thelee

fuuuuu- man, that scordeo's edge is totally the trick. thanks so much dunehunter! i could've done it even faster, but i forgot to buff avenging storm before hand. oh well. mule kick still was super relevant because even with lots of interrupts per second, i still needed it to do so to trigger brilliant and interrupt merges (searing seal ended up being way too slow and inaccurate). aside from me not having wael's on, this was as close to the real thing as possible, and all the items i used should be obtainable through a quick crit path. i've got a few more bosses to try out (mostly to make sure i have enough room to deaggro in all situations, I'm actually sorta concerned about FS Oracle that you get teleported into/dropped into), but i think we've got a real contender here with a tactician+skaen.

your obstacle has to be permanent for the duration of the fight, because so long as vela isn't aggroed, she *will* beeline towards you (like a pet). she doesn't begin her cowering until she's within range of enemies. ooblit doesn't matter for me because i only need one proc of scordeo's edge, and then i can just salvation of time it to whatever duration i need.

how long did you try? at only 1% chance of success the variance is pretty huge.

any mods active? any berath's blessings? how did you resolve whakura pass? this is real odd. i've never seen a bug like this.

no, unless something dramatically changed in 5.0. weapon modals are active abilties, so do not stack with other active abilities (tenacious/energized) edit: historically this has meant that maces are useful because if you have a consistent source of tenacious/energized/potion of piercing strikes, you can still get mileage out of the modal for penetrating enemy AR, because it's a debuff of enemy AR versus a buff of your PEN.

there was an issue (that i'm pretty sure is still in place) where arcane blaster with bullet time (-100% recovery) still had a short reload time - i think there's an absolute minimum reload durution unless you have a weapon that can specifically fire multiple shots before reloading. so I don't think scordeo's edge plus xefa is going to be great against single targets (versus 2w melee with no recovery), but the mob clearing effect of hand mortar sounds great. (though might have to reserve its usage because i don't know how many guaranteed scrolls of avenging storm one can easily get and i think huana o whe definitely has one use reserved... maybe belranga would be a great place to take advantage of the mob clearing effect)

per is slightly better in most reasonable offensive cases, especially on path of the damned, until late game where your baseline accuracy vs enemies is pretty high and underpenetration is rarer. for a barbarian, per is even better because you need to at least hit (not graze) to trigger carnage, which itself must do another hit roll (which is treated like a spell effect and has very few accuracy modifiers compared to the weapon attack but still includes perception). there's literally a (weak) squared-relationship between perception and damage output for a barbarian that isn't true with might. you shouldn't dump might, due to inversions, but low might is perfectly fine (especially considering a barbarian can basically guarantee uptime on a +5 might inspiration).

i haven't tested it again recently, but since they introduced the revised lash it's always listed a fixed +20% lash, and it's never actually done that. companions use your watcher's dispositions but obsidian-created npcs don't have any favored or disfavored dispositions (same with pallegina and vatnir) so that they can go into any party and be equally mediocre. also when you're computing lash % you have to pay attention to rounding and penetration. lashes do their own PEN check, so be absolutely sure there are no confounding variables. (xoti should have a 25% lash) edit - i've never actually tested xoti's spiritual weapon (i've used all PC-available spiritual weapon, but not xoti or vatnir, go figure), so it's also possible that xoti's spiritual is buggy and might not have any disposition scaling (not even the neutral +5% base bonus). edit 2 - if i have some time i'll do some tests tonight, in a separate game. (can't do it in my cheatyface run because magran's makes it impossible to evaluate combat log)

good to know going forward because i was getting sloppy with my act 1 time because i didn't think it mattered.

"You only have 3 days, 26 hours to finish Port Maje. You have 25 days to complete Hasongo. You have 26 days to complete Ashen Maw, and a similar amount of time to get to Ukaizo. This essentially limits your ability to explore, and really discourages you from searching abandoned settlements or burial grounds out on the world map. The time constraint is tight for the first act, but a little looser for successive acts (though not loose enough to go off and do all the DLC, at least until the final act). You can save some time and level up a bit by frontloading all the Nekataka quests in Act II (before going to Hasongo) since it only costs you a couple hours to go from district to district (versus days to travel on the map). This challenge also has the effect of requiring you to be much more deliberate about resting." i might have gotten this slightly wrong in my guide - in all my recent runs I have 27 days to complete Hasongo. I must've measured from getting the boat instead of from getting Oderisi's notes, because act 2 timer starts in the latter, even though you have no options to do anything other than go get your boat. do note that in practice the mandatory sailing just to get to crit path quest points eats up a good chunk of the time for all acts (one should try to invest in making their ship real fast). my discussion of all the challenges (except for the most recent one, the ultimate): https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/magrans-fires

that's extremely useful. all my successful de-aggro involves shadowing beyond back to where i engaged, but 150ft (~45m? i'm US but am used to all in-game measurements in meters) seems like a huge range that would basically cover many maps. i think shadowing beyond/untargetability--if there are no other targets for enemies to latch onto--removes all "not_friendly_units" from being in combat, so the third bullet point isn't even checked any more. that being said, as mentioned before there have been times with cheatyface that i can't get brilliant in the middle of combat despite apparently having de-aggroed enemies, and i wonder if there's a particular interaction with those three conditions.

