thelee

i'd also suggest that if you haven't played psion before but are interested, you really should give it a try. when you're thinking about focus generation, keep in mind that a psion continues to generate focus *while you cast powers/spells* which i feel is a bit of an unobvious interaction, or at least easy to understimate in terms of impact. this means that with the right stats/gear as you progress to higher levels you can cast tier 1 and then tier 2 powers indefinitely (you literally generate more focus passively then consume... you can nonstop interrupt [from the telekinetic burst psion power] or paralyze-lock [mental binding] enemies) and you get a substantial amount of the focus on higher powers back. add in some other spell casting from a multiclass and you'll find yourself flush with focus every time you switch back to casting powers.

the advantage is that you get a cipher w/ basically zero downtime. it's less "what does this cipher add to the caster," it's "what does this caster add to the cipher". borrowed instinct is good but is not the reason you want to do a psion/caster multiclass. more generally rather it's that you get the versatility of a multiclass caster w/out the negative action economy of having to actively generate focus, and a psion/caster multiclass mitigates the early game issues of having very slow focus generation (and late game issues where you take incidental damage or are waiting for high-level powers). you augment the cipher, not vice versa. the question is more akin to "how does adding caster to psion compare to adding fighter/ranger/monk" versus your original "how does adding psion to caster compare to adding fighter/ranger/monk"

the strange thing is that this definitely used to work, i remember chaining caltrops together and doing a decent chunk of damage. i wonder if it's one of the handful of things that got broken with the TB mode patch.

isn't there some armor that has this effect riding on a disengagement attack?

trap accuracy is a weird vestige from poe1 imo, but i think it's fine. ideally it should function like other skills and each point grant correct bonus PL to traps - i think that would fix some of the damage weirdness, but i doubt this is fixable with modding. traps should do more than priest seals imo - traps are expensive and (essentially, excluding tedious vendor resets) finite, whereas seals are repeatable for every single encounter (even more than once/encounter w/out berath's challenge and you break up a fight) i think there should be a pretty good payoff for using one of the trap effectivenss effects. since traps are one and done for a character (unlike seals can't be set in combat). if traps are upgraded to do decent damage across the board (basically not a complete rounding error), it's still good to basically give traps-oriented characters a capstone. 25% just for damage is not meaningful IMO (it'd be a whole other thing if it also boosted durations, or actually granted trap PL, that would be better since currently most of the value from traps IME are long-lived affliction durations [once you have tons of scaling] or interrupts at start for free)

w/out knowing what the actual cause of the bug is, i think those kinds of traps need much stronger up-front effects (maybe long-lived durations for afflictions) [other traps have useful other effects i think] and all traps need significantly higher damage. the effects (was it jester's boots? and the sss soulbound rapier?) that increase trap effectiveness need to easily be 2x-ed IMO

thanks! i definitely missed that post when it came up. i've been working on an update right now, i'll be sure to add it to the update as well. wow i've been doing the wrong mini-strategy for dual-wielding equipment for literally years

um Tekehu loses access to normal summons (on both the chanter and druid side). i think you might keep lashing vine at tier 7, and you get his special water whip and watery double, but you miss out on pretty much everything else (though the watery double one is meta-game-able)

please please please please please please please please please please please please fix traps before you close the book on this patch (who knows if we get another) it is probably the single biggest mechanically broken thing in the game: do this and i'll send a hand-written letter of effusive thanks to the obsidian dev team

what does that mean? i guessed it might be french but my high school french is absolutely useless these days sounds good, i almost never take the existing passive as-is my main concern is the symmetry; that mid-high level paladin-type enemies are already super annoying to kill because of how tanky they are and this would make them even more so. *thumbs up*. enemies consciously disengaging is so rare that i think the fighter disengagement attack boost (Overbearing Guard) also needs some kind of buff (if you haven't already), and that one's arguably much better than the monk disengagement.

my honest response: "there were summonable weapons in poe1??" i doubt they were as good, i stopped with the ogres and used them to solo the final boss fight. summons need to die for pallegina to get resources as an SC paladin, and sumoned weapons aren't going to die nearly as quickly as the skellies from the skeleton chant (and frankly you don't want your weapons to die, they are far more useful alive than in the form of zeal for pallegina IMO). that dragon summon is great. it's kind of a rough choice because multiclassing a chanter is very tempting, but the dragon summon is a really good payoff if you do choose to invest in an SC chanter. absolutely huge, has literally thousand+ health. i've said it before on these forums a bunch, but it's so tough i've used it to facetank megabosses (its natural immunity to corrode helps especially against the slime megaboss). and while it doesn't have a scaling weapon like the summoned weapons, it has tons of power levels so its abilities scale incredibly well: it has two uses of a fire breath attack, three uses of a knock down ability, and two uses of a cone-wide tail lash; while its sustained autoattack won't be nearly as good as the summoned weapons, it can burst out a ton of damage with those abilities since you can use them as soon as it appears, in a wide area. in easier trash fights you can probably one-hit KO a bunch of enemies with a single tail lash or fire breath.

