jakesmurf

MC - I feel like this char is gonna be pretty weak. Cipher and Ranger are two of what I consider to be the weakest classes in the game, personally. Marginally above Druid and Priest, but pretty weak. Cipher does have a couple OP spells above tier 7 but you'll basically have beaten the game before you hit that stride, and you'll never get the best abilities as a multiclass. Ascendant becomes gradually better as the game goes later but I personally think Cipher spells kinda blow and Cipher is more about whip damage than anything, and Ascendant has lower whip damage unless ascended. Ranger just doesn't offer a lot imo and Ghost Heart has to summon every combat start. Paladin/Chanter - Both very strong classes. Make sure you have enough INT that your chants actually reach everyone, though, because being in the middle of the party risks failing to buff everybody. Paladin and Chanter are both pretty strong healers imo so should be fine in that regard. Eder - Fighter is strong. Can't really go wrong there. Rogue has decent damage with deathblows. I would go 1hand+shield, personally. There are some really great shields and no daggers that really speak to me, as far as uniques go. Aloth - Fighter doesn't get you much if you're planning to chain cast spells. Fighter aloth is probably most useful as a tank because Wizard gets some insane selfbuffs. If you're chain casting then melee attacks get you nothing. The crit conversion discipline might be better than power levels for a CCer, since CC crits have extended duration. I think that works properly? Weapon doesn't matter if you're chain casting. If you're planning to melee, I would try using the summoned weapons. They're pretty strong. Takehu - Druid is very meh but I understand the appeal. If it were me I'd take pure Monk Xoti for DPS or something. That'd probably leave you over budget for melee chars though.

Frostseeker is one of the best bows in the game if you want to abuse the GAMEBREAKING ability Swift Flurry and don't care about using a mechanic that probably wasn't intended to generate infinite instaneous damage. Once it gets going it will make the game extremely boring. You will one shot entire encounters of enemies on every difficulty. If you like playing games with no challenge just to break the system then Frostseeker + Swift Flurry is for you. If you want to actually enjoy the combat system in the game then don't. You can use Frostseeker without Swift Flurry but it's pretty much just an average bow with a meh AOE damage radius on crit. It's not bad, but it doesn't do a lot either. Has a nifty special animation when it fires, though. Fortunately it's somewhat viable because of the way they changed the armor system, but it applies damage from active abilities and some passives weirdly so it's not what I would consider an amazing weapon on it's own, either. The main reason people cite Frostseeker a lot is because it's really the only alternative to the Blunderbuss for the gimmick Swift Flurry build because it generates a lot of hits. It's weaker than Kitchen Stove / Fire In The Hole for a Swift Flurry build, but stronger than most other ranged weapons. Personally though, I don't recommend it. I tried a Swift Flurry run and abandoned it halfway through because it's essentially the same experience as if you had given yourself 100000 might via console. It's effectively cheating, even if the game allows it through poor design.

Uhhh, this is super easy to do on a boss. I tried a swift flurry build on my first playthrough and started a different run after I 1 shot the kraken while triple-red-skull underleveled on POTD.

Nalpacza is probably the strongest monk subclass, and monk is probably the strongest class overall in the game... so... probably TOO viable?

Actually get flanked? Target yourself with an ability that inflicts a flanked status e.g. distracted? Blunderbuss probably the easiest way though.

I've tried it both ways and personally I don't think taking a wizard specialization is worth it. 1 power level is really not worth losing access to 50% of wizard spells, and the evocation multicast passive is too unreliable to matter much. Maybe if you're running a mod that reduces subclass penalties or they buff evocation to lose access to 1 school instead of 2, or +1 power level maybe, or give it a flat action speed buff with evocation spells, but for now I think just having access to something like chill fog is worth losing 1 power. Also, I'm not convinced that max dex is worth the int dump. Short inspirations, small aoes, etc doesn't seem worth.

Pretty simple, really. Started doing a "murder literally everyone" run through for ****s and giggles. Murdered Silvia in Port Maje. Pop the door to the cell to murder Rum-Dumb Riggere. He thanks me for saving him. I murder him too (and literally everybody else, yay!). I notice later that he's still a crew member on my ship. Totally ruins my murder everyone experience. There are people who will survive the Deadfire Purge! ARGGHHHH

I think I would be OK. Combined with monk, frostseeker deals pierce + ice + fire dmg. I don't think enemies with all 3 immus exist in the game. Even so, I can always pause the game and kill the process before its too late. While I agree that Frostseeker deals enough damage types you can probably do damage, I'm not sure you can pause in time to stop it. For me it was basically instantaneous with the blunderbuss. It still threw a few frames but the game was not giving me any feedback. CTRL+ALT+DEL pretty much the only option, lol

