thelee

i think the big thing for me is there aren't really a lot of party-based real-time RPG experiences. The last one I played that was AAA was dragon age inquisition (which it self was very RTwP, even if it wasn't IE style), and I haven't heard of anything like it since. I love F:NV and Outer Worlds and elder scrolls-style games, they just don't have the tactical/strategic depth of a party-based game though

1) i don't think so, perhaps the deadfire community mod fixes this? it will definitely benefit from scion of flame. 2) yes. note you probably want the deadfire community patch (at least bug fixes version) for rot skulls to be great, as in vanilla it has 0 pen 3) it's definitely a trade-off. single-class druid can be insanely powerful (avenging storm, tornado, greater maelstrom, pollen patch are all extremely powerful and some of them extremely cheese-able spells). but you get greater versatility or can fulfill specific niches with multiclassing that can be worth giving up those spells. fighter can also get bonus PL and int, and can even take advantage of mob stance's recovery bonus. along with firebrand and confident aim, you could be pretty handy with firebrand. 4) on potd you're going to miss a lot, especially early on think how much more you'd be missing without perception. like @yorname says, you can get tons of accuracy with ranger, but fighter also gets disciplined barrage for +5 per and graze to hit chance (you can upgrade it to hit->crit or an intellect inspiration) and also confident aim to help with the miss rate with fire brand. 5) i'm assuming you want to be a fighter/druid who is firebrand-focused. 15 mig/10 con/16 dex/10 per/18 int/8 res choose a background that gives you +1 dex, probably. pick up disciplined strikes, confident aim to make up for mediocre accuracy. use mob stance and get hold the line for bonus engagement. armored grace so you can wear some armor when you're tossing around flame brand strikes.

for all its flaws with PF:K and PF:WOTR (and I have a lot of beefs especially with kingmaker), Owlcat deserves credit for holding the banner of IE games/RTwP into the current day even as Deadfire sales floundered. that being said, Owlcat's next game is something else entirely (it's a turn-based warhammer game) it really seems like RTwP is a niche genre that not a lot of players are actively demanding. a pity, I still turn on Deadfire because it's the only game that can really scratch the RTwP itch (and despite being older and with a shorter dev cycle, isn't nearly as buggy as WoTR). Owlcat had a user survey and found the majority of its players use RTwP mode. Rather than speaking about a huge demand for RTwP, it might have just meant that RTwP players don't really have much of a choice, so they all are crowding into this one game. So yeah, unfortunately I agree DOS2 and BG3 are the future. I'll just have to wait a decade for the next IE/RTwP nostalgia revival.

really? are you not thinking about the draining chant? (still would be absolutely insane if it ever stacked per enemy)

i usually end up just spam resting in Cuitzli's exotic herbs shop (every 26 hours triggers a vendor refresh). I think antlers are a "Rare" ingredient, so it doesn't have a high chance of spawning, and if it does like maybe 1 pops up.

i think you need smart camera (or whatever it's called?) enabled for those to do anything? i remember thinking they were busted and didn't do anything, but i had smart camera disabled at the time.

it depends on your mouse. my mouse has these side buttons: the front is 3, the back one is 4. i've bound one to switch weapon sets, and one to toggle stealth.

necro-ing this thread because my lifegiver druid is finally high enough level where i'm playing around with this. i think what's neat about this avenging storm<->effort is that it runs on a spectrum. there's definitely an extreme where you have enough accuracy and/or hit-to-crit where you wipe out entire fights, but if you're not building a super min-maxed character it feels quite "fair", you don't get endless sequences of bolts, but you do get a handful of bolts sometimes as a nice reward. i also thought it'd be really important to have something like druid aoe ticks or monk multi-attack synergies, but on the less "cheesy" end of the spectrum, just auto-attacking with effort and storm can get you some bonus bolts. in this respect i feel like this is like salvation of time or combusting wounds - almost a no-op if you're not built for it, pretty good if you know how to play with it, and utterly busted if you so choose. (incidentally i found that wondrous torment plus a flail means that even a tough bullet-sponge can get bolted to smithereens from like an auto-attack proc)

i think the aft strategy isn't very good. doubling your chances to get events is extremely good, and the voyager can turn around really fast anyway. you should definitely have a cannon in the back that you can fire back at them while running away, but otherwise 2x flame cannons in the front will shred the enemy to ship much quicker with events and damage.

