thelee

is the wiki wrong? lidless gaze is listed at 6s, which would put it at a lower duration than embrace, same with gaze of the adragan. even if you have tons of easy ways to nerf dorudugan's will and make it easy to roll a crit, a +25% multiplier would still yield a base duration that's less than embrace the earth talon (the bonus illusion PL might help bump it up). petrification has a substantial base duration (12s) which would make it easier to start off the fight at a level where you can start extending it with frostfall. the ugly math: dorudugan at 25 resolve is a -45% duration penalty, which turns into a -.8182 duration modifier (inversion math). if you have 25 intellect, say (18 base + inspiration + some items), you have a .75 duration modifier. you're left with a net -.0682, which translates into a -6.4% duration penalty. let's assume that it's easy to get +5 PL for petrification, and you can still cobble +11 PL for lidless gaze. petrification hit => 12 * .936 (net duration penalty) * 1.25 (PL) => 14.04s lidless hit => 6 * .936 (net duration penalty) * 1.55 (PL) => 8.7s lidless crit => 6 * .936 * 1.55 * 1.25 => 10.9s +20% off 10s seems pretty tight margin for error and attacks, but maybe it's doable with enough save scumming to make everything works out. (you'd have to save-scum any other approach with the frostfall angle as well anyway since you probably wouldn't be getting the full suite of your debuffs going) edit: in case anyone wanted a clear illustration of resolve's increasing returns and why arkemy'rs wondrous torment is so important: at 25 resolve, that -.8182 duration modifier can essentially be explained as saying "you need +81.82% in total buffs to duration just to get to your effect's normal base duration". Approximately doable, with reasonably high intellect. at 35 resolve, the -75% duration multiplier turns into a whopping -3.00 duration modifier. You need +300% in total buffs just to get back to your normal base duration! Even with completely maxed out intellect, you're still left with a substantial negative penalty, at which point all the multipliers from PL and crits are trying to boost an extremely small remaining duration and not getting you very far.

it might be very hard to get a net gain on the petrify, right? +20% on the debuff after accounting for attack speed, you'd need to make sure the petrify on dorudugan has ~10s left at minimum. but it seems doable, as an alternate strat. edit: if you have two wizards and are willing to save scum a bit, one does the arkemyr's wondrous torment, then the other follows up with an empowered petrification, if that lands with a hit you might have enough starting duration on that petrify to get a net gain of time with each death from frostfall (you'd still need a lot of accuracy to put yourself in any appreciable hit range against fortitude without doing the whole morningstar/whatever bit), so long as you are able to kill a skeleton with each attack. then you don't have to worry about refreshing anything else.