what probably happens in turn-based mode is that DoTs and debuffs on a character don't progress don't advance until a character's turn. All DoTs do damage upon initial application as well. If the duration is not a multiple of 3, the last tick is a "partial" damage tick (so if you have a 1.5s duration tick left, it only does half the normal 3s tick damage). so maybe what's happening is that even with seconds->turn rounding, the game internally tracks how many ticks (including fractional ticks) of damage a dot does, and applies it correctly behind the scenes, which is why you might see a reduced damage tick at end of turn. like you say, this might have some odd interactions with TB mode.

if you de-aggro all the enemies in a fight, and you don't have a perception affliction/aren't flanked, that fulfills tactician's requirements to be brilliant: no one in your party is flanked, and all enemies are flanked (except there are no enemies, so this last part doesn't matter).

problem with temporal cocoon is that it doesn't block any damage over time effects. so while it's doable, it's riskier than withdraw, which both heals and blocks most damage.

the skaen priest is solely there for the infinite withdraw. consider me in the boat that will want to try an infinite withdraw approach until i can see that it's not viable (though dunehunter just gave me a big clue into a good priest-friendly approach) simply because it would erase a lot of the RNG involved in a higher-dps, finite withdraw build like SC monk or tactician/troubadour.

lololol dual wielding skaen spiritual weapons, with avenging storm, is like 4 attacks per second, combined with deadeye and potion of impediment that is an expected 1.6 interrupts per second (who even needs mule kick at that point?), not to mention very rapid, abydon-proof damage. if this ends up working you're going to get 90% of the credit simply just for bringing it to my attention. the hardest part will just be keeping spiritual ally uptime without losing vela withdraw uptime. (and the second hardest part will just be creating an efficient path to pick up scordeo's in the real version of the run)

never really used the weapon - what's the cheese? edit: lol never mind i found an old video on the forums. that in itself can be a combined cheese with avenging storm. does it seriously remove any recovery, even in 5.0?

hm, i just discovered that avenging storm can be extended by salvation of time. i'm not sure it'll help enough, but something to consider for another night of testing. any weapons that can cheese with avenging storm particularly well?

doesn't matter. same trick as tactician. run in, shadowing beyond out, with a withdrawn vela, only instead of getting brilliant automatically you keep wall of flaming yourself until you get brilliant. upon further thought might not work as well because there's the very real possibility that once vela pops back out she just keeps walking into your wall of fire. *sigh* this is rough

nope. for my specific example, blood mage can blood sacrifice the fire wall back.

another class for consideration - blood mage + skaen. wall of flame might be an easier way to try to trigger the brilliant cloak, and i think bloodmage has pretty good megaboss options (crushing doom/slicken spam hauani o whe and most bosses, not so sure about bosses that can't be interrupted though, but maybe it doesn't matter in those other cases if you or vela can't die).

after spending all my spare evening with tactician + skaen against hauani o whe i'm pretty demoralized about its prospects. it just doesn't DPS enough. even with infinite withdraw, and constant uptime on brilliant by mule kicking hauani o whe (which also requires a boreal dwarf, gauntlets of reliability, potion of perfect aim, helm of hte white void, conqueror stance, disciplined strikes to actually land mule kick against 189 fort defense), and even with pre-buffing basically an entire-in-game day to get 1000+ duration on all my buffs, once i engage hauani o whe it's a one-way ticket to loserville, population: me. i haven't even been able to get it below healthy, much less get an opportunity to deal with its splits. the cleansing effect is too strong, too quick, and even with non-stop mule kicks (which hurts dps because i'm constantly graze-ing against such a huge fort defense), potion of deadeye, and potion of impediment, i can't really make that much of a dent in its ability to whack me and take -10s off my buffs every few seconds. maybe i'm just missing some good strat for face-tanking it. also - vela really sucks in this fight. even with infinite withdraw, if i let her pop out for more than a few seconds, over a long enough fight there's a good chance she gets hit by symbiote, and will terrified-walk around, generating oozes, which murders my ability to keep up brilliant for a while. i imagine this might also be a nightmare for an sc monk, who will not have as many withdraws, but maybe blade turning + resonant touch + wotw stunlock will be fast enough that it's less of a concern. i'm down, but not out. i have a few more ideas i'm willing to try before giving up on tactician + skaen and going back to trying with monk (or even troubadour).

i think you misread marigold's comment. the community is narrowing down on SC monk because WotW and Resonant Touch. edit: oh i guess paladin doesn't have regen resources. yeah, someone else tried herald and found that the paladin side really stunk with woedica's challenge on.

Note that for TB mode durations of less than 6s round up to 1 round, whereas all other durations round down. This means that there are some weird breakpoints and it is in fact extremely hard to get short duration effects (like linger) to last 2 rounds (because you have to get to 12 second duration). In particular int adjusts off base 3s linger, and troubadour is an additive 1.5s (50%) bonus off that base. To get to 12 seconds you'd need a separate, whopping +250% duration bonus on top of troubadour. For all intents and purposes the extra linger is pointless in turnbased. Come, come ticks for damage every 3 seconds so it would be one per half round. I think how it's handled in game is an implementation detail. For example if you enable brisk recitation, it means your chants only take half a round to sing and in practice means in tb mode two phrases per your turn (does not wait until enemy turn, for example).

vela will also stealth, but it's moot because enemies don't care (or even check) for her stealth level. enemies don't even care about her existence unless you have aggro-ed them, really (which is how the withdraw + shadowing beyond + tactician combo works so well). in my earlier posted youtube video starting at 35:20 (embedded again here directly to that time) you can see me sneaking past the enemies with 5 stealth with vela in tow