thelee

over the pandemic, every time i've managed to upgrade a part of my computer i've been like "awww yeah, now to see how deadfire performs"

if you've never tried an SC barbarian (esp a furyshaper) i'd recommend it. the power is not totally obvious, but it can really wreck house: heart of fury, nuff said upgraded shouts. they still scale as if they were tier 1 abilities, so their actual damage/potential is much higher than on paper you can make a retribution build, where you get crit alot and get in a lot of free attacks with a slow weapon thanks to barbaric retaliation (2h axe with bleeding modal on is recommended) [and the dazing shout can give you lots hardiness against crits] sc furyshaper gets a totem that lets any damage source regen some health i did a SC konstanten on potd+upscaling, and honestly for half the game it felt a little underwhelming (konstanten's stats are also not great). but once I got to tier 8 and then tier 9 abilities, konstanten skyrocketed to top damage dealer of the party as a dazing shout + retribution build.

another thing is that the "downside" of losing linger when brisk recitation is on, is not always a downside. some examples: if you have a song that's just "thick grew their tongues" or whatever. the duration doesn't really matter, because as soon as the debuff is applied to enemies, they lose all their concentration. not many enemies generate new concentrate very frequently so the actual debuff doesn't matter. so if you just have a song with this one song on it, you double your chances of applying the debuff over the same time period. (also i think debuffs still have a duration, i forget) there's a chant that gives you a 10hp shield. it only gets refreshed when the song re-applies. so similar to the above, having a song with just this and brisk recitation on means you double your shield's effectiveness. (in fact, one of the early times I fought Huane O Whe, I just had this song on w/ brisk recitation, and it perfectly counteracted the Symbiote debuff that deals ~9.6 raw damage/tick) the song that summons a skeleton completely ignores linger mechanics. so you just double the amount of skeleton cannon fodder you have on the battlefield. all the resistance chants immediately downgrade all applicable afflictions when refreshed. so with brisk recitation on, you can rapidly clear away afflictions without much concern. for this reason, troubadour is an easy chanter to pick, whereas all the other ones require a bit more thought to use (and there's almost no reason to want to pick a vanilla chanter).

They definitely do. It's not common, but it exists and it's annoying, precisely because there's not much you can do to stop it (other than an extremey well-timed interrupt, since it has a narrow window), and the action economy is rougher for the player compared to generally larger AI armies.

yeah, this is one of those things where it's most annoying that enemies get this benefit, versus yourself. i remember being really annoyed in some fight way back when that no matter what i did, i could not prevent a rogue from paralyzing one of my guys after a shadow step.

I also noticed that there's really also more to OP's question. To address the other: I consider anything from mid-late SSS and anywhere FS or from the main quest pre-Ukaizo to be "late/end-game gear." Anything starting level 17 or so on I consider "late-game ability." Definitely the bulk of the challenge is before then, so having a build that relies so heavily on late/end-game gear to be not great. It also is a bit of a balance issue; for SC wizard, druids, and priests their tier 9 spells are so powerful that the need for the "right" build kind of becomes moot -- many players will likely need the most help far earlier in the game. That being said, you can still have a build that takes advantage of late game stuff; like I said, even at level 20 FS is a challenge, and there's plenty of time to use gear you find there (especially if you decide to take on megabosses, which will also make the guardian of ukaizo harder). But it's kinda lame to have a powerful build that only comes fully online then; the builds I prefer also offer interesting things earlier, even if they might have certain components that only click at the end

This is how I break it down these days (level range by quests i typically take on): 1-4: "port maje zone" very hard, but avoidable (as @dgray62 says) 5-8: "nekataka tasks, benweth, initial sansa islands, oathbinder" can be very hard, but if you properly chain quests together, it it actually pretty smooth; there's also many non-violent quests or options to help ramp up. some of hte difficulty is simply similar to 1-4, where you just don't have a lot of options or your gear is outmatched (heavy armor on potd is still almost irrelevant at this stage because of enemy PEN scaling) 9-12: "tikawara, family pride, old city" reasonable challenge but a little bit less than the previous section, especially for an all-out violent option in family pride 13-20: rest of the game, OK challenge that can occasionally be easy. at this point you can juggle main quests and other faction quests and have tons of options so you're never forced into a super hard situation. i take Beast of Winter around 13-14 and depending on what potd challenges i have enabled it can brutal or an OK challenge (e.g. an unlucky roll with galawain's challenge can be brutal; a squishier party will get wrecked by the rogue archers in the bridge section). SSS around level 17. FS is the biggest challenge, I start at level 20 (sometimes level 19), and can be very hard depending on my party. Megabosses are always the technical puzzles that that they are at level 20. the most difficult battles are in the 1-4 range, and also FS. SSS and BoW have hard fights, but both can be over-leveled to make them easier. FS is special in that it's basically balanced at level 20, so you can spend the entire DLC at level 20 and face a decent challenge.

