grasida

Shattered pillar only generates wounds from normal attacks since 1.1. Perhaps there are some special cases, but I specifically tested crippling strike and soul annihilation, and neither of them generated wounds for a shattered pillar monk. Why a dagger instead of tuotilio's palm? The shield should deal fairly comparable damage while you're hitting with it at all, which you can often avoid due to spamming torment's reach, and gives much better defenses.

That’s true about crippling strike, but for a multi class with shattered pillar specifically, that doesn’t matter so much since crippling strike won’t build wounds. You’re totally focused on actives from monk, so you’re free to spend guile only on escape and illusion spells. Actually what looks really broken on the 1.2 trickster is 1 guile cost ryngrim’s repulsive visage. A persistent save or lose aura that also reduces enemy healing and max health and can be kept up indefinitely is way, way better than 10% weapon damage and more uses of rogue powers.

They should still be able to get to a pretty solid level of tankiness! Check out tuotilio’s palm, the small shield you can buy in neketaka. That can give a monk up to 28 deflection if you stack wounds. It will give less with a shattered pillar, but spamming primary attacks works really well with that shield, since it lets you have all the advantages of dual wielding and a shield without suffering too much from the lower base damage of the shield bash. Even without the +10 deflection from the balanced shield enchant, you should reach very solid levels of deflection and excellent levels in other defenses. And if you do get overwhelmed in melee, you have access to both blade turning and ryngrim’s repulsive visage. Also remember that mirrored image is way better for tricksters than for wizards, since it only costs one guile out of your whole pool instead being of stuck at twice per encounter and competing with other spells. That means tricksters can freely recast it if the bonus diminishes, while wizards basically can’t.

Here are some things I noticed messing around with the console. I don't know if they should each have a separate thread or if posting a few issues in one thread is okay. The description of scordeo's edge states the accuracy boost can stack 10 times, but at the moment, it can stack endlessly. Stalker's Patience has no accurate property. The same is true of Kahua Hozi, but since Kahua Hozi is mechanically more like a sword, I assume that's intended. Stalker's Patience doesn't seem to be such an amazing item as to warrant losing its special weapon type property. Mohora Tanga, at least, keeps accurate, but it's also weird that only one of the unique spears is actually functions like a spear. Shared pain seems to still be performing a full attack against all targets. I'm not sure whether that's intended. The raw damage on the ability also doesn't seem to be working. As a bonus, I'm pretty sure this has been mentioned before, but Rannig's Wrath still loses its original enchants when you upgrade it with new enchantments.

I feel like this is a clear case where other classes got a lot of attention and ciphers really didn’t. With the general increase in complexity of resource systems and damage creep in Deadfire, I agree cipher focus generation feels a little boring, even if the specific numbers are okay for characters that take draining whip. In general, between power choices and passives, Deadfire ciphers are stuck in an awkward place between martial classes and other casters. But I want to reiterate that this isn’t a problem with focus itself, rather that the abilities you can use with focus tend to be boring and are mostly weak. You brought up spirit armor. If ciphers had a spell like spirit armor, it would essentially be a passive for them, since past early levels the cost would be trivial and they could keep it up all the time. A wizard that casts spirit armor is making a choice and a cipher wouldn’t be. Wizards can cast this spell and only have one use thrust of tattered veils, slicken or chill fog left. Then they could cast fleet feet or Eldritch Aim as well and give up all their offensive and utility powers at that level. And then they could be hit with arcane dampener and have to burn an empower to get just one more cast of a level one spell. If ciphers had spirit armor as a level one spell, they could simply recast it immediately if it were dispelled and the cost of using it would effectively never interfere with using any of their other powers at any level. That’s why obsidian has to be very careful designing cipher powers, because if a lot of other class abilities were just transplanted directly into the cipher class, the ability to cast them with focus would make them overwhelmingly powerful. I strongly disagree with the notion that focus is a weak mechanic in Deadfire. Ciphers don’t need a redesign of their resource system. They need more impactful ability choices and more instant cast or zero recovery spells to make up for the fact that weapon attacks are essentially their “recovery”. If the spell list were better, everyone would be saying ciphers are overpowered because of their resource mechanics.

