thelee

why are people talking about brilliant? did i miss some change? I thought it always get +1 random spell for casters.

What "classical" RPGs have you been playing? I agree. Mage Slayer and Shattered Pillar are still a mess. Mage Slayer and Corpse-Eater. I actually don't think Shattered Pillar is that bad, definitely not as troubled as those two barbarian subclasses.

Tactician with crossbow or arbalest modal. Just shoot and regain discipline. of all the ways to exploit the tactician's bonus you chose one of the slowest

Mob Stance requires you to actively engage melee enemies (not just being near them or being engaged by them) to see a recovery time bonus. I've definitely been able to see Mob Stance calculations in weapon tooltips and character screens.

wait wait wait. so woedica fists actually count as fists? So a multiclass priest/monk at level 20 with +1 PL from food or Acute will get legendary scaling twice??? that seems broken. it's better than just normal monk, in fact.

Falling stocks don't hurt companies? I want whatever good good you're smoking brah haha. And if you know about stocks you'd know EA has already passed it's 52wk low, which is a big deal. So yes, falling stocks do hurt companies and those stocks fall because of high profile flops. Gamers wasting $ on a crappy game only encourages them and hurts gamers in the long run. Falling stocks don't directly hurt companies. The causality is reversed. Crappy companies produce falling stock, not vice versa. Important: stock prices you see are the secondary market. Companies don't see any of that money when a share is sold or bought. It only matters for their IPO or for secondary public offerings, when they're actually issuing that stock and the money the stock is sold for goes into their pockets. Stock prices can hurt companies indirectly: if a company needs to issue more equity to raise more money a crappy share price makes it harder to do that. It can also make them more vulnerable to hostile takeovers. Also shareholders will start getting real antsy about their investments tanking, so you could end up with hedge funds or activist funds buying up shares and voting for major changes. If you're compensating your employees significantly in stock (common for tech companies), then falling share prices makes it harder to retain employees. But frankly, if you have a loyal board in place and you're still bringing in revenues with a good future, then it's completely irrelevant if your share price hits a 52 week low. If anything, that means the company should buy back shares because they'll reduce their outstanding liability for cheap. (It's what Warren Buffet would recommend.)

Enfeebled is an extremely powerful effect. No enemy healing and an instant +50% to all debuffs (basically like a hostile Salvation of Time), current and future, is nothing to sniff at. There's a reason why right now player access is extremely rare (pretty much just the rogue toxic strike upgrade). Both Writ of War and Writ of Sorcery will be able to shut down stuff that Frightened couldn't shutdown. Writ of Engagement is also potentially very good survival spell for squishies. Normally, if an enemy has a might inspiration, it cancels out the effect of of any might affliction (which all already disable engagement). However, Writ of Engagement spins out the "no engagement" into its own effect, so there'll be no way for an enemy to interact with it using inspirations (similar to how barbarian Wild Sprint separates out the "cannot be engaged" from tier 2 dex inspiration making it potentially more powerful and resilient than an otherwise-equivalent tier 3 Swift). What's Woedica's spiritual weapon? And their version of incarnate? anyone know? I'm already planning my Woedica run.

ffffffffff THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO THE GOD CHALLENGE FEEDBACK THREAD

It's either b or both Heart of Fury is very special in this regard) Riposte also full attacks with a gun in one hand if you dual wield ranged+melee, so it could just be that certain "special" full attacks (instead of hte bog-standard full attack of most martial abilities) are subject to this.

yes, definitely sounds like something I did; I definitely remember casting corrosive siphon, and I definitely remember watching the spellcasting delay reset after a grimoire switch.

