Boeroer

Hehe - no. That makes it easy. Then totally go for it!

You can totally sink all ships (maybe not the Deck) with the sloop and Iron Thunderer cannons right from the start (if you pick Berath's Blessing for the expert crewmen). Because char level has zero impact on ship fights. Without the Blessing you just sink some easy ships (Diccla, Beggar Winfrud etc.) and you are there as well. Grab high quality gear without a fight while sparing time and powergame on!

i didnt test eyestrike. it seems fine but is it really any better than chill fog? I did test the charm a bit. what is so great about it? It's only on one guy when you're usually fighting hordes of pirates in ship combat. and the duration is short. how are you using it that makes it so good? valor echoes seemed good but once again it falls short. it needs to be able to target yourself and also last 45 seconds. i just said biting whip looks good on paper but ya it falls short like cipher always does lol. I think the +2 pen from devoted is better than biting whip alone not to mention all the other amazing passives and skills fighters can take. cipher spells are so annoying to use. arcane knight is just one build i like. i also like devoted/trickster, -10% sneak attack is a small price to pay for mirror image. and although i havnt tested it i think devoted/paladin will be the melee king for obvious reasons. You are power gaming and doing boarding fights? Somewhat contradicts itself. Devoted/Paladin is not really the king of anything. It can be a good balance of defense and offense though or a no-frills tank that can't be disenchanted by Arcane Dampener. King of melee combat is anything with Monk I'd say. Devoted is for players who are too lazy to switch weapon sets or can't let go of their favorite weapon. I mean if you only recently discovered PEN/AR that totally explains why you think Devoted is so good. You have to know that the malus of underpenetration is multiplicative in most cases. So if a Devoted helps you to not underpenetrate then the gain is massive, yes. But you can achieve the same without Devoted. Whisper of Treason is great because it's like taking away an enemy while calling a summon at the same time. Obviously you shouldn't attack the charmed enemy - else it flips back immediately. But you can still apply stuff like Miasma or other debuffs that have friendly fire but don't do damage. The charmed and further debuffed enemy will distract other enemies and get shred to pieces by his former fellows. That's why it's powerful. The only drawback of Whisper of Treason is its short range. Bit it's still doable (with a bit of stealth) to charm enemies from stealth. That is very powerful. The combat starts and the party is still stealthed while the enemies attack each other. Puppet Master is even better because the range is a lot higher. Don't forget that base duration scales with Power Level. That means that a lvl-1 power like Whisper of Treason lasts a very long time after some levels with decent INT (even more so if you are a single class Cipher which I personally value over multiclass ones). Eyestrike is foe-only and lasts quite long for a replenishable cipher power. But the best part is that you are not limited to 2 (or 3) casts per encounter. It also doesn't take too long to cast/recover. Only 3/2 secs. For a Soul Blade you can use Sun & Moon: it applies the raw damage with the first hit and refills focus with these second flail head. Also here don't pick Biting Whip. Pick Draining Whip. Then you can spam Soul Annihilation more often or with more damage. More effective than Biting Whip.

Yeah right. Good points. I was focusing on stuff that you can get right away at the beginning without twisting things too much (besides the race/culture thing). For gauntlets of Ogre Might you need either Berath's Blessing (Port Maje) or go to the Brass Citadel. At that point you can also go and grab Chamaeleon's Touch of course. Didn't know if people like to be forced to be cruel just in order to be able to use Amra efficiently (Effigy's Resentment/Gift from the Machine). But on the other hand being forced to play Auama or Dwarf is also not the best thing. Speaking of Berath's Blessing: obviously the easiest way to squeeze out some MIG. Totally forgot about that although I was thinking about Blessings for the vendor.

White Worms has quite high base damage for such a low level spell. This means that every power level adds a significant chunk of dmg (in absolute numbers). And since it's lvl 1 you can add quite a bit power levels to it. The Daylight invocation upgrade used do do the same damage on grazes as on hits - made it quite good against high defense foes. Don't know if that got fixed.

While I'm not a huge cipher lover in general I recently played a Beguiler because its mechanics were altered by a patch. And before starting the playthrough I did a solo test in Port Maje - just for trying it out under harsh conditions. lvl-1 mind control in general is so powerful that it can put all cipher subclasses into the top league of usefulness. For imps you need something else, sure. Good that a cipher isn't limited to mind powers. I can't imagine what you are trying to do with your cipher but you seem to not use him properly. Soul Whip's bonus damage is a nice little feature that adds a little bit of weapon damage - but it's only a 20% additive damage bonus (based on weapon base damage). That alone doesn't make a decent class. Inexperienced players are often gluttons for dmg bonuses - not realizing that they are all only additive (except Power Level bonus and lashes) and based on base damage (in case of weapons it's quite low). They forget about stuff like speed (multiplicative dps increase) and intelligence (which also means multiplicative increase of dps in cases of AoE and DoTs) and many other things. Like the synergy between debuffs that target a weak defense but lower another (high) defense and further CC or hit rolls. So they take Biting Whip and go "hell yeah - so much damage" not realizing that it increases your sabre hits by a meager 1.6 additive slash dmg. So... Soul Whip/Biting Whip... yeah... cipher would also work well enough without it. Draining Whip on the other hand: +100% focus generation. This means in most cases you don't have to hit an enemy twice to cast your next power but only once. A power that has way more impact than +1.6 dmg. That's powerful. Eyestrike: blind on lvl 1 - powerful. Grab a morning star, target their deflection and lower their fortitude and then blind even "red skulled" foes. Then go back to attacking deflection. Rinse and repeat. Whisper of Treason: hit them with a club (attack targets deflection and lowers will) and turn them into friends afterwards. An additional body on the field! Awesome! It seems to me so far you tactics are a bit... plain? Hence Arcane Knights work so well for you. They combine high defenses with a decent dmg output and thus can brute-force better than some other combos.

