thelee

bellower PL bonus is very good, even for early phrase invocations. when i had a SC bellower they were actually party damage leader for a huge chunk of the game. esp on PotD, you can have extremely non-linear outcomes where the extra PL digs you out of underpenetration thresholds, on top of the multiplicative damage bonuses and accuracy bonuses and debuff durations. (and even if less optimal, getting extra duration on buffs or summons can be useful; mostly for high-level summons where only troubadours and bellowers can consistently get 100% uptime) troubadour is overall solid, but bellower is still very effective. with ez brilliant at your disposal, the benefit of the troubadour becomes more marginal.

because the build is optimized for a no-rest run i suspect that what OP is talking about is the special buff you get before going to fight the dragon in the Ashen Maw

i would suggest this, you can do your own spin on a solid fighter/chanter (with tactician you may have lots of excessive song generation at which point i recommend giving bellower a try) and i find that the obsidian-created chanters are mostly a bit underwhelming for off-tanking for various reasons (konstanten has terrible intellect, tekehu doesn't get summons, vatnir comes late and is a bit squishy and only has squishy multiclasses, the latter is true for fassina, pallegina is ok but has mediocre intellect [though ultimately saved by being able to be herald]).

Very interesting! I wonder if this is why we have a kind of relic of an effect where Disease/Poison keywording is very poorly differentiated in some current game mechanics. edit: I wonder if disease keyworded effects were originally planned to also infect targets with a disease, instead of just being another class of abilities that frequently run into same/similar enemy immunities as poison while being different enough to not benefit from the +poison PL stuff.

it came out september, so it's relatively new, but the depth and amount of bugs is still quite astonishing, especially if you want to be mean and compare it to where deadfire was four months out. some critical class features are completely nonfunctional, a lot of feat interactions work incorrectly, allegedly act v is a mess and obviously they ran out of time to QA it (i'm not that far in so can't speak personally). personally speaking i also had a lot of crash bugs early on before finding a sweet spot for graphics settings. (also, the dumbest bug i personally found and reported - i could not rebind the "W" key. Only that key. All other keys on the keyboard I could rebind.) edit - some of this stuff would be much less of a big deal if being able to respec your character (to get around surprising bugs) didn't automatically knocked your difficulty into "custom mode" which, unlike p:k, irrevocably locks you out for the current adventure from achievements. more back on topic, meteor swarm certainly kicks butt but my problem is that its range is *very* limited compared to its area, which poses more problems for me in most situations. missile salvo is very easy to deal with.

oh i don't want to oversell it. i'm still enjoying it, but while i'm playing it i'm already using it as an inspiration for my next deadfire run also - for the flack that obsidian gets for having buggy games, obsidian has nothing on owlcat. ohhh brother

in terms of balance, it's kind of wild the damage power curve that happens for priests upon unlocking tier 8 spells. the same thing happens with maelstrom and minoletta, but at least those are on classes/in spell schools that you *expect* to do lots of aoe damage.

yeah, i unironically put deadfire as probably my pinnacle video game RPG. i keep hoping that someone internally cracks the puzzle of low initial sales and inspires MSFT to invest a bit of money into poe3, before current mindshare of poe2's engine becomes stale. they already did so much of the work on the engine, they could spend a lot more time on the design and the polish and get great value out of it (much like how WotR leverages a bunch of work owlcat did with P:K or bioware did with the successive dragon age games). Even *within* Deadfire, you can tell how much more they were able to do with the engine just based on the DLC alone - I thought FS had some great set pieces both for combat (I really loved the positioning challenges of the security system fight, for example) and dungeon-exploring, way past anything in the base game. Even BoW (the first DLC) had just a much better design sense and a tighter narrative than the base game.

at the very least do you proc multiple inspirations from having multiple targets in the first blast for relentless? i could've sworn that was at least the case.

it's also a bit weird because you can actually get a bit of a lore dump from the guardian. i think there's also another way to avoid the guardian fight - i think if you just sacrifice your faction allies, the guardian never shows up (presumably busy with your allies). i know i've stumbled into ukaizo without a fight, and it struck me as a bit weird that it's that easy (and that easily for the player to overlook) to avoid what is supposed to be the last fight. (if you clear all the megabosses, it can even still be a bit of a rough fight due to all the scaling bonuses it gets as part of its "the last megaboss" buff.) at least in a game like F:NV you needed lots of skill checks and correct dialogue tree navigation regardless to do that.

