thelee

is this on mainchar or a party member? if the latter, i wonder if removing them and then re-adding them to your party would fix it.

I think it's important to note that despite the fact that Deadfire is relatively old at this point, a lot of metagame interactions are actually pretty recently discovered. The strand of favor, minor grimoire imprint, and in particular strand of favor with soul blade buff that are IIRC used by shai hulud's build are all pretty new discoveries (they in fact post-date many The Ultimate runs, you only start seeing Strand of Favor crop up in the latter set of runs), well after the bulk of players probably played and put together guides. Before then, I would imagine a hierophant would struggle a bit or require a higher player touch because of typical caster/cipher anti-synergies (namely, that a typical cipher needs to attack to build focus, but a typical caster wants to be casting spells, not attacking)*. that being said, even without some of the newer metagame stuff, i think a hierophant that hooks into a psion would be very powerful. removes the basic anti-synergy between having two casters, and then you just have the nice mix of stuff between wizard and psion. but psion was also a pretty late addition - when the game was nearing end of life cycle, so again well after the bulk of builds and players were done. *a wizard is slightly different because you could summon some pretty powerful weapons that help supercharge focus generation, but this still requires a little bit higher level of deliberation that might explain a lack of hierophant content.

perception has diminishing returns in general, but monk in particular has synergy with crits, so it's worth investing in perception for many builds. example of synergies: you can weaken on crit, you can interrupt on crit, you can get resource refunds on crit. with swift flurry, you can even chain together free attacks on crits, an each free attack can trigger further free attacks if you crit. (only a 33% chance, so it's still diminishing returns, but point is for monk even if the returns are diminishing they are diminishing very very very very slowly) also, you should basically ignore from consideration that you get +3 accuracy upon level up. Because everyone also gets +3 defenses on level up, so they cancel each other out. All the accuracy bonus on level up does is help you keep pace with other targets at your level, and make it harder for lower-level characters to fight above their level.

Monks are pretty much an S-tier class in Deadfire, especially single-class. Hard to go wrong with them. There is no cap to action speed bonuses. In PoE1, I don't believe there was a cap to speed bonuses, but there were complicated stacking rules, so probably you drank the potion and it got suppressed by a different effect. In Deadfire, action speed gives you linear returns, so you can stack as much action speed as you want without concern. Though do be warned, Deadfire has its own stacking rules: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/stacking-rules i think you might be a little confused, it sounds like you're referencing PoE1 items. Deadfire isn't simply a PoE1 copy or direct continuation. It has its own gear and its own stuff.

if you want to fit in the bride and ugprade, i would recommend ditching "seven men" and "fampyr's gaze". of the resistance chants, i generally find those the less important ones (in fact, most of the time i just pick up one dozen and i'm done, unless i'm single-classing a chanter). Things like weakened and terrified really ruin my day and seem a little more common than other day-ruining afflictions (e.g. i don't really consider things like staggered or immobilized worth switching on a chant for); neriscyrlas and auranic and drakes are some examples of predictable sources of terrify that it's worth keeping one dozen for, vs the others. kind of the problem with the fampyr's gaze one is that if you lose a party member to charm/dominate, you can't use the chant to bring them back, so it doesn't work as well reactively, whereas you can always bring back your party from frightened and con afflictions, and the terrify cases are frequently predictable/consistent as mentioned. Plus! With the upgraded The Bride, you basically get mini-versions of the other resist chants (esp fampyr's gaze) anyway, since by buffing int, dex, perception, you are also protected from a hit from each of an int, dex, and perception affictions.

Hey congrats! Welcome to an extremely exclusive club. I hope both you and Shai Hulud get verified soon.

does this imply that successfully upgrading an item all the way to legendary makes it immune to degradation? i honestly never bothered because repairs were already ruinous at superb. or are you saying that every item was manually coded in to degrade, and they forgot about this legendary plate? if that's the case, i wonder if there's anything else they forgot (probably too tedious to check)

I have mixed feelings on the characters in PoE1 vs Deadfire. On the one hand, I agree that diving into their personal history can be very deep and narratively powerful - I was surprised the first time I convinced Durance about Magran. On the other hand, I really stopped caring after a replay, and it was extremely annoying to just be rapidly mashing dialogue responses to get to the point - in hindsight it seems overwrought and over-written. I think I generally value expansive reactivity more than miles-long dialogue trees, given a choice of finite writer's time. PoE1 I remember being pretty quiet when you're wandering around, whereas Deadfire seems more like you have a party, and it was a treat to get new reactivity with new DLC and also get Vela reactivity.

