thelee

if you plan on doing megabosses, then to avoid having to rip your hair out in frustration you definitely need either a chanter or a cipher. If it's a chanter, you'll definitely have to have high-level summons (dragon or animated weapons). if it's a cipher, it's the brilliance buff (and do not take the retaliation lash). a priest is also effective for salvation of time. it is definitely possible to do the megabosses without either (the first couple of times i did it w/out), but having recurring resources or summons takes the difficulty down by a gigantic amount. of your two choices, i think the MC psion/troubadour + gaun/helwaker is the better choice. gaun + helwalker is much more synergistic than gaun + troubadour, and a psion + troubadour will just carry your party in terms of support.

for consideration - reaping knives isn't just a focus generator (and frankly i think 5 focus per hit is pretty nice), but reaping knives is also a big PEN boost on the melee character you cast it on. i'm not sure i would consider it weak; consistent DPS for one ally and super-charged focus generation on the cipher is pretty good.

I think SC ranger can be alright, but you definitely get pigeon-holed a bit. Stunning Shots coupled with tons of accuracy bonuses and Driving Flight can wreck a lot. There's also a melee alternative with Whirling Strikes, but I personally haven't tried it myself. It's a shame because otherwise mostly the story of high-level ranger abilities is that while they can be powerful, they are pretty niche because of their high resource cost. For example, Heart Seeker can be very powerful, but 4 bond is a lot!! That's 4x Concussive Tranquilizer. And I feel like I always value Concussive Shot/Tranquilizer, since even if there's no buff to clean, a guaranteed interrupt when you need it is A+.

i think this theory keeps getting support every time Josh Sawyer has to tell someone that Deadfire is not a "pirate game."

another ultimate run! wow, incredible dedication

does this also work if you summon a familiar and then summon a different thing (like phantom) ? or do you have to summon a repeat familiar before you something else to get the buff to stick around?

hang on- this works even if you resummon when you already have a familiar?

i think you should give one of them reach weapons at least, or at least give them all backup ranged weapons. there are enough doorways and narrow pathways where three melee can get tight. over time i've pretty much settled on two-melee and one-flex as pretty optimal. i've done more (three melee or three melee and one flex) but then you really need ranged backup and some abilities like leap or charge or escape that'll let you get around. you could probably do with an additional caster. any single-class druid, priest, or wizard will become aces at damage-dealing at high levels without much pre-planning. if you combine with chanter invocation to restore a resource (tier 9 invocation), you can open a fight with an extremely powerful tier 9 wizard/druid spell, get it back from the invocation instantly (since you start with max phrases), cast again. further you can empower one of those casts. this will outright end most fights (even some boss fights). (priests don't get a crazy tier 9 damage spell, but their tier 8 symbols fill the same role; cast twice, get one back, cast again; one of those casts should be empowered) edit: multiclass casters are also good, i just raise those single-class casters as a recommendation because they're essentially foolproof for becoming damage kings eventually and it meshes well with having chanters at your disposal, one of which you could surely spare to open the fight with the resource-restoring invocation.

while it's true that pathfinder is a bigger IP, the other piece of the puzzle is that tyranny outsold poe2 over like a 1 year time frame (i don't know how well the long tail of sells for tyranny has been), almost like 2x. Tyranny is basically 0 IP, whereas Deadfire at least had PoE to lean on. Even name-recognition of franchise can't adequately explain it.

neverending story indeed... ppl are free to gripe or have their pet issues about the games, but the main line of questioning in this thread is why poe2 sold so poorly. if you really think lengthy text in poe1 was the killer for sales of poe2, uh ok you do you i guess, i don't think wall of text is even a controversial opinion (i thought durance and GM were interesting the first time around, but now they're just exhausting click-throughs so i can complete their companion quests) but i don't see how on earth that would translate to a massive dropoff in sales. personally speaking, having played both deadfire and wotr in german while trying to learn german, I think WOTR has massively more walls of text in practice. it manifests in my general level of exhaustion while trying to play. deadfire i can generally keep going, where as WOTR I frequently start hitting a point where I want to give up on reading and just skip through all the dialogue and story book and just make choices solely based on the dialogue options or alignment annotation. (there's also just tons more fluff) this is to say i don't think wall of text is going to be the explainer since WOTR sold like hotcakes. (also see boeroer's comment on critical/user reviews). same thing with performance. you think deadfire has bad performance? on my beefy gaming PC i literally had no idea what was going on in the final fight in WOTR and had to turn on turn-based mode because the game would drop frames like crazy during certain spell casts (and even then i still had no idea what was going on, just that suddenly half of my party is dead). hasn't hurt WOTR sales by comparison.

