Boeroer

1. Best pet: totally depends on your character build. But for melee dps characters usually Abraham is very good. 2. Don't think there is "the best" dual wieldng weapon setup - but for an Assassin the dagger "Lover's Embrace" can be very good because it allows you to kill very overleveled enemies with its neverending bleeding effect. It stacks with the Rogue's Gouging Strike which also never ends. You can sneak in, use Gouging Strike with Lover's Embrace, maybe follow up with a Barbaric Smash and then use Smoke Veil to vanish and retreat out of sight - then and let the target bleed to death. That way you can win encounters that otherwise would be too difficult for you. You can combine this with the dagger Pukestabber in the offhand - it's a very good dagger, too. But there's countless other good weapon setups. For example Rust's Poignard is great, also the flail Ball & Chain, the sabre Grave Calling, the flail Sun & Moon and so on. I have a Discord account but I'm almost never there, sorry. You can reach me here - I don't mind answering public questions and maybe other forum users are interested as well - but you can also write a private message (top right menu besides the bell notification icon). You can also reach me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/boeroer

Woedica priests have mortars?

fixed it.

Yes, stacking works differnently in Deadfire. Gnerally speaking all passive item buffs (+x to y all the time - and so on) and all other passives (right side of the ability "tree") will stack with everything. Active effects (left side of the ability tree, also most often effects that have a limited duration) will not stack. So for example Iron Skin (Wizard active ability/spell) will not stack with Gilded Enmity (Goldpact Knight active ability). But Stoic Steel (Paladin passive ability) will stack with everything. Serafen's cipher subclass isn't very attractive but you can still build a good fortitude-debuffing Witch out of him. Also he brings the AoE blunderbuss "Hand Mortar" and you can get a second AoE blunderbuss from his companion quest: "Fire in the Hole". Both are very unique and awesome weapons. My favorite weapons even.

Little trick: if you took the Bounding Boots from Benweth you can reach most (if not all) chests/containters stealthed without having to use Sparkcrackers.

I don't think you need any stealth for stealing the grimoire. I'm not even sure you need mechnics(?).

My wife had an Indian colleague when she studied in France - he was completely unaware that he shouldn't show the Swastika or else get in trouble. At first he didn't even want to comply because he only new the symbol as one for rising sun/hope etc. After a short history lesson he understood. Since he was/is a well educated lad I guess India in general doesn't really bother. Japan even removing mirrored swastikas is understandable because they were (kind of) allied with the Nazis.

If you mean the Swastika, that's mostly from India. To be more precise: it's mostly used in Hinduism but also Jainism and Buddhism. It's still widely used in India today. The symbol that the Japanese use(d) on maps to mark positions of temples is not a Swastika - because it's mirrored. Of course here in Germany wanna-be Nazis even get that wrong so...

We had the same discussion with Google in Germany/Europe which lead to the "Leistungsschutzrecht" - basically a law that's supposed to protect the effort that was put into researching and, writing and publishing articles and such. It got canceled by the EU in its current form but the discussion is not over yet. Something will come out of it. Afaik Google never threatened to leave Germany or the EU - would be like shooting oneself in the foot I guess.

"Zykon B was used as a delousing agent - thus it can't be deadly unless you get it all over yourself". Perfect reasoning. Maybe somebody should put that weak excuse for a human being into a chamber with Zyklon B and check if what he said is true - just to demonstrate how "harmless" it is of course. Along with the Hawaiian GOP member who share the evil nonsense of such scumbags. For science! By the way: concentration camp prisoners were also mass murdered with engine exhaust gas. Which - as we all know - is used as a demousing agent and is mostly harmless unless you get it all over yourself. Jeez I have to go puke now.

RFID injections are possible. They just don't make sense. Like most conspiracy theories. So that fits guess. Yeah 5G... what about chemtrails? Poor things - all alone and forgotten...

I once worked on a RFID project for navigating in big gas-fired power plants. You need big coils to induce enough power into the passive chip in order for it so send its number (and that's all an RFID does) with enough range. That range was about 1 meter. You can use active RFIDs which have a longer range - but those would require a battery. The range is also determined by the size of the RFID antenna. If you look at cheap RFID stickers in shops you'll see that "printed" spiral. That's quite visible and yet the range is very short. The coils you sometimes see at both sides of shop doors that will sound an alarm if you try to carry a tagged item outside: those coils will induce power into the passive RFID so it can send its number. If that number isn't cleared the alarm will sound. That's why pets' subcutaneous RFID can only be activated by a rel. big coil that you hold right over the chip. The needle used for chipping pets is huge compared to a needle you do vaccinations with. Those RFIDs are rel. big as well. Try to inject something like that into human muscle tissue... ouch. Subcutaneous chips wouldn't be good because you would be able to see and feel it. I don't believe there is any passive RFID that can be activated and read by cell phone towers. But that project was some time ago... so maybe some cool new RFID tech was invented that I don't know about. But even if that would be possible: you'd only get a number. All that effort to just get a number and maybe build some movement profile with it? And yes, exactly: Nowadays everybody has something like a cell phone, tablet, smartwatch etc. which is sending a ton of information via cell phone towers and emits a lot of information via Wifi and Bluetooth for example even if you are not connected to anything. In that project we could create a unique fingerprint and movement profile that was accurate to the meter just by analyzing some emitted cell phone signals - and that was 10 years ago or so. Seamless surveillance is already possible - why would anybody go through great lengths in order to plant a dumb RFID when everybody is already wearing the perfect bugging device with them already - voluntarily? If pets could carry smartphones... I mean these people fearing they might be getting tagged with RFID-vaccines are the same that do selfies in Nancy Pelosi's office and putting them online...

