NotDumbEnough

Instruments of Pain does not play well with bonuses against distant enemies (e.g. Sky Dragon Wurm). Despite being at distant range (>4m) you don't get the bonuses, which I guess are explicitly not allowed for melee regardless of range.

1. If you Dominate a Charmed teammate, you get full control of them again. If you charm a charmed/dominated teammate, I believe they will just stand still 2. There are a few spells that get +2 accuracy per PL. The ones I know of are Slicken, Telekinetic Burst, Amplified Wave and Chanter's White Worm invocation. There are probably more out there.

With the change to Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment, I notice that the spell always bounces to the primary target. Since the effect doesn't stack, one of the bounces is sort of wasted (i.e. you will see Eder affected by two Wondrous Torment debuffs at the same time. One is the -10 to PER/INT/RES effect, the other is the -5 effect). Suggest giving the spell +1 bounce to compensate.

If you're particularly late in the game, I remember getting Adra Ban from the SSS fight with the giant Engwithan construct. Maybe you can just repeat that fight to farm Adra Ban?

Beam spells seem to have one more quirk in addition to their duration not being alterable. At least for Ectopsychic Echo, Farcasting does not affect its cast range.

Something neat about Full Attacks is that ranged weapons take the longer range of the two (or is it the range of your main hand weapon?). So in most circumstances you want to take Open Choke on the Xefa blunderbuss if you're using it on a rogue/monk. Just put a pistol/wand/whatever in your main hand and the blunderbuss in your offhand. No need to get up close and personal to spam Stunning Surge.

I think (Greater) Amulet of Health and Tough are flat max hp bonuses. They give you the same value regardless of your constitution, which is probably why the numbers are weird. I doubt most enemies have flat hp modifiers so a test without Tough or Amulet of Health would probably be more representative.

The Katrenn fight is much easier on rainy nights. Katrenn and the constructs take cover from rain like other NPCs, and it is possible to kill Katrenn without aggroing all of the constructs.

Tested Thunderous Report against Ishiza. Backstab seemed to work fine.

I've noticed in the past that when your character recovers from a constitution affliction, their max health goes back up but their current health does not. On the other hand, when they lose constitution such as through an affliction, their hp percentage stays the same. This means that even if you take no damage, if you gain and lose a constitution affliction, you still effectively lose health. I wonder if it would be possible to actually drain enemies to death with this mechanic. If a Troubadour continually sings the chant the causes Weakened, is there any way to make sure the enemy is afflicted for less than 3 seconds?

Unbroken doesn't get THAT much of a bonus for disengagement attacks. It's only +10 penetration iirc. Penetration is good but +10 is overkill. It's more about the +1 armor rating IMO.

Backstab only works in close range, are you sure you are up close?

To add to this, the Chanter's delay in chanting while recovering from an invocation seems to be independent of the movement recovery penalty. i.e. if you use an invocation and immediately start running, you'll begin chanting before you finish recovering. Not sure if heavy armor/blinded or other recovery penalties influence the chant delay. Edit: The delay before you restart chanting seems to be influenced by dexterity, but not armor penalty or movement recovery penalty or the fast recovery you get if you use an invocation out of stealth. Haven't tested disoriented/blinded, recovery bonuses, action speed bonuses and other recovery penalties like Streetfighter or Patinated Plate. Edit 2: Blind/Disorient does not influence the delay.

Not sure if a base game bug or related to the fix that skips the need to roll for attacks against corpses, White Worms Writhed is receiving a +6 accuracy from PL bonus even though I'm only level 3. Ability level bonus is appropriately +2. Other abilities seem to work fine.

Some details I noticed about Nimble/Swift: 1. You only get the stride boost if you actually see an enemy. If your allies are engaging enemies around a corner and you can't see them, you have to round the corner before picking up your speed. 2. On my old garbage computer I noticed that my characters would twitch back and forth while running very fast under the effects of Nimble/Swift while this is not the case on my current decent computer. Might be that frame rate or something influences your character while at high stride rates.

