thelee

if you're open to doing ranger again, have you tried a stalker? the bonus deflection and armor, on top of beast's claw later on (requires a bit of metagaming) can make the ranger surprisingly tanky. since you get the most important effect by tier 6 (beast's claw), you can multiclass with something that can boost the damage output some more (for example, i did furyshaper and got bored by how easy mode it was) edit: if you're curious about ranger and druid again, a stalker + shifter would be reeeeeally powerful, probably way more easymode than my stalker + furyshaper. a shifter boar would be able to do tons of damage, while the bonus AR and deflection would keep you extremely safe in shifted forms while being very fast. and you can spell cast with stupid accuracy when you're not shape shifting.

funnily, the FF of many spells and the poor AI around it also means that Confusion isn't as useful an affliction as it could be - enemy mages will happily nuke their own friends anyway.

yeah i think they focused too much on the later game, because 1 PL per alchemy scaled *really* well with all the different dimensions of a potion. i think 1/2 PL per alchemy could've still worked if stats still influenced poisons, because then a high-perception (maybe paired with might or intellect) could make poisons viable in early game.

yeah nope. if you look at the combat log it can be extremely discouraging to see the drop-off in accuracy bonuses between your weapon roll (including perception and enchantments) and your poison roll (basically nothing at low levels)

they got nerfed hard over the course of the game life. effects got weaker (the confusion poison used to be a charm poison!), they removed stat influence from consumables* (so no int, perception, might), they removed consumable-specific scaling (alchemy used to add PL and directly increase the effects of consumables, if you've ever wondered why that +8 defense against afflictions potion exists, it's because you used to be able to scale it to like +30 defense so it's actually half-decent) and then they made it so that only half your alchemy skill is used for poisons. you only get one shot to make it work, and most poisons target fortitude, which can be very hard to surmount early on. the nerfs mean that on potd, i find it's basically not worth crafting most poisons for the early-mid game. i'll still use poisons i find, but the likelihood that they actually land and that they'll do anything decent is pretty low. the will-targeting poisons i'll still bother to craft on any character interested in using poisons (there's the confusing one, and the one that got added in BoW dlc, i forget its english name). those actually have a chance against many of the foes you might find in early to mid-game encounters. with some dedicated investment, around like ~10 alchemy poisons can start being half-decent and you stop having as unfair encounters on potd with enemies having fort defenses way higher than you can handle. mid to mid-late game is the time for poisons to shine, especially if you have some gear that gives generic PL (which basically functions as 2x alchemy points for poisons). really late game though, it's really easy to just blow through enemies with top-tier spells and abilities and gear, and poisons start getting lame again, aside from big fights where you can just fire and forget a single poison on like a healer or wizard or somnething. * this probably remains the balancing change i most disagree with. edit: assassinate still probably remains the best "vanilla" way to make a poison work, simply because you can get +25 accuracy if you attack from stealth, and poisons really need the accuracy help on potd until you get enough scaling

you're probably better off just waiting for an entire day, sitting in the store itself. much faster way, forces vendors to reset inventory.

like others said, what does this mean that "all of a sudden [aloth] is trying to tank"? are you running off AI scripts? did you give him a melee weapon and no spells for the AI to cast?

nope hazard effects are extreeeeeemly weird. they kinda forget who they were cast by, with very limited exceptions. the PEN perks are among various things they completely forget about. (they also forget various buffs, which i discovered when wall of thorns would not proc interrupts when my caster had Energized active). the seal damage numbers (ward, searing) are also weird in that they don't correspond at all to what the tooltips say.

nice! does each party-wide proc have a chance to do this general echo (10%), or does each specific character proc have a chance to do this general echo (~%40 chance across party of 5)

also for a heterodox build, do a priest of magran/evoker. the evoker 15% chance of echo does work with magran's evocation bonus spells (the bonus +PL from evoker does not). add on marux amanth and vithrack slippers and the bonus spells will have almost a 30% chance to echo at least once (fan of flames, ray of fire, torrent of flame are the relevant ones). in a typical trash fight you should likely get a bonus spell or two, and the very small times that you get a magran-specific evocation spell cast echoed twice (very unlikely to get it more than that, or for a non-magran spell to echo twice) can instantly change the tide of a fight.

