Boeroer

Yes! You'll need it to not only pick locks and find and disram traps but also to find secrets stashes! The higher mechanics on one guy the better. The easiest way to get high mechanics fast is to hire a rogue adventurer with a fitting background from any tavern.

That's a matter of taste I guess. You are not missing anything as far as I can tell. I like both Spellblade and Mindstalker - but since I generally prefer Wizard over Cipher I'd opt for Spellblade. Infuse + DoTs is nice. Combusting Wounds doesn't work with DoTs though. Only with "pulsing" spells that do a new attack roll every few secs (Chillfog, Walls, Freezing Pillar and such). Pure DoTs only have one hit roll and then it's just ticks. Those don't trigger Combusting Wounds. Trickster/Soulblade is a great melee combo - especially when using "Offensive Parry" from Whispers ofthe Endless Paths: you'll get new focus from parrying and can spend it right away with Soul Anihilation. Not really DoT-focused though. One weapon the Spellblade has access to and which does very high single target dmg plus high poison DoT on its own (which stacks with other DoTs) is Nannasin's Cobra Strike (from a unique grimoire). Spellblade can also use several spells to lure enemies to a spot from stealth - like Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights for example. Anything that makes soem noise, can be cast out of combat and can be targeted on the ground. Makes it a lot easier to catch all enemies in an DoT without using sparkcrackers. Ciphers don't have that. But Tricksters can do it (Dazzling Lights) which makes them very useful for such an approach. Also don't forget Battle Axes with Bleeding Cuts: the modal is very powerful and especially good if you use a Battle Axe in your main hand (and something else in the offhand) and use Full Attacks (see Arterial Strike etc). That way you won't suffer the longer recovery but apply a very strong DoT for a long time that stacks with itself. Speaking of DoTs in an AoE: I would either go with a Scout (Trickster/Arcane Archer + Watershaper's Focus or Streetfighter/Sharpshooter + Hand Mortar/Fire in the Hole). May I also draw your attention to a Trickster/Ancient? With WotEP you can apply Taste of the Hunt in an AoE (it's quite strong) and at the same time cast several very good DoTs that also unlock Sneak Attacks and Deatblows and combine them with the Rogue's DoTs. It's unusual but it works and is fun.

Xoti should get Withdraw as auto-pick at Power Level II as shown in your picture. If it doesn't show up in the action bar then something is off. Is "Blessed Harvest" (auto-pick of PL I) missing from the action bar as well? Edit: just fired up the game (PC, not console) and made this screenshot: Withdraw is there as you can see. So on PC it seems to be working as it should. Are you on console?

I mean I would be totally ok if Edér was a ranger. It's just nothing that is mentioned neither in his backstory nor in PoE. Do they even mention a special pet he once had - like a dog on his farm or a cat or something? If so I can't remember (only the milkmaid thing I can't purge from my brain). If he was depicted with ranger-vibes right from the get-go then sure. But introducing it in Deadfire just because he likes animals would have felt a bit slapdash. I think the unlocked pet slot (with the very nice name "Can I pet him anyway?") with BB is a better fit. Something special to him. Adding an additional pets to the party is actually a very good passive (so to speak). Funnily enough you can play him in more different ways in PoE than in Deadfire despite the multiclass feature of the latter. That is because PoE went a (very narrow yet interesting) partial classless route with the "cross class" talents like Runner's Wounding Shot etc. So a rangerish Edér was possible in PoE (with a bit of imagination) but it is not in Deadfire (unless you just pretend and give him a bow and run with a pet like the Bear Cub or something). Regarding the "AC destroys dialogue options" argument: well it wouldn't have been impossible to come up with a special ranger subclass. E.g. one that hasn't a specific AC but is a friend of all animals and maybe can charm beasts as special ability or tame a wild animal and use it as stronger (non-steerable) pet that can also fight. Whatever. It would have been possible. Also sounds great now that I write about it, hehe.

@Zaerisk: great first post, thank you!

Huh? They can't be as great because they are not doing any noteworthy damage anymore. They may be still useful - but logic dictates that they cannot be as good if their weapons don't scale. So skeletons may not be useless later on - but still a proper weapon scaling for all summons - including skeletons - would make much more sense than the current "solution". Not only in terms of balancing but also when it comes to consistency and what the player expects. "Look! The great Chanter Sumonitas calls upon Eora his mighty army of Ancient Wiederganger Skeletons. Behold their awesome... erm... rusty swords... which fall apart while they rush forth..? Huh..."

