Boeroer

I think I remember him saying that.

I would choose Battle Axe + Bleeding Cuts over Lover's Kiss. Especially with Full Attacks and a light weapon in the offhand - e.g. Marux Amanth as you said.

Added some Rogue passives to the bunch and altered older ones (e.g. Overbearing Guard, Tumbling):

@One Stands alone: yes. Because if I make it too symmetrical it will look very "circle-ish" once the round mask gets removed (in UIs other than the level-up ability tree). But still looks too circle-ish. So my idea didn't work... @Thick Skinned: I also figured that a Rhino not only has thick skin but also poses a threat - which can relate to the +1 engagement. The Wilder Hunter icon is actually the top of the Xaurip Shamans' quarterstaffs. Took that from some PoE concept art.

Turning Wheel doesn't work with ranged weapons or spells - so you might as well skip it and stick to Duality of Mortal Presence and spare one ability point. Good boss killer (includes Dragons) usually is a single class monk due to Resonant Touch which has no stack limit. Against single targets which are not pierce immune or highly resistant blunderbuss is best since every hit over 10 dmg adds a Resonant Touch - and blunderbusses hit 4 times per shot. Sun & Moon is also nice since it hits twice per swing. Single class Monks also have the potential for very high accuracy via Enduring Dance (+12) and Razor's Edge (+10). If you use a Forbidden Fist with very high RES you can spam Forbidden Fist on the dragon, get a curse duration of less than 3 sec. and get healed and +1 wound while it runs out. Any other affliction also will run out quickly and heal you and give a wound. That way you don't have to spend a lot of wounds and always stay at 9-10. With Crucible of Suffering you will always have raised defenses. Forbidden Fist costs 0 wounds as long as you are not already cursed. It scales with Power Level and Transcendent Suffering and has a base PEN of 9 which leads to pretty great PEN and dmg at higher levels. Since you are stacking RES already you can make a weapon and Tuotilo's Palm build with high defenses. Your weapon should not be crush but some other dmg type. Forbidden Fist does not use your weapon but only does crush. So you csn have all physical dmg types without switching. The Enfeeblement of Forbidden Fist gives DoTs on the Dragon +50% duration. So if you have a cipher with Disintegrate he will like you. Usually Dragons have high RES and thus reduce Disintegration time a lot - with enfeebling you can counter that. Also Enfeebled reduces the dragon's current and max health by 25% which is the equivalent of many hits. More info on CON afflictions and why they are good: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/109118-how-good-is-enervating-blows-really/

Easiest solution for Josh were if he included multiplayer into his next RPG game: *poof* Critics of balancing disintegrated.

One can believe a lots of things and dismiss stuff with a handwave. That's too easy. Why is it bull****? The thing is that Josh Sawyer gives examples and makes some reasonable arguments in order to explain why he thinks that balancing is good for the majority of players. His experience as a designer (looking at unbalanced products in hindsight) also helps. Meanwhile the opposition of balancing fails to do such things. At least in this thread. It's all about one's feelings - but no effort is made to go into depth.

The "disabling" effects of Withdraw, Beetle Shell and Stasis will not get altered by resistances, immunities or inspirations. They seem to be hard-wired and not part of the usual affliction/inspiration/resistance/immunity system. Generally speaking: push effects will disable engagement, then move the character. Therefore: no disengagement attacks.

Ha - you are one silly boy, aren't you? "It's Michelle Obama! LOLZ!" I wanted to read the textual source of that statement so that I don't have to judge based on your interpretation. Since you are a forum user with a very dubious reputation the question for source was justified. And I was right. Your interpretation is devious and vitriolic. The analogy she used is still bad though. She needs to go to attend an analogy workshop or something. The right analogy would of course have been that USA is the North Pole, US citizens are all little elves, then Santa Claus died and Krampus became your new boss. That would mean Krampus is as bad as Trump (which would be unfair to say) - but who cares about Krampus anyway...

I guess. If the Wheel doesn't get fixed in time. But this time worldwide and also hollowborn animals and so on. And since holloborn seem to be too passive to procreate everything dies out. That's why Rymrgand likes this ending so much.

