Boeroer

I did in the other thread.

I personally would (and did) use a SC Helwalker with high MIG, PER, DEX and INT and low RES and CON. Since Turning Wheel doesn't work with ranged weapons you can also use Enlightened Agony for +5 INT instead of Duality(INT) and then use Iron Wheel. It counterbalances the increased damage that Helwalkers receive with every wound. You can also only take Duality and not upgrade it (I did that because of pure lazyness - no need to trigger Enlightened Agony manually all the time and I spared an ability point). You can get Hand Mortar from Serafen very quickly (you'll meet him right after the "turotial" island). And completing his quest in order to get Fire in the Hole is quickly done and doesn't even need a single combat (if you don't want to). So: you can get it very early as well. Recommended enchantments: "Blinding Smoke" on Hand Mortar (the smoke triggers Avenging Storm lightnings from scrolls or Heaven's Cacophony helm) and "Chain Shot" on Fire in the Hole (AoE also jumps one time which is very powerful in combo with the Monk) : I also wore Aloth's Armor (just for the increased AoE) and Heaven's Cacophony (INT and Avengig Storm) and Charm of Bones (for the INT). Also Ring of Overseeing and Ring of the Marksman. Acina's Tricorn is also great. I also used Loki as pet. But that's all a bit cosmetical. YOu can totally pick otehr stuff and the general build idea won't suffer. It's just that more INT and stuff like Overseeing means bigger AoE and that can make a difference. A great armor can also be one that makes you immune to disengagement attacks (see Nomad's Brigandine or Gipon Prudencso) because they allow you to simply run away from melee attackers. Nomad's Brigandine would make you slower obviously but it would greatly increase your survivability (also see down below about enemy gunners). Else you can pick Graceful Retreat + Tumbling and wear Boots of Speed - which will make disengagment attacks a lot less painful. Ajamuut's Stalking Cloak is highly advised: it stuns and does bonus dmg when you attack from stealth or invisibility - and Whispers otW makes you invisible - great synergy. Good abilites (generally all non-melee-only): Swift Strikes-->Lightning Strikes Two Weapon Style Long Stride Mortification of the Soul (good early game in order to get wounds safely) Stunning Blows-->Stunning Surge Dance of Death-->Enduring Dance Duality of Mortal Presence(INT) Thunderous Blows Flagellant's Path The Dichotomous Soul (don't like summons too much but they are very effective) The Long Pain (great against single targets and against enemies vulnerable to crush damage) The Razor's Edge Resonant Touch Whispers of the Wind Prestige If you don't mind using the empower mechanic to boost an ability (instead of regaining mortification): investing in Empowered Strikes can be really good in combination with Whsipers of the Winds. It adds a lot of jumps for WotW and then the +ACC and +PEN should be just devastating (didn't use it myself though because back then when I played this Empowered Strikes was a bit bugged - might be fixed). Enemy gunners, especially with arquebuses (arbalests as well) can be real nasty for ranged "squishies" like this one - especially in boarding fights where you can't start stealthed. It can be a good idea to skill for large shield proficiency in order to start into boarding fights with a large shield + modal and wair for the first gunshots, then switch to mortars and wreak havoc.

Yes, it's good for that (and the FIre Shield) but in general not good for your damage output at a certain level/advancement. So, bashing shields are only bad because they don't scale their offensive stats properly (except Tuotilo's Palm). Would they scale they would be pretty good (again, in general). BUT: if you use primary attacks mostly (like Clear Out, Soul Annihilation, Force of Anguish, Knockdown and so on) they can be really good. Because you are executing those attacks with the main hand anyway but still gain the recovery bonus of Two Handed Style and the defense bonus of Weapoin & Shield Style. In this case they raise your damage output significantly while making you more sturdy. Especially Soul Annihilation and Force of Anguish are good cases because they have unlimited uses due to resource regain. Same if you are using a ranged weapon (pistol, blunderbuss, scepter or wand) with a bashing shield (and mostly attack from afar). Weird setup but better than just a melee weapon if you only want to attack with the main hand (e.g. to maximize procs from unique weapons).