Turn off AI: tada! It works. AI seems to want to do other things than drinking boring potions. Fun fact: although I have thousands of hours in Deadfire I never encountered this bug. Because I neither use AI nor do I use potions. Double tap!

Not technically, but which player will know that? They are upgrades visually as well as logically. The implementation doesn't matter for the common player. If I pick an upgrade to an ability like Escape which lets me move around in a blink and gives me a x sec deflection bonus - and then the upgrade also lets me teleport around and gives my a deflection bonus (seems to be the same stuff als Escape so far) AND makes me invisible (which seems to be the upgrade, right?) - why would I assume the deflection bonus ends with the invisibility? It's neither intuitive nor logical. I would assume it works the same as Escape with an added invisivility.

They do scale (with char level though, not PL). What doesn't scale is the weapons (and armor) they wear. At least that's the case for some summons - not all.

I think it doesn't really fit his character. Just because he likes animals doesn't mean he's a dedicated ranger. His background story (Saint's War etc.) is pretty clear - and being able to make him a SC rogue is already near the knuckle in my opinion (but being a "Ruffian" still ok). Although he was designed as rogue in a first draft. But being a soldier from a farm and such... don't know. No-subclass fighter seems to be a good fit. You can use Berath's Blessing points to unlock the pet slot for Edér. I think that's a nice feature and for me it's enough to cater to his love of animals.

Attacks from stealth (and invisibility) - the attacks you make at the start of combat out of stealth mode (if you didn't get discovered). Not Sneak Attack (the rogue ability). It works with every class as long as you can't be seen when attacking (stealth/invisibility).

Shadowing Beyond et al. are upgrades of Escape. I would give the upgrades at least the same duration of the deflection bonus that Escape has and decouple it completely from the invisibility. "What they intended" - I guess they just screwed this up a bit.

Power Level means (among other useful things like increased ACC, duration and PEN) +5% base damage. That's multiplicative. It's the reason why low-level abilites like FoD or Crippling Strike stay great throughout the game and work very well with damage bonuses like Sneak Attack and high MIG and such. It also scales fists (and thus can be important to jump from +legendary to +mythic fists for example - which is a big deal). It also scales projectiles for stuff like missile spells and jumps of Mind Blades and Whispers of the Winf or Old Nary's Curse. Prestige is nearly always the best passive pick if you are using some damaging abilites. Especially if you can stack a few more PL bonuses on top of it to reach certain thresholds.

There are sorting options in the stash. Maybe you accidentially clicked one of them?

That is one single use case though. the higher the level/content the more narrower it becomes. But then: If you put the same skeletons but with exceptional weapons against the same soft casters the outcome would be the same. In fights against tough foes in the late(ish) game the skeletons are currently very weak. They will get massacred very quickly anyway (they do scale HP but not on the same scale as enemies' dmg output and PEN grow) - while they don't even scratch them anymore. They are only good as decoy then which is a bit sad. Still great with a SC Paladin and Divine Retribution of course or with Grave Calling (ot both) - but that's not the intended use I guess. It wouldn't hurt at all if they at least could scratch non-squishies a bit before getting crushed. Besides that I could make the argument that Ancient Weapons would also still be somewhat useful if they didn't scale their PEN etc. - if I put them against casters. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to take the scaling away from them. You also called for scaling weapons for wyrms. Still you could use them against casters to some effect... If scaling weapons is a good thing on some summons it should be good for all. Being systemic and coherent and all that... In my opinion it's not okay that they are really good offensively in the early game but only circumstancially useful later on - with Obsidian making sure that low level abilites stay relevant via Power Level on the other hand. They don't scale as well as other abilites do. And I think that was an issue that Obsidian wanted to avoid after PoE. In my opinion it's an oversight that the summons themselves do scale their values but not their weapons. Phantom is a very obvious case, but Skeletons are not right as well. Due to their numbers a normal weapon scaling would be too good, sure. That's why I said their weapon scaling should be somewhat slower or limited. Lvl-20 guy summoning skeletons with exceptional swords doesn't sound too much - but maybe it's too good indeed. So poor - normal - fine could be it. No idea. One would have to test that. A viable ability (for your character) should stay viable throughout the whole game. That's what PL and scaling is supposed to do - but it fails with most summons.

I just reread the description of Voidward and it sounds as if the ring was build to protect against the raw lash of Voidward and not the self damage. I mean lore-wise. So at least it's not as weird as I thought.

So what would happen if you set "max summon to its limit" to two with Essential Phantom?

I don't quite understand... So let's say Essential Phantom has its own variable that determines that it replaces every other summon (of the same "category")? Or how is that done per ability?

