thelee

uh, perhaps we're mixing up our words here, but crackling bolt is not a CC spell. It may be an "area of effect" (aoe) spell, but typically when people say "crowd control" they mean "things that disable or weaken the enemy, instead of primarily doing damage." slicken is CC effect (and extremely effective), crackling bolt is not. i just want to make sure you're understanding e.g. @Boeroer's advice correctly. In RTwP you can re-aim spells that are in progress of being cast, which is a necessary feature of how the game balances out spells with slow cast times. Is there no equivalent feature in TB mode?

i would also suggest that "hitting cap" is not as terribly a big problem for the later content in deadfire. in poe1, hitting cap early meant a lot of pointless encounters and being over-leveled for stuff. meanwhile, for Seeker/Survivor/Slayer and Forgotten Sanctum and megabosses, you'll still find lots of challenges and lots of good loot even if you're at level 20. FS is definitely balanced expected parties to be close to or at level 20, and even if SSS has a lower target level, some of the encounters scale up very well and stay extremely challenging. In both cases a lot of great end-game gear comes from those DLCs, even if you're not gaining levels anymore.

yeah, for a non-caster assassin mc, i perhaps the stealth bonus is good at the start of a fight and then only if you incidentally get invisibility later (e.g. you were using smoke veil or shadowing beyond to flee from an enemy anyway, or you have the slippers). i think there are cases where you really want an attack to land where you'd do this deliberately, but we're talking about spending tons of resources (namely i'm thinking pernicious cloud + assassin bonus for the +25 acc, but that is essentially just like the MC spellcaster situation). edit: something i hadn't thought of, i wonder if assassin + hand mortars would be OK. still very resource expensive, but you could spread all sorts of rogue-y effects at +25 ACC and huge PEN. +25 acc is great on its own for debuffs, and for offensive casts, the bonus PEN can be extremely relevant for casters (who in general will have more AR headaches and fewer options than martials). the unique wizard spell arkemyr's brilliant departure, or whatever it's called, doesn't dispel invisibility so long as you don't do a damage roll, so you can endlessly debuff (even with DoTs!) with +25 acc.

personally i'm ok if a druid gets a crappier version of BDD in the bpm, even accounting for difference in ability level. priests are the best at the shielding effect (they get withdraw AND bdd, and to a certain comparable extent watchful presence). is bdd fixed duration in bpm? i don't see that damage shield needs to be fixed duration. beetle shell is useful for long durations because enemies don't ignore a shell-ed target, so it's actually quite nice to burn out the entire health shield with a long enough duration.

it almost seems to me that chain lightning and firebug was balanced in a way that forgot there is bounce penalty to damage, because it specifies a lower damage for jump targets. firebug in particular is extremely disappointing in practice, like the third bounce does like 6 damage. at that point it doesn't even matter if it does re-bounce to earlier hit targets, i'd rather just cast sunbeam. chain lightning has a case in that at least its base damage is high enough and it does a valuable enough damage type (shock) that i'm ok using it. plus you occasionally get interrupts from crits.

miasma of dull-mindedness OR arkemyr's wondrous torment + weyc's wand (for a wizard, empower guarantees at least a graze). instant -10 resolve, and both of those also drop intellect by -10 for a total -40 to will. add in a club modal for a net -65 will at this point. follow up with a normal casting of miasma/arkmeyr and get huge duration even when not empowered at that point (arkemyr is better because of high base duration). edit: in a pinch, some luck and a cipher's psychovampiric shield will do somethign similar, though i definitely prefer the wizard approach which is pretty much foolproof. due to increasing returns from resolve, 25 resolve compared to 35 resolve is night/day for debuffs. edit: because neither miasma or arkemyr (or psychovampiric) are afflictions, all megabosses are vulnerable to this. even though dorudugan is a vessel, still vulnerable to these mind abilities.

fyi overseer rings are also good because the area bonus actually works with consumables (bombs and scrolls) whereas intellect boosts get ignored (one of many annoying aspects of consumables not benefiting from stats).

yeah overall i like that. for me on berath's challenge, withdraw goes from "nice oh **** spell" early game to "never gets used" because of the PL scaling. only downside is that beetle shell wouldn't get any other scaling. at least play dead and withdraw you get more healing. don't know how to fix beetle shell in that respect.

a little off topic, but i think play dead is at a nice base duration and base ability level where you can go either way with intellect. Unlike withdraw where it can last a super long time with high intellect with huge scaling, making it sometimes scary to use in a fight (i.e. take your chances with a low-health party member or definitely lose them for 40 seconds). high intellect = debuffs continue to tick away while pet is knocked out, and i've definitely saved my pet from some massive dots or debuffs by playing dead and waiting them out, which is harder to do with a low duration. low intellect = obv get pet back sooner but still with tons of health.

lol i'm so used to the default hud positioning that pale shelter's UI made my eyes bleed. troubadour/psion! must've been a trip

i have never even conceived of dumping intellect before, so this build tickles me in all the right ways. i never knew beam spells were unaffected by intellect, a nice loophole around the intellect dumping (and always fun to learn something new after so many thousand+ hours of the game).

oooh, sounds exciting. that also makes sense because JESawyer's twitter has occasionally posted screenshots of extremely convoluted and branching dialogue trees in his editing tool. the rumor mill article suggests it's headed to gamepass, so PC + Xbox. Based on the MSFT acquisition, I would be extraordinarily surprised if any OBS release was anything less than PC + Xbox with a Gamepass exclusive window.

