NotDumbEnough

Something I realized while messing around with my Brawler is that the Dichotomous Spirits you summon actually inherit all your gear except your weapons along with all the properties they have. They can't use active abilities attached to them, but all the passive abilities seem to be fair game. I'm wondering whether it would be possible to make a goofy build where you deliberately hit your own monk and his summons with friendly fire. The other upside to Dichotomous Soul is that it only costs wounds which you have an infinite source of, and unlike Chanter phrases accumulate quite quickly. My initial guess at making this work would be to pick a non-godlike race. Some of the helmets are fairly strong and I think they work on the spirits too. Unfortunately that means you can't be a nature godlike so you're missing that +1 PL for your fists. My second impression is that you should probably multiclass with a Fighter. Several reasons: 1. Since you're going to use your summon a lot, not having WotW and Resonant Touch doesn't particularly matter that much (I also despise playing as single class monks due to how boring and broken these skills are). You'll be spending your wounds on mostly just Dichotomous Soul and Thunderous Blows, and otherwise hold them for Turning Wheel. 2. Devoted get a cool +2 pen to their fists. Helps make up for your weaker fists compared to single class monks. Intuitive is also fairly powerful with Swift Flurry and Stunning Surge since you'll still be punching enemies for most of the game. 3. Turning Wheel+Unbending makes even a brawler with dumped RES nearly immortal due to your super high intellect. In my current brawler playthrough I often solo the easier fights with my Helwalker/Devoted if I'm feeling lazy due to how insane Unbending is. 4. Mob Stance and Refreshing Defense is also fairly nice. In short, a Helwalker/Devoted would probably suit my purpose best. Unbending effectively nullifies all the extra damage you take as a Helwalker and the extra starting wound/+might is nice too. Of course choice in gear is also extremely critical. I think there are two ways to go about this: 1. Straight up suicide build, where you want the summons to die asap and trigger on knockout effects. This means Effigy's Husk/One Dozen Stood as your armor, Mantle of the Seven Bolts/Cape of the Falling Star as your cape, and the Whitewitch Visage you buy from the Spindle Man to trigger at least one tick of Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage whenever your clones reach low HP. The idea is to have your wizards and druids hit your Brawler and his summons with all the friendly fire they've got. Since Unbending is OP your Brawler will be fine and will comfortably have infinite wounds from all the damage. Hopefully your summons will die about as fast you can summon them. 2. A Deltro's Cage Helm build where you don't want the clones to die super fast. Deltro's Cage Helm, Nemnok's Cloak for Barring Death's Door, maybe Effigy's Husk for armor or High Harbinger's Robes for the attack speed. Unfortunately there's not a whole lot of friendly fire shock damage in the game, and the best source of it only turns up very late in the form of Great Maelstrom (remember to maintain high burn AR so you get hit by shock damage instead). Hopefully both you and your clones get a very large lash from Deltro's Cage Helm from incoming shock damage, and the clones will survive a decent amount of time thanks to Nemnok's Cloak.

Others have voiced this before me, but Great Maelstrom is an absolutely insane spell. I would give it 6/5. It's so strong that I quit my Fury playthrough about 4-5 fights after I picked it up, since a single Great Maelstrom, not even necessarily Empowered, instantly annihilates anything that isn't a boss even though I was playing on PotD upscaled. Basically you drop Great Maelstrom from stealth and your enemies are dead before they can react. Incredibly boring.

A bug with Avenging Storm: if you Empower it with Quick Empower, you have no recovery on ALL your subsequent weapon attacks. Basically you have Blade Cascade while Avenging Storm is active

It doesn't get cleared out of combat. At least I just had to craft a scroll of Prayer for the Body to heal Pallegina

A suggestion regarding this mod: Heartseeker's Enfeeble should last an extremely long time, but not permanently. Making it permanent makes it extremely annoying to remove from companions if they get hit by friendly fire. If they get knocked out in combat, they won't even heal post-combat. It also can't be removed by leaving the current area, walking around on the world map, removing them from the party, etc. You HAVE to apply a constitution inspiration to remove it. A 5000 second duration would still serve much the same purpose while making it much less annoying (you could remove the effect by waiting a few hours, etc).

