thelee

if you play on PotD the bonus PEN can be very relevant at times, though it'll always be a subtle effect, since digging yourself outside of underpenetration is less flashy than like the wizard evocation echo bonus, even if going from -1 underpen to neutral pen is on average much more powerful for damage. to underline with what @dgray62 says, i think the real plus is the bonus range. not having to move or having extremely extra range can be extremely valuable in the right playstyle or build, and outside of constrained or ambushed fighting environments can give your fury immense safety. (i've even stacked it with farcasting and you're basically like a battleship launching nukes from afar)

there's also tons of enemy abilities that you won't be able to find that are poison/disease keyworded. honestly the paladin ability is probably underrated because of how difficult it is to reason about it. but there's like tons of paralyzing poisons (very common early-mid game from xaurip skirmishers), high-level naga with poison-based attacks, slimes with disease based effects, a couple of undead effects, etc. when i pick it up i'm rarely ever disappointed with it, it's an almost must-have.

Ah I completely forgot about SoF!

I mean, you don’t need to actually pick up healing spells for any given class. I mean Herald probably wants healing bc Herald is so good at it, but priest and Druid can pick up other stuff. I only mentioned Moonwell precisely because it has utility outside of healing (no amount of healing will save you from a Dorudugan ground explosion, but Moonwell will shield you, and with brilliant/SoT you can keep refreshing that shield over time)

to be fair, i don't think being unable to dorudugan or megabosses "fairly" is a knock against a build, they are just extremely annoying puzzles

i think you have this reversed - soul blades are penalized on their max focus, and ascendants are boosted. i assumed that's why constantin picked ascendant, and not necessarily for the ascension effect.

wow that's quite a build! i didn't know that dispersed suffering could interact with those cipher abilities. does enfeebled work the same way? e.g. you extend the enemy debuff and your own buff gets longer? i'm also guessing that the math is busted - if dispersed suffering extends the duration of several effects, each extension extends your own buff individually instead of doing it once in total.

i haven't done much arcane archer, but IMO i think you'll have much better success with ghost heart, esp with megabosses in consideration. i don't know how good your micromanagement skills are and aggressively you pause, but the best angle of ghost heart by far (imo) is that your pet will be immune to engagement and is disposable. you have a chanter who can also summon, but an instant-summon pet can be a great *oh crap* button. by contrast, i don't think arcane archer will offer much of anything for megaboss fights. what's the combo? i don't think i'm familiar with it absolutely recommended. SoT will make all megaboss attempts much much easier. add in Barring Death's Door for extra protection. heck, i've also found withdraw useful for my earlier attempts where i was a bit more shaky on tactics and strategy. doesn't have to be SC, but if you want an effective build, tier 8 symbol spells are an easy solution that you don't have to think about too hard. i would also suggest a druid for consideration. Moonwell is a great lifesaver of a spell and especially good in giving you room for error against Dorudugan (Moonwell's buff will counter a fire effect, including one instance of an otherwise fatal gigantic fire explosion). Form of the Delemgan gives you immunity to dex afflictions, which is super duper useful against Belranga. but you really need SoT to act as a force multiplier here (maybe a universalist priest/druid would be a good idea). there's also some immensely deranged things you can do with a druid, either involving all of their DoT attacks or Avenging Storm.

as boeroer said, chill fog is standard wizard recommendation and still very good because of inversions. a couple others to think about: maxed out explosives and sparkcrackers (you'll need to tank or neglect your will defense and resolve). you can easily get 30+ seconds from sparkcrackers from either yourself or an ally. you can do this pre-combat, too. Rokowa's Fingers. grants you sparkcrackers, but unlike the grenade, uses an old version of the effect that checks multiple times with a high explosives. Only a couple times/day, but the extra checks really make it easy to land the effect. benefit to the above is that it's only distracted, so you get full heating up effect. if you have another rogue, smoke cloud and the upgrades can apply distracted in a huge aoe, but also interrupts so may be a bit awkward, but at least you won't care about the friendly fire as much since you'll be upgrading your street fighter. note that if you have riposte and are dual-wielding a blunderbuss and a melee weapon, riposte attacks will trigger the blunderbuss modal if you have it on, so you can get distracted refreshes in crowded fights.

dang that's crazy. glad you were able to work your way through it!

i am a big fan of perception on barbarians, i think it is basically a king stat for them[1]. as a plus, if you're going with skald, high perception will also help you crit more often. i would personally max perception (i would even pick a hearth orlan and choose white that wends to get base 21 perception). after that dex and int are good, though i would not worry as much about them (i would normally rate them king stats for most other classes) since barbarian gets a very nice action bonus from frenzy and the carnage radius is so small you're not going to get much value out of int (and for the types of stuff you're typically going to be doing with a skald you can get away with moderate int, like base of 14 or 15 plus some items). [1] the math is that because carnage only triggers on a hit (vs being a separate roll), each point of perception actually gives you polynomial returns in terms of damage for a while (until you get reeeeeally high accuracy vs enemy defense), which is different from every other class. add-in some synergy with barbarian interrupting on crits with high-level talent.

i think explosives have a better upper end than potions. potions are pretty decent, but you also don't need a lot of alchemy unless you're doing drugs imo. but imp spray, frost, or shock bombs are great to have tons of accuracy on in late game (and the solid cinder bombs are good throughout the entire game). even the heal bombs are decent mid-late game with explosives investment.