Who would seriously object to "both"?

If you talk a lot to your companions you can mess up the relations really quickly. Even after several patches. I only talk to them when they show a dialogue symbol in their portrait and that way it (almost) never escalates. But yeah: the shortcomings of the implemented companion relation system become extremely obvious when you talk to your party a lot and thus fire a lot of disposition/relation events into all directions.

It works as I explained in length. The info comes from Josh Sawyer directly who designed the system and explained the workings (and quirks) of the reputation system in a stream. Don't know what other infos or sources you need.

Monks with guns are very viable. But instead of pistols I strongly advise to use blunderbusses, espcially the Hand Mortar + Fire in the Hole (from Serafen). Even more so if you are playing a Single Class Monk or a Shadowdancer (Rogue/Monk) especially Streetfighter/Monk. For several reasons: Hand Mortar and Fire in the Hole have an automatic AoE which scales with INT. Duality of Mortal Presence gives you up to +10 INT Both target reflex insted of deflection (with the AoE) which is very easily debuffed by several spells (see Miasma of Dull-Mindedness and such). Both have pierce/slash damage which is very good for a gun. Usually they have pierce-only damage and that really can screw you against stuff like Skeletal Warriors or all sorts of Risen Champiuons, Mages and Armsmen. In general pierce AR of enemies is often high. Those AoEs work with CC effects - like from Stunning Surge: every enemy in the AoE can get stunned. They also make it easy to get a Mortification refund for Stunning Surge: lots of AoE hit rolls result in a crit easily. Same with blunderbusses since they have 4 projectiles (four chances for a crit) Flagellanth's Path will fire a dual mortar shot at tha trget and not result in a reload animation but recovery. With Lightning Strikes and Two Weapon Style you will be recovering pretty fast althoug you just shot guns. Powder Burns (the weapon proficiency of blunderbusses) causes Flanked which unlocks the Streetfighter passive without actually getting flanked by enemies Resonant Touch stacks up to 4 stacks with a single blunderbuss shot on a single enemy. With Hand Mortar/FitH it applies stacks to several enemies at once. Whispers of the Wind is an AoE attack that triggers the AoE of Hand Mortar/FitH with every of its attack rolls. It's AoE * AoE hit rolls which results in an ridiculous amount of Resonant Touches. Make sure enemies stay close ot each other (use a tank to cumulate foes or stuff like luring enmies from stealth and then use Pull of Eora etc.). Like Flagellant's Path, Whispers of the Wind has no reload animation but recovery only. Also Rogue affliction strikes (Crippling, Blinding etc.) all work with the AoE of Hand Mortar/FitH. Normal bluderbusses have a high chance of applying the affliction even against touch to hit enemies. Here's a SC Helwalker with Hand Mortar/FitH in action: In general I consider single class gunmonk (or mortar monk) to be better than a multiclass just because of Resonant Touch and Whispers of the Wind. Also stuff like Razor's Edge is really good. Stunning Surge comes a lot earlier, too. But they early to mid game can be more interesting with a multiclass combo like Streetfighter/Monk because you get some early nice stuff like Crippling-->Arterial Strike and Sneak Attack. Also a more sneaky approach can be more fun (like applying Gouging Strike in an AoE and then vanish with Smoke Veil and let them bleed out). Still, SC Mortar Monk is so much fun in the later game for me that I'd recommend that over multiclasses. A pistol Monk can make sense if you go for Ranger/Monk. Pistols are pretty good with One-Handed Style because the Rushed Reload modal gives you an awesome 50% recovery reduction while the single handed use gives you +12 ACC (and good hit-to-crit conversion) which counterbalances the -15 ACC from the modal. It's actually better dps than dual wielding pistols. Then with Driving Flight and all the ACC shenanigans you can make a really reliable crit-build with Thundercrack pistol (Overload that paralyzes on crit) or Scoredeo's Trophy (+25% crit damage). Backup can be Eccea's Arcane Blaster which does raw + elemental damage. It can be fun because the reloading speed is pretty great (especially with a few shots from Scordeo's Trophy). But it doesn't have the raw power and CC capapilities that mortars have. At least on PotD difficulty where you meet more foes than in lower difficulties (and thus AoE is a good way to control more). Ranger's Wounding Shot don't work with the AoE of mortars by the way. I can't see a particularly awesome arquebus monk build. Dragon's Dowry is great for Assassins and its self damage could get exploited by Monks (getting wounds). So maybe there is a cool Assassin/Monk build seomwhere with Dragon's Dowry, but I neither tried nor tested. Red Hand is always good. But I don't think it's especially good on Monks (compared to like - let's say a Rogue/Ranger).