that being said, IIRC if you are bloodied, you can switch to eye of wael and it'll immediately trigger. but if you have summoned weapons, that's not really an option. that's right. though switching to get +2 PL on mirror image or displacement is not really worth it. gaze of adragan though...

i don't understand how shields are relevant? are you talking about protecting yourself from attacks while trying to use invocations? i don't think that's important to worry about - the more important is having concentration so you don't get interrupted. But even then, many (possibly even most) invocations cast very very quickly, so typically I don't have problems with front-line chanters getting their invocations off. As for troubadour vs skald, generally troubadours are able to generate phrases better, skalds mostly profit from being able to spam lower-level offensive invocations faster while still having linger. But possibly with a monk you might be able to generate tons of phrases since there's lots of melee crit/accuracy synergy.

bloodthirst and blood lust will also work for a cipher. getting kills from a disintegrate and free recovery out of nowhere can be nice. (though i think the free recovery applies on the next action if it happened in the middle of recovery) a furyshaper's wards also complement a cipher (on top of the rest of your party)

i think veteran would be a smoother experience. the big thing is that, in addition to buffing enemies further, PotD also changes the mix of enemies in an encounter, which can be significantly harder than simple adjustments to stats. both of the parties should be viable, though i would lean towards the "solid roles" party as a fire-and-forget approach (herald and paladins in general are pretty tanky and easy to AI script)

as a conjurer she still gets some quality debuffs from transmutation/enchantment, which includes a bunch of handy spells like slicken, chill fog, arduous delay of motion, expose vulnerabilities, pull of eora, call to slumber, etc. and of course C O M B U S T I N G W O U N D S which can be extremely OP in the right setup.

while keeping my earlier post in mind, having a herald in your party will go a long way into smoothing out PotD difficulty. i would not even consider it a "solid role" build, because you can easily make a herald that does a lot of summoning, which is not very tanky, but the summons you generate can be very tanky themselves.

if this is what you expect for path of the damned (esp if incl upscaling), you're in for an extremely rough ride even the extremely powerful builds are likely going to be something you have to manage manually a lot to pull off instead of hoping AI scripts will take care of it for you, at least until very late game (where certain spells/abilities or items become available).

if you don't know what to do, it's very very hard to go wrong with pallegina as a herald. tekehu's subclass is a little weird, konstanten has weird stats and uses a skald, fassina combines it with a wizard, vatnir combines it with a priest the latter two require a bit more care. a herald, on the other hand, is very easy to be powerful and resilient.

aoe scales, but nothing like poe1. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/races early on, this is crazy good, like a huge fraction of your party health, but by end-game even your squishies might easily have like 250-300 health and your moon healing only got up to like maybe 15-18 health from PL+might scaling. it's not nothing; i would not consider it completely obsoleted, but it does suffer in the comparison to some helms out there. that being said, moon godlike gets a +1 PL bonus from the heart-chime amulet, and bonus PL is hard to come by. CP takes a bit of a different tack; for me, the whole purpose of the fire godlike is the bonus +2 fire AR and the <50% health +1 AR, and that scales with you the entire game, provided you're using it on a class who's gonna have decent AR. IMO when i discovered that helm of the white wind applies +10 accuracy to so many things (on top of some additional minor enchantment) it has really hurt the meta for godlikes. it's real hard to compare against such a huge accuracy swing that is so generally useful. they've all become very niche racial bonuses now. nature godlike is def one of those victims. early on I would consider it S-tier, but now I think it's mostly useful if you want to be a monk or a monastic unarmed training build (real hard to get generic stacking PL to boost fist quality otherwise), or if you already have reserved the helm for someone else (in which case I think +1 PL is pretty decent, in contrast to constentin).

