yorname

If only we can get it with anyone other than Tekehu... With 10 PER and no head slot , that's more than 20 accuracy difference compared to the MC I haven't used him offensively since forever ago, maybe worth it if I run a party with full fortitude debuffs I was going to ask if we're sure duration also uses inversion, but I decided a quick test and found AWT has an advantage over miasma: it seems to apply its full duration on graze (at least main target), while miasma's graze has the normal -50% duration penalty. And I think duration might not be using inversion: my character with PL7, 17 INT hits Doru with AWT for the first time, if it's inversion, it should be 30*1.1*1/(1-(0.35+1-1/(1-0.75))) = 9.04s however the effect was actually 11.2s, seems to be just 30*1.1*1.35*(1-0.75) = 11.1375s with some rounding problems.

How good is Firebrand though, I tried it and felt it's like in the "good but do I want to be auto attacking with this?" territory. Maybe viable when out of spells but I didn't find it build-defining like it was in 1.

Sorcerer vs Wizard is quantity vs quality. Pure wizard is better as offensive caster, sorcerer is better only if you actually want their healing power, e.g. to save a party slot. Skald/Wizard is more of a pure offensive caster than sorcerer, with a easier action economy and burst damage a multiclass wizard tends to lack.

The biggest reason to pick a spell instead of relying on grimoires, is that you don't lose the hotkey. If you haven't learn a spell, and asign a hotkey to it in the grimoire, then switch and switch back, you can't use that hotkey. So just for your sanity I think spells you'll frequently use deserve a pick. Like a series of self-buffs you'll use at the start of literally every encounter. Also Aloth can get a passive that reduces grimoire switch cooldown by 1s. In comparison switching grimoire with the main character feels even more painful. Effects that other classes don't get, or are expensive for them: Chill Fog and Slicken: much cheaper than similar abilities from other classes. Combusting Wounds is exploitable with the right party. Miasma of Dull-Mindedness/Arkemyr's Wonderous Torment: -40 Will and -20 Reflex that goes through affliction immunity. Cipher can almost do it on one enemy at the cost of their own action economy Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage: Repeatable Terrify. Other classes can't get (Furyshaper's totem only has 87 accuracy, useless at higher levels) Essential Phantom: worth it if you want to use some weapon shenanigans Wall of Draining. Pull of Eora is quite unique, but PoE + AoE spells is too unfriendly to melee characters. Chill Fog can already force enemies to get closer. Arcane Dampener and/or Arcane Cleanse are very powerful but not so frequently used to pick, so using a grimoire is fine.

Well, PoE didn't push for feminism, that is a fact. It has balanced men vs women in power, which isn't historically accurate for our world, but Eora is not Earth. This has been the norm for CRPG, even TRPG from the beginning, men like playing as female fighters/wizards/whatever not because we are feminists, but because we want. And maybe to put on some bikini armor. I simply can't understand how you can feel about PoE when almost every similar game, past or present, does the same thing. It's a bit late at this point, don't you think? If you somehow feel that developers were preaching and putting significantly more women in charge than men, "one after another", the only logical conclusion is that you want a game full of men. Or maybe a game where women strictly can only work as housewives or sex workers? Edit: just to add that the things you hate, for a fact, did add numbers to BG3's player base. I don't like the fangirl-ing around certain characters, but that's the reality. Saying Deadfire's relative failure was because of being woke is just stupid. There are a million reasons why people didn't want to buy Deadfire and people were vocal, yet I literally just saw one person saying it's because of wokeness in all these years.

I mean, playing a game full of man is super gay, right? PoE is isometrical, but imagine in modern action games you'll have a man's ass stuck on the screen for dozens of hours... I'd rather play a "feminism propaganda", thank you.

Well it's the very first time I saw someone say Deadfire is pro feminism. Of the 4 major factions, one is a council so does not count, 2 are led by women, but don't forget RDC is just a tool of Ruauatai empire and I believe their ranga nui is a man. If you look at the smaller factions' leadership, I simply don't get how you can reach the conclusion that Port Maje: let's say 1:1 Tikawara: male Ashen Maw: the one giving order is male Junvik: female Dawnstar: female Temple of Gaun: female Temple of Breath: male Cult of Rymrgand: male The list can go on and on. I never noticed the game is yelling "women powahhhh" in any way. You also need to remember fantasy games have a long history of making women "not weaker than man" so that the can play as whatever character we like. TBH saying PoE, not any other modern RPG, is pro-feminism, tells more about yourself rather than the game. Imagine in a objectively gender-balanced world you find yourself annoyed by the fact that women have jobs.

A bit of an necro here, just to add that even with permanent per-rest buff mod, and even if I triggered the scripted events at the shrines, I still lose the +2 DEX from the Neketaka event when praying at the two shrines. It seems they're in the same category and I can only keep one. Similar to how I can't get both +2 CON and +2 RES. There's the workaround though: just get one of those bonuses before the arsonist event. By the way, how to find the code on whether or not I get the scripted event to prevent resting at those shrines? It seems to be completely random, I've tried simply reloading or wandering around a bit to change the outcome, and it's just inconsistent.

