, in this extreme case of 160 acc vs 81 deflection (wow that is crazy low), the my spreadsheet says +1 acc is worth only 0.2% increase in DPS, so quite worthless to stack more at this point When I said '2%' this is a rough estimate for say an average character on PotD where their acc is close to enemy defense or lower. For example right now in midgame my characters are around 80 acc and generally fighting enemies with 80-110 defenses. As the streaker says above lots of weapons have 'on crit' effects though, but that, like the penetration benefits, would be more work to model than I'm willing to invest! Stacking almost anything in this game also has diminishing returns, if you already have +100% increased damage then one more point of might is not 3% more DPS, only 1.5% more (3/200 instead of 3/100). Same with dex if you already stacked a lot of action/recovery speed. So as in most RPGs you want a balance.

Kitchen Stove is for Thunderous Report, which is per encounter and a 160 dmg nuke in a huge AoE. It's pretty hard to not max focus instantly with that But this may not escape the next round of nerfs... Cipher certainly can't compare to wizard for options though as you said. Even if as a pure nuker it's pretty decent just using the few good spells you have repeatedly (Amp Wave and Disintegrate). So yeah I guess Ascendant is mostly a worse Wizard.

Ascendant really is a bit of an exception to this though since you just get full focus at the start of the fight from Kitchen Stove or some other weapon ability and spam free high cost spells.

Beza's Toothed Blade is also pretty great if you think you can crit a decent amount of the time. On PotD crit rate for dual wield will probably be quite low though.

That statement doesn't make any sense. Accuracy works like this: You either have enough to get a hit or you don't. Having 70 accuracy and hitting an enemy is no different from having 80 and hitting. In no situation does 1 accuracy add 2% dps. The only thing that adds dps is attack speed and actual damage. His quote make sense because he considers attack hit rolls into dps calculation. Not sure 2% increase per 1 acc as there are more factors to consider. The fringe cases are when the bonus acc is huge enough to render the 1d100 roll inconsequential in miss/graze/hit/crit consideration (ie Acc - Save > 99 such that all attack rolls are crits ignoring external conversion effects) or vice versa. With such large rolls it only matters if that particular 1 accuracy would have made a graze a hit and a hit a crit. It has to do with the value towards deflection. There is no direct relation to accuracy affecting dps at all. I believe most here will include hit resolution into dps, and not just consider it in a vacuum where it is "Damage Per Second of when only all grazes/hits/crits have landed". Yes exactly. This is based on a DPS spreadsheet I made looking at average damage dealt modeling the miss/graze/hit/crit mechanics. Accuracy's effect on DPS is of course on average over a large number of attacks. More accuracy means you'll get less misses/grazes and more hits/crits and thus do more DPS. The spreadsheet also understated the benefits of accuracy because I did not spend the time to model crits giving +50% penetration, only factored the 25% dmg increase.

Agree rangers are a nice multiclass, Maia as a Scout is pretty solid. Are any of the martial classes good pure though? they are quite powerful for me. but in patch 1.1 they nerfed the accuracy ring to become +4 instead of +8. and devotion of the faithful. you can still stack them up and invest in alchemy using deadeye. make sure you have high PER.. i recommend 20 PER (which only nets you +10 ACC). if anything ranger is by far the easiest for me early game I don't get that accuracy thing. +8 ACC seems even pretty underwhelming, why nerfing it? 1 acc is a bit over 2% DPS in most cases, plus the benefits of hitting with effects, ACC is extremely good. A +6 Might ring would look pretty overpowered compared to other items, and from a DPS standpoint a +8 acc ring is as good (or possibly better if youre stacking a lot of %dmg).

Got the game recently and at lvl 11 on PotD I've got 2 Cipher's in my party (1 hireling ascendant and Ydwin mindstalker) and they seem to do fine. Up to ability level 6 they seem to have some very good stuff, even ignoring charms. Ydwin just hands out Pain Block like candy, while the ascendant outdamages everyone in the party by big margin. Doesn't take very long to get to max focus, once there at lower lvls I spammed Mind Blades which is very effective due to how fast you can spam it, and now I can spam amplified waves which has a ludicrous radius and hits every enemy (and only enemies) for ~90 dmg every 5s while also interrupting. Is that really much worse than other classes at lvl 11? EDIT: Also wow uniques with a weapon based nuke ability are crazy good with Ascendant. Kitchen Stove once per encounter AoE instantly ascends my guy, open with that then starting spamming Amplified Wave 5 seconds into the fight...that's pretty good. Possibly this weapon is just OP though.

Another rough method is to just do some fights with each build and compare character total damage to the Time In Combat stat. Due to time scaling this will yield very low numbers per second, so I just compared damage per minute between characters. For example 20+ damage per minute by game stats is "pretty good" as far as I can tell.

Wael is the closest to a 'screw the gods' option. I was a Priest of Wael (and still have trouble figuring out what that entails) but I also chose Wael's option because I tired of all the philosophizing and was in a 'screw this' frame of mind.

I did the fight for fun, but didn't save. It's a hard fight if you don't cheese it, and the dragon is definitely not an opponent to be taken lightly. In character, I was afraid of it. Definitely much safer for the Watcher to strike a deal than risk a high chance of death on some sidequest before stopping Thaos Also its just cool to release this ancient being out into the world to explore it.

I appreciated the unpredictability of some results. And I don't think that there should be a 'correct' or best way to go through a story. I got some happy endings (including a couple happy endings for companions I didn't even help, which was cool!), some bad ones, and some unresolved. If you were roleplaying as a control freak megalomaniac you might expect to control all these outcomes, but I'd imagine that most characters one might roleplay would not expect a correct path either, just some successes and some failures and a bunch of things they really don't deeply care about. Killing Thaos certainly mattered in that he didn't return Woedica to power, and that the world would be freed of his neverending, atrocity-filled meddling. I agree that the Trial was dumb. Even though apparently my testimony got people to blame the Leaden Key for the assassination, suprize Thaos kills Aevar after 2 minutes of screen time was...bleh. And when it comes to unpredictable endings and actions not mattering, just seeing little blurbs at the end of a story rarely going to be a satisfying way to tie your actions to outcomes, especially for complex things like who controls Defiance Bay. That would require a whole book to really show how your actions played a part in all the stories that made up fate of Defiance. So maybe it is more effective to stick to simpler cause > effect outcomes that can be conveyed easily in credit blurbs. But I'm glad Obsidian tried it this way.

Well you certainly don't want to dump CON on your tank considering at theres at least one fight which may one shot a low CON fighter even at lvl 12 in nice gear. And before lategame there are a few enemies where you can take a huge amount of burst damage that can kill a tank out of nowhere, such as ogres. Also if you care about not resting as much, it helps with HP attrition, useful for say a monk.

Prayer Against Treachery might not deserve to be lvl6, but it is very useful in a LOT of fights. Mind control in a huge pain in the ass and neutralizing it with a very fast cast at the start of a fight makes a big difference.