thelee

would it still cause a crash if they end up being pulled into a ship boarding fight randomly? or do you mean permakilling them?

in case it hasn't come up in everyone's cheese finding, if you steal a spell of a class you are a part of (not just wizard, as mentioned upthread), after some save/load or some other kind of cycle, it gets removed from your action bar and enters your normal ability selection. i thought i had magically resolved my permanent spells thing without needing unity console or cheats, but it just turned out all the druid spells i had stolen migrated into my ability bar. maybe that means i can respec them out?

it's a shame you can't have maia's pet, because it's pretty much the best ranger pet in the game because they're immune to engagement. hence they could literally tank dorudugan if you so wanted. (maia is also arguably the best ranger class in the game as well, sigh)

I don't know what you read that ciphers are underpowered, but ciphers are definitely not. Obv, there's the fact that even a multiclass cipher gets brilliant, as @Boeroer mentions. But ciphers have a lot of really good powers. Even a tier 1 charm is useful in to the end-game. an underappreciated power is Mind Plague - basically battle-wide confusion and dazing for huge durations. On PotD especially, giving a gigantic -4 PEN penalty to basically every enemy on the battlefield along with no engagement capability is a gigantic survivability boost; all enemy casters also get weaker, and in certain fights is just utterly ruinous (where enemies might have a weakness: intellect). I think the big thing to be worried about on PotD is PEN, because most cipher approaches require damaging the enemy with weapons, and if you don't manage your PEN and enemy AR situation, you're going to be in a world of frustration. If you don't want to micromanage that, a psion or a properly built beguiler can get you focus in less-PEN-dependent ways.

since i have all achievements i guess it doesn't hurt, seeing the red warning "achievements disabled" text does trigger negative perceptions though

Hey calling especially anyone with modding experience. Basically, if you aren't aware, the Grimoire Imprint spells are buggy in that sometimes they take a spell permanently and add it to your action bar. With my current game, I suspect it's related to doing grimoire-switching before your target dies, because I'm doing a lot of grimoire switching (and shapeshifting) and now I already have two permanent spells (after just a few uses of imprint), and I feel like I'm going to accumulate a lot more as a result. Was wondering if anyone knew how to remove these spells, or to mod it s.t. these imprint spells don't screw up like this. I suspect there are some fun "cheese" opportunities with this imprint effect to be had, but I'm mostly worried that I'm going to mess up the UI if I get too many permanent spells and stretch my action bar.

kaylon already sort of got it, but iirc avenging storm was used in part for interrupts (with potions) to help along, but even with blade cascade the interrupt chance is not great and not terribly reliable also because you still have to roll reflex for a bolt to appear; in a long enough fight you'll get a big stretch where you don't interrupt. it mostly just made bigger margin for error, especially on the smaller oozes.

uh oh it might be time to retire my pen and paper! looking forward to its release

This "balance doesn't matter because it's single-player" is a misguided trope I keep seeing. The biggest examples personally I can think of in multiplayer for balance are still relatively noncompetitive (e.g. MMORPGs in PvE/raid environments). The "balance" needs come from making choices meaningful. There's no meaningful choice if there's a clearly better ability. The argument doesn't even matter if people are just interested in flavor for the other nine, it basically acts as a penalty for people who want to use the other nine abilities. E.G. people who want to use druids as summoners on PotD are basically punished by having weirdly implemented and poorly scaling (if at all) summons compared to even wizards. It's not even really a subjective matter - the maths that designers use to tweak and balance WoW or whatnot is still mostly the same math you can use on single player games (except you perhaps have a much, much smaller population for live telemetry if you even instrument for telemetry). I get that some ppl really like the JRPG-style, have clearly OP&terrible powers and who cares about balance approach. I don't. I like looking at a system full of different spells/abilities/items and finding many ways to put together interesting builds with interesting tradeoffs with meaningfully different optimizations [no coincidence that of all the SP final fantasies I enjoy FFT the most]. Absolute balance is never going to be possible, but so long as there's meaningful decision-making along the way (e.g. Fireball in AD&D is a wildly powerful third-level spell, but there are legitimate reasons to pick up other spells instead without feeling like you're handicapped) it's fine.

important to note that in tabletop, you have a human GM who can be a partner in making even situationally or poorly balanced summons useful in combat somehow (unless you're in a particularly punishing or power-gaming campaign). in practice IMO D&D-based game systems the summons can be very easily lackluster, even if faithfully re-implemented, especially since combat encounters in a video game version of a D&D-based game are much more extreme than tabletop.

Diablo 2's synergy system was terrible. It was intended to make lower level skills useful late game (and disincentivize putting 1 point into lower skills and just hoarding skill points until later skills). But in practice synergies discourage build diversity because now you have to go all-or nothing into a few skills and their synergies to be viable for nightmare and beyond. (and many passives you still only ever need to put in one point because they never got synergies. and the handful of active abilities that get no synergies are basically dead in the water. and some synergies are still terrible - try making a golem necromancer) I clocked hundreds upon hundreds of hours grinding in Diablo 2, and I've made peace with the fact that despite its addictive loot-reward cycle, it is honestly just a very poorly designed game system. There are skills where the diminishing returns are so significant that at times you get 0 returns for several skill points.

even ones that don't scale up are still pretty useful even in late game. most summons at the very least still "level up" and get higher defenses, health, and accuracy, which makes them a free source of damage prevention and some free damage/flanking. a few summons have useful abilities even if they don't get better equipment (spiritual ally has robust inspiration at will).

