thelee

yeah it's great. it's a vessel-only bonus for just your mainchair, but fortunately vessels are some of the toughest foes in the game. (e.g. also the guardian of ukaizo)

are you talking about in that screenshot vs Dorudugan? sure. 20 base from beastmaster + 13 perception + 57 from character level + 8 from ability level +6 from druid power level +10 from marked for the hunt (ranger ability) +10 from helm of the white wind +5 from a pet (Boras, in FS) +20 from Hunter's Claw +4 from Sweet Aroma (aura from unique flail in SSS) +10 from Stalker's Link (ranger ability) +10 for Devotions for the Faithful (normally doesn't stack with Hunter's Claw unless you go through some area transitions and save/reloads) +8 from Rymrgand's Gift (you have to collect all of Rymrgand's gear [helm, armor, mace, shield] in BoW and agree to become Rymrgand's Champion, and then do SSS and disintegrate all souls at every major story checkpoint) +5 from Necklace of Bones (unique amulet) this is paired with some debuffs on Dorudugan: -25 from Morningstar weapon modal -9.3 from Hunter of Hunters (an aura on an SSS-acquired pike) this is still overkill. You only need a net +24 accuracy, this resulted in +40, so you could lose +16 in buffs, or lose +8 in buffs and do away with Hunter of Hunters.

it might be worth poing out that that IME on potd your pet will fall over a lot early game. enemies hit disproportionately hard and healing is a scarce resource for the most part early on (for this reason i prefer revive pet over heal pet as a ranger ability). a way to think about it is, that's a lot of damage that would have been hitting you or another party member but instead hit your pet, which doesn't accumulate injuries (and on berath's challenge, can't die). if you're not having fun, you're not having fun, but just wanted to highlight that having pet get knocked out a lot early on is par for the course.

nah, first, obsidian-created npc's don't actually care about your disposition, so they're always at a neutral state (here, it's a 25% lash). second, even if it were somehow at the absolute minimum, it's still pretty decent (~21% lash). but just at 25% lash, spiritual weapons are already competitive or better than many unique weapons from a damage perspective.

it also makes for some pretty neat flavor. i never actually thought of using sun and moon like this, just changing what spells you cast depending on time of day (instead i just used the wait option until the "right" time of day came up), even though both druid and wizard could have also pulled this off (druid less well compared to vatnir's bonus spells and wizard grimoire).

imo medium armor is mostly a trap on potd with upscaling*. the relentlessness of enemy PEN gain (already boosted by PotD) means that most of the time you're probably better off going lighter** for more responsiveness or heavier for actual protection. medium armor tends not to actually provide much damage reduction in practice (as it seems you've experienced). even heavy armor has trouble sometimes without additional help (AR buffs or something like dazed on enemies), especially early on where it's really hard to find/upgrade enchanted heavy armor but you keep leveling. i think you'll probably get the most mileage out of hearth defender in conjunction with a couple allies in heavy armor. but like everyone else, i generally have never used it (it itself is a mediocre medium armor for the person wearing it). *a handful of exceptions from the unique armors list, but hearth defender is not one of them. there is a exceptional scale armor that is very nice b.c. you can steal it from the dark cupboard very early in the game and it's very useful protection early on. ** ironically it feels like there's a bigger protection difference between cloth/robes and light armor than there is from light to medium. in my (admittedly very selective) memory, light armor can meaningfully help against overpenetration vs robes, but often times it seems like medium armor doesn't even help with that.

what i meant was that in tyranny, mainchar and party members can combine to create combo effects as special abilities (and different ones get unlocked based on your reputation with party members). it's not like DA or ME where you cast one spell and then another spell on the same target to trigger a new effect, but it's still something that required you to have specific party members together.

ywdin is just a nice generic cipher. i think she's a bit too underwhelming as a rogue or rogue multiclass. i think fassina as a sorcerer (druid + wizard) can also work real well. you miss out on the really good end-game wizard spells (though as a conjurer, she already misses out on the really good ones), but the versatility and survivability of being a sorcerer is really really nice. you can load up on wizard buff spells (deleterious alacrity of motion or fleet feet for speed, infuse with vital essence, eldritch aim, etc) and still have plenty of spellcasting power from your druid side. i'm pretty sure (though i haven't tried this in any recent memory) that even though you miss out on caedebald + phantom, you can shapeshift + phantom, which is still very nice and available earlier. you can also firebrand + phantom. vatnir is also great, don't forget him! he has a great unique priest subclass that is very good, and i've found any version of him (sc priest, +chanter, or +rogue) to be very good. if you're going chanter, picking up the long night's drink to help your priest spells land is good. if you're going rogue, use lots of mobility abilities and pick up the spiritual weapon to dual wield axes with a +25% frost lash, and use full-attack abilities (crippling strike is good enough for this, honestly) to stack on bleeding modals; champion's boon for PEN and minor avatar for general self-buffing are good assists.