I honestly can't recall any generic legendary item, I don't even remember the SSS reward (though I guess I haven't done Slayer path in a while). As you probably have well-experienced, my casual understanding is that generic enemy gear maxes out at Superb, even in FS which probably has the consistently highest target level in the whole game. The master ships definitely don't get up to legendary. I've only done one vengeance ship (Huana) and don't recall any legendary generic items.

If you have a spare weapon slot, you could consider having one that has a large shield and pick up large shield proficiency. The accuracy penalty is murder, but while you’re in that mode you can limit yourself to support spells and you won’t be negatively impacted at all. The massive deflection bonus and damage reduction offered by large shield + modal will protect you against ranged damage. ultimately though, being on point with engagement and distracting ranged attackers with alternative targets (an item-based summon attacking them in melee gets their attention real fast for cheap) can obviate the need for worrying *too* much about defense.

counter-point: double-casting on priest of rymrgand would be great. just don't expect it to proc very much (maybe once per late game fight) to set your expectations appropriately. griffin's blade is a pretty solid choice though. why not dual wield stat sticks? griffin's blade + marux amanth, or griffin's blade + sun & moon, or griffin's blade + keeper of the flame (for the acc bonus aura), etc. fleshmender is solid choice (especially if you can make use of the weapon set or quick item slot upgrades), but later on in the game even on PotD i feel like it might be overkill in terms of defense for a priest, whom i'm assuming you're going to be mostly keeping away from the front lines. might want to take a page from vatnir and stealborrow his high harbinger's robe - very fast, option to go even faster, would help optimize your stats a bit since you're not investing a lot in dex. i'd also say that effigy's husk is available pretty early on, and despite being cloth because it's superb at such an early point it punches above its weight in terms of defense especially with the weird +3 slash AR, and i've actually gotten tons of value from the healing penalty aura that gets triggered, as well as being able to upgrade to ignore perception afflictions (blinding can be killer for a caster, especially a support-adjacent one; huge recovery penalty and ranged penalty can make it really hard/impossible to heal/protect allies in time, on top of making your offensive casting way less effective).

you can always respec later in the game. especially for chanter, i respect a lot as i level up because some of the lower-level summons don't scale well (like drakes as you mention) have you considered later respeccing the chanter part to the party-buffing invocations? if you don't have a priest, the party-buffing ones can be very effective in boosting overall party capability. "the bride" (quick, insightful, upgradable to also grant smart) is better than "the brideman" (strong, steadfast, upgradable to +5 might/con/res and duration extension upon kill*), but either way both invocations i feel might be underrated. * the usefulness of the upgrade depends on whether or not you have the mod that "fixes" it. in vanilla, it grants +5 to stats instead of the inspiration, so it can't counter debuffs. on the other hand, it does mean that debuffs won't dispel the buffs, just counteract them.

Holy thread necro batman!

whoa, very nice find. quoting to help ppl find this from google. i don't recall finding discussions about this on the internet, so this is a really useful insight. quicksave/quickloads are convenient, but it's easy to forget that making them "quick" requires the game taking shortcuts that might introduce bugs. (the biggest one for me is the memory leak after prolonged play which only quitting to start screen can clear)

they are pretty slow, especially now that all plaque slots are gone and now it's just patches. be sure to re-email them periodically. back when i was getting verified, i had to periodically email them even though at that point they were pretty responsive. i think it's just mostly just the ordeal of them having to watch hours of not-terribly exciting content (the person who verified my run mentioned they ended up watching it while on a plane?)

a true glutton for punishment

these days, even though it's not optimal, i will build an occasional 18-20 might character that can get even more points. i still have a lizard brain that takes joy in big damage numbers, especially in the early game. i don't know about other people, but maybe you're thinking of poe1? i'm a little rusty on poe1 mechanics, but IIRC, in poe1 what action speed bonuses existed were handled really inconsistently, so there were some that basically were multiplicative with dex and each other, not additive. (i consulted my own poe1 guide and sure enough, things like Gunner and Two-Weapon Style were action speed multipliers, not recovery time adjustments, and Deleterious Alacrity of Motion was a 1.5x action speed multiplier, not an additive dex and action speed bonus). In fact I don't recall any action speed bonus in poe1 being additive, so dex was a pure multiplier on damage, making it even more of a king stat. meanwhile in deadfire, things are much more normalized/rationalized for action speed.

