thelee

Chrono Trigger has several "unwinnable" encounters (though in truth if you do manage to win them you get a special ending, but it's likely not possible until new game+). I got defeated real fast and got to see the story advance. But I had a few friends at the time who as soon as one of their characters got knocked out would reset their super nintendo and try again, and got extremely frustrated. Like, if they had literally just waited a minute or two for them to completely wipe they could advance the story, but they could not get around the idea that they were supposed to lose (at least until we compared notes some weeks later). I don't think it's completely unreasonable though for players to have an expectation that if there's a fight in the game, that fight was intended to be beaten somehow.

What's your definition of "substantial?" in SSS one of the challenges significantly changes difficulty based on how you treated maerwald. is that what you're talking about? That's a fair question. Difficult to say exactly, but some items on your list would qualify, in my opinion. Thanks for the list, btw! As for the Maerwald incident: yep, I was told that my mercy might change things, but I'm not sure if they did. It was a damn hard fight, and Maerwald sure didn't say anything about me having been merciful towards him. what did you do to maerwald? i think the heads always mention something about "maybe your mercy" blah blah even if what you chose to do is not merciful. I'm scratching my memory - my most recent run was from a game where I absorbed maerwald for knowledge, and that's suppossed to be the meanest outcome, and i had to fight 3 maerwalds and a bunch of mirrors of my party. If I try to really hard remember, I think I had another run where I released his soul, which is supposed to be the nicest option, and I only fought 3 maerwalds, or maybe it was 1 maerwald and soul mirrors. (I might be misremembering though, memory is really suggestible after all.)

i played around with bellower a bit, planning on rolling one fully for my next run. Eld Nary is pretty unreal with bellower, with +6 PL and the upgrade you get like 15 bounces and loads of damage (not to mention lots of extra PEN and acc). the -50% chant aoe penalty is pretty nasty, but i figure a good way to metagame that is pu the bellower closer to the front lines and focus more on offensive chants so it matters less that party members might be out of position. intellect is still vital because their invocations have durational effects, though you need 20 intellect just to cancel out the chant aoe debuff. i don't think eld nary is even the end-all be-all for bellower; while it certainly benefits the most from the +PL, I suspect bellowers can still be decent high-level summoners, too. +6 or +7 PL on animated weapon or dragon summon is enough (in combination with modestly good intellect) to get 100% uptime on them, whereas a troubadour has to have brisk recitation and a beckoner just has to live with bursting the summons every once and a while. similar thing with far from defeated (huge PL bonus means the energized bonus lasts a super long time). i know that myself and a few other regulars are pretty big fans of single-class chanters. i'll let the chanter experts chime in on specific multiclasses though (herald aka pal+chanter is a perennial favorite).

just my thoughts, but neither. pair with like a cipher or wizard or druid or priest. Getting one extra weapon or weapon-based hit with +25 ACC, +PEN, and bonus crit damage is meh (especially on a higher difficulty where there are more enemies with more health), getting that on like a noxious cloud, pillar of holy fire, or plague of insects is something else entirely; even on a cipher charm/dominate is useful just for the bonus accuracy. (that being said i'm sure there are people who have found fun martial-oriented ways to make use of the assassinate bonus.)

