thelee

something i discovered with my last run, which was using Effort + Avenging Storm at times. Pollen Patch is weird. It triggers the inspiration bonuses of Ring of Clenched Muscle (10% chance when hit with a weapon to get an inspiration). I swear I didn't have Effort equipped at the time, which is the main way I would trigger fake weapon attacks, so the periodic healing effect on yourself must count as a weapon attack each time. It also meant that when I would empower Pollen Patch with my least unstable coil, i'd frequently get a jumble of Tier 1 and Tier 3 inspirations (though the Tier 3 ones would override the Tier 1 if they were the same). I wonder if you could trigger other "hit by a weapon" effects with Pollen Patch?

unfortunately, spark the souls of the righteous only works on party members. don't know when that got changed, i feel like i remember being able to used to buff summons. definitely won't work on charmed enemies.

necro-ing this thread to just suggest two all-purpose non-interactive ways to take out dorudugan. (by non-interactive i mean, you could probably do these on a potato machine) first: gouging strike. requires: a rogue of any kind, wiht gouging strike. potion of invisibility or one of the rogue's invisibility abilities. 1. stealth party (if not solo). 2. sneak rogue to dorudugan and whack them with gouging strike (reloading if you whiff). use potion of invisibilty or invisibility to sneak back to party and de-aggro dorudugan. you should stay in combat. dorudugan will die eventually. go watch an episode of your favorite TV show. second: invulnerable party (may require berath's challenge) requires 1 priest (of any type, so xoti or vatnir) with salvation of time and barring death's door, and the weyc's robe fully upgraded (not on the priest), and a potion of invisibility. 1. create an AI script for your priest that casts salvation of time whenever they have an intellect inspiration, maximizing the number of allies targeted, and with 1 second cooldown (i sometimes have bugs with a 0 second cooldown) 2. disable all AI when you enter dorudugan's map. 3. stealth everyone. 4. put the potion of invisibility on someone. 5. have that person sneak towards dorudugan while everyone hugs the edge of the map where you entered. 6. aggro dorudugan with that someone, and immediately drink the potion and run back to party to de-aggro. 7. have the person with weyc's robe get surrounded by the rest of your party (esp the priest) and empower an ability to activate brilliant. 8. manually spam salvation of time (the AI script won't work if dorudugan is de-aggro-ed). after you get brilliant to ~30 seconds, start buffing your party with barring death's door one at a time, with salvation of time to extend, and only doing another barring death's door on another party member once you get up to ~30s. keep spamming salvation of time until you have >100s on everyone for good measure. hopefully a potato machine can handle this level of activity, dorudugan just sits there doing nothing while you do some very low-intensity spell effects every few seconds. 9. enable AI, run in, and just auto-attack dorudugan. make sure your salvation of time script is active and everyone is near enough to get buffed by it. go watch an episode of something.

it's always tier 3, part of the item effect.

the spell is definitely still good at later levels. it's not as consistently an insta-kill spell on 50% or lower enemies as it can be at early-mid levels due to the increasing number of bullet sponges, but doing 100+ damage almost instantaneously is always good. my xoti has an AI script that always tries to use it on any target at less than 50% health, and she's still doing instashot kills even in end-game content.

BoW can be pretty short (in regards to eothas challenge), but because you can skip most of the content once you enter the vytmádh by just heading straight to the boss fight. i think your route makes sense. there's no real reason to go in any particular order outside of pathing so whatever path looks short to you sounds good, b.c. i don't think there's any relevant gear for most ultimate runs. i ended up doing BoW->SSS->FS iirc simply because that's the order i'm used to, though it probably was a bit inefficient.

yeah it's great. it's a vessel-only bonus for just your mainchair, but fortunately vessels are some of the toughest foes in the game. (e.g. also the guardian of ukaizo)

are you talking about in that screenshot vs Dorudugan? sure. 20 base from beastmaster + 13 perception + 57 from character level + 8 from ability level +6 from druid power level +10 from marked for the hunt (ranger ability) +10 from helm of the white wind +5 from a pet (Boras, in FS) +20 from Hunter's Claw +4 from Sweet Aroma (aura from unique flail in SSS) +10 from Stalker's Link (ranger ability) +10 for Devotions for the Faithful (normally doesn't stack with Hunter's Claw unless you go through some area transitions and save/reloads) +8 from Rymrgand's Gift (you have to collect all of Rymrgand's gear [helm, armor, mace, shield] in BoW and agree to become Rymrgand's Champion, and then do SSS and disintegrate all souls at every major story checkpoint) +5 from Necklace of Bones (unique amulet) this is paired with some debuffs on Dorudugan: -25 from Morningstar weapon modal -9.3 from Hunter of Hunters (an aura on an SSS-acquired pike) this is still overkill. You only need a net +24 accuracy, this resulted in +40, so you could lose +16 in buffs, or lose +8 in buffs and do away with Hunter of Hunters.

