thelee

you're sure the person hasn't been hit by other attacks? whenever something weird like this happens i assume it must be implemented like a hazard or something. those always break all sorts of rules

so sounds like writ of war blocks both NONE and Classpowerpool. that's encouragingly expansive

gj, people will finally be able to cast an eld nary that continues even after the fight ends, as the lord intended (also lol the symmetry risk of using a heavily boosted eld nary when an enemy wizard can cast spell reflect just got hilarious)

one of the few mods I use is the community patch bugfixes only and it does fix kw rather broadly (and also fixes a few other things), which is why i have it. includes call of rymrgand:

ah, i wonder if writ of war only functions for blocking ability selection, the game doesn't check again when the ability actually is going to be used? this is characteristic of how player AI scripts work (the script is checked after an action is completed, not after recovery when an ability needs to be selected), which leads to some lag in scripts incorporating changing conditions/triggers because an ability will be queued well in advance of when it actually gets used. i wonder if frightened works like this for the AI? or frightened works better and writ of war is just implemented differently in this way.

i'm actually surprised that it even stopped brutal cleave as well. hard to square with what boeroer said though about still getting hellfire barrage. one thing i wonder is that the AI can be weird on how it queues up abilities and it might have queued up an ability even though technically it wasn't allowed to and then was able to execute it because the writ wore off. if anyone really wants to advance science they should take down dorudugan completely and report back

i believe it's comparable to restore or moonlight - 1.5m, centered on paladin. So yeah, it will be hard to cover a large area with it, even with decent int. won't help you if you're flanking a dragon, but worked pretty well for me in the typical scrum of humanoid-sized combatants. edit: it's probably the same area as shared flames. 1.5m seems really tiny actually, it might be 2m.

i do not trust writ of war or last word on how they are implemented. even if you could precisely time a last word crit and it worked as intended, dorudugan's AI script would almost certainly use it at the next possible opportunity, which would be very soon due to their 35 resolve. central to chaining anything on dorudugan would be dumping their resolve. arkemyr's wondrous torment is good because you can double-cast it and it has a long base duration - cast once to get the initial debuff, cast again to get a much longer debuff because now dorudugan has significantly reduced resolve. psychovampiric shield also drops resolve by -10 but because i believe it's a transfer effect you can't do this double-casting, the second one doesn't do much (also much shorter base duration; base duration matters a lot against 35 resolve).

i'm allowing for possibly a language gap, but the point is that the troub doesn't benefit as much, because they already have phrase generation mechanisms (brisk recitation). sasha's and blightheart and weyc's close the gap for other subclasses. and frankly, bellower can make use of sasha's better than troub. pretty much the standard recommendation with sasha's is to enchant it to get back an empower point. with bellower, i'd say the opposite should be recommended, enchanting to restore all your phrases, because getting one invocation at +PL and then following it up immediately with another one at up to +7 PL is powerful. are you actually looking for answers on how other chanter subclasses (esp bellower) can have their niches? because this is an INSANELY bad faith reading of what boeroer and i wrote. we were simply highlighting one particular invocation - my post was even talking about how previously i thought that kind of invocation was bad for bellower until i gave it a try, which if reading comprehension was your forte made a clear implication of what other invocations were obviously good for bellower. almost every other participant in this thread has commented on this. troubadours give you versatility. edit: as i've said, that versatility means that troubadour is a default recommendation (literally CTRL-F in this thread and i said it before you made this post). i feel like *i'm* talking to a wall, because i'm literally repeating myself here: but this versatility means that it's very easy to have a good chanter, but it doesn't necessarily mean it strictly dominates any other subclass (though in base game i argue that it pretty much dominates vanilla chanter).

yeah i did a SC bellower once and you can get 100% uptime on dragon. it actually changed my line of thinking on bellower, originally thinking that you should only be using very offensive invocations (to get maximum PL benefit). getting PL just so you can get extend a powerful summon duration for maximum uptime turns out to be very useful as well. only other chanter that can consistently do this is a troubadour, but you'd have to give up linger on chants (which may not be bad if you're spitting out shields or resist chants, but would be bad if you have like a aefyllath ues=>ancient memory song)

yeah, my original comment before i edited for length pre-submit mentioned that i was talking about the more extreme vanilla case, and it'd be way closer with bpm. troubadour is a default recommendation because it's hard to get wrong, but it also doesn't mean it's a strictly dominant kit (except above vanilla changer probably). i can see that if you're just brisk reciting through shield chants while blasting invocations that can feel very powerful, but you can also do powerful things with other subclasses as well (even in base game), just with a bit more thought.

