thelee

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.

wha---what?

well, i took on the final boss at level 19 and it was certainly very challenging--took several tries at many minutes (up to twenty?) each attempt. again, underoptimized party, and i made some critical errors throughout the fight (biggest of which was getting marux amanth's Worthy Sacrifice interrupted, which would've otherwise instakilled the boss at near death with my entire party still standing), but I had loaded up on all sorts of high level consumables (4x copies of Hand of Wael and Woe and Scroll of Miraculous Healing, for example), everything was as highly enchanted as I could possibly do with my mats (lots of legendary, some superb), and it was still extremely hard. it was literally down to the last possible spell on my last standing guy (Vatnir) as i had utterly exhausted every single ability, empower point, consumable and one by one my characters were falling over and Vatnir was the only one left. Vatnir had all of 3 spell casts left, a PL9 and two PL7s. Used PL9 to do Call of Rymrgand to try to eke out a bit more damage and contain the final guy. The only final option after that I had left was Minor Avatar and priest of Rymrgand's Death Ring bonus spell at PL7. Well, my only out was to get lucky (22% hit chance) with Death Ring, so cast once... miss. Boss hits me, brings Vatnir down to 40 health, basically one last hit before complete wipe. Start casting my absolute last spell on Death Ring again, boss's recovery is finished and he's literally in the middle of what's going to be a fatal attack, just as my second Death Ring goes off and... HITS for instakill and victory. I tell you, nothing was sweeter than that moment right there, not even when I got The Ultimate achievement in POE1. So congrats Obsidian. I will literally never complain about a lack of challenging POTD high level content ever again, and all my future parties I roll I will be less forgiving about the "flavor" vs "power" trade-off. DLC is definitely a lot more about sustain rather than burst damage (the boss and lots of enemies in the survival challenge track have literally thousands of health) which will definitely influence how I build out characters in the future. PS. if there's some technical trick to fighting the final boss, please do share. I'm sure there has to be some trick, because otherwise it isjust an unceasing cascade of dots, crowd control, and interrupts, even though all i had Eder do was mule kicks and had near 100% uptime on potion of impediment on my dual-wielding mainchar. (i also had people guzzling those potions that give you affliction resistance)

I had an underoptimized PotD party sitting at level 18 not doing much and used them to give the DLC a shot. The difficulty seems like a good match, though I've only really been doing the survivor challenge track. I'm not sure how well it would scale upwards if I were level 19 or 20 when I first started, but it seems like a good fit. (The survivor track in particular--unless there's some dumb technical trick to trivialize the fights--last so long that I have to put some serious thought into managing my abilities, items, and empower points.) I wonder if anyone else has been trying the other challenge tracks, at different levels, and what their thoughts on the difficulty are. For me at least, I think this fills a nice hole in higher-level content. (Though I have another, more min-maxed character that I'm ready to roll so I guess I'll see in a couple weeks what I think of it then.)

I wonder if a good compromise between 'cheevers and people who just want to play with the challenge is to let the player "unlock" a challenge to play at any difficulty or setting, but then it doesn't count towards the "Challenges complete 0/10" counter.

jlee, thanks for that clarification! i guess my most recent high-level party not getting an ukaizo fight was intentional then (they did #2). a little disappointing in that context (was hoping for one last good fight before the end), but I guess it's good that there exists a non-violent (or at least less-violent) option for getting into the harbor.

can people confirm that 3.0 in fact fixes the final boss fight so it actually occurs? i've been sitting on a high-level party for a while now waiting for it to be fixed (though I guess I can run them through the new DLC in the meantime).

Just wanted to clarify, is this the intended design? If so, then my personal recommendation is to have the player fight at least some form of the Guardian, it helps to make up for the fact that the player cannot actually fight Eothas. It's a great fight, it would be a shame for players to miss out on it! sounds like someone on the internet pretending to know what they're talking about. patch notes keep talking about the ukaizo fight, and in a bug thread about this an obsidian developer commented on how they're working on a fix for it. so very much sounds like a bug.

for monastic unarmed training, i wouldn't necessarily call it "a little too well." I was thinking about it a bit on the train today, and there are very few ways to actually build a character that can get post-legendary or post-mythic scaling (some combination of nature godlike, death godlike, prestige, Acute inspiration, hot razor skewers, and/or potion of ascension). most everyone will be stuck with post-suberb scaling, and only very nearly end-game at that; for them it's merely just a quirky alternative rather than a powerful/good choice. (this is still way better than poe1 where the equivalent talent there wasn't even remotely good enough to be comparable for 99% of builds.)