Don't buy it. The Deadfire Pack can be downloaded for free.

Yes, that was patched. Didn't try Cleansing Flame or Taste of the Hunt.

Little update: finished Barb's passives (for now):

But Cpt. Hairsplitter sir, I meant the whole D&D franchise including AD&D and whatnot. Since I never played any of those thingies I cannot really know the differences between AD&D, BD&D and CD&D, can I? I only know that all the big IE games had some D&D (as an umbrella term) in it.

Tumbling: +20 Defense against apes that hurl poop at you. Sorry, couldn't resist. Obviously didn't take Bad Joke Resistance. I like petrols and turquoise in general. The lower left would be my favorite I think.

Errr sure, if you think so... i mean correct: you didn't say "totally". You use a lot of rather ridiculous hyperbole though - which makes it hard to take your criticism seriously. You also refuse to name any example, making it hard for me and others to judge if your complaints are somewhat justified of if you maybe just didn't understand how something works or whatevr reason there may be. As some other users pointed out: There was a difficulty adjustment for Deadfire that made the game significantly harder. So it might also be that you feel that your char is gimped now even though nothing about his stats and abilites changed. Also now you are deviating from nerfs to badly explained game rules, difficulty and complexity. This is a totally different topic. If you think the game is too difficult and fights take too long you can lower the difficulty - as a player. But you can't do anything if the balancing is totally off and some abilites are too good (or too bad). You can just avoid them which narrows your choices significantly. I agree that the explanations of game mechanics are bad - but that has nothing to do with your initial topic so maybe we shouldn't open that box now just to stay focused on nerfs and balancing. I gave you a link to Josh Sawyers Tumbler where he explains why he balances and why he will continue to do so. It doesn't sound like you read that. It actually answers some of your questions - first handedly from the designer. You will have to accept that there's different tastes and reasons why players play games - also CRPGs. You don't seem to belong to the group of players that Josh Sawyers design philosophy is targeting. But just because you don't like it doesn't make the game ****ty, abilites "useless" (not totally useless mind you ) or balancing a bad thing. As you can see there are enough people here who like balancing. It's just not your thing. We can objectively discuss if the implementation of nerfs reaches Josh Sawyers design goal or the goals of balaning in general. Maybe the nerfs are too harsh, maybe the buffs are not enough. I don't think so - but I'm willing to discuss actual nerfs and if they are indeed too harsh - or not.

They are born with the souls that are in the beyond until there are no more left. Souls can't pass to the beyond from the in-between without the wheel - so with every death and rebirth the in-between becomes more stuffed and the beyond more empty.

Source?

I played both BG I and II and liked them. But I didn't play them that often. I think they are inferior games compared to PoE and Deadfire - but at their time they were very awesome. This may have something to do with the fact that I never played P&P D&D - so there was no nostalgia or bias or whatever. I only know D&D rules by CRPGs. I found Irenicus to be rather lame as main antatonist. But it didn't have much impact on the game itself - at least for me. One of the coolest enemies I encountered in a D&D game was Dran Draggore.

Would be cool if you described what the nerf actually was. Because I can't remember what really changed. It might be that is wasn't so severe. Or that the overall caster buff balanced that out pretty nicely. I don't count fixing stuff that didn't work as intended as "nerfing" by the way. So for example fixing Wall of Draining so that you can't have multiple instances of it anymore isn't a nerf for me. It's a bugfix (becaue you couldn't have mutliple walls active - except Wall of Draining). Strong ability nerfs I remember: Charge (was way too good though), Evasive Fire (was slighty overpowered but I don't think it had to be nerfed), Wounding Shot (same), most lashes like Lightning Strikes, FoD, Wildstrike, Spiritutal Weapons (were too good), Full Attacks in general (good nerf!). Devotions otF. Maybe more if I contemplated more about it. And all the item nerfs of course. Buffs I remember: new abilities (Hunter's Claw, Heartseeker and so on), casting speeds through the board, cipher focus generation, PEN softening in general, Two Handed weapons getting +1 PEN through the board, Monastic Unarmend Training, Firebrand... So it's not the case that there is only nerfing and the weak stuff doesn't get touched at all. It's just so that not every buff the crowd calls for will get implemented. I understand that designers are cautious to buff too much - because then the other half of the crows goes wild with "PotD is too damn easy!!11!!1!" We are doing a Deadfire Polishing Thread and Poll atm and there aren't so many things that need buffs actually. There are also some things that need a nerf. But all in all: not that much. I think the perception of balancing is heavily influenced by the fact that players only tend to remember the nerf but not the buff. That was not the point. The point was that some players like to play overpowered (be it through cheats or heavily overpowered items/abilites) while others (maybe the majority?) do not.

