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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.

i think this is partly a function of UI and also partly a function that IMO deadfire really should've been an additive system with a very limited set of multiplicative effects, including crits and overpen. UI: crits are very obvious to me b.c. i have the "dynamic camera" enabled to do a dramatic zoom-in/slow-down if i kill an enemy with a crit. It doesn't have to be that showy, but for example that saber does lightning damage/self-heals on crit makes the enemy spark with a glow on a crit, which is also obvious. Hate to dredge up Pathfinder games here, but they explicitly bold/label damage numbers that are critical hits, so they are obvious. I agree overpenetration is also not obvious, but some UI treatment could highlight it, or even just meatier impact sounds. Mechanically: crits are generally just not that big of a deal. An extra +25% damage on weapons is not huge. It can be huge on spells, but it gets buried in multi-target effects. Coupled with overpenetration and imp crit and other crit effects it can be huge, but honestly crits would be worth paying attention to more if it was a 1.25x multiplier. Same with overpen. I do think grazes are extremely important mechanically. Going back to the pathfinder/D&D system, save-or-else effects really just do suck and feel awful to use and are extremely hard to reason about due to needing to have a huge amount of metagame knowledge of what enemy saves are like (or having to do a bajillion knowledge checks in tabletop). Grazes basically make every save-or-else have a default effect, unless the enemies heroically save against it, which some spells in PF/D&D system do (and I feel like these spells get valued highly by players as a result), but Deadfire/PoE just bakes in as a default which is nice. You don't have to pay attention to grazes mechanically, they just help make your life quietly less frustrating.

Josh Sawyer did an interesting talk on armor systems recently, with particular bits on PoE and Deadfire. nothing terribly new if you've been on reddit or on the forums here for a while, but it's interesting just to see how he thinks

it might be better as you level up. as higher levels, you would gain pretty good focus AND you wouldn't have action economy issues of having to attack to generate that focus first. it's pretty slow in RTwP as well at first. Auto-attacking or multiclassing with caster is a pretty good solution for psion (though again, once you start getting 2 or 3 focus/second [12 or 18 per turn iirc for turn-based] i think focus issues disappear rapidly onec you realize that you gain that focus even when casting powers.)

it's actually weirder - i think maxquest found that the game (accidentally) reverses a sign as part of the max health adjustment math.

hoo boy, that thread brought back some confused memories. iirc, your numbers are like that because you have an amulet of health? the game doesn't do math correctly when restoring health with amulet of health?

Hmmm, are you sure about this? I know when you lose a constitution affliction outside of combat, you don’t retain current health % and have to regen the missing health, but I feel like you retain current health % during combat (I see enemies sometimes go back up a health category when recovering from an affliction, which appears to be based on their “base” max health).

i did some testing to confirm some of my suspicions. here's what i've found: ranged movement recovery penalty only applies while moving (correction of earlier thing i said) ranged movement recovery penalty is +100% recovery time shot on the run does benefit from inversions and will completely cancel the recovery penalty suffered while moving (edit: so, makes no difference whether you stand still or move as a ranger with this. could be pretty handy for kiting) reload time is not affected by ranged movement-recovery penalty, instead it's paused your reload progress is saved if you interrupt it, so if you run around for a while, your remaining reload time should pick up back from where it left off however, in normal circumstances it appears there is a minimum reload time of what appears to be ~2.5s for most weapons, but arquebus appears to have a slightly faster minimum reload time of ~2s. so, as i mentioned in an earlier post, if you perpetually interrupt your reload, then you'll never be able to fire again since the animation needs to fully complete. however with firearms, there's a moment during the reload animation when you **** the gun (you can hear a very slight 'click' when this happens) and if you interrupt the reload at this point and then resume attack you bypass the entirety of the reload time (including the remainder of the reload time that you should've seen) and go straight to attack. [edit: lol erroneous forum censorship strikes again! "when you c.o.c.k the gun"] if Deadfire was somehow more of a twitch-y game like DotA or a fighting game, this means there's actually a "reload cancel" optimization you could do. in practice, i don't think this is worth the micromanagement since it's like tenths of a second in savings which, while possibly a substantial % increase, is extremely annoying to keep track of over an entire fight. i say "normal circumstances" b.c. if your natural reload time is shorter than the minimum reload time, then it uses your natural reload time (possible with dual-wielding, high dex, pistol modal) i know there's a further absolute minimum reload time (it's why one of the enchantments on a gun that clears recovery doesn't work) but with some simple testing with a console i wasn't able to find what that was (i got down to 1.5s and still obeyed the 1.5s recovery time instead of being capped)

at this point who should care? i pre-ordered but i would be more annoyed if ppl were locked out of pre-order items forever, which seems to be the case. i think some pre-order items can be accessed normally in-game (i read somewhere that was the case for the sabre), and the others can be got by console commands (and doing so doesn't disable cheats/achievements, for just those items), though someone better knowledgable would have to confirm.

ah sorry I completely was unaware that there was a version on the mac app store, i only thought about steam and GoG. is it a one-way breakage? are you able to take a steam save and use it in the macplay version? just trying to figure out if there's some clue on how to fix the save incompatibility. sorry you're running into this, that sucks.

hi, no developers here, but: when you say "MacPlay" I have no idea what that refers to. Is that possibly the company that ported Pillars of Eternity 1 (and not Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire) Because I just want to make sure you are talking about the correct games and moving files between the correct systems. Deadfire saves should be completely portable between different platforms, but that may not be the case for Pillars of Eternity 1.

may not have been just the flu, mate. this was probably the original intent, so this would be the best O_O-b

I think Abjuration affects the same targets as Dismissal. There's a critical "or" in the early part of the tooltip. To me, it wouldn't make sense to have two such similar but different effects otherwise. Yeah, I don't play a lot of paladins so I can't say definitively, but 4 Zeal for a single-target Abjuration seems... real lame. I'd much rather save that Zeal for heals or an exhortation. At least Abjuration can completely wipe out most of some late-game fights on its own.

Wow. Is it just cipher spells or multi class casters also benefit?

Biggest clue is if they have any skulls on their tooltip they over level you. If there’s no skulls they are at your level or lower. pretty sure you can look at attack rolls in combat log; everyone gets +3 acc/Level, so if their level-based accuracy bonus is less than yours than you’re good to go.