Most of your list would be an improvement, but I disagree with this. Draining whip is clearly superior to biting whip and is a no brainer pick for most ciphers. But nerfing focus gain is very dangerous, since the viability of all the powers is dependent on being able to generate focus to cast them. A draining whip build should be able to cast its top tier powers every 2-3 attacks. Instead of nerfing draining whip, I’d recommend changing biting whip from a measly 10% weapon damage boost to a 15% raw lash. That makes it a serious choice that’s comparable with other good bonuses from martial classes, and makes biting whip really tempting for ciphers that care a lot about weapon damage.

I've done it, but just against enemies I've spawned with the console. I haven't played a single class cipher from beginning to end. So, I'll admit I can't claim to be a cipher expert. But, I also wonder to what extent your views of ciphers are shaped by your experience with ascendants. However, I don't think all the claims thrown out about how ciphers are no good add up. Some of them hold water and some of them don't. I don't buy it that focus is a disadvantage. If mental binding, for example, had no recovery time and did damage, focus would be considered an overpowered resource mechanic, not an underpowered one. The problem is with the power of cipher abilities, not focus itself. I seriously doubt obsidian decided to give wizards, priests and druids bonus spells just to make traditional casters more powerful. Rather, I expect it's because of the heavy limitations of their resource system, and if that resource system weren't attached to a series of very powerful abilities, wizard fans would in turn be blaming it for the weakness of their favorite class. I don't know what kind of attack speed and damage you had with your cipher. I was testing with a dual wield build that attacked a little slower than once per second with time parasite. That by itself was enough to cast level 9 powers frequently. I didn't test with reaping knives, but was getting decent supplemental focus gain with the complete self (+5 focus on crit with cipher powers) and ectopsychic echo as well as antipathetic field. Here's a point I'd like to bring up. You've mentioned that ninagauth's death ray is like a better version of ectopsychic echo. But ignoring any comparison between the two classes, or ignoring the difference in the recovery times, or the value of different resource systems on different difficulties and the number of times a particular ability can be cast, ectopsychic echo targets reflex and ninagauth's death ray targets fortitude. That alone makes a big difference. It seems that practically every nasty enemy has very high fortitude, while reflex very rarely seems to be high on enemies that don't fold instantly to weapon damage anyway.

It should work in any game. I downloaded your file, created an override folder (placed in game folder/PillarsOfEternityII_Data/override) and put your file there. With the file there, the voulge doesn't deal AoE damage to my character, my party or neutrals, but without that file, it does. So the change you made to the file works. Maybe you should try to put it in the override folder?

I haven't really made an effective deflection tank in this game before. At what point do you start to get enough defense that further gains make a noticeable improvement in effective health? For people unclear about the concept of increasing returns with this type of defensive stat in rpgs, check thelee's thread for a thorough and easy to follow explanation here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/102824-class-build-mechanics-101-lets-learn-with-umezawa-streetfighterwael/. I'm planning a helwalker/soul blade transcendent using tuotilo's palm, the monk punching shield. That shield has a nice synergy with soul blade, since constantly repeatable primary attacks allow you to mostly avoid punching with the shield, meaning you enjoy the recovery boost from dual wielding with the defense boost of the shield without much downside. The shield itself can give up to +28 deflection and reflex (+4 small shield, +8 legendary, +6 shield style, +10 from the "balanced shield" enchant). Cipher can eventually give another +20 from borrowed instinct, for a total of +48. A chanter could give another +10, or a paladin could give +20. Between helwalker, duality of mortal presence and the shield, fortitude, reflex and will should also be very high. With that character, would I be able to hit a high enough deflection that way to significantly reduce incoming damage? But this thread isn't meant only for that character. Looking at the various deflection buffs, it's incredibly hard to assess their value because I've never really tried to build heavily in deflection or payed too much attention to enemy accuracy. Any attempt at light investments have never payed off, so I guess I've never hit the point where you really start to gain a lot from each point. For example, I'm curious how much deflection you need to get from equipment and buffs before investment in resolve beats investment in constitution.

What class are you? I'm pretty sure this doesn't affect static thunder, the barbarian specific upgrade of the weapon, but does affect static charge. The description for all versions specifies that it affects only enemies, so I think this is a bug. It's very easy to fix in your game files, though. Open your game install folder and go to PillarsofEternityII_Data/exported/design/gamedata then open attacks.gamedatabundle in a text editor. Search for"static" (no quotes). Under the first entry you find, something like "coursair's voulge static charge", look for "AffectedTargetType":"All" and change "All" to "Hostile" (quotes required). That's a pretty hacky method. It will be changed if a patch changes that file. You could create an override folder and put your modified copy of attacks.gamedatabundle in there, but I don't remember where to create the override folder.

