UltimaLuminaire

The system is much expanded from FFXII's gambit system, and you have everything all available instead of having to fish around and buy if-then conditionals, but that also means you will be sinking considerable time into understanding and utilizing AI in Deadfire as you progress each level. Important thing to note is you'll want to take advantage of setting your own arbitrary cooldown timer on abilities/spells so if they ever get suppressed or something you don't have your AI stuck in a casting loop, wasting resources and time. The order you put things in will dictate priority in the event multiple cases are met.

Push effects will still send an enemy into the AoE of your Carnage. You'll also be getting plenty of Carnage off your disengage attacks. The way TB handles enemy pathing, how engagement is checked as soon as Turn Based combat is initialized and not at the start of the first turn in combat (leading to some scripted movement cheese), and how you can continue to engage an enemy you've just Terrified... it's really powerful. Honestly, Carnage just comes up constantly in TB mode.

Sadly, shout abilities didn't benefit a lot in this mode. While Turn Based Mode will truncate a lot of powers/spells with less than 1 sec cast time to a Free Action, all of the shout abilities are kept to a Standard Action. Might be something to do with it registering as an attack rather than a buff that has an attack on activation? The Driving Roar upgrade will still be powerful as a Standard Action and your actions are still refunded on kill with Blood Thirst, but it will simply be slower to cheese in real time until the refund triggers. Enemies will still be locked down from being knocked prone, letting you kite until the refund happens. Also, as a minor note related to mechanics, the changes to hit and graze in Turn Based will see your Carnage rolls landing more often whenever your attacks do hit, since Carnage rolls cannot graze and will instead hit a majority of the time you would normally miss in RTwP. This should have a direct benefit on shout abilities because they are similar to Carnage in that they also cannot graze and will simply hit. I guess the way it's programmed is that a graze is still considered a type of hit, and the graze effect on a power/spell can be flagged with yes or no. Spirit Tornado can graze, so this will impact the damage per point of Rage, further cementing Driving Roar as the most cost efficient damage power available to SC Barbarian in both modes.

I played solo SC Barbarian in Turn Based Mode and it was very successful. I can tell you that a slow Barbarian does not suffer at all thanks to the initiative rules and how ranged kiting and switch hitting tends to work. For the most part, a SC Barbarian does not need any of their attack speed boosting passives. You need only take damage, movement, and survival upgrades each level. Frenzy and its upgrades are still indispensable for additional damage, but the important thing to note is that if you choose to upgrade into Spirit Tornado, the darn thing has no cast time in this mode. You can truly nuke an area at the cost of all your rage as a Free Action before your turn ends. As a SC Barbarian, the damage per point of Rage on Spirit Tornado is second only to the final tier of shout powers since it will scale off of your PL. With DoC plate, and a dip in the luminous bath, you'll be able to blast Spirit Tornado more than enough times to end entire encounters. DPS for your SC Barbarian in Turn Based Mode will mostly come down to your build, and both Thelee and Boeroer's suggestions hold up in turn based. Just be sure to be flexible and kite enemies as needed with ranged weapons. Later on, you'll want to rethink your no-tank idea and spec into full armor/survival to abuse Barbaric Retaliation, as that will be the best way to maximize your enemy phase damage in turn based mode.

I don't know where you learned that DoC had to be dead in PoE1. You had to have her spare Harmke, and in her ending card it says she wanders off unsatisfied and is later destroyed in battle. This will flag the armor to be available in Periki's Overlook. The whole deserve thing has nothing to do with anything. You were just told a lie. As for Int resist to stop confusion, you can get by on Svef and, later, Modwyr. Certain foods can also give you immunity (capt banquet, wael's wind). You don't have to rely on any armor for the Int resist. You can also manually set a PoE1 history and use that to create a game file that has the plate. Unity Console should have worked, but if the game doesn't have the item ID for some reason, then it might be an issue of the game not generating the item? I don't recall there ever being a system where items must be spawned into your game before you can get it via the console command, but here we are.

First log-in of the year. Happy near year, everyone. Congrats to thelee on your Ultimate success! I'll have to check out your written guide soon. Can feel the itch coming back. All the talk of Arcane Dampener is reminding me of my attempts at maximizing Will just to force it to graze or miss. What a run-ender in random fights vs mages.

On the note of subjectivity, I'd like to chime in that I actually can't play SSS on anything but higher difficulties. It's such a fun expansion that let me test all sorts of strategies. Probably the most enjoyable gauntlet of combat puzzles I've ever experienced in an RPG. I can think of many builds that I've used to succeed. If I didn't use a certain ability, it was supplemented with rest bonuses and consumables. But on that note, I also don't appreciate HP bloat in any other circumstances. Having HP bloat in frequent encounters like some JRPGs like to do is a huge drain on motivation. Ideally if you've solved combat, you should be able to diffuse high HP in a common encounter. Deadfire has so many ways of piling on damage it's hard to justify sticking with one core damage strategy. You always have a bunch of cards at your disposal to counter armor, spells, and positioning.