Would it be possible to make Brilliant have a % chance to refund spell casts/class resources instead of regenerating them?

Priest Symbol spells are so powerful that they're head and shoulders above whatever you get out of multiclassing. You know how Tekehu has a foe-only Ninagauth's Freezing Pillar as his AL9 ability? Priest symbols are like that but cast faster and last twice as long, and Berath provides a better affliction too (Weakened). The Usher Incarnate you get through the AL9 summon can also cast his own Symbol (as well as Hand of Berath). You're not going to get much in the way of martial capabilities, but in general single class casters are pretty ridiculous at AL9 in Deadfire, arguably much more so than, say, a single class Rogue or Fighter.

A feature request: would it be possible to change the penetration values of various raw damage abilities? A lot of them seem to have 0 pen and do not seem to work too well with lashes (e.g. casting Silent Scream while affected by Shared Flames).

The bandits in Black Meadow can be cheesed. There's some wildlife nearby, pull the bandits next to them and they'll start fighting each other.

Another problem with Minor Avatar is that it takes a long time to cast. That's 4 seconds of you just standing there instead of getting into position. In addition it doesn't last super long and in harder fights you may need to empower and cast again.

In tough fights where you have extreme difficulty hitting the boss you can just empower your way to full focus and first drop Brilliant on your entire party while a priest spams Salvation of Time. Horribly cheesy and not very fun so your choice as to whether or not to use it.

An SC ascendant is probably one of the strongest damage dealers in the game to the point that it makes the game boring. It's like using cheat codes. Open with Thunderous Report on Kitchen Stove for instant max focus. Use Borrowed Instincts for stat bonuses. Use Time Parasite till you have 7 or 8 stacks. Spam Amplified Wave faster than your enemies can get back up and everyone is dead in a few seconds. Every fight looks like this and it gets highly repetitive.

Every play through I completely ransack the Dark Cupboard with at most 2 sparkcrackers. Bertenno is just a filthy casual.

The political conflict in Neketaka is loosely based on Djibouti. The locals commissioned a $3.5 bil free trade zone built by the Chinese, obviously analogous to Queen's Berth. The Chinese maintain a light military force in the region to combat pirate activities targeting ships headed towards the Suez Canal. https://dpfza.gov.dj/facilities/Free-trade-area/djibouti-international-free-trade-zone The Americans have a much larger military base primarily used for waging war in Yemen and other nearby regions. This is analogous to the Brass Citadel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Lemonnier Next door, Somalia is in political disarray, and many of the locals turn to piracy to make ends meet. This should be self-explanatory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somalia Of course, it's not a perfect analogy, since the Huana are more loosely based off of Hawaiians/Maori/Pacific Islanders. But I find it interesting to see the game through the lens of the real world.

I played an SC ascendant to about level 19, then quit. It's ridiculously broken to the point that it drains the fun out of the game. Hint: you can use Thunderous Report on Kitchen Stove to instantly fill your focus almost to max. It deals 100+ damage in a large AOE and gives you focus, and better yet it's per encounter. Every single fight ended up being Thunderous Report - Borrowed Instincts - Time Parasite (until I reached 7 or 8 stacks), then spam Amplified Wave until everyone is dead (with 8 stacks of Time Parasite, you Prone them faster than they can get back up), while Xoti just drops two Salvations of Time on me.

IMO while Symbol of Eothas is nice, the problem is that you have to balance targeting your own team and the enemies. You can get a lesser but still pretty good all defenses buff from Moonwell, while Circle of Protection has it on a shorter duration. I don't think Light of Eothas is anything special, it's literally two Minor Intercessions for one cast. The thing about support spells from Priests is that you can cast them all from stealth for next to no recovery time, so the benefits of being able to cast a doubled up Minor Intercession feels minimal. It does visually look cool though.