herald is notably one of the most tough-as-nails builds you can get out there. Pallegina as a herald can absolutely carry your entire party. Just very simply - exalted defense aura (for regen AND extra armor), plus lay on hands, plus ancient memory (for more regen) => your entire party can coast through anything other than huge spikes of aoe burst damage. and you still have tons of ability points leftover to spend on really powerful offensive stuff (like ancient weapons summon for chanter side) or to lean into the defensiveness (like chanter chant that grants +50% to healing recieved) for poe2, i tend to have two melee tanks, and one "flex" unit that can fill in a spot role. When I ran Pallegina as a herald back in the day (I only did it once because it honestly made so many fights too easy), she filled in a flex role, either staying back with some ranged weapons to stay in chant/aura range of everyone, and switching to a sword/shield for instant engagement if i needed to protect back line or there were too many bodies to hold back. My current run has two melee, a pet, and two flex characters, and I definitely have more crowding issues and have to make sure to pick up abilities that help me move around the fight. so you can definitely have more, but i don't think you really need more than two melee (or even one high-engagement build plus a flex) just based on how encounters are tuned in poe2. maia has a really good ranger subclass and will make for great long range DPS and make you forget about wanting another frontliner. equip maia with a good arquebus (there's one that lets you fire two shots per reload) and you can watch her shred foes and lock them down as well (free occasional interrupts). i haven't metagamed maia enough to know what the best set up for her would be, but i got a lot of mileage just from doing this and picking up good other abilities that interrupt (which scout will also get you more of from rogue). if you can micromanage, maia's pet has arguably the best pet ability in the game - the ability to avoid engagement (like a ghost heart, but you don't have to spend bond to summon the pet). So if you're fast and can tell your bird to stop attacking, you can tank literally megabosses by just engaging the boss, then flying out of range as the enemy winds up a melee attack (it'll cause the enemy to miss the target [the bird] being "out of range," which wasn't possible in PoE1). of the two i would lean towards the first one. i don't think assassin works too well with an ascendant, which really wants to cast a bunch of spells at a certain particular time that you have to build up to deliberately, whereas an assassin wants to alpha strike or cast a spell every once and a while based on being able to re-invis via a rogue ability or an item.

unless you add a mod, MCs are still locked out of tier 8 or 9 abilities. Frankly, it would be way too OP to let MCs do that, the trade-off of sometimes zany MC combinations is to give up tier 8 or 9 abilities, or else there's no point in doing SC. Konstanten, Fassina, Ydwin, Rekke, Mirke all have gotten a bit more reactivity with the DLCs, in particular Konstanten for SSS and Fassina for FS. They're still not going to be as much as "full" NPCs like Eder or Serafen, but it's quite a bit more than the blank slates they used to be.

Are you only running Obsidian NPCs and sidekicks, no custom? If so that limits suggestions a bit. Some thoughts: I might recommend a mainchar druid, because the only built-in SC option is Tekehu and like you say his subclass is so altered it's quite a different experience from other druids. Ancient is a great subclass to try, the mushroom summons can really carry you in the early game (and still tank well in the late game). Psion is a fun new cipher subclass - it's wildly different from a normal cipher. Some people underestimate just how different it is, so I always try to argue to give it an actual shot - being able to regen focus automatically means you can sustain casting of lower powers indefinitely. It also is a great, easy basis for a caster/caster multiclass, since you no longer have an action economy issue of needing to attack with weapons - you automatically regen focus just by casting spells from your non-cipher MC. (edit: beguiler can also sustain focus casting with deception powers, but psion can do it with any power. psion also gets a unique interrupt that is cheap and superb for spamming and messing up bosses) Xoti as monk can be very powerful, OP (but most monks are OP anyway). Her subclass is a bit underwhelming early on, but with whispers of the wind and ajumaat's stalking cloak, killing enemies will rapidly refill your wound count and let you spam whispers of the wind a lot. Any kind of non-Tekehu chanter will also be a good experience. Tekehu's chanter subclass is... not super amazing. Losing summons hurts the chanter a lot, very much a core part of being a late-game chanter. It can be nice to get all those free invocations, but as a single-class it's actually real bad because you have way too many ability points and abilities that you're never going to use because you have too many; it works better as a multiclass when you're getting those invocations for free and you can use those freed-up ability points to build up the druid side better. Fortunately, between konstanten, fassina, vatnir, and pallegina you got good availability of chanters so you don't have to roll a mainchar as a chanter to try it out. edit: though tekehu as chanter has a particularly powerful OP strategy - ppl discovered that if you have sasha's singing scimitar and empower avenging storm, every single lightning bolt will trigger sasha's singing scimitar's empower-based abilities. tekehu's the only chanter that has avenging storm innately as an invocation - everyone else would have to rely on scrolls or the special helmet.

yeah. I love using consumables in RPGs, but you really have to consciously use them, and not worry about being wasteful. Games are generally balanced around not needing to use consumables, so you really can get away without having to do anything. That's the big thing - I just try not to worry about wasting them.

