Boeroer

If you use shift + action to queue your commands you can avoid unnecessary pauses.

Nope, the parts are not there. That's just your starting gear and nothing else. You can find the parts in your captain's cabin (inside a cabinet) after you get your ship back floating from Maje Island.

I suspect Psion/Berserker would be a pretty dumb combo, too - at least in the unmodded game - because the Psion would constantly pause focus generation because of Berserker Frenzy's self damage? Tactician/Streetfighter: also stupid. Tactician doesn't want to get flanked usually (unless Confusion is desired for friend/foe shenanigans) while the Streetfighter's desire is to get flanked. Edit: argh, Elric beat me. PS: made a nice Berserker/Ghost Heart who specialized in delivering killing bows: Barbaric Smash (for free most of times bc. kill) + Marked Prey + Survival of the Fittest + Bloody Slaughter + Evasive Roll was effective and fun. Sometimes mixed in a Takedown Combo, too. PPS: @Elric Galad I would argue that Priest/Druid can get Spineof Thicket Green and enchant it to +2 PL to Rejuvenation and +2 PL to Restoration which makes for a pretty cool healer - like Priest of Eothas/Livegiver. +7(!) Power Levels of Rejuvenation while shifted (can even prolong spiritshift with Salvation of Time for longer +5 PL buff) - and afterwards only drop to -1 Power Level bc. of the staff but can continue with +2 PL Restoration spells. Pretty cool imo. And in the late game you might even use all your spell slots often enough.

Nope, I played some. That combo can be pretty cool. Priest/Berserker for example can remove any enemy for a long time from combat without any hit roll: just get confused from Frenzy and Withdraw an enemy. That little gimmick alone is a pretty powerful thing. I think it's hard to name a class combo that's universally bad, especially when not defining subclasses. Would be even more helpful to narrow down the role. For example a Debonaire/Psion tank would be pretty bad. No engagement, debuff when no allies are near, stops focus generation on getting damaged... ew. But a Debonaire/Psion ranged caster wouldn't be so bad: charm enemies, cast a Disintegrate with 100% crit conversion on them... cool. I could name my least favorite (vanilla) class combos, but that hasn't something to do with them being particularly bad. For example I don't like Rogue/Priest, but I'm sure there are lots of good arguments why they aren't bad. With the introduction of subclasses I think any general class combo has something going for it. I haven't encountered even one during my numerous hours that wouldn't be good in one way or another. And even if you try to combine subclasses in weird ways you can often still find a viable approach. For example: many players believe Berserker/Helwalker must be unplayable because you will kill yourself. It is a challenge obviously, but it can also be very powerful and rewarding. One of my most beloved combos. --- Anyways, my pick would be: Debonaire/Unbroken: taking away the core feature of the Unbroken (engagement/disengagement)

If I didn't want to deal with either Serafen's departure or picking up one benevolent point then I'd just leave. Btw: one benevolent decision doesn't influence your stats yet if that's for first time - unless it's a major one. Don't remember in this case, but it could well be that your disposition counter won't change yet. You could check on you character sheet under the right tab before and after. Then you can see it as "what do I care if people interpret this as benevolent?" You could also argue that you do Berath a service (saving a Death Godlike) - she's your ultimate task giver in this game.

Yeah, but... it's way better than not having the opportunity to cause prone in the first place.

Due to the increasing return of (most) speed bonuses in PoE, ranged recovery while running with Shot on the Run used to be faster than regular standing recovery. Don't know if that was ever patched. Iirc it's the same even in Deadfire (with linear speed bonus returns). It's only nuances, but it's faster than standing still I believe.

Yes, why is that sad?