well gee i never before tried binding the voulge to a fighter, but maybe now i will...

honestly that sounds like something glitched out in your favor. nothing in the spell list for gathering storm sounds like that, unless avenging storm glitched out and kept proccing

pallegina as a crusader makes a great tank. paladin hardiness and party support, and you can use a shield + hold the line for 2 engagement, or just do whatever and turn on defender stance for 3 engagement. only downside is that pallegina wastes her subclass and her first skill point on a lame upgrade to sworn enemy and getting flames of devotion, neither of which are great for a tank, but the strength of her ancestry helps ease the pain of manually picking up lay on hands.

sweet jeebus, that might explain why those druid sporelings carried me in that Sealed Fate ambush.

this is not true the "immunity to concentration" effect will immediately strip neriscyrlas of all layers of concentration, same with any other target with concentration. if it only prevented new concentration layers, it would be a *terrible* chant the only thing i can suggest is that it targets will, and you may not have been able to surmount ner's will defense.

i think one of the best part of ridable animal companions in WotR is that it interacts with things like sizes and stuff like in PnP, it's not just a cosmetic buff. So halfling, gnomes can start the game automatically being able to ride many kinds of animals, because they're small enough, whereas others will have to wait or are limited to a handful of bigger companions (e.g. horses) - which is a nice potential counterbalance to the fact that small characters move slower by default (e.g. my base 20-foot speed halfling is a 60-foot speed halfling+racing elk). At the same time, the spells that increase or decrease target sizes can help or harm one's ability to ride mounted. It can also lead to some interesting spell interactions - grease is already a pretty effective spell, but getting knocked down while mounted is doubly bad, because not only are you proned, but you're completely knocked off your mount and you could be either in a worse defensive position (if you were relying on your mount for AC) or risk an attack of opportunity to re-mount. Of course then there are other interactions like charging, barding, possibly getting 2x-ed by aoe spells, etc. I can easily see why even games based on rulesets that have ridable mounts might not implement them because of various headaches (not to mention UI issues that WotR doesn't quite solve), but kudos on WotR it adds a surprising amount of mechanical depth for having done so.