in comparison to other kits, bellower doesn't suffer particularly compared to troubadour. it's more just that troubadour is a pretty good flexible kit compared to all the other kits, and the "downside" of having chants cycle faster but no linger is not really a downside for several chants (as you mention). one thing i'll note that for bellower, it almost never makes sense to charge up chants beyond what you need for an invocation just for the bonus PL. you should be using invocations when you can - the bonus PL makes each invocation really good, but not good enough that it's worth making invocations less frequent in exchange for a handful of extra PL. bellower also benefits from sasha's singing scimitar letting your recharge all your chants after empowering an invocation. and all non-troubs benefit more from blightheart and robe of the weyc's chant boosting than a troub does, which helps close the gap.

i'm vaguely concerned the mechanics will be relatively shallow like the outer worlds but we'll have more updates till fall to learn more

yeah gibbing is weird (annihilates the corpse, which might affect the game's ability to rez them later). Normally party members can't get gibbed, but if you do get annihilated otherwise (disintegrate from enemy cipher) they disappear from your party and you can't res them. i wonder if ship boarding assists--because they're not in your party--can get gibbed (regardless of being a crew or companion) and that can (unintentionally?) cause permadeath.

i've literally never seen this item in my playtime (~2000h), and i don't see it on the wikis. Are you sure you have nothing else? Adding a new item doesn't seem like something either the CP or BPM would have done (nothing on the nexus mods page that i can see that indicates it), though adding spellcasting trinkets was something that was discussed on these forums a while back.

actually i was revisiting something and - are we sure that crew (not benched party members) are in fact perma-dying in boarding encounters? i have a note in my guide explicitly saying crew members don't permadie, and i don't think i would've written that without testing. edit: is it possible that they're being gibbed and that's causing the permadeath?

i noticed crew/party members dying in berath's challenge relatively recently ("relatively" like at some point in 2023 i think). i suspect mostly that you/we didn't notice before, because typically you can end up with tons of crew and when they die their loot is pretty crappy so in the post-ship rewards screen you don't notice any obvious tells. it was only obvious to me because after a boarding encounter i noticed some very familiar gear, and it was because a level 4 aloth got wrecked and dropped whatever gear i had put on him at the digsite way back 1 and then i started paying way more attention to everyone during a boarding encounter. i do think it is an interesting dynamic, in line with the theme of berath's challenge. since discovering permadeath during boardings i make sure to either avoid boardings or level up my party members/crew members.

yeah, thinking about the game mechanics really benefits from taking a "lawyer"ly approach to reading the descriptions and seeing where loopholes arise. you can find some surprising interactions that way, instead of assuming that something won't work with something else because of an assumption of how that something is "intended" to be done. i would say that a decent chunk of the fun of theorycrafting and toying with the mechanics of deadfire is the joy of discovering new interactions, it's like a treasure hunt. anyway for the reasons you mention, both fighter and monk (especially helwalker) are very interesting classes to multiclass with a caster. they have tons of passives and buffs that are ok for a martial but really open things up for a caster.

TBF they are always pretty strong

For OP, just some reminder text that this stacking with mirrored images only works with the escape cape. Because it’s tagged as an item ability it stacks with active abilities. You wouldn’t be able to stack with the rogues normal escape ability.

maxed resolve would be my main tip - i don't have a lot of experience with a riposte build so i'm not sure if you'd be better off with a bashing shield + weapon and shield style for full attack ripostes or whispers for the lower deflection bonus (+4) but an additional riposte. escape would actually be the best defense that a rogue has, +50 deflection unconditionally. hard to keep up though, but if mirror image isn't enough for tough fights, escape could probably fit in at a pinch.

yeah i agree. i honestly don't think it would've been too hard to make sleight of hand functional (what you talk about is pretty much it), but the history of deadfire is that sales at launch underperformed and it took a while to do well, but because of that they just couldn't give deadfire the patch-love it deserved.

you only need 1 sleight of hand for like 95% of pickpocketing. the highest i've seen is like 7, but for like literally hardtack or a fine stiletto. the difficulty isn't based (at least very heavily) on the value of the item, but some stat on the npc themselves, and most npcs have garbage for that stat. most of the value from sleight of hand anyway comes from enabling the "loaded pockets" berath's blessing so you have a chance of getting some decent ingredients or mid-tier magical items for free from pick pocketing, and for the same reason as above you only need like 1 sleight of hand. just a badly designed skill unfortunately and obs never had the time or budget to fix it.

yeah that's right. thinking more on it, it's not as bad as i make it out to be - there are sections of that DLC where you actually fight fire-immune enemies where frost would be useful. it just stands out to me for two reasons - this DLC is particularly hard compared to main game so even if main game has like element-immune sections as well, it's not as bad bc they're comparatively easier. and second, this BoW dynamic is obvious if you pick up Vatnir, since that is when you can pick him up, and it's a bad time to pick him up because half of his bonus spells as a priest are going to be of lower use in the DLC (since half of his bonus spells are frost/water spells) so the elemental immunity/toughness just feels particularly acute.

There's a very comprehensive list here: