thelee

An extra plus, in case it wasn't obvious, is that because chants happen automatically and have a fixed rate of progression (6s each, down to 3s with troubadour brisk recitation), chanters are spellcasters that are not nearly as significantly impacted by heavier armor, which gives you some equipment flexibility. Your invocation recoveries will be slower, but they make up a far smaller % of actions than a different spellcasting class's spells. If you wanted you could create a super melee tanky chanter and still be almost at full chanting effectiveness as one wearing robes. I agree that Deadfire chanters are probably one of the best bard implementations in an RPG, and I played a lot of IWD2 (IWD and IWD2 did both have great bard implementations... relative to the AD&D/3e source material)

a plug for my guide which definitely agrees paladin is a good healer: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/paladin If you want to amp up paladin heal capability, you can pick up kind wayfarers and you can spam flames of devotion to do aoe party heals while also doing some decent damage.

skald is great for that, but if you also want general diversity as well, bellower is a good choice. you don't get the cheaper offensive chants, but you also don't get more expensive non-offensive chants (which includes a chant or two that are also offensive support), and all your invocations are much more powerful (but you have to make sure to use invocations when you can). if you play on a higher difficulty, bellower can also do great for your dps because the bonus PL will help you penetrate enemy AR, which is more of a problem on PotD.

Does this change the stutter one gets when Mirror Image is cast?

IIRC you are not locked in at that point - you can still betray them, and you can side with one of the other factions - you might not be locked in until you actually use the Engolio de Espiers to summon the ghost ship. Unlike most of the other factions, the principi questline does not burning bridges with the other factions in the way huana, RDC, or VTC do.

what difficulty are you playing on? can you elaborate what feels "bad"? like... not enough damage, not enough to do, etc.?

I don't even think save and reload are critically necessary. They may be a more reliable way to trigger some underlying issue, but I'm going to refer back to my case where I was able to invoke some stack-ability just by zoning through some areas (no reloads at all). I wasn't able to figure out why, and at the time the other person I was talking to couldn't reproduce it. Maybe the pause/rest exploit in the process of doing that also triggers whatever underlying issue is occuring, and so bypasses save/reload. Who knows. edit: at the same time, i need to reiterate that save/reload is also not guaranteed to trigger it.

My main point is that the effect of "different types of buffs" stacking in different ways is not a workable hypothesis. E.G. it's not that some aspect of hylea's is able to stack because of the way it is set up, versus jayd's food, but something weird and underlying inconsistency how the game handles one of: save/loads, zone transitions, memory in the game engine, assets, etc, with regards to arbitrary rest/food bonuses. The rest of it we can chalk up to this being text on the internet and sometimes nuance of how we use words gets lost in the transmission. edit: while we're talking about personal experiences, rum and rymsjodda are very consistent for me in terms of not stacking. i have to juggle it pretty aggressively across many types of characters i play (with my theurge it meant making sure that if i have rum i consume deftness, if i have rymsjodda i consume coral snuff, rymsjodda with nature's bounty, etc.) if there's some inevitability that occurs, i don't run into it very much with that particular setup, and I pretty aggressively consult action speed/recovery time tooltips, especially when i mess up some combination of food/drug/potions (my mindset is pretty frequently a hopeful "maybe i was wrong about that" when i do that)

I'm going to confirm with a quick scan of Mohora Wraps that they are also classified as active, as are a bunch of other foods i accidentally dumped out due to a malformed regex. Re-quoting jayd edit: i don't know why my quote of jayd is so malformed, ah well

I mean outside of the "pause-before-you-rest" exploit to get an arbitrarily large number of rest bonuses

i'm requoting this: I and several other ppl actually tried this and could not come up with a consistent rule. It might even be non-deterministic! Or maybe in a long-running game with no or low rests (which would otherwise reset food/rest bonuses) stack-ability becomes inevitable because of some deep underlying bug. Sometimes when I could get it to stack, it persisted that way the entire session (easily redo-able), sometimes it did not (again, I have no idea why just zoning through some areas happened to work in one case). But please, barreling in with some categorical declarations of how something "always" worked which flies in the face of both tests and anecdotal experiences is not helpful.