For something like Blessed Harvest, the echo will be very subtle - it'll give a slightly increased chance of it working, but either way you likely just straight out kill the enemy. For something like Symbol of Eothas, it's weird IIRC @Constentin Lévine also found that each individual proc of Symbol of Eothas also has a chance to echo, not the entire spell, maybe they can confirm or correct me. Wall spells are very special exceptions because you are only allowed to have one of a specific type of wall at any given time, so an echo there will be pointless. I actually don't know about scrolls. I know the Vithrack slippers work with scrolls, but I'm not sure about Evoker and Marux Amanth echo. 10% is a pretty low chance - so if you're just casting a handful of offensive spells or debuffs, you can easily go many fights without seeing an echo, and if you're using stuff like Dismissal or Symbol, the effect might be extremely subtle. The win comes from playing the law of big numbers (casting lots of offensive spells and debuffs and heals) and dropping big spells (call of rymrgand, pillar of holy fire, pillar of faith, minor intercession, iconic projection, even buffs that you really want to land like cleansing flame, despondent blows)

fortunately it is extremely easy to produce sparkcrackers, especially because you make 3 at a time. whenever i'm in town i always make sure to buy rahi pods from an herbal merchant, and to a lesser extent make sure i have gunpowder and solution. i always err on the side of having more, especially with DLC you can be in long dungeons without easy access to stores. deadeye drugs can be very useful early on, you attack fast and proc interrupts a lot, and the +5 accuracy can help with accuracy issues early on. it also lasts a while (though you'll need a lot to avoid withdrawal after every other fight due to low alchemy) so it'll definitely get you through a long fight.

honestly you can make do with the basic ship. i upgrade ships for one of two reasons: 1. i get the Voyager if I want to travel real fast for some reason - it has the fastest max speed. (common reasons: eothas challenge, rymgrand challenge are both sensitive to travel times) 2. for the style factor with decent skills and occasional upgrades, you can totally wreck most enemy ships with just the basic ship. with Ondras challenge it's more of a difficult fight, but still do-able. the main reason why you'd upgrade is to utterly demolish enemy ships (five powerful cannons firing at once off a Junk will make quick work of any enemy ship), and to have a cooler place to hang out (so, just style factor). for this reason i'll use the rautai submarine even though it's like way worse than even the basic ship, since you can't ugprade it. it's still cool as heck

try talking to her. or doing more things to trigger more soul harvesting. either way, you need to have a conversation with her about the burden she's carrying to trigger the next part of the quest

no, i think it was unclear what i was saying by a max of 6. i meant that there was a max across your dispositions of 6. each can still only get up to 3. I specify this because you can have a mix, e.g. 6 disfavored 0 favored, 6 disfavored 2 favored, 4 disfavored 6 favored, etc. but in favored_score1 you can only have up to 3, favored_score2 you can only have up to 3, etc. so you'd get .2 + .05 * (1 + .6 + .6) = 31% lash (you forgot the 1 as well. it means in the neutral case you have 25% lash)

You get up to 3 "points" per disposition, ranging from a min of 6 unfavored to a max of 6 favored (there's no way to "erase" the unfavored points like in poe1). if you look at the character overview screen, there's a "reputation" tab. for your mainchar, you can just count the numbers in your favored and disfavored dispositions. for non-main characters, they don't have their own reputation tab, but your mercenaries still track disposition. they use the favored/disfavored disposition of their deity/order, but they are scored based on the mainchar's reputation (so it can be bad if you have a mainchar priest/paladin and a mercenary priest/paladin of conflicting dispositions). for obsidian-created npcs, they don't have any favored/disfavored dispositions, so they will always be at a neutral state (xoti, pallegina, vatnir). see bottom of either https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/priest or https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/paladin

