Boeroer

true Whirling Strikes is pretty good, especially with AoE weapons. Iirc you can even trick a mortar into the full attack (use one melee weapon like Keeper of the Flame and Fire in the Hole+Chain Shot in the offhand) which then also works with Driving Flight, doing a ton of attack rolls on everybody around. Twinned Shot (+Driving Flight) is nice if you really want to proc something that has a rel. low chance - like the AoE of Current's Rush or Ondra's Wrath from Watershaper's Focus. Those are fun but expensive - and imo not enough to pick an SC Ranger. Only exception for me is SC Arcane Archer (with Cmmunity Patch that fixes the PEN issues of the imbue shots): up to three Death Rings per shot (initial hit, 1st bounce from Watershaper's Focus or Fire in the Hole, 2nd bounce from Driving Flight) is fun and pretty dang good. It is friendly fire and destroys enemies who are near death. SInce you are triggering up to three instances that destruction happens pretty often because 2 instaces already bring a lot of enemies near death while the third one then destroys them. Too bad SC Ragers can't pick Spirit of Decay...

Cipher's Disintegrate is also very convenient when fighting Hauani O Whe. But I wouldn't say any class is mandatory if you play with a full party. Refreshing resources are very helpful though. I played Psion/Troubadour in a party - and it's one of the most enjoyable, flexible and sustained class combinations I know. The combination of endless charm/dominate with endless summons alone is enough advantage already - and there's so much more in terms of support, crowd control and even damage. So I would second what @theleesaid. Also Xoti as Gaun/Helwalker sounds better to me thematically.

It does cost 3 guile in the vanilla game.

Toxic Strike on a boss in combination with a confused buddy Berserker/Troubadour who uses Many Lives Pass By and Frostfall's Dispersed Suffering is cool I guess.

In the resp. year of release PoE sold +500K copies while Deadfire only sold +100K. I don't know the long term sales numbers though. I only read (mostly Twitter-) messages of Josh and some other devs who reported the break-even point of Deadfire and then somewhat later said that it made a profit in the long run. But one can imagine that it's a big disappointment if a sequel (initially) sells a fifth of the copies of the original game.

I also think that's the main point. Elemental/raw lashes don't trigger any additional Deep Wounds. Also maybe an advatantage of multiple small DoTs compared to singular big ones is related to the Reaping Knives "trick"? Where every tick of a DoT that the wielder of the knives inflicts would generate 5 focus for the summoner of the knives - no matter how little dmg each tick does. Lots of parallel DoTs = lots of 5-focus-ticks.

And this is a point that I can get behind - because you don't need to buy or even experience the game first (--> sale) in order to see something that repels you. Seeing a setting, genre or art style that you don't like will most likely prevent you from buying (--> no sale) and would also prevent you from writing any review about it (--> no bad influence on reviews). Same goes for lack of marketing/flying under the radar bc. of different reasons (unknown IP, too little budget, bad marketing decisions, smaller crowdfunding platform etc.). In order to be able to logically explain the drop of sales one must focus on arguments that take into account that PoE sold well, reviews were good and that similar games with even worse reviews did well, too. Most other reasons brought forth (too much text, graphics, story, bugs, game mechanics whatever) need you to buy or at least play the game and that would not only NOT mean that sales would drop but also that reviews or both PoE and Deadfire would be worse (they are good and ratings by users and critics almost similar). Then several of those reasons would also lead to similar games having bad sales - which did not happen. Also, if those latter points (wall of text, graphics, story, bugs etc.) were the reason for dropping sales then how would one explain that Deadfire did break even and then even made a good profit in the long run? It has a very long tail for a video game these days - but those points above didn't change a bit. So did the potential players all change their mind about those issues at some point? Unlikely... More likely imo that potential players only slowly discovered that game they previously didn't know about. Or potential buyers thought they wouldn't like that game bc. of superfical reasons (such as apparent setting, style etc.) but bought it way later after seeing and hearing more about it and it turned out to be cool. So those are my argumets (again, written down like for the fifth time or so) and I think in terms of logic, probability and simplicity (also see Occam's Razor) they make pretty good sense on their own - while some other arguments need several secodary conditions (e.g. "they didn't buy the game but saw it in streams") to explain why they would lead to a massive sales drop while reviews stay good and sales are slow but didn't stop until the intitially bombed game turned into a profitable one.

