thelee

I think for hte patient Hunter's Claw helps fill that role for rangers, but it requires a lot of metagame knowledge to when to and the patience to actually build up the stacks (and not playing on Woedica's or Eothas's challenge).

For everyone - Prestige. I think chanters get the lamest PL scaling of any class, but even then Prestige is worth it and is only available for single-class. Even martial classes will like it, monks and rogues especially. Monk specifically both Whispers of the Wind and Inner Death are good (the latter empowered and comboed with Empowered Strikes - basically an instakill for most normal enemies, and a hugely punishing attack on most bosses, whiel whispers of the wind can still be stupidly metagamed). I think you might be implicitly focusing on martial classes, because I think all casters have AL8/9 spells that are exceptional without much thought. I think compared to martial classes in fact, casters are more "worth it" to go single-class, due to how spellcasting resources work (you get dedicated AL8 and AL9 casts, whereas martial abilities have to compete with lower-level abilities for the same resource). As an illustration, some samples of great caster abilities from 8 and 9 (not an exhaustive list, but really just to show how easy it is to find great high-level abilities): wizard AL8 Caedabold's Bow - the bouncing terrify effect that triggers on each hit basically lets you stunlock two enemies the entire time you have this up (provided no resolve resistance) AL9 Petrification - another thread brought to my attention that people might not know that "Petrification" is a pseudo-tier 4 affliction, which means even bosses and megabosses that merely have dexterity affliction or body affliction resistance will still get "Paralyzed" instead of being resisted down to "Immobilized". The perma-petrify/paralyze effect at near death still works on bosses/megabosses, which is basically an instakill if you can land it. (A blood mage with backup healing can probably just lock down the hardest fights in the game by repeatedly casting this and an average of three blood sacrifices to replenish the AL9 cast... or have a cipher backup who will just buff you with brilliant) priest AL8 Hand of Weal and Woe - damages and heals every second not every tick, which means even your squishes will be able to facetank the hardest enemies in the game with this, all while you clear out non-fire-immune trash mobs trivially. AL9 Magran's Might - at last check, each projectile (spaced out every couple seconds or so) interrupts on hit, so not only are you stripping the enemy of all buffs with each hit but you are basically keeping them stunlocked the entire time. chanter AL8 "eld nary" upgrade - you get a crap ton of extra bounces. if you roll a bellower you can get +6 or +7 PL bonus and clear out most enemies by yourself. AL9 "They did sing a song of carnage fair" - animated weapon is already a sick summon, and this gets you an additional weapon (with an Arcane Assault ability) druid AL8 avenging storm - metagamable for lots of damage AL9 great maelstrom - stupid amounts of aoe damage

Holy Power, Blessing, Dire Blessing, Restore, Halt, Pillar of Faith, Prayer for the Spirit, Consecrated Ground, Despondent Blows, Iconic Projection, Spiritual Weapon, etc. are all great abilities available in the earlier spell slots. Subclasses can get even more (Magran, Wael, Skaen especially, and Woedica for their fists).

priest of wael really should belong to your column A, makes me reiterate that we really should be talking about subclasses because some subclasses are so transformative to the experience (like how you call out trickster). also, barbarians are real great. I've never done deadly deadfire mod, but I don't understand how they couldn't be considered in at least column B (possibly column A).

Firearms have a -.15 multiplier, no? The window in which firearms did less damage on a crit was like 1.0 and shortly after, before the blunted criticals effect got nerfed.

AD&D 2e had no AoOs, and that was the D&D version that all of the IE games except for IWD2 were based. I also wouldn't be surprised if grognards also hated 3e's changes to D&D compared to AD&D.

arterial strike is close. grog means that even if your hobble misses or the enemy is dex affliction resistant, you can still force them to chase you around while they bleed to death.

Tyranny did it first. Boy that was a surprising learning curve coming in from PoE1 and seeing my attacks miss because the enemy moved a bit.

That's the point of the pet, as Boeroer says (along with the history lesson). What in my mind makes Grog secret tech is in Deadfire, as an enemy winds up a melee attack (i.e. they aren't recovering anymore and their ability icon starts filling), the inability for enemies to engage you means you can move your character out of melee range without consequence. (Ordinarily a disengagement attack would be made at +20 accuracy and +100% damage which uh is pretty brutal coming from a boss.) That melee attack still completes because AI doesn't know how to cancel, but because you are now no longer in melee range, in the combat log you see that the attack misses due to "(out of range)". It's probably way too much of a micromanagement headache for most fights, but when we're talking about a boss or a megaboss of which there might be only one and who might have powerful melee attacks, this effectively means you can infinitely tank a boss without ever taking damage, unless they do a ranged attack. EDIT - also old infinity engine games had no concept of "knockout", being reduced to 0 health was death. This is probably another thing these grognards were bitter about. (Though strictly speaking it was not permadeath unless you got hit with significant excess damage.)

one thing that would mess up the initial rating is the wtffail of forbidden fist monk. if we're taking an average of the subclasses, that hurts the monk's standing quite a bit on its own. really you'd have to break out the subclasses and rank them alongside vanilla classes. re: wizard, i would put blood mages over the top, but possibly transmuters worse than other wizard variants. similarly, chanters in general are pretty good, but i think there's a pretty clear tiering between the various subclasses (troubadour, anyone?) and as for cipher, i could go either way for most of them, but wild mind deserves to sit in the corner along with foribdden fist.

