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thelee

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Everything posted by thelee

  1. interesting idea. also i love how there never appears to be a chanter problem that troubadour can't fix anitpathetic field or ectopsychic echo might be better than mind blades because you could repeatedly tick on the same target(s), instead of having somethign bounce around semi-randomly.
  2. edit: holy crap the forums ate my post. here's what i can remember: priests, berserkers, and monks can get good mileage out of slayer's claw (they all have tenacious inspiration access) though priests and monks need to multiclass to really get good use of slayer's claw. i did this with mirke (in combination with intuitive and rapier and stunning surge) and it worked out alright. probably would've worked better if i didn't make mirke my tank and thus she had heavy armor. single-weapon style isn't your only option. like i mentioned, rapier can be a good choice because +20 accuracy on top of inherent +5 weapon accuracy can give you pretty nice hit chance at many opportunities when dual-wielded. i haven't run the numbers to see what is better, but it's an option. i think mountaintiger is right though that chanters are not as able to take advantage of it: minimal accuracy bonuses, no crit boosts, and very slow-to-use multi-target effects. you'd probably need to multiclass it. also interrupts are mostly useful when you actually interrupt something: incidental interrupts from random crits are nice as a way to slow the enemy down, but not exactly world beating. basically while energized is a nice inspiration, i'm not sure it's exactly something you want to go out of your way to metagame to extreme lengths, you might be disappointed. (again, my mirke had rapier, slayer's claw, intuitive, the monk crit-weakend perk, stunning surge, and it was merely OK. chanter is going to have a lot less than that). But I mean, this is about in line with the other t3 inspirations anyway, they aren't exactly build-arounds or centerpiece strategies (except for brilliant which will forever be awesome)
  3. Vatnir is great. It's too bad he's gated beyond a mid-high level DLC and a tough dragon fight.
  4. high level priest spells are amazing. xoti doesn't get a great AL9 spell, but other AL9 spells are powerful, and her free Symbol of Eothas at AL8 is fantastic. I actually think monk/priest xoti is the worst xoti you can do.
  5. In PoE1 they were an extremely rare but extremely powerful form of Delemgan that could petrify at will (using Gaze of the Adragan in fact). They were so nearly fatal to my The Ultimate run (and were fatal to earlier attempts) that I can still remember where they are: level 10 of endless paths, level 15 during the master fight, and then a stupid few random ones in the outdoor areas of act 3. I think they only appeared on PotD as selective upgrades to Delemgans. When solo-ing if you didn't get them down ASAP, they could perpetually heal (moonwell and the druid heal in a close area around them) and petrify on a repeating, cycling timer, which meant that any encounter against them would almost assuredly turn fatal in the long run (due to them constantly keeping all other mobs at high health and repeatedly attempting to hit you with petrify).
  6. can't go wrong with a troubadour. i wouldn't even bother with weapons with a monk. just by fist scaling alone you will get post-superb fists and you can use litany for the spirit from your priest multiclass for an additional +1 PL from acute inspiration to get post-legendary fists. combo of fist base damage and speed is highest in game and will benefit from sneak attack and streetfighter damage bonus more than any other natural weapon in the game. the only reason why you'd use other weapons in this case is for crush immunity (rare) or high crush AR. edit: instead of litany for the spirit, you can just make this a nature godlike and the monk's swift strikes should trigger the +1 PL. what boeroer said. slash immunity IS a thing, and some enemies have super huge slash AR (and battle axe modal won't help you there), so pick up monastic unarmed training as some decent backup crush damage (everyone has proficiency with fists so devoted bonus also counts there). sure personally i find this redundant. lifegiver is such a good healer that the eothas seems redundant. are you trying to compensate for post-shapeshift poor healing? i wouldn't worry about that. my experience with life giver is that you only need to shapeshift in emergencies, and after shapeshifting is done you've done so much healing you don't need much more afterwards. i'd personally pick another priest subclass with more unique capabilities that can make up for the loss of PL and AL8-9 druid spells from not single-classing, e.g. wael can give you good survivability, magran adds diverse firepower (literally), woedica has a lot of useful debuffs for when you don't need to heal without using up your lifegiver spells. It is more that I haven't really tried an unarmed monk or anything but an eothas as a healer. I literally wouldn't know what spells to prioritise on the Lifegiver druid. I'm considering switching to swords or pickaxes for my devoted would this be a good idea or? Since it has two damaging types. fortunately for you, the lifegiver basically