Remarkable how something like "Why do I not get dragon bits if I convince the dragon?" turns into a hot take about human behaviour during the corona crisis.

Thinking more about it: Conjurer benefits the least from his PL boost because summons and summoned weapons only scale their duration with PL, not their stats. So maybe my second idea was better: allowing two wizard summons instead of only one would be a very interesting thing to have. It's not as powerful as Beckoner was in the early days because you'd still need two castings (two spell uses, two times investing casting time etc.). Does anybody know if that's an easy thing to mod? I mean the general summons limit in the first place? And then maybe only make an exception to wizard summons (else we'd have a Conjurer/Beckoner with 24 sekeletons etc.)? Maybe you can give a certain value to each conjurer summon so that it is allowed as a second summon? No idea...

That is correct. And I was one of the first to point out that Deadfire's descriptions are nearly as vague and obscure as those of PoE. But this is deflecting because it has nothing to do with the problem of the OP who could play the game fairly well even with the crappy desriptions but suddenly hit a wall in the DLCs and only then complained about the difficulty.

The game was balanced around normal difficulty. And all things concerned it is a very well balanced game - superior in that regard to most other RPGs. Now - "normal" players who start into the game will become better, more accustomed to the mechanics, more experienced and will have a lot more things at their disposal towards the end of the game. So naturally you have to make the late game content significantly harder (even in the scope of one difficulty tier and harder than the character level suggests) than the early game - which starts of with easy fights and have the character of a tutorial (besides the obvious "shockers" like Gorecci Street which are supposed to show you that this ride will not always be so easy as the fight against single boars at the beach). Unsurprisingly most players seem to have no severe problems with the increased diffuculty of the DLCs. It is to be expected that: a) late game DLCs are more difficult than the content before and b) players who came that far are more experienced than when they started the game - that should be the case for all difficulty tiers. So in order to somewhat balance the game for most players you have to take those things into account. You can't balance it perfectly for all players. Difficulty tiers allow all sorts of players of differnt skill level (concerning RPG mechanics) to enjoy the game. BUT: they also allow you to enjoy the content you are suddenly not good enough for (or all of a sudden you are too good for . maybe because you suddenly understtod some profound mechanics better). Because you can switch to a different difficulty setting during the game. So if you feel an encounter is too hard for you and you become frustrated: you can easily tune down the difficulty for that encounter. That's more reasonable than ranting about it while countless others seem to have no problem with it. The problem is not the balance of the difficulty tier or the balance of the whole game - it is the ego of the player who can't accept that she/he has to turn down the difficulty in order to be able to progress - his/her inability to cope with frustration, too. So the answer to the question "How can they can satisfy both ends of that spectrum?" is definetely "with different difficulty settings". Because you can not only start at different difficulties - you can also switch during a playthrough. What on earth could Obsidian offer you in addition to make the game approachable for individual players? Make a deep survey and an IQ test before you start and then procedurally alter the difficulty while you advance through the game? Sounds cool - but maybe the easier solution would be to put a reasonable amount of resources into balancing the game fairly well and then trust that the majority of players will not lose their sh!t while playing it.

Don't even know if you need a shield. Remember that medium and large shields will have an impact on your accuracy - including spells. And Wizards are not the masters of Accuracy to begin with. Small shield would be ok I guess. Especially once you have Little Savior (that's a difficult task to begin with though ;)). Also Alia Braccia is a very good shield for you if you use is against Lagufaeth. They can end your run pretty easily with those paralysing blowdarts. Bit equipped with Alia Braccia all grazes turn into misses (that itself is incredible) and then reflect them back and paralyzes them instead - which makes Lagufaeth encounters a ton easier.

That is not entirely correct. In most instances it also affects the composition of encounters (more/less enemies and different enemies). So the goal IS to give every player a somewhat balanced experience. You can't please everyone though - and you shouldn't try. Somebody who can rush through the main game but gets completely stuck in one of the DLCs clearly is a very rare specimen of player. You can't balance a game for those players and not screw it for the others who usually improve while playing the game for some time until they reach the DLC areas - so usually you are more experiences once the late game begins.

Conjurer: biggest problem with the Familiar is that it can't be used if you want to conjure other summons. It gets replaced. What's a Conjurer who can either have a familiar or another summon? A dilettant? Solution would be to make the familiar independent from the summoning limit (see Many Lives Pass By phrase of Chanter). Or to give the Conjurer the ability to have two wizard summons at the same time (familiar + phantom or even two phantoms). I'd prefer the first one. Antipathetic Field: too good then. Would need dmg tuned down.