masterty66

I'd say it's mostly me. The only AI programming I really do in Poe2 is setting up buff scripts for any character with Wizard levels. And that's because there's like ninety wizard buffs you can chain gun out at the start of a fight lol. But any other character buffing I tend to not mind doing and I'll handle it myself. And I never would want the AI to handle offensive abilities because those really require a Watcher's touch.

Yeah push is a lot more impactful than it seems at first glance, especially when you have another party member helping out with hobbles/immobilizes/knock downs (from Barb shout and such). I even find it cool with the Red Hand because I think with every other run I've ever did in this game (and I've done a lot of em) I've enchanted that to destroy vessels. But enchanting it to push instead has revealed that actually being able to double tap push enemies away from vulnerable party members is really quite nice. I've saved my backline a few times doing that. Sometimes all the push effects do is buy a few key seconds to activate an ability or pop a potion or get a spell off and the value of that can't be discounted either. And the old reliable sunbeam/insect plague combo is still as good as ever with this character. Animist gets some nice free spells.

So after some testing I figured out that it's Woodskin and Form of the Delemgan that cause this issue. Re-casting them makes your party appear again, as does stealthing/unstealthing outside of combat. It's kind of annoying though because I do use these spells a lot and if I don't re-cast them mid combat I'm basically looking at glitched combat models for the rest of the fight, and that is unfortunate. Some searches also indicate this has been a known issue for a bit, so I guess nobody has figured out how to fix this yet?

I'm having a graphics glitch in Deadfire where basically my character model disappears: https://i.ibb.co/GQtXK65K/Screenshot-2025-05-17-170706.png I did some googling and Thelee's guide seems to suggest that certain spells can cause this. I can fix it out of combat by unstealth/re-stealthing or by unequipping and reequipping armor, but it's still kind of annoying. I'm wondering if anyone ever found a solution for it? I remember having this issue last time I played like a year or two ago but I can't recall if I ever found out a way to fix it. That was on a different machine as well. I do have the community patches installed but it doesn't seem like those fix the issue sadly. I've mostly noticed it in Undercity so far so maybe it only happens in certain environments?

Necroing this a bit but just wanna say I've been playing this on my Watcher (slightly different as I'm a Nature Godlike instead of Orlan as I imported from poe1 but otherwise the same build) and having a good time with it. The combination of push + entangle is surprisingly useful. I just did the Woedican Temple which is normally a pain in the butt fighting that mass of humanity in there but with the combination of push + entangle I was able to buy myself time to get buffs up and get Eder into a good enough position to start soaking up a bunch of engagements on the enemy. I especially like pushing enemies and then having Xoti hit them with a halt when they try to come back into range or have Serafen knock them down with his shouts. And against enemies where that tactic is less useful sunbeam tends to do a lot of work, or blights, or healing. Spreading Plague also helps quite a bit to enable other effects for the party. This character is also great at protecting the backline. You can sit back there with the Red Hand pushing enemies away that try to target your backline and if the enemy is being really annoying you can just swap to shield and engage them and let them try to beat on you for a bit. You're tanky enough that they won't really be able to take you down. I've had a lot of success just bullying enemies that try to troll my backline. The build is tanky enough to ruin the day of any flankers that try to do that - especially with its push effects. But even if the pushes fail it has fallback options and can tank. Anyways not super far with this yet (level...10ish I'd say?) but it's pretty fun so far! Kudos on a good build. I've done other Druid multiclasses before but never done a Fighter variant

Pretty similar to how I tend to build Aloth. I often find myself giving him Golden Gaze though as his weapon. Expose Vulnerabilities is a nice spell and it fires two projectiles. But the weapon choices you picked are all very good as well. Ninagauth's Shadowflame is hilariously overpowered. It's so good that they nerfed it in Deadfire (no longer instant cast) and paralyze affliction isn't as devastating in Deadfire and that spell is still really good in 2. But in Poe1 it tends to be an "I win" button in a lot of fights.

The theme for Fior was my favorite in the game. But yeah other than that I don't recall many themes being too awfully memorable. The soundtrack wasn't bad by any means, it just didn't stand out to me.

I don't find Giatta necessary. Granted, I was only playing on hard, and maybe potd ups the difficulty enough that my opinion would change, but I had an absurd amount of consumables for most of the game. By the end I think I had like 100 heal pots and 100 essence pots and I wasn't even buying them at stores. I do agree that Yatzli being necessary is unfortunate. Though having said that I don't recall any "must have" gear being gated behind those illusions you needed her to break. It was all standard loot so if you weren't bringing her along you might miss out on a few upgrade mats but I doubt it's that big a deal at the end of the day. And you can always swap her in if you remember where the illusion was you needed to dispel.

