thelee

neat build. one thing that might be worth calling out (apologies if you did and i missed it) is that you also double up on arkemyr's wondrous torment. you probably don't want to waste the guile from the rogue side (better spent on gaze), but priest gets it and you might as well. with wondrous torment, you can really cripple enemy resolve and will defenses, which can be a really great way to get stupid long durations on each cast of gaze of the adragan. it'll only really affect one enemy dependably (you have to wait too long for it to split and bounce), but can be really useful for making each gaze last during boss fights or other tough enemies.

yeah, the timing of the weapon reload is iffy so i'm guessing it triggers first before heating up kicks in. the first reload won't benefit, the second reload will. however, what might get around this for blackjacket purposes is to have two weapon sets each with a blunderbuss, and a third "normal" weapon set. because the reload/recovery benefit doesn't kick in immediately, i'm wondering if switching to the third weapon will give you a chance ot immediatley benefit from heating up (you make an attack and trigger a new recovery with the heating up buff), and when you need to refresh your heating up, you switch to the unfired blunderbuss and shoot - because you were still under heating up, your reload is fast. when you need to refresh later, you switch back to the first one and maybe you'll be able to reload real fast because it'll be under a different heating up trigger. if that doesn't work, you can switch back to the second one instead, which should benefit from the reload. this is just a theory. anohter idea is to have one weapon set with two blunderbusses. you let one fire, and don't let the other one fire until you need to refresh distracted. and then maybe when dual-wielded like this you can get heating up to work properly

it's always baffling to me that a good number of folks play PotD solo fairly, so I really enjoyed the videos of this build in action.

This would make sense according to standard stacking rules - all of these are active effects that affect the same thing, so only the highest is used (takedown combo's +100%)

These days I have way less free time than before, but I'm currently still running Deadfire. I also play BG3... been meaning to start a completely evil Durge honor mode run after my current Deadfire run. I also am planning on a second Avowed run when that's wrapped up (and some new content patches have come out in the meantime). Beyond that though, it's honestly a little bit of a blur. I tried picking up D2 again, but I have so much less free time than in my 20s that I feel like I should be a lot more consequential with how I spend it (instead of mindlessly grinding for mid/high runes in D2r hell difficulty), so I'm also curious how other Eora fans are spending their time. BG3 scratches a particularly party-based CRPG itch pretty well, but it's a little sad that RTWP is functionally dead again. I've taken to running a family D&D session to keep scratching the party-based RPG itch from a different angle. the retro style looks fun, reminds me of Ultima, I might have to give it a shot.

had a real play session this weekend and i can't get over how significantly @Noqn personally has improved my quality of life. just effortless to use potions in fights now. what am i going to do with my "AI mode toggle" hotkey button now??

i will blame/credit BG3 for making me think about shoving pushing mechanics a lot more in Deadfire and where to take advantage of it, so yeah I also enjoy coming back to this kind of build even now, even if it's not super cheese-tastic. for example, my current run has an SC ancient, but uses tanglefoot and wicked briars in conjunction with xoti as monk and konstanten as skald (for the knock back incantation) to knock enemies around and slow them down. it's especially satisfying with the Tikawara rest bonus that lets your abilities interrupt on empower - for tanglefoot and wicked briars (as with all other pulse spells) this means interruption everytime the abilities trigger. can make some fights stupidly easy if you knock back tough enemies (or knock in ranged enemies) and they're constantly getting interrupted just trying to slowly get back into position.

had to squeeze in some time today just to mess with it, and i can't believe it, probably one of the most annoying 5.0 issues is fixed with this mod. i'll have to update my guide just to specifically endorse this mod. thanks so much @Noqn! wild fix on turning them into "scrolls" type consumables.

i won't get a chance to sit down and play for a week, but this might become my #1 mod of choice if it indeed fixes it

so does that raise further questions about how Lord of the Forest doesn't appear to be giving you the full bonus?

Sorry for the delayed response. You effectively start with 10 in each stat, with 17 to move around (15 plus 2 from race) plus one from your background. Where did you get 63? Storm of Holy Fire will be slower - each rain of fire is what prods unstable coil, which comes in pulses, whereas Minoletta’s (both versions that proc) trigger the additional effects very fast. It’s technically possible but I’m not sure if it’s practically possible; I don’t know if any enemy priests have it or if meteor shower targets count as kith wizards (iirc only certain Vithrak can use it in the game). Maybe there’s some exploit with hirelings, but I don’t know the details about that.

Hi Have you also tried Least Unstable Coil's Brilliant source for another +1 PL? oddly the Brilliant that comes from that item is passive, unlike normal Brilliant. something that we might discover is that there may be a PL cap that no one has really obviously hit before. It sounds like you hit 19 PL recently, Stone of Power or Least Unstable Coil should give you sources of stacking +1 PL to see it bumps you up another PL if Lance of the Midwood Stag is mysteriously underperforming.