Yes, it is very good.

A bit? According to my brother-in-law who holds a PhD in nanotechnology (and works at Robert Bosch GmbH) we are still far, far away from that - at least the monitoring and repairing part.

It also depends on your PoE story. It only occurs if you did some special things with Durgan's Battery I believe.

Yes, I can see a lot of combos that would be fun.

Bilestomper was ultimately designed to be able to shower himself (and the enemy of course) with poison/disease/corrosion spells. The Mountain Dwarf passive helped a lot - but in Deadfire the Mountain Dwarf gets a completely different racial ability. In Deadfire a similar approach would be to use Rekvu's Scorched Cloak and shower yourself with fire spells I guess. Addendum: Neckless of Fireballs has the keywords Fire and Evocation. It scales with universal Power Level but also fire Power Levels but NOT Evocation Power Levels (for whatever reason). So a Helwalker with Sun & Moon + Magran's Favor + Otto Starcat, Prestige and Thunderous Blows does >100 fire damage per target with the necklace easily at lvl 20 due to the 60%+ PL bonus combined with the insane MIG. Unfortunately you can't stack the same amount of power levels for the Missile Gloves (only keyword is evocation and that doesn't work for some reason as I said above). Universal PLs like from Lance of the Midwood Stag do work though.

Most powerful or effective would be spamming summons from figurines or some of the DLC trinkets maybe? Didn't really analyze that. I never used that export/import "trick" for an actual playthrough - except for a partial one with a Barbarian I build around Vengeful Defeat (with items such as Effort and other items that trigger AoE stuff on knockout). In PoE you could turn off kockout injuries so such a suicidal Barb could be fun enough to play. In Deadfire you can't opt out of injuries - it would be possible to use Vengeful Defeat up to three times per encounter - but you'd want to rest after each fight and that's kinda lame. So I exported/imported the Ring of Reset to be able to use the same approach but with no injuries after the encounter (and no need to cast a reviving spell of course). So basically it spared me the rest-spamming. I didn't consider that to be superpowerful - just a lot more convenient. So I can see how this little glitch may enable you to play some cool character ideas - like a fireball-slinging SC Helwalker or an all-fire themed SC Paladin who can still sling some spells then. Basically you could add a (tiny) subset of wizard spells to a single class or multiclass char. Like adding half a class on top. Something like my old Engineer build from PoE times who was a Fighter who used elecricity and missile spellbindings. This could be done with a Fighter/Skald for the shock stuff and the whisp summons and then add Missile Gloves. Stuff like that. Not necessarily OP but just something different that is still viable and more importantly fun.

The microchip will travel to your brain and make your gray matter microsoft?

By the way: before initiating dialogue you can pause the game (unfortunately there's no auto-pause setting for this). That way no time will pass while talking. You cannot pause during dialogue. But enemies can't find you in stealth mode nor can they initiate combat during that time.

Speaking of Necklace of Fireballs: In case you guys didn't know: if you have at least two Necklaces of Fireball you can unleash 8 Fireballs per encounter "for free". Just keep one charged necklace in the stash (NOT the character's inventory) and wear the other necklace. After a fight where you used charges of FIreballs just stack them in the stash, then reequip and *tadaa*: necklaces refilled to 8 charges. This works with all items that have per-rest uses or charged uses IF you can find at least two of them. Necklace of Fireballs, Missile Gloves and Stone of Power are the ones that most people find two or more of, at least if you use the Berath's Blessings vendor. You can also export a character with items such as Ring of Reset and then hire that guy with items in your actual playthrough to just take those items. That way you can turn all per-rest/charged items into per-encounter items.

Why would you buy the Grimoire of Vaporous Wizardry?

Just the forum grump.

I was talking about an unchecked capitalism in general. Those trends are less prominent in European countries that have (or had) a rel. strong social democratic influence. This doesn't only mean free education but also universal health care, free child care (day nursery, kindergarden, pre-school), paid apprenticeship instead of unpaid internship, access to funding and fair loans, information campagins and so on and so forth. Rich kids and kids of academics will always have a head start - you shoudn't put a spoke in the poor kids' wheels. Small anecdote: in my school class on the Gymnasium (high school basically) there were 25 kids and none of us had parents who were rich or academics. We nearly all went to university. I met most of them on our 20th anniversary of the Abitur (high school diploma) in 2015 and was pleasantly surprised that all of them had been quite successful in life.

Yes, your Animal Companion is a teammate and Minor Threat will work. Killer's Gloves don't give you a higher chance to crit, they only give you 10% more damage if you crit (which isn't a lot). Crit conversions do stack (other conversions, too). But not like "10% + 10% = 20%". Instead those conversion chances are checked one after the other - and if one succeeds the checking stops. You can calculate the combined chance to convert like so: (chance NOT to convert * chance NOT to convert (and so on) - 1) * -1 --> your overallchance to convert. Example: you have Minor Threat (10% or 0.1) and Dirty Fighting (10% or 0.1). You calculate: 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81 -1 = -0.19 * -1 = 0.19 --> 19% Minor Threat and Dirty FIghting and Uncanny Luck: (0.9*0.9*0.95-1) *-1 = 0.23 or 23%