thelee

where are you getting attacked by guards? i'll admit i don't normally explore all of fort deadlight in playthroughs where i blow benweth up, but I seem to remember that some guards in the dungeons will stay around and attack on sight even after you blow benweth up (near the ship and possibly supply room)

TBF repulsing seal in poe1 was pretty buh-roken

unfortunately there's no point in bumping because there's no more patches happening. i'm not sure this is even a thing that can be fixed with mods.

yeah this is very important to realize. i was a bit disappointed, because it's not that the bonus increases (like mob stance), which would give you increasing returns, it's individual instances of -10% recovery time bonus being added together via inversions, which gives you linear returns. so it's not super great, but it's still good

Just to add on to a lot of recommendations (which I agree with): Chanter Hel-Hyraf... // The Shield Cracks: especially when upgraded, this invocation puts all of PotD in AR/PEN easy mode Not felled... // ...nor Flame: mostly when upgraded. Pierce/Slash AR combined is handy, covering many cases, and is very useful against ranged weapons because they mostly either do pierce, or pierce/slash, which this completely covers. Fire AR is also nice. Druid Woodskin: casts super fasts, activates Lord of the Forest enchantment, huge pierce AR increase. Also Fire AR is nice Priest Arcane Veil (Wael-only): back in the day I made tons of glass cannony-types using a wael MC. Having Arcane Veil at tier 1 means you always have access to it (though that is only relevant for like the first hour of the game [edit: though it does mean you have 2x as many casts as a wizard until the wizard gets to tier 3 abilities, so this early access is relevant for a bit longer]), and it benefits from various effects that grants +1 tier one spell cast (which gives you 3 + self-empower for 2 = 5 total casts). Unlike Wizard's Veil, it doesn't share the same tier with Mirror Image, so Wael priests get tons of evasion, whereas wizards share AV and Mirror Image at tier 2. (They do get Wizard's Double, though, which in some situations is way better.) Halt: open a fight with this (like from stealth) on a melee enemy, and you've immediately knocked one enemy out of the fight for a long time. Becomes a little less useful later on because more enemies get mobility abilities (like Leap) or have dexterity resistance/immunity. Wizard Eldritch Aim: early on it's a waste of a spell slot, but later on it casts fast and boosts your accuracy for better spells. Also great for MC when you really want to help some powerful abilities land. C O M B U S T I N G W O U N D S

P:K and P:WOTR are exceptionally buggy games. P:K is a lot better these days, like years of patching later, but I'm pretty sure there was widespread expectation about WOTR being buggy as hell. Nothing about Deadfire/PoE even come close to comparing - whether its game mechanics functioning, engine stability, or just general "being able to complete the game." People still bought WOTR in droves. edit: i have a beefy gaming PC, and in the late game of WOTR I cannot get higher than 30 fps and I pretty much have to run in turn-based mode because the stutters are so unbelievable (and even in turn-based mode, an enemy turn will go by where I have literally no idea what happens because the game freezes for like 5 seconds while trying to resolve what happned). edit: also, Obsidian having a reputation for having buggy games did not prevent Outer Worlds from being one of their best-selling projects ever (I believe someone said only F:NV beats it, which was a follow-up to a famous IP). edit 2: not going to deny that Obsidian has a reputation, but this goes back to my main point to underline in any discussion of sales. An explanation has to be consistent with other data points. People bring up bugginess/instability as a deterrent, ok, but then you have to reconcile that with other games, Obsidian or not. If you can't reconcile that, maybe you end up with a better explanation (e.g. Pirate theme is an interesting recurrent theory and in fact I will note that current marketing [e.g. steam hero image, ultimate edition box art] seems to play down the piracy/nautical angle quite a bit).

is this perhaps a community patch or balance mod thing?

