Raven Darkholme

It does work with some self inflicted abilities, concelhauts hammer for example.

I need to test later how the unique frenzies behave after unequipping and saving. As far as i remember Amra Action speed buff is called Amra and not frenzy, so there might be some stacking cheese possible.

Why not just use frenzy from Amra with no downside?

You can, just keep in mind 5% blade cascade chance can take quite a while if you get unlucky. If you are late enough in the game to get Scordeo's you can also get Rakhan field boots and hit yourself with Scordeo's btw.

It is the same as with Deltro's, you can hit a target with Scordeo's (properly upgraded ofc) and have a chance to trigger the upgrades including Blade Cascade out of combat. (If you play the Magran's Fires selected solo mode you can recruit companions and instead of joining you they will be sent to the ship, just be careful to not kill them, so this is done best before getting the Deltro lash :P) If you play priest or wizard you can also just extend Scordeo buffs with Salvation of time or Wall of Draining, as long as you have brilliant or blood sacrifice and permanently recast your duration extenders Scordeos buffs will persist even after combat ends, now you can use Strand of favour to infinitely extend it. Solo the Deltro lash can go up to 300% if you play an Assassin and up to 200 if you don't. (140 is relatively easy to reach) Easiest way to apply it to self is via max arcana scrolls of chain lightning (140 lash will be more realistic than 200 then, depending on class ofc) Theres ofc several other ways to self apply it, you just never get a 2nd try and have to wait for the duration to expire (or alternatively as single class wizard cast arcane cleanse on self). Any way to hit yourself with lightning dmg worksfine, crits are key and high + crit dmg modifiers. @Kaylonreached 300% solo by playing an Assassin and applying deltros in combat while potion of final stand was active. This allows you to use Essence Interrupter (which otherwise leads to an instant death screen) with max metaphysics.

Maybe I'm mentioning Blade Cascade too much, but I'm just doing this to show my own subjective interpretation of balance. I'm not even saying everything should be as strong as blade cascade, that's why I said earlier the question is if one tool is too strong or the others too weak.

I really like Monk/cipher too. Paladin/cipher is very support heavy, monk is more offensive.

Well this thread is about solo. Op played a solo class and didn't seem to like it. My suggestion is about being able to play pretty much any class solo. Me personally I haven't finished the game including all megabosses solo with every single class in the game. So as long as I keep playing new classes I'm having fun.

Well before Strand it was very restricted, but @abotthe only summoner who finished the Ultimate already used strand, so from that point on any class could finish it with good enough strategy. I never said summons are "bad" my whole argument was based around how balanced they are compared to using other abilities. You are correct that theres plenty of other abilites who don't do enough damage on something as tanky as Dorudugan. As Kaylon said balance is quite a subjective thing. Are some tools just too op (dots, blade cascade) or others too weak?

Hm, do I want to be restricted to two classes or the game to be too easy, thats a very good question.

Close Combat becomes best after Ashen Maw is finished and you can get Scordeo's Edge and upgrade to Blade Cascade. Priest's and wizards can have 100% uptime on 0 recovery, or with .... do I dare say it Strand of favour any class can. Ofc that would be way too much fun so we can't have that in an ethical game.

Balance mainly comes from Multiplayer games. When using a class/skill/item etc. gives you an unfair advantage over people not using it its likely to get patched. Same when something is underused. (In an ideal scenario) In Deadfire being a singleplayer game I do agree it is more subjective, since players only compete with themselves, not with others. However the Ultimate was somewhat a competitive event and out of the first 12 only one was using summons heavily, even tho technically they are an ideal and safe choice. This is simply due to them being underwhelming in the damage department and this includes the animated weapons even tho they are the best summons AND scale. Now ofc I agree it's most likely an oversight the other summons don't scale, that doesn't change the fact it's in the game and won't be patched except by mods. At the end of the day summons are at best a distraction in deadfire and even if all summons scaled properly none of them would even come close to the planetars, elemental princes or even the humble skeleton warriors of BG. While BG summons might have been unbalanced in the way that some of them were too op (subjectively), in deadfire summons have a hard time competing with other skills. Their main use is being a distraction or solving fights underleveled by keeping your party completely out of the fight and let the summons do all. Killing Dorudugan with only summons damage is a feat of much patience.

You're not wrong, but in BG you have an open world-like environment, which is at least somewhat different to an actual table-top session. Unless you're intentionally looking for trouble you're not gonna run into encounters where you are getting outscaled by the enemies. Summons being lackluster happens very rarely in BG, some are just (much) more op than others, it's a very different situation from deadfire where all summons are relatively bad and some are just worse than others.

