thelee

Already talked about it, i won't rince and repeat, so in a nutshell: -Good ol' Might Attribute which i want to see dead once and for all. -Per encounter crap/auto heal after combat, which seems to reflect pretty well what Blizzard had in mind while developping their hack n slash "Diablo 3" ("Players should feel powerful" and "Nothing should get in the way while killing things") I can bear with everything i dislike, but these. It's already patch 3.0, so i guess that's it for the little hope i still had. 1. might: wow did you even play poe1? 2. auto heal: wow did you even play poe1? per-encounter - yeah that ship sailed a long time ago. no way they're just patching that away.

are you completely rolling fresh characters or going to lean any on existing protagonists? for ranged cc+secondary DPS using a protagonist, maia as a geomancer is pretty good; gunhawk is just a stupid good ranger subclass and her starting armor is great, and I think you get a lot of supplemental utility from a geomancer over a scout. ydwin as a cipher+rogue is also good. if you're rolling your own, i am a huge fan of beguilers for ranged cc over either a geomancer (even a gunhawk one) or mindstalker; a single-class beguiler also gets quick access to arguably one of the most powerful abilities in the game (PL7 ancestor's memory). tricksters are also fun with all their guile-based illusion spells (including some really powerful ones late-game) while also getting traditional rogue attacks and sneak attack for dps. you could try doing a beguiler + trickster pairing. beguiler's soul whip mechanics is sneak-attack-like and appropriately using the beguiler's cc on sneak-attack-vulnerable target gets you lots of uptime on crowd control due to all the focus generation, which in turn helps both the beguiler and trickster do damage.

the way he phrased it made it sound like he was talking about exponential returns

(trying not to shout this, deep breath) dexterity has linear returns to your dps.

Yeah, PotD, no scaling. you should try with I probably should, will have to bite the bullet for the challenges, but I really, really, really hate scaling in all forms, and always have. Since Morrowind or something. I just hate generic low level trash leveling up to me. In an rpg, I want to feel more powerful as I go up in levels. Luckily, that's almost always the case, except in some rpgs with scaling, where the level 50 wolf or bandit is suddenly vivisecting my corpse if I went light on the defenses... scaling is capped so you'll still roflstomp low level enemies, but however they implemented it in some of the potd rebalancing has given it quite a bit of staying power, and with SSS a lot of extra challenge. but i get you. my first experience with scaling was oblivion. EEEEyikes that game could quickly become impossible if you leveled up suboptimally too quickly.

Yeah, PotD, no scaling. you should try with

what a zany build, i love it. (the deltro build i had seen on boeroer's list had been deprecated, so glad to see it's still going strong)

IMO I think it's supposed to be difficult for anyone not bringing along a priest. I had Vatnir Dismissal most of each wave away. (Dismissal has been amazing since 1.0. Don't get why some people continue to think priests suck.)

nice find!

As a general rule, whenever I respec a chanter, I always delete all the chants and re-create them from scratch. I've had other issues before, and this tends to be a good preventative measure.

the ask for more clarity on power level scaling has been one of the main repeating issues i've been seeing in the community since backer beta, and yet... *sigh* at last with games like D&D it was self-documenting. (e.g. Fireball deals 1d6 damage per level up to 10, Incendiary Cloud lasts 1 round/level, etc.)

the more i play with berath's, the less i find it as a bug and more just confusing. a lot of encounters before that I thought were separate are actually linked--just something I never realized, not through any deliberate attempt to pull or anything. sometimes it's just unintuitive. the earliest example of this is in the cave in vilario's rest... you head to the right, and there's a skeleton. On most non-berath's challenge potd playthroughs, I end up pulling a rotghast and maybe a revenant after that skeleton--not intentionally, but maybe the noise of fighting triggers some rhotghast/revenant awareness and they lumber down the steps; i end up finishing them as part of the same encounter. i then later go up the steps to kill the two skeletons with pistols as a separate encounter. With berath's challenge, the first skeleton you fight is a separate encounter, and then the rhotgast, revenant, and 2x skeleton with pistols are a single distinct encounter apart from that. Definitely very different from how most of my other characters have fought those fights. The problem is it isn't consistent, and right now it exists as a bug - for instance I played the Sea Cave mentioned above where in the first battle with the beetles all of the other enemies were activated in the cave and I couldn't reset my per encounter abilities (at least I could never find the enemy who was causing it) and couldn't leave combat; then I played it again and the area loaded correctly with each enemy encounter unique and the per encounter abilities resetting as each combat encounter ended. I am fine with the extra challenge of having an area be one long battle, sounds cool and difficult (really difficult actually) but am game to try it - I mean even as a bug it is kind of exciting to play, but when you don't expect it, it can really throw you off, especially in a Trial by Iron run. speaking of which, i definitely ran into something that definitely seems unintentional from the perspective of a beraths challenge. at poko kohara, when the engwithan titan rises, my typical response is to flee to the left so I can take it out and deal with the adds later. even on berath's challenge, however, once i finished off the engwithan titan, the fight ended, and i could get my per-encounters back before dealing with the adds separately. seemed like the intention really should've been one big fight.

