thelee

does his escaping, combat-ending AI script still work if he gets badly hurt while still neutral?

i did not know this. along with this, venombloom, relentless storm, and returning storm, druid might be one of the prime classes able to abuse LUC. chanters do it pretty well, but they also don't benefit from brilliant as much (at least SC). edit: also gr maelstrom. edit 2: i suppose it actually doesn't matter how many LUC spells a class gets, so long as it gets at least one good one. density of procs is probably the better metric (e.g. venombloom [2x per target per tick] or relentless storm [1x per target at half tick] or missile barrage [lol]).

but then you can't engage enemies! that's a pretty big price to pay i tried playing iwd:ee the other day and i had forgotten how much i had gotten used to more modern rpgs with engagement (or attacks of opportunity mechanics). bad AI/pathfinding + no engagement = orcs that would just stutter step their way away from my fighter trying to get their one THAC0 roll per round off.

You can also do this without enemies engaging you if you run out of range right as they start winding up a melee ability. The combat log will say "missed (out of range)" for the enemy's attack, and that miss will still count for riposte effects. For mechanical reasons, ripostes appear to ignore range considerations, so I've triggered free attacks against enemies like this. edit: a rogue/wizard will work because a wizard gets deleterious alacrity of motion, which gives you immuinty to engagement as well. gives you more freedom for armor selection. edit 2: if it's not crucial, you can also rely on other mechanisms to accomplish what i'm talking about here. Staggered and other might afflictions disable enemy engagement. Barbarians have an incredibly easy way to spread staggered everywhere via Spirit Frenzy (don't upgrade it, so that spell effects and other such also spread staggered; it's a bug in your favor). Priests and wizards can daze or stagger depending on spell selection. Ciphers eventually get an extremely long Daze (+Confuse). Many enemies also just don't have engagement, so you can do the move-out-of-range trick freely against those.

Magran's challenge is a lot easier at ultra-slow speed, with only one character, with an AI script to spam salvation of time like there's no tomorrow, and of course when you skip 90% of the fights in the game I actually tried a "conventional" magran's challenge run with a party and hoo boy. Even with all the (vanilla) AI scripting I could muster, and sharpest WC3-style micro I could manage, enemy AI front load all their attacks at the start of the fight, and with each passing level it becomes increasingly harder to manage all your party members in a way that won't result in some of them getting knocked out through sheer stupidity or inaction in the first few seconds. As a fight goes on, it gets quite a bit easier because enemies space out their special attacks and such a bit more irregularly instead of all at once. But I gave up on it at around level 8 because I knew that front-loading of enemy attacks would only get worse over time.

oh yeah. that's the worst part about the vithracks IMO. I compulsvely equip a torch (or the backer sabre) and also make sure to send someone behind the front lines, because otherwise invariably i'm going to get hammered by some extremely high level spells without knowing. i actually really love the subtle changes skaen's challenge makes to fights in this way.

sounds like an unequivocal win to me. your nerves must've been shot after that! yeah, FS is definitely the most punishing. If I let my attention lapse I can get caught out by some of the FS challenges. Examples: the vithracks that cast minoletta's msisile swarm, the death by a 1000 cuts flying around in some vithrack fights, the frightened child, forgetting that those darn mushrooms can store up spell energy cast at them, getting hit for 100+ damage by some of those mushroom special hits, all the boss fights that can't be interrupted, being constnatly knocked-up by swarms of those blind monks. as a postscript suggestion - turning on defensive stance and equipping your melee dps with a backup reach weapon would help alot. you wouldn't be able to get flanked on the enemy, but i'd give up flanked if it meant safe face-tanking. not much help for the oracle who do those damn beam attacks at anyone, but works for most melee bosses.

i wonder: do people make aggressive use of pausing? I have terrible gamer reflexes, but I get through fights on PotD by just spam-pausing every half second or so and taking my time with every decision. I remember watching a bit of a playthrough of someone doing poe1, and i was surprised how little they paused.

if you're open to doing a paladin, i enjoyed an eothas+kind wayfarer setup, dual-wielded. it's very active front-liner while being very defensive - if you spam flames of devotion, you get lots of healing. and you can take breaks to cast a defensive spell, buff, or further heal. for party members especially spellcasters, you might want to do more vanilla setups where you can easily use a pre-boiled AI script to handle some of the party management for you. maia is great because rangers can be easily made fire-and-forget and they'll rack up kills and damage done with minimal micromanagement.