What's your definition of "substantial?" Some small sampling of differences I would consider "substantial" (on top of companions being alive or dead) in that they actually affect gameplay and aren't just a text reference or the presence/non-presence of a non-important NPC. in SSS one of the challenges significantly changes difficulty based on how you treated maerwald. is that what you're talking about? Also, depending on how you handled your god pledges matters. Things that I've seen: - pledging to Hylea and betraying her starts your ship off with a hull covered in bird poop, which reduces travel speed (though you only have to spend a paltry amount of money to buy a new hull) - pledging to Hylea and honoring it gives you the Hylea's bounty consumable - pledging to Galawain and betraying him causes him to create a buff on some boss fight. pledging to him and honoring it might also affect how easily you can avoid hard outcomes in SSS (a developer commented on this, but i pretty much go on a killing rampage in all my runs of SSS so i haven't paid attention). - helping out Woedica gives you something at start of game, but I forget (it was one of my first runs) - helping out Wael makes it easy to convince him/her/it of your choice at end of FS, I believe (otherwise I think there are some tough speech checks to make) I'm sure there's more interactions, I just haven't permuted all the different pledging/betrayal cases. (edit: I googled and found a few more: - if you pledged to give the souls to Woedica, you get the Effigy summon without needing to sacrifice a companion (though IME you can also do this by being a priest of skaen). - if you betray berath, you have a -1 to all stats until you kill a bunch of kith) Depending on how you resolve Pallegina's quest, her paladin subclass changes (irrevocably so) and her breastplate is different. Depending on how you resolve Eder or Aloth, you get different starting items for them. Depending on how you resolve Devil of Caroc you may be able to purchase a specific item from Mahiri's Metalwork. Fixing up the WM cannons gives you arguably one of the best cannons in the game for free (unavailable otherwise). There's also the availability of the two different swords you can forge (with a third combined option), though this is not really a "decision" you make in PoE but more like "did you actually do this quest".

I think this was a stealth nerf in 4.1. It used to tick more than once. I noticed this in my current run where I was using it on a streetfighter. Went from being able to be really easy to trigger Distracted to slightly harder (at least I don't have to bother with trying to stand still anymore if the first tick misses). That being said, Rokowa's Finger's sparkcrackers effect still makes multiple attempts. (This is why I think it was a specific nerf to sparkcrackers and not some incidental bug fix, because they forgot about rokowa's fingers's identifical effect.)

you should post this in the main bug report forum, since this 4.1 is no longer beta (and i doubt this forum is being monitored)

some partial answers: a. no right or wrong answer here, basically depends on what you want to do. I wouldn't pick more than a couple, though, because you'll just have so many other abilities to spend your guile on. b. ok, scratch the above, there is a wrong answer . i wouldn't recommend this. the most effective way to do that kind of backstabbery is repeat invisibility, and as a trickster your guile is going to be used for other things. if you want a backstabby type an assassin is a better choice. c. the answer to this question hinges on what do you want to actually do with this class? a trickster doesn't have the spell selection of a wizard/rogue multiclass, but what spells the trickster does have they can spam like no wizard can (e.g. a trickster can cast mirror image up to 11 times in one fight whereas a wizard is forever stuck at 2). like Verde said, a trickster can also cast freezing rake/wall of many color, which a multiclass wizard/rogue cannot, because those are ordinarily AL8 spells and thus inaccessible for a multiclass. e. single-weapon style is very close to a trap choice, unfortunately. unless you have really terrible accuracy or are specifically metagaming for crits for a specific crit build (i.e. because you have effects that care about crits and aren't just trying to do more damage), i would take any other weapon style over single-weapon style. rogues have even less need for single-weapon style due to Dirty Fighting.

Honestly I can't say for sure because I literally have never let Auranic get down to near death without having killed all the obelisks, but Arcane Dampener is a little weird like that. It will suppress some duration-less effects, but leave others alone. Passive, duration-less item effects should not be suppressed, but I would not be terribly surprised if Horns of the Bleak Mother and/or Sandals of the Water Lily are implemented oddly. I would actually report as a bug in the bug forum, attaching a saved game as well, just in case.

yeah, I saw someone (maybe even you) talking about that on the forums elsewhere. I'm not trying to capture every single possible option since I'm sure there are plenty of metagaming options that I haven't thought of or read about, but yes that is a real option to help things along.

nit: i don't think miasma and arkemyr's stack, and expose vulnerabilities and cap of the laughingstock won't help (unless you're talking about helping the morningstar connect with dorudugan in the first place).

