Wotcha

I have been dipping my toes in mod programming, and got bashing shield scaling working! It's slightly less than perfect, because I wasn't able to find a way to leave Tuotilo's monk-based scaling alone. If I didn't take away Tuotilo's Unarmed keyword, it would double-dip on scaling, and I couldn't come up with a way to have the Quality buffs selectively ignore Tuotilo. I thought I had one by setting an InclusionCondition (for the item mod GUID of Magran's Blessing or The Best Defense) on the acc/dmg/pen scaling quality status effects. That did work, at least right upon startup, but the buffs would fall off when you switched weapons or un/re-equipped them, and I couldn't figure out why that was happening. If you're curious, Woedica spiritual weapon sidesteps the double-dipping issue by only giving the summoned fists the unarmed weapon type (which lets things like proficiency modal work), but doesn't attach the Unarmed keyword (which is what TS/MUT key off of), so the only scaling they get is from the summon's variable scaling. So I took away the Unarmed keyword and left it scaling strictly with Quality. That broke Pugilist/Precision Striker from buffing the shield bash itself (they still buffed your actual Unarmed attack if you were dual wielding with a fist). I solved that by sticking an invisible second status effect on those enchantments which applies the identical bonus to the shield itself. Once I get it cleaned up and properly tested, I'll put it up on Nexus so those who are interested can give it a shot.

The Community Mod is very modest in terms of game mechanics changes. Intentionally so, I think, in order to avoid the perception of watering down the game in the eyes of players such as yourself. It's a solid piece of work. I have never played with the Wizard Revision mod, but given that every other Wizard subclass has the implicit penalty of "Is Not A Blood Mage", the mod would have to buff the hell out of the other subclasses just to reach par with that.

I thought it was interesting, so I tried it, but didn't really like the feel of it. But it was educational in a sense. What it made me realize is that Obsidian's goal was to VERY strongly encourage you to look at the stat blocks of your opponents to see what they are weak against, and to encourage stocking up on diverse damage types so that you have what you need on hand to crack open any particular nut. That said, Obsidian didn't do that great of a job of PROVIDING good diversity of damage types, particularly for some classes like ciphers. I'm working on a mod for that, which to bring it back to the main thread topic, maybe might even become somebody's must-have mod someday!

Turns out it's pretty trivial to modify Assembly-CSharp.dll to do this, if you're up for that kind of thing. It took me all of like 15 minutes to figure out how to do it, including finding and downloading dnspy to decompile it, but not including the 20 years I've spent as a professional software developer. For those brave enough to try: 1) download and extract dnspy (just search google for the github and go to the download section) 2) Make a safe backup copy of PillarsOfEternityII_Data/Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll 3) No, really, make a safe backup copy before you do anything! 4) Open it up in dnspy, and search assemblies for UIRecruitAdventurersPopulator. 5) In that module, change the loop that goes "for (int i = 1; i < num; i++), changing "i < num" to "i < num + 1". Also change the line "base.Populate(num-1)" to "base.Populate(num)" 6) Save the change to the module. 7) Restart and verify you can now recruit adventurers equal to your level. Honestly, having broken the seal here, I'm excited to poke around and see what other kinds of interesting changes can be made.

In the absence of the Unbroken malus, tanks with Weapon and Shield Style tend to have sky-high Reflex because of the huge bonus from the shield. All the Unbroken penalty does is bring Reflex down to basically where it would be without the shield, which is still going to be tank-level defense due to all the other stuff a defensively-built character is going to have going on.

Oh, I missed the “single class” part. In that case, go rogue or priest, and stealth past everything without fighting, using withdraw/smoke cloud/shadowing beyond to escape combat whenever you get detected. If you actually want to KILL anything, you might be able to do that with Monk, but it would be an agonizingly slow slog in TB.

