Boeroer

It depends which ability you are using it with. For example with a Paladin's Flames of Devotion the arquebus is better - while a Rogue with Penetrating Shot, Sneak Attack/Deathblows and Crippling Strike might prefer Lead Spitter. Reason is that lashes (see Flames of Devotion's burning lash) don't profit from DR bypass at all - so all the nice additional burn damage of each of the 6 low dmg projectiles will get eaten up by enemies' DR. A Rogue doesn't have a lashing ability but instead uses high additive damage bonuses. Those help each pellet to overcome DR more easily and lead to higher damage (unless enemy has really high pierce DR) because all 6 pellets combined have higher base damage than an arquebus. Lead Spitter is also rending so it has an additional 3 DR bypass with means +18 dmg per shot for the blunderbuss. Add Penetrating Shot (adds +30 dmg per shot). And on top of that you get 6 chances to apply Hobbled (Crippling Strike) or Blinded (Blinding Strike) and so on while an arquebus only gives you one chance. So if you tell us which class you are using we can give better advice.

According to Deadfire lore the breaking of the Wheel causes all souls to be stuck in the In-Between once they leave Eora. But I'm sure one could come up with an idea how souls who don't go to the In-Between (like Spirits usually) can possess corpses.

@Abuachumi: I didn't reply to you. I didn't realize you were asking a question because it was nested in the quote.

Carnage doesn't generate focus. Battle Axes are strong because of the modal in synergy with Blood Thirst. But the DoT of Bleeding Cuts doesn't generate focus either. But yes: solid choice - only bad thing: only slash damage. My recommendation with a Barb/Cipher would always be a Morning Star. The modal helps a LOT to apply certain Cipher spells that target Fortitude, there's a unique Morning Star that also lowers Will on hit (and had hit to crit conversion) and Ciphers can lower Fortitude and Will further with spells easily. With the Barbarian's Brute Force you can crit a lot more because you will automatically target Fortitude if it's lower than Deflection. Berserker: not too much MIG because Frenzy's self damage will kill you quickly at high levels with a lot of MIG and no countermeasures. Biting Whip is bad (I don't say such things often). I'd always take Draining Whip. Cipher Subclass either Beguiler or Ascendant.

But Deadfire uses streaming! This was specifically stated after the complaints with PoE's loading times. The loading times are still quite long it seems. Not for me though (fast SSD and a good PC, running Linux) but to be honest they weren't terrible with PoE on an old laptop without SSD which could run PoE on minimal settings as well. PS4 seems to have really slow IO. And Unity3D doesn't seem to be optimized in that regard.

Maybe - but a PoE/Deadfire map is one huge(!) piece of a high res image which gets loaded in one go while a 3D game (even the maps) consists of separated, rel. small 3D objects with textures which all can be loaded separately. Maybe that's the problem. I'm only guessing though. But the fact that a SSD drastically improves loading times is an indication for that. Afaik pure 3D titles in Unity3D don't have such excessive loading times, do they?

Bodies without soul are like Hollowborn though, not vessels. Vessels have a soul, but its connection to the body is not "right". Maybe "undead" without a soul can exist if there's some kind of will or soul driving them (which is not their own - see Concelhaut and his necromancy). I like the god stuff.

Mal nonchalant den Google-Translator angeworfen, wa?

Not enough INT for my personal taste but I'm sure it will work well. Beware the early game: Barbs need several levels to lose their squishyness (due to low deflection - high CON/endurance pool don't make a big difference in the beginning but later). So don't give up if he gets knocked out often: that's normal and it gets better and better (unlike a Rogue who always stays tissue paper) with every level up since then the enormous endurance/health pools start to pay off at some point. Also Barbs start with rather bad accuracy. Your Carnage will miss all the time, especially with a mediocre PER value. But the great thing: Carnage gains +1 ACC per level (on top of the usual level-up-improvents) and at some point it's superaccurate (if you take Accurate Carnage it will be as good as your original ACC by level 5 already). Give your Barb Accuracy buffs (Priest's your best friend. Inspiring Radiance and Devotions stack!).

I'm 99.9% sure that doesn't work since only the summoning should be tagged with "shred" but not the weapons themselves.

And after the next three fights or so: no more fun as well!

You don't need an import save. You can use one of the predefined stories (e.g. "Benevolent Soul" - although that one didn't really fit here ;)) or do those also not exist on consoles? Attributes depend on the direction your Inquisitor should go (build-wise).

I like Bleak Walker/Soulblade a lot. You can use Whispers of the Endless Paths as you main weapon. It has a cone attack that hits several enemies. If you use Soul Annihilation (special attack of the Soulblade Cipher) the raw damage not only gets applied to the initial target but some also gets applied to the other enemies in the cone. Also all AoE hits generate focus. But the best part is Offensive Parry (enchantment). It hits enemies instantly who miss you. It generates focus for you when it connects. So in order to do that you want to boost your deflection a lot. That means Paladin's passives, Cipher's Borrowed Instinct and Psychovampiric Shield, accuracy debuffs on enemies and items that boost deflection. Also high Resolve. Against multiple weak opponents this is a lot of fun and against tougher guys you can use your Flames of Devotion (with Ring of Focused Flame). Against single targets you can use Run Through or a backup weapon (like a normal Great Sword for example). It's a great fun mix of defense and offense. Make sure you max your armor. This is most important for chars who want to tank several enemies at once.

For what it's worth: I just saw a tweet from the official @WorldOfEternity account that said that Versus Evil couldn't manage to port the import function in time but is currently working on it so it can be patched. Didn't say when. You might have guessed that such a feature should be top priority for release (basically when everybody who has a PoE savegame wants to import their chars) - but silly you, it was not...

