thelee

Combusting Wounds behavior slightly varied across versions. I've seen players mentioning that it was working with DoTs or being bugged. But I know for sure that it wasn't triggering at all in v3.02, and was fixed in v3.03. Here's a related post about it. i feel like it was one of my most recent poe1 run was where i discovered the come come + combusting interaction, because i was deliberately running a character to import into Deadfire at release (so 2018). (ironically i never did end up importing this chanter.) but it's been at least a year since even then so i'm not willing to put money on it Indeed I could mix those up, that's why I left that remark I remember this post by Kaylon about flanking/engagement in PoE1. And it also could mix with what I experienced in Deadfire. Also it is unclear what to make of "One Stands Alone" (requires an additional threatening enemy to become flanked). Do you need 1 enemy from front, and 2 from behind? Or you need 1 from front, 1 from behind and doesn't matter where the 3rd is standing? I think the game checks for flanking if and only if you have at least one character on one side, and another characterly roughly on the other "half" of the enemy. If you have things that require more enemies to flank, you just need additional melee-ers at any direction to trigger flanking once the initial condition has passed. (I believe this is a change from PoE1. My own gamefaqs PoE1 guide independently comes to the same findings as Kaylon did apparently.) I was under impression that:- have ranged weapon equipped: 0 engagement slots - have melee weapon equipped: +1 engagement slot - have shield equipped: +1 engagement slot No? have ranged weapon equipped: 0 engagement slots have melee weapon equipped: 0 engagement slots <-- big change from PoE1 have shield equipped: +1 engagement slot IME the change about the melee weapon thing ironically makes it much easier for squishies in early parts of the game because many kith enemies have no actual way to lock you down. i would have to literally eat my hat if i'm wrong about this. Persistent distraction's most important effect to me is the +1 engagement, since now your rogue will actually stop enemies trying to pass you or flee (at least without you having to use spear modal or equip a shield). (edit: scratching my memories, my most recent run I was only able to survive a fight in dunnage i was way underleveled for because i was down to two characters and could just juggle the two enemy kith over and over again because they had no engagement, despite having melee weapons.)

My last run had mirke set up to do this (along with stunning surge). A bit underoptimized compared to a custom character (e.g. generic fighter vs devoted), but worked alright, if nothing to write home about. One thing to keep in mind if going this route - lots of bosses and enemies have persistent distraction. this means they can dispel the fighter's Intuitive inspiration basically at will. So when you need it the most you're not going to get as much support from the fighter side as you think. That's why I kind of like OP's idea of focusing in on this with a morning star. (I randomly had a barbarian some runs ago that did this and it worked out pretty well, and it wasn't even a deliberate strategy just something I incidentally started doing.)

when all is said and done, auranic is just another kith spellcaster, which means she will run out of spells and be left with autoattack. at near death she does gain brilliant and the ability to cast spells again, but at that point you could probably just instakill her or perma-interrupt her (her defenses suck compared to other megabosses).

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.

In PoE1 periodic damage also seemed to trigger combusting wounds. I randomly discovered this because come, come + combusting wounds = dead enemies very very rapidly. I don't think front flanking is a thing? otherwise any vanilla melee-er would instantly flank themselves just from attacking one enemy. there are some effects that make it harder to do to sandwich flanking (increasing the number of required foes), perhaps you're mixing it up with that?

it does. I used the weyc's robes from FS to grant immortality and infinite resources to almost my entire party (brilliant doesn't apply to the person wearing the robes, alas) -- 4s base duration for brilliance doesn't mean much when you have at least one priest who can cast SoT. I think the problem OP is talking about is because the OP doesn't actually have brilliance. instead, blood wiz needs "wall of draining" to really make it work, because blood sacrifice can't regenerate priest spells, only wizard spells, so you have to lean on repeat casts of wall of draining to create perpetual BDD on a blood wiz (and for a multiclass that particular combo comes pretty late, at level 19). (though honestly even with just one SoT and neutral intellect, 18 seconds is enough time to completely restore every single wizard spell you have)

doesn't work too well with a tactician since their brilliance is not durational edit - guess you could be talking about restoring salvation of time to extend other effects