There is literally no antagonist in this game. That's horrible from an RPG perspective. The presence of Thaos was one of the reasons why Pillars 1 had a much better story. I can't image BG2 without Irenicus. And the list goes on. Every protagonist needs an antagonist. As others have said, the lack of--for lack of a better term--"obvious" antagonist is not a handicap for any RPG. Ultima IV is a notable example, but we don't even have to go back that far. We can just go to Fallout: New Vegas. You basically have a MacGuffin in chasing down Benny for a while, and strictly speaking Caesar's Legion forms a potential early antagonist. But you can in fact, ally with Caesar's Legion, which means your early potential allies (NCR) become your foes. Or you could say screw it to everyone. The antagonist really, is up to the player, and the main critical path is just a macguffin that weaves its way through that. The adventure was the friends we made along the way, per se. Probably no coincidence that Deadfire very strongly mirrors this set up, and in fact JE Sawyer cited the earlier Fallouts as inspiration for how the free-roaming nature of Deadfire could still have a plot. EDIT: DANG i got ninja-ed by house2fly. The intrinsic character motivation is a little weak, sure. In-game, to really provide a role-playing relevant character motivation, you have to either be really curious about the answer, or you have to be strongly aligned with a faction's interests for it to make RP-ing sense that you keep pursuing Eothas. Aside from that, simply having Berath threaten to end you if you don't hold up your end of the bargain is pretty weaksauce IMO and is a fair criticism of the story's narrative. That being said, since PoE1 the gods have said that there are limits to what they can do to interfere with the world of kith, some of it self-imposed (e.g. in the wake of what happened in the events setting the background for White March) and others still. As Eothas gets closer to his goal, the self-imposed limits are clearly lifted (though they still pull their punches a bit but like I said elsewhere, those Engwithans really made a really good statue.

I'd play the heck out of that wizard subclass.

Happened again, this time I had the presence of mind to capture a video. pay attention to the combat log. (I believe I was only targeting 3 enemies despite the density of hte fight, so the fact that it's scrolling by real fast should be a huge clue as to how many interrupts are being attempted. And yes, they pretty much stayed prone until I killed them all.) Another dropbox link to save and output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2ihy3f3xbvawck2/AADrinnZUwxPHF1mCK-xogDYa?dl=0

I think an interesting thing about the slavers in this game is that there is a legal regime for slavery; iiuc outside of the Deadfire slavery is legal, and so the legal loophole that slavers and some factions in the Deadfire use is to only trade in slaves obtained from outside the Deadfire. and I might be wrong, but it's a little ambiguous whether or not the crookspur-aligned power interest think they are actually breaking this legal regime (Wahaki allege so, but aspects of both VTC and Principi think they the slavers are being legal or at least parts of the VTC/Principi are very willing to believe that their wares are procured legally). Meanwhile in games like Fallout 2/3/NV, slavery is illegal or at least nonlegal (e.g. evil anarchists oppressing people because no one can stop them). It might make one want to more carefully press the point to involved parties that something that is legal is not necessary the same thing as that thing being ethical.

More details: in that save, I headed to the left to fight the vast army of frost shades. It didn't happen on my first attempt (which failed because Vela got pummeled real fast by a few frost shades), but it happened half way through my second attempt. Contrary to my OP it may not be a hazard or aoe-related thing, because I also have two barbarians with blood frenzy, so the damage numbers could have come from some extremely buggy blood frenzy procs. Or something else. Who knows? I've literally never had this happen before, and I only thought of the Repulsing Seal bug because it seemed very similar (something that should only trigger once instead triggers many, many, many times). In my opinion this is a much more severe bug than the Repulsing Seal bug. I've had an enemy use Repulsing Seal on me and have it trigger multiple times, which sort of disables one character for a long time. But if this damage spike were to happen to my party, it would literally game over me.

A "primary attack" is what some martial abilities do (e.g. Fighter's Knock Down) versus some other martial abilities that do "Full attack" (e.g. Rogue Crippling Strike). An auto-attack is just a normal attack done outside of an actual ability.

