Boeroer

Some good synergies: Alacrity + Enduring Dance + Drugs = constant stream of incoming Wounds. You can spam wound powered abilites all the time. Use the self buffs - Mirrored Image and Llengrath's Safeguard stack their defense bonuses. Citzal's Spirit Lance + Instruments of Pain is great! You'll get an AoE attack with 11 meters range that works with all the melee abilites (Force of Anguish, Torment's Reach, Enervating Blows etc.) Lighting Strikes + Turning Wheel can be stacked with Zandathu's Draconic Fury (this is high level stuff though). However, that will not properly stack with Minolett's Piercing Sigil which is also very strong. But you'll do a ton of lash damage. Race doesn't matter much. Nature Godlike can be nice because Wellspring of Live gets triggered by Swift strikes, Alacrity, Infuse and others - so most likely you will have +1 PL all the time. Stats: you need high INT. If you make a lot of use of Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon you can get away with not so high CON. DEX should be good. If you go doe Swift Flurry + Hearbeat Drumming PER should be superb. In theory you could drop RES and take Clarity of Agony - but if you want to have certain dialogue options you need RES.

Heart of Fury makes them good against mobs. But you need a priest with BDD to prevent him from dying constantly. Even more if you use frenzy and the raw damage ticks in. Spirit Storm is very good for CC, it works very often. Serafen is a vanilla Barb. There is no raw damage when he uses Frenzy. Also a non-Berserker Barb is not too squishy and will not die contantly - especially not with Savage Defiance which makes him rather sturdy once you reach certain levels where the higher starting endurance has more impact (Serafen las lowish CON though, so give him 1 or two CON items). It sounds as if you were confusing Barb with Berserker..? @Jayd: which char level is Serafen currently on? Due to his stats he's not minmaxed for anything but some builds work better than others. For example once you reach PL9 you should totally skill him towards "The Bloody Mess": Blood Storm, Blood Surge, Bloodlust, Blood Thirst and Driving Roar. Acina's Tricorn works with Driving Roar. That would be the "ranged" variant. Backup weapon can be his mortars or whatever ranged. Melee variant is basically the same but also use Brute Force - jump in using Panther's Leap, then Willbreaker & Heart of Fury + Body Blows, then Dazing Shout non-stop. Wear the Bloody Links - just because of the name. You can also pick Blooded on this one, the +25% dmg also works with the shout. Once your endurance drops a lot you can trigger Savage Defiance. If you have a lot of Rage left due to Blood Surge use HoF from time to time - the Willbreaker's enchantments "The Mind makes Real" and "Battered Mind" work very well with the shout which shakens enemies (=RES affliction). Int this one also Spirit Tornado can make sense. Depends though on how often he goes down without it. The melee variant is more risky and you don't do as much dps most likely (base dmg of Dazing Shout is lower than Driving Roar) but at the same time you debuff Fortitude (Dazed + Body Blows = 35) and also Will (Willbreaker + Shaken) which might be great for your party members. I personally like Driving Roar better - it's less dependend from items and it also knocks enemies down. Once you are "in a frenzy" with Blood Thirst they won't get up again. The second variant is better if you not only want to do dmg but also debuff - and if you already skilled Serafen for Morning Star etc. and don't want to retrain. Before getting to PL9 one must maybe accept that Serafen with a Morning Star is not your best dmg dealer but more of a fortitude debuffer/dmg dealer hybrid. You can't measure the effect he has on party's damage if he lowers enemies' Fortitude by 35 constantly - but I guarantee with the right party members it can be very useful. If you want to maximize Carnage dmg you have to pick Monastic Unarmed Training, Accurate Carnage and all the speedups you can get. Also bonus INT and AoE bonuses are necessary. In general a Barb is better against tight groups, so something like Dazzling Lights from stealth followed by Pull of Eora are very good to improve a Barb's performance. If you want to maximize HoF I would pick Battle Axe in main hand (+ Bleeding Cuts) and Scordeos Edge with Adaptive + Blade Cascade in offhand. I think... Circumventing the recovery malus of Bleeding Cuts with HoF is pretty nice while doing a lot of raw DoT.

