thelee

i agree. in base game, there's only like one decent dungeon that you can stumble on in the islands, the woedica temple. it kinda takes the fun out of random exploration if 99% of what you see is a single encounter. it lowers the stakes of visiting a random spot. we don't need a 15-level dungeon again, but a couple more woedica temples, even at the cost of existing dungeons in nekataka, would've been nice. you know, i agree that weapon identity pretty much disappears by mid-game, if it ever had a strong impact to begin with (aside from club, flail, morningstar). maybe they could've exaggerated base item differences more in this vein. but ultimately, i think this is a "good" thing in the sense that unique items are special. it makes looting exciting, whereas in poe1 there was an endless list of magical items that were nothing special (including backer-made ones) that you couldn't already do with your own enchantments. i'm not sure there's a good example of a game meaningful unique items and differentiate based item types. in the end, it doesn't matter is a d4 weapon or a d12 weapon if it has a killer ability.

if you're talking about the final number you see in your combat log, then no it doesn't matter. it only matters if it's something that gets multiplied by a crit and is just enough to get you to that threshold for overpenetration bonus damage. it does matter, mostly. For DoTs, damage ticks on application, and every 3s, and then there's one last tick of any remaining duration that properly pro-rates the damage done. any non-whole numbers accumulate and every time that's enough to qualify for an additional full point of damage or healing, it'll do so on the next tick. Stacking effects accumulate any rougness across the stack (so 1.5/tick and 1.5/tick will properly result in a 2x stack that does 3/tick). For effects like Meteor Swarm or Relentless Storm or Chill Fog or Garden of Life, there are no partial hazard ticks or partial projectiles, but they also vary a lot in what kinds of effects they spawn so it's a little harder to come up with a general rule (missile salvo spawns tons so it's very sensitive to duration changes, whereas returning storm just spawns once/six seconds which leaves a pretty brutal cutoff).

yeah i tried a bit (not extensively) last night and could not replicate it. probability being what it is, i can't say for certain (was just playing, not testing, so i still need to carve out some time to do it), but i wonder if something else happened that got conflated with the devotions cast. or maybe the naga were just far enough away despite the cramped quarters.

i actually don't think so. the accuracy bonus seems to be ignored on that limitation, and the fight where this happened was the hasongo fight where there's two naga inside a building trying to break in - it's pretty cramped quarters and i actually interrupted them both with a single devotions. needs more testing probably but i haven't had the time yet.

something I just discovered--don't know if this is common knowledge--that may be useful here, is azure blade. you can enchant it to have a 25% chance to interrupt if you have enough allies nearby, in addition to +10 accuracy. what I discovered is that this chance to interrupt affects anything, not just the stiletto attack. I actually ended up interrupting some enemies with the debuff portion of Devotions for the Faithful, which is how i discovered this. So if you have summons or can keep some friends close by, this will help your non-crits interrupt as well.

for tb-mode it seems to me that less that there's a problem with trash fights, but that there are still lots more fights than a pure tb game might have (i feel like a tb game would make more effort for there to be alternate outcomes instead of a lot of unavoidable ambushes following dialogue) *and* it's a lot more bullet spongey. in rtwp a decent amount of tankiness can be ok to make sure you keep your offenses up, but in tb-mode if the fight is already inevitably won at a certain point it's just a tedious waste of time.

Try: just using a premade script for a while, and every time a character does an ability does something you don't want it to, take a look in the AI script, find out what's making that ability happen, and tweak it somehow. If you're just trying to completely script out your character at once, I would get overwhelmed a lot and I program as my day job. It's also impossible to really predict what will end up being useful. Also, like @crdvis16says, you don't have to automate everything, just the important stuff. There's a lot of abilities in the AI scripts, but most of them won't ever be relevant; the AI script just starts with the top ability, and if it's not there, moves on to the next. So there's tons of abilities because they wanted to the AI scripts to be useful for most players, and so they stuffed tons of abilities in there for a narrow set of triggers. A more typical AI script for me is just one that checks to see if the character has a perception inspiration, and if not, uses Tactical Barrage, with a 10s cooldown. One ability controlled by a comprehensible use case.

Just in case you hadn' seen it, druid is a great MC for this because druid has tons of spells that proc a lot (wizard has a bunch too, but things like venombloom or nature's terror proc multiple times per tick). i would also recommend bombs and helm of the white void with an SC chanter. then you could use the "long night" chant at +10 acc which helps land the crits, and bombs give you a parallel way to crit and interrupt (some bombs trigger hazard effects that proc repeatedly for potentially more crits)

hahaha i never experienced this one, what a gem

tactician + priest of skaen. @Not So Clever Hound nails it. I saved my skin (and sometimes it was a necessary thing) to withdraw vela and myself, to trigger health gen and brilliant. enemy AI is a little wonky when it comes to berath's and invisibility, so sometimes even invisibility was not enough to de-aggro and trigger brilliant, but withdraw tended to be more foolproof if i could get out of range.

