thelee

i generally don't like the berath's blessings (too cheaty), but the ones I *do* like to use regularly: loaded pockets (basically makes pick pocketing worth doing in the first place, doesn't imbalance the game) can i pet him (basically i treat it as a subclass for eder, though i "balance" this out by turning on an extra magran's fire challenge, because i'm a deadfire tryhard) infamous past (for same reason limax said. i actually don't know if you *can* trigger mutiny anymore, it might be broken) in the past i also liked item vendor for deflection-boosting gear, but then i found out you can get cloak of greater deflection from saving an adventurer in the old city, so i do that instead.

iirc i ended my run with ~10 days remaining. i definitely wasn't completely efficient with travel (iirc i had to salvage my route when my test character ran into difficulties that required some equipment), but i think you're really cutting it too close if you're down a few weeks.

only trouble is that "rinse and repeat" isn't terribly effective because you still need to reload those firearms, so you lose the efficiency of just having to switch weapon slots. (though eventually you'll be able to power out things like disintegrate or death by 1000 cuts, so maybe you won't need to do much rinse and repeating) early on, you may be better off with arquebus. the modal gives you extreme accuracy, and you won't get the downside (at first) because you'll just switch away. you probably want a staff or something as your final weapon slot, as a non-pierce, melee option to keep your focus up for the rest of the fight. i'd also be a bit concerned about whether or not you could actually power enough damage out with weapon-switching firearms to hit ascended. though i highly highly recommend at least using kitchen stove w/ the thunderous report enchantment as one of your weapon slots. the cone aoe will pretty much instantly fill up your focus, it's per encounter, and will help with that "rinse and repeat"

maybe it's path of exile? sometimes i get path of exile results when i google "poe"

my thought is that you'll have insane action economy issues as an ascendant (i rolled an ascendant/wael mystic and this was my experience) up until you start doing salvation of time shenanigans. even with wael's fast bonus spells, you'll still want to cast priest spells, which eat up time from attacking, which takes away from your focus generation, etc. retaliation and focus from retaliation might diminish that a bit, but the fundamental issue will be there. in that vein i think soul blade is better - you don't have to invest too much into cipher powers to be effective, and soul annihilation is a pretty good dump for focus that you can fit in-between spell casts w/out having to worry about specific focus thresholds to hit.

you mean adra ban? unless you have a mod, adra ban is finite, so you should save them exclusively for upgrading to legendary for your final gear selections, IMO. And even then you will need to rely on being smart with certain materials (e.g. the drop from the fire dragon) which you can also use to upgrade to legendary so that you're not blowing 4 adra ban on a single 2h weapon upgrade. it's the biggest surprising crafting trap in the game, since you could easily blow all your adra ban crafting a few scrolls if you aren't careful. i rely on the exotic herbs shop and una for most of my mats, though i feel like one of the precious gemstones doesn't spawn at una and i had to go to the treasure shop in dunnage (maybe i was just unlucky). some monster mats are "rare" and you need to wait a long time to get one (vithrack brains is one of them), though you can also just try to hunt out the monster (though again, vithrack are rare until FS).

yeah this also happens with DoTs when it comes to PEN. It'll always list full damage, but then if you pay attention to the numbers that appear overhead, they adjust dynamically for PEN.

yes, that's what fleshmender does - it loses a specific AR bonus enchantment it has (the bonus +3 AR), and gets it back later if you don't take hits. abydon's challenge is a completely different effect, where all equipment tracks how many hits they have taken/done and lose enchantment levels as they accumulate them until they completely disintegrate. afaict, there's no way to restore an item without manually "repairing" an item via the enchant menu outside of combat.

i don't think fleshmender restores any abydon-related damage? and damage is based on hits done, not damage done. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/magrans-fires

they get pretty ruinous, like several 1000s of gold per level of repair damage at superb. at normal/fine you could repair regularly (though i still prefer swapping stuff out instead), but the few times i did abydon i pretty much didn't go past exceptional, relying on summoned weapons to scale past that on any piece of equipment. even then, i'd keep a bunch of equipment in reserve to swap stuff out rather than repair.

