Boeroer

Fighter's Unbending ability provides a small instance of an healing-over-time effect (also called Unbending in the combat tooltips under active effects) every time the char receives damage. With Wall of Draining every such instance of Unbending gets prolonged. They all stack and thiscan lead to up to thousands of HP regenerated every 3 secs (in extreme cases). The Battlemage becomes unkillable (unless he gets one-shotted which isn't very likely). However, Unbending and Wall of Draining are not really early abilites. Luckily Vigorous Defense stacks with all of the Wizard's deflection buffs (except with Llengrath's Safeguard - the AR bonus stacks though, just not the defense ones). So a Battlemage can be plenty sturdy as slong as he's not hit by an Arcane Dampener. That is the advantage of the Paladin: his passive defense bonuses can't get dispelled.

Raw dmg from Soul Annihilation will get delivered to all enemies in the AoE, yes. But the mechanics are a little wonky. It seems the first target gets the normal raw damage, focus drops to 0 - the next one (in the AoE) gets no raw dmg (since focus is at 0) but generates focus again, the next after that gets a bit raw damage from the newly acquired focus and even generates more focus (it doesn't drop to 0 again but keeps filling), the next target refills focus even more and gets even more raw dmg and so on. The more enemies the better. It's not likely that this is the intended behavior, but it works very well. Also focus generation vs. mobs is absolutely excellent as one might guess (since the AoE hits generate focus).

Hi again. Just my personal preferences/opinion 1. Single class Bloodmage (if you don't like Empower) or non-subclass Wizard 2. Helwalker/Bloodmage (dangerous but fun) or Assassin/Bloodmage (Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure induced shenanigans). 3. Psion/Wizard 4. Arcane Knight or Battlemage 5. totally depends on your imagination 6. Arcane Knight

Carnage only gets triggered by the initial attack roll of the Lance. So it only gets triggered once per attack, no crazyness. If you are looking for some AoE*AoE power you need to combine the Lance with Clear Out (Fighter). Swift Flurry didn't work with the AoE hits of the Lance, then it did... don't know the current status 100%. It's worth testing again. But note that Swift Flurry will never redo a whole AoE attack but will only repeat that singular hit roll that it triggered off. So it's not supercrazy but might be nice nevertheless. Great stuff with the Lance are all attacks that do something special with the enemy, such as Mule Kick, Clear Out (the crazier the more enemies), Force of Anguish, Stunning Surge (high chance of refund, too), Crippling Strike and so on. That all works in an AoE then.

Speaking of wizard multiclasses: Arcane Knight is a very forgiving combo. Bloodmage/Steel Garrote with Whispers of the Endless Paths is still my current favorite Arcane Knight. Sage can be a lot of fun. Especially when using Citzal's Spirit Lance. Helwalker/Bloodmage would be my pick. I personally really like a melee Geomancer with the Willbreaker (Morning Star). Stalker/Wizard. I use Concelhaut's Draining Touch for my Essential Phantom and the Morning Star (+modal) to lower fortitude for my animal companion's Takedown Combo. Warlock can be very nice to play because that combo can reach very fast casting speed, especially once Blood Thirst is available. Berserker/Wizard for the nice PEN boost. Battlemage with Citzal's Spirit Lance is also fun. Once you get Clear Out mobs are flying like puppets.

PS: thank you very much. I have to inform you though that I'm happily married.

Unfortunately deflection (and the other defenses like will etc.) have increasing returns. That means that the more you stack the more impact any additional point has. If your deflection is already low (and fourty-something is rather low) then a few points from Psychovampiric Shield won't change much (it can if you also apply ACC debuffs like Eyestrike though). With low deflection chars I usually see it as a waste of focus. You can stack Veteran's Recovery with Shod in Faith Boots and other sources of endurance-healing which will make you more sturdy, yes. Especially if you combine them with "healing done" and "healing received" modifiers (see camping bonuses from Survival skills). But it won't affect your health - which usually isn't that high with Ciphers in the first place. You can, however, combine all that with some potions of Infuse with Vital Essence. Once your health drops very low (but you're still healing endurance) you can drink such potions and regain health. The amount of health restored is influenced by "healing done/received" mods as well. Besides that: hard disables on enemies and high DR.

Night Runner + Cape of Withdrawal do not stack - that much is correct. Wayfarer's Hide is great imo, also I'm a fan of Blaidh Golan (especially against ogres). But both will not give you more protection when getting pommeled with melee attacks. Usually Whisper of Treason and other mind control abilities are the best way to prevent getting attacked (later Ring Leader). You basically turn an enemy into a summon for a limited amount of time. During that time the charmed enemy not only stops attacking you but also keeps other enemies from attacking you. Just don't hit the charmed enemy: it won't give you focus. I mean you can and charmed is actually a pretty hefty debuff so the enemy falls faster - but I wouldn't do it as slong as there are non-flipped enemies around which would give you focus.

Yup, that's the only cultural background with +1 INT.

indeed I think all healing/dmg over time abilities (Disintegration, Plague of Insects, Lay on Hands and whatnot) also scream for bonus PL instead of Fighting Spirit. Also Fighting Spirit only influences offensive actions, Power Levels influences all abilites: offensive, supportive and defensive.