nah, my tests were a while ago, but i'm 99% sure that i did a test where i counted and it ended way too early. if i were to guess, i'd say that every time a bounce spell is about to bounce, it checks num_bounces <= max_bounces and that max_bounce number dynamically changes. it just is very very rare (borderline impossible outside of bellower and eld nary) for this to actually matter. edit: rather than try to search my memory, i checked my guide where pretty much everything in there has been tested or verified some other way, and i did indeed a note about it not working with eld nary back in 2019 (wow the years have really gone by!)

the summoned weapons do tons of damage (they are the only chanter summons that actually scale their equipment with your level, so they get up to legendary enchantment), and each weapon comes with many uses of an ability - the important one IMO is the one that comes with knock down. you can spam up to 11 uses of knock down - give it a quick hotkey and use shift to queue up multiple uses on a tough foe and you can lock them down. the fact that they scale their equipment means they basically outclass all other summons for damage once they become available, and likely even do better than the tier 9 dragon for pure damage (but the tier 9 dragon has other advantages).

unfortunately doesn't work with bellower in RTWP, only in TB mode. eld nary is so slow to bounce that the bonus power level effect from the bellower actually expires before you actually get extra bounces from it even with really high int (you basically need salvation of time). you get some scaling for the initial couple hits, but the potential is wasted on a bellower. TB mode is different because the game politely waits for the spell to fully finish before advancing time and expiring the bellower buff.

i would say that lay on hands is great for occasional burst healing against something stupid happening, but upgrading lay on hands is utterly unnecessary on pallegina as a herald. for newer players, i suspect ancient memory and zealous endurance seem like really subtle sources of healing, and numerically they do seem low, but the fact that you can keep them going for free throughout the length of an entire fight is truly astounding. chanter has even more sources of defense and sustain, but those two on a herald are easy-peasy and available early. and kaylon isn't exaggerating. way back early in deadfire's history when the first two megabosses were released, i had pallegina as a herald and i basically stumbled into beating both the spider and slime because pallegina could carry my party indefinitely with her sustain and chants (and repeatable weapon summons).

it's pretty complicated. if you want the gory details, you can read the pinned post in this forum, or my best attempt here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions and then a section specifically about action time and recovery: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/action-speed-recovery-time the tl;dr is that it's the dual-wielding and 2w style that are great, because they give you tons of speed for "free." So yes, they make patinated plate tolerable, but they would make any other armor much faster. You are still suffering a lot from patinated plate, it's just that dual wielding with 2w style talent makes it a bit more bearable than if you were 1h style or weapon + shield style or 2h weapon style. but anyone who's dual wielding with 2w style would be even faster (much more so, in fact) with medium or light or no armor.

you can also just let troubadour chant at normal speed. then it's like a normal chanter (albeit a bit slower on invocations bc they all cost +1). i tend to just let troubadour chant at normal speed so i can get a lot more chant uptime and only switch on the super-fast invocations if i need to spam a shout for some reason (or to trigger resistance/shield chants repeatedly)

i'm more saying that you need to have something specific in mind. i mentioned SC barbarian retaliation because that's not a "tank," that's someone who blindly charges in and aggros as many enemies as possible because they want to get critically hit by bad guys. if you don't have something specific in mind, you're probably better off with well-enchanted medium armors. Eder (and other fighters) also get automatic recovery for a while, which makes medium armor extremely viable at all stages even as tank (though i'd get a shield in that situation, back to that conundrum). offensive parry/riposte only procs on misses, so AR is largely not important for riposte strategies. in fact you're better off with medium armor bc there's a unique medium armor that gives you +deflection that scales on your intimidation. same as above, if you have insane deflection why bother with AR? you can just ignore attacks and put on a robe or something for amazing speed. you could do this, but you're honestly nerfing the best part of streetfighter, which is just stupid fast speed. in addition, many people find it easy to trigger streetfighter bonuses using a blinding effect like chill fog - this only works because the streetfighter bonus is so huge that it overwhelms the malus from chill fog. you add a huge additional malus from patinated plate to that and you lose a lot of the point of being a streetfighter.

frankly i like SC bellower. getting massive scaling on lower-level chants, and getting a massive-duration dragon at tier 9. but cantor (helwalker), war caller (tactile barrage and conqueror stance to boost chant/invocation effectiveness), or even a melee wildrhymer (stalker, extra defense and lots of accuracy abilities) can be all good imo while leaning into bellower playstyle.

nit-picky follow-up post i would be very careful about how you talk about maluses. "-70 speed" is very different with deadfire math from "+70% recovery time penalty", which is what patinated plate actually is (+55% from heavy armor and additional +15% from malus). also i'm not sure about your math. do you know about deadfire's inversion math? with the enchant that grants -15% recovery time bonus and 2w style + dual wield, you actually take a +70% recovery time penalty and get it down to a -7% recovery time bonus. (dual-wielding grants you a -30% recovery time bonus, and 2w style grants you a further -15% recovery time bonus. the -15% recovery time bonus from the enchant doesn't simply take away 15% from the recovery penalty because of inversions, it actually overpowers it.)