Just did a couple quick tests: 1. unfortunately corpse-eater food is class-specific power level bonus, so won't help with monastic unarmed training's PL scaling. looks like potion of ascension is the main option for +2 PL from consumables/active abilities. 2. devoted indeed works with plain fists and monastic unarmed training. extra crit and penetration!

is that really true (aka tested in game)? i seem to recall seeing some bugs posted about devoted getting -10 accuracy penalty with fists. otherwise devoted would be a pretty fun puncher.

yes you have to pay attention to stacking rules, but i think the max you could get is +6 via a single-class. +3 from pallid fate, +1 from prestige (stacks), and then +2 from either food (corpse eater food bonus) or potion (potion of ascension). that's enough to get up past mythic level scaling with monastic unarmed training. without single-class I think the best you can do is +5 (no prestige). pallid fate is a little hard to get consistent uptime for, though, and while getting better-than-mythic 14-19 "fast" weapons is good, i'm not sure it's good enough to warrant keeping a priest around just to BDD + salvation of time to keep your death godlike alive. (though it does mean a single-class priest would have some great 1:1 solo melee potential. a priest of wael would have lots of survivability and you wouldn't be wasting another party slot just to BDD/Salvation of Time your near death experiences.) for multi-class brute it would be easy to get +3 with near 100% uptime (+1 nature godlike and corpseeater food), which is enough to get up to legendary by end game, which is probably "good enough" to make the talent worth it. Edit: would have to pay attention to how corpse eater food implements its PL bonuses. Class-specific PL bonus (like ascendant's +3 when ascended) don't count for fists. So if it's +2 corpse eater PL it wouldn't work. But if it's just generic +2PL that just happens to require corpse eater, then it would.

Thanks, mant2si for testing! When I'm back at my desktop later today ill edit the OP to incorporate your findings.

This might actually mean that a single-class barbarian with monastic unarmed training would be a blast with Carnage. Highest base damage with 3s attack speed for Carnage attacks and with PL boosts you can get legendary/mythic scaling for normal attacks.

Possible theory: way back in the day when consumables erroneously scaled with character level, they used an effective PL-scaling that was equivalent to your single-class character progression even if you were multi-classed. It's possible monastic unarmed training suffers from the same bug and they never fixed it as part of the consumables reset. In this theory, unarmed training fists would get better at every 3 "PLs" (PL3, PL6, PL9, PL12) except you always use the single-classing PL progression rate (and any extra PL buffs from potions or talents would affect this single-classing PL number even if you were multiclassed). So if you can get up to PL15 and get +80% fists with unarmed training that would prove that it's bugged in our favor and is better than what I originally wrote.

You need PL > 10 You also wrote about mystic quality, but mystic quality give you only +18ACC and +5PEN, I don't know what affect Obsidian make this decision but Monk's fists the best weapon in the game, because it has unlimited scaling In fact you can stack 15PL (Pure Monk + Death Godlike + Potion), I will test it and write more info in this post I think you misunderstood what I'm saying. multiclass characters get PLs at a different rate than single-class characters. I don't doubt what you're saying you saw with training, but it's hard to reconcile that with what i saw when i was leveling a multiclass+training and a singleclass+training. At PL3 (level 5) with single class I got better fists. Makes sense, corresponds to a power-level. With multiclass, at level 5, I also got better fists. Makes no sense if this is power-level based because you don't get a power level at level 5 when multiclassing. also, you were right, i misremembered what mythic quality is, i'll fix OP.

That's interesting - I tested unarmed training with both a single class and a multi-class character and got the exact same rate of fists improvement, which was particularly notable because it meant getting improvements to my fists that didn't correspond at all to a power level (for the multi-class). What do you think is happening here?