It makes me cringe if people can't just say sorry and be a mensch but instead keep on digging themselves deeper into the sh!t. That can include myself by the way. Usually if everybody tells you that you didn't behave decently you might want to stop and reevaluate your position.

What exactly? The "super speed"? Or all the weird pacing changes from walking to running? Because those happen every half minute at least for me.

Should work ok I guess. Just keep in mind that you need 25 MIG in order to produce that Carnage-like ability of Amra. It can crit by the way (unlike the original Carnage). 25 MIG without a MIG inspiration can be kind of annoyong to come by. Although +2 gloves and some +MIG food can be bought early. But then you're kind of limited to Aumaua and Dwarf + Living Lands.

No. They work like any other two handed weapon. They profit from Two Handed Style and Weapon Proficiency Battle Axe and nothing else.

But this is highly subjective and changes a lot from player to player. For you the randomness makes it less boring, for others it's just frustrating. I played both BG and BGII only once each (IWD I & II twice I think) - because the story etc. was nice. But the mechanics were so bad (for my taste) that I didn't want to play it more than once. PoE and Deadfire I play(ed) a LOT after completing the first playthrough.

I didn't mean that specific "puzzle" - I meant puzzle-like encounters in general. Where you have to figure out a way to beat an otherwise unbeatable enemy. A bit like Belranga actually.

And returns - and goes away - and returns...

Why not? Ask players here how they feel about Wild Mind and you'll see why too much randomness is not considered to be a good thing with game mechanics. Because if you can win a hard encounter with a lucky roll you can also lose an easy one with a bad roll. Also being able to one-shot enemies all the time is not considered to be satisfying game design - unless you want to make an Action RPG maybe. It's supposed to be tactical combat in real time with pause. Not roulette. I mean if you like that kind of stuff that's fine. But I suspect you don't represent the majority of CRPG players. Both extreme randomness as well as constant one-shotting don't help with tactical combat. Especially not when going for stuff like Trial of Iron.

Not quite. The moving speed issue while stealthed got fixed, but now we have issues with character movement out of stealth (while out of combat): Move animation and speed will switch from walking to running and vice versa. While the "speedy stealth" was somewhat convenient - this new bug is just annoying. Sometimes, after reloading, you will run so fast as if you had Wild Sprint activated. That's convenient again.

What do you mean by "stacking"? Sworn Enemy gives you +20% additive bonus damage and Marked Prey gives you +10 accuracy. So they both will apply their effects no problem with a Paladin/Ranger. It's not really stacking though. More like complementing each other. Maybe you read an old description where both had a dmg bonus as well as an accuracy bonuses? That got "streamlined" pretty early after release or even in beta (can't remember). Because bonuses weren't stacking properly iirc. Or it was too good? Can't remember. So Obsidian went and turned one ability into "dmg only" and the other ability into "accuracy only". Problem solved and abilites nerfed at the same time.

Mechanics like that are pretty nice. Kind of a puzzle. Or like "find the key". But they can also frustrate the hell out of impatient players (who don't like to read). So I guess designers often shy away...

It's exactly the same with PoE and Deadfire. Not in a literal second, but figuratively speaking. Else we hadn't the two most frequent complaints about them: a) It is too hard b) It is too easy While the parts that are considered too hard/too easy overlap. And: Is it a boon of a RPG ruleset if sheer luck with dice rolls alone lets you win alleged tough encounters?

I did. Double tap!

Hitting with the shield to circumvent pierce-immunity: you will be disappointed. The base damage of Tuotilo's Palm is quite low. It will take forever to kill pierce-immune foes just with the Shield's bash damage. You can still go Devoted with spear though because there is Kahua Hozi. It does pierce/slash damage and can be used as backup weapon. Just be aware that there are a couple of pierce-immune enemies until you can get it. Maybe choosing Monastic Unarmed Training (works well with Tuotilo's Palm anyway) would be an option? You can easily retrain after getting that backup spear. I played an Unbroken/Trickster as main tank for two playthroughs now and it works really well. Not necessarily as great damage dealer - but as a pretty good mixture of defense, offense and debuffs. I'm using Mob Stance, Reckless Brigandine, Kapana Taga and Cadhu Scalth/Bronlar's Phalanx/Akola's Apex Ward though. So a bit less offensive. But it gives me very high attack speed when surrounded - given that I'm in fat armor and not using dual wieldig. If you don't want to dwell on engagement mechanics too much I'd say Paladin/Trickster is nice.

Yes, Ring of Focused Flame + FoD + Ranger is really great in the early game. Lots of crits where you usually don't see them that often. I did the same (ranged) with Spearcaster on an Arcane Archer/Bleak Walker - where I could also add the Eternal Devotion, the Ring bonus and the Arcana bonus (twice) to Imbue Fireballs. Crits galore! Try to get the amulet "Precognition" - it's not bad with such a high ACC Paladin/Ranger setup.

I tried to google it and look what I found: https://www.amazon.com/Blessing-for-Amira-Amirah/dp/B0073O8IQO

You just have annoy people to get things done. I learned that from my kids.

I accidentally laughed about the title of this thread. Buggers in Heafric's Nose...

You say things like that it's unintuitive that MIG determines spell damage and that PoE' stat system is not good because it does things differently from other RPGs like D&D - and at the same time you praise a system as intuitive that lets INT determine weapon damage (in some cases for whatever in-game reason) and does things differently than other RPGs. It sounds as if you are curving your arguments, not the others. Theirs were pretty straight.