Boeroer

It's very good in general - but especially good in my opinion as Steel Garrote/Bloodmage with Whispers of the Endless Paths + Offensive Parry. Offensive Parry triggers on every melee miss (like a 100% Riposte basically) and it dazes the enemy, thus automatically unlocking the draining effect for the Steel Garrote. You can cast spells while dishing out Offensive Parries at the same time which heal you and damage foes. The constant draining also means that Blood Sacrifice is not a problem since you are healed up most of times automatically. If not: Lay on Hands/Exalted Endurance/Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon do the trick. Usually the drainig + healing is so strong that I can run Sacred Immolation + Alacrity with not problem. It's a fun and powerful combo defense- as offense-wise. The only thing that messes it up (that messes most Arcane Knights up) is Arcane Dampener. By the way (not related to Arcane Knight) : Offensive Parry (and Riposte) also works with Swift Flurry/Heartbeat Drumming.

Sorry, no idea.

Ouf, no, sorry. I'm sure that Rymrgand approves that message though.

I tested with Come Sweet Winds and Dragon Thrashed and the damage didn't change a bit with both items. So I assumed DoTs don't work. Maybe other DoT's will? Are chant-DoTs implemented differently? I don't think so but it may be worth a try. I know that other dmg-boosts do work with DoTs like Disintegrate (see Takedown Combo).

I beat Firkraag at low(ish) levels with the help of Wizard's Eye.

That is not entirely correct:

He's currently writing the Pillars TTRPG system (mostly in his free time) which so far seems to turn out pretty nicely. So for the foreseeable future he has plenty of work with Pillars stuff. I think that this is more up his alley because it's classless and there are no boundaries for him: he's allowed to do as he wishes with this project.

Instead of buffing spells directly I would rather like to see trinkets for Druids and Priests which buff and grant certain type of spells while they penalize others. The last part is optional. Wizards have trinkets (grimoires), Druids and Priests have not. Introducing trinkets for both would solve a lot without even touching the base values of the game.

K, but animals are fair game? I'm pretty sure that some Pillars game will be done. But PoE3 as another sequel? Most likely not. The sales numbers were 7 times lower than those of PoE and while that was a financial success (given the small budget) it also wasn't selling like hot cakes either. Feargus said that he would love to do a skyrim-like Pillars game and after the success of the Outer Worlds I can't think about a reason why this wouldn't be tackled. Also Josh said recently about this topic: "Well Feargus wants to make such a game and usually Feargus gets his way." Josh himself stated that he thinks that someone else should direct a PoE3 should it ever come out. He said instead he would like to do a "Tactics" game with the Pillars IP. Which sounds awesome. It's not an RPG though and I don't know how Microsoft thinks about such a game (given that they bought Obsidian in order to expand their RPG portfolio). But who knows? If you ask yourself "Where do these infos come from?": Josh does a stream nearly every evening since he's working from home due to Corvid-19. There he talks about this and that while playing games like Darklands or Battle Brothers and so on. Lately he even held a presentation/talk about reputation systems which was very nice. He often answers questions from the chat.

If you are using a melee Paladin you can also give him a marking weapon (like Blade of the Endless Paths, Cladhalíath, Shame or Glory or Spectacular Spetum) AND Coordinated Attacks (I'm still mad this doesn't exist in Deadfire anymore): if he's standing near to you and you attack the same enemy you will gain +25 ACC (+10 marking, +10 Coordinated Attacks, +5 aura). And he will gain +10 from your St. Garam's Spark. Very useful Paladin to have if you go against the high-defense enemies like dragons and bounties and such. If he's a Darcozzi he can even stack Inspiring Liberation on you for an overall bonus of +35 ACC.If he's dual wielding Shame or Glory + Cladhalíath (which looks rather ridiculous I have to admit) it's even +45 ACC. Once had a Darcozzi who was dual wielding Shame and Glory (from the Helwax Mold) with Inspiring Liberation and Coordinated attacks who teamed up with a Priest who had Inspiring Radiance and casted Devotions for the faithful and a Cipher who used Borrowed Instincts and then Tactical Meld on the Paladin. That's +115 ACC for the Cipher iirc. Poor dragons got crit by Disintegration and then crit-charmed by Whisper of Treason nearly every time.

Well it would upgrade your system for all games, not just this one. Yes, that would have been great. Not only for the console version but for PC as well. As a QoL feature that everybody would appreciate I assume.

Griffin's Blade does indeed work for Cipher spells. I didn't test the ring but I think it's safe to assume it also does (since it uses the same mechanics as the blade in terms of damage bonuses). I don't think that Ascendant/Tactician is a spectacular combo (because other classes like Helwalker/Streetfighter/Furyshaper are better with Ascendant imo). If it's all about triggering Briliant yourself with Phantom Foes I'd rather use a Beguiler: since you are going to cast Phantom Foes anyway and gain massive focus from it - no need to deal weapon damage and easy to trigger Brilliant over and over again. But it's actually better to not combine the "causing flanked" part and the Tactician in one character. Unless solo of course. Anyway, Veilpiercer's (and also St. Omaku's Mercy's) enchantment that omits recovery on crit (50%) is pretty amazing.

An SSD for your PC would help a lot. I have one and the loading times are quite short. Also Deadfire uses asset streaming - PoE did not - so loading times should be shorter in general even without an SSD.

You have to stealth and not getting seen while pickpocketing. If your "sneaking" cirlce displays an open eye and is red you got observed. It's like doing a Backstab - but instead of hitting somebody you pick their pockets.