it seems like the internal distinction is that walls are hazards and are kind of "detached" from the character who cast it in many ways. weird

the ultimate also exacerbates it because abydon's challenge will make basically anything not fists fall apart after a fight or two. (the priest of skaen builds had spiritual weapon to use as backup where alternative damage type for PEN was needed [edit: actually i don't know if others used spiritual weapon, but i definitely did for a few fights])

i think mostly 2w style is just too powerful. my pet theory remains that they had no idea what they were doing with inversions when they first came up with the numbers, and they just over-tuned the recovery time bonuses. if they had functioned just like action speed (and wasn't inverted into larger numbers), i can squint and see the parallels with other styles (the fact that both 2h style and 2w style talents involve the number 15, and that 2h weapons are generally 30% more damaging than slow 1h weapons) but even then action speed is more valuable than additive damage bonus, and there are plenty of intangibles to just being more responsive in combat and having an extra stat stick. as a result, i think 2w just crowds out alternatives very easily for the general "don't think about it too much" case, even 2h style and even sword and shield (just because of how much faster you kill enemies; plus, a dagger in the off hand with a modal offers pretty good defense for the hard early game, as does sometimes a hatchet). in AD&D and 3e/3.5e, the cool factor was such that you would have tons of penalties for anyone not dual-wielding as a ranger, or with tons of feat taxes. but ppl would still do it because it's neat (and also the intangibles of having an extra stat stick and such). you don't need to push 2w style to get people to use it. (relatedly i have criticisms for some systems since then for giving players too many options to opt out of penalties for 2w style)

i mean, patinated plate and the malus are all pretty bad. The streetfighter's recovery time bonus is very very good, but at some point it's just a cope, and not really excelling. it's very important to be precise about what kind of malus and bonuses you're talking about, because they undergo different interactions with inversions and affect different parts of your action. The malus on patinated plate is a recovery time penalty, not action speed malus. the ugly math - i'm converting all numbers to a single, unit-less measure. maluses (the larger the worse) patinated plate baseline heavy armor penalty +.55 patinated plate recovery penalty from "Bronze Juggernuat" + .20 bonuses (the larger the better) streetfighter "heating up" +1.0 (inverted from -50% bonus) dual-wielding baseline +.428 (inverted from -30% bonus) dual-wielding style bonus +.176 (inverted from -15% bonus) mirke's baseline dex +0 (only 10 dex, if the wiki is right) "swift strikes" +.15 total maluses: .75 total bonuses: 1.755 subtract malus from bonus => 1.005 it's positive, so treat it like an action speed bonus, e.g. add one and divide it from the recovery to determine the final number a 4s weapon recovery will become 1.995s (you'll see it as 2.0s in-game), and a 3s weapon recovery will become 1.496s (you'll see it as 1.5s in-game). so yes, you'll still be pretty fast (streetfighter's recovery time bonus can be thought of us "cancel out up to +100% in recovery time penalties"), but if you want to DPS you could be much much much faster by not bothering with patinated plate at all. or related to the topic at-hand, you could try a single-handed mirke with swashbuckler and light armor. combined with the upgrade on swift strikes that lets you get bonus attacks on crits, you could pummel down enemies real fast, if you have a reliable way of triggering heating up.

the fact that they deliberately (through changing design or whatnot) made this inconsistency kinda makes the madness all the worse. and yeah, in practice, the difference between +2 acc/PL and +1 acc/PL is so minor and narrowthat i can't imagine actually optimizing for it in anyway. like you say, it's just nice that repulsing seal works ever so slightly better than expected.

ah yeah - the pistol modal + single weapon style is actually a special case of what i was talking about in OP. I mentioned it elsewhere long time back ago that pistol modal seems to be a really good case for single weapon style, because you can absolutely smash the results from dual-wielding style (even if you also apply pistol modal when dual-wielded). what i should have realized then is that what's special is the super high action speed (-50% recovery time bonus from modal), not the pistol per se, and you can replicate this success on other weapons if you have other ways to get a huge action speed boost. in fact, pistol is kind of hampered in this special case because firearms get a malus on their crits - so with weapons that don't have such a malus, you'll do even better. with dorudugan, it's a sweet spot of both wanting to stack on those resonance stacks as fast as you can and needing to actually be able to get past his enormous defenses and at least graze. so that's a great use case for a fast 1h style.