You can skip that because Two Handed Style only works for melee weapons in PoE. This can become obsolete with Time Parasite since it doesn't stack and is vastly inferior to Time Parasite. But before that it can be useful. Maybe just retrain after getting to the Time Parasite level. Or use it at the start of battle and only use Time Parasite after it runs out - that also works well. --- In general: Having to attack with a weapon in order to gain focus is not really the way of the siren (Troubadour/Psion). A Chanter build with Enigma's Charm and some chamring/dominating items would be better suited to catch the siren vibe imo. But besides the Two-Handed Style I'd say your build idea will work. Imo the best bow for Ciphers is The Rain of Godagh Field - which is a war bow. It comes pretty late though but fortunately there's another early and nice war bow: Borresaine in Defiance Bay. In combination with Time Parasite the dps will be great and you don't have to worry about foes with high damage reduction (animats, beetles, dragons and so on). Also Borresaine has stun on crit and drains health: very cool. Speaking about foes with high DR (armor): Against those a hunting bow is not so great. Also the best dps hunting bow, Persistence, has wounding. Wounding makes it so strong at dps, but wounding damage doesn't generate focus - so it's a bit of a waste for a Cipher. The Rain of Godagh Field has speed which is the other great dps enchantment. And speed leads to more focus directly. Rain of Godagh Field+Durgan Steel+Time Parasite leads to 0 recovery. You become a gatling gun - just with arrows. So for me it would be war bows. Maybe you could throw in Rhymer's Summons as cross-class talent for more siren vibes. They are not strong but 1/encounter and can be a nice distraction.

No, please re-read what I wrote and then maybe check the combat log. Every hit roll gets varied damage bonuses from Gambit because Guile gets refunded under the hood but then capped back to 2 (per hand). As I said: "Gambit refund is capped at 2 per hand". It doesn't matter how many of those multiple rolls you crit, you will only get back 2 Guile per strike at the end - so max 4 with dual wielding. BUT only one of those multiple attack rolls has to crit -> you get back the 2 Guile. So the chance to NOT crit per hand is minimized a lot. Compare with a single hit roll from Rapiers etc. ON TOP of that: Guile gets refunded "under the hood" while Gambit is executed, giving the mulitple attack rolls varius high dmg bonuses if they crit. Again: Check the combat log and hover over the individual crit rolls and press shift. A detailed list of damage bonuses will appear where you can see that Gambit causes a bonus dmage, somtimes higher than your remaining Guile suggests. This is caused by the "virtual" refunded Guile that piled up from multiple crits. But afterwards the Guile refund gets capped to 2 (per hand). The more crit rolls the higher the bonus damage. Mortar + Fire in the Hole on multiple enemies can grant dmg bonuses over 300% if you manage to hit a lot of enemies (for example if you lured them to a spot with Sparkcrackers, laying a trap or whatever). It is correct that you might drop your crit conversion from over 100% to under. BUT: the many more attack rolls (against multiple enemies) means it's much harder to only do grazes or misses. With only one attack roll (Rapier or whatever) the chance for one single bad roll that drops your Guile is higher than having "only" 80% crit conversion but more chances to crit. In case of non-conversion you can have same backup-conversion as well (Dirty Fighting, Power of Money etc.). In addition to that you get several backstabs + Ajamuut's Stalking Cloak stuns (in an AoE with mortar etc.) and +25 ACC which limits the danger of graze/miss even further. Against many enemies I consider 1 Vanishing Strike + Gambit with Hand Mortar+Fire in the Hole stronger than a Rapier setup or similar - also bc. of the AoE stun of the Stalking Cloak which is very helpful imo. Against single foes I prefer your approach with Rapiers (or Scordeo's Edge or whatever good, high ACC one handed weapon you got). I especially would look not only for weapons with higher acc, but also ones that do stuff on crit. Since you will crit all the time weapons such as Rust's Poignard (Bring Low) and Ball and Chain (Subjugation) in combination with Scordeo's Edge's Adaptive are very nice because you can perma-lock nasty, strong enemies that way. Scordeo's Edge and Grave Calling (Grave Bound) is also a nasty combo because of the paralyze effect of Crave Calling in combination with Blade Cascade from Scordeo's Edge.

PPS: Here's a showcase from years back of an Assassin with Vanishing Strike like I talked about above. The combo 1* Vanishing Strike,followed by Gambits is better, but I didn't take a capture of that, sorry.