doesn't work so well if you're doing the eothas challenge

the more i play with berath's, the less i find it as a bug and more just confusing. a lot of encounters before that I thought were separate are actually linked--just something I never realized, not through any deliberate attempt to pull or anything. sometimes it's just unintuitive. the earliest example of this is in the cave in vilario's rest... you head to the right, and there's a skeleton. On most non-berath's challenge potd playthroughs, I end up pulling a rotghast and maybe a revenant after that skeleton--not intentionally, but maybe the noise of fighting triggers some rhotghast/revenant awareness and they lumber down the steps; i end up finishing them as part of the same encounter. i then later go up the steps to kill the two skeletons with pistols as a separate encounter. With berath's challenge, the first skeleton you fight is a separate encounter, and then the rhotgast, revenant, and 2x skeleton with pistols are a single distinct encounter apart from that. Definitely very different from how most of my other characters have fought those fights.

Beat me to it. Characters with multiple insta-buffs require double the amount of inputs now, the new recent abilities interface pops up when you mouse over any empty spell/invocation tier, and it contributes to blocked status effects in the standard ui layout. Would really like to see this as an optional menu toggle. funny, i don't notice any extra inputs... do y'all not use hotkeys? because with hotkeys, it's just a few extra buttons to the right of them instead of some extra thing that pops up.

You can make Konstanten tank. Give him good plate, weapon+bash shield, all the +ar barbarian passives. Make him spam stun/push invocation. Recovery in plate is ok with Narvi pet. Mirke btw is one of the best dps companions in the game from a class/stats perspective. I made Konstanten a pure Chanter. And I don't know if it is a good idea to respec him. Did they fix the Chanter respec bug? Tekehu was ruined, he has several chants now, but he can't sing. I've had some multiclass chanters, and after a respec I delete all their songs and recreate them just in case. I haven't run into that bug afaict. maybe someone more in the know can say.

just wanted to chime in again because i restarted my berath challenge character to try 3 challenges at once (eothas, berath, and galawain) and wanted to add my thoughts on the new ones: galawain: i really really like this challenge so far. I may turn this on close to 100% of the time in the future. Really makes the prologue potentially brutal, and really amps up the challenge with fighting beasts. The randomness of the buff forces me to adapt. One encounter might have a bunch of Unstoppable (no affliction) enemies that weakens my rogue (fortunately you can still flank), but another encounter with very similar enemies might instead have Bullish---which is so far my vote for really awful because so far there's nothing worse than having your characters repeatedly pushed/interrupted and really punishes you for letting a simple bullish young boar from slipping past your front line to a caster. I love it, in a masochistic sense. eothas: not bad. it's not so much a speedrun as it is a "limited rest/exploration" challenge. I finished the prologue with 23 hours remaining and didn't rest at all. I could have explored the island a bit more and rested once and still had a few hours left. Prologue gives you 3 days/26 hours, Act 1 gives you 25 days. Haven't gotten to Act 2 yet. I like how it makes me a lot more conscious about resting and using empower points so far. I kinda wish it wasn't so hard a deadline and more of a rest limit though because world map travel eats up a lot of time (basically 3 days just to go from the engwithan dig site straight to nekata, and you only get 25 days like i said), so since i like being thorough for most of my runs this is a challenge i'll just have once or twice just as a novelty. (note: because berath basically turns knockouts into instant-reloads, combining berath with eothas is sort of a free two-for-one, since with eothas you want to avoid resting, which means avoiding knockouts) pro-tip: avoid searching burial mounds because boy they eat up a lot of time and (most of the time) it's not really worth it. if i hadn't searched the burial mound on port maje island, i could have rested and still have had more than a day left. EDIT: fyi, got to act 2 with eothas, and you have 28 days to clear ashen maw. we'll see how much act 3 gives you. but it's actually a bit less time-constrained than i thought because i aggressively cleered nekataka quests in act 1 (minimal travel time) still had like 14 days left and went to do poko kohara, and then some fetch quests in dunnage, and then a few ship bounties and cleared act 1 having done two rests with three days left. now most of the easy "gets" are done, which leaves me lots of time to do quests/bounties that involve a bit more travel. I assume act 4 will give you a similar amount of time, which means plenty of time to do a lot of exploration and questing.

...is the single best gameplay improvement that's ever happened in Deadfire I've generally put some sort of hotkey on all sorts of abilities half the time not even because I use them, but just to remind myself that they exist because otherwise they're hidden behind a submenu (especially back in PoE1 where priest/druids would have a crapton of spells per level), and the new "recently used' slots--and the fact that they don't overlap with existing hotkeys--obviates that use case for me. So, to whatever designer or UI person or programmer thought this up: thanks!!

re: interior being intended, please please don't have the music play over the tavern music. i don't know if that counts as other deadfire tracks or is just incidental environmental ambience, but i want the taverns to have that jaunty inn music remix without any obscurance.