I don’t think this is true, at least for Bloodlust. Was playing some today and it only triggered on Rekke when Rekke landed a killing blow, didn’t matter if an ally killed someone.

omg this makes these way better for barbarian (they were already pretty good).

whoa, i thought it was simply it didn't matter if you killed enemy with enemy or spells, but it also counts kills your allies do?

i wonder if Driving Flight is implemented not as a jump, but as an additional attack that you instantly make at another target. Would it also double-up on other "on attack" effects that have been ignored because of that distinction?

that's a nice find - i feel like even though i haven't used blightheart much, i had absorbed from somewhere that it affected around yourself as well. maybe that was an old interaction that was silently patched out? but that definitely makes it better.

??? i'm honestly curious. are you speculating, or do you have access to internal game statistics somehow?

i guess at the end of the day, my argument is that the problem isn't that the car goes down 50mph after one year, it's that the car ever went 150mph to begin with. i don't think the solution is to keep the car going 150mph for the rest of its usable life, it should always have gone 50mph (or 70mph or whatever). you'll never get perfect balance, and part of the enjoyment of these games is finding ways to optimize, but my basic point is that bashing shields just do way too much, especially if they also scale like weapons into the endgame. the way the devs assigned enchanted value to the bashing, it's almost like they treated it extremely minimally. it makes itemization decisions less interesting, especially if they scale. maybe the approach is just to crank down the defensive aspects of bashing shields, so bashing shields have a niche (they give up defense for some offense and combat flexibility) while still giving normal shields breathing room (they are the kings of defense).

big difference is that shield also gets you engagement for free, and the deflection bonus scales really high (early on though dagger or hatchet is good enough for the deflection aspect). a bashing shield just does a lot in current design. that does sound interesting, though it sounds like beyond what a mod could do unfortunately.

i think it's an interesting question. honestly, even a vanilla bashing shield i would still use (so long as i could still enchant the shield deflection). i think the problem is that the current way shield bashing works is just not a great design. because "reduce recovery time a lot" is a benefit that automatically scales way late into the game. it's not even a DPS hit for much of the game, until your main hand weapon is super duper enchanted, or your shield is facing massive underpenetration. but even with a DPS hit, i'm not really doing sword and board for the DPS anyway. (edit: hence why i think scaling would do too much, at that point there's no drop-off point and essentially bashing shields are strictly better than normal shields) in bg3, shield bashing is a reaction (so the effects can be balanced statically around some slight once/turn action economy), and in pf2e shields that can bash are treated as any other kind of weapon and any shield can be augmented to do it, so there's no real tradeoff consideration to make between bashing and non-bashing. i don't know what a deadfire-y RTwP-y better approach to bashing shields would be though.

my thought on this is that there is massive value in simply being able to take advantage of dual-wielding's faster recovery (in addition to the two weapon style extra recovery). shield style is not really supposed to a DPS style, and making shield bashing more weapon-like makes it do too much IMO. I definitely use the bashing shields in all my runs (especially the medium shield fire one, it's so easy to get), and it's frankly very rare that I use anything else. i don't know if it's an oversight, but I prefer the status quo and think the monk shield is overtuned from benefiting from transcendent suffering - it would be a good-enough shield on its own if all it did was shield bashing and benefiting from transcendent suffering, because even with less base damage than monk fists, getting +16 deflection w/ weapon and shield style (up to +20 at mythic) and +1 engagement while still having dual-wielding speed is an interesting and really good trade-off. But Tuolito's Palm does a whole bunch of other stuff as well. (It would still be an interesting and potentially good trade-off if it merely did all the other stuff and didn't benefit from transcendent suffering.)

hey just a friendly nudge that you should post anything useful you find. i think the deadfire fan base is heavily skewed towards RTWP so there's a big knowledge gap with turn-based mode. if you find something that works in TB pretty well, you should post it for the benefit of posterity.

Why voulge? Is it for the engagement? a riposte build might enjoy a two handed axe with the bleeding cuts modal more. also not just raising def, but lowering enemy accuracy helps. Persistent distraction from rogue gets you -5 perception on enemies. You could pair with a priest who can cast Despondent Blows or Devotions for the Faithful, which would stack with perception debuff. A wizard has easy access to blind from Chill Fog and while the perception penalty won’t stack, blind comes with its own additional accuracy penalty.

I'm thinking that it might not have to do with an unused ability, but something special about rain of fire. Rain of Holy Fire spawns in an area of effect that itself ends up spawning new projectiles inside as new spell effects (which is why it triggers Least Unstable Coil a lot), i wonder if this additional level of indirection interacts weirdly with whatever hack they put in place that would force HoW to split if killed while essence interrupter is active. If this is true, then something like Meteor Swarm or Missile Salvo should do something similar.