To elaborate, invisibility is still useful even if it can’t reset fights (though with tactician you effectively reset a fight with brilliant) but most importantly Skaen gets withdraw as well. Ultimate (and Hylea’s) challenge requires you to protect Vela, and the least RNG way to do that is with casts of withdraw. (Unlike normal solo play Eothas challenge prevents you from resting to refresh vendor inventory for withdraw scrolls). Withdraw/Invis are such immensely useful tools for the Ultimate that I find it hella impressive everyone who did it without access to both (even SC bloodmage, however powerful that is, is gonna have a headache with Vela and no reload option).

unfortunately the stag isn't good at this - the carnage ability is only a once/encounter attack, not something like what the barbarian has. i just checked this, and it only interrupts the primary target.

Jeeeez this has been bothering me for so long, because I thought the ability was randomly bugged. What an odd effect!

you know i actually don't know if the aoe itself interrupts - funnily enough i only really use stag form 1:1 (because it's low on my priority list and there's not many enemies left at that point... cat form and boar form rock). i need to actually double check that.

Was working on a guide update and had this very small note that I felt is worth sharing. It's kind of common knowledge that the stag form gets a really lame-seeming "carnage" ability that actually is nothing like barbarian carnage; instead of like in poe1 lasting for a while and actually functioning like a barbarian's carnage, it's a single attack that does miniscule aoe damage. a lot of people (including myself) wrote it off completely. in my current shifter run, i noticed that the stag's carnage actually interrupts on hit. so it actually is useful, if not necessarily super powerful. this extra tidbit is enough that i actually think stag is better than a wolf (who gets a single-target prone knockdown, but a potentially less-useful passive IMO). on a shifter especially, being able to rapidly switch between wolf and stag to do both knockdown and stag carnage on an annoying caster is quite handy.

yeah this is the ticket. inspirations from least unstable coil are considered "passive" and will stack with anything else, even other identical inspirations.

yeah, I think a lot of players have to make peace with the fact that difficulty is a very, very wide spectrum for the player audience. Obsidian has said that their most common complaints about their game are: "it's too easy" as well as "it's too hard." I definitely am someone who thought Veteran even back in PoE1 early days was way too easy. But I've also internalized over the years that instead of complaining about difficulty, the better critical target is just making sure everyone has a good entry point. If speedy managed to find PotD a good challenge, then the fact that there are 4 easier difficulties shouldn't really matter IMO. I'm happy that the game has PotD + gods challenges for me, and I'm also happy that they have story mode and such. edit: more to the point, it's pretty commendable that the difficulties are generally well-balanced and don't "cheat" in a way that leads to other bigger problems. as past examples of bad approaches: games where increasing the difficulty gives you more experience, which also means you top-out faster and so you actually make for an easier or similar experience games like fo3/skyrim, where increasing the difficulty is a damage multiplier that is unevenly applied, resulting in companions that can do orders of magnitude more damage than yourself outer worlds, where the hardest difficulty has interesting features (like needing to manage thirst, food) but also locks it into an ironman challenge, instead of letting some of the survival challenges be available at "hard" or lower difficulties pathfinder, where on harder difficulties, enemies get high bonuses that are poorly designed (so they double-count in some situations, like for athletics rolls), which makes many gameplay types unviable for ppl who just want a challenge i'm actually impressed at how encounters actually can scale with new enemies or upgraded enemies, and that obsidian actually clearly went through with some min-maxing to make sure encounters and difficulty modifiers mostly made sense (even if sometimes i wonder what glutton for punishment decided gorecci st was a good first-ish encounter for potd ). took more work, but is a much more thoroughly well-designed game that attacks a bunch of different player skill levels. (and i've been in the poe-circuit long enough to have heard every difficulty level being played and enjoyed by players, so i'm not going to complain about story mode or normal mode balancing.)

thanks to @Theosupus for poking this thread, because I forgot where I read that the +5 might/con/dex from the chanter invocation stacks, and this helped me find it AND give me a useful hypothesis. anyway, i don't know what @abot was doing - I have a run going on right now where I'm using this invocation a lot and it definitely does not stack :(. Not with inspirations (e.g. barbarian frenzy), not with items (e.g. Taru-Taru Chew), not with other direct stat adjustments from active effects (e.g. Devotions for the Faithful). (Though not a huge loss; just getting an additional +5 constitution and +10s to duration on kill turns out to be pretty handy for a 3-chant invocation. But it does make the fact that they cease to be actual inspirations once you upgrade more of a lame bug, at least if they stacked you could have had that.) I wonder if abot was getting inspirations from a source like theosupus mentions (ring of clenched muscle's inspirations)? Similarly, Least Unstable Coil will also grant inspirations that stack with other sources. Inspirations from items are weird.