I don't recall needing too many interrupts against Neriscyrlas. I've completed the DLC 3 times, 2 of them being a solo run, and that fight is usually a staggered DPS check based on what phase the fight is in. I do abuse mobility, so I will regroup to a tower to wait out Safeguard if it manages to get off, but that usually doesn't happen between the handful of interrupt powers I happen to have, spells (I think I even used grease at the time, but that's because I swear by that spell in every D&D game I play, digital or real life), and Barbarian Interrupting Blows 50% interrupt chance. My solo mageslayer attempt was weird, though. I don't recall the disruption stacks ever working on Corrosive Siphon. I think it can't work because it doesn't count as a spell. Ah well. At the very least I recall forcing it to miss by blinding Neriscyrlas through explosives and that dropped the healing to 0. I do remember needing to use Empower to recover half my class resources on all my front liners and wizard, though. Whether that counts as micromanagement, I don't know. I primarily beat Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 at a very young age by figuring out how to micromanage. Back then I didn't have access to guides (hell, my dial up sucked and my computer could barely run the games), so I didn't know all the cheese. I just had to pause constantly and think.

In the gamedatabundle files, se just stands for status effect. A bulk of all the nity gritty numbers and multipliers fall under that file. Child effect? Hmm, I don't think that's how the code is organized. The status effects were made to be modular rather than be a child to any specific class. What they did is ID and name status effects alongside each ability, regardless of if the ability is an upgrade or unique, to help with organization for mods. They planned it out pretty well. You can ignore their organization and add a status effect ID to any number of different abilities without having to make something up from scratch if you didn't want to, assuming you find an effect you want. And yes, that's what I'm getting at. There is no existing crit damage multiplier on regular Crushing Blow. If you search the relevant gamedatabundle file, the entry was not created, nor is any referenced by Crushing Blow itself. All they did was add the same damage boost status effect ID a second time. You can also verify the damage output and the active (visible) multipliers in the combat log. The ability description also lists active properties/effects based on the IDs added to the ability, so you can treat that as an accurate representation of Crushing Blow's error. Flavor text still says bonus crit chance and damage, which is actually present both in the original attack ability and Barbaric Smash (with their own IDs and entries).

Trying to understand the nature of your confusion. So for basic attack scaling, you pretty much get accuracy and defenses per level. Fighting enemies way above your level requires a huge swing in resources to help you hit for this reason. Penetration and weapon damage scale off your weapon's quality. For enemies, this is accounted for by encounter design and expected level. The exception to all of this is Monk Fists (EDIT: oh yea summoned weapons are cool), which scale things off of PL. You can rock some serious damage with Monk Fists if you can boost your PL up, or watch it suffer if you take PL penalties from afflictions, etc. Weapon proficiency modals are good for resourceless augmentations. Having access to them is good early on when you're still building up resources for consumable crafting and food. Mid to late game, you may have plenty of resources to burn so the modals will come into play less frequently outside of the clearly abuseable ones, such as pistol's rapid reload modal. Specific classes have abilities to help with accuracy. Fighter has the best tools for boosting accuracy early on while Barbarian doesn't give you any accuracy bonuses outside of the accurate carnage passive and lion sprint, for instance. Cipher does get a significant accuracy boosting ability in their own progression, but if you're managing your party buffs correctly they may never have to use it. In general, though, late game accuracy is not an issue for any class or combination thereof, even on PotD. As for your question about gameplay hinging on abilities, I'm even more confused. PoE 1 & 2 has always had ways of optimizing auto attacks, but abilities in Deadfire greatly influence the range of burst you have access to, which help a lot with nasty targets or mobs. Managing your resources and knowing when to coast on your auto attacks is important.

Sorry for the necro. I decided to jump back into Deadfire after I noticed the community mod had been up on Nexus for a while now. I also noticed the Funnening mods, and this lead me down another Barbarian rabbit hole. Long story short, I didn't realize Crushing Blow had an error. It lists its damage multiplier twice, and as you all know, active ability damage multipliers (EDIT: of the same type) don't stack. So having the two 20% extra damage doesn't do anything. Worse, they forgot to even make a Crushing Blow crit damage multiplier se entry. Ended up just scrapping the crit damage on my end and using Funnening's gatecrasher idea to give Crushing Blow a solid identity as a full HP nuke, but I digress. If there's ever a future update to the community patch, I hope this gets addressed. As for the current patch, glad you guys caught the off-hand carnage snafu. They had the entry made, just nothing was pointing to it haha.