In case you wanted a minimally cheesy way to get rid of dorudugan (without the balance patch), I recommend chaining together a bunch of petrifies of sufficient level. I stumbled on this unintentionally with my disruptor theurge because it was the first time I was combining helm of the the white wind with a chanter and a druid, and I did it again without that specific build, though I definitely did the math beforehand to make sure it would work again. I still think the theurge is the most self-contained way to do it, but you can do this with a combination of: a wizard that can cast arkemyr's wondrous torment with high base intellect and weyc's wand a druid that can cast Embrace of the Earth Talon OR a wizard that can cast petrification, with high base intellect a priest that can cast Salvation of Time (* combined with the below, only main bit of cheese here) weyc's robe club modal morningstar modal a bunch of other accuracy bonuses for your petrifier (esp against vessels), or penalties to fortitude, some combination of your petrifier being the mainchar and becoming rymrgand's champion and destroying all the souls in SSS (up to +6) helm of the white wind (easy +10) multiclassing with a ranger for hunter's claw, marked prey, and stalker's link (ez, but pretty strict on what your character needs to be) multiclassing with a monk for dance with death, which gets you up to +15 necklace of the bones (+5) devotions for the faithful (+10, plus a -8 to enemy fort if you land the debuff) PL bonuses (e.g. prestige, potion of ascendance, lance of the midwood stag + woodskin/form of hte delemgan, weyc's wand) boras (+5 to spells) obsidian black wurm pet (+3 when flanked) remember that there's an optoinal berath's blessing that lets eder equip a pet for doubling up on both boras and the obsidian black wurm ngati's tusk (hunter of hunters can give you up to ~10 debuff against fortitude) gloves of accuracy edit: long nights chant can apply weakened (resisted down to sickened) for -10 debuff plus an additional -4 from the stat penalty edit: this isn’t a comprehensive list, just what comes to mind easily depending on what you have, your build can be more or less strict - on PotD dorudugan has 180 fortitude. you can pretty easily bring that down to 155 with just a morningstar modal and ngati's tusk (-35). a level 20 character with 10 perception will start off with 77 accuracy, so you need to find a way to close the gap of 103 accuracy, so you can have a net advantage against dorodugan's fortitude of +24, which means you'll never miss. Might sound like a tall order, but based on the list above there's quite a bit of flexibility to how to hit that goal (e.g. one successful casting of devotions will swing the accuracy-defense number by 18, (you get +10 acc, dorudugan gets -8 fort); the spell you use will itself have some innate accuracy bonus; etc). here's an example from my most recent attempt: (sorry it's in german) in this particular situation, i ended up with a net +31. I overshot the +24 requirement because I honestly kept making mistakes in this run (e.g. i forgot to become rymrgand's champion) so I ended up pulling together some extra bouses in case my math was wrong or made some other mistakes. translating into english and explaining the math, my accuracy buffs were: +24 from 34 perception (maxed orlan and white wends to start for 21, +1 from the alchemist's hut, +1 from a cloak, +1 from a ring, +2 from sleeping with aenalys, +3 from svef, +5 from intuitive from least unstable coil [important that it's from an item, so it stacks with svef]) +8 from embrace the earth talon's ability level (petrification would have +16 *) +11 from power levels (+5 from SC level 20 druid and prestige [petrification would only get +1 from prestige *], +2 from lance of the midwood stag, +2 from potion of ascendancy, +1 from spellshaping the spell smaller, +1 from weyc's robe brilliant [important from an item, so it stacks with potion of ascendancy]) +3 from gloves of accuracy +10 from helm of the white wind +5 from boras +3 from changeling's mantel armor random pet aura (this was actually pure luck and wasn't planned on, but you could theoretically save-scum this bonus if you're relying on it) +4 from sweet aroma aura from keeper of the flame +10 from devotions of the faithful +5 from necklace of bones dorudugan gets -25 from morningstar dorudugan gets -8.8 from ngati's tusk aura (i did this suboptimally, you should be able to get to 9 or 10) dorudugan gets -10 from ben fidel's neck invocation dorudugan also gets a "hidden" -8 because their might is reduced by 4 from devotions TL;DR game plan I mentioned this in another thread, but a wizard with wecy's wand, empowering arkemyr's wondrous torment is guaranteed to at least graze, which will tank dorudugan's resolve down to 25, at which point even a normal casting of arkemyr's wondrous torment will easily last for 30 seconds. combine with club modal, dorudugan's will defense is pretty much shot, which makes refreshing arkemyr's wondrous torment easy, as well as making it easy to add on other will-targeting debuffs if you need to. getting down to 25 resolve makes all the difference. it means your morningstar and club modals stop lasting for only a couple of seconds even on high intellect characters. it also means that embrace the earth talon and petrification, on a decently high intellect+power scaling character, will last 12+ seconds, which also means that even on a graze you'll still petrify dorudugan long enough to cast another after brilliant gives you another resource. with key players having brilliant from weyc's robe plus salvation of time, you can petrify-lock dorudugan all the way to his death and you can completely bypass all the annoying fireball/fire explosion dodging. just need to pay attention to refresh arkemyr's wondrous torment before it runs out (most important!) as well as any other debuffs you have going on. Why "Embrace the Earth Talon" or "Petrification?" Both have higher base durations than Gaze of the Adragan, which matters quite a bit for competing against Dorudugan's resolve, even when its hit with wondrous torment. You could probably cobble enough bonus PL with like an illusionist and some items, but then you start making it hard to cobble together the bonus accuracy you need to actually land it past dorudugan's fortitude defenses. I weakly prefer the druid for their embrace the earth talon here, because it actually does damage (helps speed things along) and more importantly you get two casts from the start which can help cushion the early rocky start as you get things going and your resource regen still needs to get everything back to 100%. plus, if you only have a single wizard who's responsible for wondrous torment AND petrification might easily be missing out on a cast of petrification because of resource regen being random. * petrification being at higher level also has an advantage in that it has a higher innate accuracy then a comparable embrace the earth talon. you get +2 acc per ability level, and only +1 per power level, so all things being equal you'd rather a level 20 wizard casting petrification than a level 20 druid casting embrace in terms of affecting the net accuracy balance. Why do this at all? There are plenty of other far easier, far cheesier ways to get dorudugan, but I like this because while it certainly is cheesy, it feels like you still have to work for it a bit (getting all the items and coordinating the chaining debuffs) and is satisfying as a result, versus just hammering Dorudugan down with axe modal and blade cascade, or attritioning it out with gouging strike's endless DoT. Plus, outside of dorudugan, you can do this against most bosses in the game (very few enemies in my memory are actually immune to dexterity afflictions, they tend to just be resistant) without needing as many accuracy bonuses, so it can serve as a decent strategy across your entire run if you feel like slightly cheesing out a harder boss encounter.