lol i was going to recommend a build i used (fury + stalker) that also used firebrand a lot, and then i realized that yorname already linked it. here it is again just for good measure: the plus of using a stalker is that you can cheat on your defensive stats again, like a fighter, and still be rather safe. this build actually goes down to 7 con and 8 resolve. this is only true for a single-class druid. you need a regular source of Avenging Storm to make it powerful. Otherwise it's kinda merely OK (i'd rather use Firebrand)

Tyranny came the closest but still pretty far off, but I agree the combo mechanic that Bioware (and only Bioware it seems) did in DA and also to an extent in Mass Effect was a pretty neat way to mix up the party RPG formula.

yeah +100 there are some folk around here who will happily dump res and con w/out worry, and you can eventually pick up Tough as a huge boost to health, but frankly my play experience is a lot more enjoyable when I'm not getting two-hit comboed by enemy archers and/or enemy rogues (one hit, followed by a finishing blow ability or a big crit) than from a small amount of extra damage output. I still take a couple points out from resolve and con for back-of-line mainchars, but not typically lower than 8-9 for con/resolve. There are exceptions, for example, with Bear/Boar form I'm more willing to lower resolve a bit since I can always become tankier on demand if needed. Still don't really don't take con down much. (And I always take Tough anyway)

i think the big thing for me is there aren't really a lot of party-based real-time RPG experiences. The last one I played that was AAA was dragon age inquisition (which it self was very RTwP, even if it wasn't IE style), and I haven't heard of anything like it since. I love F:NV and Outer Worlds and elder scrolls-style games, they just don't have the tactical/strategic depth of a party-based game though

1) i don't think so, perhaps the deadfire community mod fixes this? it will definitely benefit from scion of flame. 2) yes. note you probably want the deadfire community patch (at least bug fixes version) for rot skulls to be great, as in vanilla it has 0 pen 3) it's definitely a trade-off. single-class druid can be insanely powerful (avenging storm, tornado, greater maelstrom, pollen patch are all extremely powerful and some of them extremely cheese-able spells). but you get greater versatility or can fulfill specific niches with multiclassing that can be worth giving up those spells. fighter can also get bonus PL and int, and can even take advantage of mob stance's recovery bonus. along with firebrand and confident aim, you could be pretty handy with firebrand. 4) on potd you're going to miss a lot, especially early on think how much more you'd be missing without perception. like @yorname says, you can get tons of accuracy with ranger, but fighter also gets disciplined barrage for +5 per and graze to hit chance (you can upgrade it to hit->crit or an intellect inspiration) and also confident aim to help with the miss rate with fire brand. 5) i'm assuming you want to be a fighter/druid who is firebrand-focused. 15 mig/10 con/16 dex/10 per/18 int/8 res choose a background that gives you +1 dex, probably. pick up disciplined strikes, confident aim to make up for mediocre accuracy. use mob stance and get hold the line for bonus engagement. armored grace so you can wear some armor when you're tossing around flame brand strikes.

for all its flaws with PF:K and PF:WOTR (and I have a lot of beefs especially with kingmaker), Owlcat deserves credit for holding the banner of IE games/RTwP into the current day even as Deadfire sales floundered. that being said, Owlcat's next game is something else entirely (it's a turn-based warhammer game) it really seems like RTwP is a niche genre that not a lot of players are actively demanding. a pity, I still turn on Deadfire because it's the only game that can really scratch the RTwP itch (and despite being older and with a shorter dev cycle, isn't nearly as buggy as WoTR). Owlcat had a user survey and found the majority of its players use RTwP mode. Rather than speaking about a huge demand for RTwP, it might have just meant that RTwP players don't really have much of a choice, so they all are crowding into this one game. So yeah, unfortunately I agree DOS2 and BG3 are the future. I'll just have to wait a decade for the next IE/RTwP nostalgia revival.