@Verde Stacking? I usually take it on classes and characters that I don't typically have a similar bonus. Characters that aren't using shield modals, mostly. I take the passive on... Barbarian Chanter Cipher Cleric Ranger Wizard Usually at the tail end of the PL or during the next PL in the case of Barbarian. @Phenomenum That's a weird exception for 1/encounter. Granting all body or mind tier 1 inspirations sounds crazy over-tuned. I'd use it every battle at that point. If I may suggest, you could make it so the spell periodically buffs you with the relevant tier 1 inspiration at certain intervals. If the inspiration is countered, it will return at the next interval unless the spell's duration runs out and the next interval doesn't occur. Not sure exactly what the code would look like, but this would make the spell a really powerful counter to certain effects but otherwise no stronger than a tier 1 inspiration.

I feel the same way as Boeroer on Deep Pockets but I also thought the idea of a "Lesser" Deep Pockets for all other classes was pretty cool. Voted for that.

There might be a misunderstanding on my wording. The only reason I brought up Uncanny Luck was to state my bias. I'm well aware I'm biased towards the talent since I run it all the time, but people were making posts under the assumption no one in the world took the talent. I just wanted to point out when and where I take the talent. As for my comment to Verde, I was under the impression Verde was talking about the resistance as well as the crit chance. I don't use it purely for the DPS aspect, either, and many of you have already stated that it's not too bad defensively. Please do not take my claims of the log as anything but me making sure you all know of my confirmation bias and not to take me seriously. I just feel a little bad since I didn't consider the log could be bugged at all. I really liked seeing it come up and thought I was one lucky player. As for buffing Uncanny Luck, in my own posts I even state that the votes on the poll will favor a buff to the talent. I never advocated otherwise.

At that point it would be supremely flexible. Barely a combat situation that one talent wouldn't apply to. I'd take it even on my multiclass characters. Speaking of bugs, did anything happen to the field boots + platinated rebound interaction? I haven't checked it in a good while.

I didn't know the log was bugged. My bad.

5% not accounting for multiplicative stacking, is the standard for a D&D player. That's 1 in 20. For a solo class, which usually has access to fewer resources, this just works. Not every solo class is a Rogue, man. But it's understandable that anyone who does not regularly play D&D, particularly 4th edition, would be highly uncomfortable with 1 in 20. I swear by it just because I've seen it proc so many times in my log. It even tells you when something happens as a direct result of that talent in the log. It's hard for me to miss since I do as much as I can in most of my runs through the game. I don't know how the devs see the talent or if they will listen to the feedback from the poll, but I'm sure the majority of votes are with you, Verde.

On the topic of Uncanny Luck, I'm one of the guys who always takes that talent on solo class builds. I'm not usually speedrunning, so all the times it procs to help me resist enemy attacks just stack up and astound me. The hits to crits comes up way too often on a solo Barbarian, it's kind of funny. That said, I find myself taking it on dual classes far less of late. I'll still take it on bruiser types that I don't put shields on. Barbarian - Mage Slayer I've messed around with Mage Slayer for 2 whole playthroughs, both turn based (solo) and real time. The benefits really shine with the DLC content because of all the non-standard casters that can be disrupted but who are otherwise immune to interrupts. The problem is getting the Barbarian to survive long enough to continue disrupting targets. Funny thing is, Barbarian is so tightly balanced that just one additional survival feature modded into the game was enough to significantly boost the speed and success rate of a solo run. I would propose a modest damage shield that activates when the Barbarian successfully resists any attack. Something like a 5pt all damage shield that scales with PL and lasts for 15s. Boerer also suggested raising the SR, which wouldn't hurt. Barbarian - Corpse Eater I would make Frenzy and Yell abilities immune to the Rage cost increase. Leave them at 1. I've already taken the poll by MaxQuest. It looks like you guys have most things covered. I won't be able to contribute that much to discussion since my game knowledge is child-like compared to the giants on this thread, so I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who responded. It's been fun looking at where people stand on game design, particularly Thelee. I hope Obsidian is able to look at the survey results in some capacity.

Without the restrictions you can do as heldred suggests thanks to the flexibility and power their team provides.

