thelee

historical lesson - this "only in combat" effect was introduced in an early patch because apparently it was considered an issue that it was hard to keep parties including island aumaua together, because the island aumaua would get way ahead of everyone else. i don't really agree with that decision, because a lot of people were confused by it (and still are, apparently), but that's why it's the way it is.

if you don't want to rest-spam by vendors (i frequently use magran challenges that make this annoying), rathun (fire giants) are good sources for pyrite - you can go sailing and blast them and gather some this way as well. (though they have very annoying sailing fights - they charge at you and you have a massive penalty to your own attacks)

the action economy is looser in higher difficulties, because enemies will have higher defenses and health so you'll have more time to do stuff. but yes, even then there's still action economy concerns. adding on to something boeroer said, for this reason i generally stay away from most generic caster/caster multiclasses. really early on, the extra casting on a caster/caster can be a life saver, but by mid-game you just have so many spells and so little time, and if you made one caster double up on two roles you could be in an extreme pinch trying to decide between healing or debuffing, for example. Exceptions to that rule are generally setups where you can avoid action economy clashes. I've done a few wizard/caster multiclasses, and the wizard side focuses on fast-cast (near-instant) buffs and only occasionally other spells. this limits how much action economy constraints i have while still giving me the benefits of having add'l casting pool. psion/caster is another favorite multiclass, because with a psion you naturally have phases where you're not doing anything with the cipher because you're generating focus.

interesting. i have the same experience, but i just assumed that those characters were set that way, not that they gained spells from scaling. edit - so it would still be limited to kith-like enemies, though. no matter what level I do SSS on (probably the only thing I really change up in terms of order), the e.g. beasts always have the same abilities.

as you probably know, the scaling is limited to accuracy, defenses, and health (and occasionally increased enchantment levels on gear). that means like... a spider is going to be the same overall spider 4 levels higher, just with slightly more health and accuracy. so the scaling isn't nearly as powerful as true "levels." everytime you gain a level, you gain accuracy, defense, and health (and correspondingly better gear), but you also gain new abilities, those two combined give you your true power impact. meanwhile a xaurip priest will never learn new high level abilities*, even though a player priest will gains tons over 4 levels. so anyway, upscaling doesn't really help areas stay challenging, it just mostly makes it a little bit harder to easily out-level areas** (which is all i really want anyway). *apparently with enough scaling, some (kith-like) enemies will pick up new abilities, but i've only heard of this happening with a mod that unlocks the current limited scaling to be unlimited. **the one exception is that without upscaling, the priest Dismissal spell becomes really good. at a point in mid-late game, you overlevel all constructs and most vessels and you can just wipe them all out. with upscaling on, many constructs and vessels stay atleast at your level, so dismissal becomes less an auto-win in many fights.

i would second going all-in on explosives, if you go into explosives in the first place. explosives are really versatile, and at really high levels the scaling you can achieve on some effects is really great, and it's never not worth it to point a point in. but if you just want to scatter-brain some enemies, you can use cinder bombs with their auto-interrupt without having to worry about a single point of explosives.

huh... really? i've been thinking it was +15 for literally years

absolutely does. only bombs that don't benefit are precisely the ones w/out an affliction (grenade, concussion bomb, immolator, that healing bomb). tested/verified each one for that interrupt-focused druid build i posted a while back. ring of focused flame also boost sparkcrackers and cinder bomb (also immolator). cinder bombs end up being pretty great on top of the guaranteed interrupt because of how much accuracy you can stack with them, and how you craft 2 at a time.

Crossbows also benefit from the fact that they have a % chance hit to crit that applies to everything as long as you are actively holding that crossbow, so the idea that arbalests or arquebus's are just better than crossbows might be old advice.

yeah this is an example of that hard cap with reload times. Bullet time does set the gun reload time to 0, but you still end up spending some time reloading, and if you were already a reasonably fast dual-wielder or using the pistol modal, you barely see the difference.

because perception doesn't influence grenades, classes that have other ways to boost accuracy or effectiveness can do better. i really like grenades on fighters, for example, because they have an easy way to get at least Aware (50% graze to hit) and +5/10 accuracy (adventurer/conquereror stance). Tactical Barrage grants +1 PL as well (which helps accuracy and overall effectiveness of grenades). Monks with Dance with Death can get up to +15 accuracy to grenades. Rangers can get tons of accuracy, but expensively. Priests can help anyone out with the still-OP Devotions for the Faithful (+10 acc), and/or Dire Blessing (50% graze to hit). explosives are definitely worth using, and i aggressively craft them so I don't have to worry about hoarding them. Cinder Bomb esp I find to be a great equalizer - not only is blind an effective affliction for survivability, but they always interrupt enemies when they explode (the interrupt completely ignores accuracy checks). A great way to mess up casters and to buy yourself breathing room. (Other bombs don't appear to do this)

in case it isn't clear (i don't think it was explicitly mentioned here but it is a part of the grimoire imprint spells), but in addition to stealing the spell, the grimoire trick gives you infinite uses of that spell. so even spells you might normally want to pick up manually, you'd be better off stealing, if you want to use the cheese.

you could still get to +6 PL pretty easily with: stone of power +1 conjurer +1 wellspring of life +1 weyc's wand empowered effect +3 (suppresses tactical barrage?) and you'd still get wall of draining so you could extend that wand effect and have it last an entire fight. haven't had to do the fist +6 or more PL math in a while (i'm happy enough for 3) so don't know if there's an easier way to do it, but that conjurer familiar does appear help. edit: this is still not necessarily an endorsement of going conjurer. like i said you lose a lot of defensive spells useful for a fist battlemage. merely that it's doable.

i'm inclined to very slightly disagree when it comes to single-class. it's undoubtable that blood mage is consistently powerful especially early game, but the game is not so difficult (that is, when talking about party mode + potd + challenges, a whole other story if you do solo or something) that you need the resource regen. In the end I've personally gotten much more bullish on empowering high-level spells + the empower passives. If the entire fight is already over as soon as it starts, you don't really need blood sacrifice edit - just to emphasize that this is only a consideration for single-class. multiclass don't get the really juicy high-level spells, or enough skill points to spare on all the empower passives.

i mean, the why bother is the +2 PL and the unique bonus (though that pretty much does not exist for transmuters). one can certainly go around and decree that any wizard build that doesn't pick up combusting wounds or wall of draining sucks, or is a challenge build, but in my mind cheese is cheese and exists in a separate spectrum from "effective", which is a much broader tent