mrscojangles

From what I've seen, attacking people at sea has no impact on your relationship with their respective faction. I imagine the thought process was something along the lines of, If you kill them all or sink their ships, there's no one to inform the faction that you did so. If it does have an impact, its definitely minor as I've attacked pretty much every single ship in the game so far and none of the factions have locked me out of their quests or anything yet.

Ranged Helwalker/Ascendant is pretty awesome. Lightning Strikes, Duality, Thunderous Blows, Enduring Dance, etc on the monk side of things. With Draining Whip and the blunderbuss that has the built in aoe damage and one of the scepters with an extra jump or something like that, you cap your focus super fast if any enemies are close together. I'm sure it'd be really strong with long pain and turning wheel too, especially for single target, but I haven't messed around with that yet. Definitely a bit squishy but its easily manageable if you're playing with a party with a tank/melee or two and something that can give you some heals. Good damage, good cc and debuffs. I'd definitely recommend it.

Same here. Extra stuff I want for quick slots but don't have space for (explosives, scrolls), gear I swap to, extra grimoires, etc. Helps to distinguish what I want to save for easier access for specific characters vs what is all getting sold to vendors. Less of an issue with yellow quality gear and stuff like that but if I have 25 grimoires in my stash and i want to save 5 of them and sell 20 of them, its an annoyance to have them all in the exact same place as opposed to sticking the ones I'm keeping in my Wizard's personal bags. Shift click to send to stash works just fine for me too, so its gotta be a bug for the people it isn't working for.

Good call, thanks. I'd imagine that should do the trick to at least prevent him from dumping all his mortification before I even notice that arcane dampener is up. Might still burn a few if I'm half assing it and not paying any attention but definitely better than nothing.

Kind of figured that was the only option but wasn't sure if i was overlooking some conditional that could account for suppressed buffs.

Ran into a bit of an annoying situation today with the AI behavior and I'm trying to figure out if anyone else has found a way around it. The situation is as follows: I have my monk set up to autocast Lightning Strikes when he doesn't have a Dexterity inspiration and to autocast Thunderous Blows when he has 2+ wounds and doesn't have a might inspiration. Ran across an area with enemies that cast arcane dampener pretty regularly and whenever my monk gets arcane dampener on him, it appears he's blowing through all of his mortification in like 2 seconds trying to cast Lightning Strikes 10 times in a row, but it doesn't stick due to the dampener - or at least thats what I think is happening as thats the only mortification ability I have on autocast and he's dropping to 0 mortification before i even see what happened. The question is, is there anything within the AI options that I could set to account for Arcane Dampener or is my best option just to pray i notice it and am able to turn off the AI immediately before he dumps all mortification? I'm guessing this issue would apply to any other setup with autocast buffs that dampener is suppressing as well, but my monk is the only one I have set up with that sort of auto casting and I haven't taken the time to test with other classes as of yet. Certainly not gamebreaking but its not exactly ideal to start a fight and go from 10 mortification to 0 in the first 10 seconds.

To add on the above post, the definitions of "cheesing" vary so much from person to person too. Yes, there are some people playing with SCS/Tactics/Ascension who are kiting every single fight while they have 5 ranged/casters chewing up the mobs. Some people are lobbing cloudkills and webs into fog of war every fight. But there are also people who are playing with those mods and refuse to use robes of vecna or certain other pieces of gear or certain specs/skills/spells/etc. And then there is everything in between. The great thing about BG2 specifically is that there is a huge range of mods and there is huge range of options within those mods. As Tigranes said, once you're familiar with SCS, theres so many different ways you can set it up. Do you like the playstyle where you have to figure out how to dispel 15 different things from the enemy casters every fight? You can play that way. You like some of the AI improvements but don't want the enemy casters to all fully prebuff and use HLAs long before you have them? You can turn those options off. Don't like beholders? You can adjust them. The flexibility of the difficulty is what makes it so great. If you want to beat your head into a wall because its so damn tough, you can make it that way, and I think for a lot of players that capability to set up a game to be insanely difficult is a really important thing, especially for replayability and powergaming. However, I know thats the minority but at the same time, you'd still like some options to adjust to at least get it reasonably difficult in the meantime until people (hopefully) make some mods.

Good news is Deadfire will likely have a lot more mods than the first game, and if we're lucky we'll have some folks making SCS/Ascension/Tactics style mods to really beef up the difficulty. Granted, I know nothing about modding so I don't know to what extent things can be adjusted, but my understanding is this game is much more mod friendly than the first. And hopefully the potd tuning that they'll do in a future patch is significant as well. All we can do at this point is wait though. As much as I'd love for them to do the tuning immediately and for some people to put out mods today, I know the devs have higher priorities in terms of bugs and gamebreaking issues, and its much too early to realistically expect anyone to be putting out well made, large scale difficulty mods this early on. Have patience, as difficult as it may be.

