Boeroer

Ha! Welcome back.

The hand mortar of Serafen was mentioned several times in the Q&A sessions so I thought it's not that much of a spoiler anymore. Maybe a half-spoiler still. Sorry if it was.

Hm... hm... I see. And how do you feel about it?

Song for the Troubadours out there:

Both Led Zeppelins are not working here (Romania). It says "Not available".

Speaking of mortar: did you guys know that Assassinate works with explosives?

Yes, she is quite nice. I also like Wrath of the Five Suns very much.

Howdy! No, only the sword. If you have both proficiencies (for sword AND dagger) you also get two buttons: one for each modal. So if you'd turn on both modals you would gain +2 PEN with the sword only and suffer a deflection penalty, but at the same time you would lower the damage of the dagger and get a bonus to deflection again. All in all you'd have +/-0 deflection, +2 PEN with the sword and a longer recovery phase after strikes with the dagger. Hope that helps. I'm not quite sure if the deflection malus stacks if you dual wield swords with the modal active... didn't test that. Or if the deflection bonus of daggers stack. They should...

Yeah... Maybe you should do a forum poll?

That's because the first time you came in contact with a paladin was with D&D and that ruined the whole paladin theme for you. I think it's better to have a more "open" approach to paladins. They can form an order of zealous god-followers, but they can also form an order of zealous contract-followers. By the way the Goldpact Knights also kind of follow the teachings of a god: Woedica is called Oathbinder and punishes people for breaking oaths. Goldpact Knights always keep their oath once the oath/contract is signed. Maybe a lot of them follow her teachings. So it also depends which gods there are. Imagine a paladin of Skaen: not very paladin-like in terms of D&D and friends. In PoE, what all paladins have in common is zeal. The reason behind their zeal can be multiple things and I think that makes paladins in general less one-dimensional than the usual holy warrior theme which is boring for me. I mean they can be and thus the common D&D-Paladin fan can build such a holy warrior, but they don't have to be, which opens more choice for players with a more differentiated taste when it comes to zealous characters.

The last two points make sense for me. Err... I mean the rest does as well, I just wanted to say I support the last two things in particular.

If you could "define" that class level of multiclass characters is -2 compared to single class chars then there's no difference on first glance. But then you will have issues with XP gaining and some other stuff: Power Level gives you an additional adjusting screw that doesn't interfere with character level. So you can decouple things that you want to scale with level (for example enemies' level scaling) from things that you want to scale with Power Level (for example active abilities like spells). If you throw it all into the class-level pool things can get messy and obscure. I think that Power Level is an elegant solution. You can easily adjust its values without interfering with things that you want to tie to class level. You can also have things that alter your Power Level then (Empower, racial ability like Wellspring of Live, class ability like Livegiver's Spiritshift Power Level boost when casting Rejuvenation spells), certain afflictions without messing around with character level which usually entails many more things than Power Level does (like base Accuracy, health, defenses and so on).

Maybe enemies will make more use of pushing/teleporting/pulling abilities. Some already did in PoE (Monks, Shades, Specters) and people got pretty annoyed.

One of the best things PoE did was decoupling paladins from deities. The original meaning of the word paladin is "person who's close to the emperor" - which totally fits the Darcozzi Paladin. Most other (current) connotations of the word paladin (holy warrior and whatnot) came later with D&D. I'm glad that PoE didn't follow that one-dimensional and somewhat boring approach but depicted paladins as orders of warriors that are zealous and dedicated to a common goal/philosophy/whatever, but are not necessarily bound to a god. Still there are some orders who are (Fellows of St. Waidwen Martyr for example). Same with monks: not tied to certain gods at all but rather to a special philosophy. That's a good thing. Gods have their priests and that's enough in my opinion. My favorite orders are Darcozzi and Bleak Walkers by the way - mainly because of their special talents. Darcozzis are great ACC supporters and Bleak Walkers are among the best alpha strikers.

I played a bit with it and you can completely prevent an enemy from using active abilities as soon as they need some time to activate (mostly spells). It's kind of a class for special occasions only, but it can come in handy. The malus of halved frenzy and such is a bit stupid though.

There IS a hand mortar in Deadfire. The official companion Serafen will have one.

It's a fire that broke out after your dad fell asleep on the sofa in front of the TV with his cigarette still burning.

Eh - I just realized that Torrent of Flame from the Belt is a spell bind, not a spell holding. So of course it has friendly fire. Stupid me...

Please: Henry Rollins cameo?

Wait... trick question... ummmm... the one who behaves arrogantly? I'm pretty sure that's correct. Is there a price?

Ouch...

Just hit him yourself. And a graze from Force of Anguish will already cause a quite long lasting prone effect. But yes: a fighter with Disciplined Barrage is great for knocking dragons prone.

That's a bummer. Cries for a barbarian then - or for a monk or any other build that likes to stand in the thick of it all on its own.

Hi, that's a Spellbind, so you basically get Crackling Bolt as an active ability. You can decide when you want to use it. Therefore all spell bindings function in the same way as their counterparts on the casters' side. Spell Defense, Spell Holding, Spell Chance, Spellstamina and stuff like that which automatically releases a spell once a certain condotion is met (you receive a crit or your endurance drops below a certain point for example) are dfferent: here you can't decide when the spell triggers directly. Therefore in this cases OBS changed (or should have changed) such AoE spells with friendly fire to foe-only (if it's a spell that has firendly fire in the first place). OBS did that so you don't accidentially kill/CC your own party in the midst of battle all of a sudden without being able to control it. Otherwise those items would be very bad - or two-sided at least. tl;dr: Crackling Bolt on Stormcaller has friendly fire and thus is NOT foe-only.

If you plan to attack one enemy with two party members a lot (one of them the wielder of Cladhaliath), then Coordinating is a lot better. Especially against dragons. If your "flanking buddy" is a paladin with a marking weapon and Coordinated Attacks (plus a priest in the background) then it's one of the best setups against dragons I can think of. It all stacks with everything (spear +5, superb +12, Coordinating +4, Coordinated Attacks +10, marking +10, Zealous Focus +6, Devotions +20, maybe even Inspiring Exhortation +10 and Inspiring Radiance +10). I would even choose Mob Justice over Merciless Hand in this case because that also stacks with all other ACC buffs. So you could end up with +87 accuracy against dragons, even +96 with the Cloak of the Frozen Hunt. +76 without Exhortation (only Darcozzi) and Inspiring Radiance (quite short-lived). You should be able to stun everything. We Toki is good against Alpine, it just lacks 9 accuracy compared to Cladhaliath. With single weapon use you will be able to get to +108 and have lots of hit-to-crit conversion via single weapon style and durgan steel. If you're a rogue (?) then via Vicious Fighting and stuff, too. You can stack crazy amounts of ACC in PoE1. One reason why I always say it's too easy.