I don't want to tear down your build, but Swift Flurry being broken as hell is widely known. I think you should rename the post to "In case you haven't heard, this is how you gimmick build". I didn't follow the forums either until after launch. I thought Swift Flurry would be neat, decided more hits would make it work more reliably, built the thing around the Blunderbuss. I killed that playthrough when I 1 shot a major boss with like 50 crits in one long Swift Flurry proc chain. In an amusing turn, though, there were some treant type enemies? somewhere that were apparently immune to physical damage, and that encounter crashed my PC because it kept generating crits + more shots infinitely but they didn't actually take damage, so it generated n+1 projectiles on my screen and my vidya card gave up.

I'm sure it would work fine. Wizards can be very powerful melee combatants because they have access to a LOT of self-buffs with martial purposes, especially things deflection related from Illusion. I would suggest that you plan that build more around using a summoned weapon though (there's a bunch of them in Wizard). You cannot melee attack AND cast spells at the same time, so casting nukes from melee range doesn't really do much unless you just want to absorb damage.

All I know is that I made a 5 beckoner party / 1 troubador party and they cleared POTD so fast it was laughable (to be fair there were 2 paladins multiclassed in there somewhere). I've had a beckoner and troubador (yes, both) in every run I've done so far and they're both great for what they are. Beckoner summons rarely die and have never despawned on me in POTD, I guess if you're playing a super defensive party that takes a while to finish enemies this might be an issue though. The small size is useful because they need to swarm around things. Double the amount of half-sized bodies is still roughly the same amount of body blocking potential. My only thing is that I think the middle dragons (I don't remember the name) are much better than Ogres, even being a tier lower. I had a lot of issues with ogres (slowly) gathering around an enemy and not attacking for what felt like a long time, whereas the middle dragon summon throws out it's fire breath AOE poor man's fireball the instant it spawns, which is nice utility. P.S. try the 6 chanter party. At least for a little bit. Summoning a screen full of the small dragons and their ranged attack spam is kind of hilarious. P.P.S.: You might not have given it much thought but I think the stride chant is super useful for a summoner because the summons can move between enemies a lot faster.

I'm planning on trying a Ranger/Rogue blunderbuss sort-of-solo POTD build. I'll actually probably use companions but I won't micro them and will set them to autolevel / default AI etc. Just to have them for the story etc. I suspect they'll die a lot and be largely useless. Anyway, I'm looking for ideas of ways to apply sneak-attack/deathly blows qualifying status effects. Preferably passively with on-hit / on-crit / on-kill / on something else proc effects or auras but open to other suggestions. Would also prefer that it not be a weapon slot item because I have intentions for those already, and that it work with ranged weapons. TL;DR; Are there any gloves/armors/rings/etc that can apply sneak attack qualifying status effects "for free" somehow? I've tried looking at the wiki but it's largely unfinished right now.

Yea, you have about 20% chance to see one or the other total. Since it hits twice with driving flight you see it do the split every other hit. Though it triggering 8 times doesn't happen every fight, you see 4-5 triggers often and very quickly cunks high health enemies. The drawback is the reload time unfortunately. It's not 100% reliable, but procs enough to be helpful. Combo this with Kitchen Stove in the other hand. Wild Shots/Barrage (the per rest buff you get / can enchant onto Kitchen stove) adds +1 or +2 bounces (and damage, and a huge reload speed buff, basically wtf op) to ranged attacks for 20+ seconds (with both guns). I used this combo with Fire in the Hole because it already has 1 bounce and deals AOE damage around the target (size of aoe scales with int, so its a pretty gigantic AOE on certain chars, lol).

How does this work with crit? Imbued Ammunition just adds crush damage and a chance at another effect from enchantment... how do you get the damage to proc that many times? I upgraded it to chance to split into multiple bullets enchantment (up to 3 I think). Driving flight lets it hit twice. Since it proc'd 8 times after DF I'm guessing the splits also have a chance to split. Otherwise it would have hit 6 times max. It looks like two driving flight hits split (2+2) and those split (2+2+2+2). I mainly put crit in there cause of how much it adds to the damage even with pistol. It's mostly relevant for the frost bow (frostseeker?) I have as backup that triggers on crit like this. Isn't the split chance like super tiny though? 15%/5%? Seems like it would be really inconsistent to get multiple split procs at a time.

I feel like that scaling with Int has to be a bug, lol