hard +upscaled might be more in line with poe1 potd. as others have said potd+upscaled in deadfire can be rather punishing, especially if you aren't familiar with the system. if you want to start off with that, be prepared to reload a lot and be willing to experiment/respec as you figure stuff out.

for the most part, the reactivity is on the minor side - e.g. companions might have slightly different starting gear. not necessarily worth it to optimize. you can always customize your poe1 history if you feel like, using the options in deadfire (through a bunch of Q&A). (more drastic reactivity is if you like murdered a companion in poe1. they obviously won't be around in deadfire.)

so to confirm some TB ideas i'd seen before, does it make sense to make sure your casters always go last, then? that way you don't have to worry about enemies running out of area of effects

double-check the description. it does "shock" damage, but that's it. it's a type of damage, it's not a debuff that would count as CC. CC are things like: an affliction knock down, knockup, interrupt (kinda, i don't always count these as CC) direct stat penalties (like miasma of dull-mindedness or nature's mark)

uh, perhaps we're mixing up our words here, but crackling bolt is not a CC spell. It may be an "area of effect" (aoe) spell, but typically when people say "crowd control" they mean "things that disable or weaken the enemy, instead of primarily doing damage." slicken is CC effect (and extremely effective), crackling bolt is not. i just want to make sure you're understanding e.g. @Boeroer's advice correctly. In RTwP you can re-aim spells that are in progress of being cast, which is a necessary feature of how the game balances out spells with slow cast times. Is there no equivalent feature in TB mode?

i would also suggest that "hitting cap" is not as terribly a big problem for the later content in deadfire. in poe1, hitting cap early meant a lot of pointless encounters and being over-leveled for stuff. meanwhile, for Seeker/Survivor/Slayer and Forgotten Sanctum and megabosses, you'll still find lots of challenges and lots of good loot even if you're at level 20. FS is definitely balanced expected parties to be close to or at level 20, and even if SSS has a lower target level, some of the encounters scale up very well and stay extremely challenging. In both cases a lot of great end-game gear comes from those DLCs, even if you're not gaining levels anymore.

yeah, for a non-caster assassin mc, i perhaps the stealth bonus is good at the start of a fight and then only if you incidentally get invisibility later (e.g. you were using smoke veil or shadowing beyond to flee from an enemy anyway, or you have the slippers). i think there are cases where you really want an attack to land where you'd do this deliberately, but we're talking about spending tons of resources (namely i'm thinking pernicious cloud + assassin bonus for the +25 acc, but that is essentially just like the MC spellcaster situation). edit: something i hadn't thought of, i wonder if assassin + hand mortars would be OK. still very resource expensive, but you could spread all sorts of rogue-y effects at +25 ACC and huge PEN. +25 acc is great on its own for debuffs, and for offensive casts, the bonus PEN can be extremely relevant for casters (who in general will have more AR headaches and fewer options than martials). the unique wizard spell arkemyr's brilliant departure, or whatever it's called, doesn't dispel invisibility so long as you don't do a damage roll, so you can endlessly debuff (even with DoTs!) with +25 acc.

personally i'm ok if a druid gets a crappier version of BDD in the bpm, even accounting for difference in ability level. priests are the best at the shielding effect (they get withdraw AND bdd, and to a certain comparable extent watchful presence). is bdd fixed duration in bpm? i don't see that damage shield needs to be fixed duration. beetle shell is useful for long durations because enemies don't ignore a shell-ed target, so it's actually quite nice to burn out the entire health shield with a long enough duration.

it almost seems to me that chain lightning and firebug was balanced in a way that forgot there is bounce penalty to damage, because it specifies a lower damage for jump targets. firebug in particular is extremely disappointing in practice, like the third bounce does like 6 damage. at that point it doesn't even matter if it does re-bounce to earlier hit targets, i'd rather just cast sunbeam. chain lightning has a case in that at least its base damage is high enough and it does a valuable enough damage type (shock) that i'm ok using it. plus you occasionally get interrupts from crits.

