[How does Unbending/Unbending Trunk work exactly?]

Oh thanks, this is great @Elric Galad!

You briefly mention wall of draining in your first link. Do you think wall of draining is a good way to exploit unbending? If not, what are some good ways to exploit it? Some things that come to mind:
- Salvation of Time
- Really high int (maybe buffed even higher by +10 int from monk)
- Wall of Draining
- <insert something that restores discipline here>

[How does Unbending/Unbending Trunk work exactly?]

I have 400+ hours in Deadfire and in all by my most recent playthrough, I pretty much ignored unbending/unbending trunk. On paper, it sounds okay, but not great. Here was my incorrect understanding: I take 100 damage, unbending trunk heals me for 33. Even if I assume it takes Might into account and assume I have 21 Might (makes math easy), I heal for 33 * 1.33 = 44, which results in a net damage of 56. Sure, the damage got reduced, but I still take quite a bit of damage.

However,I gave the ability a fair shot in my most recent playthrough and found that it basically makes you immortal lol (unless you get weakened/enfeebled I guess). On POTD upscaled, Eder would basically never drop below full health as long as unbending trunk was on. He doesn't seem to be healing for 33% or even 44% of the damage done; he seems to be healing for >100% of the damage done. One strategy I started using was to have Eder stack engagement, pop unbending trunk, get as many engagements as possible (close proximity), then drop missile salvo right on top of him. Not only would it wreck the bad guys, but would somehow super-heal Eder, and I have no idea why.

What is going on here? What are the actual mechanics for Unbending/Unbending Trunk? 

[House Rules to Increase Challenge/Fun]

I was curious what sort of "house rules" people typically use to make the game more challenging or increase the amount of fun you get out of it. Sure, if you play The Ultimate, you probably don't need any of these sort of house rules, but for the average playthrough, what do you do to increase challenge/fun?

Some background on why I've been thinking about this...

On a recent POTD scaled playthrough, I was playing a min/maxed evoker for the first time and things were just getting silly. At level 14, my evoker had 120k damage. The rest of my team, combined, only has about 55k. No battle so far was challenging. I started feeling like my evoker was too good (and maybe the rest of my team were just cannon fodder) and I no longer really feel compelled to finish that playthrough. Shadowflame in particular was doing huge damage and paralyzing in a huge area for 12+ seconds. Plus I figure if my guy was dominant now, at level 19+ battles will just a be a formality with some of the high level evoker spells.

Fast forward to now and I'm wondering how I can create a fun playthough and maybe nerf myself a little bit. Some ideas:
- No evoking spells allowed. I could either purposely choose a sub-optimal wizard class like Transmuter, or I could just informally avoid using any evoking spells.
- No Wizards. Wizards are generally regarded as one of the better classes and maybe banning them from my party would add an element of fun.
- Use a subset of Margran's Fires. I have to say, some Magran's Fires don't appeal to me at all; maybe some people enjoy playing the game that way or really want the challenge, but especially tedious things like hiding stats, food spoiling, weapon repairs... It doesn't do it for me. That said, maybe I could try playing with just some of the Fires turned on, like Berath's.
 

Some things I already do to nerf myself:
- I basically never use consumables. This is partially to nerf myself and partially because of the "what if I need this later" conundrum that happens in all RPGs.
- I never used summons (until I re-bought the game on PC). This was mainly because on PS4 the hitching/lag that would happen when loading in a summoned anything (including Mirrored Image) was absolutely brutal. I kind of retired this house rule now that I purchased the game a second time for PC and the hitching is not nearly as bad.'

 

How about the rest of you? What things do you do to increase the challenge and fun factor of your playthroughs?

[Marked Prey Working or Bugged?]

Oh interesting, thanks for the explanation! Also, I did not know about the "holding shift" thing. I did look at the attack roll without holding shift and it wasn't super clear, but I'll try with holding shift.

[Marked Prey Working or Bugged?]

Working on my first Ranger build and I'm noticing something odd about Marked Prey.