depends a little bit on what difficulty you play and what settings. IM(very extensive)E, on potd with upscaling, heavy armor is generally just a niche choice regardless of character build: on POTD enemies start with such huge boosts to PEN that the bonus AR from heavy armor doesn't typically help mitigate damage, but you suffer a significantly larger recovery penalty all the time further hurts that you getting magical heavy armor is very slow, so it doesn't keep up with enemy scaling further hurts that you can easily steal an exceptional medium armor as soon as you land on nekataka, which actually gives you better than normal heavy armor protection[1], for less recovery penalty, at a time when normal heavy armor is hard to come by [1] even with equal-enchantment medium and heavy armor, heavy armor has weaknesses as bad as medium armor (medium armor has 7 AR by default, but only 5AR against two types. heavy armor goes up to 9AR, but still only 5AR against two types). on top of that, the most common heavy armor at first is brigandine, which has a weakness to pierce. this is actually pretty brutal - pierce is very common, and notably a major source of ranged damage. normal breast plate (medium armor) will actually probably give you better all-around protection because it doesn't have pierce as a weakness. it's basically not until you stat finding exceptional plate armor (which doesn't have a pierce weakness) that the tough defense really comes online, but at the same time you're starting to find great medium armor as well. magnera's chain is fantastic medium armor because you can enchant it to basically cover every weakness possible, and it's extra tough against pierce damage. contender's armor can be enchanted to give an unconditional +1 AR, which puts it in spitting distance of heavy armor, but with less vulnerable weaknesses and faster recovery time. tl;dr - on POTD go with medium armor unless you have a very specific synergy in mind (patina's plate is useful for a sc barbarian taking advantage of retaliation - you're going to get hit tons so the stun effect on enemies can be a huge survivability boost). on normal/veteran, heavy armor is a better survivability boost, but i would only switch to using heavy if you're actually finding survivability in combat difficult, and even then mostly rely on plate armor (the "actually" is important because you might be able to be just as survivable in combat with decently-enchanted medium armor). tl;tl;dr: - wait to see how it plays out in-game.

it's not just about making his active abilities faster, it's about making him entirely more responsive. if you're not playing RTWP it doesn't matter. but in RTWP, a medium-armor slow-weapon 1h will take 5.3s to recover (assuming +35% medium armor, eder's starting 11 dex). If you're 1.5s into recovering during which you get brought to near death, you have to wait another 3.8s before you can do anything else, like Second Wind or potions or whatever. A medium-armor Eder using magran's blessing and 2w style will take 3.1s (+35% medium armor, -30% dual wielding, -15% two weapon style, eder's starting 11 dex) with either slow weapon or shield. In the same scenario, if you're 1.5s into recovering when something happens, you now only have to wait 1.6s to do anything else. That is a massive improvement in reactivity, and you'll readily notice it in hard fights - the second eder might do a little less damage, but you'll be able to respond quicker to changing circumstances (for me it mostly means needing to use a second wind or drink a healing potion). the situation is more extreme when interrupts are involved. when interrupted, you end up having to recover for 2s. if you get interrupted multiple times, then that stacks. the only upper limit to this is your recovery time. the first eder can easily become extremely sluggish in a fight where interrupts are involved. extremely common with rogue-type enemies, who also like to dual-wield; a successful dual-wielded crippling strike will knock the first eder's recover back 4s. the second eder can only ever be knocked back at most by 3.1s, a significant improvement in interrupt resiliency. i.e., if both eders had 1.5s left before their next action (again, maybe a queued Second Wind to heal) and got hit by a dual-wielded rogue's interrupt, the first eder would reset completely to 5.3s recovery, whereas the second eder would get back to 3.1s; you only lost 1.6s versus losing almost the full 4s. on especially harder potd fights you can definitely be in a situation where the first eder barely gets to do anything at all before getting knocked out. general responsiveness is a huge win. edit: this is also why reloading ranged weapons are very good, even though they come with significant downsides compared to bows and implements. being able to do anything else in the middle of reloading versus having to wait for a recovery period is an extremely huge advantage in a complex fight.

interesting! that opens up more classes that can trigger a lot of least unstable coil inspirations.

there are some other storybook encounters that select specific characters. what you're talking about is visible in the storybook encounter as greyed out characters. but IIRC, some examples include SSS storybook where an arbitrary character is chosen to suffer some consequences or make choices, or on the island where you can find eccea's blaster, there's a bridge where if you don't have adequate athletics like party member #4 is chosen to pass checks or die.

if you're indecisive, troubadour is the all-around better choice IMO. i have a lot of fun with bellower but it comes with limitations that you need to work with/around, whereas troubadour is a good all-purpose chanter.