While I don't consider Avengers (or any marvel movie really) to be the pinnacle of filmmaking, that is wrong. Time travel IS the pivotal part of the story there - and it is done quite well with the travels back to scenes of the former marvel movies - and also making it clear that altering the timeline splits it up into alternative realities - so you can't just kill baby Thanos in the past and that's it. It's done better than in most contemporary movies with time travelling, excluding Interstellar and Arrival (those I have seen and they handle that time thing very well), but certainly better than in Back to the Future where it's the main part of the story but still wildly nonsensical (but fun for me as a teen nonetheless). I personally don't like time travel too much because it always feels like a loophole and takes away consequence. But saying that its use in Endgame made the former movies pointless (why?) or that writers were lazy is just wrong. This time travel was set up since Ant Man's quantum realm and Dr. Strange's time stone. That doesn't indicate that anybody was lazy or only had one day left to do it. BUT: I totally agree that I don't want to see time travel in PoE3, should it ever come out. It's just stale by now. And I also 100% agree on open world: not worth it in such a game that is supposed to be driven by narrative and character development.

Fellstroke

An SSD for your console would help a lot.

Furyshaper I only do as single class recently since I discoverd that Blood Ward drains health even from DoT-ticks.

I tried to execute the command to advance the quest and tried to autocomplete with the tab key. That way you avoid typos. But I get an "ArgumentOutOfRange" exception. I don't know the ID of that special "Nature's Mark" passive (or is it a boon?). Else I could tell you how to add it with the normal console commands. I searched for it with "FindGameData" but couldn't find anything that fits (nothing that's named Nature's Mark - besides the obvious spells). However, you can shortly just change your race to nature godlike by using SetPlayerRace Godlike NatureGodlike That will chance your race to Nature Godlike. You won't see a difference at first, your character model will not change. But you will lose your headgear slot. If something's in it it will be put into the stash, but in that case your character's head will be invisible (because the game wants to reload a nature godlike head without headgear - one that fits your non-nature-godlike body model - which of course doesn't exist). Better to take off the headgear first, then change the race - which should unlock the dialogue option. When the dialogue is finished just use the same command to set your race back to what it was. Human would be something like SetPlayerRace Human SavannahHuman . You can use the tab key to autocomplete commands and parameters. So if you don't know the exact names you just guess it starts with "H" and then hit tab. You can then cycle through all options that start with "H" with the tab key. Hope it works.

I don't find it very difficult. The dragon can be disabled and locked down quite easily. But not at lvl 10 I guess.

It took me more than a minute to sidescroll that post. Love the playful sarcasm.

Monastic Unarmed Training is decent enough if you stack some Power Levels. See SC Barbrian. But that wasn't the point. The point was that if Transcendent Suffering and Monastic Unarmed Training can both scale with Power Level and don't create big balancing issues - then I don't think scaling summoned weapons with Power Level will result in balancing issues. I know that wasn't your own argument but rather said from the perspective of the devs - but I still think it's not a convincing one.

Speed enchant on reloading weapons only applies to the recovery, not the reloading phase. For a pistol that's 260 frames instead of 275 frames or in other words a 6% speed increase (at 10 DEX). As comparison: a war bow would have a 14% increase in speed at 10 DEX with the same enchantment. With Durgan Steel on top it would be 12% (pistol) vs. 30% (war bow). If you use Swift Aim it becomes a bit more interesting though (192 frames with speed ench. vs. 210 without speed enchantment) because the 50% reloading bonus reduces the reload overhang quite a bit.

Sounds like Beguiler. You can gain a lot of focus just by casting Phantom Foes or Secret Horrors on several enemies at once. You can alternate between Deception Spells (gain focus) and other spells (spend focus) without using a weapon. Ascendant can also deliver what you want (somewhat): once you have full focus you can cast spells for 0 focus cost for a certain amount of time. You don't need to care for focus regeneration during that period. Didn't try it in TB mode though. Psion just gains focus from by time. It stops briefly when getting hit though. So no frontliner. Instead of dealing weapon damage it just comes to him. Instead of dealing weapon damage you just have to wait. If combined with another caster (e.g. Chanter or Wizard or Druid or Priest) you can alternate between spell from that class and cipher spells. For example Troubadour/Cipher: cast invocation (then need to recharge phrases), cast cipher power (then need to recharge focus), cast invocation and so on. Or Wizard/Cipher: cast a wizard spell, another one, then cipher spells, again wizard spell... Lots of casting, no weapon usage. If you want to stick to blunderbusses: Kitchen Stove is great and so are the two hand mortars (which are also blunderbusses). All those can fill up your focus with a single shot (if you hit enough enemies). Also Watershaper's Focus + Blast is a nice weapon in TB mode I heard. All those weapons work even better with a Cipher/Ranger because ot Driving Flight. ALso Ranger/Cipher has the highest potential accuracy in the game. That's also good for casting.

There is no pistol that applies an effect you describe. Blunderbuss: yes. The first pistol I would use is the Disappointer. If you enchant it with any quality enchantment (e.g. "Accurate I") the "Terrible" will get removed. There's no other pistol that comes so early. Then St. Garam's Spark - and I would stick to it. It comes quite early and has the marking enchantment: provides +10 ACC for your animal companion if you attack the same target and stacks with everything. Fellstroke and Dulcanale are also good. Stiletto for pierce damage I presume? But for optics may I point you to Aattuuk? Since it looks a bit like a (small) cutlass. The alternative to the hat would be the Crossed Patch obviously.