ebonfowl

Just released a mod that reworks the Watcher abilities (...of Death's Herald and ...of the Lost abilities) slightly on the Nexus. I was tired of them just taking up space on my abilities bar only to get used zero times ever. The most notable changes are that the abilities are no longer 1/rest, instead you refresh their use through dealing damage or getting kills. The afflictions caused by the upgraded abilities are now also upgraded on crit. There are some other minor changes as well which are all explained in the description on the mod's Nexus page.

As I work on a mod to prevent crashes with Mohora Tanga self-proc overflows, I stumbled across something interesting about Heartbeat Drumming and Swift Flurry. At the mechanical level, these two abilities work in different ways, and the difference matters. Swift Flurry simply fires a primary attack 33% of the time on crit as you would imagine it works. Every melee weapon crit can trigger it. Very straight forward. Heartbeat Drumming, on the other hand, works in a different way. When you crit with a melee weapon, 25% of the time it applies a status effect to the target that cannot stack with itself and that status effect then triggers a primary attack from the monk against the target. This extra step is important due to the order in which scripted attacks resolve. In effect, this means that HBD will only trigger once for most weapons that self-proc (such as Mohora Tanga) or for weapons that launch multiple attacks that can proc concurrently (such as Ball and Chain, Sanguine Great Sword, or Sun and Moon), depending on how the attacks these weapons proc are scripted. This is similar to how cleaving stance works under the hood. This means that HBD is much less useful for chain proc builds than Swift Flurry, not just because the chance to proc is lower, but also because it will always only get one bite at the apple for each set of self-procs or set of eligible attacks that proc concurrently. To illustrate, a double crit from Sun and Moon should have .747 probability to proc at least one extra SF/HBD attack if they both worked as I assume the community has always thought that they do. However, since HBD can only proc once on the concurrent attacks, that means the actual probability for at least one extra attack is .663. Mohora Tanga is even crazier - with my mod running that cuts off self-procs of Red Flag Flying at 50 in a row, the full chain will only proc one HBD. Still a meaningful improvement, but less useful, and as you look at the odds to get a respectable chain going, the odds are impacted more and more.

I love Black Jacket but hate that the Fire Shield from Magran's Blessing deactivates when you switch weapon sets and does not come back on when you switch back, wasting the effect's duration. This mod makes it come back on when you switch back so you get the full duration. Note, the duration is a running clock from the time combat starts so the clock is ticking while the shield is unequipped. Still behaves the same otherwise. I will put this on the Nexus soon along with my Red Flag Flying crash preventer mod. MagransBlessingFireShieldReignite.zip

I want to get a couple things from the Huana: 1) the prince's equipment, and 2) the Apex Ward shield and I don't want to wait until the Final Maneuver. So a couple questions: 1) If I kill the Huana faction early in the game (before Hasongo), will it ruin things later? I just murdered all of Serpent's Crown to test and nothing immediately went haywire as far as I could tell. 2) If I decide I just want the Apex Ward, how can I lower their reputation enough that the ship appears but remain able to complete their faction quests? I have been intimidating their captains, but I get to -1 reputation and it freezes there. My reputation is at zero with the Huana on my save and I have not started any of their quests.

Summon twins + run and hide + Mortification of the Soul? Just force the wounds, rinse, and repeat?

Mohora Tanga is my favorite monk Swift Flurry/HBD weapon, but the Red Flag Flying self-proc explodes stacks and kills games. I am working on a mod that will prevent the infinite loop behavior and avoid these crashes while still essentially allowing Mohora Tanga to function as it does currently. I am still working on a fix for holding Mohora Tanga in the main hand - it is substantially better with this mod, and I haven't crashed my game yet while testing it, but there is still extreme lag. Currently, however, this mod completely fixes the crashes that can be experienced by holding the spear in your off hand (my preferred format) by limiting Red Flag Flying's self-procs to 50 at which point the ability is removed and immediately replaced, breaking the infinite loop. I will post this on the Nexus once I can get the main hand behavior reliably limited, but for anyone who wants to use Mohora Tanga with your monk today, here is the mod. RedFlagFlyingSafetyValve.zip

Hauani can merge back up into bigger oozes?? I've literally never seen this. Gross! Another good monk strategy for Hauani is Fire in the Hole (main), Mohora Tanga (off hand), WotW, and a source of Avenging Storm (scroll, Heaven's Cacophony) - you can sometimes one-shot with such a build if you can get some bonus accuracy and hit-to-crit, or lower its fortitude and deflection. I think only the first blob has resistance to might afflictions, so you can stun the lesser blobs if you use WotW with the stalking cloak. This can also work against Belranga to bounce mortar shots and WotW off the spiders, but her defenses are a good deal higher and the results aren't usually as spectacular until you kill a lot of the spiders and lower her defenses (though this happens quickly with this setup). On the other hand, I don't think she has any resistances, so you can sometimes get a lucky roll with one of the many attack rolls you will be making with WotW and stun her if wearing stalking cloak, even early in the fight.

