thelee

nit: i would adjust this and say that you *shouldn't* turn it on all the time until you get the higher level stuff. kinda depends on your party, but i remember some quick math I did where there's a point where the extra damage from the battle axe modal finally makes up for the massive recovery penalty, and i was surprised to find that even in potd upscaled, i was not actually hitting that point very often with everything else going on, unless it was a boss or a particularly beefy enemy. all bets are off once you get blood thirst though, you can really start snowballing. edit: the calculus is probably different if you multiclass with another martial that has a better full attack option than barbaric blow

Pictured: Constentin in their Deadfire game, discovering new cheesy interactions never before seen to exploit Avenging Storm

yeah, same same. but did you know you could just swap characters in/out at an inn? you don't have to be on the overland map. it means you can't do it whenever, but it's "safe."

what happens if you use the out-painting on some deadfire portraits, or the pirate-ship deadfire hero image? man that outpainting is insane

most places like to keep these numbers close to their chest, unless it's something super huge to brag about. i think our best chance is another steam data leak and then extrapolation based on that

[screenshots of avowed, an open world RPG that combines Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim] Do any very specific pillars of eternity terms work? [Eothas sunbathing on a beach with Berath] [Screenshots of Josh Sawyer's latest independent game, a pixel art Bike Shop RPG simulator]

Vatnir is a sidekick so doesn't have a ton of reactivity, but I would put Vatnir as dark-side territory. If you select the right reactivity/background, Aloth already has a bit of a darker streak, and you can reinforce this in the game. After that it's kind of a stretch. I guess you could say Mirke is dark in that as a drunken sidekick, she'll go along with whatever genocidal plans you have in mind without complaining. those all sound good flavor picks. i think assassin could also be worth considering. there's also an angle where you can take on the more sinister aspects of berath (offensive-oriented priest of berath) or nature (druid, pick up all the decay spells). also for consideration are multiclasses with names that can lend themselves to a darker side, like zealot for woedica/berath (rogue + priest), or a bleak cannibalistic fanatic (bleak walker/corpse eater). i would actually be surprised if you could actually lock yourself out of the game. josh sawyer pointedly tries to enable the "mass psychopath" style of play. i was on reddit where i saw an insightful comment that observed that all the factions have two possible leaders, and they are on different maps, so it's impossible for the player to ambush a faction without warning and leave it completely headless (and possibly break an end-game encounter). so the game is designed to be resilient against mass murder. i would actually be very curious to know what would happen if you tried to kill everyone in port maje (i know you can kill all the huana without any problem, don't ask me why i tried that; but i didn't try killing the vailians).

wow - i know that stable diffusion's corpus (controversially) uses a lot of stuff from deviantart and such, so it makes sense it would likely be able to understand pillars of eternity more. i have a decent gpu at home, i need to get it a try. with your first rogue art, even though the eye is kinda screwed up, at the same time it looks like an intentional effect (e.g. scarring).

also the wizards are quite good if not quite the right style

do some variations on the orlan art! can you feed it multiples at once for one set of output? just to help guide it a bit? also lol:

this is almost assuredly on the assumption of playing on "Normal" difficulty. I think PoE is "special" amongst CRPGs because the hardest difficulty is actually a balanced difficulty mode, with encounters/etc deliberately tuned for it (in fact initially all the magran's challenges were intended only for PotD mode). This is in contrast to most other RPGs IME, which simply just multiply damage (skyrim, BG) or dramatically inflate stats (P:K/WOTR) or are intended as a niche challenge (IWD/2 heart of fury, FO4 survivor mode) and so are more like throwaway difficulties just for masochistic try-hards (I say that as a frequent try-hard myself who still generally doesn't indulge in the hardest difficulties of all those other games). So I could easily see someone with lots of RPG experience unknowingly sticking with "Normal" (or even Veteran, which is the main other difficulty advertised as broadly-accessible) and then being surprised at how easy it is. edit: personally speaking, I find PotD satisfyingly challenging even now (though I do turn on some magran's challenges as well). I don't do the cheesiest strategies, so that keeps the difficulty up. Most of the head-banging-on-wall difficulty I've smoothed out over the years by developing a pretty optimized path through the game so I'm never underleveled for a quest/challenge (and sometimes deliberately overleveled, like for Family Pride quest or the Hanging Sepulchers, which can be brutal at-level), but even then I still have fights that I have to reload several times for. And it's a common joke around here that the hardest part of the game, especially on PotD, is the first island.

I've been giving TB mode a more serious try thanks to @Noqn's beta S4 mod, and I discovered an interesting thing that I hadn't known before: many effects that do periodic damage have their damage multiplied to simulate 6 seconds of time passing as one "round" hazard effects tick like every second (it's why their damage numbers frequently look so low), so their damage gets 6x-ed most persistent aoe effects only trigger on specific initiative points each round. (This makes it really easy to run in and out of e.g. a tanglefoot or a chill fog without getting hit. lucky for humans, enemy AI is too dumb to exploit AoEs like this.) TB mode hazard effects, however, trigger both on initiative but also while moving into or through it. all these points combined, especially with #4, means that every "unit" of movement in or through a hazard effect on TB mode triggers the 6x-ed damage. If you can kite enemies, knock them around, terrify them, or somehow just get them to move around, you can do a sick amount of damage with hazard effects. I discovered this with Wall of Thorns - ordinarily does 4-5 damage per hit on RTwP - it's 6x-ed to 24-30 on TB mode. I had hobbled enemies stumbling through it wracking up tens of damage with every "unit" of movement, not to mention the additional "tick" of 24-30 damage just from the once/round effect. Easily did hundreds upon hundreds of damage in one fight alone. There's not a lot of persistent hazard effects in the game, but I anticipate these all become damage kings on TB mode: Wall of Thorns Wall of Flame Wall of Force Wall of Draining <-no damage, but probably lots of drain Wall of Many Colors <- not sure if damage gets 6x due to the way this is implemented, but enemies do trigger the color effects a lot LMK if I missed anything. Interestingly, in the tooltips, the damage isn't 6x-ed for hazard effects like other durational things, so it must be a dynamic adjustment done when someone is hit. Given that movement/trigger damage is unintentionally 6x-ed, I wonder if priest seals (electric and searing) also get 6x-ed despite having no duration?