Wow, I'l be honest I've personally never done those sequence of events (sparing Benweth, then betraying Aeldys) - you sure Furrante doesn't give it to you directly or it ends up in your stash somehow else after finishing the quest?

i will certainly agree that the story for poe1 resonated better with me, and i liked dungeons, but some of the other stuff that poe1 did didn't do it in a way that made me prefer the game to deadfire. rest/resource management in poe1 wasn't really well-thought out, and it took playing p:k (and from what i've heard p:wotr) to realize just how much better rest can be handled. oh boy, poe1 may have more stable FPS but it also has out-of-this-world load times. Builds up over time. But even with SSD/NVME there's just too much save data bloat or whatever and it's just unbearable. At least Deadfire has pretty constant load times and for me stays within the order of seconds for most transitions. Choose your own poison, I suppose, but I'll take in-combat stutters and gradual degradation to lower FPS over wasting a bunch of my time on load screens.

it is possible to avoid the final fight, but you have to make galawain pretty happy with you. some combination of the following: choosing a background where you gave souls to galawain empowering the wilds around kazuwari enough times you finish one of the main SSS quests NOT letting aexica/whehami escape NOT showing him the tooth after you come back from dealing with whehami I think there's some internal counter that tracks these, so if you do things that tick galawain off (bad background, or showing him the tooth) you can counterbalance by empowering kazuwari more often, and if galawain is already pretty happy with you (good background, not showing him the tooth) you can get away with doing less of the others.

was testing an arcane archer / fury combo, and it looks like driving flight doesn't affect the fury weapon (only ever +1 bounce)? is this something that's fixable?

Yeah, imagine doing "scale up AND scale down", you do Sealed Fate at like level 4, and instead of enemies being scaled down 1 level or so, they are still scaled up +3/4 levels. that's crazy

the quest itself is not level 10 though? i seem to recall it being not-skulled at level 8 or so. it's a rough encounter at that level. though the big difference versus talfor is that you're ever so slightly higher level and more builds have more options to have a fighting chance.

yeah, A+ incredible find @Avaritica. I think I've only ever beaten Talfor at the intended difficulty level once, and that probably had a lot more to do with just how good ancient's sporelings are than anything else (still required a lot of micromanagement to run allies out of range of rogues winding up with an attack). Good to know this was likely accidental.

I must be in the minority here, because for the most part I appreciate a slight dusting of immunities. I think disease/poison immunity is a bit too common (not helped by the fact that some abilities and some immunities to disease/poison are hidden), and mind immunity is also similarly hidden (took me a while to realize that vessels are innately mind-immune without having an explicit immunity), but otherwise they spice up encounters and force one to have a more diverse toolkit. There's definitely an extreme that's unfun (most final fantasies i can remember most non-damage spells aren't worth using in part because enemies are arbitrarily immune to so many different things), but between D&D, pathfinder, deadfire, I haven't really seen these style of RPGs get too excessive in general (though it's up to area design to not load up a place with immunes). The problem with like infinite AR is that players may try to brute force through that, instead of going for weaknesses, and unintentionally lead to unfun grinds. I think this was something that JES cited as a move away from the DR approach - players were just sticking with their favorite weapons even if enemies had like 3000 DR.

combusting wounds + wizard & druid spells that tick for damage = absolutely tons of damage. have fassina self-buff with infuse with vital essence for extra duration to really increase the stack count. you could do the same with two separate casting classes, but this gives you something to do while waiting for wall of draining to come online that being said, i did a sorcerer and had fun with it. i mostly used tons of buffs and deleterious alacrity of motion plus ring of focused flame so i could get real up close and personal with a bunch of short-range druid and some wizard spells (e.g. venombloom, wicked briars, taste of the hunt, autumn's decay, etc.) and spirit shift (+cat form as needed) or firebrand when i run low on casts.

thanks for this report - i've been tossing the idea of an AA around and it's interesting to hear this feedback about preferring MC over SC. You don't think that Death Cloud is worth it for SC? what about marked prey? do you find you need it much? i've been worried about resource limits between a couple of marked preys eating up so much of what could be another imbue. i think they only scale with extra projectiles for the missile imbue, no? i don't think theres any additional damage or accuracy or anything. if i hadn't read otherwise, i'd say that the high accuracy from arcana is meant to be there instead of normal scaling and missiles get the extra projectiles because they auto hit anyway, but i think we do have dev confirm that it's a bug. curiously, if you empower an imbue, they scale as if they were a martial ability (some very specific rules) versus a spell (+5 PL).

just to double-check, you're talking about the output_log.txt file? There's nothing? are you playing via gamepass? unfortunately, i've had some games have extremely poor behavior when installed/played through gamepass/xbox app (including crashes before i can even get past publisher screens or intro screens). i might later play the same game via steam with no problem. something about microsoft's integration is just plain ol' ****ty. I know that's not exactly a helpful thing to say, but maybe you can try a steam purchase just to see if it runs that way (and then refund very quickly).

I'll see your FO:NV and raise you Oblivion. I can still hear those voice actors as if it were yesterday. ("have you heard of the fighter's guild" "STOP THIEF" "then pay with your blood") they must've blown their entire VO budget on just patrick stewart and sean bean All the more reason to just limit VO to the main important dialogue. Save costs, don't break the fourth wall. Plus what voices you do have can be essentially all unique. (*cough* Disco Elysium *cough*)