thelee

it's been a while and it's in an older notepad so i'm not quite certain overall, but i'm almost 100% sure i was a hearth orlan who maxed perception (with white that wends), with intellect as second-highest stat (maybe at lowest 15, but probably 16). 21 perception is pretty much my standard for mainchar these days, because it makes megabosses so much easier. the endgame plan for a beastmaster is to take advantage of all that accuracy (up to +50) and spam embrace the earth talon on dorudugan and hauane o whe. don't need to worry about all the technical aspects of a megaboss fight if they're perma-paralyzed. (edit: it's a bit more complicated then that [you also need to debuff resolve especially], but +40-50 accuracy makes all the other math easier)

for beastmaster it's all about that (ranger) accuracy and that bonus AR. bonus accuracy is great for landing good spells for any MC. shifter boar/cat form are already extremely powerful, extreme accuracy makes it extremely easy to overcome possibly the main weakness early on on PotD which is a lack of tools for a shifter to overcome enemy AR (crits do a great job of doing that) or high defenses. stalker's bonus AR propels all shifter forms to heavy armor tier, and bear form to exceptional heavy armor, all with no recovery penalty and no AR weaknesses, and combined with autoscaling is quite a huge leg-up in early PotD survival, whereas normally you're stuck with limited amounts of vanilla heavy armor (which still has various AR weaknesses) or upgraded medium armor for much of the rough early-mid game. coupled with the bonus deflection and add in a woodskin at the start of the fight and formerly scary foes are barely hurting you. Family Pride, for example, is an extremely rough quest if you take it on relatively early and do a non-pacifist take, and I ended up stomping the bardattos and valeras into the ground without breaking a sweat, propelled almost solely on the back of my beastmaster. (i'm doing a SC shifter now and while it's still powerful especially with single-class ability progression, not having the bonus acc and AR really does make it a bit rougher by comparison. kind of hard to express how much of a difference just +1 AR can do, especially on bear form where it can likely put enemies from -50 to -75% damage malus, which is a halving of damage done) ward ranges are limited, yes, so I had to periodically re-cast them to reposition at times. It was fine for me - for that build I typically didn't have barbarian abilities outside of frenzy for much of the game, so I felt free to re-cast wards. If wards are re-cast, the ward that gets vanished doesn't trigger the "destruction" penalty for the furyshaper.

i did a beastmaster build and it was so effective, i actually got bored of it and re-rolled, so take that what you may i would actually suggest furyshaper, but only because i'm a berserker skeptic because of the malus. i had a furyshaper/stalker and it was real effective. barbarians are special because they get much more returns out of perception/accuracy than other classes. Because carnage only triggers on a hit (and then has to roll itself again), you actually have n^2 returns from accuracy at first, rather than the typical sub-linear returns... and unlike other scenarios where accuracy drops off in effectiveness once you have enough, barbarians can get a passive that lets them interrupt on crits, which in my opinion keeps the practical effectiveness of sky-high accuracy quite high. so the huge accuracy from a ranger won't go to waste. bonus AR and deflection can help you withstand the -15 -10 def penalty of frenzy (bonus AR goes great with Thick Skin barbarian passive), and eventually (if you want) you can upgrade Hunter's Claw to give you defensive bonuses (which I did).

a fun trick i did early on was use it in conjunction with a large shield modal. the immobility doesn't matter much when you can hop around the battlefield and you get huuuge defenses as a result (massive deflection bonus from large shield, temporary even larger boost from escape, plus the massive damage reduction from the modal). good for tanking in a pinch (or on a character like eder, just a great tanking solution when facing down a bunch of enemy rogue archers).

FYI in case it wasn't clear, unbroken still gets bonus engagement and bonus to engagement attacks even without a shield. I've actually contemplated using unbroken without a shield for this reason (though usually i prefer blackjacket).

last time i checked in vanilla (was pre-5.0), in the combat log i see critical hits, but the effect doesn't change at all for carnage. same thing for grazes - still same effect. so it "crits," but whatever carnage does doesn't interact with anything else related to crits. (carnage really is its own thing)

I think difficulty matters here a lot because of extra/upgraded mobs on PotD? What is OP playing on? Even if fighters get extreme engagement counts, on PotD+upscaling hold, in practice for me positioning makes it extremely hard for a single beefy character to protect all the squishies (and Into The Fray has terrible hit rate early on), unless there's a doorway. Two beefy characters can generally suffice though. i generally tend to slot in a third character, while not really a tank or off-tank, can at least survive some melee punishment for a little bit for cases like the fampyr fights mentioned upthread or when you're just being flanked from all directions in a street encounter, so they can keep the even squishier party members still standing. I occasionally do this, but only really mid-late game when the person I'm peeling off actually has enough tools at their disposal to survive being so isolated, or if it's temporary. Most common example is simply just a rogue or other melee-dps type diving straight for a critical caster, though sometimes in some dungeons I just need a character to take an alternate route to engage the enemy because they're blocked off and I don't have leap or something. (though now that i'm using druid more, druid has enough close-range spells worth using that i find myself leap-ing or running around on their own more often for optimal targeting) but again, only mid-late game really. early on, my rogue trying to take out a skeletal sorcerer will get hit by one arrow and lose half their health and they don't have any escape or evasion skills. only rarely worth it.

well to my confusion, carnage does technically crit, it just doesn't do anything special

carnage as well or no?

is this really the case? i double-checked my guide for my notes and what i have there is actually a confusing mishmash, so i'm not so sure (and i need to clean up those notes). for some reason my current understanding is that blood frenzy/storm only procs on weapon attacks (based on my understanding that carnage crits doesn't trigger it). I know spirit frenzy (but not spirit tornado) works on spell hits (incl carnage).

