Boeroer

I always did that. In PoE as well. There were just a few exceptions, mainly wounding (from Tidefall/Persistence/Boar Tusks/Drawn in Spring/Acuan Giamas). Shining Beacon with maxed INT and MIG was doing tremendous damage with a crit.

Disciplined Strikes boosts your accuracy by 5 points. I wouldn't call that a lot. Honestly the more I try to trigger Cleaving Stance with several characters the less I think of it (in a full party). I find the Unbroken's Disengagement Attacks to be pretty... broken? You can't leave an Unbroken's engagement without severe punishment. No enemy ever leaves an Unbroken when I play him. He's like a Monster Magnet.

Yes, it got buffed in one of the later patches to also work on grazes. Pretty big improvement. Still not overwhelming, but ok.

Try to shoot an enemy who's affected by Confounding Blind with dual bluderbusses: instant -30 deflection. Now imagine a Black Jacket/Sharpshooter with 4 weapons sets, Quick Switch and 8 blunderbusses. That's -120 deflection in seconds. Bosses beware! Also nice synergy: Confounding Bling with rod&Blast (= AoE appliance of Blind) and then using Swift Flurry (additional attacks with crits). At some point, when deflections drops enough, a chain reaction is triggered where the low deflection leads to a lot of crits which trigger additional attacks which also end up as crits which trigger additional ttacks as well and so on...

No, it does not apply to spells. But Assassinate does.

Also try Assassin with explosives from steath...

By the way: Beckoner can summon 6 skeletons in 3 seconds (not 6!). That's base duration. With a bit of DEX it's even faster. The Skeletons split into two other skeletons after death. So a dying skeleton is no problem. No nead to heal them. And he only needs 2 phrases for the summoning. And he starts the encounter with 2... At the same time he can buff the summons' damage with Mith Fyr and boost their move speed or use Sure Handed Ila to speed up the attack speed of ranged summons like the wurms (he can use slower summonings without a gap after the initial summoning of skeletons). That's why he's WTF tier. Definetely more use- and powerful than a Devoted. Like in PoE it's not pure dps of every party member that wins the game. As I said in another thread: if you multiclass with a paladin with Zealous Focus and Shared Flames the damage of 6 skeletons with a +45% burning lash is crazy while the survivability of the whole party is increased so much. Enemies tend to attack skeletons first because of their low defenses. They die, they split, those die, you summon new ones. Who cares? It's so powerful... Next upgrade: exploding skeletons please.

Since the Adra Dragon can put her soul into other bodies even over great distances (with the help of an item as an anchor) I think she doesn't plan to die soon but change bodies.

Right. But now it is easy to balance because it's just some weapon-unrelated AoE effect. It's just too weak atm. In terms of accuracy (it misses all the time for me) and in terms of damage. It's nice that it's raw damage though.

Sure Handed Ila stacks with everything. So the Champion invocation will stack with Sure Handed Ila, making you shoot really fast. You can use Outlander's Frenzy to bridge the gap from start of the encounter until the Champion invocation is ready. If you use tier-one phrases (or a tier-two phrase like Ila with two or more tier one phrases that fit into the linger time) you can actually reach 5 or 6 phrases pretty quickly with Brisk Recitation. At lvl 16 it halves the duration of chanting time (leaving linger untouched) so tier-one-phrases only take 2 secs to complete (only 12 secs to get 6 phrases). Even with Stuff like Mith Fyr (only takes 4 secs then) it's not too bad. Brisk Recitation is an automatic talent, you don't need to pick it.

Hehe. No, the style itself (hit-to-crit conversion) only affects the weapon attacks. Best tactic for a Dragon Thrashed Chanter in a party: max PER, max MIG, max INT, one handed weapon with some nice sideeffect (like a spellbinds or whatever). Buff ACC with items and buffs as much as possible, also INT and MIG. Also bring a priest and choose Withdraw as first Spell Mastery. Walk into the fray chanting Dragon Trashed, cast Withdraw on him and you have a high ACC/damage, invincible totem that can block doorways, block dragon paths and whatnot while chanting away while withdrawn. Also works with other phrases of course - like Soft Winds right from lvl 1 on. Chanters are a cheesefest.

