thelee

i think this is just way too good. i think you're overemphasizing the pet. if you need to have an ability this overtuned at tier 8 to make a pet viable, then what you're basically saying is "pet isn't viable." which i don't agree with. imo, it should be reasonable to have a pet build and go w/out a talent without major cost, but you're basically making a skill that would be a trap for pet builds to not take. (for this reason I don't particularly like Vicious and Resilent companion, they are basically talent taxes for rangers, at least on PotD) the problem we're trying to address, if I were to summarize, is simply that Bonded Fury as it is, isn't a particularly great payoff for single-class rangers, especially since a party of 5 (or a multiclass) will frequently be able to cover several tier 2 inspirations. We don't have to go all the way to all that to make it useful. I honestly believe as I mentioned upthread that simply just granting a medium-duration Swift even is Good Enough to make it worthwhile. Tenacious+Swift if you want a bit more (and Tenacious is a bit more "Fury"-ish). (Energized + Swift would be pretty good, but might be busted on lower difficulties where crits are easy to come by with a pet.) Yeah, it kinda breaks the original theming of Bonded Fury, but I don't think it was a particularly compelling theming to begin with. It would give pet builds a lot more survivability and utility, and would make single-class pet rangers less of a trap compared to just including Maia into your party (again, her bird basically is the best all-around pet and there's nothing much the mainchar can do about it). And it would not be a talent tax for pet builds, because you still have relative alternatives (Master's Call).

still a mini combo! not everything has to be hermetic to a solo character. though the big problem with this stuff is that at least on PotD enemy health way outscales your character, so relying on returning some of the damage you receive in any meaningful way does not seem like a great strategy. at least with stuff like riposte, you are avoiding damage at the same time.

ime it's far more likely for the pet to be stationary for extended stretches of time, so it'd be mostly "free" resource gen. i like the idea of a mobility reward, because the ranger has some mobility pay-off (shot on the run mostly) and it encourages an atypical playstyle. i'm not sure how that would actually play out in terms of implementation though

in terms of heal companion buff, have you considered giving it an instant cast and no recovery? there's still an unpleasant action economy to heal companion, and Play Dead has instant cast. at least then "Heal Companion" has value in that it doesn't cost you action economy to use to use more pre-emptively. I haven't played aroudn with it in BPM mode, but when heal companion is available, enemies tend to be able to take a pet from healthy to dead pretty quickly, so you want to use it pre-emptively, but also not necessarily waste cast-time (even down to .5s BPM) and recovery time just to do that in case there's no real danger coming up on the pet. adding resource recovery to bonded fury seems too good, imo. it would basically be an auto-pick in any build. i'm circling back to an earlier point - if bonded fury had a narrower set of tier 3 abilities, that would be extremely good for a pet-support. Swift in particular (whatever other T3 is an exercise to the reader). Maia has the best pet in the game because her bird can face tank megabosses because it's immune to engagement, a single-class ranger focusing on their pet should get a similar payoff and not need to rely on an exhortation.

*sighs, takes Konstanten out of the storage closet* time for another run

if like, you get a couple skellies in one hit you get two free full attacks on the enemy? (or is it one cleave per attack. doesn't really come up often, so curious)

there's no immunity to pierce. probably what you're seeing is an immunity to disengagement attacks.

you can avoid this outcome with some carefully selected dialogue choices.

probably not what you're looking for, but "everything bad" i find to be really hilariously fun challenge. everyone's dead, you get cursed by basically every god, etc. more seriously, the non-"everything bad" pre-built legacies generally get you everything in the game, whereas if you import or do your own custom history you could easily choose to resolve quests and story points in ways where you deny yourself unique stuff. the one exception that i can think of is the Devil of Caroc plate, only some of the pre-built histories will get you that, and i'm only pretty certain of "everything good" option being one of them. (there may be another) edit: you won't be able to get "everything" using a pre-built history, because the berath option (fair and balanced) is the only way to get the unique consumable "berath's bell", but also impossible to get devil of caroc breastplate. similarly i don't think there's any other way to get hylea's consumable without benefiting her in the legacy, which is mutually exclusive with berath's bell. can be important for e.g. a no-rest or low-rest run where the hylea's consumable is very very good.

nope she'll run over to you first before getting scared. important that she freaks out first lordy you got a pickle of a challenge here. how far have you been able to get throughout all your iterations? another thing possible consideration is cinder bombs. unless BPM changed it, the explosion itself will interrupt, without a roll, so it really doesn't matter how good your explosives skill is. it could act as an extra source of interrupt that you don't have to resource-gen for, for stopping merges.

if you skip to 20:30 in my video you can see what i do. sorry i don't recall the extent to which bpm nerfs various things but, what about that wand that has a barring death's door effect? could you use that in conjunction with your 4x ooze wall of draining to give you a lot more blood sacrifices?

