thelee

spells are per encounter. if you see "0 rest", as engvito suggests, it's a spell that's coming from an item you have equipped, not from a grimoire, and you've exhausted it.

it sounds like the OP is saying that even primary attacks also get the -35% damage penalty, which is clearly a bug. it should only apply to dual-wielded full attacks.

misspelling aside, it is a bit annoying the various quest-related street ambushes on PotD, because you could trigger the quest when you're low level and have no idea you're about to get an extremely rough encounter. This is one of a few times where PotD just really punishes a lack of metagame knowledge.

that is the mega boss

the inability to look up from the bestiary what an ability actually does is probably one of my few big gripes about the game. from what i understand, the actual ability mechanics itself are auto-generated, so it'd be nice to just get that, even if the designers don't want to write up the actual flavor text that goes with most abilities. re: weakness frost vs weakness electricity, if i had to guess there are two different types of "weaknesses." There's the weakness I see on fire giants which gives them a penalty to defenses against frost-keyworded attacks. Then there's the weakness I see on fire oozes, which actually cause frost-keyworded attacks to enfeeble the frost ooze. If I had to guess, I would say that "weakness; weakness: whatever" is the simple one where you just have reduced defenses, but "ability; weakness: whatever" is the more complicated one where the attack of the given keyword actually triggers something special. Pure speculation of course, I've never actually noticed or tried to take advantage of porokoa's weaknesses.

has anyone tested this interaction? because Mortification of the Soul does not break Dance of Death, so depending on how Blood Sacrifice is implemented, it might not break Dance of Death either.

I think it got a little better with some of the late-game rebalancing (guardian fight better, the faction fight less of a trivial roflstomp), but yeah, especially considering Ukaizo gets its own map I was expecting a lot more to it than just wandering from small (mostly empty) area to small (mostly empty) area.

Yeah, but I more meant it as a concern for SC Chanters in general. MC chanters get to use their other class's abilities and strengths while not casting invocations, *and* they are constantly chanting. SC Chanters just have invocations, chanting, and auto-attacks without any strong martial abilities. I guess they should still be able to hold their own with good gear (medium armor, I guess?) but it seems potentially...unexciting? oh yeah, add to that chants scale with character level not power level, so MC chanters don't take any hit to their chant quality themselves. not sure I would call it unexciting (they still get better invocations and chants faster), maybe at least uninteractive; i remember in PoE1 I would have chanters where (because chants are unaffected by recovery) I would just load them up with heavy armor and a shield to basically be like tanks with no other abilities.

not to mention that aside from the way more actual instadeath in BG2 (lit. a random trap you fail to disarm could have a disintegrate effect basically right at the start of the game) doesn't gate things as strongly as maybe it should for newer players. I remember things like a) randomly wandering into a secret room in an inn and being mercilessly slaughtered by a lich, b) randomly wandering into a secret chamber under the sewers and being slaughtered by mind flayers, c) randomly opening a secret cave wall and being expected to defeat an iron golem i don't feel like re-litigating people's conceptions about BG and BG2's difficulty (there have been many threads before), but tl;dr to me BG/BG2 difficulty frequently amounts to "here's a round hole, do you have a round peg or are you stuck with a square one?" At this point I can replay BG or BG2 with an arbitrary party and there's no challenge because I know all the technical tricks, where as such is not the case with PoE or Deadfire (i.e. difficulty is less "tricky" and more organic). edit: actually addressing one of OP's points: it's not a gimmick or "artificial nonsense", it's been inherent to the game since backer beta. you can call it a matter of taste, but due to the open exploration nature of the game, they seemed to have always planned on having different scaling options for different tastes and challenge levels. magran's fires challenges, sure, those definitely feels like more gimmicky ways to increase difficulty in random ways, but before they opened up those challenges to any difficulty you had to have potd with upscaling enabled, which seems to me the clearest word that potd+upscaling is the officially sanctioned "hardest" mode.

Me in this thread: I remember playing RPGs where inactive party members got 0 experience. Anyway, I just figured that what Obsidian was doing here was just going in that same RPG tradition that used to be extremely ubiquitous but has gradually become less common about inactive party members not getting the same experience as active ones. I don't think it has any big design goal, but is rooted in the same ancient sense of "logic" where inactive party members shouldn't be accumulating experience because by definition they're not doing anything (in that sense it's more of a punishment for failing to swap rather than an encouragement to swap), but adapting that over time because back in the day sometimes you would be forced to take along a party member and it sucked a lot if they were level 10 and you were level 50. it worked better in RPGs where you weren't forced to have a specific protagonist (there weren't many of these) because like in Deadfire, in other games like Chrono Trigger or various Final Fantasies you would invariably have a super-leveled protagonist and a bunch of equivalently-underleveled party members if you actually did swap a lot.

