Jayd

Thanks for the helpful replies re: stunning surge. I'm surprised you guys didn't mention Helm of the White Void, though, as it's one thing I know to be great for this. I'm generally surprised I don't see it mentioned more as it's clearly one of the best items in the game. Are you guys aware that it gives +10 acc to every attack roll included in an ability that causes afflictions? So for stunning surge it gives +10 vs deflection and +10 vs fortitude. Some goes for Forbidden Fist, Barbarian Shouts, and anything else with an affliction attached.

Tangent: how do you make sure that Stunning Surge crits? I tested it and found that it needed to crit vs. deflection (the fortitude "attack" can crit and it still costs resource). Deflection isn't that easy to lower so I avoided using the ability because I like consistency. As for FF, of course it costs resources if you spam it, but that's not what I'm talking about. When you pace it properly it actually generates resources, as Galad pointed out. The cost is time and some self damage (which gets healed) for a high-pen, good damage, Tier-3 affliction causing attack that gives you a resource. It's a very different dynamic than other active abilities. The option to spam it for high cost in exchange for damage is just a bonus (that sometimes comes in clutch). But as I said, I take your point about the comparison with auto attacks.

While I take the point of your post, the difference is that FF (ability) doesn't cost resources. That means you're using it a lot more frequently than you might other offensive abilities (primarily because there is no opportunity cost except for time), which creates a very different gameplay loop to Mule Kick, etc. You can and should use FF so often that it notably more like an auto attack than other abilities (speaking from experience).

I've been running a single class Forbidden Fist, built for max deflection (Tuotilo's Palm). He is ridiculously good. Resolve as high as it goes, then PER, then DEX. Both the tankiest and the highest DPS (by far, at level 20) in my team. Wound generation has never been a problem in the playthrough, ever. High deflection + other defenses means that Enduring Dance is very hard to remove. There are also enemies that give you short-duration hostile effects more often than you think. I remember I solo'd a room of spores at an early level because each of their attacks gives a short burn that restores health + gives wounds (The health restoration is more clutch than you might think) and Charmed was actually beneficial without any teammates. With Imagined Pain at level 20 he goes from "wound generation isn't a problem" to "more wounds than I know what to do with". Then you just spam Whispers of the Wind til everything dies. This guy just does not die (almost nothing can hit him and he has Iron Wheel on top), and deletes everything around him. The Forbidden Fist ability is fantastic. He can stun-lock bosses with Skyward Kick. Even slime and Veil-touched get blown up by Resonant Touch. He is a machine, dawg. It's not fair.

Did you dump Resolve? Enemies prioritize your party members with low deflection and armour.

This is tangential, but just wanted to say that after having a character get dominated and spend all their resources spamming high level abilities on my team, I have utmost respect for the Dominated ->Charmed gulf. I don't think there's anything else enemies can do to you that actually drains your resources. Plus, you have to deal with potentially getting nuked.

I don't see how Boil their Flesh is worth it. I wanted it to be and tried it out, but it's just too situational considering the competition in the chanter tree. It was basically never the right time to use it. I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong but I don't think it'll happen. Don't sleep on Seven Nights She Waited. It kinda sucks that it and Eld Nary share a damage type, but they are both worth having as Seven Nights is capable of pretty awesome burst damage. If you're right up under enemies and hit them with multiple beams they can get deleted. And it is also great against crowds surrounding you, especially when upgraded. I remember making the Porokoa disappear with it (and when you're fighting a single boss Eld Nary can't bounce). My experience with this was using Konstanten as pure Scald.

I'm not clear on what you're looking for. What do you mean by "unique"? And are you opposed to using single class characters? They tend to be stronger casters: getting spells faster, higher power levels, and the most powerful spells.

What? I did not just say "priests can be effective", I clearly was saying that priests have a valuable role that other classes cannot replicate. Maybe read the post again?

Priests offer some strong party buff support along with off-healing and off-dps. No other caster has quite the same package. Wizards only really self-buff alongside their dps and debuffs. No heals. Druids have very limited party buffs, as do Ciphers, and they can only heal with Pain Block. Chanters have the most similar package over all but their party buffs rarely overlap and their healing has a different niche. Some priest spells just immediately make your party significantly stronger in any situation (Devotions, Dire Blessing) while others you can pick for specific synergies they have with star party members (Litany for the Spirit on a Druid at the beginning of a fight makes that Druid significantly more powerful, for one example). Priests can have irreplaceable roles in parties. I know Vatnir secured his role in mine after trying out several other options.