Humans are bad at reasoning or intuitively "feeling" probability. In all likelihood, because of how selective human memory is, you are also just forgetting about those stretches of time where you had luck in your favor, such as hitting three consecutive attacks that had ~1/3 chance of hitting. In very short sequences, even seemingly absurd outcomes are not all that unlikely. It's the gambler's fallacy to think that the game "remembers" previous rolls and should compensate future rolls as a result.

Generally you first pull her two melee helpers back to the entrance where you can dispatch of them quickly. Then you try to take out the Cleansing sigil when it's up, healing through any of its attacks. I'd stack healing gear and spells on your toon/party and not use anything that the sigil can Cleanse until after it is down. On my Thaumaturge, I stacked all healing gear and healing spells and potions/scrolls of healing and focused the cleansing sigil (including combusting wounds and any DOTs that tick when it's not up, like Gouging Strike could work)....once it is finally down, take your drugs and go to town on the boss and the other sigils. I was already pulling them to the entrance, but found that stacking Konstanten's rest bonus with a bunch of spell reflect potions combined with completely ignoring the boss until I got all of the sigils down was key. Guess I was overcomplicating it, she died in one try today. Now for Dorudagan, who seems like a huge time sink more than a challenge. I tried him today, but got bored and decided to take a break. Any advice from anyone on that guy? My team wasn't having too much trouble surviving against him as long as we stayed close, but we also weren't able to really dent his health bar at all. From what I've read, lightning damage is key. Anyone know where the ideal place to position my team should be? Range or melee? that's pretty much the fight: a huge grind. it's a good ol' fashion vanilla World of Warcraft raid boss: a slight technical dimension that you have to keep perfect over an extremely long period of time, but not much challenge beyond that. I would recommend mostly ranged because otherwise you might have a hard time getting to safety when it starts doing Helstorms. Essence Interrupter (shock damage), Eccea's Pistol upgraded for multiple shots and imbued ammunition: force (raw plus crush triggered damage) are particularly good ranged weapons (I would say at least one of them is mandatory due to how good they are at dealing damage to Dorudugan). If you have a chanter who can use The Shield Breaks that will help with AR. or a melee person with a mace. You can make the fight a little shorter by bringing along a lot of instakill effects, if you haven't already been doing this for the megabosses. In one attempt, I hit it with a Marux Amanth just as it hit near death and ended the fight right there. I also once hit it with Petrification just as it hit Near Death, which while isn't technically an instakill, a perma-paralyze pretty much ends any need to pay attention to the fight any more. Death Cloud, Detonate, Touch of Death, and that chanter rip the flesh invocation should also work. Because of how tanky Dorudugan is, an instakill just at Near Death is still literally like thousands of damage and lots of minutes saved. (though you need to do some accuracy buffing and/or bring along a morning star since most of these target fortitude and dorudugan has huge fortitude defense) My take on the fight: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/dorudugan

I'm sure Unity is nice but man, if there's a bug with *Unity itself* you're just kind of boned. Reminds me of how in PoE1 even the smallest patch was gigabytes of data to download just how resource management was done, not to mention the longer you played the game the kinder your save/load times became, both issues that we're only fixed with a unity version upgrade for Deadfire.