Honestly I do not understand how a significant contingent plays on solo here. I did the ultimate, but solo play still sounds to me really hard to do regularly. If you don't want to rely on resource cheese, you could MC or SC a skaen priest. They have shadowing beyond and escape, and so long as you're not on berath's challenge that means you can disengage from most fights and rest or just wait for resources to come back. All priests can kinda do this with if you're able to get far enough away and withdraw yourself, but skaen makes it a lot easier/foolproof.

i haven't done a harbinger, but a streetfighter/skald might be a delicious combination, provided you have a way of reliably triggering heating up (sparkcrackers, diving into trouble, etc.). you get dirty fighting, loads of extra crit damage, and huge crit rate boost from your attack speed, and tons of invocations as a result, which you could use in part to paralyze enemies or the ugpraded frightened invocation and get even more crits. edit: at high levels you could become an interrupt build with the chanter's energized invocation and lots of crits. i would recommend a hearth orlan for the high perception and the hit-to-crit racial bonus. edit 2: confounding strike can help you seriously lower enemy deflection and help get you tons of crits as well.

*sad trombone noises* is there like a broken reference or something between effect and item? I think what's interesting (might also just be a red herring) is IIUC that the auto tooltip for burning ground trap doesn't list a duration for the hazard, just a tick rate. edit: i just noticed that (if wiki is accurate) this is standard for hazard effects, but the ability itself should list a duration (versus being attached to the effect). burning ground has a 0s duration. sparkcrackers had like a duration of 1s and ticked every 1s. In practice it was extremely hard to get enough scaling to get more than two ticks. it only matters for offensive/niche uses, because it gives you multiple attempts at trying to distract targets. You can use a highly-scaled glove sparkcrackers and compare against item sparkcrackers and the theft-ability is no different (ticks are too fast). i'm probably like the only person who noticed because my umezawa build relies on using sparkcrackers on self to trigger streetfighter bonuses, and it noticeably took a hit circa 4.0 or so because it got a little bit harder to consistently self-trigger streetfighter bonuses.

unfortunately I have no idea how long Caltrops is *supposed* to last, same with Burning Ground. The visual effect for the latter lasts until end of combat, but I'm not sure if that's how long the fire damage is supposed to last as well. I just remember in both cases I used to definitely be able to use them for much longer - kiting enemies through multiple caltrop traps back and forth, and I remember using Burning Ground in one of the bounty fights to help damage and re-shaken some of the enemies. Maybe that info is already in the game data and the connecting glue is simply broken? (Sparkcrackers still lists a duration IIRC but in practice it doesn't tick more than once anymore. If you compare to the Sparkcrackers granted by those gloves, you'll see that there's a difference).

I finished up a run where i made more of a conscious effort to use traps, and I discovered something dispiriting. At some point, the hazard durations on traps got broken (I wonder if it's related to Sparkcrackers no longer having a duration). This doesn't impact many traps (e.g. Chain Lightning still disorients for potentially huge amounts of time), but does impact Caltrops and Burning Ground, which are relatively common. It used to be the case that I could kite enemies around on caltrops traps for quite a while, and the very long visible duration of the burning ground actually corresponded to the actual effects. However, now both of them last for a fraction of a second, pretty much only when they go off - Caltrops ticks for one or two times before having no effect, and Burning Ground basically only ticks once. They basically become useless (not that traps are typically game-changing). It *seems* like this might be easily tweaked with a mod. So this is a request for someone to do that. (If Sparkcrackers are impacted by the same phenomenon, then pls fix that too).

that sucks, but i guess is not typically an issue. still, *sad trombone noises*

I've been using the mod. I can't vouch for how idiomatic or correct it is, but it appears to be working well enough for me (and i'm learning an awfully specific domain of vocabulary in the process). It certainly seems better than the base translation - i forget some of the original translations, but some of them seem wildly off after seeing what the mod used.

It never really made sense to me why Uncanny Luck is missing from just druid and priest. Especially druid, who is expected to do some offensive action or martial-ing. Priest I can sort of get if the designers thought priest would just be casting buffs all the time, but Uncanny Luck has almost universal (small) utility just from the hard resist chance.

sorry, to clarify, the problem when it was super common was that you crit-gibbed an enemy. something about the gibbing (which already interacts oddly with some effects like cipher transfer spells) would clear item properties. i think they fixed like 99% of cases, but i don't know if the remaining 1% still has to do with crit-gibbing an enemy.

I doubt it; I think it's a pretty deep engine bug. It's happened to me a few times, very rare, and unfortunately something that emerged in later patches and was never fully fixed. In one run I had to reload, in another I only discovered it too late and had to completely abandon the item. god I can't imagine if it had happened in anyone's ultimate run. When it was more prevalent it had something to do with death-by-critical hits. I don't know if it's still related to that.

i didn't see it confirmed elsewhere this thread, but yes, firebrand benefits with extra PEN. the wizard ranged spell kalakoth's minor blights also benefit from the spell PEN keywords, but each blight benefits separately (so you need all four to get +1 PEN across the entire range of blights). i don't think other summoned weapons benefit from any keyword effects, directly at least (only longer duration from bonus PL for a conjurer, for example).

in particular, the fists as a base weapon are already better than any other base weapon (iirc it's essentially already like a 30% lash on a weapon like a sabre). for pure damage dealing via summoned weapons it might be hard to beat woedica fists.