i was finally able to get someone at gamefaqs to fix a spam filtering bug on their end, so thankfully i was "only" locked out for a week

that's partially true - i was focusing on the case where you want to use a specific weapon, in which case preferring 1h style is better than a modal. the story is definitely different if you just want to maximize dps. i haven't run the numbers, but i do suspect there's also a case where when you are severely underpenetrating with 2h style (-2 PEN or lower) where it makes sense to use 1h style even over 2h style, thanks to how nasty those inversions start getting and how important crits become. though ideally at that point you have some other option than having to just eat the huge damage penalty at either -2 or hoping for crits at -3 and worse, though there are definitely cases where your options are limited (constructs, guardian of ukaizo with megaboss buffs). edit: estocs are super good for this case though, since like swords, you can get +2 PEN w/out any recovery penalty. too bad there's not a lot of selection for estocs in the game.

gamefaqs is busted so failing a guide update i'll put some of my findings here. Basically, I think it's safe to say that one-handed style is avoided by a bunch of players. I've called it a borderline trap build based on how much of a drop in DPS it is compared to dual-wielding or even 2h (which also is a drop from dual-wielding but makes up for it with extra PEN and/or reach). Basically it only existed in my mind as a setup that desperately wants crits on PotD (where even the much higher number of attacks from 2w might not make up for the fact that you have 0% chance to crit, if you rely on those crits), but there's not really that many builds that care *that* much about crits. But one place where single-weapon style starts competing well with dual-weapon style is on characters that are already very fast. Yes, Action Speed is Linear Returns. But if you have multiple dimensions that feed into damage and a fixed amount you can put into those dimension, you maximize your outcome by balancing those dimensions (the area of a square is larger than the area of a rectangle, if their perimeters are equal). So for very fast characters, you start doing better if you make each of those weapon attacks ''better'' instead of making yourself even faster by dual-wielding. Keep in mind you have to be very fast or effectively very fast for the trade-off to make sense - you just get so much action speed for "free" by dual-wielding. It takes a lot for the single-weapon case to be noticable versus the consistent returns on increasing action speed. You need high dexterity (20+), with action bonuses ('''Deleterious Alacrity of Motion''', '''Frenzy''', '''Swift Strikes''', ''Cat Flurry', or consumables), with minimal armor encumbrance (at most comparable to light armor, even better if it's a piece of light armor with a recovery time bonus, cloth, or light armor with a pet or passive that reduces armor recovery penalty). On top of that, it helps to be a swashbuckler with a -50% recovery time bonus, or a monk that gets a bunch of free attacks from '''Swift Flurry''', or some other class that can abnormally boost your effective attack rate--even the barbarian's barbaric retaliation would help. At that point, the fact that you aren't getting as many attacks as a dual-wielder is made up for the fact that your attacks are doing more damage overall and critting more often. Aside from this, even with "conventionally" fast characters, single-weapon style is great for when you're expected to underpenetrate the enemy. In such a situation, even a more normal single-weapon user can overperform a dual-wielder who has to flip on a weapon modal that grants +2 PEN for +50% recovery time penalty. This is all because of the fact that crits get a 1.5x multiplier to your PEN, so getting more crits from both +12 accuracy and a hit->crit rate is a huge win over time, even if on any given individual hit it seems like the +2 PEN on a dual-wielder with a weapon modal would do better than a single-weapon attacker without a weapon modal. For a martial character with spare weapon slots (like a Blackjacket or someone equipped with Fleshmender) it might even be more worth investing a point into single-weapon style and reserving one weapon slot for single-weapon-wielding, even if that's not your main focus, for precisely these PEN-related reasons. This PEN effect also has the implication that if you like using weapons like daggers, flails, and hatchets, which don't have a +2 PEN modal, you may want to consider a partial single-weapon style setup over pure dual-wielding setup for precisely the underpenetration cases. (This is much more of an issue on Veteran/PotD than on lower difficulties) I ended up making single-weapon style work pretty decently on a SC barbarian wearing basically cloth (actually, the changeling's mantel with the -10% recovery time bonus and Nalvi) and who would get a Quick buff from a chanter. Aside from the calculations, it definitely "felt" ok, too, and it was a huge difference between cloth/fast light armor and even medium armor - with normal medium armor it still "felt" bad compared to dual-wielding. (Though in the end, spamming Driving Roar is what really ended up mattering )