Off the top of my head with your restrictions in mind. Other people will do you better, tbh. Tank: Paladin/Chanter. You can go goldpact and a troubadour just to continue applying various buffs, but it's whatever because this multiclass is pretty strong in a party. It's got armor, auras, sustain, damage, and possibly bonus engagement. Just remember that auras count as active abilities, so certain bonuses will not stack with things like modals, spells, or potions. You can still stack equipment, though, and if you stack every available regeneration accessory... DPS off-tank: Fighter/Monk. You can do a devoted helwalker for some funny damage. Access to tier 3 might inspiration and stacking +2 pen on PotD is really good. Choose mob stance for dumb results. Tactician is also really powerful in a party. Consider the benefits. If you don't go devoted, consider using the ability, clear out, w/ weapon modals to debuff secondary defenses by 25. You'll want to look at club, flail, and morningstar. This significantly bolsters your allied Magic DPS. Ranged DPS: Cipher/Rogue. You can kind of wing it here in subclass. Rogue abilities are powerful and you only ever need hobbling strike for damage in most scenarios. Fire off Cipher abilities for phantom foes or something. Don't forget to take Cipher's talent for +1 pen on weapon attacks. This multiclass will work well with whatever firearm you want them to have, pretty much, but works best with dual pistols. Just don't forget to take Maia's sharpshooter's garb for the extra reload reduction on arquebuss since that's what you desire. Magic DPS: Wizard/Barbarian. Just do bloodmage. The barbarian should be either vanilla, berserker, or fury shaper. Berserker might do too much raw damage to you but with proper party support you'll be groovy thanks to bonus pen and armor. Frenzy for bonus action speed. Hilarious. Also, this multiclass is flexible enough to use a conjured weapon if you're so inclined. Healer/Buffer: Unfortunately with the conditions you've set, the last option is Cleric/Druid. This is not recommended, but I guess if you're just looking for healing and buffs, this will have you covered. Combined with the Tank's auras, you'll pretty much have healing as good as it gets in Deadfire aside from what a certain user on here would do (team of 5 paladin chanters). In fact, you'll probably end encounters before you'll need this multiclass... and when you do need it, it'll be for barring death's door.

Well, a slog zone gets created. This could be an issue but by this point most of your team has access to some kind of teleport ability via class or boots. The boss also tends to periodically get stunned, which can be handy but is not mandatory considering you could just DPS the boss the entire time. Only way to make it worth is to take out things before starting the fight yourself, usually by abusing something with big damage and range, but slow-ish projectile speed, while luring the oracle elsewhere on the map. There's enough space that you can do so and safely re-enter stealth before combat can be initiated. Of course, me being me, I used a single class Barbarian's Leap and Instrument of Boundless Rage and that was that.

You can also consume potions of arcane reflection for an extra chance to survive nukes from the adds.

It might not be you. The whole thing was very strange. I'm using unarmed strikes (w/ training) and was wearing Platinated Plate at the time, so I should have gotten stunned at some point with all those attacks flying around. Anyway, let me break down what I can. First, I was playing in Turn Based Mode, but I executed the attack out of combat. I was also running Eothas and Berath's challenge, but that shouldn't affect anything either. The type of Barbarian was Mage Slayer so I could test it for once (ugh, softlocks all over in the 2nd half of the playthrough), but this shouldn't affect No Quarter. My gear consisted of Platinated Plate, anything I could grab to increase Perception, Upright Captain's Belt, armband of accuracy, unarmed fists, a ring of prosperity that increased my hit to crit conversion, the ring with time dilation from Beast of Winter, and the Rakhan Field Boots to use No Quarter on myself. The food I was benefiting from at the time was Hot Razor Skewers. I had the luminous bath bonus. There was also the mysterious bog water bonus granting +2 Might and Constitution. None of these should matter. Talents (that might matter aside from Barbaric Retaliation) Blooded Monastic Training Bloody Slaughter Uncanny Luck Improved Critical Spell Resistance (Maybe? I mean Mage Slayer has inherent 25% vs spells but No Quarter *can't* be a spell. Unpossible.) Platinated Plate was upgraded for 30% stun rate on being hit in melee and +2 Armor vs Melee attacks w/ increased recovery penalty. No weapon modal was active.

I always love testing things on solo Barbarian, so here I am. Level 20 solo Barbarian on my current playthrough and I just hit myself with No Quarter and Barbaric Retaliation. The game had to stop and think about what was going on. It looped into overdrive in a chain of critical hits and retaliations, resulting in over 2000 damage to my character and an explosion of red shock waves and blood. You could abuse this in a party suicide build between Barbaric Retaliation and Vengeful Defeat or use Barring Death's Door. The resulting Carnage damage radiating off of you alone would probably kill most mobs within close range, not to say the least of what you could do with max Intelligence, two rings of overseeing, and Aloth's armor.

While fighting Jungle Lurkers in the Hohina Ravine on Tehiwai Islands I encountered a soft lock. My best guess is that Mage Slayer is successfully interrupting a spellcast but this is causing turn based combat to break. Unfortunately the combat log does not offer an indication of a spell being interrupted here, though it would if I was using the pet boar and still it would soft lock so long as there are spell disruption stacks. I have not encountered this problem before this point due to either luck or bursting down an enemy before or after their spells had been cast. This is on Veteran difficulty (solo, Eothas and Berath challenge) and can happen even with the pwgra if they attempt to cast something while there are spell disruption stacks. A screenshot