I don't think you have much of a choice, other than to build a really really cheesy character that can take out neriscyrlas at early levels.

if you're willing to consider a build not just in isolation, but as part of a party of five, many penetration problems get effectively solved by bringing any kind of chanter aboard. The Shield Cracks is an amazing invocation that basically permanently debuffs the enemies with -2 AR. Coupled with champion's boon and Scion of Flame (if it works correctly with arcane archer imbue) and even without crits I think most penetration issues disappear. if you don't want a chanter, a single-classed cipher will eventually be able to bestow +8 penetration, which is frankly amazing for magic-type abilities, buggy PEN or not.

there's some friction points there, because in just a straight-forward usage, you're "wasting" some time trying to refresh it, which can be somewhat frequent depending on the enemies, so the long run speed bonus might not be as good. i'll admit i haven't played that much with time parasite, so i don't have too much visibility on the itneractions with it. that being said, simply maximizing speed may not be the complete picture. riposte (and similar effects like barbaric retaliation and mob stance) gives you "secret" speed bonuses with its free attacks. part of why barbaric retaliation is so good - you basically get super huge effective speed bonus, passively, and the effective speed bonus is higher the slower you normally are (heavy armor, bleeding cuts, etc). but you don't have as much control over that, versus just auto-attacking. add on blood thirst for periodic recovery-free attacks, and be a fury shaper so you get that action speed totem (+10% that stacks with everything) edit: maximize athletics and get the contender's armor from SSS plus one of the pets that reduces armor penalty. i haven't done the math, but i suspect that'd be faster than light armor with -10% (pale hide, benweth's armor, the soulbound changeling armor) with a pet, but you really need to hunt those athletics bonuses down.

*taking notes* for some reason i never considered using an aoe weapon effect to spread the modal debuffs. that's slick, i gotta try that

i don't think special K ever worked. I think it was more like superstition, or people comparing running-for-a-while performance to special-k-fresh-start performance. the original special K post had some truly outlandish claims of performance for a few years ago. I tried it aggressively many times over, except writing down numbers attempting to control conditions and saw basically no uplift. the only thing i can suggest is to periodically quick-save-"exit to main menu" and then reload your game. when the game runs for a while (especially with effects-heavy combats with quick-loads), there's some sort of memory leak that degrades frame rates (i can go from 80ish down to like 30ish) and only exiting to main menu (not just loading) frees up the jank.

i would argue the exact opposite. dots, and druid dots especially, are extremely damage efficient, but require time to hit that efficiency. if you're on a lower difficulty or are so over-leveled for an encounter that it's over in like 10 seconds, the dots don't have time to work their magic. high enemy HP and high difficulty are successful niches, not a downside, for dots. [edit: e.g. a tier 2 autumn's decay will do 50% more base damage than a tier 5 blast of frost, and the damage will scale very generously with intellect unlike with blast of frost. there's a time discount factor for sure, but the point is that if you end the fight in a few casts, autumn's decay can't compare, but in any decently scaled fight, autumn's decay will overperform.] yeah, fortitude is higher, but dots are still extremely effective even when they target fortitude. and AR is higher on potd, sure, but corrode is not a particularly hard damage type, compared to fire or frost. in my last run, my druid was damage king early on almost purely off of autumn's decay [note: which targets reflex], insect swarm, and infestation of maggots. (later on, they were still damage king, but for more cheese-y less dot-y reasons like avenging storm or greater maelstrom) i mean this is literally true about using any ability. outside of a long fight w/ infinite resources, you're making choices. like you suggest, a morningstar alone can easily put many bosses into easy-dotting range. pretty much the only time i didn't bother with dots are megabosses, which are more cheesy/technical encounters.

just to clarify, they are immune to plague of insects (which is not poison keyworded, but is countered by antidote, which functions as the same thing), but they are not immune to insect swarm and infestation of maggots. so they're only immune to bug bites that come in a large (plague-level) quantity.

also another advantage of druid is that a good number of their DoTs do raw damage (insect swarm, infestation, plague of insects), which dodges one of the more annoying issues with other DoTs vs direct damage, PEN issues. (unlike direct damage, crits do not help DoTs with penetration) landing an insect swarm/infestation of maggots on e.g. ironclad constructs is pretty nice. (but what are the bugs/maggots eating??)

i believe the way it works is that the game just extends the duration of the debuff, so it doesn't count as a fresh application. the behavior that you're talking about mostly really works for stacking dots (bleeding cuts, combusting wounds, etc.).