miasma of dull-mindedness OR arkemyr's wondrous torment + weyc's wand (for a wizard, empower guarantees at least a graze). instant -10 resolve, and both of those also drop intellect by -10 for a total -40 to will. add in a club modal for a net -65 will at this point. follow up with a normal casting of miasma/arkmeyr and get huge duration even when not empowered at that point (arkemyr is better because of high base duration). edit: in a pinch, some luck and a cipher's psychovampiric shield will do somethign similar, though i definitely prefer the wizard approach which is pretty much foolproof. due to increasing returns from resolve, 25 resolve compared to 35 resolve is night/day for debuffs. edit: because neither miasma or arkemyr (or psychovampiric) are afflictions, all megabosses are vulnerable to this. even though dorudugan is a vessel, still vulnerable to these mind abilities.

fyi overseer rings are also good because the area bonus actually works with consumables (bombs and scrolls) whereas intellect boosts get ignored (one of many annoying aspects of consumables not benefiting from stats).

yeah overall i like that. for me on berath's challenge, withdraw goes from "nice oh **** spell" early game to "never gets used" because of the PL scaling. only downside is that beetle shell wouldn't get any other scaling. at least play dead and withdraw you get more healing. don't know how to fix beetle shell in that respect.

a little off topic, but i think play dead is at a nice base duration and base ability level where you can go either way with intellect. Unlike withdraw where it can last a super long time with high intellect with huge scaling, making it sometimes scary to use in a fight (i.e. take your chances with a low-health party member or definitely lose them for 40 seconds). high intellect = debuffs continue to tick away while pet is knocked out, and i've definitely saved my pet from some massive dots or debuffs by playing dead and waiting them out, which is harder to do with a low duration. low intellect = obv get pet back sooner but still with tons of health.

lol i'm so used to the default hud positioning that pale shelter's UI made my eyes bleed. troubadour/psion! must've been a trip

i have never even conceived of dumping intellect before, so this build tickles me in all the right ways. i never knew beam spells were unaffected by intellect, a nice loophole around the intellect dumping (and always fun to learn something new after so many thousand+ hours of the game).

oooh, sounds exciting. that also makes sense because JESawyer's twitter has occasionally posted screenshots of extremely convoluted and branching dialogue trees in his editing tool. the rumor mill article suggests it's headed to gamepass, so PC + Xbox. Based on the MSFT acquisition, I would be extraordinarily surprised if any OBS release was anything less than PC + Xbox with a Gamepass exclusive window.

Wow, I'l be honest I've personally never done those sequence of events (sparing Benweth, then betraying Aeldys) - you sure Furrante doesn't give it to you directly or it ends up in your stash somehow else after finishing the quest?

i will certainly agree that the story for poe1 resonated better with me, and i liked dungeons, but some of the other stuff that poe1 did didn't do it in a way that made me prefer the game to deadfire. rest/resource management in poe1 wasn't really well-thought out, and it took playing p:k (and from what i've heard p:wotr) to realize just how much better rest can be handled. oh boy, poe1 may have more stable FPS but it also has out-of-this-world load times. Builds up over time. But even with SSD/NVME there's just too much save data bloat or whatever and it's just unbearable. At least Deadfire has pretty constant load times and for me stays within the order of seconds for most transitions. Choose your own poison, I suppose, but I'll take in-combat stutters and gradual degradation to lower FPS over wasting a bunch of my time on load screens.

it is possible to avoid the final fight, but you have to make galawain pretty happy with you. some combination of the following: choosing a background where you gave souls to galawain empowering the wilds around kazuwari enough times you finish one of the main SSS quests NOT letting aexica/whehami escape NOT showing him the tooth after you come back from dealing with whehami I think there's some internal counter that tracks these, so if you do things that tick galawain off (bad background, or showing him the tooth) you can counterbalance by empowering kazuwari more often, and if galawain is already pretty happy with you (good background, not showing him the tooth) you can get away with doing less of the others.

was testing an arcane archer / fury combo, and it looks like driving flight doesn't affect the fury weapon (only ever +1 bounce)? is this something that's fixable?

Yeah, imagine doing "scale up AND scale down", you do Sealed Fate at like level 4, and instead of enemies being scaled down 1 level or so, they are still scaled up +3/4 levels. that's crazy

the quest itself is not level 10 though? i seem to recall it being not-skulled at level 8 or so. it's a rough encounter at that level. though the big difference versus talfor is that you're ever so slightly higher level and more builds have more options to have a fighting chance.