thelee

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)

might be worth pointing out that @Elric Galad's balance polishing mod significantly boosts corpse eater. i played a corpse-eater a while back, that was in a suboptimal MC, with gibs enabled (didn't know about the interaction at the time) and it certainly felt not-great even considering the further harming factors, though it had moments where it felt pretty good (and it's certainly still viable). another way to mitigate the downside is to use expensive abilities, but yeah it doesn't change the fact that the malus (more expensive abilities) is active 100% of the time and the main bonus (eating bodies) is active much, much, much less of the time, and near-0% in boss fights, and the first body you eat mostly just helps to counteract the malus, instead of being a true bonus. at least with the BPM IIRC you get much higher PL bonuses as a more pronounced and steadier bonus counteracting the malus.

oh yeah, if one does want to go corpse-eater, make sure to 'disable gibs' in game settings, or you'll have even fewer bodies to devour. +1 rage is a pretty severe malus, and you have to be in a party and build that doesn't mind the barb leaving the front lines to chow down on something. it can be fun for the flavor though (edit: no pun intended).

Checked the deck compatibility page and saw this for Deadfire: Gotta say, playing Deadfire (among other Steam games) on the go is a very attractive proposition, but I'm not sure I'm willing to drop $400 USD just to wait some indetermine amount of time to try it out. So thought I'd check to see if anyone here is part of the first wave of Steam Deck owners to see how Deadfire performs.

lol, probably, but i think in practice the only time that might matter is for that club in FS that scale with diplomacy. that would be where you could test it. but nothing else i believe calculates based on diplomacy skill specifically (using thresholds instead) so a negative value wouldn't be any different from a prolonged 0.

In the early days, I chose some sort of fantasy-esque name that obliquely referred to what I found on that island. ("Nexus of Friendship" i think I used for that island where you recruit a xaurip crewmember, as an example) In the later days, I chose some sort of fantasy-esque progression that corresponded to whatever "theme" my party had. (like if I had a sneaky party, they'd all be named thematically around shadows or darkness or something. A mad-scientist theme would use some sort celestial catalogue-style sequence of letters and numbers.) In my most recent run, I literally just named them "Point A" "Point B" etc in order of how I found them. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just have gotten lazy. It's hard to keep coming up with new ideas. In my next run I'll probably just resort to "First Island" "Second Island"

i literally use cloud storage for this (not steam). i used dropbox first, and now google drive. if you know anything about symlinks, you can replace the save game folder on your local machine with an identically-named symlink to your cloud storage folder where you keep your saves (and then disable steam cloud storage). way more reliable, and lets you go cross-platform with achievements and saves. if you don't want to bother (it's not bad, it's like two command line commands, something like C:\whatever>mklink /d NAME TARGETPATH in windows and $ln -s SRC TARGET in mac, i can provide more detailed steps if you need it), you can just manually copy the save folder.

streetfighter would help mitigate the effects of having heavy armor if you can keep up blunderbuss or distracted (or just dive in and get flanked). sparkcrackers works great here and can last a long time, as long as your will isn't very high; you'd have to tank resolve, which hurts riposte but having a large shield that can scale to legendary makes up for it; notably sparkcrackers also benefits from the helm. trickster is nice, especially early on, and repulsive visage would be very nice to spam. if you go that route a skaen priest would give you some extra rogue-like abilities sparing you some guile in combat, while still giving you same priest versatility (salvation of time especially); you wouldn't need as much of wael's defleciton since you can spam mirror image. i would still personally lean towards streetfighter because heavy armor without something like armored grace + other speed passives is going to be quite a hit for your action economy for wanting to DPS, and your DPS is already hurt by having a large shield (though escape, shadowing beyond, mirror image, arcane veil, llengrath's deflection, etc. all have 0 recovery so those would be OK)

just explicitly calling it out (don't know where OP's level of familiarity with the game is) that having staffs and pikes can help with crowding due to their inherent reach (one of the several advantages of aforementioned Citzal Spirit Lance), and still give you the gameplay satisfaction of staying in melee. It might help one or so extra characters operate in chokepoint/crowded situations. aforementioned instruments of pain is a similarly very helpful effect with much larger reach, but comes late compared to just picking up a staff or pike (but can work with any melee weapon). if you don't want to MC or SC one of these classes in particular, Bounding Boots are a really handy and underrated item. Two free uses of Leap per rest. Sometimes that's all you really need.

honestly imo the full set is kind of an odd fit for a strong character, because they're kinda at cross-purposes with each other. debuffer-types are going to be the ones that really want that +10 acc from the helm, and they're going to be ridiculously punished by having heavy armor and a large shield, the latter basically defeating the point of having the helm. i tend to just split the pieces up amidst my party. the only chant that would benefit from the +10 acc would be long night, so it wouldn't be that great. (a few invocations do benefit though). if you're just in it for the flavor, maybe a fighter/rogue? fighter has talents that help mitigate the downsides of hte gear (confident aim, armored grace), has a few good abilities that would enjoy the +10 acc help while tanking (mule kick, power strike) and rogue would add more such abilities while also giving you riposte to add on top of the unique large shield retribution (the high deflection from large shield and the unique bonuses would help trigger riposte as well) as well as mobility to use so you can hop around the battle field without having to toggle the large shield modal on/off (which has a cooldown)

not gonna defend TB (i think some of its issues are pretty well known and it was a late-cycle quick addition) here, but just wanted to chime on interdiction: in my mind, daze is not effective because of -5 might (as you find, it will really be small amounts of damage so is only useful as a prolonged effect), but because of -4 PEN and lack of engagement. -4 PEN can occasionally be dramatically life-saving damage reduction (especially against casters), and lack of engagement similarly vital for survival. The rough rounding cutoffs for TB mode probably might make it much harder to take advantage of though. But interdiction does also suffer in RTwP from having such a short duration, but might be enough to flee or cripple a caster. (In TB mode you'd need a heroic amount of intellect and scaling to get interdiction to last more than one round due to that rough rounding cutoff.)

do you stay invisible with the disengagement attacks? that'd be nice

if you're not opposed to hiring an extra mercenary just for this fight, get a druid who has hold beasts and charm beasts. that'll really help things along.

this is the most reccurrent theory and one that doesn't really have an obvious contradiction, so it's something that seems relatively plausible to me. it's also uniquely a theory that doesn't involve someone having already bought the game. personally i really enjoyed the polynesian/age-of-sail setting, but maybe there was a bit better way to handle it when talking about it to the playerbase than "PIRATES". i'd be curious to know of the players who put off by their perception of the setting, what they ended up thinking about it after they actually played it (including yourself). did it end up being ok? not nearly as off-putting? or just as off-putting and you played through it despite it? or too distasteful and you gave up? i have a weak hypothesis that for most players who were put off by it, it wasn't nearly as bad as they thought it was going to be, which would say a lot of how important the right messaging/first-impression is.

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.