Am I the only no-AI micromanager who finds "knock up" abilities annoying as hell because they break targeting? you're not the only one. it's really annoying for an enemy to miss out on being hit by a spell because a knock up went off at the right time. knock up is good enough that i'm willing to work through that annoyance though.

I played a little bit with my own Bubbling Chalice last night as well. I think by default Bubbling Chalice has an inherent AL of 13. It uses the buggy consumable scaling (also applies to Monastic Unarmed Order) of always using single-class PL scaling, even if multi-classed. Because the ability is keyworded like the wizard flame shield spell, it benefits both from generic PL scaling, alchemy scaling as well as fire and evocation PL boosts. I had a character with an alchemy of 13 as well as prestige and they had +50% on the duration, which aligns with my above theory and the numbers you are getting. So with all our sleuthing, the solution should be: re-balance the bubbling chalice to have an AL of 0.

If you're going for like a phalanx thing, it seems like Unbroken is tailor-made for this approach. Single class devoted + bladed weapon (single-weapon style or like an estoc) seems reminiscent of samurai tropes to me.

I haven't seen much mention of this pet - if you're not familiar, it provides you resolve affliction immunity and engagement immunity, at the cost of being unable to engage and being utterly annihilated when reduced to 0 health (instead of knocked out). Party-wide engagement immunity I suspected was really good, since Deadfire lets you run out of range of melee attacks. And sure enough, I just gave it a try with Dorudugan (the vessel megaboss). I just kept an eye on Dorudugan's attacks and ran Mirke out of range every single time, while everyone else pelted it with ranged attacks -- basically granted me infinite tanking ability. It also made the global pulling effect irrelevant because all my party members could just run away again without taking disengagement attacks. I don't know if Grog would be great to generally have, but for some big fights might be the most powerful tool you have in your toolbox, if you're up for some micromanagement. Might not be as good solo since Nomad's Brigandine can be enchanted for engagement immunity anyway. But Grog can be combined with any armor. (And yes, I did manage to beat Dorudugan with this strategy. Mirke only ended up getting hit by Dorudugan twice or thrice by my own failure to pause/pay attention at the right time. Also lack of engagement made it extremely easy to kite Dorudugan around the map to avoid letting it self heal from fire damage.)

i am a bit biased, because i play priests a lot. but i play priests a lot and have a lot of experience with them. so i strongly believe they don't belong at the bottom--as a whole I think they're overall balanced, with some individual subclasses that shoot up the tier (wael, skaen). devotions of the faithful alone is still an amazing general-purpose buff/debuff.

I actually find Rogue not the best. My top four would be chanter, paladin and monk and wizard. oooh yeah, this is what i mean about me being paralyzed... i think it depends on what you're trying to do. i would rate chanter super highly just because they are unparallelled for big long fights (bosses, megabosses), but people who don't care about those fights (or skip a lot of them) might not rate chanter as highly.

I have trouble really coming up with a top 3 because I am paralyzed with being able to see merits in every class, but that being said wizards are definitely powerful and I just have to reiterate how early in the backer beta (and even around release) there were plenty of people who thought casters suck/were super underpowered. I feel like I literally predicted this outcome - every. damn. time people complain that fireballs don't do enough damage but then that's not the only thing wizards do, and nukes are not even the main reason why any caster can be so friggin good.

Simple - Bending Trunk to stay alive and kill as much as possible, then cast Smoke Veil to replenish resources and reset the fight. Come back and repeat until everyone is dead. I didn't think smoke veil would let you drop combat entirely like a Withdrawal does. I guess I'm wrong. I remember mobs still coming after you. Also I would have thought that the damage from all those mobs would eat through Unbending and Gipon Prudensco pretty quick, given he's dual wielding. Again I guess I'll have to go check. Thanks. Smoke Veil gives you invisibility+untargetability, and that's good enough to drop combat if there are no other viable targets. I think literally any invisibility or untargetability effect works like this. Plus, I would generally trust Kaylon to know what works for dropping combat, since Kaylon is a (the?) solo master around these parts. In my experience, solo experiences are only intended for people with a high tolerance for tedium.