It's the procs that make Lance/Blast/etc. crazy, not the damage. Swift Flurry for example doesn't care about the damage as long as it can trigger an endless chain reaction that snowballs everything to death in seconds.

If you use Assassin/Priest of Skaen the additional skaenite invisibility uses for Assassination+Backstab make it a fun combo. Also the summoned weapons hit really hard (as all spiritual weapons), but sadly Backstab/Assassinate only affects the first hit - so as light weapons they are not optimal for Backstabbing. You can backstab with an arquebus (or whatever heavy hitter) though and summon the stiletto+club once invisibility is out. Also the summoning breaks stealth (at least it did in beta3 when I was testing). Assassinate also works with direct damage spells - so I guess a Pillar of Faith or whatver might be cool with the additional PEN/ACC and the higher crit damage. And who knows what Preists of Skaen will come up with at higher levels (I know the names but don't know the effects). By the way: did anybody test what happens when an Assassin/Priest cast a damaging seal spell from stealth and an enemy then later trips it (I mean while the party is still stealthed)? Does Assassinate work with traps? never tried...

Yes, did they approve the Orlan exclusive swinger club & spa "Furnicula" I was asking for?

Eh? Where did you see that? I agree that Carnage is a bit weak. I mean all right it doesn't need PEN and all but 30% is pretty whimpy. Also because Carnage's radius is smaller due to the nerf of the effects that INT has on AoE size. Carnage has always been utter crap. The only thing that saved it in PoE was weapon procs. Without that, it's trash, even if it is raw damage. In PoE it's not. It gains +1 ACC with every char level und thus has +6 (+11 with Accurate Carnage) accuracy compared to barb's base accuracy at lvl 16. Or in other words: it's like an AoE auto-attack with a higher "base" accuracy than a fighter has. The 34% damage malus loses its impact soon enough once you get other dmg modifiers. It's only bad in the early game due to abysmal ACC and low damage (=low DR penetration). And that's when people start to judge and toss it aside. Shame if you ask me. It's one of the most powerful passive abilites in PoE if you know what you're doing and when you have to do it. But I wouldn't want Deadfire to reintroduce the weapon procs with Carnage. You can already see which horrible balancing problems come with that: look at Spirit Lance/Minor Blights/Blast and how they are implemented (like PoE's Carnage basically...). Proc BLinding Strike in an AoE - use Soul Annihilation in an AoE - Cascade Swift Flurry to one-shot groups. Ach! Again: I would want Carnage to be a bit better in Deadfire though. At the moment it makes me sad to look at those disappointing numbers (at lvl 9!). For starters they could give the Mage Slayer spell disruption for Carnage, too.

Please stop smoking your worn-up shoelaces! I mean zero-waste is cool and all, but also think about your health!

Haha - now I saw it. Was on the phone and somehow missed the red square. Well - then I'd call it a bug - or oversight. Negative defenses are nonsense.

Haha! Superembarrassing! I love it...

I put carrots into mine. I'm so special.

Ok... right... Now off to something completely different!

My evil macho mole-brother approves this massage!

I don't think they got nerfed. They even got immunities now which they didn't have before. Thing is that you can get to higher levels now and have access to a lot more effective abilites/talents. So maybe that's why it feels easier. Ultimate (without cheating) is no joke... It's not even the dragons - it's the WMII bounties.

Nice. Goldpact Knights can be cruel without any drawback by the way. In Deadfire Paladins and Chanters are even better and have even more synergies. Speaking about synergiy with a two-man-party: you should try Barb + Priest.

I was mainly answering Christliar. I'm just trying to answer the initial question: "Why?" and look at it from Obsidian's perspective (with lots of speculation of course).

I find it way better than Shadowing Beyond (which is too expensive).