Flavor choices are one thing, but regardless of how "realistic" it is in practice to go up against a god (and keep in mind people DID successfully blow up a god in the lead-up to poe1), people generally want their protagonists to be able to effect change. I think it's amusing on an intellectual level how nothing you end up doing matters (even having Wael destroy Eothas, or bringing Waidwen to plead the case does nothing), much in the same way it's intellectually amusing that Indiana Jones has 0 impact on the outcome of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but in a less intellectual sense it's also unsatisfying. You don't have a character arc, so you're left with your impacts to judge your story, and you have zero impact on the crit path. Perhaps if the writers had put way more emphasis on the factional conflicts in the Deadfire (where you can have massive impact) and treated Eothas as a much more abstract mcguffin, or really let you make meaningful actions in personal vengeance (instead of throwaway lines), there would be less complaints about the main story. But as it is, the crit path is treated as a monumental story beat, the factions are pretty much optional, you have flavor text that takes you to the same dialogue outcomes, and so you could easily end up with an experience where you're mostly interacting with something that you have no impact on. I get why the main story is a recurring criticism. edit: i watched a game/story analysis video, and one thing that stuck with me was their claim that you can either have lots of meaningful reactivity, or you can have a strong main story. You can't have both. Everyone loves talking about FNV but it's worth pointing out that you could specify for yourself in starkly different ways the fate of New Vegas and its surroundings because anything else would make all the reactivity and impact of the rest of the game a lie. I'm not sure it's workable to have lots of places of impact in the Deadfire, but then have a main story that must end a particular way (the wheel gets destroyed). Anyone remember the controversy over the Mass Effect 3 ending? Imagine that, except you don't even have the two or three blunt choices on offer at the end. I think if the writers had been willing to let go of prescribing an ending and truly let you have on impact on the fate of the wheel and Eothas and your relationship with him/them, that would be a lot better, even if it makes a direct sequel challenging.

Sawyer also mentioned that despite the effort it had very little payoff. Some people may not talk enough to trigger relationship adjustments, other people might stumble upon a degenerate way to get two characters to hate each other within like 30 seconds. I don't know if it was the same talk, but he said he really liked how Disco Elysium ended up doing dialogue adjustments and would lean towards that approach.

Something not "external" - I think someone got their ultimate run DQ-ed because they alt-f4-ed out of a (buggy?) world map encounter that killed them and tried again. the logic being that they could've known that was a risk.

For me I think you've hit a lot of the good points. They put so much work into the engine for this game, that I really wish they could leverage that and make a PoE3, saving costs by keeping most of the internals working with some minor tweaks under the hood to polish turn-based mode or enable a few fancier graphics and faster load times. It might not be an AAA game, but "poor sales" in this context is really just a mismatch between expectations and reality. For a lower budget, the same sales could be amazing. Lord knows that Ubisoft and Arkane and Bethesda are all just using the same engine (with modifications) between their games in a similar way. I really think they could do PoE or classic BG style and just voice the main lines. While I'm impressed with how thoroughly things are voiced, I think this is culprit #1 in soaring costs (that needed high sales) and makes every little change or DLC that much more expensive to produce. I've played plenty of other recent-ish games that aren't fully voiced, and I don't feel like I've missed out that much, honestly.

I think there has only been the twelve so far. The Ultimate thread continues as long as people chime in on the Ultimate thread If the Ultimate thread hasn't had activity, then there hasn't been much activity. I would imagine it's a function of: anyone who wants to try knows what the main classes are and the metagame for that hasn't changed, and the people who did different classes (like the psion/troubadour most recent) don't appear to be forum regulars sharing their tips or video playthrough.

After 1600+ hours this is the first time I've done a combination of: - turning on Hylea's challenge (requiring you to escort and protect Vela) - having Rekke in my party as a primary companion Eventually Rekke learns common, as anyone who's used Rekke might know. What you might not know is that at one point Vela and Rekke interact and it becomes clear that Rekke is teaching Vela Seki. (in German because of my mod/I'm learning, but roughly translated: Vela: Hello Rekke: Have you returned for more Seki lessons? Vela: Do we really have to? Rekke: [something something in Seki] Vela Vela: [something something in Seki]) Just never fails to impress me how Obsidian adds these little bits of reactivity (with voice actors, no less) in extremely obscure situations that ~1% of the player base may ever encounter. (e.g. how many people have ever turned on hylea's challenge? and then played long enough with rekke for rekke to learn common?)

my only specific recommendations are stalker's link (for +10 acc and engagament), marked prey, and hunter's claw; that's a general recommendation for all rangers.