generating events is highly dependent on how many ranks your cannoneers have in cannoneering. there is a 0% chance at 1 rank, and a tiny chance at rank 2. you really need rank 3 or 4. being really close doesn't seem to hurt enemy ships nearly as much as being far away does. anything in between is so marginal that i hardly can tell. and even then, you should be sailing at full speed (parallel to the enemy ship of course) to maximize the accuracy penalty when they fire (the AI even sometimes tries to wait for you to stop moving before it fires). i'm assuming you're talking about the flame cannon that has 0-75m range (the 0-400m pretty much sucks IMO). it's frankly bonkers good, but you really do need cannoneers at rank 2 for it to really shine; plus you should either be in your starting ship or the voyager, basically a ship that can turn on a dime. voyager's the best, since you don't even need to turn to get into firing position. you won't be able to strafe the enemy ship in between shots with a voyager, but i just hold position in between shots anyway to maximize the accuracy at ~100m (any closer and the AI is likely to try to ram and board you) and i quickly overwhelm the enemy ship with events before it even matters that you're not strafing them. another one that works well for me is to get the cannons that have up 600m range (i prefer the higher fire rate one to maximize events), and sail to pretty much >550m. strafe the enemy in between shots and fire when you can. manyenemy ships don't have that cannons that cover the 500-600m range, and even ones that do, the AI is silly enough that sometimes it'll turn to its short-range cannons and then never switch over once you sail out of optimal range. and yeah, ondra's challenge does buff enemy ships quite a lot.

if you want a deep dive answer on passive skills, you should check out this old-ish post from @Noqn i think the skills to pay attention to are ones that are player-only (scroll down to third post). normally you can choose what character to do a check in storybook moments, but sometimes you have no choice and are forced to use the watcher. in these cases, you probably want to prioritize one of the passive skills with lots of checks and lots of harder checks (like metaphysics or even athletics--which despite being an active skill gets used alot in interactions) for your main character to exclusively invest in. and according to Noqn, for other passive skills you're reasonably well off just distributing points, though i don't totally agree with that analysis.

Make sure you're clicking on the correct side of the crucible, that you can access. If you just generically click on the crucible, the game might try to path you to an impossible side that you can't access.

alas, i don't think there's much you can do about the console versions, they're just in a shakier state

the two invocations you list that say "allied aoe + self" are that way because their effect emits a cone from the chanter. so, without a "self" aspect, it would not actually affect the chanter, so it has an additional "self"-targeting effect so the chanter benefits. the chanter chants are big circles that sit on top of the chanter, centered on the chanter, so it doesn't need a separate "self" effect to make sure the chants affect the chanter. so don't worry, all those effects affect the chanter itself.

also the best shield in the game if you're a non-monk but a class that (can and does) pick up monastic unarmed training

does the space it take up also grow? might be extremely relevant in how effective the dragon is at body-blocking (e.g. against dorudugan's vacuum effect)

all you need to do is to get that cloak that converts fire damage to health restored when you have a wound (Rekvu's?). Easy-peasy, now you only need to worry about tanking Dorudugan's direct hits! (only helps one person if you're playing with a party though) yeah i agree. this thread is pretty old, but in a slightly more recent thread I discovered that having a wizard who can cast illusion magic is basically great tech for a less cheesy approach to the fight. get weyc's wand, because when soulbound to a wizard and maxed out, you get 100% miss to graze conversion on empowered attacks. open up a fight with an empowered arkemyr's wondrous torment (better than miasma due to higher base duration), then follow up with normal castings to refresh the debuff duration. with resource recurrence on that wizard (if brilliant is too cheesy for your tastes, just leave the wizard on auto-attack and have a troubadour doing the tier 9 invocation to restore 1 class resource, should recur fast enough to do the same thing), i feel like many other possible strategies against dorudugan become easier/have greater margins for error because going from 35 to 25 resolve does wonders for debuff durations due to how resolve normally has increasing returns. (edit: i vaguely remember some more ways to passively debuff resolve that'll stack with wondrous torment, but don't remember the specifics. edit 2: don't forget club modal! with only 25 resolve, the will debuff on a mod/high character lasts a decent chunk of time, for extra will-weak dorudugan) of course, you can just summon a dragon and have it face tank dorudugan while you plink away at it with ranged weapons. that chanter dragon is a megaboss wonder

the main problem i have with ring of mule's wit is that you don't need the effect in every fight, but that -8 intellect always hurts. if you really need the mind resistance, you can chow on some svef, which even a 0 alchemy user will probably be able to have last for at least one fight where you need it. (incidentally: svef is great)

this definitely also works, but has also definitely crashed my computer a couple times. at least this approach is fast enough that it's not as big a deal if the game crashes

Since this thread was originally established (i don't know if i mentioned it before), but another problem with the resonance (aside from possibly feeling "cheesy") is that a) if you mis-estimate it you're screwed, but the bigger deal is b) i have crashed my game several times doing this. Deadfire doesn't really enjoy having to resolve hundreds of buffs in an instant.

shifter gets all forms, so you don't have to really pick. but Boar form is particularly special in vanilla (i think one of the community mods fixes it) because the boar form damage-over-time-on-attack lasts an *extremely* long time, and stacks, so you can get it to stupid high damage numbers. only the shifter boar form does this, the other druid boar forms, while good, don't last nearly as long to let you stack so much of it. i would actually not prioritize PER as much because ranger gets so many good ways to increase accuracy. i would instead focus on dexterity and/or resolve. the way i think of the stalker's deflection bonus: it makes it pretty painless to dump resolve a bit, but can also make a full-defensive play extremely powerful. so you can invest more in offense stats, but if you want to be really tanky i'd go with a race that gets +1 resolve (human or orlan) and basically go all-in on resolve. combined with beast claw in late game (and either spiritshift form or hatchet/dagger early game) and some +resolve and +deflection gear you can be very very tanky. b.c. ranger gets stuff like marked prey or stalker's link for lots of bonus accuracy, it doesn't hurt your offense nearly as badly to go so strongly into resolve. (but like i said, you can also just use it as the opportunity to move some points from resolve to an offense stat without hurting your defense)

hm, do you think Berath will forgive her herald if he decides not to wear his armor? edit: bah, i made this post because on my screen EdgarBB's post showed up 6 times. refreshed, and of course now I look like a crazy person

It's kind of surprising, but this has never happened in any of my Hylea's runs up until this point. It must be AI related, most AI just won't bother trying to charm/dominate Vela, but not the Giant Spores! Here she is trying to punch my mainchar I wish I had looked in the combat log b.c. i'm very curious what her damage is like (she did hit a couple times). eventually though the "i'm scared" ai kicked in, and while she wasn't cowering, she would just wander in place.

yeah exactly my thinking. the opportunity cost to drink a +2 to stat potion or one of the other weaker potions in combat just feels reeeeeally high. at least with drugs (and also poisons!) is that you can use them out of combat. plus, there's probably a handful of potions that i will actually willingly drink in combat, and i'd rather reserve my quick item slots for them (examples: healing potions, potion of impediment, the +action speed potion, antidote depending on the area)

yeah, i think if the game had sold better up front, we'd have gotten a longer support cycle and probably some revisions to the early nerfs. i think it's also unfortunate that we completely cut off any potion effect scaling, because some potions really need the additional scaling to be effective (the +8 defense vs afflictions for example is utterly useless imo; the +2 to some stat potions, which are pretty much obsolete by the longer-lasting +3 to stat drugs), but it definitely would take a lot more design time to manually tweak those specific cases versus a wholesale "no more scaling" decision, additional staff time they probably couldn't justify based on initial sales.