I recently reported an issue where Repulsing Seal could trigger (sometimes many many many) times from one activation: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106556-31-hazard-effects-can-trigger-multiple-times/ I just came across what appears to be a related issue. I'm not precisely sure what triggered it, but in a fight with Frost Shades where several AoE effects were going (and where the battle was intense enough that I was pausing every other second or so), I got to a weird state where while the game was paused I saw lots of damage numbers appear over a Frost Shade (a huge cascade of red "1"s appeared overhead) until they died while the game was paused. A short bit later, during a different pause, every other Frost Shade also did this, wiping them all out, again while the game was paused. I was so surprised by this I wasn't able to get a screenshot of it in action, and the damage numbers don't appear in the combat log, so the best I can do is provide a dropbox link to a save game and an OS X output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ue7f165aztxlnq0/AAD5f9_Z6oBIF43kVKSdAkola?dl=0

there's no rule saying you have to use the ranged weapon. if you a super good one handed weapon, it is optimal in fact to equip a ranged weapon in your off hand and just never get out of melee range. that way you are attacking at dual-wielding speeds with the same very good one handed weapon, instead of alternating between that and something less good for you. this applies mostly to fighters and monks who for some reason have lots of primary attack martials; and casters who don't have martial abilities to worry about but may still want to melee decently.

Additional wrinkle for those curious, some melee abilities that do primary attacks will only function if your melee weapon is in your main hand. If you have it in your off hand, the ability just won't be usable (it doesn't check your offhand and only sees a ranged weapon in your main hand). In addition, you only get engagement if you have a melee weapon in your main hand. Again, even though you may still have a melee weapon in your off hand, the game only checks your main hand for a melee weapon to let you use any engagement. Basically you should almost always put the melee weapon in your main hand.

Nope they are different. Here are some examples: The most egregious example is Arkymyr's Dazzing Escape. While under the effects of the spell you can drop as many non damaging debuff spells or buffing spells as you like and you will not drop combat. This means Confusion, Arkymyr's Wonderous Torment, Displaced Image, etc. All of those spells if they land on a target while under the effects of Dazzling Escape will not break the effects of Escape concealing you. What will break the effect is any application of damage including any DoTs that are currently active. This runs counter to a common rule to stealth and invisibility that "hit" applications like a "hit" of Pull of Eora or Chill Fog that you cast on a hostile target will cause the invisibility/stealth to break but active DoTs will not break invisibility or anything like it. I just tested having Aloth cast spells while in combat and in stealth. Mirrored Image did not break stealth but Confusion did. Shadow Form does not break stealth on casting of buffs or even when you one shot a target. I've even timed it so that a hit will occur just after Shadow Form procs and the stealth effect does not break. Also there's a fun bug where if you kill more than one target at the same time, Shadow Form activates and then just goes away. My Assassin/Evoker is a little salty about that one. Casting Shadowing Beyond while it is already active does not break Shadowing Beyond. Casting Smoke Veil while it is already active not