i'm not sure if it works with tactician brilliance (due to engagement-dropping issues with interrupts), but a wizard with brilliance is literally show-stoppingly good. you literally don't even need anything past AL1. just slicken all day long, until the cows come home, double and triple stacking them as the brilliance cooldown allows. Enjoy mopping up a fight where enemies can't do anything other than fall down and stand back up. beyond that, any kind of caster for sure. The way the game costs martial abilities, one high level spell cast from AL7-9 is roughly equivalent to 3 or 4 of a martial resource (very roughly). The fact that every 6 seconds you can get +1 AL7-9 spell cast while a martial class only gets 1 resource back is therefore, to put it charitably, insane. you won't be able to do this on a tactician/x multiclass, but brilliance on a wizard spamming just petrification can literally keep even megabosses locked down (not to mention any other AL9 you could spam every 6 seconds). it probably sounds like i'm focusing in on the wizard, but really any one of {priest, druid, wizard} excels with brilliance.

tyranny is also a much, much shorter game than PoE1 or Deadfire. depending on your tastes, this is a plus or a minus. this short length does give the game an extreme amount of reactivity. Just for fun I picked it up again after hundreds of hours on Deadfire and I had forgotten just how much reactivity there is in the game even compared to Deadfire. but like MaxQuest said there's a lot of issues with the mechanics. I really hate how obtuse attack rolls became, the ability trees while interesting actually leave room for very little design space for character customization, while straddling the classless "use your skill to strengthen them" has all the problems of literally every other system that has tried it without doing anything to fix them. Also in contrast to PoE/infinity engine per rest or even Deadfire per encounter systems, due ot how abilities work in Tyranny combats really, really, really boil down to just repetiviely using the same 4-5 skills over and over and over and over. The main saving grace is that this was the first Obsidian game where enemy encounters could have technical aspects to them (watching for certain abilities being signaled so you can avoid them, proper positioning, etc) but ultimately Deadfire does this pretty well in some fights as well (e.g. I enjoyed enemy mage fight in FS, the improved Ukaizo fight, and even the sometimes-very-frustrating seeker challenges in SSS). in conclusion: meh

Have you read HP Lovecraft? Yep. At first I found him too verbose and a bit purpley, but eventually decided it fits the stuff he writes about rather well. I mean if you write about incomprehensible, mind liquefying cosmic horrors, then muddled, meandering run-on sentences convey your message much better than, say, Hemingway'ish concision. "He glimpsed into the unknowable. The unknowable was there." - HP Hemingway (context: based on a passage that is the most Hemingway sentence Hemingway ever wrote, which was "He came to the river. The river was there.")

your snark aside, i would actually put someone using hylea's challenge as being put into a literally unplayable situation (there is another bug in the bug forum of someone complaining that they cannot progress meaningfully in the game). i only managed to scratch through the end of it (I was in the middle of BoW when 4.0 dropped, ended up skipping everything else and speeding to the end of the crit path) because I had 2 priests that could chain-cast withdraw, one of them with an item that grants +1 AL2 priest casts (which means with empower you get an additional +1). if someone was in a similar situation as me when the patch dropped (in the middle of an area with no way to respec/recruit without running into some hard encounters first), but with e.g. only one priest or no priest, then yes, they would essentially be soft-locked and still be twiddling their thumbs for a patch to fix it before being able to progress. without scaling, vela literally gets one shot by even the most incidental effect at mid-high levels - literally if i failed to have 100% uptime on withdraw once 4.0 dropped, i was likely going to get a gameover.

Wowowow. You are one patient person.

it only affects the duration. (yes, it's lame, compared to the scaling some other abilities get) conjured weapons have a separate scaling factor based on your character level: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/non-pl-scaling

I do agree with this sentiment. In D:OS 2, doing primarily the main quest content you could get around level 20, but doing everything you'll hit 21, maybe 22, and I never had an issue with the level progression. It's about constantly progressing, whether or not you hit the next level. They could of just made the level 20 exp extremely high, so maybe you'll get an extra level if you do everything, but doesn't really matter in terms of power levels, etc. It just feels like an MMO when you hit the cap really early - you're character never really grows since an arbitrary ceiling has been hit and the power of your character is not determined from intrinsic strength, but extrinsic gear. Always hated that about MMOs - your character isn't that powerful, your gear is. it might be interesting to do something like paragon levels in Diablo 3. Extremely slow progress to levels 21 and up, and each level you gain past 20 grants you stacking bonus +PL. In practice, you may never get more than a couple, if that, but just having that open ended progression might be OK.