But even if more and bigger does sell more copies: it also costs a lot more to make.

No, it takes several hits/crits until it's gone. I don't remember the exact number of hits. 8 or 10 or so. In Deadfire it's 10. The description is really bad. Note that grazes do NOT count. So if you have high defenses (e.g. via Mirrored Images) so that enemies mostly graze you then the Iron Skin lasts forever basically. Only hits and crits count.

I really like Soulblade/Trickster with Whispers of the Endless Paths. With Borrowed Instincts + Mirrored Images (which stack) you'll have plenty of defecltion to trigger Offensive Parry and Riposte which will generat focus while you are recovering and you can then apply the cumulated focus with Soul Annihilation in an AoE. You can combine this with Nomad's Brigandine which can turn Disengagement attacks against you into 100% misses with the enchantment "Tactical Withdraw": Just disengage for free damage and focus via Offensive Parry and sometimes Riposte. Gipon Prudensco has the same enchantment available. It also has another one which makes you immune to flanking (bad for a Streetfighter but good for a Trickster). But it's mutually exclusive with th disengagement enchantment. At the same time another enchantment of it lets you gain +1 deflection and +2 Reflex every time you get hit (stacks to +10/+20). I usually pick Nomad's Brigandine because it has better AR and is easy to get. Not a great concept for Soulblade/Streetfighter though since the deflection in general would be too low. Here I would go for Sun and Moon etc. like Kaylon saidf. It's a nice combo. Also in the early game it happens very often that you miss your Soul Annihilation due to a lack of ACC buffs and rel. low ACC/enemies' Deflection ratio. A one handed Rapier + modal (=+37 ACC!) helps a lot to land those important SA-hits until you can get some more ACC and/or the flail and the shield. By the way, talking about shields: there's a large shield named Shining Bulwark that gives you +10 deflection against flanking attacks (basically negating the deflection malus without lifting the affliction itself). If you combine it with the Pale Hide (+8 deflection while flanked) you can have the equivalent of +18 deflection while flanked and still triggering the passive of the Streetfighter. Of course both items look ****ty together and well: it's a large shield - so not really a massive focus on dps. You can also use Nomad's Brigandine (can have +10 deflection against melee attacks if you don't leave your party members) or Casita Samelia's Legacy (~+10 deflection via Intimidate) or Gipon Prudensco (up to +10 deflection after some hits). Once you get some ACC buffs and Sun & Moon it works well with the primary attack of Soul Annihilation and you'll be quite tanky (for a flanked Streetfighter). Coming bacl to Shadowdancer: there's the flail Sungrazer which has an enchantmet that triggers if you kill with a crit and does pretty substancial AoE dmg then. Usually it's hard to trigger because how do you want to ensure that you are killing with a crit. But a Shadowdancer (or any Monk) can combine Swift Flurry/Heartbeat Drumming with it. Usually, when those proc it's a kill. And usually it's a crit-kill. So compared to other classes it's rel. easy to proc it. You can use it with One Handed Style + Dirty Fighting in order to maximize procs. Streetfighter has short recovery anyways while flanked so you get decent attack speed as well. It's not superreliable (you can't trigger it willingly) but really great fun and a great mob clearer. Its even good with a Shattered Pillar because you can use autoattacks mostly (which generate wounds quickly as Shadowdancer).