Is it doable for newbs like me? And do I need to be level 20 to be sure of passing? having done some more of the challenges, i think the difficulty spikes a bit. it is certainly challenging for a level 18-19 upscaling POTD, but there have been some challenges that are relatively easy compared to others (but still not a pushover). And while I said my party is underoptimized, I definitely play to my fullest. if you're playing at less than level POTD, I don't know what the scaling is like. Some of the difficulty I encountered was because some of the enemies had just sooo much health that normal tricks wouldn't work because they could just outlast them, so just being able to sustain was more important. It might be the case that outside of PoTD upscaling high health isn't as big of a deal. (For reference, in the final boss, I got lucky and hit with two crit Inner Deaths off of Xoti... one for ~250 and the other ~350... and that combined did not even take the boss down a single health category (i.e. "blooded" to "near death"). I even hit with a Resonance off like 40x stack for ~800 damage and that wasn't enough to do a full quarter-slice of health in on its own (though it was closer). So we're talking boatloads of health, all while the boss is constantly terrifying you, stunning you, grabbing you, and applying dots and afflictions. I don't know how much of that is PotD and upscaling and how much of that is just the boss being a hard nut to crack.) That sounds nuts. I am planning my next run to be PotD, but I don't plan on ever scaling it. As for the need to sustain: I plan on running 1 Zealous Endurance Paladin multi-class and 1 Ancient Memory Chanter multi-class for sustain though. Is the spike damage so much where I do need a dedicated Priest? I'm just one guy, but to me unless you have lots of DPS and scroll/potion abuse that doesn't sound like enough healing. If your paladin is nothing but a lay on hands heal monkey that might take you pretty far (esp if unscaled). there are some arena challenges that you can be a bit more tricky about without as much healing... in one case I basically just used a fast runner to kite a bunch of invincible shades around while i took care of the non-invincible one.

To be clear, I liked this music just fine in PoE1. It just feels really out of place in Deadfire to me. Maybe if I hadn't clocked so much time with PoE1 it would be less dyrwood-y, but to my layperson's ears it just sounds qualitatively/thematically different from the deadfire music (which i also love).

Is it doable for newbs like me? And do I need to be level 20 to be sure of passing? having done some more of the challenges, i think the difficulty spikes a bit. it is certainly challenging for a level 18-19 upscaling POTD, but there have been some challenges that are relatively easy compared to others (but still not a pushover). And while I said my party is underoptimized, I definitely play to my fullest. if you're playing at less than level POTD, I don't know what the scaling is like. Some of the difficulty I encountered was because some of the enemies had just sooo much health that normal tricks wouldn't work because they could just outlast them, so just being able to sustain was more important. It might be the case that outside of PoTD upscaling high health isn't as big of a deal. (For reference, in the final boss, I got lucky and hit with two crit Inner Deaths off of Xoti... one for ~250 and the other ~350... and that combined did not even take the boss down a single health category (i.e. "blooded" to "near death"). I even hit with a Resonance off like 40x stack for ~800 damage and that wasn't enough to do a full quarter-slice of health in on its own (though it was closer). So we're talking boatloads of health, all while the boss is constantly terrifying you, stunning you, grabbing you, and applying dots and afflictions. I don't know how much of that is PotD and upscaling and how much of that is just the boss being a hard nut to crack.)

It's music that is permanently tied to the Dyrwood for me. I don't know what it's called, but this first youtube link that I uploaded will give you a quick sample of what it is: https://youtu.be/5W3XVC2u5Jg I don't know why in 3.0 it's all of a sudden made a come back into Deadfire, since after ~400 hours of playing PoE2 i've literally never heard this piece music in deadfire before, and I don't know who was clamoring for it to have a comeback in Deadfire. Personally, as a matter of taste, I find it out of place in Deadfire and don't like it that much in this context. The BIG problem is that it seems to play all the friggin time. It appears to start triggering when I'm Nekataka, and then will keep playing at regular intervals. It will even trigger at the same time as other music. See this recording: (it is choppy, but it's not the video that's the point, it's the overlapping of this returned song with existing Deadfire music). https://youtu.be/BAO9aTNrc3o Here's a dropbox link to a save in brass citadel which should trigger the old/new song, and then you can wander around and hear it playing a lot: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uil2zf70hwiexe6/AAATPzO14mqYYXldeJIZ1HY2a?dl=0 Ideal outcomes: 1. get rid of this music, OR 2. make it play less frequently and not overlap with existing deadfire music.

Fallout 1 and 2 almost literally let you speech your way out of the end boss (though less so in Fallout 2), and that fact is part of what made those fallout games great (i.e. investing in Speech and Charisma instead of gun skills was not a dead-end for finishing the game). You could kind of do that in F:NV, too. So I'm perfectly fine with Obsidian giving players a non-violent option for Ukaizo... with the new DLC and megabosses it's not even the hardest fight in the game anymore. Still, I wish it was a bit more clear about how to avoid it and not, so it's less of a surprise when players don't get the fight.

yeah definitely this. when this happens it's extremely annoying because i have no idea what enemy is keeping me in combat and i just have to wander around, possibly aggroing a completely unrelated pack of enemies and even after that i'm still in combat. compulsive quick-save and quick-load seems key in this challenge.