say what? did you like run a party of 6 fighters in BG? because if you run with a mixed party of casters, challenge drops off exponentially as you level up due to caster power scaling. AD&D is really broken in that sense. Also, I guess BG has a "consistent challenge curve" if by that you mean "from beginning of game to end of game all fights are super easy because of level 1 Sleep spell and also easily-found wands of fire" (edit: this is less true in BGEE because sleep using the BG2 engine is less ridiculously broken)

yeah, i wouldn't really call them OP in the strict sense but they do reward metagaming (in M:TG parlance I would call it a combo engine). It's kind of like Salvation of Time; on its own it's probably one of the most mediocre AL6 spells around, but the interaction with a bunch of different things in the game that you need to have metagaming knowledge about is what really gives it its power.

Oh, from those quests you get to hunt down artifacts for the specific face? Those then lead to fights under the same category? yeah. i think there are 3 optional fights that you can unlock for each path, one per artifact, and you have to complete them all. make sure to keep talking to that valian guy to ask for more things to find.

you can sell a gigantic stack of it to a vendor for 0 gold. in the initial version of rymrgand's challenge, the spoiled food itself used to decay and disappear, but now it doesn't do that. i sold a stack of 999+ to one vendor, and i kept another stack of 999+ in my inventory just for fun.

I've only sanity-checked the animated weapons, and I believe they are fine. Unfortunately the summon scaling bug is why I'm holding off on a run with a chanter, since my Xoti and Fassina got hit a bit in my last run by this bug. edit: to your first paragraph, it's worth remembering that the bellower's chants themselves are as good as any other chanters. they only have a smaller radius.

all reflection effects only block directly targeted spells. it is their biggest weakness and why reflection effects aren't just straight-up OP in mage fights. (also you can use this fact against enemy mages. concelhaut or other big mage fights ain't so tough when you just dampen away their spell protection/reflection) all else fails, any untargetability effect will prevent you from being arcane dampened, and this means priest withdraw can work in a pinch (if you're desperate, since it takes you out of combat for a while). if you're a priest of skaen you can also use shadowing beyond. edit - i believe suppress affliction will work, but it's very temporary since arcane dampener will just come back after a short time because suppress affliction has such a short duration. I seem to remember being able to use liberating exhortation (similar to suppress affliction) on party members who were dampened.

depends on if the guns have any special passive bonuses that you can combine, but yes, in general you are correct. in fact, if you have a particular gun or one-handed ranged-weapon that you like to use a lot, it is optimal to wield it with a one-handed melee weapon instead of a lesser second gun, if no full attacks are in play. Unrelated question but I just want to get the bottom of this. Is stacking -% recovery time items and skills a good idea or does it have diminishing returns? Because based on what I read, you and MaxQuest haven't agreed on whether it has diminishing or linear returns. IIRC we actually do agree, MaxQuest has a specific definition for "intrinsic diminishing returns." This is the idea that mathematically, with linear returns you still get less relative benefit from something the more you have of it. I agree with the math, I just more disagree with the naming. Basically under a scenario with linear returns (or intrinsinc diminishing returns) you should be concerned with tradeoffs; it essentially means that if you're trading off between two sources of damage boost (e.g. might or dexterity) you should balance them out (as I've mentioned elsewhere it's for the same reason why maximizing the area of something with a fixed perimeter means creating a square instead of a rectangle). "True" diminishing returns means eventually it's just not worth investing in on its own, regardless of merit, which is not the case for something like recovery time. So does that mean stacking 4 sources of -%10 recovery will be exactly twice as strong as 2 sources of -%10 recovery? So returns are linear? for a simplified example, "linear returns" means that a +10% damage bonus will always give you the same absolute benefit, no matter how many other damage sources you had before. so if you did 10 damage, then whether or not you had +200% damage bonuses or +0% damage bonuses, an additional +10% would always give you 1 more damage. what you're talking about is actually "increasing returns." so no, 4 sources of -10% recovery will never be exactly twice as strong as 2 sources of -10% recovery, but any given -10% recovery time bonus will give you the same absolute benefit to net damage (or whatever) regardless of whether you had no prior bonus, or you already had a lot. for anyone who's ever taken calculus, linear returns is essentially where the second derivative is 0, and increasing and diminishing are when the second derivative is positive or negative, respectively.

