thelee

if you have high crit conversion, you might also sungrazer. i don't know which crit proc is better overall, but i've had a lot of fun clearing out rooms of trash mobs with the "on death by critical hit" proc (since it can chain with further crit hit kills).

there's no steam achievement related. they had them for poe1, but there was a bit of an outrage for achievement hunters for tying steam achievements to such an insane challenge. (disclaimer: i was one of the outraged voices. but i'm a sucker for punishment so i did them anyway.) your satisfaction is that in the magran's fire menu, those options are now checked as completed.

one thing i can say is that if you have access to illusion magic and aren't doing berath's challenge, time is definitely on your side, once you unlock access to arkemyr's brilliant departure. you can basically ditch the vast majority of fights and refresh resources once the going gets tough (though you might leave party members knocked out, since they won't revive if an enemy is in sight). to a lesser extent, fleet feet and deletrious alacrity of motion can do similar things since you can outrun most enemies and de-aggro them if needed. doesn't work in small areas though.

yeah i only call out specific spells if i think there's some very interesting to discuss, or something not obvious, both good or bad. un-listed spells may very well be good (or bad), just not as interesting to talk about. though actually the -all defenses stacking with the other stuff is interesting (and is only a relatively recent discovery, along with the chanter fear invocation that does the same thing) so maybe it's worth an update to include shining beacon in.

i would kindly argue that it's not even a case of "meh => still good". For whatever restrictions any subclass has, bonus stacking PL is such a rare gift that I'll happily take it. Even Transmutation, which gets the lamest subclass bonus, I'll happily take +2 PL to things like slicken, pull of eora, petrification. Enchantment is probably the closest to borderline because of how most of its spells benefit weakly from +2 PL, but even then there's enough stuff I like spamming at +2 PL that I'll happily take it (it also has a pretty decent subclass bonus). you obviously lose out on some cheese options depending on the school (e.g. losing conjuration=>lose wall of draining), but i'm not sure how strongly to weight that when evaluating subclasses. (e.g. blood mage loses out on least unstable coil shenanigans but is still extremely powerful)

Yes, Shining Beacon is a blast. It's easy to underestimate how much combat will swing in your favor when you have a decent DoT and everyone is much easier to hit; because of the nature of the debuff, it even stacks with more specific debuffs and afflictions (-all defenses is considered a seperate "category" from e.g. -deflection or -will, and both the former and latter are also separate from afflictions). But as you've seen, the priest is flooded with good choices at tier 4. I would just go with what "theme" your priest is angling for, and not worry if you are picking something suboptimal, because it's hard to go wrong with any of the spells you mentioned. If you still want the benefit of shining beacon without straining priest ability points, you can also craft/buy scrolls of it.

for active skills: a couple skills i highly recommend just maxing out if you plan on using them at all (arcana, explosives). but most of them can be fine with just medium, shared investing, even the ones i just suggested as candidates for maxing out. definitely don't go with many skills with smaller investment. especially on higher difficulties, you need some scaling to make abilities usable in fights. the only exception is pickpocketing, which--even if you are big pickpocketer and have the berath's blessing--you're better off with just a few points and then putting the rest in stealth.

loooooooooooool you definitely wandered into a high-level area. you should be proud of your survival! yeah the eotans have a chanter that can chant a robust inspiration to everyone, IIRC .super annoying. in one of my ultimate practice runs, i got some bad luck on a megaboss named belranga. if you don't know, the megaboss has impossibly high defenses, and to bring them down you have to kill baby spiders she keeps summoning - but as her defenses go down her power and speed increase. she also has an attack that knocks your character down and drains them for some health. i didn't have enough damage, and i killed too many baby spiders, so that i reached a point where i'd get her closer to death, but then she'd bite me and heal an enormous amount of health back up. even though i could never die with my game, it was functionally a failure, because i could also never kill her, and the ultimate means you can't just alt-f4 the game (you're supposed to record your entire run if you want official credit), so i had to just fail the run. you better believe i planned for that better in the next attempts...