gets all the important spells you want for free that's kind of what makes lifegiver such a good druid subclass - the downside is really narrow (no summon spells) and you get all the heals that the class wants for free, so you're free to shape the lifegiver how you want, whether to shapeshift better or to cast debuffs or damage spells. eothas is a pretty redundant priest subclass because they don't really have much unique compared to other priests. it only really works if you for some reason specifically want sunbeam (AL1) or their special spiritual weapon (AL2) or their seal (AL8), or in multi-class situations where you want those free eothas priest spells anyway and it spares you a lot of ability points on your other multiclass. but with a lifegiver, you're essentially making your lifegiver worse at healing (no AL8-9 spells, missing out on up to +3 PL organically) just to pick up some additional heals and buffs for free that are.... (probably) worse than the lifegiver's healing capabilities. that's why i recommend those other priest subclasses - you can still pick up some priest buffs/debuffs/res spells, but the free spells interact better with a lifegiver. two-damage types are better. either what you suggest is going to be good though I would personally lean more towards war hammer due to their inherent higher PEN than swords (8 vs 6). with devoted inherent +2 PEN and the additional +2 PEN from weapon modal, and warhammer, you may never have PEN issues on even PotD+upscaling. (The main difference is that axes, on top of only having one damage type, their weapon modal doesn't grant any bonus PEN.)
  7. can't go wrong with a troubadour. i wouldn't even bother with weapons with a monk. just by fist scaling alone you will get post-superb fists and you can use litany for the spirit from your priest multiclass for an additional +1 PL from acute inspiration to get post-legendary fists. combo of fist base damage and speed is highest in game and will benefit from sneak attack and streetfighter damage bonus more than any other natural weapon in the game. the only reason why you'd use other weapons in this case is for crush immunity (rare) or high crush AR. edit: instead of litany for the spirit, you can just make this a nature godlike and the monk's swift strikes should trigger the +1 PL. what boeroer said. slash immunity IS a thing, and some enemies have super huge slash AR (and battle axe modal won't help you there), so pick up monastic unarmed training as some decent backup crush damage (everyone has proficiency with fists so devoted bonus also counts there). sure personally i find this redundant. lifegiver is such a good healer that the eothas seems redundant. are you trying to compensate for post-shapeshift poor healing? i wouldn't worry about that. my experience with life giver is that you only need to shapeshift in emergencies, and after shapeshifting is done you've done so much healing you don't need much more afterwards. i'd personally pick another priest subclass with more unique capabilities that can make up for the loss of PL and AL8-9 druid spells from not single-classing, e.g. wael can give you good survivability, magran adds diverse firepower (literally), woedica has a lot of useful debuffs for when you don't need to heal without using up your lifegiver spells.
  8. Late to the party, but the discussion is interesting enough to want ot chime in on this thread necro For what little it's worth, as much as the RDC's usage of assassination and conquest doesn't sit well (and shouldn't), I still get the sense that they may be the group that wants the best for the most people. Utilitaranism as a moral ethic has its limits. Especially since how the RDC defines "most people" is exclusively nationalistic: e.g. they only want what's good for Rautaians, and not even Huana, who they are basically kin with but deem an uncultured mass of savages that needs to be rescued from itself. (I fully expect in their society to see a poem entitled "The Rautaian Aumauan's Burden"). At least the Valians are meritocratic in the sense that if you are effective at political intrigue and can make the VTC a lot of money you can do well. Rautaians kinda also (in a militaristic sense) but they are nationalists first, whereas I get the feeling the VTC ultimately only care if you can make them money. There's an interesting dynamic there. The old guard of Principi are basically pirates out of necessity and have a shared sense of purpose and culture, so one could argue that they are the "better" part of the principi since they aren't just greedy looters. But then they also support slavery. Meanwhile, Aeldys hates slavery but definitely encompasses the more Joker-esque "just wants to watch the world burn"-type piracy. Ultimately I don't think any faction is supposed to be "good". They just... are. I think threads like this show that there are things people will try to highlight as beneficent about a particular faction, or other things that are just repugnant. So while I have my capital-o Opinions about my favorite faction, I think it's great that it's set up that basically anyone can justify siding with a particular faction, or no faction at all -- in this respect I think Obsidian did a way better job than F:NV where it was pretty hard to view Caesar's Legion as anything other than the traditional bad guys.