Single class shattered pillar seems very strong so far. Can keep up lightning strikes and thunderous blows all the time. Upgraded torment reach lets you pump out a lot of stuns. Force of anguish can be used to knock melee off your back line folks. Rooting pain is constantly going off for a lot of interrupts. Flagellant's Path gives you the mobility you want to get to the back lines. Blade Turning is a good "oh ****" defensive for when you're swarmed by melee. I haven't got to the level 7, 8 and 9 talents but they look good too. I will say that it is ideal to put lightning strikes/thunderous blows on the AI to autocast whenever they drop, and if you don't really want to babysit it, you'll want to set up Torment's Reach/Raised Torment to also autocast at 3 wounds, since you'll be generating a ton of wounds and you won't cast rooting pain if you're capped at 5. Duality and Turning wheel won't provide you as much int/fire damage as the other monk subclasses, but even 3-5 Int and 15-25% fire damage for all your Torment's Reach helps out and its some free extra damage on your other attacks, duration on your buffs, and range/damage on your rooting pain. Early game it seemed a little squishy, but I think the same could be said for most anything until you get a little gear and some source of healing, and you could easily pick up some defensive talents or set up your attributes to make it a little tankier if you find its survivability lacking. I've been using the devil of caroc breastplate and that seems to be a decent choice from the gear I've found so far, in that it has solid AC but the recovery penalty isn't too severe. And with lightning strikes/dual wield/two weapon style it doesn't feel slow by any means.

Thanks for the post. Disappointed that there are none that are increasing the difficulty, as they specifically said there would be.

If you want to play ranged, you can dual wield two of any of the 1handed ranged weapons (pistol, blunderbuss, wand, scepter), and from a distance that will be a better damage output than 1 melee, 1 ranged weapon as rogue has a lot of full attack skills, which means they will attack with both of your equipped weapons. Put melee weapons in your second weapon set and can swap over when you want to go melee. Realistically though, there isn't any one "right" way to do things. There are certainly options that may be more effective or more ideal, but theres a million ways you can build and play your character and if you're enjoying yourself and are able to progress through the game, then I wouldn't sweat "finding the perfect build" too much, especially if you're new to these type of games. One thing that is worth mentioning that you may not have seen yet, is you are able to re-spec your character at most any vendor. On the left side of the vendor window, there is a icon with some dice, and that will give you the option to reassign your characters points. The cost increases the higher level you are, and your level 0 choices are locked in, but you can change any of your talents/points you spent on subsequent level ups.

You get a 30% benefit for dual wielding regardless of if you have the talent. Then the talent adds another 15% on top.

This right here. There is actually a shield that counts as a melee weapon as well, so you can ranged mainhand and shield offhand and you get the dual wield speed bonus while still getting a little defense. And can bash people with it in melee range.

1. Yes, its viable but probably not the most ideal option. No reason you can't play like that though 2. If you have a ranged weapon in one hand and a melee weapon in the other, and you're not in melee range of the enemy, the game is going to assume you intend to use the ranged weapon. If you want to attack with your dagger, move your char up to the mob you want to attack and then attack it once you're in melee range 3. Yes, unless it specifies melee or needing to be in melee range 4. If you're in stealth and do an attack from stealth, thats a stealth attack, Visually, it isn't going to look drastically different or anything, and as poster above mentioned, the guidelines are a little different for ranged weapons.

So you didn't want to leave the city because you want to get every single quest from the city, and then you're surprised that there is a lot of reading involved in running around a giant city and picking up every single quest? And you're annoyed that you haven't fought much yet when you've been specifically avoiding leaving the city. And you're annoyed because you have to pay attention to the dialogue in a crpg to understand what is happening. I hate to break it to you, but you're bringing these issues on yourself. Personally, I explored islands and fought stuff on the islands and boarded ships and picked up/completed a handful of quests before I ever even went to Neketaka. And then when I was in Neketaka and had explored two of the city areas and wanted to do some combat and exploring, I left and did some of the quests I already had. If you're bored of the city, maybe you should consider not picking up 100% of the quests before you go out and experience combat or other stuff. The rest of the city will be waiting for you when you come back. And if you have to go back to a few zones for quests you didnt pick up beforehand, no big deal.