figurines eventually run out. two chanters... well,

yeah at low levels, druid->pierce/burn/shock. chanter->slash (don't care about the redundant ones). combined with armor that favors blunt AR, you can cover any weaknesses and the difference between having both buffs and not is a major difference in survivability on potd i find. on early-mid potd, you pretty much need those buffs to have any effect at all, because the numbers involved need to be high to deal with early game enemy difficulty scaling on PEN when you have few options and weak items. +1 AR from upgraded pally aura or +2 AR from hardy/robust may do literally nothing for everyone at the early stages, but going up to +4 can be the critical difference in getting down to -50% damage reduction (and druid gets you up to +6). eventually chanter can upgrade and cover pierce/slash/burn/shock on their own, but druid still picks up a few other ones later on (mostly elemental).

alchemy is always a safe backup choice, because anyone can make use of healing potions and getting extra healing out of them is really handy. extra duration is nice on the other stuff, but it's not exactly world-changing the way high-level arcana can be; i don't go all-in on alchemy normally unless i have someone that i really want to take advantage of poisons or drugs (really sucks to run out of drugs in the middle of a fight). edit: for folks coming in from poe1, time is very different in deadfire. one drug with long duration could last many fights in poe1. in deadfire even with long duration, you might be hard-pressed to get more than two. it's been long enough that i don't quite remember athletics' effectiveness in poe1 anymore, but 1 or 2 points in athletics broadly is great simply because without it you don't get Second Wind at all. You get maximum return for those first two points, since having everyone with a near-instant once/encounter minor healing potion is pretty nice for easing your progress. there is one DLC armor in SSS that gives you increasing returns for investing in athletics (-1% recovery bonus per point). something to possibly consider. if you have trouble juggling potions, investing in athletics can be better than alchemy, even though alchemy might have better overall outcomes at mid-higher investment than athletics. i love explosives. they are great. they reward you for heavy investment. not quite the exponential way like arcana, but still a blast (pun intended). Notably, Cinder Bombs are relatively easy to make (you can buy the ingredients in Nekataka and you make them in batches) and have the special effect that they automatically interrupt everyone when it first blows up (e.g. no attack roll, so even at 1% chance to hit you still interrupt them). So they are always useful, and getting increased damage and blinding duration from its aftereffects can make any fight bend in your favor real fast. The really high-level bombs can cause some serious mayhem in your favor, too (lightning, implosion, and frost). The lowly fiery bombs (i forgot the english name i'm only playing in german now ) also really need the help of dedicated investment to keep up with enemy AR in mid-high game, and also reward you with lots of damage. you can even use it to heal! by the time i get to BoW i have tons of spirit stuff and i'm churning out the healing bombs and they are great on backup characters to supplement heals if i get hit with a lot of burst damage. easier to replenish than healing scrolls. only "problem" is in boss fights it gets real easy for me to dump my inventory too quickly and it takes me a while to replenish. due to action economy issues, i would recommend bombs only on martial classes and defensive/buff-oriented casters. offensive casters and debuffers will be too busy doing anything else to use bombs.

yeah, i don't know how much you played poe1 if at all, but one major change is that you definitely need a little bit of offense because otherwise fights can go on for literally forever. At least in PoE1, health/endurance means that all fights have to eventually end (and was pretty much the only way I triple-crowned solo with my paladin in many fights). there are a few bosses here and there that can be extremely annoying if the fight goes on enough that their AI script starts looping (Neriscyrlas's casting of Llengrath's Safeguard for example).

oh yeah, i would easily put potd on deadfire as much harder than poe1. at release, deadfire was probably comparable, even a bit easier, but they definitely ramped up the difficulty quite a bit. another low/mid-level example - if you do the hanging sepulchers or (non-passive) family pride as soon as they're no longer skulled in your journal, you will probably get absolutely wrecked unless you're super optimized or doing some metagaming cheese. once you get to like level 8 or so, the difficulty curve starts slowing down, at least until you get to some of the DLC parts.

i think most of the internet metagame is unfairly sour on wizard subclasses. +2 power level isn't a lot for most conjuration spells, but there are still some spells that benefit from well. the free familiar spell you get at tier one is pretty good too, even if it is some slight anti-synergy with, say, summoning essential/substantial phantom ("[the familiar] grants you a random passive bonus which always at least grants you +1 PL, then +3 of a random stat and an additional bonus."). in effect, conjurers have +1 PL to enchantment/transmutation and +3 to conjuration spells as a result. as for "not worth it," I think that perception/calculus relies too much on focusing on the spells one loses, versus the spells one keeps. If you can find a comfortable way to live within your means, so to speak, you basically have no downside and get bonus PL as a result. and the school spells are generally balanced enough that i am always comfortable and happy to pick up fassina, and have done so in basically all her different forms and it's great. she'll play differently than, say, an evoker (or a general mage like aloth), but i'm able to find niches where the downsides are basically not apparent at all. (parenthetically, in the few times i've independently rolled a wizard, i keep having to stop myself from rolling a conjurer because that's actually where i keep drifting to play-style wise) also i was wrong upthread. conjurers still get access to transmutation. still get chill fog and slicken.