It may be that Story Time has a an auto graze-to miss conversion for the party (not sure). If that's the case then I suspect that this log-message gets shown accidentially instead of "[Aila Braccia ->]". There is the same problem in Deadfire where a Debonaire Rogue (who has 100% hit-to-crit conversion on charmed targets) never sees that conversion message like [Deboniare->] in the combat log but instead always [Dirty Fighting->]. So maybe this is a similar problem. To be sure you'd need to test some more. But the graze-to-miss conversion of Aila Braccia itself is normal behavior on all difficulties. I never had the difficulty setting accidentially change in PoE ever and also never read about that in the bugs subforum. So I find this unlikely - although not impossible I guess.

After Deadfire Josh (from Obsidian) spoke to Swen (from Larian) and they found out that the overlap of D:OS- and PoE-players is only about 40%.

Doing everything by hand surely leads to a better result or one with more character (like with all handmade things I guess). But also it's a real pain if you need to make some changes. This whole event/listener system is also called "inversion of control" in programming and it was invented to be able to couple things loosely. So instead of Xoti triggering Aloth directly (hard-wired) during her dialogue he now only listens to certain events (no matter if emitted by Xoti or Klaus Pumpernickel). That way you could remove Aloth's answer (or Aloth completely) and Xoti's dialogue would still throw no error (because if done the hard-wired way there would be something missing and the call to Aloth or his reaction piece would fail). But it feels too "mechanical" in my opinion. Doesn't matter at all in normal software, but in a game (which is also art and entertainment, not only programming and logic) it's a bit. But I guess I would also have though it's a brilliant idea initially.

No. Aila Braccia turns all grazes of ranged attacks into misses (and then reflects them). Wouldn't make much sense to get damaged by a graze and then reflect it (like - did you pull the arrow out of your armor and threw it back? ;)) - so it converts them to misses. Actual misses don't get reflected. No matter the difficulty. That's why it is the best item against Lagufaeth (and pretty darn good in general - it's like a 100% graze to miss vs. ranged weapons + reflect). Lagufaeth come in different shapes, forms and stats. It depends on the map. For example the Lagufaeth in Longwatch Falls are much harder than the ones you meet in Russetwood.

No, it's not only visual. Some lines of dialogue get tagged with certain dispositions (like "Antireligious" or "Progressive" and such). Let's call them disposition-events. And those events got added during and after dialogue was written. Adding tags/events to text which is read out of context... I guess it's hard to get the connotation or the deeper meaning (and sometimes also maybe who's the receiver) every time and so it's understandable that some events gets picked up the wrong way. It might make sense to tag a certain line as progressive (but it's actually not in greater context) if you don't know who's the listener or what the history between party members is. All companions have a set ot favored and non-favored dispositions and if they are in the party they "listen" for those events. Josh thought this was a neat system which might save his writers a lot of time because they wouldn't have to hard-wire reactions but instead couple them loosely with this events/listener system. That way you could also always add or remove characters without breaking the dialogue of the others participants. In hindsight he said it wasn't a good system and that he wouldn't repeat it since it didn't work out so well. Doesn't feel as natural as manually added reactions and still was a lot of work to setup.

