thelee

yes. it's a neat and subtly powerful effect. for example, if you have the special axe from SSS, you can turn any might inspiration into energized just by rapidly switching into it repeatedly, and it won't cost you anything. as another example, if you like micromanagement, you can switch into a large shield right after each attack, and back to a normal weapon before your next attack comes up, maximizing your defenses without costing you offense (this is much easier to do consistently on turn-based mode). as another example, for trash fights you can load of 3 out of 4 weapon slots with guns and just switch through them real fast and not worry about reloading before settling on your final slot for the rest of the fight. still another example, load up a couple weapon slots with xbow/arbalest with their modal. if you need to interrupt someone, switching to one of those, fire it off, and switch back to a normal weapon. something to consider is there's an SSS medium armor that gives you -1% recovery time penalty bonus per poitn of athletics. it has increasing returns. with a fighter (who starts off with some athletics), maxed atheltics investment, and some gear with bonus athletics, combined with armored grace, you can have decent protection while also being super fast. (i think i got xoti as a monk up to a -25% armor recovery penalty which pretty much cancels out the medium armor penalty on its own; a fighter with starting athletics and the right background and the chameleon ring [fighters get +1 athletics] should be able to even better, plus also has armored grace)

if you want power creep, make xoti single-class monk, get ajumaat's stalking cloak, and spam whispers of the wind in fights (backed up by dance of death for wound regen). she'll be a one-woman fighting machine. she can basically bring down one of the megabosses by herself without much effort (hauane o whe). [her monk subclass is a bit meh but is actually really useful in this setup because each kill will give you a burst of wounds to help instantly funnel more whispers of the wind] if you want ascendant to go full Goku, get Salvation of Time on a priest. It requires a bit of paying attention, but once you get ascended, spam salvation of time on your cipher a few times and just toss out all your top damage and shred spells (death by 1000 cuts + a multi-hit shred power like mental blades or antipathetic field, tons of amplified wave [or silent scream or mind wave for more death by 1000 cuts synergy]). make sure you have real good dexterity and try resting with rum or rymsjogga lager for extra speed.

Do we have the emergence of some new anti-Dorudugan tech here... It's pretty easy to lower Dorudugan's reflex defense (flail plus the ever-useful arkemyr's wondrous torment), plus shock is its lowest defense. on a SC priest with a scroll of avenging storm (and maybe a potion of perfect aim, depending on whose attack roll is used), would you be able to pelt out enough shock damage with spark the souls and effort with a party of 5 to wipe it out before avenging storm wears off?

yeah i completely forgot that OP was a berserker. in that case, you're mostly just getting baseline CON from frenzy with possibility of upside.

since you ruled out some other monk subclasses, my suggestion is maybe the con overlap isn't a big deal. iron wheel should still give you an AR bonus, regardless of con stacking, which is extremely handy. you can think of the con overlap this way: at low wounds, frenzy gives you a baseline con bonus at high wounds, you still get a net gain over frenzy via iron wheel (up to +5) in situations where there are CON afflictions going around, iron wheel keeps granting you con bonuses, even though frenzy will keep losing its CON inspiration so while it doesn't sound synergistic, it's also not really an anti-synergy either. that being said: the might bonus from the helwalker subclass is passive, so will stack with frenzy. you can easily max out might to 35 with helwalker + barb. the duality modal is weird because it really feels like a passive ability, but it's on the left side of the ability tree, so it doesn't stack with similar bonuses. same thing happens with paladin auras and fighter stances.

interesting. that means even the partial PEN bonuses from scaling can be useful, so long as the enemy has partial AR or you have .75 PEN. i thought the game just truncated everything.

this is roughly what i would recommend. i posted a build here that's hella fun, uses the energized invocation, and has a focus in explosives: unfortunately, even on story mode you won't be able to get away with doing *only* explosives or even a majority, but you can focus on it and get good utility out of it. interestingly, the cinder bomb is particularly useful for many reasons, but one of them is that the initial explosion automatically interrupts, no hit roll. so even if you suck at explosives, throwing a cinder bomb in the middle of a fight can be really useful because it'll mass interrupt a bunch of foes. obv if you do invest in explosives, actually hitting with the blind and the debuff is useful, and it also scales other bombs real well (implosion, frost, and shock are the ones that i use with high level explosion)

careful: bellower power level bonus only applies to chanter invocations (not even chanter chants). it didn't seem clear that you understood this distinction. a few abilities have their projectile counts fixed at a hard number and don't scale. Thrice Was She Wronged is one of them. it is still very good for a bellower because the bonus PL can help with penetration (on top of the accuracy and damage). eld nary benefits hugely from empowerment and bellower, but only for bellower in turn-based mode. In RTWP, the bellower buff doesn't last long enough (and the bounce is so slow) that you actually lose the buff and the bonus PL before you even get to the best part of the extra PL (the extra bounces). pretty sure this is also fixed. at this point a bellower gets some nice damage and PEN and acc bonuses, so missing out on extra projectiles isn't bad (+25% dmg, +1.25 PEN, +5 ACC) in terms of damage invocations, white wurms is also very good. it will. one of my fun late game tricks was, with sasha's singing scimitar enchanted with full phrases, was to get to 3 phrases somehow (starting off with far from defeated which grants +3 phrases is one way) and empower "her revenge" to get at least +17 PL invocation (+8 from all the ability tiers you unlocked above tier 1, +1 from prestige, +5 from empower, +3 from bellower) and then you get refreshed up to full phrase count to do another invocation (sometimes i'd do "her revenge" again just because of how fast it is and its repeat hits) with +7 PL from phrase count.