(assuming you mean arcane knight here) if you're including tactician for discussion, then i would say a battlemage no question. if for whatever reason tactician is out of consideration, then i'd defer to ppl with more solo experience, but battlemage still seems strong if less obviously so (you'll be mostly doing casting and fighter offers more assistance to casting than paladin does)

yeah i would start by just making a copy of one of the default cipher scripts. then, if you find it too spammy or doing an ability that you're constantly changing/cancelling, going in and tweaking whatever conditions are controlling that ability (the default AI scripts probably don't do anything overly tricky and so there's only one obvious rule controlling that ability). that's probably a lot more incremental and less immediately overwhelming approach than starting from scratch. it could even just be a simple matter of increasing the timeout (little number at the top-right of each rule that tells you how many seconds before it tries the rule again). edit: i program for a day job and played FF12 (gambits) so i'm used to thinking in kind of the way that AI scripts force you to think, but even then it's hard to predict what rules might be actually useful in practice. as a result, most of my scripts are honestly just copies and tweaks of existing scripts that have just gradually gotten more complicated over time, incrementally. the plus is that any changes you make to AI scripts are saved separately from your saved game - so sometimes if I'm in the middle of wiping on a fight, i'll make some tweaks to an AI script then, and when I reload I'll be able to try a fight with the changes already in place.

i have a really hard time micro-ing ciphers if they're not my mainchar (which i naturally pay more attention to as a personal psychological bias). i put on an AI script, even if it's suboptimal, because when serafen (or ydwin) starts doing something, it's very obvious, and is a great time for me to be like: do I want this to happen? if not, i pause the game and change what they're doing if i do, i just let it happen and thank the AI script for using focus that would've just been wasted so i would personally recommend setting up an AI script, even if it's just the default (though honestly I would copy it and add in an appropriate minimum focus requirement, because by default the scripts are way too spammy and don't let focus accumulate). though personally i don't know what the big deal with mind blades is

yeah, forgot to chime in that aside from the weapons summon and the dragon summon (for SC), getting 100% uptime on summons isn't really worth the bellower's time. i would also be careful since it hasn't been explicitly mentioned - the bellower PL boost is a temporary buff that appears on your character and expires after a few seconds, which means the "Eld Nary" is almost a trick choice for a bellower despite looking great on paper - the projectile and bounce in RTwP is soooo slow that the PL bonus will expire before you get the best benefit from PL scaling (the extra bounces). On turn-based mode, it's awesome though (since you're guaranteed to have a PL buff that lasts a round, and your guaranteed that your invocation ends before advancing rounds).

i mean i agree with sharidian; there was certainly one game-breakingly good hunting bow (persistence), but the vast majority of hunting bows were too niche because of how vulnerable they were to DR. it's been a while, but istr that you were just better off using warbows most of the time. i remember having to make a conscious mental adjustment in deadfire to using hunting bows as a damage machine.

you should check out that link in my post the tl;dr is that mig is less relevant because of essentially a math bug. because ApplyOnTime is so weird, the game has to figure out a per-tick damage, and it divides your MIG bonus by the number of base ticks, and then accidentally divides it again by the number of ticks. So your might bonus is significantly diluted by the base duration of the effect. Intellect and PL scaling work normally though.

I put it in my guide, but there are so few that I can just try listing them off the top fo my head (there are so few that it almost just seems like a bug that these were all applyovertime instead of applyontick) priest cleansing flame cipher disintegrate rogue deep wounds ranger wounding shot edit: whoops, forgot about druid taste of the hunt