Like every other PLIV Priest spell, Triumph of Crusader's biggest problem is that it competes with Devotions. It's only worth the ability point and spending a chance to cast Devotions if it has specific synergy with your party's needs, as Boeroer indicated. Devotions is always good in every party and every situation.

I took Uncanny Luck with my Monk because he gets so many hits, and crits have so much value for Monks. On deciding to take the ability I looked at my total hits compared to total crits. This is rough because I already had the talent for a bit when I did this, but from what I could see, if I had had UL for the entire game, I would have had ~15% more crits (i.e. n = 5% of my total hits was roughly 17% of my total crits, rounded down because I had already had UL for a bit). There are all sorts of issues with those numbers. But, taking everything into account, I think that's worth a talent point. Remember that Monks turn crits into more hits and more crits.

The waterfall was kinda "meh", but I don't see the issue. You just walk through and hit all the things and you're done. It would have been annoying if it actually took thought. The sundial quest I thought was a brilliant idea. One of my favourite sequences in the game.

I think Deadfire is better than PoE1 in just about every way. Dramatically in many.

Yet you can still bang pretty much anyone else (who is bang-able) and they don't care. More like "don't know" - but that suits the established relationships of the characters. In the stories and books, Geralt and Yennefer constantly cheat on each other. They seemed bound to each other despite each other, rather than via a solemn commitment.

Here's a modest request: can Boar's Charge on Survivor's Tusks be per encounter instead of per rest? It is not nearly strong enough to be per rest, and the change would bring it in line with Staelgar's Lunge on Slayer's Claw. I imagine it's an easy change to make, too.

Definitely. Hardcore gamers always complain about full scaling saying they like the feeling of finding an area they are not supposed to be in yet, only to come back and conquer it later. PoE embraced that and I think Gorecci St is supposed to be an introduction to it. I'm not sure if it's worth it, though, because a non-insignificant number of casual gamers just stop playing when they encounter Gorecci Streets.

I haven't played Witcher 1, but I love Witcher 3. I can tell you that the romances are far more fleshed out and mature than Xoti staring at you, blushing, and blowing "wet" kisses after barely meeting you, while doing nothing else a functioning adult does to establish mutual affection. God, I can't stand her character. And I usually love religious people. (Minor romance spoilers for Witcher 3 below; don't read on if you don't want to get the romance subplots spoiled but it's important in addressing what you mentioned.) In fact, Witcher 3 is the only game I know that actually punishes the player for treating romances as collectibles. If you pursue both Trish and Yennefer, they figure it out and both of them deny you as a direct result. The main romance options actually act like people with their own standards instead of passive options. Unlike Xoti, who literally tells you she likes Eder but will take you if you want her because we can't deny the player their fantasy/she just wants a man I guess. Ugh.

Alright, so things have been going great with Serafen now. Still not as much damage as my monk (who went from great to absurd with Whispers) or Konstanten (solid since day 1), but he does dive tanking amazingly. I'm finding dive tanking much more effective than the intuitive "turtle up behind the tank" strat. By starting a fight by sending Serafen righting smack into the middle or backline of enemies, I get to control the field instead of just desperately trying to not get swarmed. As described earlier in the thread, Panther's Leap (why would anyone ever use Dragon?) -> Spirit Tornado -> Dazing shout is an incredible combo. Dazing Shout is easily one of the best tanking abilities in the game. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and say the best to see if anyone can prove me wrong. I'd say this is what Barbarians are specifically good at. I don't know any other class that could pull this off quite as well. They can do other cool stuff as shown in this thread too, of course, but they seem to be designed to stand in the middle of a mob and take damage while dishing it back out.

I can confirm that I basically pushed through PoE1 to get to to Deadfire. Not only do I find Deadfire much better in every way, but I was also looking forward to it more.

