Lokithecat

My Helwalker / Berzerker was punching for 50 on a non crit, so a Ranger + Cipher does 450 damage unarmed? Wow. Or maybe Barbarians Brute Force (Target Fortitude, instead of Deflection if its lower) is realllly overpowered.

Maia was one of my main companions, and I honestly forgot about the bird most fights. Occasionally I'd notice in combat, but rarely was it taking damage. I'm sure intelligent placing of them, not putting them in until the enemies engaged, and some caution, they might contribute a bit of damage. I still wouldn't bother with one, at this stage, the risk / reward, of Grief vs how much they contribute is really badly balanced. Ghost Heart, until pets become more meaningful, is probably the safest path. You can drop one if you feel you need it, but don't have to sweat the downside.

Assuming you don't rest at Inn's you can just keep the wound, by not feeding at campsites. I haven't checked wounds, but I'm sure there would be some that would be irrelevant to a mage.

Because securing this boat is so simple... anyone could do it... if they have a Watcher, marked by Berath, to get into the Hanging Sepulcher, confront an Ancient Guardian, get an Artifact weapon, learn how to operate it, and defeat a Ship full of Ancient undead that have been pillaging the seas. Sure, that's all you have to do. And then you have to know where to sail it, either through your soul / god statue problem, or your collection of Native artifacts that you built as a map... Yeah. Easy. Although I was annoyed at how easily everyone else just followed me, despite me leaving on my own, and not being part of a faction, my Pirate buddies still managed to survive the storm, and find the place with no help from me.

You can build a very rogue oriented party, just with the basic companions. With Eder as a Swashbuckler, everything he tanks will be vulnerable to sneak attack, which doesn't have any sort of Range restriction, unlike Backstab. Everyone benefits from Distraction, and Sneak Attacks. The damage bonus from free Perma sneak attack is higher than Barbarian frenzy Might + Haste (although Berserker's penetration might tip the scales, most Barbarian stuff doesn't help a Range build, no Carnage, etc...). The ability to apply lots of debuffs (Confounding Blind = Deflection destroyer) from range makes a Scout (Rang / Rog) really impressive. I find the pets just aren't worth the trouble, and the class penalty of Sharpshooter feels too large, I usually go Ghost heart. Arbalest (Giant crossbow) modal is really worthwhile, aside from immune prone enemies, you can basically lock 1 person down, unable to act, until the massive DPS kills them.

Not sure if this is a build, as much as a bug, and the idea that as of 1.1 beta all bugs in the game have been fixed is basically ridiculous.

Devoted is definitely a meta knowledge based subclass. At least you didn't pick one of the weapon types that only has one unique. Use Soul Bound weapons, you get all your + from devoted (at least your supposed to) and all of your specializations etc. should transfer. Being stuck with one weapon type + every Soul Bound weapon, (Most aren't bad) is lots of variety.

Maybe a distinction between 'fake' and 'manufactured' should be considered. Sure, once upon a time, a bunch of people made some devices, that granted them god like powers. Using it, they gained the ability to sway the world into worshipping them like gods, since they had the power to back up their claims, everyone bought in to it. A few cults rose up, trying to erase evidence of their 'origin' and largely succeeded. Enter Dreadfire, where this Watcher person shows up, claiming to be a Herald of one of the gods, while a giant glowing monster statue shows up, playing Godzilla to all the nice little towns it passes by. The Watcher claims this person is one of the gods, and tries to do things to deal with this rogue god. At what point would anyone really care that these beings are not the creators of everything, merely thousands of years old, beings with god like powers. The difference might be of interest to academics, but to the average person, they probably don't care that this world destroying monster's origin story is different than what they were taught in Sunday School. Saying, for eg. that Wael isn't really the god of secrets, he's just a super powerful, almost omnipotent being, in charge of / interested in secrets, with a religion / cult that worships him... just seems like a lame conversation.

I always save before Enchanting uniques, since many of the upgrades seem to counter other ones... Occasionally you can guess by the names (Spearcaster you can get Elemental Bolts or Rune Bolts [i think it was]) but generally its just guesswork or experience.

You don't acutally NEED to buy a better ship, you can finish the game with the Ghost Ship. That said, getting a larger capacity ship earlier can get you more slots, for more crew, to level them up... which doesn't actually mean anything anyway. Gatecrashers (Nekata) are probably the best Gauntlets in the game, for a melee character. Dragons Dowry, SpearCaster (Nekata) are probably the best range weapons (If you don't want to use the bugged Frostseeker of OP ness). Theres a Light armor in the Narrows (The guy with the medicine) which is worth using at the End game.. I'm sure there a few other 'best' items which come from vendors, but they'd be for pretty specific builds.

