guildwriter

If you really want to make it reliable, bust out a Ranger/Wizard and buff them with all sorts of +accuracy bonuses. It'll be like they don't have any defenses at all.

You're giving too much credence to Might. At Might 3 that's a -21% bonus to damage and healing. Not great obviously but not the end of the world either. There are plenty of ways to mitigate that loss.

I somewhat understand this idea that "CC is trash because it doesn't work on boss fights" but honestly I think it's a bit silly. There's no "difficult" enemy in this game where I've ever thought I needed summons or infinite resources with a party. But that's what I like about this game. Everyone is free to play however they please and it all works. Unless you solo. Then you pull out the degenerate stuff . There is a way to make CC reliable. Make your Accuracy as high as possible (and shaft their defenses). One of my favorite combos is Assassin + Caster for this exact reason. With the right setups I can CC lock the entire enemy group and they all die in a hail of spells before they even can move. +25 Acc from Assassin and +10 from Helm of the White Void means that if I can't CC the targets outright, I can usually make the hole to do so. As another example. Take the Magma Dragon fight I did last night. Utterly clownstomped her because my Assassin+BW stacked hit to crit, loaded up on +Action Speed through DAOM + Modwyr + Rust's Poignard Shank enchant. Hit her with Confounding Blind and dropped her deflection to 10. This meant not only were at least a graze guaranteed, my main was critting more often than not. Which meant that Rust's Bring Down was proccing more often than not. Which means she didn't spend a lot of time vertical. That's not even mentioning what everyone else was doing. I'm not mentioning this to discount the way you play the game. If you like summon armies that's great. I'm saying this because it seems like you don't really know how to effectively use other strategies in this game. Hopefully it gives you some ideas and maybe sparks some interest in another run.

Yeah I have no idea what is going on. I opened up from Smoke Veil using Confounding Blind, Crippling Strike, Regular Melee and nothing. Then I tried from stealth and it worked every time.

No wonder you have so much trouble controlling fights. Your team has no CC and no one who can use engagement to hold the AI in place. One or two people with 3-4 engagement slots in the frontline should be all you need to hold down incoming meleers or to grab someone who leaps into the backline. It's really important that you are able to control the characters that are responsible for holding engagement and placing them in ways to block access or provide support quickly to your backline. I really recommend you make at least one character a dedicated tank complete with shield and plate. Especially on PotD upscaled where everything gets +2 Pen and shreds as a result. Summons are not a panacea. Spells like Ryngarim's and Chill Fog etc are invaluable for keeping incoming damage predictable. Defense in RPGs can generally be broken down into three legs of a stool: mitigation (healing), absorb/resistance, and avoidance. The best approach usually has at least two legs and ideally all three. You can survive with one leg, but it's not that stable. Paralyze, Stuns, Blind, Terrify, etc. will make your life much easier. You don't need more healing, You need more diversity in your play style and tactics.

Not sure if this is a bug or not. Ajamuut's correctly adds Bushwhacking damage when attacking from stealth as well as the stun. If you use Smoke Veil and attack through, Bushwhacking damage is added but there is no stun. Technically speaking Smoke Veil is invisibility and stealth is its own thing which is why I'm unsure if it's intended for Bushwhacking to take effect at all with invisibility active. I will say though that if it's not intended for Ajamuut's to work with Smoke Veil and other similar effects then the cloak loses a lot of it's luster.

With a party the megabosses should be fairly straightforward. Dorudugan is mostly understanding what gear/abilities let you mitigate/negate burn damage and what will penetrate his defenses to damage him. Not much to make a video on to be honest. Infinite resources are mostly for solo runs due to the fact that the game is balanced around a five man team. And even then there are ways around that.

A smaller party would definitely be better for Tactician I agree. A small party of Chanters and Monks.

Unless you're playing solo it's usually not worth it to force Brilliant as you won't even need the resources to begin with. In the cases where you will need it it's pretty easy to force it (boss fights or specific Survivor fights that have a low amount of enemies). So I wouldn't worry too much or at all about the setup.

Depends on where you plan on standing and what you want your character to do. All advice is assuming you're running with a full party. Weapon lashes don't apply to spells. There is Deltro's Cage Helm but that's a discussion for another time. If you want to boost spell damage, you have a choice between Griffin's Blade, Magran's Favor, or Sun and Moon. Each of these weapons either gives a flat boost to spell damage or boosts elemental PL. Chromoprismatic Quarterstaff can give +1 to all element PLs if you want pure choice. If you want to stand at the back and just shoot, Scordeo's Trophy is an interesting choice as you can upgrade it to reduce recovery time with each hit. Won't make the pistol shoot faster but it will help with spells. Other good options are The Red Hand, Spearcaster, and so on. Blunderbusses are a good option if you want to really abuse Combusting Wounds. See Kitchen Stove and Xefa's. If you want to tank, I'd get Bronlar's Phalanx or the ice shield from BoW. With a Tactician/Blood Mage I'd probably favor something outside of harms way and would either use dual pistols (Scordeo's/Thundercrack) or mix in something like Kitchen Stove so you can keep Thunderous Report on standby. That or use the spell damage boosting items that were mentioned. A lot of this comes down to preference. I like dual pistols because I like two pistols. There's a lot that works so use something that will make you happy.