Example:
1. I highlight my enemy and it shows 75% chance to hit with my attack
2. I cast marked prey
3. I highlight my enemy again it still shows 75% chance to hit with my attack

Is this just a visual bug? Do I still get the accuracy bonus? Also, does Marked Prey work for ALL attacks (meaning AoE, attacks that bounce, etc.) or just attacks that directly target my enemy?

Assuming this is just a visual bug, to calculate the accuracy correctly, do I just take the displayed percentage and add 10 percentage points to that number? So in my example above, would I have 85% chance of hitting?

[Solo Playthrough Without Cheese Tips]

Do you have any advice for a first time solo player? Is there any guides for this type of thing? I'm not really looking for a build as I can figure that out on my own, but a strategy/expectations. For example, can I expect to be able to win the fight at the dig site, or is that basically impossible?

[Solo Playthrough Without Cheese Tips]

After a few hundred hours playing Deadfire, I'm thinking of trying a solo playthrough. However, I'm not trying to go for "The Ultimate" or something like that; I just want a fun, challenging playthrough without any party members.

Keeping in mind that my main goal here is fun, quest completion, and avoiding cheese... What is the best difficulty settings to have a challenging, fun, solo run without having to cheese?

I've seen a few videos of people doing content solo involving stealthing in the middle of battle, pulling mobs one at a time, abusing combos, skipping content, etc. Don't get me wrong, a lot of this is pretty impressive and requires a lot of skill haha. That said, is it possible to do a POTD solo run without doing this stuff? What about with level scaling turned on?

Here are some cheesing/unfun things I want to avoid in a solo playthrough:
- Stealing in the middle of battle
- Pulling single mobs (doing this occasionally is okay, but doing it for every battle is tiresome and feels like cheese)
- Skipping content or avoiding battles until character reaches level 13+ <-- This personally would take a way from the fun factor for me. 

Is there a specific difficulty people would recommend I play on given this? I've been playing on POTD trial of iron (no scaling though) with my party playthroughs and I'm not opposed to difficulty, I just don't want to have to cheat the game in order to win.

Also, any tips on progression as a solo character in general?

[Tactics to Speed Up Priest Cast Speed]

After reading about all the hate priests get in Deadfire, I hadn't really given them a fair shot in any of my playthroughs. However, I finally decided to make my player character a solo class priest and I'm actually pretty impressed; priests are great! They start off pretty slow, but I find spell levels VI, VII, VIII, and IX to all be full of amazing spells. My character has second most damage in my party and is also great at putting out clutch heals, as well as buffing my top damage dealing wizard before she unleashes.

That said, I do have one complaint: even with 21 dex and only 20% armor penalty, my cast times all feel painfully slow. What are some good ways to speed up cast times for solo priest? Is there some gear I should be using that I haven't though of yet?

One strategy I tried was equipping Dragon's Dowry with Blazing Fury as it gives "40% action speed for 20 seconds" according to the ability description, however upon testing (and reading the description of the ability closer), it only affects attack action speed, not casting speed.

Any other good strategies to speed up cast times? On my wizards, I just pop DAoM and they feel pretty snappy, but there doesn't seem to be any similar options for priest.

[Avoiding Getting Disintegrated]

Thanks @Waski and @thelee, this is a ton of good info! It sounds like basically I need to be super careful in FS and avoid being near death at any time. Also watch out for enemy statuses like reflect as well as their numerous ways of insta-death.

One noob question: how do I inspect the various status effects on a given enemy on PC? I feel I should know this by now having played 200+ hours, but I do not lol. I know highlighting an enemy, I can see the list of statuses show up on the left, but can I actually see what each status does? For example, @Waski mentioned the "storing magic" status, which I actually saw, but I did not know how to see what that status was actually doing. I just see the name of the status in the window that pops up, but when trying to move my mouse over to the window to highlight the status, of course the window disappears.