Why is he supposed to be very old? He recently got killed by Moedred of the Sanitarium where they were both doing research and only since then was "undead". Also: being great at necromancy and animancy doesn't necessarily lead to being great at fighting random murder hobos. But ok: with such an impressive curriculum vitae a group of murder hobos might rightfully expect a bigger challenge. Especially because it was said that Helig single-handedly fought against the Northwatch Rangers and wiped them all except Dalton. Man, those rangers must have had dayflies as animal companions...

Basically yes. Auto-attacks don't gain anything from Power Level directly, but passives like Sneak Attack do scale with PL which might also affect the performance of auto-attacks. But generally I would say that auto attacks (weapon attacks with no use of an active ability) are better off with Fighting Spirit. But don't forget that Death Godlikes also get a dmg bonus against near death enemies. The good thing about Power Levels is not only the multiplicative dmg (or healing) but also the multiplicative duration bonus (especially good with healing and damage over time - since both the ticks do more dmg/health but also you get more ticks from longer duration - which means multiplicative dmg * multiplicative duration). And also improved PEN can mean a huge difference in damage since underpenetrating is a severe dmg loss due to the double inversion that all maluses go through when dmg calculation is done. The -25% of 1 point of underpenetration is not additive! -75% from 3 points of underpenetration is so severe that you will only deliver a tiny fraction of your usual dmg. So more PEN is always great. Especially with spells and other non-weapon attacks since you can't boot their PEN with the use of weapons. Helmets aside of course - since there are some that put +3 PL to absolute shame with the right character (like Fractured Casque or Deltro's Cage Helmet and so on) - and under the prerequisite that you are near death at all times (which is either not very likely or extremely tedious to manage). In general I would prefer Human over Death Godlike because keeping the Death Godlike at near death is too tedious to enjoy it (for me personally).

+3 Power Level is superior. Besides a 15% multiplicative dmg bonus for all abilites you also get more PEN, more ACC and longer (multiplicative) duration for them. Fighting Spirit's dmg bonus is only additive and it also it has a limited duration. If you want to use autoattacks mostly then Fighting Spirit is better though I'd say. Power Levels are especially powerful once you use weapons and/or abilities that scale especially well with them - for example Monk's fists or stuff that scales projectiles (missile spells for example) and jumps (Eld Nary, Mind Blades, Whispers of the Wind etc.).

I am not. Chilling Grave does trigger Grave Bound as I explained above.

Sorry, zero time to play any games right now. Not even the new Blazing Deserts DLC from Battle Brothers which I so anticipated...

Def. number 3.

Maybe Concelhaut stumbled across those ancient dude's small lichdom and was plagiarizing? Maybe it's an Engwithan Lich - because the phylactery Concelhaut uses is explicitily called an "Engwithan phylactery". So even if some animancers of Engwith couldn't do this doesn't mean that some ancient Engwithan Archmage couldn't. I guess. Like Helig of Thein Concelhaut combines Necromancy with Animancy. Maybe this isn't all new stuff. Also the Engwithan Saints emanate a lot of lichy vibes.

I agree. I'm not really interested in faction stuff. If they are in that's okay, but I don't like to be nudged towards joining them.

Iirc I had MIG at 10 - or maybe 13, not sure. But not high. Since you already want to have high RES and INT and PER and DEX shouldn't be too shabby either not much is left for MIG and CON.

They said something like "I could be convinced to do it." with a smiley or "I'm in!" and stuff like that. And they said that on Twitter (Josh's Tumblr posts automatically get published on Twitter as well).

Rofl. ADHD?

After Josh posted his last answer to a Deadfire question on tumblr (basically saying smth. along the lines of "we know there are fans who love PoE and Deadfire, we hear them and we know that they want a PoE3, but we as a team of developers also have to want to make it" Alec Frey (Producer), Matt Hansen (Artist) and other Obs devs chimed in and said they'd do it. So maybe it's not a distant future when the devs decide they want to try again. Don't know if Josh wants to be in though (he still seems to feel pretty unenthusiastic about a PoE3). But maybe he doesn't have to be the lead. Maybe somebody else will do it and Josh will just give feedback and throw in ideas. I mean most DLCs weren't directed by Josh and they turned out pretty well imo.

I also believe that single player isomeric RPG is a rather narrow niche. But I also think that MS Game Pass could lead to some more (lower-budget) isometric RPGs. Microsoft wants a broad portfolio for the game pass and naturally they don't want to fill it with AAA titles only. Isometric RPGs have a long life. Recently more and more people came up on Twitter saying that they only now started to play Deadfire and had a blast. So I wouldn't lower prices... yet.

Non-lethal damage would have been easy to implement with something like PoE's endurance/health system (which got simplified to health-only for Deadfire unfortunately): you would only cause endurance damage but instead of doing the same dmg to health you would In fact Deal 0 health damage (or very little). It wouldn't matter against normal enemies but could be used for a bunch of other encounters where you might want to win by knockout but not kill the opponent. I could also imagine abilities that would only do endurance damage would be nice.

Blood ward is indeed very powerful since it drains from all damage you cause, AoEs and DoTs included.