Surprised to see this argued. In my experience, the weakest part of combat and combat balancing in this game is long fights. Regenerating resource characters (Chanter, Monks, Ciphers) gain such an incredible advantage in really grindy fights and I don't see the justification for it - they are not comparably weaker in quick fights for balance. If there is one thing I would change generally it is making resource restoration much more common and easy. It doesn't really make a difference in quick fights in which you use your abilities freely anyway, and it prevents some characters from being systematically useless in certain situations. I don't see the downside. Let's look at Heart of Fury and Whispers of the Wind. Comparable abilities in strength and cost. The biggest difference between them is that a monk can restore resources by taking damage (or not taking damage with dance up) and a Barbarian can only potentially restore with a PL9 talent which gives back one rage on kill 25% of the time! Not only is it on kill, which is an inherently bad trigger condition, but you have to win a little lottery as well! Why? Where is the tradeoff? Seems to me that a blanket buff of talents that restore resources for classes that don't have that built in is a great idea. They currently don't have a meaningful tradeoff benefit and just become frustrating in long fights.

Since switching to two-handed, I think Serafen is doing better damage. But more importantly he's been acting like a "dive" off-tank. Just smack him in the middle of a mob to disrupt and stick some, while my monk flagellant paths a squishy. My main tank either pushes up to support them or holds back to support Tekehu and Konstanten while they cast. So far it's been fun and effective, though I haven't had many difficult fights yet. (is the fire dragon on upscaled considered hard at ~lvl17? cuz it was fairly easy for me and I don't know whether to be proud)

Sorry if the "frankly useless" comment came off as an insult. I had in mind just that such comments aren't helpful for understanding how a game will be received in general unless contextualized by actual data. Could have put more thought into phrasing it. I don't think I asked my friend what difficulty he was playing on, but I assume it was normal. Based on my experience playing normal in PoE1 in the context of what I said about young me and NWN, I think they are plenty of people who would struggle deeply with PoE1 on normal. In fact, if I remember correctly, the tooltip for "normal" said that that difficulty was NOT recommended for players new to RPGs. I also remember having to try pretty hard on normal with stuff like the Llengrath fight even after my party was high enough level that I was mostly on autopilot.

The only person I know confirmed to have tried Pillars and then shortly abandoned it was because it was too hard. If there is anything making this game (or at least the first one - I've never tried Deadfire's lower difficulties) inaccessible it's because it was made for and by powergamers. People who just want to pick a character to RP and click things to death are intimidated by how punishing it is. Wow. I cannot disqualify anyone's experience, but I cannot see how this could be true. I am not a powergamer, I have absolutely no interest in it and I frankly find it a bit strange that some people take powergaming so far. I just want to pick a character and see the story, and PoE definitely wasn't too hard. If anything, it was too easy. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is way too hard for people like that. But not PoE. As a teen, I found NWN1's DLC campaign impossible to finish without cheating due to its power spikes. When I played it again as an adult a couple years ago, I breezed through it without a full party. If I had never had that experience as a youngster, I wouldn't believe that some people might find that game too difficult to finish. This is why, with respect, pronouncements like yours are frankly useless. People are terrible at understanding their own skill level and the experiences of people at different skill levels. You are much better at games like this than you give yourself credit for, and for a game to have high sales all the people much worse than you need to at least have a decent time when they pick it up. People who wouldn't even dream of creating a profile on a board like this. After having such an incredibly easy time with both Neverwinters, I tried out PoE 1 on normal difficulty and found it significantly more punishing than NWN. Imagine teenage me trying PoE 1! He would've dumped it in frustration. My friend who did quit is an adult but was probably closer to that level of proficiency in these kinds of games.

Bumping this because I've been having a lackluster time with Serafen as pure Barb and was hoping for more insight. I was using him as a dual-wielder with what I thought were decent enough weapons for the level. He felt like he wasn't doing too much and when I looked at the damage report I saw that he was just under 20,000 damage while my SC Forbidden Fist monk had above 55,000 and Konstanten (SC Skald) had about 45,000. My can't-hit-sh*t Herald tank had about 10K and support druid Tekehu had just under 15K. Sorry for all the numbers but that puts into perspective how bad Serafen was doing compared to my two other dps. Keep in mind, however that Serafen joined a bit later than the others so the numbers aren't quite as bad as they look, but they definitely shouldn't be so low. Looking at suggestions in this thread I've decided to try him as a two-hander build with Willbreaker and LD Voulge. Haven't tried it out just yet but I was wondering if anyone had had a similar experience and whether they were able to diagnose the problem and fix it. At the moment I suspect the issue is accuracy, which I'm hoping will be fixed by Body Blows + Brute force. Does that sound right? Have people had good experiences with dual-wielding barbs early/mid-game (potd-upscaled)?