I had a bit of a summoned weapon subtheme with my current sorcerer. Firebrand + various wizard buffs (eventually Draconic Fury at tier 7), plus the aforementioned Ring of Focused Flame. Taste of the Hunt at tier 2 (though probably only one casting because it shares with Firebrand) is a nice spot heal and leaves some lasting damage. It's only a subtheme because between druid and wizard spells (even if most are fast-cast self-buffs) there's a lot of action economy constraints, but doing 100-ish dmg per melee hit ain't shabby when you're running low on spells (great sword + legendary + modal [helped by ring of focused flame] plus 40% fire lash plus 15% slashing lash plus occasional crits + overpen), and those melee hits come relatively fast (schwungvoll, +15% action speed from deletrious alacrity of motion, plus druid soulbound SSS armor, plus helm of the falcon). Makes sunlance the spell look extremely crappy; a highish spell slot and longer cast time to do less single-target damage?? against fire immunes or fire aborbers, being part wizard helps because you can summon lance or one of the two staffs, though firebrand does a stupid amount of damage compared to those options in normal situations. (though llengrath's staff is fun simply for knocking people around and preventing them from doing much of anything)

sporelings are wildly good early on, but they only get more health as you level up (unfortunately very few druid summons scale well). so they won't help nearly as much late game, but they will make for some impressive bullet sponges nonetheless. truth be told, i hardly ever use wild growth, maybe like a few times in an entire run for when i'm almost out of spells and i desperately need to keep a summon alive for some extra damage soaking. what i sometimes do is focus on MTG color combinations. like doing a multi-guild party. (or one of the wedge sets) sometimes i find that it's easier to find thematic overlap with MTG in that way. might not be exactly what you want. but for example, a decay druid is very BG/golgari, even if it's not a great "black" or "green" match on its own.

this is totally my jam; the first build i posted here was drawn straight from MTG lore: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/case-study-1-umezawa i also use the mtg color pie to explain wizard schools: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/wizard as a perennial blue mage and lots of hours of deadfire, i'm actually thinking you probably want to be a pure wizard, and probably an evoker. I know "evoker" sounds a bit red-ish, but this is a school specialization that gets you both enchantment (which has spell reflection, call to slumber, spell stealing), illusion (invisibility, mirror image, mind-based debuffs), and a great set of countermagic (thrust of tattered veils & minoletta's concussive missiles are evocation interrupts, concelhaut's crushing doom is A+ illusion interrupt). if you can't get over the flavor of being an evoker whose native home is tossing fireballs, then i recommend transmuter instead - you still get decent countermagic (slicken is transmutor, concelhaut's crushing doom is illusion, a friend school), and a relevant +2 PL bonus to illusion (for all your debuffs) (edit: i don't know why i said you get +2 PL to illusion, you get +2 PL to transmutation; you can do illusionist to get +2 PL. but +2 PL to slicken and other transmutation is still good if you do that). single-class wizard gets you some extremely powerful end-game magic, regardless of your school. this kind of stomps over your black color choice selection (blood mage part), but it's just a suggestion for something that seems a lot more "blue-y" to me. in deadfire, i feel like blue and black overlap a lot in terms of mtg color wheel. if you don't care about as much about the countermagic part of it, then i think something like what you suggest is great for battlefield manipulation. though i might suggest a psion, because they get a unique cipher power which is basically a pure interrupt (e.g. counterspell) that eventually you have enough focus generation to use nonstop if needed. for synergy I recommend instead a shifter/stalker. I actually rolled this in a game and got so bored by how much i steamrolled fights on PotD that i started over with something not as simply powerful the bonus AR from stalker combines extremely well with shapeshifting; by default most forms give you one step above medium armor (but with no recovery) and the bonus AR basically puts you into heavy armor. boar form is extremely powerful as a shifter because your DoT effect will last for way too long (a bug in your favor) and high ranger accuracy will help you do lots of damage. bear form is super tanky with the bonus stalker AR. it requires a bit of micromanagement, especially since you might be leaning on this char to do healing, so you'll have to more actively juggle shapeshifting and spell casting since you won't be able to cast while shifted.

tbf, compared to poe1, soulbound gear are not necessarily as such tent-pole items here. i remember going out of my way to get all soulbound gear in poe1, here i only bother if it's particularly necessary for a build. edit: it's been a while, but i don't remember many *interesting* unique items in poe1 (many of them were normal magic weapons with a fancy name). there are tons in poe2, which you can enchant with special enchantments. that fills in a lot of the gaps that soulbound items fulfilled in poe1.