Err... brown? @raw dmg vs. general dmg: good! I can easily swap out those two. No problem. @Brute Force: the body + arrow - icon looks a bit silly though. As if somebody painted an archery target on his chest and is like "come on! try to hit me!" Hammer shattering the earth at least gives a feeling of "Brute Force". Or I depict somebody using his head to crush a wall...? Or I use an alternative symbol for accuracy - not that target + arrow thing... @One Stands Alone: an icon will seldomly be able to "describe" the whole ability. So if a player really thinks that it only works from the front (judging by the icon) the description should help him. I can also try to bring one ot two spears behind the head. I added a helmet to the head shape because it looked a bit bland before. I like that it looks like Rekvu's Fractured Casque now (which is a barb item and belonged to a Barbarian who is kind of the incarnation of "One Stands Alone" - judging by lore). @crits: yeah, I also tried a D20 (with 20 up) - but it's all too filigree and doesn't look too good because of that. Actually I like the skull stuff pretty much. It's easy to add details to the crit-skull (see Toughened Fury or Bloody Slaughter) and it still looks good, not silly and not too packed. For "kill" I think Berath's symbol is ok. For "death" or "ko" of allies/player I think I will use the tombstone/holy cross symbol that I already used with Vengeful Defeat. It also gets used by Paladin's resurrection abilites and so on - so there will be some consistency. @Chest: I think Phenomenum meant "cross" or "crest" - the plus-symbol I changed a little bit so that it doesn't get confused with the other plus symbol that stands for healing (see Practiced Healer for example.)

Yes, it is viable. You can rebuild it on many ways though. Too many to list them all here. There's the option of multiclassing with several classes like Rogue, Barbarian, Fighter, Monk - but you can also try and do it single classed.

@MaxQuest: I'm totally open for switching the raw-dmg symbol for something else that might indicate increased damage or damage in general. Do you have something in mind? Or maybe I scrap that symbol entirely and go by intuition? For example for Improved Critial on could make a small skull morph into a bigger one or something like that. I also thought about symboly for miss/graze/hit/crit and came up with D20-shapes that er either empty (miss), half filled (graze), filled (hit) and exploded (crit). But it looks kind of weird and and strangly mathematical/geometrical and I don't think most players won't get it anyway. Maybe in this case looks trumps symbolism? Don't know... I do like consistency - but since this is more of an artistical challenge... for me at least.

Alternatives? I have to say: having certain symbols for effects (shield = defense, strongman for fortitude and so on) is nice as a starting point, but if I stick to them too fiercly the symbols become either rather undistinguishable or very detailed which will not work woith 42*42 pixels. They also sometimes become messy und ugly. It's also questionable if one can deduce what the ability does just by looking at the icon. So - I try to incorporate those symbols - but when I can't make it look decent I take some liberty and do something else - just to see if that's any better. When I look at the sheet I also have to say the icons where I didn't stick to the symbolism too fiercly are the ones I like best (judging by the aesthetics and how interesting they are to look at).

No worries. I can alter that. It's just so that drawing new icons is more fun than fiddling with the older ones - so I tend to push the latter. I will catch up on the older ones that are still so-so. Colors: there doesn't seem to be a consistent color schema where blue=defensive, red=offensive and so on? Don't know. Obviously the "blood" stuff has to be red. Afaik there's grey, red, dark blue, light blue, yellow and purple for the more "simple" icons in the passive side. I would also like a kind of greenish color - petrol or so: -petrol- But for the most part I think I would just use the background-color that they had before? I mean if it looks ok and makes sense. As I said: Blood THirst and so on would be kind of silly in blue or yellow.