Maybe dumb question: are you letting vela get scared before you kite? Her scared AI shouldn’t wander that much, whereas her normal AI will try to find you (and then getting scared when an enemy is in range). I dragged Vela with me to aggro HoW so I could trigger her fear, I withdrew her, and then kited. It was pretty foolproof in terms of safety

not about accuracy, but about maximizing procs/second avenging storm procs count as "weapon" attacks (if you're not aware, there's some infinite damage cheese that you can do with this fact combined with the 2h sword Effort). so it can trigger interrupt off impediment. it's also a bonus source of damage. so with potion of impediment, deadeye, and high speed (i had scordeo's edge buff, so ultimately dual wielding didn't even matter i guess, i was just dual wielding because that's skaen's spiritual weapon) you get the possibility to interrupt from the weapon, and an additional chacne to interrupt from the avenging storm hit. especially after the initial ooze form splits and defenses lower, it can be a massive aid. i looked up my own run again just to verify that potion of impediment does in fact work with avenging storm and can be effective: it varied. i could have infinite withdraw casts because i was part tactician, but really i had to manage that pretty carefully since in my practice runs i could run into a situation where the wrong spell gets restored by brilliant, or i'm starting a fight without a sufficient withdraw cast because i didn't restore enough spells in the last fight. i think generally i tried to aggro enemies so that vela gets scared, withdraw her, and then lure enemies far far away from her so that i don't have to worry about re-withdrawing her and can just focus on getting back up to full withdraw and restoring my own resources.

nit: slicken isn't a hazard AoE. it's an AoE with a repeating effect. want to make sure we're precise, because "hazard" has a specific meaning and interacts differently with items and buffs. yes, but they're not additive. they're independent checks, so you'll have a 1-(.85 * .75) = 36% chance for hit->crit instead of of 15 + 25 = 40% chance. what race are you? for my ultimate i run i chose a boreal dwarf expressly for the hauane o whe fight, which was by far the roughest of all the megabosses when i was planning things out. boreal dwarf gives you a massive 50% miss to graze chance against hauane. would be real useful for landing something like slicken. have you considered scrolls of avenging storm and dual-wielding something? iirc my ultimate attempt was basically dual-wielding, lots of effects to boost accuracy, deadeye, impediment, scordeo's edge buff, avenging storm, and going to town on hauane o whe. basically my entire character was planned just to be able to take on hauane o whe.

sorry it was an arbalest. mechanical marvel sorry, when i say "won't prevent HoW splits" i mean it won't prevent *any* split. but you're right, if you're fast, you can dps one down and use it to kill it at near death before they have a chance to merge. but merging begins at 50% health and the instakill isn't active until 25% health so that's quite a window of merging to deal with (and you'd need a separate solution for the more basic oozes that merge immediately) i swear it used to work with spells early on, but on a more recent one i couldn't get it to proc, so i think it's only weapons now. deadeye definitely works with spells, but the proc rate is rather low on its own. if you're able to get the axe from SSS you don't need to worry about getting berserker (with the hidden health) since you'd be able to instantly always ugprade your frenzy to energized with weapon switching. jester's cap cap of the laughingstock has an aura that lowers everyone's deflection by 10. the way it's implemented though, it shows up as a positive buff on the enemy, and for wall of draining it counts as a buff you can drain duration from (except it has no duration, so it'll stay active and be a perpetual source of +time on your own buffs). again, i don't know if BPM changed how cap of the laughingstock does this aura, since it is a source of cheese. i mention it because it would give you a lot more time on energized and you can spam a much lower-level (and easier to blood sacrifice spell) like chill fog, where crits would interrupt. you'd need to stack a bunch of +accuracy though (though the last couple times I ran Deadfire I basically did this strategy with a druid, just layering on so many ticking aoes with energized active and preventing HoW from doing much of anything). what about slicken? has always been a tried-and-true boss interrupt, and it has an aoe (to get multiple oozes), and as a tier 1 spell it should be really easy to restore with blood sacrifice.