  9. ignoring hand mortars and aoe weapon interactions (i know i know a big caveat), soul whip necessarily lends itself to single-target focus, and many of their effects are limited aoe or single target. they do have aoe effects, but they tend to have really weird targeting based on a specific target (beams, bounces, aoe effect centered on target who gets a stronger effect). i think an effect like phantom foes or secret horrors, however much i love them, are more exceptions than the rule. Whereas the opposite seems to be true for a wizard/druid - they have tons of aoe effects, and single-target stuff tends to be more of the exception (necrotic lance... sunlance... thrust of tattered veils). i think possibly in practice ciphers feel less single-target because they can just repeatedly spam one's favorite aoe effects, whereas once a wizard/druid uses up their single-target stuff they can't get them back normally, so the general design of the class is more apparent. well i didn't say it was great the health loss can be relevant, but most of the time the duration isn't long enough to notice, and the health loss itself will never kill anyone (only reduce them to 1). i mostly like it for shutting down healing and lowering fortitude by 10, especially around paladins of any stripe (which is what i thought you are referencing for paladins of woedica). on dorudugan a sickened/weakened can mean literally hundreds of health loss. too bad the fight is so long it's hard to make that meaningful.
  10. you probably want to provide more details about your party, because othwerise i'm going ot say a lot of stuff that may require re-speccing. if i remember correctly, the boss merely resists body affliction, so with a level 20 aloth you can cast petrification and paralyze it for a while. empower and then cast again as needed. you'll probably need a morningstar modal to debuff with -25 fort to help land the effect well (bonus: have aloth use Eldritch Aim for extra accuracy and Infuse with Vital Essence for extra duration, or better yet Litany for the Spirit from Xoti; also use Devotions for the Faithful). You can also use scrolls of gaze of the adragan in a pinch (but petrification is better). you can petrification early on to buy you some breathing room, and/or you can cast when the boss is at near death and permanently paralyze them. If Xoti or your paladin has soulbound marux amanth you can also just instakill when boss is at near-death, saves you 25% of the fight. make sure you are using the right weapons and paying attention to PEN and AR if you're not doing significant damage. Mace modal or Eder with Sundering Blow can go a long way. it also might help to have you or eder just tanking the big guy while everyone else works on whatever adds crop up (this is the fight where the ?? teleporting beasts appear right?)
  11. Yes, with each DLC you're free to come and go as you please, with the exception of one climactic area in each DLC where the only way out is through is there one for FS? I don't remember... in fact I was on rymrgand's challenge and kept making trips out to harbinger's watch for some more of that lager and brew battered ysae.
  12. cross-class comparisons aren't great though. wizards are just a better aoe (damage or debuff) class, ciphers are more narrow and single-target focused. ryngrim's is probably too strong at AL5 (heck the AL3 one is also really good), but more importantly, I wouldn't use a cipher to fulfill the role of a wizard or vice versa. like I said, it's not going to knock my socks off, but I'll never downplay a hard-CC. (also a subtle distinction is that haunting chain targets will which synergizes with some cipher passives. it's not much, but it's something)
  13. my thoughts as no one in particular: I agree. I've said it before elsewhere, but BoW also has my narratively favorite pillars sequence in the entire game (the bridge ablaze sequence), which explored an area of the lore that most games and game worlds would be content to leave as mere mythos. And the lovecraftian setting in FS has surprisingly been underdone in these types of RPGs and I really liked it (the closest equivalent I can maybe think of is the illithid lair in BG2, but there wasn't much plot to that area). I totally convinced Wael to let the spore colony grow and thought the ending slide for it was great. From a replay perspective, though, FS is my favorite. Better dungeoneering, high-level encounters, interesting fights (whereas BoW sometimes gets real repetitive with the umtpeenth soul collector or big beast guy, and all those burning archers that keep popping up from the ground gets old and feels a bit unfair at times). Plus, even if it doesn't have the same kicker of story that I thought BoW did (and Rymrgand got fleshed out way more interestingly than Wael I thought), well, now tayn I can get into! I didn't care much for SSS the first time through, but I like it more on replays for this reason. It's fun having these isolated battles just to throw my parties at and see how they perform. The story is thin, but for replays that works out fine for me since I'm skimming/skipping through text anyway. I really hate the seeker challenge where you get transformed, though... just awful. You spend so much time carefully leveling your party and then they all get replaced by the same transmogrified group of creatures that any party gets, and you're expected to fight with that, not to mention that the transmogrification is imperfect so some classes do obscenely well (paladin auras, martial classes with lots of passives).