I strongly agree with the first, and I agree that the cipher power list looks like it really suffered from a lack of attention from developers in deadfire, but I'm not sold on the second point. Cipher is not comparable one to one with traditional casters like wizards because of their passives, and compared with other class' resource systems, I don't think focus looks too bad. In fact focus is pretty much just the same as wounds on shattered pillars, and in their case, people see their resource mechanic as a positive. Of course, shattered pillar is backed up by a secondary resource pool and very strong buffs and passives, but the conclusion to draw from that is mostly that monk ability choices are better and more interesting than cipher ability choices, which we already knew and isn't related to the resource mechanic itself. Let's compare focus to per-level spells and martial power pools. It's true that per-level casters like wizards can cast more powers per fight, but they're highly limited in their usage of specific powers. Take mirrored image as an example. This is a really good spell, but it competes with a lot of other very strong choices at the same level, both in offense (combusting wounds), debuffs (miasma of dull mindedness) and other melee buffs (infuse with vital essence and arcane veil). A wizard might really, really want to cast mirrored image, but not really be able to because it competes with other more important choices. Ciphers will never face this problem. They'll cast fewer spells overall than a wizard, but they can cast individual spells, or spells from a specific level far more frequently. Compared with power pools, focus also has an advantage. Both resource systems allow frequent use of low tier abilities, but martial characters have to be very sparing in their use of expensive skills, or they'll be unable to use any of their powers at all. A fighter that's used inspired strike 2-3 times is now fighting at half strength. Ciphers don't have to deal with that. A high level cipher can reduce most anything to its component particles very fast with death by a thousand cuts followed by recall agony, antipathetic field and mind blades, and they're only limited in their ability to do so by the remaining health of the enemies on the field. With time parasite, they can probably pull this combo off at least once every 10 seconds, maybe more considering the kind of focus generation powers high levels ciphers have access to. I'm not arguing there are no issues with ciphers. But I don't think focus itself is a weak mechanic in deadfire or that the comparison with per-level resource systems is valid. Focus is still very strong. As you mentioned elsewhere, ciphers really need a ground-up rework of their skill tree in the way that chanters got. Maybe they need some way, through trinkets or a list of automatically granted powers, to get more versatility. But if they actually had a variety of fun, interesting uses for focus, it would still be seen as a highly advantageous resource system.

I'm really having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. Let's assume the simplest possible situation. No crits or grazes or penetration or anything complicated. You attack once per second, deal 10 damage per hit and hit every time. What's your damage per second? It's 10. Very simple. Now assume exactly the same speed and damage, but not you hit only 50% of the time. Now what's your dps? It's 5. Again, very simple. In this case, 1% accuracy translates exactly to 1% dps, unless you simply can't miss at all, at which point further gains in accuracy do nothing. Let's make it easier to visualize: Here is your string of attacks over 10 seconds. Each attack deals 10 damage and you attack every second: 100 accuracy: 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. What's your dps? 10*10 = 100. 100/10 = 10. 50 accuracy: 10, 0, 0, 10, 0, 10, 10, 10, 0, 0. What's your dps? 10*5 = 50. 50/10 = 5. This is your damage per second. You are dealing more damage each second on average because more of your attacks hit. Therefore Accuracy increases damage per second.

You really seem to be confused about the seconds part of damage per second. Again, I haven't played one, but you don't need both of those things. On another site, I read someone who described doing quite well with a single class streetfighter and largely ignoring flanked after the early game. The idea was to stand on the front line controlling positioning in the early stages of a fight, then jumping to the enemy's rear once bloodied and deleting the casters and ranged fighters. Part of the reason that can work is that streetfighters gain comparatively little from might, since they already get overwhelmingly large amounts of +% damage. So I imagine they're durable enough to work as an off-tank or flanker if you go with low might and very high constitution.

I haven’t played one, but shouldn’t single class street fighter consistently be one of the best single target damage dealers? Especially at high levels with gambit it should compete with most multiclasses.