PS: here's a Gambit build by @Kaylon for further inspiration:

Rapiers work but are limited to pierce damage so you need a bsckup. Something like Scordeo's Edge with Adaptive + Sun & Moon is a good alternative. Instead of using Rapiers + modal (it doesn't stack with other active acc buffs) you can use multihit-weapon such as Sun & Moon, blunderbusses - or against multiple opponents - Fire in the Hole (Chain Shot) + Hand Mortar (Blinding Smoke). That also minimizes the chance of grazes and misses, especially if there are many enemies in one place (which is the norm when going solo). Only one of the many hit rolls has to crit for the refund zu happen. Guile refund is capped at 4 max (2 per hand) - but internally, while Guile is executed, the Guile refund of multiple crits gets registered and leads to very high damage bonuses* - before it is cut back to 4 at the end. An Assassin with Vanishing Strikes and Gambit as well as Backstab can do tremendous damage with Hand Mortar and Fire in the Hole by just using Vanishing Strike and Gambit in the middle of an enemy pack. Vanishing Strike's invisibility never breaks. Assassinate adds +25 acc which ensures even less grazes. Ajamuut's Stalking Cloak adds accuracy and stuns all enemies. Streetfighter is also excellent if you use Powder Burns bc. of the reduced reloading speed. Maxed INT is recommended. Against single tough targets obviously mortars are not great. Also check out Rust's Poignard. * Gambit grants 10% bonus crit dmg per point of Guile.

I worded that not too well. I had 7 Guile when I activated Gambit. It costs 4 Guile, the crit conversion and bonus dmg are calculated with the remaining 3 Guile.

Hm, I get funky results. The Boltcatcher Gloves get higher dmg bonuses (+180%) than my Guile (7) implies, but then the Gambit roll itself at the end doesn't get extra dmg bonus. It's different than with mortars. And of course shortly after that try I did another one and the game crashed.

I didn't try it out but it could. I don't know if there's an internal cap somewhere, but with a mortar I had often numbers around +300% in the combat log iirc. It isn't that obvious then because the individual hits of a mortar have low base damage. But how would you stop the crit chain so that the game doesn't crash? With 100% hit-to-crit conversion that seems hard to do. Maybe only use it when Guile is low... PS: tried to test it, only had 3 Guile at the moment I used Gambit - game crashed. Lol.

Arcane Archer/Ascendant is a good pick if you want to concentrate more on the shooting and less on casting spells: the soul whip damage is 10% less while not ascended, but increased while Ascended and soul whip doesn't turn off. This combo can use Spearcaster (+modal) to great effect vs. single tough targets for perma-prone. It profits from Arcana directly (which Arcane Archer wants to raise anyway) and gains great accuracy that way - and it proftis twice from Arcana if you use the Arcane Archer's imbued shots with it. And then this multiclass can use Frostseeker against mobs. Frostseeker has the added benefit that it counts as elemental attack (no acc malus for Arcane Archer with auto-attacks) and generates focus superquickly against mobs (because the AoE that procs on crits also generates focus). I played an SC Psion with a special attention to Puppet Master some time ago - and she was very impactful (SC leads to 2 more focus per second due to higher Power Levels). I'm sure Ydwin can also be nice as SC with a good setup even though she has to harvest focus the conventional way. SC Ciphers can use Shared Nightmare which is pretty bonkers with any AoE weapons (except Wahai Poraga which doesn't scale its AoE size with and Keeper of the Flame bc. the AoE doesn't generate focus) and in combination with Reaping Knives on a party member. You'll have lots of focus quickly and then a huge AoE for your spells. Ydwin as Cipher/Rogue can generate focus more quickly, but then advances more slowly through the Power Levels (later access to abilities) and misses out on Time Parasite, Reaping Knives and Shared Nightmare of course. But as a ranged "low maintenance" party member the Cipher/Rogue works better I guess.