wael + rogue (streetfighter in my case), wael + fighter (a monastic unarmed training build) remains some of the most enjoyable builds i've done from a MC/priest perspective. you'll do less buffing, because you'll be burning spell casts on Arcane Veil and Mirror Image a lot for massive protection. getting gaze of the adragan and arkemyr's wondrous torment at high levels are also fun. skaen works for a martial multiclass, but honestly i'm a bit burned out on the subclass because of my deadfire ultimate run so i don't have specific recommendations for it. it sounded like you were interested in eothas, though, and honestly eothas doesn't offer as much for offensive martial multiclassing. i did try eothas with a paladin (kind wayfarers) as well as with a beckoner, and it was pretty acceptable play for both, you just give up on some direct offense in favor of indirect offense. though given your preferred stat spread, maybe the latter two are angles you want anyway (my beckoner wielded a shield and acted as kind of an off-tank with lots of support spells, so missing out on e.g. might and accuracy wasn't a big deal because most of my power came from lots of summons). both of these will definitely work. i'm also going to put a plug in for Bellower. Not as much flexibility/cheese potential as a troubadour, but can do some insane things with all the extra PL you get on invocations, and the flexibility/cheese potential loss is somewhat made up for by being MC with a priest. ascendant with SoT is also good, but can also get a bit boring. you pretty much only really get much use out of ascending once you have salvation of time (otherwise the focus efficiency isn't nearly as great as a single class) and non-trivial fights can play out extremely same-y once you unlock that spell. almost literally any priest build will be viable for megabosses so long as you have a combination of brilliant, barring death's door, salvation of time. they will basically carry your party. you need some special handling for auranic and hauane's cleansing effects, but a priest puts you on extremely strong foundation.

The fire sword is pretty good with the ring of focused flame (lets you cancel out the acc penalty of the weapon modal) and the fire PEN passive. Also, as someone who basically played a melee sorcerer recently, it's not that you don't do spiritshift, it's that spiritshift lasts like a fraction of the fight before you can do wall of draining. Summoned weapons fill in the gap pretty well (better, depending). I maintain that shifter is not a great pick for a melee-oriented sorcerer. some of the summoned weapons on the wizard side are bonkers compared to shifting, and in practice i find that not being able to cast while shifted *is* a major hindrance (i'm playing a SC shifter now). My sorcerer could freely cast buffs like Arcane Veil, Ironskin, etc. or close-range/centered aoes like torrent of flame, piercing burst, etc. while still in spiritshift form. As shifter, it's a deliberate decision of risk to leave the protection of spiritshift form in order to cast again. For some forms, it comes with potentially quite the opportunity cost (losing the regen of boar form, the extra AR of bear form, or the defenses of stag form).

shape shifting doesn't last very long without wall of draining later, so maybe you're better off with summoned weapons? fast-casting buffs from wizard, maybe summoned weapons, or use the fiery sword from the druid along with that ring that gives +10 fire accuracy. taste of the hunt is a great choice for this, but conflicts with the fiery sword. nature's terror comes later and is also a good supplement. robust at tier three or the lightning storm spells (relentless or returning) also fun. normally shifter is considered to be real good at shape shifting, but i think would conflict way too much with this build, since it bars any spell casting while spell shifted (including taste of the hunt). i think vanilla animist is fine, but you could also mod her to be a fury, giving up the healing for better fiery sword/nature's terror/storm dynamics.

i tried it on potd, in a "fair" way, and it seemed basically impossible, at least as a normie with casual-levels of APM. enemies front load their attacks, which makes it extremely important to be responsive in the early moments of fights, and things could snowball out of control if you couldn't respond; at least with vanilla AI scripting, it became increasingly harder to pull this off. magran's challenge is basically a cheese or pacifist challenge IMO. (this is diffeerent from turn-based mode, which remains a mode of play that i 've been meaning to play; turn-based with 6 second time pressures sounds interesting). edit: what does not help is that deadfire, even on my relatively new and shiny gaming pc build (3700x + 6900 xt), stutters in certain situations (e.g. anytime a mirror image effect happens). the game is still going on even as the frames drop. in rtwp i can just hit spacebar and wait for the frames to settle. in magran's challenge a stutter is basically a recipe for disaster (especially if i was mid-click).

It should be the same - you're definitely verifying that you're not just missing (via combat log)? There is a very occasional issue with effects that travel like that, where the AoE that gets drawn when you're aiming doesn't precisely correspond to the reality of the level geography. The most common culprit are elevation changes - the drawn AoE definitely doesn't take into account inclines or elevation changes, but for many traveling effects a slight elevation bump will really change how it goes. A related and less common, but still damning, issue is that obstacles that don't affect the drawn AoE may still affect the actual spell effect. I haven't used twin stones nearly as much as other spells, so there may be bugs unique to it, but the few times I used it, it functioned like PoE1/

What would the general contours of the challenge be? I'm interested, but between kids and work I am not exactly swimming in free time.

The constellations will light up permanently. It's funny that you're complaining about the timed/Eothas one, because I think the Magran's challenge (no pausing) is by far the worst. On turn-based mode I can kinda get behind it, but is absolutely bonkers for anything other than story mode.

Just as reference, Dorudugan literally has something like 10,000 health on PotD. hauane o whe can literally have effectively infinite health if you’re not adequately prepared. i get there’s a certain satisfaction of going in blind and winning, but many players collectively have spared you the headache by figuring out the mega bosses and sharing info about it. You do you, but I don’t think it’s weakness to do your due diligence, in the same vein as planning your character in advance: All my characters/parties since the mega bosses are explicitly planned so they have viable options against all the mega bosses; it’s just a part of my character planning. (As a result, my need to ensure certain debuffs land consistently has over time made perception a king stat, in counter to typical stat advice.)