I think the ship has sailed on this, honestly. I built a brand-new computer and before I had to RMA my gpu for the third time (nvidia rtx friggin sucks) and get something else, I had a 2080 Ti and the beefiest AMD cpu, plus loads of ram, and the fastest NVMe storage I could get. I basically had the same exact frame skips as I did on my 5-6 year old computer that it was replacing. Something in the game is just coded so inefficiently that at this point I have to write it off as just a systematic misdesign in the engine, since no amount of hardware can apparently smooth it out, and would require some deep re-coding to fix, something that they are definitely not going to risk doing so late in the game life cycle. According to some posters in the Steam discussions the problem is Unity didn't code multithreading correctly, so on processors with a lot of cores the game begins to starve itself of resources. https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/2572002906843374108/ Yeah, I tried that before posting my complaint. Unfortunately, it didn't result in any improvements to my frame rate. I spent around 4 hours trying to get even a slight boost - testing all the options - but to no avail unfortunately. Let's hope Obsidian finds a solution. From what I can tell it's connected to big open areas (like Neketaka) where you can see shadows moving depending on the sun and weather effects. It's like every time the sun and shadows move, the game hangs for a microsecond and then continues relatively smoothly until 5-10 seconds later the sun moves again. I think the ship has sailed on this, honestly. I built a brand-new computer and before I had to RMA my gpu for the third time (nvidia rtx friggin sucks) and get something else, I had a 2080 Ti and the beefiest AMD cpu, plus loads of ram, and the fastest NVMe storage I could get. I basically had the same exact frame skips as I did on my 5-6 year old computer that it was replacing. Something in the game is just coded so inefficiently that at this point I have to write it off as just a systematic misdesign in the engine, since no amount of hardware can apparently smooth it out, and would require some deep re-coding to fix, something that they are definitely not going to risk doing so late in the game life cycle. According to some posters in the Steam discussions the problem is Unity didn't code multithreading correctly, so on processors with a lot of cores the game begins to starve itself of resources. https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/2572002906843374108/ holy crap man I need to try that. AMD cpus in particular have tons of (logical) cores, so I might have actually made the resource starvation a bigger issue over my much older cpu. I can vouch for Special K: I spoofed my cores from 6 to 4 and noticed a significant difference in FPS. As of 4.1 I haven't needed it but it might work for you. I think this is a YMMV situation since it's literally hardware-dependant. Currently have an AMD vega 64, and on 4K if i cast a few wall spells my fps starts to suffer pretty badly. I just gave SpecialK a try and reduced my logical cores from 16 to 4 and tried a test battle where I summoned every single wall I could and wow I don't think my FPS dipped at all. Definitely seems like a unity-specific threading-related resource starvation issue (so not even GPU-related, which normally tends to be the culprit).

I really do not see (or hear) what other people are complaining about. The delivery sounds fine to me. It's literally like "oh hey, what a fun surprise, it turns out the other guy (whom I just killed in cold blood) is right after all." that being said, LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE.

VTC you don't have to work with slavers. If you resolve the slaver situation by killing everyone Castol basically doesn't even acknowledge anything; plus you can always go along with the coup that unseats him. Also, "leaving the balance of power" is itself not a great moral option, because it's not like the status quo is particularly good. Also, the principi literally make money from plundering property that isn't theirs. That being said, only with the Principi can I get a whole room full of people completely sloshed and also recruit a perpetually drunk character (who finally in SSS and FS got some interactivity). Also only faction where I can gain tons of reputation just by giving someone candied nuts. So whatever, let's greet the end of the world with drinks in hand.

Generally you first pull her two melee helpers back to the entrance where you can dispatch of them quickly. Then you try to take out the Cleansing sigil when it's up, healing through any of its attacks. I'd stack healing gear and spells on your toon/party and not use anything that the sigil can Cleanse until after it is down. On my Thaumaturge, I stacked all healing gear and healing spells and potions/scrolls of healing and focused the cleansing sigil (including combusting wounds and any DOTs that tick when it's not up, like Gouging Strike could work)....once it is finally down, take your drugs and go to town on the boss and the other sigils. i don't know if it was already mentioned in this thread, but the #1 thing you can do on auranic is recruit konstanten (so his room becomes free) and then rest in the wild mare in his room, which grants +30% spell reflect that can't be cleansed. craft a bunch of arcane reflection potions (doesn't even have to be the 75% one, even the 50% reflect chance one is fine). you need multiples just so that you can re-use them when they get cleansed or expire. all told you end up with 1-.7*.5=65% chance to reflect any targeted spell with just using the lower arcane reflection, up to 82.5% or the better one. after that and some source of resolve resist i feel like the fight mostly takes care of itself (two of the obelisks will literally kill themselves from attacking you; the missile one won't kill itself (can't penetrate its own armor) but you'll take way less damage from all the spell reflect), and auranic doesn't become that much scarier than any other high-level mage fight.

best of luck with the rest of your run

I think this is more just a function of the role of the priest having changed in Deadfire. I just have made peace with the fact that the priest of Deadfire is just nowhere near like a priest in PoE1 for debuffing (much of that is a function of how differently prones function in Deadfire).