single-class wizard is brutally powerful in end game, if you survive that long early on you may run out of spells, true. i recommend a good bow or something. cast some conjured weapons, they will give you lots of juice as you run low on spells (and all of the wizard ones are either ranged or have reach, which is great for a wizard's longevity). fassina gets extra long summoned weapons as a conjurer (no chill fog or slicken though).

just for context, have you done much potd before? even if something is "your level" it can still be brutally hard on potd, especialy at low-mid levels where you have fewer options and resources. i don't think i would attempt old city at level 6 - i wouldn't even attempt woedica's temple until like level 7 maybe. do some sanza exploration quests or smaller nekataka quests or bounties.

depends. kith (e.g. humans, orlans, etc.) are like you - they have resources and spells and they can run out. some enemies are extremely kith-like (e.g. xaurips) and follow the same rules. notably - the megaboss Auranic is pure kith-like and you can totally outlast her spells at which point she just has a rod to try to hurt you. non-kith (e.g. boars, spiders) have an infinite use of their abilities, and they are limited only by their AI script. some enemies may seem kith-like, but are actually more like this and follow these rules. the naga casters may fall into this category. keep in mind there are also kith-likes that are chanter-likes, so given enough time they will use an infinite number of invocations - and their invocations may be unique to them. (sirens are like this. maybe naga casters are also like this? because i could swear that naga followed the kith rules. a stun wave is a pretty recurrent special invocation only available to enemies [and tekehu]) only way to really be sure I think is to dig in to the game files, or use an ability that only targets spellcasters (e.g. mage slayer).

yeah no, i agree with your assessment. white flames is really nice dual-wielded but if you are dumping perception then shieldbearer is the way to go.

engagement here is more so that certain characters can prevent other characters from running away. it's meant to limit kiting/mobility and give tanks/melee-ers battlefield control options. flanking is an orthogonal mechanism.

i think this was a poe1 specific behavior, but functionally it wasn't terribly different from now because everyone had +1 engagement by default and a 1-engagement limit by default, so it was rare to come across enemies that needed more than two normal allies to flank. (edit: also unlike deadfire, there really wasn't a mechanism by which characters lost engagement, so pretty much any ally in any situation could suffice so long as they had a melee weapon)

yeah, i think if the designers had more time, they should've done a cost-pass on martial abilities. fighter in particular suffers from the fact that knock down/mule kick are eternally useful abilities and suffer particularly from "would i rather do X ability once, or mule kick Y times?" I occasionally do power/inspired strike when there's lots of concentration or immunity to interrupts at play, but most of the time, I'd rather just do Mule Kick 4 times.

i was thinking along the lines of -- low reflex and having tanglefoot or something like that. would that also trigger toughened fury? i guess the proc rate is extremely low either way...

My wife did a pass yesterday at doing the watercolors on this orlan portrait on artstation after I complained about a lack of good orlan/halfling art in games, and I'm pleased with the results, happy to share.

possibly there's some party synergy to be had with toughened fury, and if so, then a SC fighter also has the advantage of upgrading a few abilities (and also sundering blow or take the hit). SC fighter is probably just way under-explored honestly. though i actually think having clear the path as an upgrade is worlds better than just vanilla clear out and worth SC on its own, if that's the angle you're going for. i did it once in an aborted run, and had a lot of fun with it, sheer mayhem.

for pure dps, the summoned weapons are better, but for pure Unstoppable Boi energy, dragon is great. literally a ton of health and various helpful immunities. and even if the summoned weapons can pelt out a lot more damage over their duration, the dragon can burst out a lot of damage and clear out a lot of trash mobs with their tail whip or fire breath right when it appears (easily mid-100s damage in a huge area). with a troubadour or bellower to easily get >100% uptime on the summon duration, i've literally used the dragon to tank several of the megabosses. that might take up the entire screen