Boeroer

If you look at the build "Drake's Ambassador" you'll see a defensive Dragon Thrashed chanter. That build was not for solo play and had some roleplaying fluff so you might want to improve it on the defensive side and improve the self-healing (that build is kind of old and pre WMII,so it lacks some talents/abilities). But basically that's a blueprint for a Dragon Thrashed chanter. Also looks kind of great if you don't mind the self-laudation.

Yes, something like this. Or shorter casting time of your school or whatever. Or +3 power level or... Something substantial. Not a 6-sec transformation that will leave you with -4 INT or a familiar that is of little use.

They also changed it because you would be gimping yourself if you took a two hander. Full Attack was too powerful in PoE in my opinion. Also because the cone doesn't care at all about the damage of the weapon. So a slow heavy hitter was the worst choice while two fast hitting weapons were perfect. I like this change - and I'm a big fan of the PoE monk. Too bad Turning Wheel is not there anymore.

That's a very good approach.

"My installation of PoE" sounds very prosaic.

Stag carnage is only supposed to happen once the stag crits with the initial attack. Is that the weirdness you were experiencing or something else?

You know that only 50% of misses get reflected with Soul Mirror, right?

Mee too. The spell restrictions exclude you from too many useful spells. The subclass bonuses don't balance this out by any means. It also reduces your overall spell choice and as a single class wizard you end up taking spells you don't really want or need.

I can totally agree to that (I have no strong opinions in favor nor against STR/RES or MIG by the way).

There is a big difference though: When it comes to a new product (and you have nothing substancial to show yet, only theories and ideas), then you are right: customers don't really know what they want (yet). Most of the time they don't even know what they really need. They know what they liked so far, but they can't foresee if they like new features A or B - because those are new and unknown until now, not implemented yet and the customer can't imagine if those features are likeable or not. And since most people are a bit neo- and xenophobic by nature they will rather stick to the old stuff. Until they can experience those new things. This is a beta. It's another situation. Here you have some real stuff that's already implemented. You can try it out and then tell if you like it or not. In this case the claim "the customer/fan doesn't know what he wants" doesn't apply. After some playing time most people will exactly know what they like and what not and most will also have proposals that are thought through. They may not be ideal solutions but they are far from idiotic, stupid or uninformed. It's like doing a market research while saying "but never mind the results, the customers are stupid anyways". That's a 100% guarantee to fail with your new product. It's like presenting an idea for a new fragrance that will be made from whale puke - and everybody's like "Yuck!". They don't know that ambra smells very good in very small quantities and you as inventor can say "They don't know yet, they are a bit stupid, but I will show them". But then, when you give out samples and 75% of the customers still say "Yuck! Dude!" then you should change your attitude and improve your product.

You're welcome. I sincerely hope that you'll find a satsfying answer over there.

It used to be in PoE. Don't know why they changed that and then made a circle for the bear. It's ok if they wanted to have consistency with all shouts (look at the invocations that are also animated like shouts) - but then the bear is an oversight. I would have liked all shouts to stay circle-shaped. Cone is kind of lame for somebody who wants to be in the fray (like most barbs want to because of circle-shaped carnage).

Why mid-battle? The Devoted is bound to a single weapo for the whole game retraining aside - I wouldn't want to retrain for every battle where I'd meet immune foes), not only for one battle. Doesn't really matter how often you switched weapons in mid battle in PoE - what matters more is how often you wanted to switch weapons from encounter to encounter. If the Devoted meets a flame blight and his devoted weapon is an estoc, a spear, a rapier or whatever piercing weapons - then he's screwed. Well, not really screwed - but he will either do no damage OR he has to switch weapons which will lead to -10 ACC (and no proficiency which alse affects some of his abilites that only work for proficient weapons - he will also not be able to use modals). Of course you can choose a weapon that's most likely enough to counter immunities like a Great Sword and thus won't feel the need to switch weapons too often - but all those weapons have lower base PEN and you still might encounter situations where it would be better to switch a weapon. But in the end, a comparison between PoE and Deadfire in regard to weapon switching is futile because the PEN/AR system is very different from the DR/DR bypass system of PoE. I totally agree on wizard's subclasses and Blackjacket though. For example: The Black Jacket is only (a bit) useful for your first playthrough - if you don't know anything about the game and its enemies. Once you have a bit of meta knowledge this subclass becomes totally useless unless you want to create a gunner build with quick switching OR if you want to cheesily cancel long recovery times wich a quick switch (which still works afaik). Both is not really the intended use of the Black Jacket I presume.