I did read what you wrote - you're arguing that it comes down to the specific buff types (not true) and said I happened to test the ones that don't stack (if somehow the first was true, this is not true). it comes off as sheer gaslighting. In that Ultimate thread you seemed to be operating under the assumption that it wasn't the specific buff, but some interaction with save/loads that causes it to stack (which is exactly what I've been saying in this thread! and now in this thread somehow it's always been some completely other effect) and in fact I tested the precise buff you said worked (as did others, ocelloter, decadence, and i believe waski as well). And sometimes it did work! Sometimes it didn't. Speaking for myself, I could not figure out the mechanism that made it work, so I didn't rely on it - so when it did end up stacking later on in my run, it was just a fun bonus that made the run a bit easier.

Here's Hylea's Bounty in particular from the gamedata: https://pastebin.com/kk7864Qc note the two major lines: I'm happy for anyone to determine the cases in which resting bonuses can be made to trivially stack, consistently, outside of exploits.

what's extra frustrating is that going through the ultimate thread to see other people talking about seeing suppressed food bonuses versus not stacking, @Raven Darkholme is there themselves talking about the buggy mechanism by which you can get food/rest bonuses to stack with other bonuses (which later I and a couple people test out to try to clarify, and that's when I was able to get somethign to stack simply with zone transitions (no save/load), and both me and ocelettor failed to understand the exact mechanism by which a save/load can get a stack consistently) The viewpoints being expressed here is just historical revisionism compared to that. *headshake* The idea that I'm testing a category that doesn't stack is some maddening re-imagining of the past. Throughout all the various bits of testing I've done, among other things, I was testing something that you literally claimed as able to be stacked via a bug (and in situations I was able to get it stacked! and others, not. similar with others, including Decadence who themselves didn't rely on the mechanism for their own early ultimate run because their own tests couldn't produce a stack)

I didn't write in my guide, but when I was creating the character and playing through it I thoroughly evaluated and non-stacking rest bonuses were the norm - hence rum on top of the streetfighter bonuses. A no-rest guide that relies on a whole other bug/exploit (arbitrarily stacking rest bonuses via timed pauses) makes no sense as a basis for judging the apaprent mechanisms of stacking rest bonus. Both @Kaylonand @Raven Darkholme pretending to say that it's either a) definitively trivially true that rest bonuses always stack or b) think it's just an artifact of odd categories of stacking should actually go through either my ultimate thread link or the bug report link. In the ultimate thread link you see a quick discussion in which under different circumstances with the exact same rest bonuses and potion bonuses considered you can either get them to stack or not stack, and cannot even be reproduced in two different games on different cpus despite seemingly identical inputs. In the bug thread MaxQuest literally dives into the gamedata and shows rest bonuses are tagged as active. In this very thread you have a couple others other than me with their own eyes seeing that rest bonuses don't stack. In pure logic, both Kaylon and Raven's basic assertions have been trivially falsified. It's OK to be wrong, but for goodness sake don't stubbornly peddle wrong information.

it's not just a new patch thing, dude. and it's not just limited to those. since like forever i've had to be careful about various potions, buffs, and rum, because of the overlap in action speed and resulting suppression (since way back when i first wrote up my umezawa build which was back in the 1.x days).

the save/loading when you leave and enter would count. just perhaps any kind of saving and loading. also see below. not true. i would in fact bet serious money against this version of history. this thread shows a lot of the regulars here on this expressing the expectation that rest bonuses don't stack (including maxquest, who dug in and found the that food/rest bonuses were marked as active, making the developer intent pretty obvious) what might be true is that this bug of the food/rest bonuses losing their "active" indicator somehow has been around since forever. a lot of the early ultimate discussion thread operated around the assumption that resting bonuses didn't stack or that triggering the bug that causes them to stack was inconsistent to rely on. which is why i express confusion upthread on how exactly to trigger the bug; in the investigation below i found only some zone transitions was needed for me in one case, while ocelotter had trouble getting his bonuses to ever not be suppressed by active effects

wow, i've played this game so many times and never noticed this interaction. i always thought degnos quest had an abrupt and unsatisfying end either way (esp if you did the hard fight), but nice to know there's this bit of closure.