Priests do, at least, have Spark the Souls of the Righteous as fallback for damage dealing. The 70-80% of the time where it does work, Symbol of Magran works wonders. It's mainly the lower levels where it's an issue, i.e. trying to fight Fire Naga or Rathun while you're below level 16.

IMO Berath and Magran are somewhat better suited for single classing. They arguably have the strongest Symbol spells (Magran's especially is fairly insane, as it rolls against will and blinds), but their lower level innate spells don't offer as much utility. Wael and Skaen have somewhat inferior Symbol spells (Wael's symbol is partly offensive and partly defensive, which makes it kind of bad at both, while Skaen only hobbles which is thoroughly unimpressive), but have great utility spells to multiclass with martial classes. Eothas is probably the weakest of the bunch, unless you really need those first aid spells from the priest, in which case it fulfills that role quite well. Haven't really played Woedica so I can't judge (haha).

You actually CAN go from graze to crit. I suspect that you need to have paralyze on the enemy.

The necrotic lance is a bug. You can never detect the trap and it will never fire when you first trigger it. Instead it fires if you load a save within the area after you trigger it.

IMO the worst part of pathing is that characters will refuse to cast a long range spell if they can't literally walk to the target area. Yes, there's someone in the way 4m away from the target area, but your spell has 6m range. I actually somewhat dislike the "out of range" feature for melee, as it allows for minor cheesing against enemies that can't hold engagement. And sometimes enemies will break engagement and run away from you, but for some reason you can't catch up and re-engage them (the chasing character will stand right next to the enemy and make stuttering steps), and if you try to swing at them you're guaranteed to miss. The enemy that is trying to run away is literally invulnerable to melee attacks until it stops moving, and this can be abused by the player too (if you're willing to take a disengagement attack, you can often run away even if you're hobbled)/

I've never found engagement super useful, outside of triggering Persistent Distraction on as many people as possible. There are too many scenarios where you start surrounded, or the enemies can teleport, or there are simply so many enemies that you can't possibly hold them all. Might as well resign yourself to fighting them point blank. Or, in easier fights you might be able to alpha strike them and kill enough that it doesn't really matter anymore.

I'm not saying that these don't work, but I find that a dual wielding Swashbuckler Eder does #1 decently well while barely running any risk of being KO'd, and Lethandria's Devotion's 1hp/3sec isn't really worth using a shield over (compared to, say, dual wielding flail and club for defense debuffs, or using a morning star for similar purpose).

I have a couple hundred hours of Deadfire under my belt, but I've never seen much use for shields outside of Tuotilo's Palm. I've never really seen the point of deliberately building a character to be tanky in terms of attributes either; the AI is usually smart enough to not go after the most durable target and is often scripted to attack whoever has dealt the most damage. On top of this, on higher difficulties the larger enemy count means that you quickly get surrounded and holding your enemies at bay literally isn't possible (unlike in the first game, where you could have Eder stand in a doorway and most of your enemies would run back and forth stupidly). In fact, my personal understanding of "tank" is a glass cannon that Xoti has used Barring Death's Door on. Am I missing something? Are there any situations where you'd contemplate actually using a shield, or deliberately putting lots of points in Constitution and Resolve (outside of maybe a Forbidden Fist, who wants high resolve to shrug off debuffs)?

I don't think it's a problem with the DLCs being too hard, but with the rest of the game being too easy. e.g. for most of the game you can mostly disregard interrupting enemies, but it's really important against Neriscylas or else she uses Llengrath's Safeguard. Meanwhile on PotD Upscaled 90% of the basegame high level fights you encounter are cakewalks that are almost instantly resolved by having Tekehu using Great Maelstrom, Aloth using Wall of Many Colors, and Xoti using Call of Rymrgand simultaneously from stealth. Melting enemies with wombo comboes is fun the first few times but quickly becomes boring. If you're accustomed to walking over everything by just dropping a few high level spells then many of the DLC fights can be problematic. My guess is that the devs didn't understand the game well enough to quite grasp what players were capable of while designing base game encounters. They were able to do much better in the DLCs do to having player feedback and telemetry to understand what players are capable of.