With High Resolve / Healing only Bonus (not Might), I expect the healing done to be a bit more on the plus side. But constitution afflictions will be detrimental. if they haven't changed the scaling, you get an additional +3 health per debuff expiration at every even ability level, whereas the damage does the standard +5% per PL scaling. this means at high levels, one stack of forbidden fist could be a pretty decent health generator.

Almost (ignoring intelligence): 1st hit: Stack curse duration = 6secs-resolve [Minor net healing buff] ... 2nd hit Stack curse duration = rest_duration_from_1st_hit + 6secs-resolve (1st curse stack runs hidden expiration timer) ... 3rd hit Stack curse duration = rest_duration_from_2nd_hit + 6secs-resolve (1st and 2nd curse stack runs separate expiration timers. 1st will likely have expired by now.) interesting! so the flat +10s (on top of the base duration) that was constantly being applied with each use of forbidden fist was really buggy then. here, you're just tacking on an additional 6s-resolve to the existing duration of the curse.

Smoke Grenade has really funky targeting rules and it's literally impossible to affect yourself (even when confused), even though it's friendly fire, even in the intellect-expanding area. you'd have to rely on a rogue (literally, ha!) party member. (i also don't love this strategy because of the interrupt on hit of those abilities bothering your streetfighter)

still would consume lots of wounds after a few stacks. but still, now that the 1st stack is so short, you basically have an enfeeble that you can use for free every few seconds. your wound generation is still going to lag behind nazpalca et al but at this point it might be in good balance with the strength of the free enfeebling effect.

interesting. so with 20 resolve, you have 4.2s just for the first curse... which means a once/few seconds wound generator and healer? (though i doubt the healing cancels out the raw damage to self) 3 would stacks is probably the most you'd generally want to do, since then you're no longer net positive on wound generation (i also imagine now at +50% damage it's pretty severe). so, to make sure I understand the ptch notes and your stuff correctly: 1st hit: creates a 6s (resolve/intellect adjustable) debuff on self 2nd hit: creates a 6s (resolve/intellect adjustable) + 6s (always) debuff on self 3rd hit: creates a 6s (resolve/intellect adjustable) + 12s (always) debuff on self ? and each layer would expire separately? (so that by the time the third comes around the 1st hit might already expire?)

Notably, in that JSON you spat out, there's a line in the AttackFilter section (keep in mind I've never messed around with game files before, so I could be off, I'm just reporting what I'm seeing): St. Drogga's will always do a fire lash on each hit, but there's a separate 20% chance to apply effect?

it's extremely effective. not terribly easy, though and will require some metagaming. i've run a couple streetfighters, in certain setups I can get near 100% up-time, in others I could more charitably put it at 60-70% uptime (which is still pretty good considering how stupidly good the bonus is). the bonus is good enough that it's worth self-blinding or self-disorienting yourself, even though those are far more punishing than self-distract or flanked. (probably the easiest way is to just have a wizard handy who can cast chill fog all the time - in this case it's a good idea to have defiant apparel so that you're "only" disoriented).

is it just about not gaining levels, or is it that "experience gain" becomes meaningless? put another way - back in Fallout 3 the cashregister "kaching" sound of experience gain was so satisfying that when you hit level 20 (pretty easy to do in that game) and you no longer got that feedback, it was an extreme bummer. I could care less about hitting a level 21 (though DLC did raise the cap), I just wanted the feedback. Similarly, in Deadfire, I don't mind hitting level cap relatively early since I like hitting peak power with plenty of content left, but it would be nice if I still had a ticking experience meter, even if I never hit a level 21. Just wondering if this is a similar sentiment.

Now that's what we in the sitcom business call a callback.

LMAO - sweet! I'm serioulsy thinking about putting this into my signature... Yeah, one could almost get the impression that specific answer was slightly tongue in cheek and with a subtle reference to another thread Hey Frak, are you all over testing the new forbidden fist ability design? I'm curious especially what exaclty it means that subsequent duration extensions don't affect initial curses.

interesting balance adjustment for TB, I guess to avoid strings of misses and quicken the pace. Though seems to me a "be careful what you wish for" situation since I can only assume the change is symmetric with enemies against you (riposte and binding block just got extremely crappy). Re: forbidden fist - looking really eager to see how this ends up working out. Frak: where are you to run the numbers/tests?? edit - still awaiting that summon/vela scaling fix...