But that's not true. You have to resummon all the time if you don't want to end up with no summons. And you are still a full-blown chanter besides summons who can also cast other invocations or hit stuff with a weapon. The advantage of the Beckoner is that he can summons twice the minions at the same time. This is very benefical when it comes to body-blocking. It's also twice the damage potential because while the summons are smaller and have less health, they still have the same damage output (which is not bad at all). Also twice the summons can do twice the things at the same time. I think it's a great concept and more powerful than allowing to have two parallel summons on the field. This would mean you'd spend double the phrase points and need twiche the casting time. It's actually worse than the current approach. A Beckoner can keep on summoning right after the initial summoning process - in order to replace the damaged summons with freh ones. Samne effect as haveing two single summons on the field - but spares a lot of time.

My PoE is bigger: #PoE-measuring-contest

You have to repair the barbican in your stronghold first (costs no money nor time). Then you can pass through the south gate of Caed Nua, over Woodend Plains in order to reach Defiance Bay from the south. Didn't you read what the steward told you? It's all there...

Please note that the console version of PoE was not released by Obsidian Entertainment but Paradox Interactive. They have their own subforum for bug reports: Paradox Interactive: PoE Bugs (console version) Th same thing could happen on the PC version, too. Very seldomly though. As far as I know there's no fix other than using the console commands (console here meaning the terminal-console inside PoE) to teleport you out of that map - but on the Xbox you can't use console commands I guess. Sorry if I can't help you further. Maybe there's somebody on the Paradox forums who knows a workaround on the Xbox.

I have to correct me: you can disable Expert Mode once. Actually I never did this during a playthrough, so I missed this entirely. So now - in my game (Ubuntu 17.10 and also Windows 10) I can disable Expert mode during the playthrough. But I can't reenable it if I did so. Just like the description said. I tested this on Hard mode and PotD difficulty. I didn't try the combination with Trial of Iron though. So, I guess it's a bug with the PS4 version. Please note that Obsidian has not much to do with the console versions of PoE (I know, confusing). Those where done by Paradox Interactive (the publisher of PoE PC version) on their own initiative. They have their own subforum for bug reports: Paradox Interactive: PoE Bugs (console version)

Wait, I'll check with my game. Didn't start it up for some time now...

Hm, with a similar build, using Turning Wheel, Lightning Strikes and Blood Testament Gloves as well as Vulnerable Attack, max MIG and Scion of Flame (may I also had Savage Attack - don't know if this works anymore with Battle Forged) I saw damage numbers near 200 with Battle Forged quite often (see Monksterlasher build in this subforum). But yeah: the game is balanced around party play, so no wonder one has to use cheesy tactics in order to solo the game. There are only few build that can just walk into the fight and stay alive until everyone's dead (like a superdefensive paladin - but it's so tedious to play until lvl 13). I once did that solo run with a barb - and there I wanted to jump into the fray because of Heart of Fury. But it was always a very risky game. But that's def. a class that ends fights quickly after lvl 11 - in a positive or negative way. Priest is very powerful if you can reach the higher levels. Wizard, too. But the easiest way in my opinion to do a solo game is to pick chanter and skill for tankyness + The Dragon Thrashed (lvl 9). Also quite fun in early levels because of White Worms (which can be used in a cheesy way because dead bodies can be reused over and over again after explosion. You basically pull all enemies to a chokepoint and kill them there. The more dead bodies on the pile the better. Turn off gib effects in the game menu!). A chanter can have decent defenses, great regeneration (Vet. Recovery + Ancient Memory + Beloved Spirits + regenerating item like He Carries Many Scars + survival), thick armor doesn't slow down his chanting and dumped DEX also doesn't gimp his chanting. High MIG and INT and PER are good for Dragon Thrashed damage. Besides that nothing boosts the chant's damage yo you can focus on defensive stuff. Try to expand your AoE size with an overseeing item + Voice of the Mountaintop + INT bonus item. You might still need to split-pull somtimes, but at least the enemies will get killed while they're trying to reach you.

I don't agree to the criticism of the Beckoner. He is very powerful and summoning double the creatures with the same casting time is good. Since summons only last 12 seconds you need to resummon right after the initial cast in order to keep some summons on the field. So there is no "one cast and then you'll do nothing". I played a Beckoner/Bleak Walker with Shared Flames and Mith Fyr as dps support abilities and enemies got wanked pretty hard.

You can't. Once you pick it you are bound to it for the whole playthrough.

I'm sure nearly everybody would like it. It's just a matter of cost.

Yeah ok, we can agree on that. I'm talking mainly about the combat system of Deadfire here (because most things in Deadfire that are non combat-related I like), so I didn't differenciate properly.

My brushing is done (and it turned out to be a nice piece of coiffure by the way) - so please go ahead.