it might be worth poing out that that IME on potd your pet will fall over a lot early game. enemies hit disproportionately hard and healing is a scarce resource for the most part early on (for this reason i prefer revive pet over heal pet as a ranger ability). a way to think about it is, that's a lot of damage that would have been hitting you or another party member but instead hit your pet, which doesn't accumulate injuries (and on berath's challenge, can't die). if you're not having fun, you're not having fun, but just wanted to highlight that having pet get knocked out a lot early on is par for the course.

nah, first, obsidian-created npc's don't actually care about your disposition, so they're always at a neutral state (here, it's a 25% lash). second, even if it were somehow at the absolute minimum, it's still pretty decent (~21% lash). but just at 25% lash, spiritual weapons are already competitive or better than many unique weapons from a damage perspective.

it also makes for some pretty neat flavor. i never actually thought of using sun and moon like this, just changing what spells you cast depending on time of day (instead i just used the wait option until the "right" time of day came up), even though both druid and wizard could have also pulled this off (druid less well compared to vatnir's bonus spells and wizard grimoire).

imo medium armor is mostly a trap on potd with upscaling*. the relentlessness of enemy PEN gain (already boosted by PotD) means that most of the time you're probably better off going lighter** for more responsiveness or heavier for actual protection. medium armor tends not to actually provide much damage reduction in practice (as it seems you've experienced). even heavy armor has trouble sometimes without additional help (AR buffs or something like dazed on enemies), especially early on where it's really hard to find/upgrade enchanted heavy armor but you keep leveling. i think you'll probably get the most mileage out of hearth defender in conjunction with a couple allies in heavy armor. but like everyone else, i generally have never used it (it itself is a mediocre medium armor for the person wearing it). *a handful of exceptions from the unique armors list, but hearth defender is not one of them. there is a exceptional scale armor that is very nice b.c. you can steal it from the dark cupboard very early in the game and it's very useful protection early on. ** ironically it feels like there's a bigger protection difference between cloth/robes and light armor than there is from light to medium. in my (admittedly very selective) memory, light armor can meaningfully help against overpenetration vs robes, but often times it seems like medium armor doesn't even help with that.

what i meant was that in tyranny, mainchar and party members can combine to create combo effects as special abilities (and different ones get unlocked based on your reputation with party members). it's not like DA or ME where you cast one spell and then another spell on the same target to trigger a new effect, but it's still something that required you to have specific party members together.

ywdin is just a nice generic cipher. i think she's a bit too underwhelming as a rogue or rogue multiclass. i think fassina as a sorcerer (druid + wizard) can also work real well. you miss out on the really good end-game wizard spells (though as a conjurer, she already misses out on the really good ones), but the versatility and survivability of being a sorcerer is really really nice. you can load up on wizard buff spells (deleterious alacrity of motion or fleet feet for speed, infuse with vital essence, eldritch aim, etc) and still have plenty of spellcasting power from your druid side. i'm pretty sure (though i haven't tried this in any recent memory) that even though you miss out on caedebald + phantom, you can shapeshift + phantom, which is still very nice and available earlier. you can also firebrand + phantom. vatnir is also great, don't forget him! he has a great unique priest subclass that is very good, and i've found any version of him (sc priest, +chanter, or +rogue) to be very good. if you're going chanter, picking up the long night's drink to help your priest spells land is good. if you're going rogue, use lots of mobility abilities and pick up the spiritual weapon to dual wield axes with a +25% frost lash, and use full-attack abilities (crippling strike is good enough for this, honestly) to stack on bleeding modals; champion's boon for PEN and minor avatar for general self-buffing are good assists.

lol i was going to recommend a build i used (fury + stalker) that also used firebrand a lot, and then i realized that yorname already linked it. here it is again just for good measure: the plus of using a stalker is that you can cheat on your defensive stats again, like a fighter, and still be rather safe. this build actually goes down to 7 con and 8 resolve. this is only true for a single-class druid. you need a regular source of Avenging Storm to make it powerful. Otherwise it's kinda merely OK (i'd rather use Firebrand)

Tyranny came the closest but still pretty far off, but I agree the combo mechanic that Bioware (and only Bioware it seems) did in DA and also to an extent in Mass Effect was a pretty neat way to mix up the party RPG formula.