No, there's two separate things to consider - power level and ability level - they are completely separate effects. For +2 PL you get +10% duration and +2 accuracy. For specific illusion spells, you get more scaling based on its ability level as well as your native power level. For Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage, which is a natively third tier spell, you get +4 accuracy, because you get +2 per ability tier past the lowest one. This is a wholly separate scaling mechanism than PL scaling. If you're high enough level that you've unlocked the fourth ability tier, you get an additional +1 PL scaling on that spell, which amounts to an additional +1 accuracy and +5% duration, stacking with your +2 PL illusionist bonus, any other bonus PL, and the base ability scaling (this base scaling doesn't change as you level up). If you hover over the accuracy number for a spell like Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage you can see these numbers at play - you get different numbers based on whether it's the accuracy number in your ability bar, the pop-up tooltip [where you can hover over the accuracy number and see a breakdown], and then in the combat log when you actually use it. The number you see in the combat log is the most accurate. edit: "ability level scaling" is basically a mechanism that means that if you have two identical spells, but one is at tier one and the other you unlock at tier two, the one you unlocked at a higher tier is just going to be inherently more powerful despite otherwise identical effects (due to inherently higher accuracy and PEN)

do you have any mods? i have a skald with a similar setup and I definitely am able to get up to 5. The fact that I started with 5 was also extremely handy early on because it let me spam two different invocations (the frightening one for 3, and then revenge for 2) right at the start. Maybe it's a turn-based specific bug? how odd

oh nuts, good to know

on the plus side, it seems technically feasible to add in that momentary death prevention if it doesn't already exist - duplicate whatever watchful presence does but have it heal only like 1 health or something. wouldn't feel as "neat" though.

so in my mind watchful presence also functions as a "prevent death" of sorts - if you recieve fatal damage, you instead appear to go down to 1 (or 0?) and then instantly heal up. does the same thing happen with the tweaked BDD (except a damage shield instead of a heal)? i just think it's ideal if there's not a situation where you recieve so much damage that you bypass near death and die without getting the preventative shield.

in more recent popups of the bug I actually don't remember how I fix it. I generally end up probably doing some combination of: recreating all my songs save/reload changing songs i don't think i've needed to respec. earlier versions was much worse. i'm not even sure if respec consistently fixed it. i think i abandoned tekehu in one run while waiting for a patch.

i said non-FF mostly because the way I think of building an FF stat-wise is kind of at cross-purposes for the kind of melee-combo i'd get out of merging it with a rogue (e.g. i'd go with trying to make FF pretty tanky). just spitballing, i could be very wrong.

is it possible to get adra ban without loaded pockets? the big problem is that you actually don't need that much pickpocket/sleight of hand to pickpocket all the goodies you get from loaded pockets (or even just vanilla game). A few points plus a pet on occasion will take care of it. Stealth is more important for pickpocketing, than pickpocketing itself, since you actually need to sneak up to people to pick their pockets. Occasionally you'll see someone with like a 7 sleight of hand-gated item, but it's almost always incredibly lame (a fine stiletto or a piece of hardtack) because the way the system is set up I believe pickpocketing is based on the NPC skill or perception (which is not very well set) and only tangentially the quality of the item being looted. if they had had the freedom to, i would've wanted OBS to spend more time polishing their stealth/pickpockt mechanics than, i don't know, ship to ship combat.

this has happened to me on occasion - it was worse in earlier versions of the game, but i don't think they ever fully ironed out the bug that causes this. it's pretty rare now, but when it happens it can be extremely, extremely annoying.

Yeah, I tried the german version for a bit, then remembered that someone here (you?) recommended the german translation mod. i installed it, and what a world of difference that made. I don't remember the specific words off the top of my head, but when I gave myself a dex inspiration, in the original german it was a really clunky word (iirc it was a word that resembled "really good with your fingers" (i'm guessing some weird literal translation of "nimble")). with the mod I believe it's just "schneller".

(any non-forbidden fist monk) + trickster rogue is something that would come to my mind. the trickster gives you mirror image for some extra survivability, whereas the fists + monk + rogue sneak attack damage combined will give you some pretty capable melee prowess.

yeah, don't be afraid to hire companions on the first island. i think you have to more aggressively care about how you order your quests you do on potd. even if a quest doesn't have any skulls for you, they can still be extremely hard (for example family pride and hanging sepulchers can be extremely brutal for a non-unoptimized party even at target level). don't be afraid to back away and regroup. (family pride in fact i keep several saves in case i get stuck inside one of the houses in an impossible-to-win fight.)

this is pretty much me. the first couple times i was there for the story, but now i'm just in it to see build/party ideas click together in fights and take on challenges. it's a wee bit of a shame since i know the writers spent a lot of time and here i am just smashing through dialogue almost essentially by rote based on what outcome my particular character probably best desires. at this point i've played the game so much that even mechanics/fights aren't enough to get me through a whole playthrough - it has to be something new that i'm experiencing and that i'm really into as a concept, which deadfire actually has a lot of. but it does mean i abandon runs more aggressively these days to try something new, whereas in my earlier days i would see even meh builds to the end. (recently i also periodically turn on the german translation [with the german mod] to help practice my german learning. the game feels real fresh again when i'm struggling to figure out what the object of a sentence is.)