thelee

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.

in the past i've heard that playing at midnight can help, because it reduces commoners and those are the ones that can trigger the bug. maybe give that a try?

sorry to necro this, but any chance of incorporating whatever fix @Elric Galad did for the animal companion attack inconsistency into the community patch?

i guess an open question is - what CRPG has done summons generally very well across the board? i'm not sure i have a good answer to that. I've been trying Solasta of late, and even with extremely rigid adherence to 5e SRD, there are some way too good summons and a lot of garbage, because the tabletop game itself doesn't seem to have put a lot of consideration into making summons work well, even though it has stronger restrictions than Deadire on how it copy-pastes monsters (challenge rating?)

it's funny though because incarnates suffer both from being underpowered, but also because spiritual ally is essentially overpowered. like arguably in a vacuum the incarnate summons (except maybe wael) still are servicable use of your action economy in keeping enemies occupied and dealing a bit of damage. but b.c. of the same design oversights, spiritual ally comes with infinite uses of healing, which is ordinarily limited by an AI script, but which you can spam endlessly. compared to that, even Rymrgand is a hard sell, since they both compete for the "summon slot" that you're allowed to have.

maybe i'm missing something, but are you not able to do the Strand of Favor cheese? that should give you plenty of invisibility (You can rapidly pick it up and drop it back into your inventory slot, and every single instance of this gives you a compounding 10% increase in duration. Also works with that armor that has the +10% duration enchantment (the gambeson))

Ive been off social media for lent, so sorry for the necro, but say whaaaaat?? This is a vanilla game issue? seems like this should also be addressed in the community patch bug fixes

alright i think you've convinced me on energized v swift. it also means you have a little bit more work to benefit from the interrupts (even if it's just marked prey and stalker's link) whereas swift would have been an easy pickup for anyone.

I guess Bonded Fury granting Energized + Swift would solve the problem for Maia for a non-pet maia I think Heart Seeker is a great capstone (esp bpm version) BTW does BPM do anything with Twinned Shots? It always struck me as underwhelming.

you ninja-ed me on post-timing, but I disagree that this is bad. Maia's pet is too good. Maia's subclass is too good. Swift on a pet would be a payoff for SC Rangers that gives them an option that can compete with Maia's pet. As it is, it's frequently hard not to feel like a mainchar or merc ranger+pet setup is a bit of a trap compared to just rolling with Maia. Maia would still get an incredible pet for 100% of the game, and could multiclass and still have an incredible pet. Swift on Bonded Fury would just let mercs/mainchars have a similar lategame option in their toolkit if they want to.

i think this is just way too good. i think you're overemphasizing the pet. if you need to have an ability this overtuned at tier 8 to make a pet viable, then what you're basically saying is "pet isn't viable." which i don't agree with. imo, it should be reasonable to have a pet build and go w/out a talent without major cost, but you're basically making a skill that would be a trap for pet builds to not take. (for this reason I don't particularly like Vicious and Resilent companion, they are basically talent taxes for rangers, at least on PotD) the problem we're trying to address, if I were to summarize, is simply that Bonded Fury as it is, isn't a particularly great payoff for single-class rangers, especially since a party of 5 (or a multiclass) will frequently be able to cover several tier 2 inspirations. We don't have to go all the way to all that to make it useful. I honestly believe as I mentioned upthread that simply just granting a medium-duration Swift even is Good Enough to make it worthwhile. Tenacious+Swift if you want a bit more (and Tenacious is a bit more "Fury"-ish). (Energized + Swift would be pretty good, but might be busted on lower difficulties where crits are easy to come by with a pet.) Yeah, it kinda breaks the original theming of Bonded Fury, but I don't think it was a particularly compelling theming to begin with. It would give pet builds a lot more survivability and utility, and would make single-class pet rangers less of a trap compared to just including Maia into your party (again, her bird basically is the best all-around pet and there's nothing much the mainchar can do about it). And it would not be a talent tax for pet builds, because you still have relative alternatives (Master's Call).

still a mini combo! not everything has to be hermetic to a solo character. though the big problem with this stuff is that at least on PotD enemy health way outscales your character, so relying on returning some of the damage you receive in any meaningful way does not seem like a great strategy. at least with stuff like riposte, you are avoiding damage at the same time.

ime it's far more likely for the pet to be stationary for extended stretches of time, so it'd be mostly "free" resource gen. i like the idea of a mobility reward, because the ranger has some mobility pay-off (shot on the run mostly) and it encourages an atypical playstyle. i'm not sure how that would actually play out in terms of implementation though

in terms of heal companion buff, have you considered giving it an instant cast and no recovery? there's still an unpleasant action economy to heal companion, and Play Dead has instant cast. at least then "Heal Companion" has value in that it doesn't cost you action economy to use to use more pre-emptively. I haven't played aroudn with it in BPM mode, but when heal companion is available, enemies tend to be able to take a pet from healthy to dead pretty quickly, so you want to use it pre-emptively, but also not necessarily waste cast-time (even down to .5s BPM) and recovery time just to do that in case there's no real danger coming up on the pet. adding resource recovery to bonded fury seems too good, imo. it would basically be an auto-pick in any build. i'm circling back to an earlier point - if bonded fury had a narrower set of tier 3 abilities, that would be extremely good for a pet-support. Swift in particular (whatever other T3 is an exercise to the reader). Maia has the best pet in the game because her bird can face tank megabosses because it's immune to engagement, a single-class ranger focusing on their pet should get a similar payoff and not need to rely on an exhortation.