the main problem I have with damage shields in this game is that they're extremely hard to reason about - you have no indication how much or how little health is left. with the BPM's change to salvation of time is a BDD tweak really necessary? (does BPM also incorporate that brilliant nerf?)

there's a bug, where resting/food/drink bonuses become passive (and therefore stack) after some sort of save/load cycle (i don't know the specifics). it happened to me in my ultimate run so i ended up w/ higher stats than expected (a plus!). pretty sure it's not intentional so it's up to your own standards on what's "fair" or "not fair" in terms of whether or not to take advantage of it or not for your own game. on the spectrum of possible cheese in this game, it's probably not that bad.

sure, especially with rogue-type AI around. but it's very short duration and needs to be paired with other stuff or else mostly it just stalls the inevitable. in this respect the special lay on hands variant is very powerful if even shorter duration because it comes with a free (in terms of action economy/resource) heal. resurrection comes with a 20s death prevention shield and no one really blinks an eye at it in terms of power level. BDD stands out because it's much easier to do something degenerate with it, which implies interaction with salvation of time and/or wall of draining and/or brilliant (and the new strand of favor tech someone discovered here) i hope ppl here aren't just theorycrafting; if so please try a few hard fights where you have BDD and no brilliant/duration-extension exploits. it's not going to blow the fight wide open. And even when used exclusively with salvation of time [but no resource recurrence] the power level is not significantly past what i would expect out of a total casting of two level 5 spells and two level 6 spells to be, as someone who played using this interaction with a few glass cannon builds; it all functionally boils down to resource recurrence in fact.

spefically for weapon modals you probably want: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/weapons-and-proficiency-modals the action speed stuff is hard: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/action-speed-recovery-time if you're not interested in the math, the TL;DR i would say is to pay attention to the sign and type of modifier you're looking at. negative numbers are always much more powerful than positive numbers. so a -50% recovery time bonus is actually much much more powerful than a +50% recovery time penalty (in fact you need +100% total recovery time penalty to cancel it out), and a -50% recovery time bonus is very different from a +25% action speed bonus even though they both might affect the same thing at some point. (this mathematical weirdness applies to almost all numbers you see, with the exception of defense/accuracy adjustments. so even things like +%/-% effect duration from resolve or +%/-% bonus/penalty to health from con or even negative reputation effects for paladin/priest are effected by this negative number/positive number weirdness. it's kind of, but not exactly, the same as multiplicative multipliers: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions (lot of credit to @MaxQuest who I think was the first person to put this into an equation))

I would maintain this is also not that powerful without effects like salvation of time or wall of draining. Brilliant ordinarily is too slow, very limited.* * major exception is cipher who can get decent duration on their brilliant and with a psion can get >100% (e.g. multiple party members) uptime on it.

note: mc cipher also gets ancestor memories. part of what makes mc cipher relatively "painless" compared to sc for min-maxing purposes.

also disagree a bit on the psion side. The breakpoints are pretty critical for faster focus regeneration rates and the psion lives or dies by them. Getting to higher PLs faster is very powerful for early/mid-game. It really depends on your multiclass though - an offensive caster/psion can probably keep themselves busy while waiting for focus regen, but if you're more of a reactive healer/buffer caster + psion, then you might find yourself a little bit more stretched on focus and if you value the psion angle more than the multiclass side an sc psion might be better. an sc psion also gets as a reward reaping knives, which just supercharges their focus regen and helps them keep focus gen up even in fights where there's periodic aoe damage (which is normally a nightmare for the psion).