thelee

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.)

hey hey i have actually been thinking a lot about a fey build recently. (i even put one together in pathfinder 2end) personally, i've settled on an enchanter/ancient. in hindsight i think i should've been an evoker to retain access to illusion magic, but several things worked against that at the time: being an evoker itself didn't feel "fey" enough illusion wizard magic in deadfire is a lot more about "scaring the pants off of people" than D&D-esque style "create tricks, deceive" and the wizard lacked the the charm/dominate angles that really make it fey-like that a cipher has, so i didn't feel *as* compelled to go with illusion magic (though here and there while actually playing it i wish i had access to mirror image, miasma, and eventually invisibility) losing access to essential phantom, which i wanted to have as a mid-late game niche option and felt very fey-like self-synergy opportunity with enchantment school in being able to be temporarily immune to all my own hobbling druid spells (and not losing my deleterious alacrity of motion buff) in the end i thought keeping access to enchantment was preferable over illusion, since you get stuff like arkemyr's capricious hex, call to slumber--both of which are fey-like-- and great overall utility. i picked enchantment over e.g. conjuration becuse i wanted to retain access to evoker magic for its late game utility and interrupts. i didn't pick blood mage because i wanted to be able to empower spells with venombloom. i picked wizard over a cipher (which i briefly considered) because being a wizard frees you up from having to use up a lot of ability points just picking up spells - past tier 3 i don't pick up a single wizard spell until wall of draining at level 19. the rest goes into druid spells and multiclass passives. it requires quite a bit of micromanagement to juggle grimoires, but it's pretty great overall. i also did a psion/lifegiver along time ago, so i'm not against the idea of cipher/druid multiclass working, but the decision i went with this way just gave me a lot more options with my ability points. so far i have a lot of fun with it. there's a fire subtheme, so i have ring of focused flame. most of the time i summon the mushrooms to help me fight, but when the situation calls for it, i create firebrand and then summon essential phantom. or in some other cases, cat form and then summon essential phantom (you get a phantom with cat laws). i did discover a really unfortunate bug: if you switch grimoires while spiritshifted, you lose all the spells from grimoires, and can't get them back until you turn off spiritshift and switch grimoires again.

Disintegrate is an ApplyOverTime effect so most auto-generated tooltips and helpful things will probably not be any help to you since the auto-generation is incorrect. A crit DoT of any kind will have a multiplicative 25% duration increase (note in that link I wrote that PEN also gets a boost for DoTs but I'm honestly not so sure if I got that right, need to retest). This is not necessarily as great as a crit for a non-DoT, but the multiplicative nature means that if you have lots of intellect on a powerful effect you can get a whole lot. DoT damage is not affected by crit. Things like Necrotic Lance will be affected, because it's actually two components - an instant damage part (that gets boosted by a crit) and a DoT (which only has a durational increase by crit). I played a Debonaire fairly recently (5.0) and could swear it worked fine for me even before picking Dirty Fighting. To OP's q's: I've found in practice it's rarely worth deliberately trying to crit an enemy with most effects for much of a fight. Once you get up to a high enough level where you start granting body inspirations to a charmed enemy, it narrows the type of effects you can safely land a crit without it being a complete waste (or at least significantly undermining it). And effects that break charm you don't really want to land because the charm is really powerful, i'd rather have the charm in place most of the time. What I ended up doing is mostly trying to micromanage and landing a simple weapon attack (or cheap rogue ability) or poison attack when the enemy has like a couple seconds left on the duration especially if it's the last enemy (for last melee enemies I found it fun do an arterial strike and just run away and let the extended duration kill it as it tries to chase). Disintegrate might be a rare exception because just getting a durational boost on that is huge and there's no affliction that might be immediately countered by the charm effect. Toxic Strike maybe something similar, but that's a rather expensive 4-guile combo. edit: make sure you are actually using charm. dominate doesn't give you a 100% crit conversion.