only breaks Smoke Veil, it breaks Shadowing Beyond or other effects. I don't think it's intended to work this way as when I reported it as a bug, they seemed to treat it as one. Using Smoke Veil and then using Potion of Invisibility clears Smoke Veil and replaces it with Potion of Invisibility. I've seen Shadow Form and Shadowing Beyond active at the same time. Using Smoke Veil and then Shadowing Beyond causes them to stack. See the notes on the weirdness of Shadowing Beyond. I've never seen the AI do that for either Potion of Invisibility or Smoke Veil. I'm sure the logical thing is that these are all either Stealth or Invisibility but I've found time and time again there are weird corner cases for each ability. Either this is classic Obsidian or intended or some weird mix of both. An Int of around 20 or so makes Smoke Veil around 10 seconds. Combined with a reload time of about 6 or lower on Dragon's means you can Smoke Veil, reload, and shoot all in one go. Really helps open up possibilities. I consider maxed Int and maxed Dex to be mandatory to make Assassin builds work properly. Sorry if this sounds like I'm being argumentative, but I'm really just trying to probe this in more detail because it's interesting to me to try to figure this out (and I can't test this myself right now). One thing I noticed is that because invisibility breaks the moment you do virtually anything, it exposes the internal workings of certain spells. My Assassin/Skaen learned, for example, that Pillar of Faith is two distinct effects, because I would get an assassinate bonus on the pillar dropping, but then the AoE prone check would not. Relatedly, I think Smoke Veil lists its effects as "Invisible, Untargetable" whereas Shadowing Beyond lists its effects as "Untargetable, Invisible". Since these tool-tips are automatically generated, I don't think this is just a designer typo-ing a description, but an actual internal difference with how these effects are implemented. So Smoke Veil followed by Smoke Veil, I wonder, is doing this: 1. Ability used. 1a. Invisibility granted. 1b. Linked Untargetability granted. 2. Ability used again. 2a. Invisibility would be granted, but you are already invisible so no effect. But this is the start of an effect! So now break invisibility. Untargetability checks for invisibility and sees that that it wasn't granted, so this gets skipped. Shadowing Beyond followed by Shadowing Beyond is: 1. Ability used. 1a. Untargetability granted (also teleport). 1b. Linked invisibility granted. 2. Ability used again. 2a. Untargetability granted (also teleport). Invisibility is broken, but untargetability/teleport still happens. 2b. Linked invisibility granted. Similarly, any other effect followed by Smoke Veil: 1. <character already has invisibility> 2. Smoke Veil used. 2a. Invisibility would be granted, but can't because you're already invisible. But this effect triggers invisibility breakage! Under this hypothesis, you could overlap Shadowing Beyond and Smoke Veil because Shadowing Beyond's invisibility comes after an effect that would break invisibility. I can't explain your accounting of slippers' Shadow Form or Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure's behavior however. I wonder if "invisibility" and "stealth" are both just some internal effect with identical display names, and designers attached "stealth" to those abilities instead of the correct "invisibility" (which would mean that you could cast buffs and other simple effects). One way to verify that would be is if you get the -85% recovery time bonus from being stealthed while in either of those abilities Anyway, this is certainly all a whole lot weirder than I thought. Mind if I add your notes to my gamefaqs guide? (with attribution of course)