[Avoiding Getting Disintegrated]

I was recently playing a POTD Trial of Iron playthrough and it was my best ToI run yet. I was level 20 and doing end game content, specifically everything in Wael's dungeons (forgot what these are actually called; the place with Wael's body). For context, I had a battlemage (my character), warden, herald, wizard (no subclass), and mindstalker in my party. My battlemage and herald had both never been downed up until this point. I had tons of good gear and, at least for my understanding of the game, fairly decent builds (I retrained pretty much everybody at level 19 to get rid of any old skills I found myself no longer using and take either better skills or passives).

This is where things went off the rails on three separate occasions.

Perma-Death #1: My wizard got disintegrated by somebody in the infected spore area. I actually missed what happened in the combat log, so I'm not sure if it was by an enemy or if maybe my mindstalker got dominated and cast disintegrate on him...? After this, I recruited Fascina to fill the gap and because I suppose she's supposed to be part of this quest anyway.
Perma-Death #2: My mindstalker disintegrated herself lol. Can disintegrate be reflected or something? I looked at the combat log to see what happened and again, I couldn't exactly figure out what happened, but what I saw a "Wren destroyed Wren" (Wren was the name of my mindstalker). After this, I briefly left Wael's dungeons, defeated The Messenger, and then recruited Vatnir to fill the gap.
Perma-Death #3, the nail in the coffin: I returned to Wael's dungeon. Unfortunately, I delved too deep and unleashed the "Frightened Child". The battle was actually going quite well; my team was all still alive and the majority of the summoned ads had been killed. However, Frightened Child was doing some crazy damage to my main battlemage with that multishot crossbow thing (even though I had 10 or so martial buffs cast on my guy). That said, the battle still looked to be going in my favor and I was not too worried about. Then, slow motion death animation... and I notice the portrait for my main character is gone. Once again, f****** disintegrated lol. Trial of Iron game over. Save game deleted.

My Questions
I know what I signed up for and I do enjoy Trial of Iron mode, but to lose my main character at level 20 who had no injuries and previously had never even been downed in my play through did feel pretty unsatisfactory, especially since my other four party members could easily have cleaned up that battle under non-disintegration circumstances. I did not even see the spell being cast that ended up being my character's doom. I'm about to jump back on the horse and make a new party, but I have some concerns:

1. Are there any tips for preventing your party getting disintegrated in general?

2. Is there a way to prevent disintegration via some item and have it result in a standard knockout/injury instead?

3. Is there a definitive list of all the enemies in the game who can disintegrate you?

Having not really even seen exactly how it happened in any of the three perma deaths above, I don't feel very confident I can avoid making these same mistakes on my next playthrough and I really need some tips. Thanks!

[How does the number of ship defenders work in boarding/deck combat?]

Ah sorry I missed this reply. Let me add a few things I think I observed...

- I had ~18 total companions, give or take, because I recruited most of the story characters, a few side kicks, and maxed out on hirelings
- In a given ship battle, the number of companions actually assisting me was not consistent
- Sometimes I only had my base party in the battle (myself and my four active party members). The trend I seemed to notice with this is that it would sometimes happen when attacking a weaker vessel, but I can't say for sure if that had anything to do with it)
- The pre ship battle status pop up that shows hull health, sail health, and most importantly in my case number of defenders, would almost always show a much larger potential number of defenders than would show up on my ship. It did seem to be affected by the size of my ship (it might only say 8 or so for a sloop but show 18 if it was a junk), but the actual number that showed up in battle did not match this regardless


A few other details:
- I was playing on POTD trial of iron mode, but this sort of thing has happened to me on all the modes I have tried since owning the game
- I have the latest version of the game on PC and it is unmodded, so either this is all intentional or there are some bugs...?

[How does the number of ship defenders work in boarding/deck combat?]

I still have a lot of questions, but one more observation: I think the game prioritizes your highest level non-party companions, but I haven't done exhaustive tests, so can't be 100% sure. That said, I hired two new companions at (Player Level - 1) and they showed up in all of my ship battles. My next highest level companions were (Player Level - 2) or lower.

