Boeroer

Luminaries are a special kind of extra smart Vithrack from PoE's White March. I also don't recall how the game translated that. Maybe we just take it out of the english version as well. I can't deduce an argument here. Maybe if Brilliant restored Empower points then the Empower mechanic would be used more often? Seems to work with Sasha's Singing Scimitar...?

With Brilliant restoring Empower you wouldn't need to rest. It would be like Sasha's Singing Scimitar - but for everyone who's brilliant.

Why is that?

Hm... what about giving an Empower Point periodically? You can't use more than one per encounter anyway, you can't have more than your max anyway - but you could avoid resting and use Empower more often (either in order to get more resources or to ewmpower an ability). Is it just me or would this immediately solve the problems with SoT and Wall of Draining?

"Dieser geheimnisvolle Trank wird aus gelösten Vithrack-Hirnen destilliert und mit der Essenz eines unerbittlichen Adra-Animats aufgeladen. Sie erlaubt schier sagenhafte Einsichten und erfüllt den Nutzer mit einer unermüdlichen Beharrlichkeit." Don't know the Deadfire-traslation of Luminary so I just skipped that.

Edér

If it weren't for the bad accuracy I would be all in.

I would love to see an effect that is in line with the attribute it's attached to: Intellect. So something that only really smart characters could have/do. I thought Anti-Confusion was such a thing. Maybe there's something else that sounds "brilliant" and is cool from a mechanical point of view. I mean restorig resources is pretty cool and fits - It's just so hard to balance between casters and non-casters imo.

Yes, vanilla game Shifter/Helwalker has that bugged(?) boar DoT which then gets amplified by the Helwalker's MIG and INT - and that really shreds stuff.

I like Ring the Bell the most actually. It's a tad pricy but it always works, the ticks are high and it lasts pretty long. Toxic Strike can be brutal but immunity to poison isn't that uncommon unfortunately. If you start from stealth against a Steelclad and apply Gouging Strike + Lover's Embrace, Deep Wounds, Ring the Bell and then Arterial Strike in a quick flurry and then zip away you can watch it melt while it tries to catch up - even if your PEN is total crap. It's fun imo.

That's why I added Instruments of Pain and "or at least one that doesn't get hit a lot" The good thing is that Enfeebled itself profits from its own +50% duration buff - so a graze isn't actually that bad and can still make some difference. The base duration is 12 secs but because it buffs its own duration it's always more than that. It also lowers Fortitude so you actually can try to reapply it more easily if you wish. If the boss ist resistant to CON afflictions then at least you will apply the weakened status - which isn't as good as enfeebled obviously but still better than applying no CON-affliction at all with your damaging ability. Keep in mind that besides a healing malus -5 CON also reduces the health of the enemy - even significantly if it's a boss. It's even helpful if the affliction ends prematurely: Here's one good thing about Envervating Blows though: if you have no trouble landing crits vs. deflection it will apply weakened automatically (no seperate roll vs. Fortitude). So maybe it's even worth taking if you are a Forbidden Fist. You dodged the part about Enfeebled + Mind Control which I think is a rel. strong suit of Forbidden Fist/Cipher imo.

Imo German newspapers are Starker Tobak hard if you know what I mean. If it's not the BILD Zeitung (which is just awful so please don't read that).

It's a nice build to just shred high DR stuff. Good riddance Steelclads and friends. Underpenetration and low weapon dmg don't matter that much. I won't use all of those attacks on every enemy though. Some are immune to poison so no Toxic Strike, some enemies don't move so no Arterial Strike, Gouging Strike is pretty low DoT so it often only gets used if the rest isn't enough (or when I dispatch overleved enemies with a Gouging Strike + Lover's Embrace from stealth) and so on. I didn't use Battle Axes (total overkill) but daggers for the speed. Especially Pukestabber. Full Attacks with dual daggers and Pukestabber have really short recovery so you can breeze from enemy to enemy and deliver some nice DoTs and also potentially interrupt in a rel. quick time. Rogue/Ranger isn't bad for this. High ACC and you can use Evasive Roll instead of Escape to zip around but don't waste Guile. Shadowdancer is also very nice because of the high INT.

Yes, against normal foes Gambit is great. Vanishing Strikes calls for a different playstyle, but it's also very cool. It's also true that you will only use passives and no other offensive ability then. But I find that's a problem with all classes that have a finite resource pool: Since the offensive abilites compete for the scarce ability AND resource points a player is somewhat encouraged to focus on one main attack ability. Even with MC Rogues I often only use Crippling Strike/Arterial Strike. Only if I do a DoT build I will use Arterial + Gouging Strike, Toxic Strike and Ring the Bell (because the different DoTs stack). But that's a very special case.