I don't think all those are different, I think rather that "invisibility" and "stealth" are different things, and there are different rules governing invisibility and governing stealth. From my experience, any action breaks invisibility, whereas only actively hostile ones break stealth. (I was really bummed out when the act of applying a poison on my weapon would break invisibility). There might be something weird going on with drinking potions of invisibility (I've literally never used one), but everything else (Smoke Veil + Shadowing Beyond + Shadow Step + Slippers vs Stealth) seems consistent with the above. Are you really saying Shadowing Beyond twice in a row will result in one of them being a no-op that just dispels invisibility? So ordinarily I would just interpret your example as "smoke veil grants invisibility -> act of drinking potion breaks invisibility and makes you visible to everyone, alerting them -> potion makes you invisible" but I'll admit I haven't used the invisibility abilities enough to really thoroughly have a detailed knowledge of their mechanics. Agreed. I completely underestimated how important the 0 recovery on Shadowing Beyond was compared to Smoke Veil (on top of the extra duration). With my first attempt at an assassin, Smoke Veil turned out to be a real bummer because my recovery and intellect were bad enough that I couldn't do another action before Smoke Veil's invisibility wore off.

For me the fun of Assassin/Skaen comes from the playstyle, not the OPness of the build. I enjoy the challenge of making something that is less powerful like this work without resorting to scrolls and the like except when there is no other option to do so. It's a build that lives or dies by the choices you make and has a lot less to do with the initial build so much as how you choose to approach the game. It's not about backstabbing over and over. If I wanted that I'd get a different build. The axe is a good example. I did play with dot stacking with Magran's Favor and did find it to be strong. The issue is how full attacks behave out of stealth when you dual wield versus when you use a single weapon (2h or 1h). The recovery bonus of stealth gets consumed by the offhand swing of the initial full attack out of stealth. This means when the full attack completes, you eat the full recovery penalty of the offhand swing which in some fights is long enough for you to die. Instead a 2h or a firearm can perform the full attack and gain the recovery bonus or have no recovery at all, allowing you to almost instantly perform a second action (which also has interesting implications to how the AI starts reacting). Furthermore when you have to fight outside of stealth (and you will have to fight outside of stealth), the damage you get from the dot is often not enough to compensate for the reactivity you lose as a result of the malus. Being off by a half second can get you killed. Plus this build doesn't have to be about backstabbing only. You have BDD and Salvation of Time meaning you can Deltro + Maestorm and wipe people out. You can mass spread arterial strike and toxic strike and get the AI to run around non stop and kill itself using mortars. You have strong self buffs and a summon to tank as you need to. Yes there are classes that are specifically tuned for these things that do them more efficiently. I also find those classes are one note and can't do much else besides the one thing they're good at. There are a lot of diverse ways to play the build. Another fun thing to note: Assassin's Slippers gives Shadow Form which is neither Stealth or Invisibility. What I mean by that is you can cast buffs and other specific spells while in Shadow Form and NOT lose the buff. This means your decision tree can change depending on when you time the kill to happen on your approach. It also seems to not break if you one shot your target in question. Using Shadowing Beyond immediately after an initial strike causes the AI to wonk out and behave like the player isn't there even if you are out of stealth and are even in combat. It's not a durable loss of "awareness", but it can be useful to buy time to perform other actions or setup in a different position. There are more little weird corners in the AI behavior that can be exploited to give the game more texture and expand your options. Out of stealth you should use a 1h or 2h for precisely the problem you talk about - blowing your stealth recovery on an underpowered main-hand attack (whether a normal attack or as part of a martial ability with a full attack). With my aborted assassin/skaen, I had different weapon styles for my weapon sets; I would open with a 1h axe hit (this preceded BoW and its 2h axes) and optionally either switch to another weapon set or casting spiritual weapon, depending on the situation, for precisely what you are talking about (rogue full attacks). I don't know if was particularly great way to go about it (essentially I "wasted" my fast recovery so that I could immediately Smoke Veil or Escape and safely change/summon weapons if needed), but that's one way to go about it. If I didn't care about recovery, it did mean that I could sort of "condemn" weaker front-line enemies to death by whacking them with a huge axe hit, whacking them with a smaller axe hit, and then finding a way to go about my business elsewhere with alternate weapons while the two bleeding ticks work their way in to finish them off. I also tried arquebus for reasons mentioned above (either effectively instant reload, or perfectly reactive recovery), but didn't love it (also the blunted critical is a damper on the assassinate accuracy perk). I don't know, maybe this just isn't my play style. Re: the Shadowing Beyond behavior - when enemy rogues use it, I definitely cannot target them even if they've broken their invisibility early. But does it really work when we use it? I seem to remember being disappointed that I didn't get the same privileged untargetability by an early invisibility break with Shadowing Beyond.

You can stay stealthed until an enemy detects you or you do something that affects an enemy. Because you get a huge -85% recovery time bonus while stealthed, it can be worth keeping buffers stealthed to cast lots of buffs at the start, before they get detected. I tried an assassin/skean focused on backstabbing, and consider me underwhelmed. Stealthing and invisibility is hard to come by "just" to end up whacking someone for large damage a few times, at least on PotD seemed underoptimized to me. Before I abandoned it, I pretty much thought you should instead rely on getting that assassinate bonus on spells (so e.g. priest debuffs or things like Pillar of Holy Fire) to get the most out of it. That being said - no one considers an axe? The bleeding damage dot from the weapon modal triggers off your total weapon damage, which means an initial huge hit pays dividends (and there are even two-handed axes now). Plus, the -85% recovery time bonus means you recover almost instantly from the +50% recovery time penalty from the axe modal (either to immediatley whack again for more bleeding damage, or to do something else).

what difficulty are you playing on?

Screenshot says it all: One Vela is from the normal story, the other Vela (with no nameplate) is the one created by Hylea's challenge. Dropbox link to output_log and autosave: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8meiqthwi3zt6f1/AADKW4quImZUnaaL6QutGKf9a?dl=0