really? are you not thinking about the draining chant? (still would be absolutely insane if it ever stacked per enemy)

i usually end up just spam resting in Cuitzli's exotic herbs shop (every 26 hours triggers a vendor refresh). I think antlers are a "Rare" ingredient, so it doesn't have a high chance of spawning, and if it does like maybe 1 pops up.

i think you need smart camera (or whatever it's called?) enabled for those to do anything? i remember thinking they were busted and didn't do anything, but i had smart camera disabled at the time.

it depends on your mouse. my mouse has these side buttons: the front is 3, the back one is 4. i've bound one to switch weapon sets, and one to toggle stealth.

necro-ing this thread because my lifegiver druid is finally high enough level where i'm playing around with this. i think what's neat about this avenging storm<->effort is that it runs on a spectrum. there's definitely an extreme where you have enough accuracy and/or hit-to-crit where you wipe out entire fights, but if you're not building a super min-maxed character it feels quite "fair", you don't get endless sequences of bolts, but you do get a handful of bolts sometimes as a nice reward. i also thought it'd be really important to have something like druid aoe ticks or monk multi-attack synergies, but on the less "cheesy" end of the spectrum, just auto-attacking with effort and storm can get you some bonus bolts. in this respect i feel like this is like salvation of time or combusting wounds - almost a no-op if you're not built for it, pretty good if you know how to play with it, and utterly busted if you so choose. (incidentally i found that wondrous torment plus a flail means that even a tough bullet-sponge can get bolted to smithereens from like an auto-attack proc)

i think the aft strategy isn't very good. doubling your chances to get events is extremely good, and the voyager can turn around really fast anyway. you should definitely have a cannon in the back that you can fire back at them while running away, but otherwise 2x flame cannons in the front will shred the enemy to ship much quicker with events and damage.

generating events is highly dependent on how many ranks your cannoneers have in cannoneering. there is a 0% chance at 1 rank, and a tiny chance at rank 2. you really need rank 3 or 4. being really close doesn't seem to hurt enemy ships nearly as much as being far away does. anything in between is so marginal that i hardly can tell. and even then, you should be sailing at full speed (parallel to the enemy ship of course) to maximize the accuracy penalty when they fire (the AI even sometimes tries to wait for you to stop moving before it fires). i'm assuming you're talking about the flame cannon that has 0-75m range (the 0-400m pretty much sucks IMO). it's frankly bonkers good, but you really do need cannoneers at rank 2 for it to really shine; plus you should either be in your starting ship or the voyager, basically a ship that can turn on a dime. voyager's the best, since you don't even need to turn to get into firing position. you won't be able to strafe the enemy ship in between shots with a voyager, but i just hold position in between shots anyway to maximize the accuracy at ~100m (any closer and the AI is likely to try to ram and board you) and i quickly overwhelm the enemy ship with events before it even matters that you're not strafing them. another one that works well for me is to get the cannons that have up 600m range (i prefer the higher fire rate one to maximize events), and sail to pretty much >550m. strafe the enemy in between shots and fire when you can. manyenemy ships don't have that cannons that cover the 500-600m range, and even ones that do, the AI is silly enough that sometimes it'll turn to its short-range cannons and then never switch over once you sail out of optimal range. and yeah, ondra's challenge does buff enemy ships quite a lot.

if you want a deep dive answer on passive skills, you should check out this old-ish post from @Noqn i think the skills to pay attention to are ones that are player-only (scroll down to third post). normally you can choose what character to do a check in storybook moments, but sometimes you have no choice and are forced to use the watcher. in these cases, you probably want to prioritize one of the passive skills with lots of checks and lots of harder checks (like metaphysics or even athletics--which despite being an active skill gets used alot in interactions) for your main character to exclusively invest in. and according to Noqn, for other passive skills you're reasonably well off just distributing points, though i don't totally agree with that analysis.

Make sure you're clicking on the correct side of the crucible, that you can access. If you just generically click on the crucible, the game might try to path you to an impossible side that you can't access.

alas, i don't think there's much you can do about the console versions, they're just in a shakier state

the two invocations you list that say "allied aoe + self" are that way because their effect emits a cone from the chanter. so, without a "self" aspect, it would not actually affect the chanter, so it has an additional "self"-targeting effect so the chanter benefits. the chanter chants are big circles that sit on top of the chanter, centered on the chanter, so it doesn't need a separate "self" effect to make sure the chants affect the chanter. so don't worry, all those effects affect the chanter itself.