Boom! Got it! Took me several approaches, but now I have tight, reliable control over the max number of self-procs Red Flag Flying can do. This is 10 max, time to do some testing at 100 and see what happens.

Haha I didn't know this. I guess I am going to have to console Eder into a monk in every playthrough now... Speaking of multi-hit weapons, does Ball and Chain give 3 chances for Swift Flurry/HBD per attack when it crits with Crushing Yoke and Subjugation? I am looking at Crushing Yoke in the exported JSONs right now and I didn't realize it launches an attack in basically the same way Mohora Tanga does. If so, there is only a ~12.5% chance that it doesn't trigger at least one proc. That's pretty great.

I figured I would test it more and sure enough crashed my game almost immediately with Stunning Blow and MT in the offhand. Just had to add a bunch more accuracy - I don't think I was quite high enough to truly go infinite on PotD with modded extra upscaling. Also, I had Seeker's Fang in my main hand for my last playthrough on a transcendent, so I think the giant raw damage was killing all the low-fortitude weaklings before MT even hit them (so maybe the consistent order of hits with full attack abilities does matter in some contexts). Currently making a "safety valve" mod that does not interfere with the self-proc, but prevents the infinite loop. By setting `MaxTriggerCount` to a finite number I think it may stop the loop from going infinite. I just one-handed MT hit a dummy three times in a row and my game did not crash. It hangs for a bit, but the loop does stop even when every Red Flag Flying hit is a crit. I need to tune the value a bit to see if I can cut the loop off earlier. At `MaxTriggerCount: 30` it still overflows the combat log before stopping itself and hangs for a good second or two.

OK, so I have read through the thread where the Red Flag Flying self-proc was discovered and discussed, and it is my go-to monk loadout now. In that thread y'all pointed out that it is much less risky in the offhand, but will still crash the game if player accuracy exceeds enemy defense by over 100 points (every hit is a crit). After playing for over 100 hours with Mohora Tanga in my monk's offhand I think there may be more to it. Even with multiple stacks of +20 accuracy from Scordio's Edge + SoF (like 5+ when I've tested it), I never crash the game when it is in my offhand unless I do a regular auto-attack. If I use any other active ability that does a full attack (such as stunning blow) it has never crashed the game, even though I get massive Red Flag Flying chains. One thing I have noticed is that the animation from the standard auto-attack will often attack with the offhand weapon first (and these are the only times I crash my game), but a full attack ability will always attack with the primary weapon first, then the offhand. I have not tested this with Entropy or other 100% crit conversion methods yet, but my accuracy has been so high that it is in effect the same thing. @Boeroer did you ever crash the game with an active ability full attack, or was it always with auto attacks? I am curious if I am on to something here, or if it is just the luck of many, many draws. Also worth noting that I strictly play turn-based. Not sure if that matters. To the OP: my vote is 1) Magran's Favor (main) + Mohora Tanga (offhand) for single target annihilation or 2) one of the mortars (main) + Mohora Tanga (offhand) for widespread destruction. You can add bolt catchers, etc., but it is not needed if you have some way of boosting your accuracy. I see Mohora Tanga as a worker thread that proceeds in the background allowing you to attack over and over with the main hand weapon due to Swift Flurry/HBD procs, so there is much less need for a multi-hit weapon in the main hand. Then the question becomes: which one-handed weapon is best to hit with over and over? In my estimation, this seems to be something with Bleeding Cut for single targets and multi-hit mortar AOEs for groups. Seeker's Fang is, of course, also great if you want to MC with Cipher, particularly if you are willing to make a bunch of Soul Blade max focus stacks permanent with SoF/CG - then you are holding an absolute nuke that deals massive raw damage and basically has its own version of Bleeding Cut. Also has a cool multi-hit cone AOE once/encounter that won't proc Swift Flurry/HBD, but will proc the giant raw DOT once on each target and the smaller, but stackable raw DOT three times on each target. With the potentially sky-high intelligence of the monk, the cone is actually pretty good sized too.

Hey all, it has always bothered me that you stopped getting combat XP after filling the bestiary so I edited the .NET assembly to always give XP and released it on the Nexus. Unfortunately, the behavior is hard-coded in the assembly file, so you have to replace your own assembly file with the edited one. I do not know of any other standard Unity method for injecting patches at runtime (such as using Harmony) that works with Deadfire, so this is the only option I was aware of. Luckily I am about 7 years too late with this, so new patches will not be forthcoming. I completed a PotD playthrough and it worked fine and was honestly less impactful than I thought it would be on the speed of leveling. Hope you enjoy! Obviously not compatible with anything that also requires replacing the IL assembly. Always remember to back up your vanilla assembly before replacing!!