yorname

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?

Both in-game tooltip and the wiki don't list some AOE weapons' damage, so I looked at the file, it's incomplete since I might have forgotten some. Citzal Lance: 10-17 crushing, 7 PEN Rod modal: 9-13 piercing/slashing, 6 PEN Hand Mortars: 5-8 piercing/slashing, 6 PEN Kalakoth's Minor Blights: seems to be the only true AOE weapon with 14-20 damage to every target Rot Skull applies a DOT that does 12 corrode damage per 6s. I'm not sure if it ticks when re-applied, but even if it does, being a DOT means it doesn't get as many damage modifiers. So wizard has an edge here. You can get dual-wielding speed with Minor Blights, and Citzal's Lance is the best among the severely nerfed AOE melee weapons. Rods are underwhelming considering the recovery penalty, IMO only the Watershaper one is on par with hand mortars. I can't remember if these 2 also hit main target with their blast, but anyway we're discussing about the AOE part. Edit: Wahai Pōraga only does 5-9 damage to secondary target(s). It's a wierd one: it only triggers carnage around main target, but I'm not sure if it only triggers Heartbeat Drumming on main target, or does it seperately on every target. "TreatAsWeapon" is set to true for the AOE circle, but false to both actual attack effects.

I see. Megabosses are more "controlled environment" that avoid being hit isn't too hard. I was mainly thinking about SSS fights, those with ranged enemies are tricky. I got the impression that dealing damage or low defensive stats attracts enemy attention, not sure about CC effects tho. Focusing on CC/debuffing might be a good idea. Stone of Power trick is nice! Neck slot is generally not as good as head, it's a good trade.

Any idea to make good use of Enchanter passive? They lose almost all wizard offensive spells except for Evocation, which makes them okay SC, even though immunity to dex affliction is less important for pure caster for how easy to get in BPM. Do I want to use summoned weapons when I have access to Missile Salvo? For MC it's less appealing just because Evocation spells are meh. Even if I want wizard side only for self buffing or tanking, losing repulsive visage and wondrous torment on a tank is painful. And wizard MC just doesn't bring too much to help ranged character. On paper their passive is pretty good, I just can't think of a good use for it. This is s not a proposition for change though, just a discussion for build ideas. Edit: I remembered, I made a trickster/enchanter hireling a while ago but the watcher was boring so I dropped. To me that combination makes some sense. It gets most of the things a spellblade wants and requires slightly less babysitting than a normal one.

Exactly! The maps, quest design and storytelling were so different between 1 & 2. If you neglect the graphics, BG2, DAO to BG3 were not all that different, but BG1 was something else. I began to play when I was teenager because I was trying to be this edgelord: BG was not a huge deal in my country, the majority got PC and games slightly later, at the time of Warcraft 3 and WoW. So I just wanted to be different and play this "cult classic" someone told me about. It was the first game I played with proper story at all (with localization at least, Starcraft actually had good storytelling but no localization meant it was gibberish to 10yo me) so I didn't notice it. But after many years that I've played newer CRPGs, or even games in general, the difference was obvious. I too went back to PoE1 a few times but could not finish it again. I think the problem is that in many QoL aspects Deadfire is a strict upgrade, unlike BG1 and 2 where the different character levels made player experience different enough that it's only a matter of preference. For example I noticed that PoE1's shorter but more frequent encounters to be very tiring. You need to do the exact same things at the start of nearly every encounter, but every encounter is so short that you feel most of combat time is buffing chore. When playing BG you can afford being lazy, but endurance/health design in PoE1 means you want to at least do something in trash fights if only to preserve health.

Yeah I played on BPM. It was quite rough. It was a good support but I couldn't get enough focus safely to be as offensive as I like, so maybe that's their niche use. I can only imagine vanilla would be even more so. I guess that means nature godlike is less important for non-BPM. If food PL happens to not stack, on top of 7+2(potion), their +1 racial can't increase focus gain.

Also maybe a bit nitpicking here: the playlist page of the ultimate run specifically said SoF exploit was part of the run. I haven't watched to see how much exactly they relied on it, but the class is definitely not that powerful. CP soul mind is just something else. Without it I had to position much more conservatively and gear towards defensive stats to the point that offensive chanter spells felt bad to use. Even the "infinite CC loop" on the cipher side only worked once in a while.

Does +1PL from food stack in unmodded game? It's kind of a big deal for psion especially MC. It's one of the few cases that nature godlike is really good: food + racial can raise PL from 7 to 9, so focus generation grows from 4/s to 5/s

Basically I saw discussion in this topic, it seems vicous and speed 20 enchantments are applied to the character, not the one weapon, so having one speed weapon can reduce even eliminate recovery for the other hand? Is that true? It's hard to figure out by myself in game because recovery time isn't shown like in Deadfire.

It seems -accuracy +damage means it's always going to be a win more situation. Did some quick calculations if adding +30% crit damage on top: If acc-defense = 25, weapon_modifier = 100%: no modal: 182.5% per hit modal: 191% if acc-defense = 50, weapon_modifier = 100%: no modal: 215% modal: 244% looking at the results, I think it's still "don't bother" territory. 100% total weapon modifier is not hard to reach with legendary weapons, and having accuracy be 50 higher than defense is quite situational. I guess a ranger against Guardian of Ukaizo is the example here, but would you be using a greatsword in that fight to begin with? I think if you intend to keep the +damage design, the numbers need to be much higher. Like resulting in a 1.3* overall damage when acc-defense = 50. It's kind of wierd that they got a pretty niche but accurate idea about longsword's half-swording, but greatsword is back to this stereotypical berserking meathead weapon.