BoW at 13/14 can be rough, but I typically do it at around ~14 and have a couple times done it around late 13 (though that's pushing it and I believe I relied a lot on chanter summons). It basically boils down to your party build: your ability to interrupt the main BoW antagonist while they are trying to cast Llengrath's Safeguard (or: if you have a way to repeatedly dispel effects) how good your balance of sustain and damage are. BoW has a decent number of bullet sponge enemies that can attrition you out if don't have enough damage or enough sustain (including the main BoW antagonist and the optional secondary boss fight). I think those are the main difficulty considerations. (There's also some really annoying kith-like enemies, by far the worst are archers that love to use Confounding Blind... I can't decide if the bullet sponges or the archers are the hardest part of BoW).

i think overall that would be an extremely useful change. with the slight niggle that the only thing is that i feel like it'd still be useful to have mats or something for crafting consumables. you're getting some mats after some fights anyway. (and even for enchanting, getting an adra ban off the fire titan fight saved me some cash from having to buy it) but i can't deny it'd be heck of a lot more convenient to just worry about cash only i think it's fine to have "out of chronological order" stuff. makes this mod really like a battle sandbox (esp fun to have some of the items to buy that normally are only available like a few minutes before the end of the game)

So now that I've gotten the hang of TB mode i think you hit a good spot with the cash rewards same thing with exp i was wondering how you were going to deal with the treasure hunting part, glad to see they all get unlocked some thoughts: remove high-level scrolls and bombs from vendors? seems a bit trivializing that it's easy to buy 5 scrolls of maelstrom, at least make people craft for it c'mon! edit: similar thing with foods. edit 2: well, maybe not foods, since the nice ones are expensive enough that they may be more of a tradeoff to buy and rest spam similarly, it feels like mats should be split up, like one person gets jewels, one person gets creature parts, one person gets the other stuff. makes it hard scrolling through least unstable coil guy's inventory. edit: eh, maybe not, upon further play it's nice that i don't have to run around while trying to remember what mats i needed for an upgrade.

lolol good to see that other people also use The Hole as their testing ground

you know, i think actually some other chanter invocations also last past end of combat (i seem to recall opening with a buff invocation that didn't do anythign because i had still carried it over from a previous fight), though may not be as powerful to use with strand of favor compared to immunities

dang. while the art is definitely more coherent than the other one, it's wild to me that the corpus is so different that it doesn't know what you're talking about. (lol at the AI generated craiyon poe screenshots though) does "screenshot" as a prompt do anything?

if you're just casting, as an end game weapon you could use weyc's wand. when you empower an ability you get +3 PL for 20 seconds (intellect would help boost it), which can make your casting phase go pretty well. In fact, this might be a good synergy for any caster paired with a darcozzi for any hard fights. With Least Unstable Coil, you could empower the Darcozzi's Lay on Hands on your self. Every time you get hit and trigger you minor flame aura damage, you'd trigger another tier 3 inspiration. Eventually you'd get Brilliant. (I think you can also keep this effect going by re-using Lay on Hands on yourself. The game "remembers" that the original use was empowered, and just refreshes the duration. Though the flame aura should last plenty long by itself). You'd basically be able to cast druid spells in perpetuity, with a +3 PL for much of it. or you could just keep shifting into forms (though brilliant won't restore spiritshift) and spam flames of devotion over and over and over and over again.

only bear and boar forms get the engagement in unmodded deadfire, a few of the forms do pierce: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/druid

oop also small consideration - even on PotD the spiritshift forms can be pretty tanky, and I think bear form plus the defensive paladin aura should give you some pretty decent hardiness; you end up with AR equivalent to heavy armor (with no weaknesses), automatically enchanted to a reasonable level, plus an additional +2 AR

i haven't explored this combo before, and you probably have already considered it, but loading up on the wildstrike and spamming flames of devotion seems like a decent melee-ing option. As a plus, upgrading flames of devotion to add a damage lash would be useful for switching out of a form and blasting enemies with a few spells as needed. (if you use spells like wicked briars and venombloom you probably could open with them and then when you get the flames of devotion lash later the damage should dynamically update) boar is going to be your premier melee-dps-er because of the stacking DoT, and the lash from flames of devotion plus the bonus damage from the mark should really skyrocket its effectiveness.

i'm just curious - if you're not really wild about the monk subclasses, why are you thinking about doing a monk run? and anyway, when push comes to shove, the really powerful stuff is not subclass-dependent. boeroer has a lot of useful info, but i do think that forbidden fist is quite different from the general monk experience, so even if you grok how to play it, it's ok to just say no :). if you just do end up going vanilla monk, it's not the end of the world. n.b. i have become more of a fan of xoti's subclass for mid-high level play in recent times, if modding/consoling that in is something you're considering. with whispers of the wind, the +3 wounds upon enemy death can help you chain together non-stop uses of the ability (esp coupled with dance of death).

hey man, action economy considerations really different in TB mode! you can get wrecked pretty badly when naga outnumber you like 2x and focus fire and they are all guaranteed a turn each round

lol i'm using S4 as an opportunity to try out higher-level turn-based mode and i honestly have only just managed to get past the second fight (naga one); quite a steep learning curve for TB-mode coming from dedicated RTwP play. so not much comment yet.