Wizard/Chanter is always interesting because you can prolong all benefical effects with Wall of Draining, including effects from chants (including Ancient Memory and Mercy and Kindness) even though you don't sing them anymore. That is correct. It scales with character level but has no weapon proficiency (modal). Thus it is not great for Devoted. Since it already scales with character level it does not scale with Transcendent Suffering or Monastic Unarmed Training. Sure. It's also good to have a setup of fist + Tuotilo's Palm for backup. There might be enemies who are quite resistant or even immune to corrode damage (which is the damage type of Draining Touch). I personally value +5ACC over +10% damage. It's only additive damage and the bash (which counts as unarmed) as well as the fists base damage isn't so high that +10% means a lot. The bash does 8-10 or 9 base damage on average. +10% means +1 dmg per bash. Fists are 14-19, so 16.5 on average base dmg. +10% means additional 1.7 crush damage per strike. It's more if you use abilites because they scale up the base damage with Power Level a bit. But still... not my favorite enchantment. +5 ACC is more useful imo. Ah, by the way: Draining Touch does not cause Deep Wounds (Rogue) because it does not deal pierce, slash or crush damage. depends on what you plan to use. the Pike modal works for Spirit Lance - but only the initial target, not the AoE. It redices enemies deflection by 10. This can be helpful against high deflection enemies. You only need to graze and their deflection drops by 10. It's nice imo. As most modals you must decide when it's worth turning on and when not. Seems good to me. Human would be my pick, too. Fighting Spirit is so easy to trigger with a Bloodmage. Puh... so many options... I really like quick reloading, high ACC arbalest shooters as low-maintenance party members most of the time - but they can be extrmely valuable when they pin down difficult enemies with their modal. Something like Ranger/Paladin, Ranger/Chanter, Ranger/Cipher, Ranger/Rogue and so on. Another nice, low maintenance party member with big moments I like is dual pistol SC Kind Wayfarer. But you need a Chanter in the party then, too (for limitless summons which can be turned into free Zeal via Divine Retribution). That is the most effective approach. But the juggling of Grimoires can be a bit inconvenient at times. Which spells you use all the time depends on you. I think self-buffs you almost always want to cast at the start of battle are good candidates. Devil of Caroc's Breastplate heals per crit. I may be nice in combination with Blood Sacrifice. With AoE stuff like Spirit Lance I try to hit the 35 INT cap, so items such as Charm of Bones (+2) and Heaven's Cacophony (+2) are favorites of mine. Also Aloth's Armor (+15% AoE size) as well as the pet Loki (also +15% AoE size). But it's all not super important imo.