what a neat build, i never though to try make those on-death effects worthwhile. I believe it's Shroud of the Phantasm, which is great for other reasons as well.

just to add on to my last post: intellect is all around useful, i consider it an S-tier stat on virtually ever build, but on some classes it's lower and closer to equal footing as dexterity dexterity is a king stat in RTWP. especially for DPS, it's close to a 3% true damage multiplier. even for non-DPS, being responsive in fights is extremely valuable. perception and might are roughly similar in terms of effectiveness for pure offense - they translate to about a 2% true damage multiplier. on lower difficulties, might is more effective. on higher difficulties, perception is more effective. both become less effective as the game goes on, especially perception (eventually when you have 100% chance to hit/crit, the returns are pretty small). (edit: for offensive casters, there are few other damage bonuses, so might's effectiveness doesn't drop off as much as it does for weapon-based classes.) ideally you want to balance these out (for the same reason to the fact that to maximize the area of a quadrangle with a fixed perimeter, you prefer a square instead of a rectangle), but there are some cases where a class might want more of one than the other: for barbarians, because carnage only happens on a hit (not all the time), perception actually gives super-linear returns to barbarians up to a certain point, so barbarians want to invest in perception more rangers already have tons of accuracy bonuses, so perception is less valuable. for healer casters, might is more important for debuff casters, perception is more important etc resolve and constitution both get a bit of the short-shrift because they're defensive stats and defensive isn't how you win fights. resolve has increasing returns so in certain builds can be infinitely powerful. i tend to prefer stealing points out of resolve over stealing points from constitution since on potd i want my squishies to be able to survive incidental spells or hits (i also get frequently get Tough). edit: there are always exceptions/nuances plus the stats aren't strongly thresholded so it's hard to end up with a bad build, so don't feel like these are ironclad rules. for example, some casters might want to do with less dexterity in favor of other stats, since while being responsive (and avoiding interrupts) is good, for some casters all high dexterity means is that you just run out of spells faster, whereas putting those points into might/perception will make those same spells (albeit slower) individually more impactful. at the same time, there are a couple of items that really want you to have 25 might, so if you want to take a particularly item-flavored build, investing heavily in might at teh expense of other stats might make sense to you.

whoa whoa, hold on there. in turn-based mode, many ppl have argued that dex isn't that useful, especially for casters. edit: i haven't done much turn-based so i can't speak it to personally, but it seems like the main advice these days. in real-time mode, dex is still basically a king stat (shared with intellect).

a glass cannon build would be pretty good for staff and pikes, a build i used to do a lot back in the poe1 days. make sure you have a good tank with good engagement and you can reach over their shoulder to safely output a lot damage. drop constitution lower than you'd like without fear and invest in dex, perception. (i'd suggest dropping resolve too but resolve is used for some in-game chat resolutions. though most dialogue checks use your actual passive skills.) rogues in particular do well with this at-distance approach, especially streetfighter, since they can output a lot of damage and they tend not to be very tough. many quarterstaffs do fall into "stat stick" territory and are geared for casters or spellswords, but i like to use street sweeper a lot - the cleansing ability is real nice in harder fights. you can enchant it to only cleanse away buffs, but i frankly find the cleansing of debuffs to also be useful if a party member gets his with something bad, i can whack them a few times. pikes are also good, especially their weapon proficiency modal, which is an easy way to lower deflection. ngati's tusk has a sweeeeet effect (lowers enemy defenses based on your survival). it's part of my anti-megaboss toolkit.

big difference is that every bolt from avenging storm would restore phrases (3 or all). for longer fights, tekehu just becomes a super-machine, whereas revenge is a one-shot. too bad he doesn't get summons.