yeah +100 there are some folk around here who will happily dump res and con w/out worry, and you can eventually pick up Tough as a huge boost to health, but frankly my play experience is a lot more enjoyable when I'm not getting two-hit comboed by enemy archers and/or enemy rogues (one hit, followed by a finishing blow ability or a big crit) than from a small amount of extra damage output. I still take a couple points out from resolve and con for back-of-line mainchars, but not typically lower than 8-9 for con/resolve. There are exceptions, for example, with Bear/Boar form I'm more willing to lower resolve a bit since I can always become tankier on demand if needed. Still don't really don't take con down much. (And I always take Tough anyway)

i think the big thing for me is there aren't really a lot of party-based real-time RPG experiences. The last one I played that was AAA was dragon age inquisition (which it self was very RTwP, even if it wasn't IE style), and I haven't heard of anything like it since. I love F:NV and Outer Worlds and elder scrolls-style games, they just don't have the tactical/strategic depth of a party-based game though

1) i don't think so, perhaps the deadfire community mod fixes this? it will definitely benefit from scion of flame. 2) yes. note you probably want the deadfire community patch (at least bug fixes version) for rot skulls to be great, as in vanilla it has 0 pen 3) it's definitely a trade-off. single-class druid can be insanely powerful (avenging storm, tornado, greater maelstrom, pollen patch are all extremely powerful and some of them extremely cheese-able spells). but you get greater versatility or can fulfill specific niches with multiclassing that can be worth giving up those spells. fighter can also get bonus PL and int, and can even take advantage of mob stance's recovery bonus. along with firebrand and confident aim, you could be pretty handy with firebrand. 4) on potd you're going to miss a lot, especially early on think how much more you'd be missing without perception. like @yorname says, you can get tons of accuracy with ranger, but fighter also gets disciplined barrage for +5 per and graze to hit chance (you can upgrade it to hit->crit or an intellect inspiration) and also confident aim to help with the miss rate with fire brand. 5) i'm assuming you want to be a fighter/druid who is firebrand-focused. 15 mig/10 con/16 dex/10 per/18 int/8 res choose a background that gives you +1 dex, probably. pick up disciplined strikes, confident aim to make up for mediocre accuracy. use mob stance and get hold the line for bonus engagement. armored grace so you can wear some armor when you're tossing around flame brand strikes.

for all its flaws with PF:K and PF:WOTR (and I have a lot of beefs especially with kingmaker), Owlcat deserves credit for holding the banner of IE games/RTwP into the current day even as Deadfire sales floundered. that being said, Owlcat's next game is something else entirely (it's a turn-based warhammer game) it really seems like RTwP is a niche genre that not a lot of players are actively demanding. a pity, I still turn on Deadfire because it's the only game that can really scratch the RTwP itch (and despite being older and with a shorter dev cycle, isn't nearly as buggy as WoTR). Owlcat had a user survey and found the majority of its players use RTwP mode. Rather than speaking about a huge demand for RTwP, it might have just meant that RTwP players don't really have much of a choice, so they all are crowding into this one game. So yeah, unfortunately I agree DOS2 and BG3 are the future. I'll just have to wait a decade for the next IE/RTwP nostalgia revival.

really? are you not thinking about the draining chant? (still would be absolutely insane if it ever stacked per enemy)

i usually end up just spam resting in Cuitzli's exotic herbs shop (every 26 hours triggers a vendor refresh). I think antlers are a "Rare" ingredient, so it doesn't have a high chance of spawning, and if it does like maybe 1 pops up.

i think you need smart camera (or whatever it's called?) enabled for those to do anything? i remember thinking they were busted and didn't do anything, but i had smart camera disabled at the time.

it depends on your mouse. my mouse has these side buttons: the front is 3, the back one is 4. i've bound one to switch weapon sets, and one to toggle stealth.

necro-ing this thread because my lifegiver druid is finally high enough level where i'm playing around with this. i think what's neat about this avenging storm<->effort is that it runs on a spectrum. there's definitely an extreme where you have enough accuracy and/or hit-to-crit where you wipe out entire fights, but if you're not building a super min-maxed character it feels quite "fair", you don't get endless sequences of bolts, but you do get a handful of bolts sometimes as a nice reward. i also thought it'd be really important to have something like druid aoe ticks or monk multi-attack synergies, but on the less "cheesy" end of the spectrum, just auto-attacking with effort and storm can get you some bonus bolts. in this respect i feel like this is like salvation of time or combusting wounds - almost a no-op if you're not built for it, pretty good if you know how to play with it, and utterly busted if you so choose. (incidentally i found that wondrous torment plus a flail means that even a tough bullet-sponge can get bolted to smithereens from like an auto-attack proc)