I would never touch it at lvl 4, too.

Veteran

Unless someone points me to it I can't see particularly good synergies with a Troubadour/Assassin. Dual Scepters have higher dps than an Arbalest, especially with the modal. You could pick Ancient Memory as phrase to counter the self damage of the scepters' modal. However, Backstab and Assassinate favor heavy hitting weapons, not necessarily dps weapons. So yeah - an Arbalest is better for those attacks from stealth than scepters. You need a weapon with high base damage. THe higher the better. Best weapon for Backstab/Assassinate is Dragon's Dowry (which is a unique Arquebus). I would pick the Mith Fyr chant. It's not doing any attack rolls (so it won't break invisibility) it supports all your damage dealing party members and it is great for your Backstab/Assassinate attacks.

That is not correct. I beat SSS with several parties, all vastly different. I don't even use consumables. And I never had severe problems. The only thing that can be really annoying for first-time players is that trappy fight which transforms you into a bunch of creatures (Ironclad, Lagufaeth etc.). Here it does indeed matter who gets transformed into which creature. But you can change the order of your party members to accomodate. As I said: players are winning that DLC solo while doing the Ultimate Challenge - so you can't argue that those fights are impossible for a whole party (no matter the composition - since a party on PotD upscaled shouldn't consist out of trap builds in th first place). Maybe instead on blaming it solely on bad design you could consider that you're not adept enough (yet) for SSS on PotD upscaled?

I hope so. Because the current state doesn't make sense obviously.

****!

To be fair: OP chose Veteran, not PotD. One can't know that Veteran + upscaling might be harder (in some cases) than the higher difficulty setting without scaling. You'll only find out after trying. But still: keep an eye on your blood pressure! Whoha I posted in the wrong thread. Had two tabs open and the topics were kind of similar... should stop with those tabs...

Correct, I was talking about penetration only though (because that's what was specifically asked for). So what I basically meant was that Arcane Archer's penetration works just fine (like any Ranger's) besides the penetration of the damaging imbue effects. The imbue effects don't scale properly with Power Level. But projectile count will scale with the Minor Missile imbue. For example I just fired Imbue: Minor Missiles with a lvl-9 Shepherd and then with a lvl-20 Shepherd. Projectile count rose from 4 (3 is base) to 6. Didn't test duration lately but damage still doesn't seem to scale at all for Missiles, Fireball and Death Ring. The Imbue effects do not suffer from the usual dmg malus of jumps. Jumps (from Driving Flight etc.) make up for the non-scaling damage. The imbue effects get the same ACC from Arcane Archer's Arcana skill and the level bonus as the initial weapon shot gets. So for example my aforementioned lvl-9 Sheperd gets +24 ACC from level for both (shot + imbue effect). At lvl 20 both get +54 ACC. The imbue effects won't profit from stuff like Marksman and Rune Bolts (Spearcaster) and other stuff that's closely tied to weapon-only attack rolls. Shootist from Acina's Tricorn works (for everything as usual). PS: it seems that the pulsings of Binding Web and Pull of Eora suffer the -5 ACC penalty of Arcane Archer which he usually gets for non-elemental and non-imbue abilites. It seems that once the shot is released the effects are not flagged as imbue/elemental anymore. That's an odd oversight.

The icons look very nice nice. I personally would've chosen a more plain style for the passives* so that they match the existing ones (or redo all passive icons so that they all fit together because yours are nicer than the original ones, ha), but generally they all look very nice. I also like the overall vibe and the ideas you put into it. It seems you put a lot of work and thought into the mechanics of most abilites. So this mods looks impressive. For Deadfire the abilites are totally overpowered in most cases (if anything, Monk already is too strong). At least judging by description. I didn't test them in the game. But if that's fun for you (and others) why not? I mean having fun is the whole point, right? --- )* something like this (shameless self promotion incoming):

Whoo calm down! In the end you succeeded, right? Be proud of yourself! No need to risk a stroke now. Besides the general improvements that come with levels (higher ACC, defenses and so on and higher Power Level which scales all abilites) - some classes/multiclasses gain substancial abilites with a certain level. So sometimes one level up can mean a big difference in power gain because you get that one (or more) very good ability. Maybe those guys (lots of Steel Garrote Paladins, Priests of Woedica etc.) got some stuff through scaling which was making it substancially harder for you than a few levels might indicate. one point of armor alone can seriously scale up the difficulty because underpenetration is a severe disadvantage that is much worse than the numbers suggest (if you want to know more about that search for "double inversion" mechanics for maluses such as underpenetration, grazing etc.). For example if the Paladins got Exalted Endurance and Brand Enemy and the Woedican Priest got Devotions for the Faithful then all of a sudden the fight would be much, much harder just because of those abilities. Scaling can only be done with levels. So you could argue this special encounter is not balanced when it comes to scaling and most likely that's correct, but I don't think the scaling in general has a problem (may be it has - but I didn't read much about it since release). Encouter design was done on normal difficulty with no scaling. Due to the unhomogenous nature of classes and their ability progression there will be certain bumps and spikes. You can't expect the developer to then go and check every enounter in case scaling or difficulty settings make it a bit harder or easier than might be intended. With several difficulty settings and scaling (and god challenges) there are just too many combinations to check. I personally would rather pick PotD difficutly than playing Veteran + upscaling. It's more consistent because enemies get flat value increases (flat bonus to defenses, armor etc.) which won't surprise you. But that's just me...