Yeah that's a bit counterintuitive - and also frustrating to use as well as to test. You won't guess how many times I thought "wtf - this doesn't do anything" until I used a dw blunderbuss quickswitcher (Black Jacket/Streetfighter) and found out that you have to overcome the malus from flanked first.

The last part is really weird though. It's the same weapon used with he same ability. Why would you get an ACC malus on impact? And if the keyword is attached afterwards - how do you know that Essence Interrupter profits from Heart of the Storm and thus gets +1 PEN for the shock dmg in order to pick the "better" dmg type?

Two Handed Weapons DO have higher PEN and base dmg than one handed while they have the same speed as the heavier one handers (sabre, sword, spear, mace, hammer, axe). If you look at some of the dps comparison sheets or posts you can see that they are in a pretty good spot. One handed single weapon use is the loser, not 2H. I don't agree with most of above, but I agree that too many active abilities can be bad. First of all they make the fights harder to manage. But that's not my problem with them. My problem is with actives of classes with fixed resource pools (Fighter, Rogue, Ranger, Barb) is that usually there are clear winners in terms of what do I get for x resource points". And since all actives compete for resource points you end up using those winners only anyway. If not: taking too many actives is a trap choice. More passives for those classes and only a few great actives (that are truly differentiated - see Disciplined Strike and Mule Kick) would be nice. The resource pool system leads to the opposite of PoE where fighters, rogues, barbs and rangers wanted to take as many active abilities as possible because it added per-encouter uses. I like the pool system better, but it has to be tweaked more.

I guess because it's too much hassle to alter the code for that one single NPC kith?

It is a bug. But it doesn't affect lashes in general because those don't add keywords automatically. Only items that are keyworded will experience this bug. Those are Dragon's Dowry, Essence Interrupter, Sun & Moon, Firebrand, Frostseeker, Kalakoth's Minor Blight and maybe some more. I think those had keywords added manually because it fits their "lore" or nature - that kind of thing. Also got added because people complained that stuff like Firebrand or Frostseeker didn't profit from keyword abilities (+PL, +ACC, +PEN etc.).

No. It's only a couple of weapons. Having a lash does not automatically entail the keyword.

Let's hope for the best.

That's not a mistake. That's access control. Drives away players who can't read three lines without breaking out in a cold sweat and starting to drool. If you think Deadfire has too much text then try a book. That stuff is totally over the top with... letters. I'm no native speaker nor did I ever live in a country where English is the first language. I only have my English lessons from school an the Internet. And books and movies. I have zero problems understanding everything in PoE or Deadfire.

Nobody I their right mind would call Divinity one of the best RPG ever as well. Seriously. I mean I like Larian in general and I played the heck out of the original Divine Divinity. But calling any of the Divinity games best RPG ever is like calling Jamie Oliver the best chef ever.

I agree. Most likely it's just missing.

Ah, ok. It may be that the 25% is included in the dice roll and thus doesn't get listed (see Power Level bonus). I don't think so, but maybe. Try Gambit with Hand Mortar and Fire I the Hole on a tight crowd and check the dmg rolls.

I'm also curious how this can happen all the time. It was a problem with PoE but I thought they would do it better in the sequel. Usually this is a sign of very entangled (non-decoupled) code...? Doesn't Unity use the usual component-driven approach? I'm only messing around with the Godot Game Engine from time to time (its approach is awesome) - and there it's pretty hard to produce spaghettis. Don't know how Unity performs in that regard. Only did some tutorials with it and found it meh. But I understand that it's very difficult to produce robust code all the time if you have no time / a deadline and the project is very complex.

Wounding Shot doesn't work with AoE weapons as well while other abilities (like Rogue's) do. Well not atm because there's a recently introduced bug with AoE weapon as well. But they usually do. I think this was intentional because lots of patches ago Wounding Shot was considered to be too strong and thus those AoE/jump capabilities were removed. There's even a setting/object/variable in the code that prevents this from happening. But they nerfed it even further. Nowadays I think this restriction should be removed. Description of Wounding Shot's raw dmg is also not correct.