I've been taking a break from Deadfire (1700 hours, man) to give Wrath of the Righteous a shot, and here are some thoughts. I know some people here are genre RTwP fans, and options these days are pretty limited, so I thought I'd share some opinions because a desire for another RTwP is what really drove me to give WoTR a try. Background: I pretty much disliked Pathfinder: Kingmaker quite a bit. Terrible encounter design, I could not get over how terrible the writing was. It did get me into Pathfinder Second Edition though, so there's that. (Though learning up on the 2nd ed ruleset made me dislike Kingmaker's 1st ruleset even more. [WotR is still 1st ed pathfinder rules]) On the game itself: I actually enjoy WoTR, definitely much more than PK. Part of it is better story focus - the stakes are much clearer from the beginning. Encounter design is better; there are still those stupid "come back later" encounters, but it's not as bad as in PK, they're broadcast a bit more (less likely to just stumble into them without warning) and so far there's no loot behind it (so really they're just for the challenge); they really just seem like minor megabosses scattered throughout. Difficulty balancing is better - I play on "Core" which is comparable to somewhere between Veteran and PotD (generally acceptable difficulty and occasional hard fights), and it's better than P:K where Core was too damn easy but the next step up gave enemies so many bonuses (sometimes double-counted) that it basically eliminated most build viability and made many fights an all-or-nothing "everyone got initiative and sneak attacked the enemy" or "a wolf tripped your flat-footed tank and everything snow-balled out of control" binary. There's still those harder difficulties, but I feel like they got a better middle ground this time. YMMV on this one, obviously. Anyway, things that Deadfire/Obsidian did well and has aged well: art/area design. it's funny that we got a complaint about reused assets in another thread, because WotR is a whole heck of a lot of tile re-use. Areas look really same-y and it can be hard to geographically center yourself without constant reference to a map. the nuts and bolts of RTwP interfaces. Translucent spell effects when paused, constantly visible targeting circles and selection circles and health/engagement indicators, compacted combat log entries (where related entries or AoE spells get grouped into one expandable entry), adjustable speed, holy crap all amazing quality of life things that are missing form WotR which is several years newer. Even though I hate on the Deadfire combat tooltip becoming vertical walls in later fights, it's aces better than what WotR does (at least it's no longer hidden behind a Knowledge check like in P:K). AI scripting and smarter default AI behavior and scripts. WotR pretty much just only lets you automate one single ability at a time and your character will do it nonstop without pause. Pretty much only good for cantrips or other infinite-use abilities. Writing. I'm playing WoTR in german so it's a bit hard to assess (I'm at best B1-grade proficiency, plus it's a translation) but it feels a bit better than P:K but damn some of the character development is still just dumb and two-dimensional. having a fixed D&D-style alignment doesn't really help, but it's also not handled well where you get comically binary dialogue choices just so you can fulfill a "good" option or an "evil" option. better leveling/multiclassing system. i mean, 3/3.5e-style multiclassing is a travesty, so not going to spend much time here. rule clarity. yeah Deadfire is dense, but auto-generated tooltips and hover menus are plentiful and viability is still generally ubiquitous. Even with better tutorials of basic concepts in WotR, you're just tossed head first into the pathfinder system, which is full of jargon and build traps (e.g. heavy armor is not a good long-term strategy for defense). Plus, while there are hover menus, it's not expansive - I have to constantly reference other sites or the pathfinder rules to remember what particular afflictions do. the only saving grace is that there's a larger pathfinder community so there's tons of threads explaining rules or why certain builds are terrible ideas Things that Obsidian should learn from WotR in any future RTwP endeavour: Getting the story stakes right. I'm not one of the people who have complained a lot about Deadfire's story, but WotR really communicates the big stakes to you very clearly from the start and constantly updates you with it, and it does really draw you in much better than the kind of distant concerns over Eothas and the various Deadfire factions. It does this (at least so far) without even the heavy-handed timer countdowns of P:K! This is a vast improvement over P:K. I had a similar criticism of BG vs BG2; BG2 tossed you in the middle of a suspenseful dungeon break after being captured by a mysterious (and charismatically voice-acted) Irenicus, whereas BG you were wandering around some open meadows and just given slight suggestions of "hey maybe you should go south to Nashkel at some point." Turn-based really seems like table-stakes for a RTwP game now, and it shouldn't be a separate option you only have one chance to choose. You can swap in/out of turn-based mode with the press of a button in WotR. Especially since WotR implements 5-foot-steps in turn-based mode, and because of some of the sprawling fights, it's nice to have that option at hand, even if I generally don't use them. "Going first matters" - I get that turn-based in Deadfire was kind of added on, but Owlcat has done the "initiative" concept the best in any RTwP I've played; I'm glad they designed RTwP with this primarily-turn-based concept in mind, even ignoring how broken sneak attack can be in P:K (less so in WotR i think). Ridable animal companions!!!! Seriously, I never realized how much I needed this feature in a game until playing WotR. Great implementation of rest mechanics. WotR is a rest-based game (not encounter-based), but even ignoring that, resting is the downtime for your characters to craft scrolls/potions, cure ability damage (much more common vs P:K), but at the same time areas become gradually cursed the longer you rest in them from the demon invasion, which adds buffs to your enemies as you cross thresholds; a high religion ability from someone assigned this job at rest can slow the curse down, but not stop it from advancing. If Deadfire had things gentler than Wounds as well that don't require knock out (like ability damage or long-term diseases), there'd be more of an incentive to rest. At the same time, rest-spamming to refresh empower points or per-rest item abilities would be more constrained if the concern wasn't simply "you'll run out of shark fish soup." I'm actually one of those weirdos who enjoyed the optional constraint in PoE1 where you can only access your stash upon rest. Feeling "epic." Yeah, I tend be a very strong Balance Guy, and WotR is a little bit on the overkill side with the mythic paths, but it definitely helps with the story stakes and sense of progression. If the watcher abilities had been a lot more notable, that could really have helped. I'm not going to gloss over the fact that a lot of players liked BG2's Throne of Bhaal for similar reasons, even though I personally hated its mechanics. A better rest mechanic and resource constraints would make it easier to make e.g. more powerful/epic-feeling watcher abilities without messing up the balance. really sprawling battles. sometimes set-pieces, sometimes an encounter that merges with another, I just feel like these are set up better, whereas Deadfire everything tends to be isolated, and even the ship-to-ship fights happen within a small like 10m space. That being said, if anyone's itching for a newer experience, or just wants another angle to appreciate Deadfire by, I do recommend giving WotR a try. It's no Disco Elysium, but it ain't shabby.