If you can remove a crash with the console (never tried actually) it should be doable with a mod, shouldn't it? I don't mind that drug effects get suppressed by Arcane Dampener - they are timed benefical effects after all - but that crash once the AD is gone is kind of silly and a reoccurring complaint. It would be no big deal if AD wasn't that widely used later in the game. I mean those Scriveners etc. in the Drowned Barrows will cast AD before they even stretch in the morning...

Speaking of successful mystery/fantasy writers (maybe not ridiculously successful, but still): What do you think about The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by P. Rothfuss? I enjoyed reading them and it wasn't difficult - but I can't really judge the quality of writing. It felt quite good (to me as a non-native speaker) though.

Thank you. I'm already part of the Community Patch group and maybe we will address this, too - if there's consensus of course.

I don't think he's a strict upgrade of vanilla monk. If a Nalpasca is out of drugs he can't heal and gets -1 wounds per tick which is pretty bad. Sure, you are better than the average monk when using drugs, but you are way, way worse when not. And Arcane Dampener (which is pretty common later in the game) would still be a huge pain. I consider the removal of crash after AD wears off a bugfix.

Most pictures of Jack Sparrow where he's wiedling weapons show him with a pistol and a cutlass or some rel. slender sabre. So I guess Scordeo's Edge and Scordeo's Trophy would be fine? My class choice would be Debonaire/Beguiler I think.

I don't know. I find Deadfire is pretty easy to follow in English. Sure, there's some vocabulary that the average reader might need to look up - but that's a good thing imo. Like I find it nice to look up new words while I read an English novel. I can guess what some words mean but am not 100% sure - then I look them up and learn something new. Otherwise I think Deadfire is not too complicated. It doesn't have those awful multi-cause sentences like German humanities scholars like to write them. And if the average German middle schooler can read it then @theleecan, too. I once tried to read Victor Hugo's "L'Homme qui rit" (The Man Who Laughs) in french, miserably failed - then in English, also failed - then looked at the German version and tossed it all aside. I also didn't like "The Name of the Rose" in English at all. Josh might hate me for it - but that's how it is. What I really liked was Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe". I guess the German version could be equally fun to read? Another great piece is Gottfried Keller's "Kleider machen Leute" (Clothes Make the Man). I loved in when I was in school. Obviously the language used is a bit old but I think it's fairly easy - at least compared to some other contemporary stuff. I know that the Brandon Sanderson novels are very easy to read for me in English - so I assume the same is true for the German ones. I read the first two books of the Stormlight Chronicles in German while I ws sitting in planes and cars, travelling. The rest I read in English. Not to say it's high qulity literature - but Sanderson's later novels feel rel. well written and entertaining to me. So maybe that's also something to look into. Usually German traslations of such books are well done. I also enjoyed reading "IT" (King) back in the day to improve my English while I was in school. Most of King's books were easy reads imo. Not all were equally entertaining, but some I liked a lot. Just so that we're on the same page: I wouldn't advocate to learn German with Deadfire alone. Eh no. I just think it would be a good addon. If you're playing it anyway then why not use it to read even more German text? Of course - if you want to learn a language in earnest you want to take some form of proper lessons, too. Before, later, at the same time or whatever works.

Well, newspapers or professional articles can be hard. Stanisław Lem is a philosopher. Those are not known to write texts that are easy to read. But I guess Deadfire is more on the easy side (if you take all those names of creatures and metaphysics stuff etc. away).

Right. But the German mod is pretty good (by the way: for PoE1, too). I studied "Germanistik" (German philology) before I became a computer scientist so I'm not totally clueless when it comes to stuff like that. You can support your lessons with books, movies and also with Deadfire if you want to. I think it only will help and not hurt. But I would def. install those mods to avoid some of the pretty strange parts. And besides my lessons in school I only practiced English with articles, books, games and movies (and audiobooks but very rarely). I don't play/read/listen to German versions (if the original is English). Imo that improved my colloquial English tremendously. Not that it's flawless of course, but I feel comfortable using it.

Well I guess @theleeis incredibly familiar with the story of Deadfire.

Maybe - and wrong gender etc. is pretty bad. But if there's a good mod (done by Spanish native speakers I presume) I guess it would be totally fine? Somwhat unrelated but I think Obsidian should drive to the translation company they used for Deadfire and casually kick them in the nuts a bit*. German, Spanish and also Russion translations seem to be quite bad out of the box. Reading about Spanish and Russion I think the German one was the best of the lot. )*I'm not serious of course. But maybe kick their butts?

Aloth Durance Rekkance