[How does the number of ship defenders work in boarding/deck combat?]

Another oddity: I equipped a couple of my recruits (who are not in the party, but sometimes participate in ship battles) with superb and exceptional plate armor. However, when inspecting these two people in ship combat, they have 19 and 18 base armor respectively! I verified they did not have any sort of crazy buffs or something. The game seems to buff your non-party ship combatants from the looks of it, but again, I have no idea what the formula is.

Would love to hear from anybody that knows what is going on here  

 

[How does the number of ship defenders work in boarding/deck combat?]

To add further confusion to this, does it also depend on the enemy ship? I just attacked Biakara at sea who has a pretty small huana ship and my ship had zero additional fighters... just my five base guys. In my previous ship battle, I think I had eleven fighters. Any idea what is going on here? Luckily I was way overleveled for Biakara so it didn't matter, but that would be a real bummer (especially in trial of iron mode) if you attack a ship expecting to have 12 fighters and only 5 show up haha.

[How does the number of ship defenders work in boarding/deck combat?]

In deck combat on ships, prior to engaging, there is a "ship defenders"  stat which I was recently trying to optimize, but I'm confused as to how it works (does't work...?). What I'm trying to do is increase my number of attacks/defenders to better my odds in ship to ship combat and be able to take on ships higher level than myself, primarily for looting purposes. However, even though my ship defenders currently says "17", when I engage in combat, I think I only have 11/12 people on deck. Because of this, I have a bunch of questions:

1. Do different ships allow different numbers of attacks/defenders? Like, will a junk let me have 20 guys, buy a sloop only  handful? If so, does anybody know the stats per ship?
2. Are attackers/defenders the same, or different? In other words, the stat does specifically say "defenders". Should I not expect to have that many guys if I'm actually the one starting the battle?
3. Say I have 17 people who can fight in the ship battle according to the stat, but only 12 actually appear on the deck. How do I control which 12 show up? Of course my active party will be on deck, but what about the rest of the fighters?
4. Any other tips here?

 

Note: while the cannon minigame thing can be amusing sometimes, I'm not really interested in optimizing for this minigame and would rather have a boarding event, so not really looking for tips for the minigame.

[Fastest Early Game Leveling]

Does anybody have any step by step guides or tips for leveling quickly in the early game? Specifically, I'm looking at how to get from level 1 - level 7 as quickly as possible.

I find that I love trying new builds (especially multiclass builds), but many multiclass builds don't really get rolling until acquiring a few skill levels. I'm basically looking for how to accelerate this early part of the game and level as quickly as possible so I can decide whether or not I like my build. Thanks!

[Illusionist Mirrored Image Lag/FPS Drop]

Ah, that's unfortunate. Sounds like this is a known issue that I would suspect won't be resolved. I will say that tapping pause immediately on the lag is good tip, thanks thelee! I'll maybe play with my Illusionist for a little longer and decide if I can handle this annoyance or if I should just roll with a different class.

Related question: I'm trying to avoid reading too much about ideal builds and stuff because I find part of the fun is coming up with that stuff on my own, but do people find Illusionist/Melee multiclass builds to be strong? The free deflection granted from Mirror Image cast on hit seems pretty powerful at a glance...

[Illusionist Mirrored Image Lag/FPS Drop]

I was super excited to play POE II: Deadfire on console and basically started playing right at midnight last night haha. That said, I ran into an issue that is kind of putting a damper on things for me...

When playing my Illusionist/Paladin multiclass, there is a pretty big hitch/FPS drop every time the Illusionist's Mirrored Image triggers. This is pretty unfortunate to the point where I'm debating remaking my guy just to avoid having to deal with this hitch in literally every combat for the remainder of the game.

I hope this gets fixed, but I have found multiple threads about this issue happening on PC versions of the game online (one from a year ago, one from two years ago) and it seems to still be an issue.

Do other people play Illusionists, or did you give up and play a class that doesn't automatically lag the game every battle?