Its one thing to have a completed / solid / bug free game, that has software conflicts with certain graphic cards, or processors etc... the product is finished, working, and just doesn't agree with x combination of hardware software. Its another thing entirely, when 'self contained' parts, like story, importing saves, combat balance, or creating histories aren't working correctly. Its not like we're having massive patches to fix balance, because the game doesn't work properly with some computers.

Pre internet (I remember loading Wing Commander games through Floppy disks) a game had to be bug free... now with all the different hardware / software configurations, its expected that a game will have issues, and be patched over time. That practice has let developers get sloppier and sloppier, to the point that most people accept that a brand new game isn't going to work 100% out of the box. Good publishers will have a solid game, that might have some odd hardware / software conflicts causing crashes, bad ones can release clunky games, where the issues have nothing to do with conflicts on the odd machine.

There are a decent amount of 'freaks' you can crew your ship with, troll cook from the Hole, Worthless (who's actually great at his job), I got a bug / spider person somewhere...

I'm beginning to think that Full Attack has to go, entirely, until they can get some base balancing stuff fixed up. Then add it back in to only some abilities. If there was no Full Attack, the divide between 2h and DW would be less significant.

Kontsanten (or w.ever the dwarfs name was) leaves the cushy life of a ho, to travel with you for the excitement... too bad the more interesting ones don't have that option.

Anyone else want to be able to give him a magic item, so he bulks up like Nemnok?

The unkillable cloak would be great as an 'oe noe' countermeasure... (Nemnok's Cloak) but its per rest abilities.

I had Maia down to a 3 second reload (tooltip) just from equipment, so its probably still a thing. The bug = 0 reload time, so it won't be as crazy as exploit build... But the Spearcaster is a very powerful weapon, with great innate Crowd Control, you can get a lot of milage out of that.

I'd think it would work fine, things that give resources (Xoti's Sickle also) should be a separate thing than 'regular' wound generation.

The 2h Sword of Endless paths has a Counterattack Enchant, I figure that (and the area attacking shtick) are why they felt they had to cripple its damage.

Yeah, I can imagine this working... For each 'fix' they put up a post, explaining the idea / direction they want to go with a tweak / nerf / change... put a poll on it, and everyone can fight over their opinions. And as they said there's over 100 (or 1,000?) changes they put through this great idea would give us awesome results, in a timely manner. Everyone knows, that on the internet, the majority is always right, yeah? And that people discuss things without getting all hyperbolic and devolving into the equivalent of slaps and hair pulling...

I'm not 100% finished with Po1; but in 2 from the 'build your ending' thing, each companion has specific 'states'. Palle's were obey / disobey faction, didn't finish, or died. It seems like everyone here is upset that when they chose to disobey their Ducs (and become Kind Wayfarers) that the game / future cared about the disobedience, and not the joining up with the Kind... It seems like the important thing for the 'world' is what happened as a result of her decision, not which cult she happened to be hooked up with. When she starts in the disobey state, she seems to have been kicked out of her usual cult, but rejoins them anyway. On the plus side, this version of her armor, has a better 'Enchant' for group, compared to the obedience one.

Killing them takes them out of your roster, but doesn't help with the imaginary loss of xp.

I though I read something about the 30% reduction or some number, but when I was writing this, I went into the game, and was looking at tool tip #s to see things, so I had a point of reference. A character with no skills in dual wielding, was still showing the same time when using 1h, or dual wielding, and the tooltip on recovery only showed their Dex, and their Armor. Oddly, just looked on a game now, and showing the 30% on the tooltip. So, much faster swinging, almost 3 Dual attacks to 2 'other' attacks. The base numbers of 'high armor enemies' still favors 2 Handing. Every other scenario Dual wielding is better. The #s on some of the 2h weapons are just really strange though. Like the 2h and 1h versions of Endless paths, the 1h has higher Base damage.... how... And many other 2h weapons are substantially lower base damage than a 1h weapon, which obviously have even more DPS, when you take their speed into account. Like the Wahai Poraga, 2h Poleaxe, does 12 - 17. Sure, it could hit multiple people at once (so they gimped the damage to balance it?).

Out of curiosity, anyone attempt some Full Attack Back stabbing post patch? Previously only the first weapon got the bonus... if they lowered it to 100% from 150%, and made both blades (Full attack) count for the bonus, we're actually up damage on dual wield backstabs... which thematically seems right...