Party size per se has not much to do with RTwP or Turn Based Mode? Only indirectly: The problem with "modern" RPGs in combination with real time is that every character is supposed to have active abilites that make him interesting to play. Even the most plain fighter build will have some abilites like Knockdown or Vigorous Defense, a Taunt or whatever. Now the problem is that active abilites require smart decisions to be effective in combat - especially if your enemies run around and act while you are acting. Smart decisions need some thinking and also anticipation. Some thinking can't be done without pause, so there's RTwPause. But the pauses get longer and longer and more frequent the more every character needs to get micromanaged because of his active abilities. Those abilites also have a ton of VFX nowadays, especially the AoE ones. Also players want more tactical depth and so there are interrupts and different defenses against different attacks and different armor against differet damage types. Result is a screen with tons of parallel VFX stuff and pausing every second (or even more frequently) because so much is going on that needs processing and planning. It becomes messy and tedious. This was one of the main criticisms with PoE. Older games like BG2 have a lot of classes that don't have active abilities (or very few) but ,ostly feed off of passives. So having three or four of those doesn't really make a difference in terms of micromanagement. So - reducing the party size and/or the number of combatants in general seems like a totally reasonably idea - like it or not. Another approach is better AI setting. Deadfire did that, too. Was well received. The alternative would be to make characters like in BG2 again: little to no active abilities for martial classes and such. Enemies: same. But I let you take a guess what RPG players would think about that... Turn Based Combat doesn't have those problems because you have all the time in the world to plan you next move. And every (active) action, including its VFX takes place on its own. Not superimmersive or realistic but a lot easier to manage. Because that apporach needs a lot more time per enemy usually the encounters are a lot smaller (but maybe enemies tougher) and often there are less encounters because even smearing easy trashmobs will take a significant amount of time and that can get boring. I don't know where you get the "pedantic combat" though from. It's just devs tyring to make sure that the combat is not overwhelmingly messy. It's not like they sit down an plot something like "Ok, how can me make combat more appealing to pedants and how can we piss off Ontarah the most?"

Good question. I didn't actually test that. I assume the old one gets cleared and the new one takes over - or the higher one supresses the lowers - but I can't say for sure. Let me test... Edit: I had 6 phrases (max) when I cast "So Singt..." (costs 5) and got the +6 PL Bellower bonus. Then I waited until I had 3 phrases again and cast "The Shield Cracks" (costs 3). When looking at the PL bonus it was still at 6, not 3. So it was not replaced. In order to check if they stack if you are not at max phrase counter yet I did the following: I started a new battle, waited until I had 3 phrases only and cast The Shield Cracks: got +3 PL. Then did the same again and still only +3. So they don't stack at all. Suppression seems most likely. But no matter how it's done internally: you can't stack the Bellower bonuses but keep the highest individial one.

They stack.

Shadowdancer (Rogue/Monk) is a good multiclass in terms of damage. With Blunderbusses (and the weapon proficiency) it's very easy to get your Streetfighter flanked (via distraction) without actually getting flanked by enemies. But since Monk and Rogue both have abilities which help with movement (Long Stride, Flagellant's Path, Escape) it's also no big problem with melee weapons. Single Class Rogue can get the abilities "Vanishing Strikes" and "Gambit" which are very good if you build towards them (in case of Vanishing Strikes that means Backstab and maxed INT as well as everything that prolongs duration, Gambit wants high ACC and crit conversion). That will take some time though. On the road towards Power Level 8/9 (where you'll get those two abilities) it will be less exciting than a Shadowdancer.

It's fun. If you use it with a Shattered Pillar you'll get wounds from Imagined Pain and from the Offensive Parry (does count as "auto-attack" and generates wounds for a Shattered Pillar). So getting 10 wounds* by running past some guys is easy. *10 wounds on Shattered Pillar with Community Patch, else only 5 max.

Yes, they do stack and proc separately from each other, so an Offensive Parry + a Riposte getting triggered from the same miss is common.

No, Riposte works as usual: only a certain percentage of misses will trigger a Riposte. Offensive Parry however will proc 100% of times.

Hello, Nomad's Brigandine has an echantment named "Tactical Withdraw" that makes you immune to Disengagement Attacks. While I always thought this means immune to Engagement I now realized that this is not true. Instead you will still trigger Disengagement Attacks - but they will miss 100% (with a combat log message like "[...] but <charname> is immune!"). I just made a Monk with Nomad's Brigandine and Imagined Pain. Running around some Xaurip Champions to fill my wound count to max in a matter of seconds. Also Riposte and Offensive Parry do trigger on those "misses" (might be a way to make both worthwhile in Turn Based Mode). Have fun with this info!

Yeah, since a Beguiler usually has plenty of focus at most times and Whispers of Treason you almost never use Rogueish Charm. It's more about the 100% crit conversion.

Hauani O Whe and Dorudugan are immune to INT afflictions, charm will not work. The others are not immune afaik.