  14. Haunting Chains... yeah I don't get it as well. Seems like a complete waste of ability points But maybe I'm overlooking something. Like Fractured Volition - that's also... "errrm?" Fractured Volition seems like one of those abilities that didn't survive the transition to Deadfire very well (much like Mind Plague imo which used to be amazeballs in PoE1). I used Fractured Volition a bit in PoE1 because it was a great way to do -20(+) all non-deflection defenses and keep enemies from barely moving. In Deadfire, there are more ways to debuff defenses, and Hobbled and Weakened don't do nearly as much defense lowering as they used to. Haunting Chains is alright... it's a lengthy hard-CC and I'll never kick a long duration hard-CC out of bed. I remember picking it up on one of my Ydwins and it wasn't bad (though was annoying because this was early on in my Deadfire career and at AL9 I was fully expecting it to be a bounce or aoe spell and was disappointed when it wasn't).
  15. ...why are you returning to the hub? you can repair whenever you need. is it just that you're out of gold?
  16. I don't know about this as in RtWP you could cast many spells directly in a row. For example, if a round is now 6 seconds, that's equivalent to casting 15 wizard spells that are currently marked as free actions. Not to mention a lot of instant class buffs you could stack really quickly in RtWP by simply pausing after each activation. thing is in RtWP there's a difference between "instant" (like disciplined barrage or thundering blows are so instant they can literally be used while the game is paused) and merely "very very fast" (like frenzy or the fighter's pull effect). In RTWP, the very very fast still consumes animation time (and could even be disrupted). TB doen't seem to distinguish between these, and both are free actions. So while you could spam thundering blows to your hearts content in TB just like in RTwP, you could also spam the fighter's pull ability or spirit tornado as many times as you want in one round without anyone acting, which has no real equivalent tactic in RtWP.
  17. it's powerful because it's a tier 3 affliction, though in all honesty the other tier 3 afflictions can be way worse (though blind can feel punishing because the durations are longer) rogue and ciphers are different combat roles, maybe you just prefer the play style of a rogue? that's fine, but to me the idea of "rogue does everything better [than a cipher]" makes no sense to me because what rogues do is very different from ciphers. edit: also, spells are useful without weapon-modal debuffs, take it from me (700+ hours of gameplay). boeroer is mentioning strategy. -25 debuff can take spells from useful to insanely good, even against targets that have no business being affected by that spell. (i've literally chain paralyzed megabosses with a -25 debuff modal) on PotD I would say that it's only really feasible for non-insanely-good people (nb. in case you think I'm about to gloat, I would also put myself in this "not-insanely-good" category) to beat higher-level enemies at lower levels if the overall encounter is actually targeting your level. What I mean by that is that an encounter might target level 5 but have a few level 8s, at which point I would consider those level 8s eminently feasible. Torkar, meanwhile, is a bounty targeting level 14, which is way above your level, a fact that probably isn't altogether clear because it's probably showing as just three skulls (the max displayable); with downscaling enabled it might not even show skulls despite the fact that it would only downscale to at most level 10. Personally, on PotD+upscaling I would be hard pressed to do it at level 10-11 and, not to sound arrogant or condescending, I would be hella impressed if you could manage it at even that level, much less level 5. PotD encounters are so intense that until I got really used to the quest difficulties I actually refered to this thread https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98843-level-scaling-difficulty-potdcompilation-thread/page-3 there's a table halfway down that lists the "target levels" for each quest (though this doesn't cover DLCs). For a newish PotD+upscaling experience, I would personally stay away from a quest until you are at least +1 level from the target level. edit: if torkar himself is level 14, he at least has 79 accuracy, so your 80 deflection is a moot point in terms of defense (it just means torkar "only" has a 4% chance to crit you). he probably also has level-scaled weapons, so has +8 or +12 accuracy (up to 12 or 14% chance to crit). add in buffs or perception stat and 80 deflection doesn't seem that notable at all. add in all the other adds he has, and that would quickly obliterate your party methinks.