from a boolean math perspective, no maybe shai hulud has those to make it easy to switch AI actions on and off (you just invert the "always true" conditional with a not)

wow, impressive script, shai hulud. this is inspiring me to create a script that's just focused on consumables that i can load up on all my party members. (i pretty much always have one script slot empty) can't run into the AI consumable bug if the AI is always consuming when I need it to anyway

one thing i learned from taking doing physics and stats classes is that it's very important to be clear what your target units of measurement or that you are accurately selecting the correct metric. everything else will flow from that. the correct metric: the RETURNS you get from investing in dex or attack speed is how much effective damage you do over time (generally per second, since DPS is the normal way gamers talk about this stuff). Not recovery time. Tracking recovery time will give you a curve, because it's the denominator. it's not the metric, just a part of the metric. the correct units of measurement: what you should do is invert your attack speed, essentially, because that converts "seconds per attack" into "attacks per second" (which then is a straight-forward shot to "damage per second"). the original relationship is inverted (1/x), and an inversion will look somewhat loggy or polynomial, but it's neither, which is why neither a log transform or polynomial fit will work. there's a graph part way down this page which is a perfect line: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/action-speed-is-linear-returns edit: what bosmer said about relative differences is right, i'm speaking more generally about how those relative differences end up manifesting, mathematically, such that it becomes basically indisputable that action speed has linear returns.

don't quote me on this, but when I was messing around with magran's challenge run (abandoned, it's not worth it at all lol), i found i was somehow able to avoid the potion-drinking bug when my Eder's AI script had a potion drinking action at the bottom of the list (even with other potions). i haven't investigated it thoroughly, but maybe there's a way out of the potion-drinking issue. omg that's hilarious. must be like how AI script can ignore hidden health (like from berserker rage) and trigger health status conditions. i need to do that on my scripts, would make final stand much more useful (frequently i miss the opportunity to use it)

two reasons, both related: one - the game tries to preserve the current % of health whenever max health is adjusted (e.g. from CON changing up and down from afflictions and inspirations). two - more intuitively, if you somehow permanently reduce an enemy's CON, then you objectively need to do less damage to kill it. effectively, you've given yourself a damage boost. an extreme example is if you somehow reduced an enemy's health from 1000 to 200. You only need to do 200 damage to kill it. You've effectively 5x-ed your damage, because you effectively did 1000 damage compared to before the health reduction. the first point I mentioned above is relevant because this would all be for nothing if, when a con adjustment wears off, the enemy gains back the entirety of the missing health. instead, the game continues to try to preserve the relative share of health. So if you somehow reduced an enemy's health from 1000 to 200, but only managed 100, when the con effect wears off, the game puts the enemy's current health back to 500 health (goes from 100/200 to 500/1000), not 900 (i.e. 100/200 and then +800 current health when their max health goes back to 1000). the specific 12.8% multiplicative damage bonus number was derived from the specific numbers you shared from dorudugan's health pool above (vanilla numbers). edit: like i said and you've noticed, there's some weirdness going on with dorudugan's numbers specifically for some unknown reason. but for more reasonable fights (even against enemies with ~1000+ health), any error should be overwhelmed by the general advantage of doing more damage (a ~1% difference in current health only becomes noticable at dorudugan's massive ~16000 hp health pool), and the effect is more powerful the lower the enemy's starting CON is.

wow i never knew that!

CON inspiration and CON affliction are both just two sides of the same coin. But that thread was specifically about how those conspire with effects that add a set amount of health (mainly those amulets that grant +health), and how the game doesn't handle the math right. I actually don't remember which way the interaction goes, it's pretty obscure (but had an application in letting you infinitely restore health in e.g. woedica's challenge). But the Dorudugan thing shouldn't be the same thing here, I doubt he/she/it has a specific health buff. Given the closely-aligned numbers involved in Shai Hulud's post outside BPM (87.4% of health to 88.7% of health, back down to 88.3% of health), I half suspect maybe it's some funky rounding with the difficulty health boost (which, thanks to this thread I now realize is a multiplicative bonus on the enemy's total health), which we only really notice here because of the massive numbers involved with dorudugan's health pool. edit: i speculate that it has something to do with the difficulty adjustment mostly because back in that thread i think Boeroer had specific numbers and MaxQuest had an equation that matched the game to a T, so I don't think CON adjustments alone causes the health healing weirdness. edit 2: also want to underline that this concern is probably mostly for solo, since if you have reasonable uptime and reasonable party DPS, even with dorudugan healing some tiny % of health every time the CON effect wears off, it'll get overwhelmed by what is a 12.8% multiplicative party damage bonus against it by virtue of good uptime on the con affliction.

i don't think there's a default way in the AI scripting system to control the range something is used. and rage doesn't take a target, so that especially i don't think you have control over. i think your best bet to avoid wasted action is just to maneuver serafen manually next to enemies.