The normal values of the axes will scale with level no problem. But I guess the lash will stay low because it only scales with the Priest's dispositions - if those are in line with their god's dispositions. I suspect that wouldn't work with a non-priest. But I haven't tried. Maybe it works if you character adheres to Rymrgand's dispositions - I mean you can accumulate disposition points as non-priest as well. Just don't know if that gets translated to the axes then. Worth a try I guess. Draining Touch is the most powerful one handed weapon in the game (besides stuff like Scordeo's Edge+Salvation of Time or Wall of Draining or Grave Calling with skeletons and such things)... if you can keep it with the Grimoire switching trick. Not much comes close imo. The very high base damage, combined with some damage bonuses, leads to hefty dmg per hit, the health draining and the weakening as well as the targeting of Will make it more powerful. There's a reason why you are supposed to only get one proper hit or crit with it. In combo with a club+modal it's even better. It's also very good on a Wizard/Monk. You don't need Enervating Blows anymore, the draining is nice to stay healthy (even makes Helwalker less scary) and Swift Flurry + Heartbeat Drumming in combination with Merciless Gaze and the ultra low Will of the enemy from club strikes and spells means that additional attacks will proc frequently. Or improve the dmg per hit with Lightning Strikes, both options are great. Turning Wheel is also nice in combination with that high dmg per hit. Hylea's Talons add a lash, Baby Boar does so, too. Wizard can pick Spirit of Decay which grants +1 PEN with the Draining Touch weapon. Add Monk's Thunderous Blows and you are at +3. --- Another nice combo with Wizard and Draining Touch is Steel Garrote. Steel Garrote drains health if you attack afflicted enemies. Draining Touch put weakened on enemies: nice synergy. You drain twice from the same attack which is great for using Blood Sacrifices, you can achieve enormous defense and AR numbers. You will have nice synergy between Eternal Devotion and your spells, too (+15% burning lash to spells, Eternal Devotion works like that). Eternal Devotion's accuracy can get buffed by 10 points with the Ring of Focused Flames. That means that not only do you drop enemies' Will via club and spells but also raise your accuracy by +20 (FoD+10, Ring +10). If you don't like Steel Garrote then Kind Wayfarer also works nicely. Instead of draining twice you will heal in an AoE with white flames and drain health with Draining Touch. Also nice for Blood Sacrifice. Rest is the same as Steel Garrote or any other Paladin/Bloodmage: Lay on Hands with Wall of Draining etc. --- A brutal combo can be Soulblade/Bloodmage. Citzal's Spirit Lance is awesome with focus gain and Soul Annihilation. --- Bloodmage/Unbroken is also very good: Mob Stance, Kapana Tanga club with +2 engagement, Hold the Line, Draining Touch and Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage as well as an Essential Phantom. Enemies will get terrified and disengage, you and the phantom will deal incredible disengagement attacks with Draining Touch (remember: diseng. attacks get +100% dmg). Mob Stance cleaves are likely to kill enemies on the spot, leading to potential chain-cleaving and so on. --- Bloodmage/Furyshaper: combine Draining Touch with Barbaric Smash, Bloodlust, Bloody Slaughter and most importantly Blood Thirst. Also Carnage profits from the high base damage. Summon a Fear Ward so you don't need to cast Ryngrim's spells. Do similar things like with the Unbroken but at higher speeds but less potent disengagement attacks. Instead of cleaving you will have higher speed and 0 recovery after a kill. Barbaric Smash + Bloody Slaughter does enormous damage if you use it as finisher against near death enemies - and costs nothing if it kills. Bloodmage/Berserker also works but is very tricky.

Kind of. Gambit is (unnecessarily) complex: The max refund of Guile is 4. You cannot generate more Guile than you spend. So the best case is that Gambit costs you nothing. The described refund of 2 can happen twice if you dual wield, bc. you have two weapon strikes. It doesn't matter how often you crit during those strikes (for example with an AoE weapon like a rod or mortar - or a multihit-weapon like a blunderbuss or Sun & Moon). If only one of the rolls during that strike is a crit you will get a refund of 2 for that strike. If you do 2 strikes (bc. two weapons) and both of them contain at least one crit you get 4 Guile back. Best case. Gambit shows 100% crit conversion with 10 Guile - but the 4 points of Guile you pay for Gambit itself get subtracted before the conversion applies during striking. So during the execution of Gambit your Guile is 4 less and thus the conversion drops accordingly (-10% per missing Guile). Therefore it is recommended to raise your max. Guile well over 10. Check out Devil of Caroc Breastplate for 2 extra Guile (=+20% crot conversion). You want that big chance to crit with every Gambit roll. This then means free Gambit executions as long as you don't graze or miss (or get interrupted or spend lots of Guile for something else first). A hidden gem: Internally, while Gambit is excutedand the game is calculating stuff, the Guile refund is NOT limited. It only gets cut down to max +2 per strike at the end. But while you are striking and doing crits the "internal" Guile counter can go through the roof. Since the crit damage bonus of Gambit (+20% dmg per point of Guile) relies on the Guile you currently have l, this can mean that you can achieve huge dmg bonus numbers during the execution of Gambit. For example with Hand Mortar+Blinding Smoke and Fire in the Hole+Chain Shot you can roll a ton of crits with every strike/shot and your internal Guile refund will skyrocket, giving you +200% dmg bonus and more for subsequent attack rolls during that shot. Only after Gambit is done it is all cut back to +4 Guile (max).

Wow, awesome.