  18. Maybe a higher-level cipher has a lot more action economy concerns, but for an ability at that ability level and for only 10 focus (with possible lots gained back for a beguiler) the cast time and effect seem in line with the other effects at that level (except maybe whispers, because charm is frequently way more powerful than even other T3 afflictions). Play styles may differ, but personally Eyestrike is one of only a handful of AL1 cipher abilities I would actually continue to use later into the game (along with Whispers and Tenuous).
  19. yay, summons fixed! I can roll my bellower now i have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually an intended nerf (e.g. the designers never intended for this aoe weapon interaction, and they took wayyyy too long to address it, letting people getting used to it) and the reason why no one official appears to be commenting on it is to try to sidestep the player rage at having such a big and late-in-the-cycle power-level cut.
  20. Possibly any effect that has a target plus an aoe will need to connect with the initial target for the aoe to actually happen. Beam spells are an exception, because the beam effect is automatic and they just check to affect the target at every "tick." Pillar of Faith is definitely like eyestrike (checks to roll for damage on main target, and only if it connects will the aoe prone effect kick in... and because the two effects target different defenses, it's worth targeting a low-reflex target just to make sure hte prone (targets fortitude instead) happens). I think Mental Binding or Fetid Caress (also target + aoe effects) do something similar. I could be wrong or missing some exceptions.
  21. It's worth highlighting that I thought Fallouts NV handled this strength/accuracy conundrum that you all are going on about reasonably well. In that game (also in Fallout 1/2), all weapons had a minimum strength. For weapons like handguns or a sword, the strength is really really low. but for something like a gatling gun it's pretty high. If you have anything less than the minimum strength, you get a huge accuracy penalty (and in first-person mode there's visible weapon sway as you are apparently struggling to hold the weapon). Once you have the minimum strength though, strength doesn't matter one bit. If a weapon needs 5 strength, then 10 strength does nothing for you that 7 strength or 5 strength couldn't already do. In my mind, F:NV is closer to "reality" than what crucis is talking about, or what you're talking about. Strength is a threshold. If you can barely hold that rifle up, you're not going to be doing any precision shots with it (but you probably will be able to do some shots with it, even if they go wild). But once you have the upper body strength just to hold it in place, the difference between benching 100 lbs versus 300 lbs isn't going to matter at all, and after that it's your specific skill with the weapon and whatever accuracy stat you want to add in here (perception for fallout and deadfire). Strength might matter for repeat shots or swings or thrusts (e.g. fatigue), but really that's endurance or constitution, and again this is why I argue that "realism" is not a good metric for assessing a game mechanic because it's a hole with no bottom and you have to make some cutoff at some point, so why not just prefer a mechanically fun abstraction rather than being fetishizing realism as an end unto itself. (In terms of game play design, though, strength requirements for weapons were definitely a case of murk. Probably most people didn't notice that weapons had strength requirements, and the weapon sway and reduced VATS accuracy probably got lost in the action.)
  22. To be fair, just being able to solo a megaboss does not necessarily equate to general power. Solo-ing basically amounts to "is this class lucky enough to have the right inherent toolset to take advantage of some technical tricks." For example, my two solo runs (one Triple Crown, one The Ultimate) for PoE1 used a chanter and paladin, respectively, and it had less to do with any in-built power, but more just about their sheer ability to repeatedly use powers or high defenses themselves (e.g. infinite summons with chanter, bonus defense with paladin) and I would nowhere near put them on the top of the list of "most powerful PoE1 classes." That being said, I think lists like this are pretty useful if you acknowledge their shortcomings. They are essentially a crowd-sourced list of what casual Deadfire players think are powerful (because it'll basically be heavily weighted towards casual players), and if you contextualize it like that, it can be a good guide for other casual players to quickly figure out what are good classes to pick up and play. But if you start picking at it ever so slightly for more details, or expect some high-end guides on class/multiclass power, it's going to collapse really quickly. (Imagine determining Starcraft 2 meta or Super Smash Bros tier lists based largely just on what casual players like to play or worse think they like to play.)
  23. Haven't watched this video, but watched some of their other stuff, and it seems prudent to at least wait for beta to be over, because there are certain mechanics that seem way too abusable and likely to be patched (free action spamming mostly).
  24. that's a bloody good quote, had to immediately go look it up. Now i have a reading list, thanks!
  25. you should repost this in either the main bug report forum or the turn-based feedback forum, since i don't think this forum is actively monitored unless there is an actual patch on the beta branch being evaluated.
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