Int should have 0 effect on a consumable. The only clues here: -17% is exactly equivalent to a -4 PL deficit and -9% is exactly equivalent to a -2 PL deficit. So it definitely seems like we're looking at something related to PL scaling and an inherent ability level. If you take off everything from each character, do you still get the variations? What passives do they have? Do they have other skills (in case bubbling chalice is looking at something else other than alchemy)? Importantly we'd be looking for something that is different between Eder and Pallegina by two in some way (it could also be a multiple of two) and which Pallegina has more of. edit: also, who was holding it when you took the screenshot for the -13% ?

from a micromanagement perspective, if you're worried about a particular enemy, have you considered pressing "x" to cancel any action by your melee-er just so that you're actively doing nothing until you start seeing an ability being used?

I have played hundreds of hours and have never gotten a baby boar from Chief Echoing-Strike. looking it up now it appears to be a function of me never having hte stealth to sneak closer and observe. looking at it now, the baby boar sounds like an insane pet. Is it a 100% interrupt chance??

Have you considered a blood mage. On top of Thrust at AL1 there's also Slicken, which prones repeatedly for a short duration. Even if the cast time makes it hard to interrupt a specific ability when you see one first being used, the repeated prones means it will very likely keep the enemy locked down and interrupt future ability uses. With a blood mage and some external source of healing, you can basically be a perma-interrupter for important fights. Use Slicken or Thrust, then blood sacrifice you get a guaranteed AL1 cast back. Interrupt again (or cast another overlapping slicken). Blood sacrifice to get a guaranteed AL1 cast back. Repeat until you no longer need to lock down the enemy. No other wizard can do this (at least without a source of Brilliant). Rogues are also very good at interruption because literally every single one of their offensive martial abilities has interrupt on hit. Dual-wield a rogue, use something like Escape or Smoke Veil to hop next to someone you want to interrupt, and make sure they never get anything done ever again. If you get Smoke Cloud and one of its upgrades you can interrupt a huge area in one go. Monks are great interrupters. With passive wound generation (Dance of Death ability, Mortification of the Soul ability, Nazpalca subclass, Shattered Pillar subclass) you can use Efficient Anguish as an infinite source of prones (albeit you have to hit fortitude to do so). They also get Skyward Kick which is a knock up---kind of like an interrupt on steroids. Fighters are also great interrupters. They also get a knock up effect (Mule Kick). You can also use a tactician subclass which will basically grant you infinite resources to be an interrupter.

That really sucks dude. I don't have much to say, other than in PoE1 after losing a few runs due to game-breaking bugs, yes, I manually ended up saving and keeping back ups of those saves just to preserve the iron man runs. If Deadfire's not autosaving for ironman, that's even worse than PoE1 (which at the very least did autosave, and made keeping backup saves easier--just alt-tabbing and copying the save file to a backup folder--instead of having to exit completely all the time). Developers really should not be designing game modes that rely on games being crash proof.... ever (I had similar hair-pulling crashes doing Fallout 4 survival mode). But I empathize with you, that sucks.

A long long time ago, various consumables had different "inherent ability level" much in the same way abilities have an inherent ability level. If you had total PL less than this inherent ability level, you would actually get PL scaling penalties (with inversions) instead of PL bonuses. With like patch 2.0 or something, they were supposed to have rebalanced all consumabesl to have an inherent ability level of 0, so you could only get upside scaling from PL. It looks like the bubbling chalice might have a high inherent ability level, and that's why you are seeing negative scaling attributed to "level" ("level" in tooltips encompasses power level scaling [which includes scaling from skill points like alchemy] and character level). Other effect you talk about (bonus or penalty to healing) would not be attributed to "level." Similarly, negative or positive effects from resolve never show up in tooltips, they only show up in combat log implicitly (when the actual duraiton for an effect diverges from the hover-over duration, you can impute the difference due to resolve). I do not know why it would vary from character to character if they are all level 20 and they all have the same alchemy skill. Do they have other PL bonuses? Are some multiclass vs single-class? -13% due to "level" is exactly what you would expect if your total PL was 3 less than the inherent ability level (1-1/1.15)... just as a theory, for example, a multiclass character caps out at exactly 3 less PL than a single-class character with Prestige. Either way, at the very least having a high inherent ability level for a consumable is buggy - it should be tweaked so that internally it is AL0.

both pistols and blunderbusses do less damage than average compared to other ranged weapons on top of having a crappier penetration setup. their main advantage is their single-handedness while also being reloading. have you considered single-weapon styleing a pistol with the rushed reload weapon modal on? probably much better outcome than dual-wielding two pistols (and you don't even need to pick up the weapon style ability to get use out of it, since crits aren't too useful for guns).