There was a guy trying a turn based build for The Ultimate, which was chanter/ranger I think. Ranger lets you start the fight in perfect safety by sending your pet in while you stay in stealth. Just let the pet go down, it doesn’t matter. Combat doesn’t end if your pet’s body is in sight of the enemy. Then you send endless waves of summons to grind everything down, again in perfect safety. The only dangerous fights are the ones where you yourself start in combat due to scripting.

I wonder if it's possible to mod the "one level less than the Watcher" maximum to allow hirelings of equal level. I started working on a mod last weekend to address some of my pet peeves, and hirelings starting so far behind is one of them. You'd still want to be as close to the beginning of your own level when hiring them to minimize how far behind they would still be, but at worst it would only be about as bad as it currently is at BEST.

It should also be noted that you don’t have to rescue any of your crew before going over to Port Maje. You can come back after getting your hirelings, which makes it all much easier of course.

Just doing the quest to clear out the room upstairs gets you more than enough money to hire a full party. I wonder if they did that on purpose.

I suppose I see what you’re getting at. I guess my difference of opinion is that putting too much effort into crowd control is wasteful- most fights with a lot of enemies really only need them CC’d briefly until the weak-but-dangerous ones are easily dispatched, and then it’s a long slog to kill the harder targets. My tool of choice for that is generally a blood mage chain casting Ninagauth’s Shadowflame, which achieves wide area CC along with significant wearing-down damage to speed things along.

Okay, if you assume you’re basically at 0% recovery then it’s every 4.5 seconds with infinite phrases. Let’s say you have 1.5 second attack+recovery, and crit 100% of the time, and you magically make that 50% crit to phrase check every time. That’s 6 seconds, plus the phrase every 6 seconds from brilliant, and you’re putting out the second 2-phrase invocation 6 seconds after the last one. With 100% crit rate and magic 100% phrase-to-crit rate. With more plausible crit rates and no magic 100% crit to phrase conversion, you’re reasonably likely to just get your second phrase from chanting or the next Brilliant pulse by the time you get another bonus phrase. So unless you’re really really trying to speed up those more expensive invocations instead of spamming the cheap ones, there’s not that much point in worrying about weapon crits.

Keep in mind that you aren’t getting any weapon crit phrases during your Invocation recovery either, because it’s RECOVERY. Asymptotically that’s going to be your rate limiter. Even if you have infinite phrases all the time, you’re probably not going to be firing invocations more than once every 6 seconds or so if you’re wearing armor heavy enough to survive the front line.

Far easier is to just figure out a way to get Brilliant on your skald and call it a day. That’s going to be giving you an extra phrase every 6 seconds. You will be able to knock out 2-phrase invocations so frequently that you won’t really have much time to worry about your attack or crit rate. You’ll even be knocking out 4-phrase Eld Nary quite fast. Note that Invocations interrupt your chanted phrase gen until your recovery completes, but the Brillant bonus phrases don’t pause. The real offensive benefit of Skald is the -1 phrase to offensive invocations, not the 50% extra phrase on crit. The occasional bonus phrase from crits is a minor perk relatively speaking.

It probably cost you some Guile to use whatever ability made you invisible in the first place, so whatever resource recovery would have to overcome that cost as well as be worth more than the opportunity cost of the autoattacks you would have otherwise been getting instead of faffing about “being guileful”. Any mechanic that requires you to take your eye off the ball and do something other than focus firing down each kill target in turn, is a mechanic that somehow has to be better than JUST DOING THAT, by enough margin to make it worth the hassle. A not entirely terrible idea might be a passive that recovered 1 Guile per X damage inflicted by weapon attacks that received the benefit of Sneak Attack, along the lines of Shattered Pillar. A similar ability for Ranger would be 1 Bond per X damage from weapon attacks against a target your AC is engaged with.

It'd be even funnier if they didn't bother putting a recovery time on the self-destruct power, given that it's not meant to be recovered from.

If you make the right choices in the first god convo, your 1/rest watcher ability gives you a level 1 INT inspiration. If you make the right choices in the second convo, it upgrades to a level 2 inspiration. And then again in the third convo to get to level 3. It requires some mix of Clever/Passionate/general-smartass responses to do this, I’ve never written down the exact choices. It’s still only 1/rest but anybody can get it, and it has a huge duration. You need to trigger it by casting it on somebody, but hey, Vela’s standing right there.