a) if not solo, the most "legitimate" way is to equip everyone other than your tank with crossbows or arbalests with modals on and interrupt merges. you would have to deliberately hold off on shooting at times to make sure you have it up and available when you need it, since the merge can happen very fast. if you are willing to go this far, there's an xbow that shoots in a line. you could reload, cast spells (so you don't fire) and then when you see a merge, run into position and fire to hit both oozes. there's a chance you'd miss, but it might serve as a backup if below strategies don't work. b) the oozes are also vulnerable to dex afflictions - if you use petrify. it'll get resisted down to paralyze, which is still hard CC. but if you're doing this to stop a merge, you have to hit both mergers, if one is hard-CCed but the other is still able to merge, it'll still succeed. "potentially" was just game-dev future-proofing for adjustments of the percentage rate without needing to update text/translations. in reality, it's always been a 100% chance of success on a successful graze or better on a near-death enemy. however, this won't prevent HoW splits, and merges start happening at 50%. what about Concelhaut's Crushing Doom? interrupts multiple times, and does damage. you'd need to be able to rapidly recover it, don't know if that's possible w/ BPM's nerfs. just have a couple casts active on both oozes and the likelihood that they'll be able to merge is real low. does BPM nerf wall of draining? energized + wall of draining on HoW to keep it up. you can use jester's cap to act as a buff that you can drain from HoW (unless BPM fixed this interaction). use stuff like chill fog or something else (not hazards) that will do potentially lots of interrupts while being easy to spam/restore. This solves the problem too that lower-level oozes that start merging immediately and you might be caught flat-footed if you're in the middle of recovery.

i've used a lot of +beneficial effect items in the my last few runs (both percentage and also fixed), and sadly chants aren't impacted by them. they are just overridden in the game mechanics to always just be based on the default chant duration + the calculated linger. that being said, salvation of time does work, but i suspect only because it happens at a different point in the game's computations than at chant-application time. i haven't checked to see if offensive chants are negatively impacted by resolve or -hostile effect stuff, but i suspect they aren't either (ISTR being able to keep up some offensive chants on Dorudugan, who has maxed resolve)

yeah mostly the issue was that in The Ultimate Magran's challenge is turned on, which prevents you from pausing. So it doesn't become foolproof (and in The Ultimate you can't really afford a mistake). also, with Berath's challenge on, you can pause the game when you're close unenough, unstealth and then re-stealth while the game is still paused, then unpause, and that'll be enough to trigger combat while still in stealth. don't even have to bother with traps or anything. traps are useful if you need to split up enemies though.

i wouldn't say it's bad, but you do need to avoid those traps. instead of the +acc stance you can do mob stance. meanwhile disciplined barrage line of buffs and confident aim make it a lot easier to generate focus on vanilla ciphers, especially on high difficulty. open question: does a kill from soulblade's soul annihilation trigger mob stance full attacks? might be a neat interaction for a fighter/cipher.

yeah, I can't peer into @Elric Galad's head, but I seem to recall this was a factor, just the quality-of-life aspect.

I actually precisely did a "Berath simp" style party/character, I used a Druid that invested in Decay effects and a few Poison effects (since Decay alone won't give you enough coverage). Heals would give you some versatility, and is in keeping with Berath's cyclical portfolio. Are you against companions? Vatnir would be happy to join a Berath simp party, even if he's, strictly-speaking, Rymrgand. Lot of overlap. What about corpse-eater barbarian? A barbarian from a society that has a ritual around eating the dead seems on brand.

i haven't done too much turn-based (mostly just using the S4 mod for some high-level play), but in turn-based mode I find this to be a much more practical strategy since you have the time to do this every round. If somehow Deadfire was a sweaty esports game, then I would totally anticipate some tryhards doing this in RTwP mode to optimize every tiny fraction out of this game.

i don't think you can cast restricted spells even if you steal it with grimoire imprint... can you?

yeah, it works. i think i posted a build sometime a while back that if you just care about doing some fire nukes, this is the way to go. small correction: for evoker, it's a 15% chance for evoker to echo. too bad that Magran spell list "wastes" a few slots on non-evocation or useless evocation (like Flame Shield). So you mostly get Fan of Flames early on (Ray of Fire is a little underpowered imo, better than nothing) and then eventually Torrent of Flame (only one cast normally). At least you can bathe in the bath house to boost your Fan of Flames output. edit: IIRC for the build itself, it also stacks a ton of +fire and generic PL (i think i get up to +13 sustained), recommends champion's boon for the +2 PEN and might bonus, and salvation of time (which can also echo) to boost the bonus PL you get from using it with weyc's wand. the vithrack silk slippers also works with scrolls. i've only ever had it happen once, but i noticed it because i got a targeting indicator again with my cursor (!)

have fun! in the final DLC there are some slippers that give you a 5% chance to echo. it's not a lot, but stacks multiplicatively with the evoker echo and gives you just a bit of extra oomph. It also does mean there is a very very very slight chance to echo a spell twice. Not terribly likely for any given spellcast, but there are enough fights left at that point that there's a reasonable chance it'll happen once (though because of how uncommon it is it might be relatively wasted on like a level 1 spell).