This is generally going to be the case simply because if consumables were good enough that you want to use all the time, it would blow out individual character customizations. For precisely this reason, consumables today are a heavily nerfed form of what they used to be at release. That being said, consumables can be very good situationally, but those situations are less common on lower difficulties (where you can just brute force fights). As @Constentin Lévine alludes, Arcana can scale to be extremely good, and is the only consumable skill to do this. The only downside is that compared to Alchemy or Explosives, I find them to be extremely hard/expensive to keep a regular supply of (and powerful scrolls consume extremely valuable/finite ingredients), up until the end game where you suddenly get tons of extremely powerful scrolls. Something to consider - one of the ways consumables were nerfed is that they don't benefit from stats (might, intellect, perception). For this reason, on PotD, it can be quite hard to actually land offensive consumables. However, they do benefit, from generic combat buffs, like accuracy boosts and such. In addition, indirect effects from inspirations have an effect: intellect inspirations above smart (+1 PL) perception inspirations above insightful (you get graze to hit and possibly hit to crit) might inspiration above strong (+2 PEN, possibly interrupt on crit) All that being considered, think about these classes for a consumable focus: monk: easy access to Tenacious. Dance with Death for up to +15 accuracy. fighter: easy access to tier 2 (up to 3) perception and intellect inspiration. Adventurer/Conquerer stance gives you direct accuracy bonus. ranger: marked prey/marked for the hunt spam to give you +10 accuracy to targets (won't always be calculated in the estimate to-hit/graze chance when you're targeting, but will always work correctly [which will be verified in the combat log]). Stalker's Link can also gives you bonus accuracy. Hunter's Fang/Claw will give you a further +20 acc and up to +20% damage boost. Survival of the Fittest will get you even more accuracy rogue: bonus hit to crit, smoke bomb is basically like a re-usable consumable . they also can get extra quick item slots. chanter: energized inspiration, up to tenacious (you also have great action economy) cipher: the bonus AoE you can get at tier 9 works for consumables and can be zany, especially with arcana scrolls druid: the potions they can summon at tier 7 also benefit from alchemy so there's a very light synergy here. Don't forget about Lucero, a very late-game pet that gives your entire party -25% recovery time bonus when using quickslot items. Ring of Focused Flame and Helm of hte White Void can boost various consumables. Ring of Overseeing can be a way to boost AoE for bombs and scrolls. Fleshmender can be upgraded to give you another quick item slot.

wow, I did not even know this was a possibility. Good find

it's a rough comparison. the discount is mostly useful for tier 1 and 2 offensive chants, which merely puts it on par (in terms of time) with a troubadour during brisk recitation. sure, the troubadour in this situation loses linger, but there are a whole host of other possible benefits from rapidly going through chants that it's not really a trade-off. that means the skald can only really come out well in the comparison if you are also getting some bonus phrases from melee crits, which a bow-user would not get. chanter/ranger would be fine. i'm guessing you'd want to stay in range of your pet, so that your pet also gets chants, at which point it seems like a stalker is a natural ranger subclass, which will give your pet important survivability boosts when you're at 4m or closer. you lose a bit of the benefit of the bow, but you're still avoiding melee combat, and protective companion on your companion will help keep enemies at bay. come come soft winds of death (or the dragon thrashed) chants function like DoTs, which will activate Predator's Sense for your pet, for a little bit of extra damage. like @dgray62says, if you actually want to use your bow, you'd probably stay away from priest since eventually you'll spend a lot of time just casting buffs and debuffs. with chanter/ranger you still have some buffs and debuffs but you can also invest in making your auto attack very good.

good consideration, but have you tested any encounter with enemy rogue-likes? i feel like one of the ways that the fights don't get so insane is that the AI runs out of guile so it finally runs out of being able to use finishing blow, as otherwise anytime someone drops below 50% health can be a snowballing event if you don't have a quick heal response to an enemy rogue (especially ranged). this seems like one of the areas where the symmetry of BPM might be very frustrating in terms of enemy buffs (for reasons that you said). maybe it's not so bad. but you are right in that the fundamental player/enemy asymmetry means finishing blow is rarely an ability i'll pick up myself, and dread seeing queued up by an enemy. edit: not sure i have any better idea, except maybe to make it much more expensive and function more like a near-death instakiller (maybe the devastating upgrade would get the bonus damage it has now, but the base doesn't do anything extra, kinda like marux amanth), which would be harder for enemies to use to punish players while still making it more valuable for players.

I am also a big Furyshaper fan. Not enough can be said about how great even the first totem is: as a stacking 10% action speed area bonus it has immense party utility from beginning to end. That’s before you even get to the up to two other useful totems you can get (though only one at any given time). edit: while they mechanically function like summons, they are probably better thought of us something like consecrated ground, a fixed aoe. The fact that they can be attacked can be used as a further advantage (absorbing some hits and sparing party members, or attaching beetle shell or withdraw to them)