it depends on your current clvl progression - it's lower for multiclass, potentially higher for SC (up to 11). beckoner gets 2x polearms. they don't last as long, but that's a ton of knockdown. i've literally made a macro on my gaming keyboard just to easily automate queue-ing up tons of knockdown just to exploit the infinite free knockdowns a chanter gets, beckoner or no.

awesome! good job! did you submit and get recognition for this run? i'll have to carve out some time to watch the run (probably at 2x speed), but i'm just happy to see build variety that's not just priest of skaen/salvation of time (though i'm guilty of it)

yeah it's extremely "in the weeds" of how a spell is implemented. I suspect that it's an automatic thing in the engine to upgrade the acc PL scaling to +2/PL if none of the other parts of PL scaling were enabled, but if the base ability doesn't have ability scaling but it spawns secondary effect that does, you may still end up with doubled accuracy bonus. it's such a terribly small, tedious detail that I'm not terribly sure it's worth treating as anything other than a glitch. is this something @Elric Galad's modding skillz can address somehow?

sorry i was a bit unclear. if the mountain dwarf already has a constitution affliction chant, then it's no different than any other character with a constitution affliction chant. what i was trying to say is that the "redundancy" doesn't matter when the chant refreshes - despite the fact that the mountain dwarf innately has constitution affliction resistance, when the chant re-applies it will downgrade the constitution affliction, as it would normally do so for other characters. this is contrast to how we would expect redundant effects to work, e.g. no impact. the case i was talking about (enfeebled rapidly disappears) i was imagining a specific situation where you get by enfeebled (or weakened, which is more common) but don't have a constitution affliction chant running yet. the mountain dwarf would resist it down to weakened (or sickened), and then you'd flip on the constitution affliction chant, which would let the dwarf resist it further down (sickened (or nothing at all)) and then completely gone after one refresh, whereas everyone else would have wait one more cycle for the song to repeat.

imo lightning aura is pretty slick, especially with combusting wounds. i used to be pretty bullish on dismissal, but over time w/ DLC power creep vessels/spirits aren't exactly the fights i have the most trouble with in the end game (rather, wilder/primordials in FS). so yeah, i tend to save tier 8 priest for symbols or lightning aura or hand of weal and woe these days, and reserve any add'l ability points for supercharging empowers.

IIRC even characters with affliction resistance benefit from the chanter chants. when the chant is active, it's redundant, but when the chant is first applied/re-applied, it automatically resists down existing afflictions. So, e.g. a mountain dwarf will rapidly lose even an enfeebled condition (though that is very rare). also having constitution resistance might be pretty good on a barbarian because their only main source of self-healing despite being pretty beat up is a Robust inspiration and it really sucks for some tier-1 enemy ability random sickened affliction to cancel it out. personally i do not think intellect is necessarily a king stat for barbarian. early on, having short frenzy durations suck, but later on PL scaling helps take care of that. Unlike PoE1, the aoe for carnage is smaller and scales less generously with intellect, and also carnage is also just less of a damage monster. I would personally recommend perception and dex. i also lightly suggest that Amra isn't worth optimizing for as a barbarian, though I don't have a lot of experience metagaming with this. Barbarians get exponential returns from perception investment (because carnage only triggers on a hit, instead of being something that gets checked every time) whereas might will only give them linear returns; i'm not sure some occasional extra carnage hits from Amra will make up the deficit. Willbreaker (or another morningstar weapon) is a pretty S-tier pick for a barbarian because of their ability to target fortitude defenses, coupled with interrupting enemies on crit, and I think that'll give you much better outcomes than some extra carnage hits.