This is Matt Hansen's Twitter: He is the (very nice) art director of Obsidian and only recently changed his profile name to the one you can see above. Since I guess that there's no other Eora related project in the works atm I assume that this means Awoved is not dead.

Imo Psion is the best Cipher subclass for solo as long as you have something to occupy the enemies. So summons (Psion/Chanter), mind-control (Cipher itself), invisibility (Wizard, Rogue, Skaen) and hard CC are your friends. I also had very good results with a single class Psion with a very defensive setup with a small shield (no acc loss but higher deflection and reflex) because it shifts focus away from you towards squishier targets (weak charmed/dominated enemies mostly). It is so good to be able to just generate focus all the time while hiding, recovering, kiting and so on. No other cipher can do it. They all have to hit something with weapon or spell which not only is bad for action economy but also is bad against single tough/high defense foes. Also played Psion/Troubadour and the constant stream of resources is so good - you will never run out of things to do, you have summons, mind control, hard-CC, single-target- and AoE damage and defenses/resistances.

The buff of the familiar stays for the whole fight (except the PL bonus) no matter how it disappears afaik.

Written preview: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/08/pentiment-preview-obsidians-historical-religiously-charged-murder-mystery/

On a Paladin I would prefer Half-Mast/BotEP. Marking + Coordinated Attacks is just too good to pass up. Firebrand is good on Barbs, Rogues and Ciphers. Also not bad on Paladins - but they can be more useful with the setup above imo.

No a preview, but an interview with Josh and Hannah:

Doesn't work anyway. Having max RES and stuff as a Paladin/Forbidden Fist helps a lot to make the self damage part quite short though.

Hm... that should mean that a Berserker/Paladin with Slayer's Claw could fry a friendly Troubadour's Many-Lives skeletons (together with real enemies) with his Sacred Immolation and not suffer any self damage from it? A shucks - the confusion would also be suppressed, dammit!

It's a great weapon in the right hands. Imagine how disappointed I was when I slew Firkraag with my self-invented Wizard's Eye cheese at a rel. low level and got Carsomyr which I couldn't use because I had no Paladin... 🤷‍♂️

Tehehe - but wait: does Shadow Fang's DoT stack (like Bleeding Cuts etc.)?

It was a stretch goal for the Kickstarter campaign and was cobbled together rather haphazardly I think. See Deadfire's ship fights. I liked it nonetheless.

I'm not a fan of Chris Avellone - but I like Durance. Grieving Mother... not so much. Funny thing is - and I will repeat myself the forth time at least (hence the neverending story): if the amount of writing was such a strong repellent then this point would have found its way into reviews of users and critics and be prominent there. Yet the review scores are very good and don't speak about too much text a lot. This doesn't fit. It should at least raise the question whether this explanation makes sense when one applies it to a majority of potential players - or if it rather might be a projection of things one personally didn't like.

It's for weapon attacks only.

Guess it's debatable what's unnecessary fluff and what's enjoyable writing. I did enjoy it immensely the first time I played the game The link to the forum post was there to show you that there's people enjoying reading while playing cRPGs - not to refute the statement that there's a lot of text. You produced a wall of text btw...

Still valid.

It sounds like you read the Backers' NPC stories in PoE. Because besides that I don't really remember "two pages of unnecessary fluff".

I remember that it has the following behavior (might be wrong): if you walk you will create (or "drop") rel. small instances of healing areas that pulse for some time and heal allies (if there's movement or not) - but new ones of those AoE instances only get created (or dropped) if you move. Iirc you can create a lot of parallel healing instances if you move back and forth a lot.

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say - but maybe it doesn't work as I remember.