+13% in january is not nothing given the normal trend of games and attach rates, but it's not going to be a cure-all for sure.

FYI: Fampyrs use dominate at will via a gaze. Against Fampyrs, the best solution is actually to use blind (or have a dedicated Aegis of Loyalty paladin). Like the affliction description says, if either you or fampyr are blinded, the gaze attack will not work (if it's the fampyr, they cannot use it; if it's you, the combat log shows you as immune to the effect). But yes, you can actually have multiple copies of an inspiration or affliction (they don't stack, they are just extra "layers" to get through). My current party has mirke with Disciplined Barrage, and I have Xoti cast Dire Blessing regularly. 99% of the time it's never relevant if I hit Mirke with Dire Blessing, but on occasion it is relevant that Mirke has two sources of perception inspiration (intuitive and aware). I don't know what determines the order in which thigns get dispelled. It could be as simple as first-in, first-out. The only wrinkle here is that perception affliction multiples is a little buggy, because you only get the "free" Flanked once, so a second perception affliction will not apply flanked, which is weird if the first one lasts for a very short time but the second lasts for a long time, you end up with a long-lasting perception affliction with no flanked, and you can't use it again to re-apply flanked (you have to either manually flank or apply a different perception affliction source).

Hey, that's fair enough. But if you insist on these two points, then you must also subscribe to the ethos behind that. And that, simply put, is: don't complain. I also don't lower difficulty, I also don't skip fights. I also play with extra challenges enabled. No problems, which is to say, it's all eminently doable. It's OK to get frustrated (I still do in some areas (*cough* Bridge Ablaze *cough*) no matter how many times I've run PotD+upscaling+challenges), but yeah, like someone else said, this is starting to sound like "one of those posts." Basically what I'm also saying is, you should read this JE Sawyer post on this issue: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/181220302256/someones-very-touchy-on-that-subject-it-seems-and#notes "Deadfire has five difficulty levels. At launch, Veteran and Path of the Damned were undertuned, so we progressively increased the difficulty by tuning encounters, first in the early game, then on the remainder of the critical path, and finally in the other prominent areas off of the critical path. Nick and Ryan have been attentive to player concerns throughout the process. At this point, if someone is having trouble on a higher-than-Story difficulty level and refuses to turn the difficulty down, the problem can be found in the nearest mirror." It's true. I don't think I've ever played any game where designers have been so extremely responsive to player concerns about difficulty tuning. There was a lot of collective grousing to increase the difficulty to where it is now (and it's to Obsidian's credit that they kept tweaking it up); the difficulty is now at a point that I feel like many players are adequately satisfied (and for the rest there's things like Deadly Deadfire). Path of the Damned difficulty is explicitly a difficulty designed to require more metagaming, more strategy, and punish suboptimal builds and tactics.

this is definitely wrong. there's 3 melee skeleton warriors this time last time there was only 2. and they have more skull icons this time too. three as you can see. It might have something to do with level scaling, scale up everything. I gained 1 more level and went in there so they over buffed vs if i went in there at level 3? They are literally impossible. I went back to town and picked up all blunt weapons and it makes no difference. what is "last time?" like myself and others have said, PotD got amped up in difficulty. also, encounters definitely are not randomized. the only thing that could be varying it is if you're pulling in a mob from a different encounter by getting too close somehow, a real possibility in that skeleton encounter (there's a skeleton warrior downstairs i believe, and if you don't take the fight to the far left of the area you pull them up the stairs)

Ya i beat it before no prob. This time i swear it got up rolled big time. These skeletons have 60+ deflection. Did you last play before PotD got rebalanced? Because yes the entire first act got much harder.