Luagha

Tekehu as a Chanter is a StreetShark with Chain Lightning. I have no regrets.

There is a very dramatic and obvious cutscene in the Queen's Palace that makes it absolutely clear that you are about to hit a point of no return. The Queen even says explicitly that it is time to stop playing privateer, that any of the factions can help you with the final goal, and that you must choose one of them.- your quest log also says this, and mentions a fifth option. This is where i'd suggest the hard save if you want to do all four, because each faction will open up their last quests at this point and it finally becomes possible to lock the others out if you're not reading carefully.

You are focus starved until you hit max focus, at which point you gain +20% damage and unlimited power usage for <I don't know how many> seconds then your focus drains to 0.

Even after 3.0, the original game is trivially easy by act 3. Even without min-maxxing. Just like this game now. At this point it's just a hallmark of the series (and even the genre, considering I remember the same being true in Baldur's Gate 2/Arcanum/Icewind Dale) that we're much more powerful than the enemies and if we want it to be difficult we need to set self-restrictions. Irritating, but easy enough to do. My favourite self-restriction is only using a rotating subset of my party for each encounter - allows all the high-level toys and can still throw the whole party at difficulty spikes. I'm much more bothered by bugs like the companion-related ones, because you can't work around those without cheating.

And i don't even like how Cipher plays (having to wait to cast spells and those spells having awful visual feedback), but I like the arpee. Want a priest, but Xoti is creepy. So there's me trying to make what feels like an agressively sub-par combination work, and wondering what powers you min-max types would select if forced to use it~ My first thought was "Wael Priest for lovely defense buffs on top of Devotions/Beacon/Pillar, Soulblade for a focus dump", but so far the real result seems to be ineffective nukes/buffs with lots of dull autoattacking. (Won't be the end of the world if he just ends up being the 'face' for cipher/priest arpees and the other four are the interesting combatants, especially with difficulty as low as it is. Just seems a pity.)

This list of console commands which was posted on Reddit: https://gist.github.com/SonicZentropy/f3711d2fa9b547a05cd2496077fda42d LIsts "ShowScalers" and "ToggleScaler(DifficultyScaler scaler)" - those look promising.

Mage/Fighter is plenty strong - it's the summoned weapons that seem a bit meh. There's plenty of nice self-buffs in there for wizards that cast quickly - and now that we can tell our guys to auto-cast, buffing for every fight won't be a chore like in POE1.

Great resource Aravane, thank you. ... frustrating to need so many external reference sheets to have a smooth playing experience, though.

I hate the way cipher plays but like the 'psychic' aspect RP-wise, so getting to basically ignore the class powers while putting all those active skill points into the other class works out perfectly :D

Bwahahah. At least we can't be tempted to use this with Tekehu since his chanter subclass gets no summons <_<

The bug makes him flip-flop more than he's supposed to, but as far as I can tell there's no combination of backgrounds that changes his 'pro-eothas' stance. There's some denial and hypocrisy going on, but it seems to be intentional and he's even aware of it... sometimes.

Soulblade of Wael turns out to be surprisngly effective, but monstrously boring. I take back the suggestion entirely~

You jumped into a topic to belittle people who cared about the topic, in what world would that ever not result in defensiveness? Acting righteous about responses you seem to have fished for is an interesting approach.

For every other priest spell I have looked at, it is treated as the power level your subclass gives it to you and not the native level. Gaze of the Adragan is level 6 wizard spell, PL7 Wael. Ingame it uses a level 6 spell slot alongside Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment. Easily reproducable: Take a priest to Power Level 7, look at level 6 and 7 spell lists.and see behavour inconsistent with other Priest subclass spells.

If you primarily want the mage half to buff, why not look at cleric of wael? Wael gets some of the wizard self buffs you highlighted and Devotions is the single best example of "does this increase my chances of hitting them and reduce their chance to hit me?" around. And it frees you from the creepy Gaunite.

In the original, the stuff 'for allies' did NOT affect the paladin.

If you get her un-fired and she joins you, it is for the ducs and she changes back from the wayfarers to the five suns for your party.

Have Pallegina disobey her orders WITHOUT giving Galawain the souls. Source: https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Pillars_of_Eternity_endings That's assuming she isn't bugged like Eder (Eder ends up being a nonsensical mix of all his endings no matter what state you import him from or set him to)

Karkarov: I love that somehow took from my posts that "undertuning" and "too easy" would be a carrot, when my complaint was that I couldn't trudge through under/overtuned encounters before The tweet and stream have shown clearly that no matter how high you crank it up, Deadfire will suffer from the problem normal/hard had in the original BUT that a manual pass to make an even (instead of spiky) challenge will come in future weeks. If he follows through with that then we'll get a POTD that we're still locked into but that's seen a human hand evening it out instead of the tacked on stat inflation from the original and waiting until he's done that for a first playthrough will make me a happy camper ^_^ Perhaps the less grimdark tone of D:OS2 will be a great palette cleanser for the intervening month, anyway. Might even be healhier that way lol.

CohhCarnage's stream clearly showed the text about not being able to change this option ingame, and Sawyer has a super recent tweet about how they're too busy bugfixing to consider balancing that difficulty until post launch but that he does hope to have a better look at it in patch #2. Not an answer i'm happy about (It's hard to imagine enjoying the gameplay if it's repeating a decision that prevented me enjoying the original), but a clear answer. Sorry for wasting yer time. Edit: The tweet in question, for reference. https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/992552266841411584

ananthanielh: If you switched lower difficulties, areas you hadn't entered yet had their group sizes adjusted accordingly. When you use cheat codes (or IEMod) to change to and from POTD, group sizes adjust in areas you haven't visited (just like before) but also the stats of everything are adjusted on the fly... the stat changes are applied instantly to things on the same map as you. I recall experimenting with that on Gramrfel. Toggling POTD toggled the expected 15 on their defences. So that technical explanation does not make sense for the restriction. That it was a choice they made does (and then "achievements" is the only rational explanation for the choice)

I learned about the console commands from this forum around the same time as IEMod - they're functionally equivalent as a fix, including feeling a bit dirty for cheating. I expect i'll do something similar if need be this time around instead of repeating my mistakes or missing out on the game, it just left a niggling dirty feeling and i'm hoping for some reassurance from someone who's messed around with the menus that I won't need to. Your mention of scaling is encouraging, though only a bit since I recall how frustrating it was seeing an option RIGHT THERE that would obviously help yet which they'd arbitrarily blocked :<

It's Obsidian: even if you play it three years late there's going to be a zillion bugs and bafflingly unfinished-feeling systems, both large and small. They'll have introduced nearly as many problems as they've addressed, too. If you enjoy their art for what it is (I do!) you may as well just play unspoiled with the earlier bugs instead of spoiled with the later bugs.

Despite buying on release it took me four tries to finish POE 1 because of the awful difficulty curve (each of the first three had an extended period of boredom or frustration that killed my motivation)... can we switch as appropriate when things are too easy or frustrating this time around? On the fourth try last month I had learned about (From this forum, thanks!) and installed IEMod to start on Hard then finish on POTD, but cheating through an external tool like that is unsatisfying, plus my understanding is that it took a while for the cheaters/modders to enable that function anyway?

Start casting suppress affliction when you see the fire projectile of DOOOM flying through the air, and it should go off just after the flames land. Suppress lasts longer than the flames do. That's normally more precision and micromanagement than i'd bother with, but cleansing flame is one attack worth being that vigilant against, especially once you know exactly who'll throw it at you.