i actually did not know this

i was under the impression that upscaling doesn't take effect in places that you've already loaded into - is that not true? either way, +6 acc/def can be a huge swing. It can make an (unlucky) run of events much more likely, which may be what happened. The monks in FS in particular also love to use skyward kick, which even works on a graze, which suuuuuucks, and will suck even more if they have +6 acc on that (i could easily see it turning into something you have virtually no chance of avoiding being chain-knocked-up) true, but maybe this is more like a bell curve where the scaling is effective at the beginning and effective at the (very) end, with a flattening out in the middle. at the SSS/FS level, the enemies already have powerful abilities and the power curve isn't nearly as much in your favor (e.g. if you come back 2 levels higher against a mid-game boar level encounter, you are just way more powerful than they can imagine with all your new stuff, whereas coming back 2 levels higher against FS vithrack, they could already use death of a 1000 cuts and minoletta's missile salvo, did you really gain that much of an advantage in those 2 levels?)

on top of what other people said: spread out you can see when the dragon is prepping a spell, and separate everyone you can. one siphon target is much easier to out-dmage versus an entire party's worth. part of also what might be contrbiuting to siphon messing you up is if you let llengrath's safeguard take place - which will massively boost Ner's defenses and make it hard to overpower a HoT. same strategies for interrupt. You can also use tranquilizing shot to cleanse it (best solution for most annoying boss tactics), or try your luck with club modal and arcane dampener.

this. i don't even use it to steal. leap is just such a good mobility effect to give to non-barbarian classes. has made me appreciate the barbarian ability more, too (but this way you don't have to spend ability points on it). use it to escape engagement, use it to debuff enemies (daze), use it to get into perfect positioning, just great. i had a recent run with mantle of the seven bolts, and uh i'm stupified i haven't used this earlier. it would be utterly broken with the mod that turns per rest items into per encounter. for most of the game, the bolt spell is a room-clearing effect, especially indoors where you can bounce it off walls. I also like charm of bones. +2 intellect is always nice, the vessel bonus is very relevant against some very tough enemies throughout the game (esp neriscyrlas and dorudugan), but the cherry on top are the summons you can get which are a) extremely freaking powerful [you can summon some high-level fampyrs or priest vessels with high level spells for example] and b) not limited per encounter. You are limited to ten total over its lifetime, but you can either make some early fights a lot easier, or save them up for some rough fights later (in my most recent one I used 8 charges just to drain megaboss Auranic out of all her spells). i don't see a lot of chatter for this item, but it really has lasting value and you can get it potentially really early.

i think this is mostly just dated wording, back when the constitution afflictions used to be: sickened -50% healing, weakened -100% healing, enfeebled -100% healing + duration malus as a possible alternate or additional balancing solution - what if concelhaut's corrosive skin was auto-hit ? i think the biggest problem is that for a tier 9 spell that targets only a single creature and a generally tough defense, the spell effect itself is not worth the risk or even worth the morningstar modal; i'd rather just cast missile barrage, meteor swarm, crushing doom, etc (the first two will end many trash fights on their own). if it was like a fire-and-forget, eventually fatal (to casters and weaker tanks) spell, or a guaranteed source of damage/debuff on tough bosses, that would be more on par for a top level transmutation spell.

does it stack at all? 2% sounds puny even if it lasts a while

it's worth highlighting that at some point in one of the patches, enemies got more easily pulled by noise. i think it came around with the arrival of the "berath's challenge" (combat doesn't end until all enemies in an encounter are dead). i don't know if it was an unintentional side effect or a deliberate choice to make it harder to pull enemies away from each other. so it is definitely easier to accidentally pull e.g. the deathguard than it was before. as for noise, i think noise is one of those things that are very subtle but can yield extremely emergent gameplay; i think it's like 95% of the way to being a really great game mechanic. this is me rehearsing a particularly hard stealth section in my ultimate run (because fighting the enemies would've wasted too much time and been very dangerous), using things that make noise in different ways to lure enemies around:

hot damn, i was always annoyed at hitting myself with crushing wave and it completely slipped my mind that i could combine this with aefyllath. when the keywords work/are properly set you can have some fun interactions