Of course! I like how this build can be very flexible, like with a spellblade using Confounding Blind + double BotEP I didn't even need to pick Brute Force, but that character is by no means neccessary because Body Blows + Brute Force is a great starting point already.

Yeah, I found having both to be quite fun: If someone teleports to my back line, I can push them towards other enemies and use them to stun the crowd. The biggest limitation I had with only FoA is that when all enemies are in melee ranged/engaged (including fighting single bosses), pushing them messes with my other melee characters in the same way like Skyward Kick making enemies untargetable.

I'm playing the this class as a hireling, I have a couple of questions about ability choices: why not pick Torment's Reach as well? I get that FoA has better single target damage, but as the only way to spend wounds, did you find the push effect often unnecessary? Besides even using FoA nonstop you still can't spend all the wounds generated solely from self damage, so I think an alternative can help a lot.

Yeah you're right, played a bit more and saw no effect on the main target. Must have mistaken it for something else or looked at the wrong enemy in a multi-hit.

I'm getting interrupt on crit effect from Ciztal's Lance's AOE. Combat log shows the lance is the source of this effect, but I didn't see this in description or anywhere. One more reason it's a super useful weapon.

I had an effect of 30s base extended to 43.5s by INT on tooltip, and when applied to enchanter I got 46.5s, so I think this is additive.

Rod + modal is quite comparable to DW hand mortar overall, because Fire in the Hole has a bounce it's better than most rods (unless there's only one enemy ofc), Watershaper's Focus has a bounce but main target damage is even weaker than hand mortar.

Those numbers are already listed somewhere, so I didn't include.

Ah I completely misunderstood you earlier... I adviced on a weaker weapon because I thought you were open to letting the caster keep it so that it's more consistent between caster and phantom. If that's not the case, should the phantom be allowed to keep it just because it already did, but the whole interaction is clearly unintended and counter-intuitive? I think it's important that it behaves the same way on caster and phantom if only for the reason of consistency.

Maybe I understood, so the weapon still disappears after single use on caster?

Is damage a bit high if you compare it to Nannasin's Cobra Strike? They have about the same damage, the latter has worse damage type, and the poison, while is strong, will face immunities. Melee is also much more preferable to 1.8m ranged weapon except for ranger MC, because wizard can easily weaponize disengagement attacks. Also only changing one hand is arguably better than both. It seems that a lv3 common spell is much more appealing than lv4 unique spell of similar function in most cases.

Also I want to add that even though it is true that some Japanese politicians justified themselves with "levitating and educating our Asian brothers", the mass didn't really think that way. It's a more simple war, victory, rich! mindset. In the game you can see ordinary Ruauatai sailors or captains **** on Huana culture, although there's some truth in it, it's not a iconic part of imperial Japan thinking. In fact it's much more similar to white colonizers that saw everyone else as barbarians.

To this day I still don't get how Ruauatai is modeled after imperial Japan when the biggest war crime they can put in the game is murdering a small number of civilians. Any country trying to militarily control lands that belong to another is going to do way worse than how they wrote Ruauatai. Japan was only special because they were very barbaric by 20th century standard, let's don't pretend war was civil at any moment of our history. And what did we get in the game? There's not even a case in Deadfire that's comparable to that story you learned in PoE1 from souls and Maerwald, and the latter was the norm in history. If writers said themselves they modeled them after IJ, they missed the point, period. The writers fxxked up big time when trying to draw parallels from real world politics. Instead of portraying how indigenous people struggled when facing more powerful opponents, they were just given Wakanda cheats (watershaping) and fairy tale level of social reforms if you side with them. They wanted to talk about militarism but the worst they could do was assassinating a couple of local leaders. It's all sugarcoated to the point that you can't have any meaningful discussion about the topic anymore.

Maybe make it a simple close range spell with no weapon involved? Like jolting touch or sunless grasp. From the description we don't really need a weapon to begin with. Healing could be much higher imo. Draining missiles is a tier 2 spell with 100% heal and double PL scaling, since draining touch isn't unique and already has a weakened component, it can have like a 50% heal. If you want to keep the phantom+weapon possibility, you can make it summon a weaker weapon after the initial spell impact. keep the weakened effect but no further draining? It can have a short duration (base 5s for a couple of extra hits?) and lower than average damage, so that you don't really want to keep it for damage on yourself, but if you want to exploit phantom for a longer weakened effect at the cost of damage potential, you can.

I completely forgot about this one lol. Is it additive together with intellect bonus?

Now this is a proposition: weaker but lasting draining touch? Because you'll never want to use it normally, it only makes sense if you have like deathblow, but even then it's pretty questionable to spend a level 3 slot, you can do similar things as a rogue. It's either phantom trick or grimoire switching trick. I think that's exactly what needs to be balanced: no ability should be "exploit only" IMO if you cut its damage to 1H level it can be somewhat balanced as a weapon. Weakened lets you benefit from helm of the white void, but that's pretty much it. At late game weapon effects is an important part and weakened isn't even particularly good.

I forgot about the flail, is it treated as weapon attack for applying effects? And does it get weapon modifiers?