i'll bet it wouldn't be that hard to generate a mapping of "in game name" => "CRE_xxx" codes for every creature in the game, and then subdivide some maps into easy coordinates. basically, what i'm thinking is: a website (i tend to think in websites since i work on internet stuff), where you select a map, and you get a scaled-down version of that map subdivided into a grid, and you can click spots on that grid and select a creature from a dropdown, and then click a button and generate these .txt files (since it looks like just a series of SpawnPrefabAtPoint)

did you have like a script for this, or did you have to do a lot of manual lookup and guess-and-check for coordinates? there's some very intriguing possibilities here, especially if it can be hooked into SSS/S4 somehow

so when's this going up on nexus

odd, i thought the essence interrupter was patched near the end to prevent it from stopping hauani's splitting.

hey wow this is a great find! i definitely didn't know about it. heck, for some reason this never clicked for me, and i'm constantly running with a druid of some sort these days (tekehu, fassina, or otherwise). even ignoring the cheese, paladin face-tanking inside a venombloom sounds awesome. this is honestly my vote. not just venombloom, but also wall of thorns is poison-based. between the two that's a ton of procs for combusting wounds. it almost doesn't matter what the other wizard spells are

dropping resolve has a triple effect here - sparkcrackers targets deflection initially (i don't remember if i made it clear in the guide, but it makes no sense to drop sparkcrackers on yourself if you have a priest of wael deflection or escape buff up), and then targets will, and then has a duration that is modified by resolve's hostile duration effect. so even if it's just two more points to go down to a bare minimum of 3 with the blessing, it pays off 3x, -2 deflection, -4 will, and +6% duration (multiplied by explosives). without blunderbuss to fallback on, i'd say it's worth losing the extra resolve, even if it does make you all the easier to hit, even with your buffs (my suggestion: put it into constitution. you've already maxed intellect)

a possible tweak is to avoid using alchemy skill points at all, just go all in on explosives and dropping resolve. you can toss sparkcrackers on yourself in stealth before a fight and keep trying until you succeed (though if you're too close to enemies you will alert them to your presence :P). with sufficiently low resolve and good explosives (and the gloves also benefit from intellect IIRC), you can probably get like 40+ seconds of streetfighter mayhem by mid-game. i forgot to mention that losing out on blunderbuss does hurt in being able to randomly sustain distracted in dense fights. sometimes i'd stick with my 1h+blunderbuss setup if i'm surrounded because riposte full attacks would trigger more powder burns. i actually don't know if this really made a difference, but just something to put out there.

in case you haven't seen it mentioned on the forums yet, but the general consensus is that gorecci st and the digsite are like the hardest fights in the game. so i wouldn't worry too much if you struggle in those fights, because everyone will likely struggle, unless you specifically tune a mercenary or character for those fights (sometimes i bring along a druid with both charm beasts and hold beasts for digsite [edit: though i feel like i'm unlucky and always get some group of beasts with "unstoppable" on galawain's challenge, which makes them immune to that]). especially i think barbarians have a rough early game because all their power kind of adds on to itself until they explode at higher levels. kinda like an old-fashioned power-curve of a wizard. dude your english is great no worries, i would not have even noticed anything was off if you hadn't said anything

yeah, i revised the build at some point (i forget if it's here or on gamefaqs) to drop resolve more, so that you can lean a bit more on sparkcrackers. unfortunately, everything outside the sparkcracker effect from the gloves got nerfed so that they only check once for the distracted effect, so you're going to burn more sparkcrackers to keep it up. i haven't played the build in 5.0 through the entire game (just to make sure certain interactions still work), but when i played this earlier on, IME blunderbuss was mostly important for the early to early-mid game. later on, with lots of points in explosives i relied more heavily on sparkcrackers and/or getting pummeled to and managing sub-50% health. you could probably make do with the blunderbuss tweaks, but the early game is going to be rougher and the later game more inconsistent.