*sighs, takes Konstanten out of the storage closet* time for another run

if like, you get a couple skellies in one hit you get two free full attacks on the enemy? (or is it one cleave per attack. doesn't really come up often, so curious)

there's no immunity to pierce. probably what you're seeing is an immunity to disengagement attacks.

you can avoid this outcome with some carefully selected dialogue choices.

probably not what you're looking for, but "everything bad" i find to be really hilariously fun challenge. everyone's dead, you get cursed by basically every god, etc. more seriously, the non-"everything bad" pre-built legacies generally get you everything in the game, whereas if you import or do your own custom history you could easily choose to resolve quests and story points in ways where you deny yourself unique stuff. the one exception that i can think of is the Devil of Caroc plate, only some of the pre-built histories will get you that, and i'm only pretty certain of "everything good" option being one of them. (there may be another) edit: you won't be able to get "everything" using a pre-built history, because the berath option (fair and balanced) is the only way to get the unique consumable "berath's bell", but also impossible to get devil of caroc breastplate. similarly i don't think there's any other way to get hylea's consumable without benefiting her in the legacy, which is mutually exclusive with berath's bell. can be important for e.g. a no-rest or low-rest run where the hylea's consumable is very very good.

nope she'll run over to you first before getting scared. important that she freaks out first lordy you got a pickle of a challenge here. how far have you been able to get throughout all your iterations? another thing possible consideration is cinder bombs. unless BPM changed it, the explosion itself will interrupt, without a roll, so it really doesn't matter how good your explosives skill is. it could act as an extra source of interrupt that you don't have to resource-gen for, for stopping merges.

if you skip to 20:30 in my video you can see what i do. sorry i don't recall the extent to which bpm nerfs various things but, what about that wand that has a barring death's door effect? could you use that in conjunction with your 4x ooze wall of draining to give you a lot more blood sacrifices?

Maybe dumb question: are you letting vela get scared before you kite? Her scared AI shouldn’t wander that much, whereas her normal AI will try to find you (and then getting scared when an enemy is in range). I dragged Vela with me to aggro HoW so I could trigger her fear, I withdrew her, and then kited. It was pretty foolproof in terms of safety

not about accuracy, but about maximizing procs/second avenging storm procs count as "weapon" attacks (if you're not aware, there's some infinite damage cheese that you can do with this fact combined with the 2h sword Effort). so it can trigger interrupt off impediment. it's also a bonus source of damage. so with potion of impediment, deadeye, and high speed (i had scordeo's edge buff, so ultimately dual wielding didn't even matter i guess, i was just dual wielding because that's skaen's spiritual weapon) you get the possibility to interrupt from the weapon, and an additional chacne to interrupt from the avenging storm hit. especially after the initial ooze form splits and defenses lower, it can be a massive aid. i looked up my own run again just to verify that potion of impediment does in fact work with avenging storm and can be effective: it varied. i could have infinite withdraw casts because i was part tactician, but really i had to manage that pretty carefully since in my practice runs i could run into a situation where the wrong spell gets restored by brilliant, or i'm starting a fight without a sufficient withdraw cast because i didn't restore enough spells in the last fight. i think generally i tried to aggro enemies so that vela gets scared, withdraw her, and then lure enemies far far away from her so that i don't have to worry about re-withdrawing her and can just focus on getting back up to full withdraw and restoring my own resources.

nit: slicken isn't a hazard AoE. it's an AoE with a repeating effect. want to make sure we're precise, because "hazard" has a specific meaning and interacts differently with items and buffs. yes, but they're not additive. they're independent checks, so you'll have a 1-(.85 * .75) = 36% chance for hit->crit instead of of 15 + 25 = 40% chance. what race are you? for my ultimate i run i chose a boreal dwarf expressly for the hauane o whe fight, which was by far the roughest of all the megabosses when i was planning things out. boreal dwarf gives you a massive 50% miss to graze chance against hauane. would be real useful for landing something like slicken. have you considered scrolls of avenging storm and dual-wielding something? iirc my ultimate attempt was basically dual-wielding, lots of effects to boost accuracy, deadeye, impediment, scordeo's edge buff, avenging storm, and going to town on hauane o whe. basically my entire character was planned just to be able to take on hauane o whe.