Personally I don't think high con is extremely necessary on a Helwalker. You could eventually use Iron Wheel to boost your con when having a bunch of wounds, and you can always spend your wounds as well if you think you're taking too much damage. But if you combine Iron Wheel with some heavy armor I would think you'd be sturdy enough, especially since it sounds like you're using Tuotilo's Palm as well and planning to have decent Resolve. So your deflection will be good. All that said, I think your stats are perfectly fine and your character should still perform well with them. If I were to lower those points from con at all I would probably pump Resolve even higher (deflection has increasing returns).

I think they key with Soulblades is to realize that sometimes a well placed power is more effective than just dumping your focus for another SA attack. If you're playing it well you should always be doing that calculus of should you use a power or should you dump the focus. Most of the time just dumping the focus is an easy answer but a charm spell at the right time or a secret horrors etc can turn the tide too. So that's why I think it's important to be present when playing that class and don't just be lazy and spam SA all the time. Sometimes a power really is the better choice. But it's easy to get into a habit of just spamming SA 24/7 because frankly that is very effective more often than not lol.

Arcane Archer/Ascendant is very powerful. Use the Frostseeker bow and you'll generate enough focus to get ascended very quickly. From there you can spam powers or continue to ranged dps as desired. With the high Ranger accuracy you'll crit often and your spells will land well and spells like Borrowed Instinct will make you even more accurate. If you don't want to deal much with a pet you could do Ghost Heart/Ascendant which would also be quite good. Another weapon which pairs well with ranged Ciphers of any variety is Kitchen Stove with the Thunderous Report upgrade. That is a 1/encounter ability which will do a ton of damage and get you to max focus (or very close) quite quickly. So that one goes well with Ascendants. Essence Interrupter is a good ranged weapon as well. You said you're not totally opposed to melee builds. I recently played a Stalker/Soulblade using Sun & Moon + Tuotilo's palm (and then later Seeker's Fang + Grave Calling). The way the Soul Annihilation ability works is it does a primary attack, so the off hand is ignored. Sun & Moon strikes twice (once with Soul Annihilation, and then once by itself) so the way that works is you dump your focus with the first attack and then instantly regenerate focus with the second attack from Sun & Moon. In essence that means you can spam Soul Annihilation all day. With this character I would usually throw on a buff or two (Borrowed Instinct and/or Psychovampiric Shield) and then go to town spamming SA. It was quite effective. You can use powers as well when you want to. A good charm spell or debuff can sometimes be more effective than spamming SA, so don't totally neglect your powers. Just a few ideas. Hope this helps.

Losing illusion spells kinda stinks for tanking but she'd still have Spirit Armor, Ironskins, and Llengrath's Safeguard so I don't see why she wouldn't be capable of tanking if you really wanted to. Heavy Armor + those armor buffs and Llengraths should make her quite sturdy. I think the issue more than defenses would be the lack of engagement slots.

A Devoted/Soul Blade should be able to stack extremely high accuracy and solid defenses as well and so should be a fairly resilient character. With Armored Grace you can eventually afford to wear heavy armor as well without suffering much offense. Take the spells Borrowed Instinct & Psycho Vampiric shield and buff yourself with those and you'll have fairly decent defenses and high accuracy too. With Armored Grace you can cruise around in Heavy Armor being quite durable and you'll still attack fast enough. Devoted + Berserker has the obvious synergy of being able to use Modwyr's upgraded ability (Immunity to Intellect afflictions) to make it so that you don't get confused when you berserk. I don't have a ton of ideas beyond that as I don't often play Barbarians (want to try them at some point) but I thought I'd point that out. Definitely second the recommendation to read @thelee's gamefaqs guide as well. It's pretty easily digestible and helps break down a lot of the mechanics of Deadfire.

Finally got this going and having a good time with it so far. I've got a FF/SG (PC), SG/Trickster, Priest of Woedica/Psion. The last two slots are rotating Obsidian npcs depending on what quests I'm doing. This is the first time in a long time that I haven't been leaning on Eder as a main tank and it's kinda interesting. My frontline has hardly any engagement slots but it hasn't seemed to matter so far (potd/upscaled). If I'm ever doing an area where I feel I need that I probably can sub Eder or Pallegina in. I think the lack of engagements slots hasn't been felt too much for two reasons. 1) Enemies seem perfectly content to attack my front liners despite the lack of engagements and 2) My frontline has exceptional defenses and when needed good emergency healing as both front liners have lay on hands. The Mystic has a bit of healing and withdraw in a pinch as well. Dps has been pretty good so far. It's kinda disgusting how much dps the FF/SG outputs considering all the durability it also has. The SG/Trickster hasn't been lighting the world on fire dps-wise but with Wotep + her defenses she's a very sturdy dpser. Can't do dps if you're dead. Mystic provides amazing utility between buffs, writs, and cipher spells. Can pretty much do it all.

I have done Red Hand Maia with phantom and it's definitely a solid build.