I don't know. Depends on the enemies. Against mobs some AoE spells are surely more effective in terms of overall dps. But is dps a useful metric in a solo run in the first place? The Assassin/Tactician gets +25 accuracy for his attacks from Assassinate (the damage bonuses don't really matter that much - Kaylin even states that Deathblows isn't worth the trouble - but they are a nice addon of course) which stacks with Aware/Intuitive and the arquebus' modal (+20 acc). In Kaylon's case where he uses Dragon's Dowry (which does fire-tagged attacks) you could even add the Ring of Focused Flames for additional +10 acc and the Ring of the Marksman (+5 acc) and Helm of the White Void (+10 acc if Rogue strike ability) or Acina's Tricorn (+5 acc) which is all very efficient in order to take on enemies with high defenses (bosses, buffed up enemies or simply overleveled encounters). The overall acc bonus adds up to +70 or +75 after a while. It doesn't really matter if it takes a bit longer than casting spells imo - since you cannot get attacked anyway - so there's no need to kill multiple enemies asap in one go (other than getting bored, heh). It's also a lot easier to play. But It may be that it's more fun to abuse this mechanic with a Priest of Skaen or a Wizard instead of an Assassin. There's more variety and versatility for sure. Now that I said that: a whole party of vanishers (Rogues, Wizards, Priest of Skaen) mixed with one or more Tacticians could be really fun to use with this mechanic. Even SC Monk (Whispers of the Wind) as well as normal Priests (Withdraw counts as invisibility) could work at some point. As soon as all party members are invisible the Tactician(s) in the party would all become brilliant. Hm, hm, hm...

Btw.: I didn't test this but Brilliant Tactician should also trigger if you can charm or dominate all enemies. The faulty logic is: if there are no enemies, then zero enemies are NOT flanked -> must mean all enemies are flanked -> become brilliant. This might also trigger as soon as all enemies are friendly. But as I said I didn't try it out.

Yeah, it's a powerful interaction for sure. Maybe because lots of players talked about it in the past, now they ran out of things to say about it. The "turn invisible->becoming brilliant" part only works solo btw. - bc. of a logical flaw in the implementation of the "Brilliant Tactician" passive. Here's a cool solo build by @Kaylon from 2019 that uses this very mechanic: Since the mechanic seems to be unintended by the devs it is considered cheesy by some players - and thus I think they are not too enthusiastic to recommend it nowadays. Same thing with Lover's Embrace/Gouging Strike/Brand Enemy in combination with invisibility: you can solo 99% of the game with just those endless DoT attacks: Just apply the bleeding (and/or burning), turn invisible, hide out of sight and wait until the enemy's dead, combat ends, repeat. You can even kill several megabosses like that. It's super effective (even in a party just to take on totally overpowered enemies in order to get certain loot early for example)... but also kind of lame after a while. I suspect the same effect sets in with (solo) Brilliant Tactician and invisibility: it's very repetitive and may feel cheesy, so I guess some players aren't too enthusiastic about it. It is a very powerful combination nonetheless and if you like it then there's nothing to hold you back.

Hi, I'm sorry to hear that you lost your job. I'm also sorry to hear that you encounterd that situation with your party members. It never happened to me (on PC) during thousands of hours of playtime and I also didn't really read about that problem (or maybe I did and forgot about it) - so I'm not sure how to solve this. But I can understand your frustration. Unfortunately the console versions of the game are more buggy than the PC version is. Originally the Pillars game were done for PC exclusively. Only later the publisher (not Obsidian) decided to port the Pillars games to consoles and hired different devs for that task. On PC I could at least give you some console commands to try to fix this, but iirc the X-Box-Version of the game has no in-game console for typing in commands. The game is old though - so if you read about ways how to solve this issue they might still work, no matter if they are 10 years old. The game hasn't changed in the past years - so what worked then might still work now. Maybe it's also a good idea to search in the Paradox forums (they are the ones responsible for the port): https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/pillars-of-eternity-console.989/ But I wonder: don't you maybe have some save game from before this happened? I mean it sure is annoying to have to replay parts of the game - but better than not being able to fix the issue at all I assume. Sorry that I cannot be of more help. But I thought I'd answer anyway just to bump the thread.