depends on if the guns have any special passive bonuses that you can combine, but yes, in general you are correct. in fact, if you have a particular gun or one-handed ranged-weapon that you like to use a lot, it is optimal to wield it with a one-handed melee weapon instead of a lesser second gun, if no full attacks are in play. Unrelated question but I just want to get the bottom of this. Is stacking -% recovery time items and skills a good idea or does it have diminishing returns? Because based on what I read, you and MaxQuest haven't agreed on whether it has diminishing or linear returns. IIRC we actually do agree, MaxQuest has a specific definition for "intrinsic diminishing returns." This is the idea that mathematically, with linear returns you still get less relative benefit from something the more you have of it. I agree with the math, I just more disagree with the naming. Basically under a scenario with linear returns (or intrinsinc diminishing returns) you should be concerned with tradeoffs; it essentially means that if you're trading off between two sources of damage boost (e.g. might or dexterity) you should balance them out (as I've mentioned elsewhere it's for the same reason why maximizing the area of something with a fixed perimeter means creating a square instead of a rectangle). "True" diminishing returns means eventually it's just not worth investing in on its own, regardless of merit, which is not the case for something like recovery time.

Even if you don't plan on doing megabosses, seemingly like half the boss fights in FS are against an interrupt-immune target. You'd also want to stay away from Galawain's Challenge become Unstoppable would also make them interrupt-immune and there's a 1/6 chance that Exalted would give them interrupt immunity (via Courageous). Re: weapon: I would recommend Saru-Sichr, even if it's not as much "in theme", because chance of paralyze per tick of damage is even better than a weak effect on an interrupt. Beyond that, just stick with morning stars, since the -25 fort debuff + brute force = lots of crits. an alternate choice is to get the Slayer's Claw from SSS (upgrades might inspirations a tier) and roll either a berserker (their tenacious frenzy becomes energized) or a monk (their thundering blows will grant energized); energized will do the same thing as Interrupting Blows does (50% chance to interrupt on crit). might be hard to get easily on solo though. But you can not soulbind it with a monk or? Can you upgrade it at least to legendary? oh sorry, you'd have to multiclass it. my mirke was a fighter/monk so it was bound to fighter.

That would be a pretty huge nerf if the patch stealth-fixed that. I'd have to rip up my own deathless thaumaturge variant. You're definitely "hitting" the enemies?

that is true. +5% for pure durational effects is still pretty lame, though, even with possible double-layering. Given that you can get +2 acc/PL if there's not much else to gain, a +10% per PL duration scaling when duration is the only that is present seems better. though the ship has long sailed on this i think.

I'd like to introduce you to my friend, the Gul. Oh how do you pronounce it? It's pronounced "ghoul." No, it's different, I swear.

that video is not a memory leak issue. there's a fundamental inefficiency in the game engine. I think it's related to some operations being done synchronously instead of asynchronously, or poor job scheduler management. The reason why the game lags in that video there is because a ton of resonant touches are being processed, and it does in a way that is characteristic of poor threading or job scheduling - it tries to do it all at once, in conflict with trying to render new frames of graphics or processing other game logic. this happens with a bunch of similar other effects - before I gave up on nvidia 2080 ti (due to constant RMAs) i had a beast of a machine that i built a few months ago, but even then if i cast mirror image the entire game would seize up for a split second, which to me sounds like just way too much work being done on the main thread no matter how much hardware you throw at it. this is true whether or not mirror image was the first thing i did from a cold boot, or i had already been playing for a couple hours. there are issues with quickloading not completely "cleansing" game state (resulting in various bugs over the life cycle of this game), but it should not be resulting in memory leaks. also, i would possibly raise the issue that if you're experiencing slow downs as the game goes on, that you're experiencing throttling on your hardware due to insufficient heat dissipation or something. Before I built my new PC I had a 6-ish year old CPU with an ancient intel cpu, a gtx 1060, and like 8 gigs of ram and didn't have any kind of slow down over prolonged play. edit: also try turning down graphics settings. glow and lighting settings add a lot of graphical overhead. my current system (now using an amd vega 64) can run fallout 76 almost perfectly at 4K-max settings, but I still have to turn off anti-aliasing and settle for consistent sub-60fps on Deadfire at 4K (dropping into the ~20-30fps if I have more than one wall effect active). Unity just gives you a less optimized experience than other game engines.

Merla! They are postenago.

an ancient run i had a berath priest who would use morning stars to help debuff fort to help land spells (including her own). ironically, once i picked up saru-sichr and discovered the stacking it meant that she was a pretty spicy damage dealer herself (and the stacking DoTs significantly make up for the -25% damage from the morning star modal) someone adventurous should make every DoT in the game act consistently. It's a little annoying to have to learn/remember what effects stack (bleeding cut, saru sichr, combusting wounds) and what effects merely reset (rot skulls, rust's poignard, nannasin)