The raper is Squid's Grasp which is bought out of Dunnage. Be ready to spend an Adra Ban to get rid of Calmo's Curse though. The club is Kapana Taga which is looted off of Fyrgist who sails around the Black Isle. Make sure you sink him with cannons. Boarding is bugged with him and doesn't drop the weapon. The armor is Gipon Prudenesco and is acquired through the Principi Vengeance ship fight. Make sure you have no more than one positive rep with the Principi before you drop your rep with them. Wipe out the Undercroft and/or kill Talfor who is part of Degnos' quest. Or use the mod on the forum to spawn the ship.

Not that I know of. I managed to get Maia's good ending in spite of slaughtering most of the RDC due to rejecting their assassination proposal. Think it has to do with who you ultimately side with. I chose to go on my own to Ukaizo and told her after her quest that assassination wasn't a good look and that the RDC should do better.

It's about 0.25 per point of Survival. So with some effort you could reach -10, but it would take 24 Survival. Even at -9 though that's pretty good. Stacked with all sorts of other debuffs and accuracy bonuses you could probably make Poisons a viable option against even bosses. I bring it up because Stone Joint is one of the more efficient DoTs in the game if you can land it (especially with Alchemy and Poison PL). Might need to check to see if different Poison instances stack now.

If you right click the summoned Quarterstaff to look at its stats, the recovery time descriptor is broken. See attached screenshot.

See this thread for a complete breakdown on PL and what it does.

Thanks man I appreciate it. Hopefully you or someone else finds it useful. Someone also posted a build using FF/Arcane Archer using Pull of Eora to generate wounds which could also be interesting.

See this thread. Supposedly Disintegration will flat out destroy the boss without causing him to split, leading me to conclude that potentially any ability that "destroys" the target like Death Ring will do the same. No idea if it's still like this or not.

I bought and tried Tyranny recently and couldn't stand it after a couple of hours. Here are the things that stood out to me quickly: UI felt . . . not good. Took too much of the screen and there were a lot of aspects that simply were unpolished. When there are large gaps of empty space due to the borders of the window not being anchored correctly to the text boxes I get annoyed. In general felt unpolished and needed a lot of work. There's a big difference between waking up and having Eder wisecracking and having someone who comes off as a psychopath be the first to greet you. That is to say the characters matter and I didn't like anyone I met. Everyone you meet is angry or fighting with each other or a professional ****. It's a bit much, especially for a brand new setting. I understand why it's this way but it's still offputting. Combat system felt too fast and honestly letting the AI take control was for the best. Unfortunately I hate playing that way so it was hard to get into it. The systems themselves felt like a weird mish mash of concepts that just got thrown in your face and you had to try to figure out everything on the fly. These three things sunk the game for me and I just stopped after a couple of hours. I can see the game getting more interesting if I gave it more time, but it's hard to justify it when I enjoy Deadfire so much more.

Belranga is one of the easiest Megabosses for any Rogue class to solo. Kill enough small spiders and then land Gouging Strike on her. Then load up Netflix and come back after an episode or two.

Yeah I can't agree with that. If you have a deep understanding of the game then that might seem true. But I've cleared SSS using an Assassin/Skaen solo which is pretty far from powergaming. There are all sorts of tricks and cheeses you can do to clear these fights that work for a lot of classes.

Most of the time 2x casts will work. The number of fights where that becomes an issue you could probably count on two hands at the very most. And those fights are so outside the norm of the game that they don't reside anywhere on the critical path to completion. (And in those cases you can still make it work with limited casts if you know how to make it work). Personally I find boss fights to be the least interesting fights in the entire game. Mostly because there isn't a lot of creativity involved in beating a boss. Most of them are either straightforward or gimmick fights. There are not a lot of options for how to beat them due to the specific efficiency constraints with no catch up mechanics going on at all.

Single Barbarian is solid and you can't really go wrong with it damage wise. Single Paladin is an issue if you want to do damage as past PL3 or so your offensive talents grow thinner and thinner.

On that note, it's worth mentioning that Concelhaut's Draining Missiles are a 1:1 ratio for damage to health. At around 20 might and PL7 they do 17 damage per missile with 6 missiles per cast. The downside is that they require a Fortitude check to hit.

The game has gone through several difficulty tuning passes since that video. What you see now is the new normal and there are a lot of builds that no longer work as well or as intended with the changes. I wouldn't judge your play ability on what you encounter on the first island on PotD upscaled personally. Characters that work well later on will struggle a lot in the earlier phase. My tips: Get level 4 before you hit the excavation site. This should be possible if you explore everywhere and resolve all the quests in Port Maje non violently. Getting access to PL2 will help some builds quite a bit. If you aren't using grenades and other consumables, start playing around with them. You group composition lacks mass CC at this point which will make fights tricky. Don't feel bad if you have to stealth past some groups. You can stealth the entire island if need be. I do this a lot on my solo runs as many of my characters simply don't have the tools at levels 1-4 but can take apart the rest of the game once they do.

It's one of the reasons why I'm experimenting with a mod that drops Rogue guile costs on certain abilities and gives a passive perk at PL5 which gives one guile per kill. It makes a more stealth focused approach much more fun to play in general.