Aravane

I had this bug today. Managed a workaround. Did you arrive in the district via the Undercroft boat, or any means other than the intra-city travel screen? If you travel through the city you should get an encounter with the Principi captain involved. Avetta's dialogue should trigger correctly afterwards.

As a stopgap measure here's a table of quest info I extracted from the game files. Good enough for checking the level of a specific quest or deciding on a new direction. (Spoilers, obviously.) Google Drive link (searchable).

Adding my voice to the chorus. That explanation makes sense for scaling everything, but not for the "only scale up" option. The game doesn't differentiate what's below your level, only what's above it - and that remains the same if you're only scaling up. Is there a value to mod or a console command to execute which would allow us to turn this back on manually?

Might in Deadfire has multiplicative scaling, unlike everything else that boosts your damage. Hence people saying Might in Deadfire is all-important.

The wording on DAoM is negative health restored (rather than raw damage taken) so it's ambiguous. Someone with the beta could check. Wizard/Monk seems respectable, though not spectacular. Agreed on the Trickster. Class resources are scarce enough without adding to the issue. Melee Assassin/Wizard? Seems extra squishy if anything goes wrong. I wouldn't take it on PotD, but you could probably make it work on Veteran. Lots of micro involved, but I think that's always the case with Assassin. Most Assassin/Wizard builds I've seen floated around are about nuking from invis with spells (Backstab bonus doesn't apply but Assassinate does) and disappearing again. Melee/magic hybrid characters are in ample supply in Deadfire. Druid does that all on their own (spells and spiritshift), as does a Skald (crit in melee and cast invocations). You could probably multi a Priest if you're stubborn but I don't think they're especially well suited. But most of all there's the Soul Blade Cipher - they melee, they've got a bunch of spells as a sideboard, you can multi them with basically any martial class for good results. They also have a fair few spells with an 0.5 second cast time, though these come with a 3-4 second recovery unlike the fast Wizard buffs. But at least getting interrupted shouldn't be a problem. (Actually, did they end up nerfing Soul Annihilation in the full release? I was worried they would.)

The inspirations are pretty underwhelming, but the accuracy and deflection seem quite good. It's about what I expected, and I think it'd be worth using if it weren't for the duration issues.

Based on this post on Chanter summon durations (I think summoned weapons/transformations interact with PL in the same way) you get +5% duration per power level over unlock level. IIRC Empower gives +10 PL for a spell, so that's potentially +50% duration. The Lasting Empower passive gives a 20% increase on top of that. Doesn't seem worth it. Probably better to do another cast and use the Empower to refresh available spells. The 3 second cast time isn't disastrously long. There are also the passives that speed up the cast: Martial Caster (+15%) and Rapid Casting (+10%). Martial Caster seems awful - with 3 casts of a summoned weapon in an encounter (which seems on the high end of things) it saves you 1.35 seconds. A really narrow and underwhelming effect. The 25 second duration also present a problem when using Citzal's Martial Power. That buff lasts 30 seconds and disables spellcasting, meaning you're guaranteed some time with no spells and no summoned weapons if you try to combo them together. Really unfortunate, since they're clearly meant to be used together. I wish they'd actually nerf Martial Power's duration to match. I'm just left hoping there are items with unique properties that work well for this character archetype, though I'm leaning towards rolling something else entirely.

There's also power level to consider. Does it affect duration for summoned weapons? Since IIRC the stats on the weapons scale with character level.

So the full list of abilities is out now. Citzal's Enchanted Armory turns out to be the capstone spell for a summoned-weapons-centric wizard. We get two weapons (two weapon style ahoy!) and a breastplate. Exciting, though we have no specifics on their stats yet. But it makes multiclassing a melee wizard less of a no-brainer. However, I'm concerned about the duration of summoned weapons. It appears they've all been nerfed to last 25 seconds. I don't have the backer beta, but that seems... rather on the short side. And out of step with other wizard buffs. Hoping for some thoughts from our experienced character builders on how impactful this nerf might turn out to be.

MaxQuest put together a list of the inspirations and afflictions here.

Oh, it isn't? Shame. I misunderstood what you meant by "conversation nodes can easily be edited".

I can see a point to editing conversation nodes. If you're trying to mod in a new subclass (like the Blind Priest of Wael mod) you could add some dialogue options/reactivity. It might be rather superficial (in the sense that it wouldn't lead to new outcomes for a given conversation), but it would really improve a custom class in terms of feel.

According to the datamined ability list over at RPG Codex Heart of Fury is a Power Level 8 ability, so only accessible to single-classed barbarians.

I hope I'm missing something, but I see basically zero synergy between a ranger and a wizard. I suppose one could go for a Stalker/Wizard summoned weapons and buffs melee build, though even that is probably worse than the other melee wizard combos. But that doesn't apply to Maia anyway since she's a Gunhawk, which is presumably some kind of ranged/guns focused subclass.

I downloaded the Twitch video to my hard drive via JDownloader 2 and used my normal video player (MPC-BE) to go frame-to-frame when something flashed by. So I had the video in its native resolution and I avoided the screen-darkening-on-pause that Twitch does. I took the actual screen captures with the Snipping Tool just like you - it's pretty handy.