Witch has a really strong synergy with lord darryn’s voulge. The crit rate from berserker and barbaric blow help proc static thunder regularly. Carnage itself doesn’t build focus, but it does apply stacks of static thunder, and static thunder builds focus. Meaning whenever you crit you deal a high damage lightning explosion that also generates a lot of focus. Combine with soul blade for being able to immediately use another soul annihilation after every crit and you have a build that should deal amazing single target and aoe damage. It’s probably not as strong, but ghost blades from that unique estoc has the same effect, meaning each soul annihilation that kills can immediately be followed up with another soul annihilation. I haven’t tested every weapon with procs, but I imagine there are some others that probably function similarly. Void wheel’s necrotic lance builds focus, but is extremely unreliable.

I'll double post in my own thread to bring up an interesting tidbit I discovered while messing around with various soul blade combos. Primary attacks always use your main weapon, but don't reset the attack order while dual wielding. That means if you do a normal attack with your main weapon, then use soul annihilation, your next attack will still be with your main weapon. Effectively, you can drastically reduce the number of times you attack with your off hand. There are probably a few niche cases where that's useful, like using the magistrate's cudgel to mark enemies and break through armor, while using a more damaging main hand weapon most of the time. But there's one clear case where it's really good: the monk punching shield. A transcendent could get up to 28 deflection and reflex from the shield while greatly mitigating the loss in damage. It's probably not worth it for classes other than monk, since if you want to build focus for spells, you can't avoid attacking with the shield. But it looks like a really nice tool for a helwalker / soul blade.

Check in the power level scaling mechanics thread. Weapon based skills get the base damage of their weapon multiplied by something like 5% per power level. This becomes extremely noticeable if you are testing stuff and do something like give yourself 100 alchemy and drink a potion of ascension.

Soul annihilation adds 10 + focus spent/2 raw damage to a primary attack. The melee attack is normal except that it benefits from the hidden power level bonus all martial abilities get. The raw damage is boosted multiplicatively by might and power level. Assuming we take draining whip, which is probably always better for soul blades, the flat damage is worth about 40 damage dealt on an off hit. Even if you’re dealing well over 100 damage with your focus generating hits, the flat component still makes up a significant portion of soul annihilation’s damage. Why is that bad? Because before it was nerfed, the ability primarily scaled off of focus spent and the flat damage was fairly insignificant. That meant soul annihilation was mostly weapon style agnostic. It basically worked equally well with dual wielding or two-handed weapons. Now it’s yet another situation in which dual wielding is supreme, since maximizing attack speed lets you get the most benefit from the flat damage. The vast majority of soul annihilation’s damage should come from focus spent to make sure the skill is equally useful with all fighting styles. What’s more, saving up focus for big hits is heavily penalized when flat damage is so significant. But it would add more tactical choices if it weren’t always the best move to use soul annihilation as often as possible. I don’t know if this is the right place to post suggestions for the dev team, but here you go. If anyone else has any ideas, or just wants to discuss how to build around soul annihilation in general, please feel free. I think a street fighter/soul blade looks like the best choice to maximize damage with it, but I could see arguments for shattered pillar, helwalker, or berserker as well. A witch using lord darryn’s voulge could do well with it, for example, since static thunder builds focus.

I posted in the beta for 1.1 that Lord Darryn's Voulge's static charge ability had friendly fire, which seemed unintentional given that the item description says it damages "enemies". I don't know if that was fixed, because I sloppily modded it myself to hit only hostiles. But in 1.1.1, it's back to self damage and damaging allies. But, the barbarian upgrade of static charge doesn't have friendly fire. There is no difference in the description of the power to note that change, so again, I assume neither version of the ability should be damaging the wielder and allies. Finally, carnage applies stacks of static charge or static thunder, which seems too strong. I'm also not sure if that's intentional.

I haven’t specifically checked, but I’d be really surprised if carnage procs static charge/thunder. I think people like barbarians with the voulge because first, it can only be bound to barbarians, fighters and druids, second, the barbarian upgrade is really nice, because it lets you hit everything in a large aoe with disoriented and third, berserkers get a high crit rate, which is important for getting static charge to fire. The way static charge works is it applies a stack whenever you hit, then whenever you crit, all the stacks in an aoe explode. But the 10 damage from static charge is treated like base weapon damage and gets modified by everything, so it gets super powerful if you can crit frequently. Unless static charge itself is triggering carnage. That would be crazy, if so. Edit: Well, there is definitely something going on between carnage and static thunder. I think carnage is actually applying stacks of it, which is really pretty broken and probably shouldn't be happening. Also, I was playing a character using this weapon starting from 1.0, where static charge did nothing, to the 1.1 beta, where it did friendly fire. I then modded it to not do that, and it changed back with the patch today. But, for barbarians, it still has no friendly fire, meaning the weapon is probably almost unusable if you're not playing that class.