I thought about trying my hand at that. Where I can see a problem is making sure you don’t double-bonus Tuatilo’s Palm, in the same fashion that there was double-bonus for monk fist combined with Woedica spiritual fists. Perhaps whatever they did to address that would transparently work also for hypothetical scaling bashing shields, but perhaps not.

Or, for that matter, investing to bump your PEN from 8 to 10. For a Legendary-grade weapon, the PEN should already BE at least 10, straight out of the box, just to be barely equivalent to a low base-PEN one handed weapon.

It interrupts on graze, so it’s as reliable as it gets, short of Thrust of Tattered Veils.

You need a lot of patience for turn based. It can be... very slow. For a first play through it’s probably not a great choice. And what do you mean, no magical abilities? Did you miss the whole “I see dead people” schtick? Relax and roll with it. Perhaps your brief brush with divinity awoke yet another former life’s talents in you. Maybe you picked up stage magic as a hobby to while away those long, boring Caed Nua afternoons.

The bigger issue if you’re playing turn based is that Action Speed goes from being one of the best things in the game to being basically useless. There’s no POINT to Streetfighter in turn based. Trickster is fine due to the defensive options and the ability to use Arkemyr’s Dazzling Lights to split enemy groups. Since you’re new and may not get that second part- the noise mechanics of the game are pretty versatile, and can be used to gradually draw one or two enemies away from their allies until they’re far enough away that they can be killed separately. This is super easy to do with the trickster spell that they get at PL 1, but it can be equivalently done with any ground targetable ranged ability.

It is the best of the bashing shields because it benefits from monk fist scaling, unlike the other bashing shields which I believe do not scale at all. This makes for a punishing loss of both accuracy, damage, and most importantly, Penetration, by the endgame for the other shields. However, there are some caveats: 1) You still are pinned to either Transcendental Suffering scaling (which is fine for SC monk, but only decent for MC monk), or Monastic Unarmed Training (which is not that great). So yes, it scales, but probably not as much as you'd like. If you metagame +PL stuff, you can help beef up your scaling a bit, but that only goes so far, and you'll be sacrificing opportunities to do that. 2) The base damage is very low, so even with scaling it doesn't hit very hard. So all-in, you benefit from the defensive aspect of the shield (particularly with Weapon and Shield Style), and you benefit from the base dual-wield speedup (and potentially also Two Weapon Style further speedup), but you're losing a lot from your "second weapon" damage being very low. And you'll be mixing damage types with the weapon types you're wanting to pick, which means that for hard targets, one or the other weapon is likely to have poor penetratation.

You should be aware that there are many enemies with Immunity: Mind. Many Deception spells have the Mind keyword, which means those enemies will be entirely immune to those spells. Oozes and Imps come immediately to mind, and I’m sure there are many others. Ciphers do have some decent AoE spells, but many of them require bouncing off of a teammate so they are entirely useless for a solo run.

At some point a few patches ago, full attacks while dual-wielding caused each attack to have -35% to the damage roll. Dual-wielding remains the best option for auto-attack damage, that didn't change, the nerf only tamped down on the huge mechanical advantage that full attacks used to have with dual-wield. If you work out the math, you'll see that if you add up the damage rolls from two slow one-handed weapons (i.e. with the same attack and recovery times as a 2-handed weapon), multiply by .65, and compare it to the damage roll of a 2-handed weapon, they're pretty close, but the 2h is a little better off. However, due to the nature of Deadfire's damage bonus scaling (a topic unto itself), the dual-wield damage scales up faster than the 2-handed weapon does, and eventually overtakes it. Note that in turn-based mode, even your normal "auto-attack" suffers the -35% to the damage roll, which further eats away at dual wield's damage potential. I think they adjust weapon base damages slightly in turn based to account for some of that, but I don't remember the details.