Suggest adding an extremely minor instant damage effect to Soul Ignition and Disintegration. Can be literally 1 damage. The game doesn't count damage over time for damage counters (so, for example, you cannot level up soulbound weapons that require you to deal X damage with just damage over time spells), but in the Cipher's case this also means that they don't trigger Death of 1000 Cuts as one might expect.

Never stackable would be better then, I think.

One of the largest imbalances remaining in the game, IMO, is food bonuses being buggy and sometimes stacking and sometimes not. Would it be feasible to make all resting bonuses stackable but a bit weaker (maybe halve the effects of food in general) so that there would be less RNG in this regard? Would also make choosing resting bonuses less of a Sudoku game where you choose the buffs you can't get elsewhere instead of the ones that might benefit you the most.

The game's description for the Ascendant subclass is misleading and in fact understates their power. It states that your Soul Whip deals more damage while Ascended; this is not true. Instead, Ascended is a universal +20% damage bonus that applies to your spells as well, which is extremely powerful in conjunction with the +3 PL bonus.

It's worth noting that Amaeliora or whatever you call that scepter you get from Splintered Reef, provides universal bonuses against vessels. As in, it is not just bonus accuracy and damage with that particular weapon against vessels, but all spells and weapon attacks as well. I also think that Farcasting is not necessary at all on a Fury unless you plan on using some of the close range plant spells like Venombloom. There's no real reason to go beyond 15 range with your spells.

It seems that a general rule is that recovery penalties apply immediately while recovery bonuses only start applying after the current recovery has ended. Very obvious when a Streetfighter walks into Chill Fog or something. So I would not be surprised if yeah, movement penalty for recovery lasted for the remainder of the recovery. I'm not sure if that rule applies to reloading though -- perhaps I will try reloading before and after spamming Time Parasite and/or a Chanter sings Sure-Handed Ila. Not even sure if action speed bonuses follow that rule the same way as recovery time modifiers.

Does anyone know the recovery penalty for moving while in recovery? Rangers get Shot on the Run but I'm not sure how it compares with simply standing still while recovering. I'm also not 100% sure if reloading progress is saved if you stop it and do something else. i.e. if you spend 3 seconds out of a 5 second reload actually reloading, then stop and cast a spell, do you now need to start over and reload for 5 seconds or just 2 seconds?

With rogues, though, Sneak Attack, Deathblows, Streetfighter passives etc. quickly drown out the full attack dual wield damage penalty. Say you're using a slow one hand melee weapon that's dealing an average of 15 base damage. A late game rogue will hit for upwards of 40 damage if they're just single wielding that weapon. If you apply the dual wield full attack penalty that really just goes down to 35 damage per swing. Since 2*35>>40 you really want to dual wield for full attacks on rogues, more so the more damage bonuses you have. The one exception to this case might be for Streetfighters, whose -50% recovery time also drowns out the recovery time bonus from dual wielding -- in that case there's an argument to use 2-handed weapons instead for the greater base damage and better penetration on your basic attacks, at the expense of lesser damage on your full attack abilities.

I went and thought about it a bit. If there's one thing a SC Soulblade has an advantage in, it's Reaping Knives. Since the most cost-effective way to expend focus is to immediately use Soul Annihilation when you have 10 focus, an SC Soulblade can get a slow but steady stream of focus through Reaping Knives. If you have 2 instances of Reaping Knives up, you should be able to simply spam Soul Annihilation on every single attack (in most scenarios, assuming your allies land their hits) without having to do a normal attack in between to gain focus.

I'm not too sure what you're referring to, but yes, I find that I only ever bother to use Borrowed Instincts on Soulblades due to it being an incredibly strong self-buff that can't come from anywhere else. All my other focus goes into Soul Annihilation. Usually you want to multi class Soulblade with a rogue (Streetfighter is fine) and a high focus Soul Annihilation will easily one-shot most non-boss enemies. I personally don't see much point in a single-class Soulblade, they don't have enough martial passives to make Soul Annihilation worth it. Time Parasite is good but too expensive outside of Ascendants casting it for free. My build looks somewhat like this: