grasida

The description of soul annihilation suggests it adds (10+focus/4)*might bonus*PL bonus raw damage. Actually, it adds (10*weapon damage bonus + (((focus-10)/4)*weapon damage bonus))*PL bonus raw damage, where weapon damage means things like sneak attack, weapon enchantment, might and soul whip. To insert my opinion, I think that’s pretty weird. If it followed the formula in the description, it would be way too weak, but I guess it might be stronger than intended right now on rogue multiclasses.

I hope this isn’t something a bunch of people already know. I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned here yet. Soul Annihilation’s tool tip description is completely wrong. If you work backwards from the number it gives you, it describes damage dealt as (10 + focus/4) * might bonus * PL Bonus + miscellaneous bonuses (sworn enemy shows up in the description if you have it). That’s not how it works. The actual raw damage dealt by soul annihilation is (10*weapon damage modifier + (((focus-10)/4)*weapon damage modifier)*PL bonus (whoops, I forgot to actually test PL bonuses, so if it’s totally inconsistent with every other ability in the game, that part might be wrong). Weapon damage modifier means anything that multiplies your weapon’s base damage like sneak attack, might or even soul whip. Yes, that means you’ll do more damage with soul annihilation at one point less than max focus than if your focus is totally maxed. “Lash” damage doesn’t affect SA’s raw damage and even though SA is a spell, +% spell damage doesn’t either. The raw damage can’t crit or graze. tl;dr: 1. The Soul Annihilation description is totally wrong, it will typically do a lot more damage than it says it does. 2. Soul Annihilation is way better than it looks according to the description, especially if you go for a streetfigher/ soul blade, which on paper is probably the highest single target melee damage character in the game. Edit: wrote down the wrong formula, focus is subtracted by 10 before being divided and multiplied by all the other stuff.

He said "Maybe because of the sneak attack bonus from assassin", so I thought maybe that's what he's talking about. Otherwise, there's no accounting for the random number god. It giveth and it taketh away.

It's easily summed up this way: the game presents so many powerful one-handed weapons and so many skills that favor dual wielding that it's both very hard to make a dual wielding character that is worse than a two-handed weapons character, and it's very hard to make a two-handed weapons character that can compete with a dual wielding character. Ideally, you should have to think about the game systems a little to find the best way to use any style. But no style should require you to totally build around it in order to be effective. That's just not the case right now. There is still a serious balance issue with weapon styles in Deadfire.

D:OS 1 got an enhanced addition that completely shook up the balance of the game and D:OS 2 is slated to get the same. BG games were from an earlier time, before steam or GoG when frequent patching wasn't feasible. I didn't make it through dragon age origins and only tried it many years after it was released, so I don't know about that one. At any rate, your complaint here seems more targeted at the nature of Obsidian's balance patches than the existence of balance patches at all. You don't like nerfs and you like buffs. That's fine, I understand some people just want to land on a really strong build and smash the game. One of my best friends still likes early Final Fantasy games best because he doesn't want to think about which skills to pick, he just wants to find the best way to smash the game to pieces as quickly as possible. But I believe that by the final version PoE 2, as long as Obsidian remains committed to balance, players will be able to have more fun playing the game than at the time it was released, because the great majority of skills will be worth using. That's never been possible in any complex game ever released without the aid of balance patches.

Assassinate will provide more critical hits on attacks from stealth than intuitive. 25% hit to crit is not the same as 25% accuracy. Hits can only account for 50% of your attack roll at most, so 25% hit to crit is only converting at most 12.5% of actual attacks to crits, while 25 accuracy, assuming you have at least 50% chance to hit already, actually gives you 25% chance to crit. What's more, accuracy stacks additively. 25 Accuracy plus 12 accuracy from dance of death means +37% chance to crit. But 25% hit-to-crit from intuitive + 20% hit to crit from single weapon style actually only makes for 40% hit to crit, or at most 20% of attack rolls converted to crits. So, while attacking from stealth, shadow dancer has a clear advantage. But, for a brawler that's not messing around with stealth and invisibility and such, but just standing in the middle of a big group of enemies and punching them, you should get more critical hits over the course of a fight. You just don't have as much ability to dictate exactly when you crit.

A lot of single player games get frequent support and balance changes. Even if a game is single player, or has no competitive play in the game itself, a lot of players like to engage with the community online by posting creative builds and pointing out interesting synergies. That's a lot of what makes games like that interesting. I'd list Grim Dawn as a prime example of that. Although the game has multiplayer, it's not balanced for it at all. The balance is completely directed at single player and it gets frequent balance changes. Many rogue-like rpgs also see frequent balance changes. That keeps the core community engaged with the game and stokes constant buzz about it on social media. And balance changes don't only mean nerfs or removing existing play styles. Or were you upset that ranger pets were buffed? At this point with Deadfire, I think buffs for uninteresting or under-performing abilities are more important than nerfs, even if I do believe some nerfs are still needed. If I had complete control over deadfire's patches with no restrictions on freedom or resources, my goal in the next patch would be to buff things players don't seem to like. -Early level priest spells and many priest buffs are a frequent target of complaint, and I'd try to spice them up. I think priests of Eothas are boring and weaker than other priests, and I'd like to see a more unique and interesting spell list for them. -Ciphers are now in a good place (as a result of balance changes, I might add) but there are still a number of weak cipher powers that could stand to be much more interesting or powerful, like wild leech, fractured volition and haunting chains . -Rogues are pretty good now (again, as a result of changes coming from balance patches), but a number of their abilities have issues. Coordinated positioning is very difficult to find a use for. Sap is extremely situational. The smoke bomb line isn't very popular. Shadow step is often rated as weak or very situational. Enervating strike is highly overpriced, etc. All of those could be changed to make rogues more fun to play with a balance patch. -A lot of fighter abilities are really overpriced, like inspired discipline, power strike and, in my opinion, into the fray. Reducing the cost on those abilities to make them competitive with other uses of discipline would make the fighter more fun to play. -Paladin inspirations are very rarely considered useful. I would be hard pressed to think of a reason to take any of them. Sacred immolation is a frequent target of complaints. There doesn't seem to be much reason in general to take a single-class paladin over a multiclass, though I admit some of the high-tier powers like healing chain might be incredible. All of that could be fixed with well designed buffs to the relevant skills. Do you really mean to say you don't want Obsidian to change any of that? You'd rather just have a bunch of crap abilities in the game that nobody is ever going to choose? You'd rather ciphers suck and rogues to be strictly weaker than fighters? Why? I'd much rather have more balance patches that make weak abilities worth considering.

Might is really important for soul blades, since it multiplies their raw damage on soul annihilation. I wouldn’t dump it if you take a soul blade. Dexterity and perception are really nice for them also. Which one is most valuable is extremely complicated and probably depends on play style.

Soul annihilation can crit, but it doesn’t influence the raw damage. Critting before you use it increases your focus, which increases your raw damage, though. Fun thing about soul annihilation, though — it interrupts on crit. With sun and moon, every attack can be soul annihilation. With borrowed instinct and tactical meld, as well as secret horrors or psychovampiric shield reducing deflection, that means you have two good chances to interrupt on every attack and you’re swinging a fast weapon. Also soul annihilation base melee damage is multiplied by 5% per PL after one and the raw damage is (10 + focus/2)*might bonus* PL bonus. It adds up to a lot of extra damage, especially if you can make every attack soul annihilation. You can charge up a bunch of focus and drop it all into one big soul annihilation, but that’s not very efficient, especially if you’re not so accurate you can’t miss. It’s better to try and use it as often as possible to avoid overkill and maximize its flat damage.

If you think of soul annihilation as like a melee passive that’s increasing your total damage dealt, it should still easily be one of the most powerful melee “passives” in the game if you build around it right. At very high might, attack speed and accuracy, it’s a very large total multiplier to damage dealt. But that’s not say it would be more damage than amplified wave spam on an ascended witch with blood thirst cancelling recovery. But is there any melee build that could compare with that? I suspect helwalker/soul blade with sun and moon is the best choice to get the absolute most out of soul annihilation. You could build it to have solid deflection and other defenses, too, with tuotilo’s palm. I haven’t actually tried one, though.

Testing is likely to be artificial too, since testing assumes choosing specific characters to use savage attack with and specific enemies to use it on. Unless you do something like play through the game with one guy using a great sword with savage attack on all the time, one guy who never uses it and one guy who uses it judiciously. I did some calculations on it last month and came to the conclusion it’s a damage boost on most characters (not rogues, almost for sure) as long as you would have a 50% chance to hit or so anyway. Since you can flank enemies for a free 10% chance to hit, that makes it okay most of the time. It’s still a fairly disappointing ability, since missing is no fun and it only results in a minor damage increase in most cases. But it still is a damage increase. Most weapon modals aren’t very exciting, to be honest.

Interesting. I tested it on a cipher wizard after casting eldritch aim and infuse with vital essence to see if you could control the inspirations it gives you. It put distracted on an enemy and it did nothing for me. I guess wild leech warrants further testing.

The beta patch speeds them up considerably, though there’s no mention of a change in damage. It will be interesting to see how the pets do now. Their damage is still not recorded on the character sheet, unfortunately.

Regarding tactical meld: Perception inspirations aren’t that common. Fighters get one as a core skill for the class. Priests can give out perception inspirations to the whole party, but you have to bring a priest, you have to pick those spells on that priest, then the spells have limited duration and compete for limited resources. Tactical meld is nice for an unlimited source of a tier two perception inspiration on two characters alone. But the engagement buff is also potentially very good. You say ciphers don’t care, but tanky multiclass ciphers do. It’s really good for a riposte focused mind stalker, for example. Or it could be used to give a fighter (either the cipher himself, someone else or both) a very high engagement limit while in mob stance. Regarding wild leech: First, your point that you wouldn’t take psychovampiric shield doesn’t make sense if you’re taking wild leech. Nothing says you have to take a fourth level spell. You could take psychovampiric shield in addition to the other strong second level powers instead of wild leech. And psychovampiric shield is competes with them less, because it costs half as much as wild leech. Second, using wild leech to set up sneak attack or death blows seems inefficient. Ciphers can inflict much more powerful afflictions to large groups of enemies at once for less focus than wild leech uses. Yes, it buffs the cipher at the same time, but the buff is minor, unpredictable and frequently useless. And rogues can apply multiple afflictions to an enemy with one guile while dealing damage at the same time. Melee rogues get death blows against any enemy they’re targeting for free, because of persistent distraction. For ranged rogues, wild leech won’t qualify the enemy for death blows by itself anyway, so you’ll still need to do something else to them anyway, so why not just skip wild leech. Third, I meant wild leech might be worth taking if it had no recovery time at all, like wizard buffs. It has a three second recovery, which is fast, but still not good. Remember all cipher spells have a built in “recovery” because you have to generate focus to cast them. Even if wild leech had no recovery time, it would still be dubious because almost any other action you could take would be more efficient.

Escape also has no recovery. The difference is escape gives a large deflection bonus and immunity to engagement for a very short duration, while evasive roll gives the quick inspiration. Also escape looks much cooler.

This used to be my opinion, and I even proposed it here (or on something awful, I forget) but for good or bad, the game treats tier 3 inspirations as special. Most of them are unique to a single class and are only available as personal or single target buffs. While I think having wild leech provide tier 3 inspirations would add some interesting reactivity and diversity to ciphers, it would be a striking departure from the way the game handles these buffs.

Lord Darryn’s Voulge is no longer unquestionably superior to every other two hander when used well, but it’s still very good on the right build (berserkers, tempests, maybe some wardens, etc.). Magistrate’s cudgel applies a marked effect that boosts gives +10 accuracy to everything you do to it’s target. That’s really powerful! And it has stun (or paralyze, I forget) on crit for ciphers. And the mace modal is quite useful. It’s a really solid weapon in the right hands. Marux Amanth falls short of Pukestabber, but is still a good weapon. It’s not possible for all your characters to all wield Pukestabber all at once. Even if you don’t count Modwyr, and notice the “even if”, the soul bounds are all pretty good, except for the arquebus, which seems underwhelming.

All of the soul bounds except the arquebus are pretty good, though, and have unique, powerful effects you don't see anywhere else. I haven't really used the arquebus, but it looks thoroughly unimpressive. And the soul bounds in PoE were generally unimpressive too, they were just more interesting than most uniques. That's not to say I wouldn't agree with a rework of how soul bound equipment works. Uniques became a lot more interesting in deadfire while soul bounds didn't change much. Their primary advantage now is that they upgrade for free. It would be more interesting if, as M4xw0lf said, they reacted to dispositions, or had other exotic properties.

Wild leech applies a random low-tier infliction and inspiration, and random means random. If you already have a perception inspiration and it rolls perception, you get nothing. The debuff is weak and unreliable and the buff is weak and unreliable and if you have any other buffs on your self or debuffs on your target, it might just fail completely. Compare it with psychovampiric shield, which does the same thing predictably but better (-10 enemy resolve vs. -5 to random stat) but costs half as much. In my opinion, it’s one of the worst abilities in the game. It was twice as powerful in poe 1 and nobody liked it then either. If it were a level one spell, it would be okay. If it had no recovery at all, like many far more powerful wizard buffs, it might be okay, though not worth the focus if your cipher regularly uses psychovampiric shield or tactical meld, since it then has s 33% chance to fail. And it would certainly be worthless if you’re team had any character that likes to cast lots off inspirations, like a priest or a chanter. I read one good solution for it here, but I can’t recall what it was. I think if it randomly gave two or three afflictions for two or three inspirations, it might be worth taking.

The issue with something like bonfires or save points is that without respawning enemies or random encounters to enforce attrition, they’ll just be seen as similar to the current system, but with a backtracking tax added. Functionally they’re not all that much different from poe 1’s resting supplies. Fights in dark souls are typically over fast and are designed assuming you’ll get killed by them many times. Old-school JRPG random encounters are considered pretty abhorrent nowadays. I think the only way such a system would work in a game like pillars would be with major sacrifices to the feeling of simulation. Perhaps if you could only use a rest point once per dungeon and everything in the dungeon (including the camp site) respawned if you left it would enforce attrition. But that wouldn’t help Deadfire much, in which there are few dungeons and a lot of the combat takes place on boats or single encounter screens.

I’ll have to wait and see how it’s implemented, but the trinkets described in the interview seem like the most disappointing possible design. I thought Deadfire was a step away from per rest! And with no meaningful restriction on resting anyway, the only thing powerful per rest abilities adds is a big leap up in player power paired with an increase in tedium. Perhaps the 2.0 patch or beast of winter will make resting a more difficult decision.

I tested it thoroughly at some point and just forgot exactly what the progression for monastic unarmed training is, but it's definitely slower than the monk passive. Of course, they start the same, and it's possible they overlap at some levels.

Monastic Unarmed Training increments it’s “quality” bonus every 3 PL (I think, maybe it’s 4) instead of every 2. It should still be decent as a backup weapon for a spear devoted againts skeletons, for example, and probably still makes a very solid main weapon for single class characters.

Can the OP or anyone who’s tried this build pitch in on how to maximize the effectiveness of disengagement retaliation? I’m thinking of making a harbinger that works in a somewhat similar way, but I’m worried it won’t be easy to actually be targeted by engagement, then disengage and trigger riposte. Is it possible to really get a significant number of disengagement retaliations per fight?

Where do you get bracers of greater deflection? Are they a random drop from abandoned villages or something?