But if "only scale up" is enabled and I'm level 6 and a quest has a predetermined level of 10, then nothing has been changed, no? The whole point is that if only scale up is enabled, the only time things are scaling is if it is below us, and then there would be no difficulty indicator present. If the content is higher level than us, there is no scaling taking place and the predetermined levels are all in force. At which point, why can't the system still utilize these predetermined levels, as literally nothing has changed.

Resolve is very dumpable for ranged characters that don't plan on getting hit much. Likely to be a little bit rough early on prior to getting some gear/talents/full party. Dex is semi dumpable for some tanks i'd say. Chanter/paladin tank can live with the increased recovery time and can take the .5 second invocations where they're still fast cast even with low dex. Intellect is semi dumpable for anything without aoe and with limited focus on buffs/debuffs/dots/stuff that benefits from intellects extended duration. Not exactly sure what build you'd dump it completely but maybe a soulblade single target build? Haven't played around with that, so I couldn't say with any certainty. Perception could be dumpable for a pure heal/buff class, though doesn't seem ideal as most heal/buff setups still have some potential for dps/debuffs/cc

From my limited playing with Troubadour/bleak walker tank, I'd say you're going to be better off mostly sticking with the .5 second cast invocations if the character is your primary tank. Even with high dex, the cast time on the summons is going to be less than ideal for a character that theoretically is going to have multiple people beating on them. Obviously this is situational and if you're CCing all the enemies or they're flocking to other characters/summons, then you'll have time to cast summons, but they don't seem particularly ideal to cast when you're actively tanking multiple enemies. where as the invocations that are .5 seconds baseline are really easy to get out even with dex dumped.

I don't understand why it doesn't still function with the only scale up option. If the zone is using its manually set level because its 8 levels higher than me and not scaling up, then shouldn't the game still be able to tell me that the fight is higher level than me? If I'm level 6 and the area is level 14 without scaling, the only scale up option has had 0 impact on it at that point and only would impact it if I'm higher level than the manually set level, at which point the skulls wouldn't be showing anyways because it'd be scaled up to be equal.

Would be a nice feature to have added in a future patch, since I can't imagine it would require very much work and would be a huge convenience upgrade, especially considering how big the world is and the fact that the difficulty skull indicators don't work if you have the only scale up option enabled. The result is a lot of stumbling across stuff that is too high level but no easy way to keep track of where I need to return to besides jotting down notes on a list outside of game, which isn't very convenient when I'm trying to remember where things are.

That makes no sense - how is that the intended behavior? I understand them being turned off if you have full scaling enabled for both scaling up and down, but why are they disabled when only scale up is selected? There is tons of stuff that is massively over leveled for the player and there is no way to gauge it until you get one shot by some enemies that are twice your level.

I'm guessing they mean the option in the Difficulty setting, for "Enable Difficulty Indicators." Don't seem to be showing for me either. I also have only scale up enabled, like z_liquid, and I've definitely stumbled into some fights where they're a lot higher than me, based on their spell selections, and they were not showing any of the skull icons.

Perhaps I'm an idiot and just missing the option for it, but I'm not finding any way to add our own notes to the full Deadfire Archipelago overview map. I know a lot of things are already marked on there with little bronze or bluish dots, but it would be really nice if we could right click to add our own dots/notes to mark islands or ruins or other stuff we need to come back to when we're higher level or other things like that.

I feel like the whole needing to use fists as monk thing is overstated. Its true that fists can be very strong from an accuracy and damage standpoint, but there are plenty of weapon effects/enchants that can make them worthwhile to use. You can also put a weapon in offhand and fist in mainhand, and still get the benefits of transcendent suffering for MH. In the first game, i really enjoyed having at least 1 draining weapon on my monk, as it provided them with a good chunk of self sustain with the healing. And with high end enchants on weapons and other special abilities on them, the slight loss in raw damage/accuracy can often be negligible. Thats not to say fists can't be great too, but I wouldn't entirely discount using weapons on monks. As for your question, I'd say a lot of it depends on what you want to do for the character and how you intend to build your group. chanter/paladin has a lot of potential as a tank, as a support char, as a summoner, as a healer/buffer. There are a lot of ways you can build it. If you want a tank or support char, i'd say that option is your best choice, where as berserker or soul blade multi with paladin is going to be more of a striker type char that also offers some utility with paladin skills, depending how you want to spend your points. You're likely going to want one relatively tanky character in your group, so you may want to consider which NPCs you want or if you're going to use hirelings or how you plan to round out your group.

That is from February. The other quotes saying it does work are from May. Different versions of the beta.