why not just gouging strike for bosses? though pairing with psion does seem intriguing. in addition to the disintegration synergy on the last standing enemy, if you charm + invis, you'll have plenty of time to generate focus while the enemies attack their former friend (if you're not planning or unable to reset the fight after the charmed enemy dies).

lol, don't forget with blood thirst for zero recovery while you do that. honestly driving roar and dazing shout are way too good, once you unlock them barbarian kind of goes out of control without much metagame effort IMO; you don't even need barbaric blow for that.

are you just hoping to be able to land crits everywhere, and use beguiler's whispers of treason to charm targets that you can't hit with debonaire charm? i don't think cowardice is going to be that bad, with enough perception. (said as someone who rolled a debonaire and sent them to sneak off alone to do what i'm about to mention:) what you probably will be doing is hoping to land a charm and going invis to reset the fight after the mobs kill the charmed target, right? w/ cipher if you dominate the last target they'll count as a friend for cowardice while you're busy stabbing them in the guts. definitely a heterodox strategy for solo methinks but might work. (i would not recommend vela for this approach because you make it harder to escape fights)

yeah, what also doesn't help is that hit to crit conversion and crit damage is almost pointless on carnage (the only exception i can think of is Energized for interrupts), so it's only for the full attack itself, which is not at all clear from the autogenerated tooltip.

early on i thought builds w/out access to withdraw (and by extension, BDD) were effectively impossible b.c. of vela's fragility. it's made the successful runs without a priest all the more impressive. even with cheese, the ultimate is a massive test of patience and consistency and withdraw/BDD at least is a bit forgiving[1], so the fact that a few ppl have been basically able to tightrope without a net underneath them is all the more impressive. on paper, strand of favor/brilliant/etc exploit might seem trivial, but it really isn't [1] in my actual run, iirc i had two almost disasters, despite tons of practice. the ability to drop a withdraw on vela and yourself (and/or invisibility) can be quite literally the life saver.

i'm still trying to carve out some time to more properly put it through its paces, but a few quick thoughts blunderbuss doesn't appear to be in the initial set of superb gear? i double and triple checked but i don't think i saw one what about turning down the initial gold and the per-match gold rewards? to make purchasing stuff a bit more strategic decision what do you think about splitting up the accessories between different merchants? there's just so many, it feels like it takes a while to find items to buy through the long list and if they were subdivided somehow that'd help. simlar thing with weapons - maybe split 1h and 2h weapons betwen different merchants to make it easier to find through them? though i had less problem here because it feels like there are a lot fewer weapons to go through what about a few non-unique items? i was trying to find gloves of accuracy, for example. i ended up settling for the unique gloves of the dungeon warden, but that wouldn't suffice if i wanted more than one character with them. same thing with other non-unique accessories.

i think the big thing for me is enemy rogues. they frequently dual-wield and rogue abilities are all interrupt on hit. while i prefer GLoH, HoL does fill its niche pretty well, because especially around the level I get it (SC or MC) those skeleton rogues on PotD start appearing everywhere and they can be absolutely punishing in the early-mid game w/ no chance to react to multiple hits. (and i don't think the timer on their ability cooldown script is shared between their normal strikes and finishing blow, so i feel like i often see a relentless sequence of crippling/blinding strike -> finishing blow = interrupt-locked to death)

yeah the test is very annoying, i actually recruited my wife to stand around bored so i just had a spare set of hands to start/stop the stopwatch repeatedly while i was clicking around to move. yeah, +50% -50% is equivalent to being in a chill fog (+50% recovery penalty) as a swashbuckler (-50% recovery time bonus), which is a killer and obvious speed up.

honestly this is how i thought food bonuses did work for much of my playtime, since the way you set them up is more akin to setting up an extended passive bonus rather than, e.g. drinking a short durational potion. maybe this is too much of a buff, though honestly maybe it's a necessary change to make a set of rest bonuses and consumables more useful since they're no longer trivially overriding each other.

wowowow this is great work. ...where do i install the mod on macOS? i'm not near my gaming PC for a while and only have my laptop edit: this is as close as I can see so far in terms of equivalent paths:

yeah this is why i prefer greater. non-interruptibility can be a life saver, but often times i feel like the bigger threat is my tank or someone in dire straights has a CON affliction on them (and in a few situations late game, enfeebled even) and needing a heal. spending 2 zeal for the equivalent of a full-strength baseline LoH can make all the difference since you can't stack lay on hands. either way i agree with other folk on the zeal cost-effectiveness - most of the times i'm just using the 1 zeal base version and only using the 2 zeal one when i really need it.

wait, have you tried reloading a game? e.g. save, then reload (with or without exiting)? that seems to correlate with stacking for me, though imperfectly. but yeah, i find it to be extremely unreliable to repro. there's some additional conflating factor.

you would be right but your numbers are mixed up between poe1 and poe2. in poe1 you have a 50% recovery penalty, in poe2 you have a 100% recovery penalty. the inversions work out just right so that in poe2 you have no penalty whatsoever with shot on the run. (+100% penalty combined wiht an inverted -50% recovery bonus) if there's a bug, it's different than what kaylon says - in poe1 shot on the run only erased half the recovery penalty, in poe2 it seems by accident it erases the entire recovery penalty. but the talent is niche enough that it's not worth addressing imo. anyway, while niche, i think it's pretty handy for kiters or part-time archer/casters. once i learned that it completely cancels out the movement penalty for ranged weapons, i figure that once you have it there's no reason to not be running around in between attacks, which aids a lot in survivability and casting positioning. none of this applies to reloading weapons though. edit: further reading - https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/ranged-weapon-recovery