lololol. gonna have to make sure my parties always pair a druid or wizard with a priest from now on

yeah, b.c. of this i find arcane suppression more powerful than arcane cleanse, because of how it can really mess with AI (both useful for exhausting enemies with limited class resources and a much better way of dealing with infinite casts that are just limited by timer). suppressing an enemy barbarian frenzy will result in them periodically re-activating frenzy to no effect, burning up their resources. same thing with spell reflection on enemies (esp ones that seem to have it as a special ability they can cast repeatedly). similarly, it took me a while to realize that my AI script that activates frenzy or tactical barrage whenever the character doesn't have the right inspiration really needs a cooldown timer, since if they got hit by an arcane suppression the AI script would repeatedly, in short order, use up a bunch of resources repeatedly refreshing a suppressed effect.

i would consider this more as an exception since fury spiritshift is so weird. my working knowledge (based only on what i happen notice, not saying i looked this up in gamefiles or that this is definitive) is that beasts, spirits, primordials can't be resisted by medium shield modal. Wilders, vessels, and kith can be stopped but even then I don't believe something like dargul swipes will be affected. This is why I think one should consider fury spiritshift weird - I think internally it's treated as just replacing the player character with a spirit creature (originally it was an exact duplicate before they buffed it a bit), versus being more mechanically an "alternate" kith form like the other spiritshifts. large shield applies to anything that's ranged (regardless of species). note that sometimes this can be a little ambiguous, since some enemies will use ranged attacks in melee range. Oozes, for example, I can never remember - they both have a clearly defined ranged attack, but when you're up close it also looks like they're using a ranged attack but it might be a different melee attack, I can never remember.

an indirect way to increase damage is to increase PEN (indirectly also from PL). especially relevant on PotD. Importantly, the damage adjusts dynamically based on your current PEN, so once again crits don't help, but a buff like Tenacious or the chanter invocation (+3) or chant (+1) can be significant boosts to damage.

ah, so this is for like lethandria's devotion?

out of curiosity, how does this AI look ("for fast-switching purposes")? wondering if it's something i should incorporate

funnily enough, pets (not animal companions) can also get galawain's buff. normally completely unnoticable but i had a run where my obsidian wurm got the galawain's buff where they get a random tier 3 inspiration. it was actually a wee bit annoying since every time i reloaded the game or zoned into a location i'd see like the inspiration combat text float above the pet. and because the RNG seed is set at the start of the game, this lasted the entire run.

you know, i always thought tekehu had pretty interesting subclasses but not necessarily a WOW character, but between this and Effort, it's funny to me that Tekehu has become a monster of a cheese character, all because of that recurring avenging storm cast

does this mean it functions like how you mentioned Pollen Patch functions - it'll will always count as empowered for Least Unstable Coil??

good find!

tekehu has a pretty good subclass, but it comes with major drawbacks: missing out on fire keyword spells and no summons; no summons is not that big a deal unless you single-class a druid at which point you start missing out on some decent summons (lashing vine, oozes, fire stag). so while it's definitely good, a custom mainchar druid can achieve different niches than tekehu. importantly watcher abilities to get brilliant (and to a lesser extent energized or intuitive), but it's only one/day so without rest-spamming it's not a huge differentiator. the best thing a watcher druid can do is do something different from what tekehu is pigeon-holing himself into, or multiclassing, even with a chanter (since tekehu's chanter is wildly different from any other chanter). personally, i would recommend a druid build if you haven't done one before. always good to try something new IMO, and after giving a druid a whirl a few times I'm a big fan of the playstyle. i'm not as big a fan of berserker set up as others, but a tactician/druid would be very powerful if you can keep good uptime on that brilliant buff. if you want to do something wildly different than tekehu, than maybe a shifter/trickster? (lean into shape-shifting plus tons of defensive and offensive goodies from trickster)

hi, i suspect you may not be getting much of a response simply because w/out knowing much of what you actually want to do (versus just comparing builds) it's hard for us to know what you actually want. you have three very different builds that all seem fine, so my instinct is just to say to roll a d3 since i don't know what values you place on play style or whatnot. there's a double-negative here that may or may not be intentional, so i don't know what exactly you're trying to say; my one main remark is that a herald can very much function as a very sturdy tank as well.

sun and moon is the gift that keeps on giving. i loved dual-wielding to spam kind wayfarer heal FoD, but never once considered/thought that sun and moon would trigger a third! become a king/queen healer at that point

even at low level it's pretty moot. the fire godlike buff should mostly be seen as a conditional AR boost

i think things from a damage perspective definitely pick up for a fury once you can get calling the earth's maw (tier 4) and embrace the earth talon (tier 5), so like mid-game. they do both solid damage (if still a little bit under the wizard curve) on top of decent cc. they also benefit from bonus PEN more since they do physical damage which tends to face higher AR. only problem is that they are useless against flying creatures.