Hm, I don't agree. Deadfire summons biggest weakness is that the low level summons don't scale well late game, so to say Baldur's Gate's summon system is worse than Poe because it suffers from a similar weakness is .... a strange argument. In a DnD game them being based of actual creature stats is actually quite a good way to balance, because creature stats in dnd are very balanced. (You wouldn't want a lone goblin summon to defeat a dragon? as a silly example) IF Deadfires PL scaling was applied better to all summons then I'd agree with you but it just isn't.

Idk about pre EE-version of BG because I only played it once fully and it was my first playthru of BG saga ever so I didn't pay enough attention but: EE BG summons are very balanced because they use the actual creature stats of ingame creatures. Tbf only Animate Dead scales with caster level afaik, so you probably meant specifically in terms of scaling, but in overally balance BG saga/IWD1 has one of the best system for summons period imo, most of them just don't scale, but the one scaling summon is a go to summon, so the scaling is implemented quite well on that one.

@Boeroer I tested this over a year ago (maybe closer to two years, it was in the early stages of the Ultimate). Shadowing beyond from rogue never broke on dot ticks. However shadowing beyond from skaen priest breaks on dots even tho it looks exactly the same, maybe you played a rogue/priest? As to Brilliant Departure while its true that many non damaging abilities AND wall spells (even the damaging ones) won't break it, dots will break it, so it's not superior in every way to Shadowing beyond from rogue.

Well in general Power level works like that in deadfire, some summons just got the bad end of the stick, pretty much all other abilities scale. A very good example is another chanter invocation Thrice was she wronged. Not only is the Powerlevel 3 upgrade Her Revenge an amazing upgrade, but thru scaling it remains one of the best invocations thru the entire game.

Lol I'm blind then and edited my post.

edit: I can't read

If you really only want to fight with summons, which I wouldn't recommend, all you need to do is shoot vela in the face with a blunderbuss while having belt of Magran's chosen on, while you have no dot of any form like deep wounds from a rogue, until the belt spawns a fire blight. Charm the blight, send your summons to the actual enemy, never get even close to enemy and they will only fight your summons. If you really want to do it from invis just do as Boeroer says, use wall of draining, use briliant instead of blood sacrifice to get wall back whenever it runs out.

With itself. I was being a cheeselord wanting to stack it off barrels etc, but I guess if you combine it with enough action speed buffs, "frenzy" from Amra etc, you might be able to reach 0 attack time anyway. (it's like 0.4 even with just barb frenzy + bloodlust on a avg speed weapon) Another upside of Bloodlust is, it seems to negate halted recovery from reforge the flesh, so you can freely weapon switch. I might just go for soulblade/ranger tho, onepunching everything is just too much fun and with autoclicker "stranding" doesn't take that long.

All this talk of Mage Slayers and berserkers made me go and try out Barb. One interesting thing i found was Bloodlust being out of combat and prolongable with Strand but sadly it doesn't stack.

Brilliant + confused is no problem if you are not above being cheesy. As always the key to all cheese is strand of favour. get brilliant thru any item effect granting it, Shroud of the phantasm or least unstable coil and who knows what else. Prolong it with strand of favour for however long you want it, 100ish equips will get you over 20k secs. (really fast if you have another necklace in inventory and just keep double clicking invent) Now the real trick is to make the game think you don't have brilliant (sadly this doesn't work with confuse from street sweeper, first thing I tried ofc :P) To do this simply unequip your shroud or coil, quicksave and reload. Voila you now have a unique effect called shroud of the phantasm/least unstable coil, but you can also be confused and will not lose it. Berserker is definitely a nice candidate just for the sake of self confuse but it doesn't bring much else for the ultimate.

Hm, tested it a bit and it's a lot less good than I thought initially. First application of confused will not be overwritten, so the base duration of street sweeper is all you get and Rakhan can't be recast more than once in combat. Also self targeting allied skills does not work since charmed and dominated lets you lose control of char. One interesting observation: When charming/dominating out of combat this will put you in combat. While at the start you don't have control, once charm wears off you will still have a couple seconds control of your char before combat ends. And ofc also all allied and foe only spells can be cast on vela, paladin stuff for example, or Stasis shell. You can charm vela too I guess, no idea what purpose that serves.

Not gonna lie I was thinking about that one just for you. What I'm experimenting with rn is cipher + street sweeper + tenuous grasp. Self confuse with Rakhan and sweeper for 20ish secs, but then on a crit its 60 secs with tenous. The amount of possibilites cipher gets with self confuse is pretty insane including taking care of vela, but also being able to self target allied skills.... I just don't know what to multiclass it with, or even single class, remake alotta but in the ultimate??!