Tekehu SC chanter just suddenly became an S-tier companion 😮

did you free the slaves, or just kill the slavers? did you ever talk to aeldys (before a shrewd proposition)?

i always try to have some sort of fun thematic selection for my mainchar and build around that. frequently I use magic: the gathering color pie and color combos to guide it. a little bit similar to you i end up trying to have 2 front-liners, 1 mixed role (can do melee or ranged), and 2 safe-in-the-back. I slot my protagonist in there; if it's one of the double-roles i pick an NPC to complement any gaps and help flesh out that category. generally i'm not picky about the specific *type* of role (e.g. dd vs cc, off-tank vs melee dps), so long as i have enough damage output that battles don't crawl to a halt. I allow myself one mercenary just so I can get a little bit more fun character planning done in a given run without necessarily blowing out the difficulty by over-min-maxing my entire party. (and also sometimes it's hard to fill out the roles with just obsidian npcs given a particular mainchar. in particular, there's basically no priests, so if i need support i might roll a merc priest or other support char instead of using xoti for the umpteenth time) edit: in the past i've tried mixing up the mix a bit more, e.g. more melee, but in practice i have issues just managing 3 or more melee-ers (incl animal companions from a ranger) with the choke points i like to use in dungeons; invariably one might end up not operating at good efficiency because they can't reach somewhere. though these days i'm much better about investing in things like leap, charge, escape, etc (or using items that grant those abilities) so maybe it's worth mixing it up again...

there are gear and weapons that offer synergies for various casters. have you considered a fury? there's deltro's cage, there's a halberd that gives +storm PL. at high levels, an SC fury (or any druid) could also just do avenging storm with one of the blunderbusses that has a bounce (e.g. kitchen stove with wild shot + avenging storm => damage king thanks to 4x shots bouncing around to three targets, each potentially triggering a bolt. avenging storm should have decent duration on TBM)

you don't have to do an all-MC or all-SC party, you can mix and match. just saying. that being said, I would not read too much into your experience on the first island; on the first island with PotD the battles are extremely hard and a bit overtuned... but in a way where certain builds can absolutely stomp or suffer and it doesn't reflect accurately for the rest of the game, where everyone gets more options and your gear becomes better. for example, an SC druid with charm beasts/hold beasts pretty much wrecks the digsite but that's more an accident of how the encounters in that area are designed and not truly representative of their typical power level (at least until you get greater maelstrom). Similarly, a debonaire will absolutely wreck gorecci st with their charm ability, but that's also not representative of their typical power level.

tbf the shattered pillar wound limit is not a great design imo, if we're talking about balance changes. while there's something to be said about being able to generate wounds without drugs or getting hurt, as a whole package just from being unable to max out the +intellect/lash or +con/ar is a huge penalty to the class.

i feel like there's still a market out there for "isometric" party-based CRPGs, but maybe it's extremely superficial: WOTR & Wasteland 3 [both "nostalgia"-esque continuations] are in full 3D. 2D

to that point, fig backers never recouped their money. when MSFT bought OBS, fig backers got a tiny bit of a final payout as they were basically bought out, but they never got to see the long tail of sales drips that eventually put Deadfire into the black.

I also think MC has a lot more variance in power level. It’s hard to do a bad SC, but I think you could easily build an MC that is a bit confused or suboptimal. But you could also come upon a really synergistic MC that blows the socks off a typical SC. what difficulty did you play on?

This is an interesting and more convincing reframing of some old grouches. What puzzles me though, is that Tyranny outsold Deadfire for quite a while along comparable timelines, and Tyranny is wildly different from the typical CRPG nostalgia path. What do you think might account for the difference?

it's still not fixed because it was introduced in some of the last patches at the end of deadfire's support life cycle. i really hope obsidian got some decent extra sales out of adding turn-based mode for their sake, because it destabilized the game and they didn't leave enough of a support runway afterwards. edit: in PoE, they broke traps fundamentally at some point and it never got fixed. I was doing what you were doing some years back, shouting into the wind and begging for a dev to fix it. Major unpatched bugs are one thing, but it's even worse when it's broken in a way that it can't be modded with a fix.

so i guess this gives me a better hook into your line of thinking. if it were me, i think i'd focus less on direct equivalences with abilities as they are costed now, and go with my "intuitive" sense of 1-common [and basically very few abilities past tier 3 should be a 1 just on a power-level sense], 2-powerful, 3-encounterchanging. for me this gives an immediate sense of what abilities are too expensive or too weak without resorting to cross-class equivalencies. the only pickle is with phrases, wounds, and focus, because they're unique. i honestly have no idea. with wounds you could probably actually try to quantify it based on dance with death, which gives you 1/wound per 3s with a major caveat to work around, so you could frame it as "how often should a vanilla monk be able to do X ability if you're optimized for it" which is still extremely intuitive, but that's what i got. focus a similar logic but based on expected damage output at various points in the game with vanilla weapons (hypothetically scaling similarly to in-game summoned weapons). phrases no idea, i just have an intuitive sense that some invocations are way too expensive for the benefit (like that high-tier dazing shout).* * complete side note, i thought the invocation "his heart did fill with the light of dawn" (+1 class resource in an area) was hopelessly overcosted for its effect, but it wasn't until a recent run where i realized what this really means is that your tier 9 casters can cast 2x (or 3x with empower point) their game-ending tier 9 spells at the start of a fight. in practice it's almost certainly an ability that's only ever meant to be used once, and not in the middle of a fight, so in that sense there's actually no fair cost for it because you automatically have enough phrases to use it instantly.