Static charge is special and seems to be considered a weapon attack by itself. The same with ball lightning on the voulge. They build focus, for example. This isn’t terribly surprising, because they inherit things like two-handed style that benefit weapon attacks. I haven’t yet tested if static charge is a “melee” attack and can do things like build skald phrases. I built a helwalker/life giver around the voulge and it’s very powerful. Helwalker supercharges your heals even further, so you can take a lot of damage and never go down. Duality of mortal presence also makes the stun on your relentless storm really debilitating. The character makes it almost impossible for the team to die, but casting heals eats into your damage output a lot, especially once companions start to be able to kill enemies really fast on their own. And the play style becomes pretty rote, after a while.

If they increase the level cap, they might go for BG2 Throne of Bhaal style high level powers. I’d be pretty surprised if they let multiclasses have access to level 8 and 9 powers, since some of those seems designed around not being able to be mixed with other class’s skills. Rather it would make more sense if there’s just a special set of “epic” skills, and maybe multiclasses would be restricted from some of them.

Helwalker/Lifegiver is really cool. Helwalker supercharges your heals, which helps mitigate the damage penalty, and you get a bunch of other amazing caster stats. Overall you deal tons of damage with magic and melee, spread stun around the screen constantly and also provide strong healing for the whole party.

I expect you're right that a streetfighter would outdamage a soulblade. Honestly, it should, even if I also think soul annihilation was hit a little too hard in 1.1. But here you're describing the amount of damage a PL 1 character with 10 might would do with soul annihilation. SA also scales with might and power level (though the damage reported in the tooltip before using the skill, the damage reported in the combat log after using the skill and the damage predicted by the formula never seem to be exactly the same). For most characters soul whip will do a lot more than what you describe. What's more, the damage of the basic melee swing is also boosted multiplicatively by power level. I tested with a CL 20 single class soulblade with 100 alchemy and potions of ascension and was hitting for over 50 damage on the base hit with a plain rapier. Whether this works out to an advantage over other classes depends on how often you are using their martial abilities, since those also benefit from power level, but this likely benefits a soul blade, and especially a soul blade / shattered pillar more than anyone else. I'm going to attempt mathematics, which might not work out well for me, but assuming you took draining whip, SA is improving the damage of every other attack by roughly (roughly is an important word, since the numbers between the tooltip, combat log and formula results don't match up): normal melee damage * power level bonus, probably 1.05 per level past PL 1 = physical damage 10 * (strength bonus + power level bonus) + normal melee damage/4 * (strength bonus + power level bonus) = raw damage To give a concrete example, for a level 13 transcendent (13 is arbitrarily chosen to represent the "mid game") using lightning strikes with 25 might and using fists, soul whip's damage is multiplied by 1.65 and the base melee attack is multiplied by 1.2. Assuming no other bonuses and you're generating damage through normal attacks, you deal 16.5(average base fist damage)*2(1.2+.35+.45)*1.15(lightning strikes)*1.2(power level) = 45.45 crush 10(base soul annihilation damage)*1.65(1.45+.2) + (9.48 (standard attack damage=37.95 divided by 4) * 1.65) = 32.15 raw Meaning soul annihilation roughly doubles the damage of every other hit, for about a 50% damage boost overall. It could go much higher with power level boosts and more might, for example if you go for a helwalker. That's still a good boost. It's almost certainly not as good as a streetfighter, but then the issue becomes more about whether cipher in general is ever worth it and whether soul blade is worth taking for a melee cipher. Cipher is a weird class, with brokenly powerful charms and a lot of underwhelming other powers, and soul annihilation feels like it was nerfed a little too hard, but I think the answer to both questions remains yes.

They probably do unless something's broken. I checked this in the game's files only for scordeo's edge, but its on hit effects in the files are flagged as on graze, hit or crit. If I recall, I did see some things as on hit and crit but not graze, but I don't think there's an on hit only.