Yes. Both weapons' damage is keyworded/labeled/tagged with "frost" resp. "fire" - even though they do different base damage. This makes them work with Secret of Rime, Scion of Flame (+1 PEN) and Ring of Focused Flame (+10 ACC) and PL bonus (pet Otto Starcat) and so on. They also don't put an ACC malus on an Arcane Archer's non-imbue attacks. Also see Essence Interrupter (shock keyword). The downside seems to be that when immunity gets checked that first of all keywords get checked. Somebody forgot about this it seems.

The +25% is a leftover from Finishing Blow. Apparently Devastating Blow, which is an upgrade, doesn't update that part of the description. So the +50% in your second example is correct. The first one has 50 included in the overall dmg bonus of 312. So there are 262 left. I don't exactly know the actual "under the hood" mechanics. You could ask MaxQuest in these forums who can most likely give you a detailed explanation how it's computed. The descriptions are mostly auto-generated and with more complex mechanics they simply don't work properly. Don't know if this is fixable. Also have a look here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/107521-devastating-blow-inconsistancy/

Try to use Hunter's Claw/Fang with a blunderbuss/melee weapon (up to +8 ACC against creature group per shot) and Whirling Strikes with Fire in the Hole/Keeper of the Flame (4 * AoE hits * AoE hits). Also works for Hunter with Clear Out (but only primary attack: 3*AoE *AoE).

I do indeed pick no spells with a wizard unless I need to - or unless I always want access to that spell no matter what. Usually those are the spells I want to spam in quick succession at the start of combat (self buffs for example). But even for that you can find the proper grimoire (and start encounter with that one). I will pick passives with an SC Wizard over spells, knowing that I can get the spell with a grimoire. With a muticlass wizard I will pick mostly abilities of the second class. If I have to pick wizard abilities I will pick the generic ones I wanted to pick anyway (e.g. Two Handed Style when I play a Sage with Quarterstaff or Fast Runner if I play a ranged Geomancer). It's true that new players will not be able to exploit the grimoire mechanics - initially. There is retraining though. So nothing stops a new player from realizing that one doesn't necessarily need to pick spells. As soon as he has a nice collection of grimoires one could retrain and pick less spells - and only pick the spells that are not in the grimoires.

Then - I'm sorry - you guys are using grimoires ineffectively. Sure you can (and maybe want to - in case if SC Wizard heven have to) learn some spells with ability points - those that you always want to have access to without switching. But using a meticulously composed collection of up to 7 Grimoires (trinket slot + 6 quick item slots) can give you access to nearly all spells while you don't need to spend one single ability point. Switching Grimoires doesn't take a ton of time in Deadfire (Quick Switch doesn't help by the way). Of course meta knowledge is very handy here. So the system is totally designed to motivate Grimoire swapping. You could even make a collection of fire grimoires which you swap to once you switched to Magran's Favor + Sun & Moon - or some Illusion Grimoires once you switch to Eye of Wael and so on. The grimoire mechanic is such a huge advantage over Priests' and Druids' spell & trinket mechanic (hint: they have no trinket mechanic) that it's OP. To have access to all spells without retrainig. Even during an encounter you can have up to 14 different spells per spell level at your disposal. While the idea to give bonus PL for a spell that you learned and that's also in your current grimoire is nice - it would make an overpowered mechanic even more overpowered. Having no spells in grimoires makes no sense (unless we redifine grimoires as tomes which don't hold the actual spells but something like explanations, comments and "metamagical" knowledge about spells).

I'd also say yes.

Nope

Interesting. I don't have those problems on Linux. I mean during WotW the framerate drops like crazy - but afterwards it's back to normal.

Yes, the initial target gets twice the damage. A bit like Whispers of the Endless Paths was doing before nerf.

If you can cause Resolve afflictions in the party or by yourself reliably I would take those enchantments like The Mind makes Real etc.