interesting interaction; ironically if they had just used the difficult-to-grok inversions this wouldn't be an issue (the first +100% would cancel out the inversion, and then the rest would work normally). though in practice, could one consider it a balance trade-off for the powerful ability to being able to generate focus by casting deception powers?

i'm surprised druid hasn't got more mention as a dot approach, because druids do butt loads of damage via dots (ignoring cheese*). while druids are pretty exposed to poison/disease immunity, in terms of dots i'd say that the majority of them are not disease/poison keyworded (secretly or not). Insect Swarm and Infestation of Maggots, and IIRC also Touch of Rot & Autumn's Decay are non-disease, non-poison, and using just those alone your druid will do tons of damage in most sitautions. Plague of Insects is the main one that is impacted by disease/poison immunity. (Also depending on how you define "DoT", Wall of Thorns and Venombloom are poison-based). edit: there's also taste of the hunt, but it's single-target. * including cheese, a wizard with combusting wounds and a party full of pulsing effects will do absolute bonkers amounts of damage against anything not fire immune.

oh boy so the way the damage bonuses are implemented are themselves weird. gotta love these edge cases

i suspect they don't stack, but it might be worth testing. a complication with stacking rules is that sometimes the game doesn't consider very similar bonuses as being in the same stacking category. Example: ±x to all defenses vs ±x to deflection (or fortitude, reflex, will). even though the first buffs deflection directly, it will stack with the second because "All defenses" and "±x to deflection" are considered separate categories. at the same time, a similar-looking case where things don't stack. Dagger modal gives you +deflection vs melee, whereas most illusion buffs gives you +deflection, and even though this looks likes a variant of the previous example of a specific buff vs a general buff, the dagger modal is more like "+deflection (but only available against melee weapons)", so it's considered the same category as other deflection bonuses and won't stack. i suspect mouth char is "+% to damage (but only for weapons)" so won't stack with the self-damage boost barbaric smash/blow/etc gives you, but there's an outside chance that it's more like the former where it's more like "+% to weapon damage" vs "+% all damage" that being said, some weapon abilities have innate damage bonuses (shown at the top of the tooltip, e.g. many rogue abilities) and those are innate/passive bonuses and will stack with active sources.

as soon as i saw the name of this build, i immediately knew what weapon it was based on. real underrated weapon; it's not flashy and is super early, but that +5 deflection bonus with a shield is real nice. fun riposte build. do you find that you really need the extra engagements? if you pick up hold the line you have 2, and then you can switch to mob stance instead for recovery time bonus and free attacks.

*slaps forehead* a really obvious non-standard scaler is rogue sneak attack damage. numerically it's the same (+5%) but it's an additive increase, not a multiplicative increase, and is definitely different from how most other abilities scale. IMO for any hypothetical pillars 3, they need to make sure "how this ability benefits from PL scaling" is also included in the auto-generated tooltip.

i think OP's point is that most everything that we could say about berserker self-damage scaling would also influence soft, soft winds chant equivalently. the fact that the self-damage is way more than soft,soft winds is a big tell. i've never played a berserker but i've been told that the self-damage can become substantial (a few people msged me on my gamefaqs guide to tell me that self-damage was a bigger deal than the confusion). it's possible it has custom scaling rules, and would explain why i've been told that. would love someone to confirm (am unable to test right now). some examples of other non-standard power-level scaling: forbidden fist self-damage, psion focus generation, barbarian carnage, etc. the first two definitely use whole numbers per PL (as opposed to percentage) so it's not unprecedented. edit: oops, forbidden fist self-damage scales by ability tier, which is even more nonstandard. sighh...

potions are considered active effects, so won't generally stack, though there are some oddities (interrupt chance and hit->crit, graze->hit, miss->graze stack on independently) in particular, druid's nature's bounty buffs won't stack with similar active effects. pretty redundant with frenzy (aside from perception). though you still get healing.

no i think link is broken by using suppress affliction to supress the debuff on your allies, and then what you're extending is not the buff, but extending Salvation of Time.