thelee

yep

i'm just here to suggest that BDD is not OP in a world where effects like salvation of time and wall of draining are limited in their potential. in a normal world it's just a helpful emergency spell that temporarily gives you huge protection. But the duration is inherently very short and if you haven't "solved your problem" by the end you're still gonna get knocked out. I think any fix for BDD actually has to be a fix for salvation of time or wall of draining. (such exists in a balance patch or community mod, no?) edit: you can see this clearly with some risen/skeleton caster groups. undead priests love to cast BDD on near dead friends but all it really does is just delay the inevitable for the enemy by a handful of seconds, unless there happens to be a risen champion nearby who also does lay on hands (which targets similar to priests with BDD), at which point the BDD power is increased quite a bit but still not extremely powerful. meanwhile, god help you if a priest puts BDD on a risen wizard who then uses of wall of draining on your party - you best get the heck out of that wall and/or hope you have some good cleansing/supression effects.

spells don't have a "hidden" accuracy - they are computed very similarly to weapon accuracy, you just don't get weapon-specific accuracy bonuses. if you hover over spells or abilities in your menus, or you right click on an ability and look at the description, you'll get a reasonably accurate spell/ability accuracy number. you don't have a general "spell/ability" accuracy like you do with weapons because it varies depending on ability tier and other things. [I say "reasonably accurate" because even the tooltips and right-click menus are a little bit wrong, though close; most accurate is simply looking at the combat log.] things like "fine" "exceptional" or a club's +5 accuracy modal, or even most magical weapons +accuracies generally only affect weapons. weapon penalties like the pistol proficiency modal or blunderbuss acc penalty only affect weapons as well. however, shield accuracy penalties (medium or large shield) affect both weapon and ability/spell accuracy. heavy-duty offensive casters should not hold heavy shields. yes, for the non-probability savvy, what this intuitively means is "what is the chance that any of your hit to crit triggers" which is equal to (1 - "what is the chance that none of your hit to crit trigger"), hence all the 1-'s to "invert" your hit->crit odds from success to failure, and then one more flip to go from .81 to 19%. assassin only gets its bonuses from stealth, which--once you enter combat--is impossible to become re-stealthed like you normally can (unlike games like BG2/IWD where if you ran out of line of sight you could re-stealth). You have to rely on abilities like Smoke Veil or potions of invisibility to become re-stealthed, which is expensive and pretty limited. i and others tend to recommend multiclassing assassin with a caster so you can really get mileage out of those assassinate bonuses by using them on heavy-hitting spells instead of a few weapon attacks. by contrast, streetfighter bonus is actually fairly easy to get really high uptime on... and the numbers involved are huge. -50% recovery time bonus is roughly equivalent to getting +33 dex through your recovery... on top of that you also get huge +50% sneak attack damage bonus. if you manage to get both bloodied and flanked, you also get massive crit bonuses. the problem is that streetfighter bonuses--while they can be easy to get--also encourage extremely dangerous behavior. being flanked and bloodied is generally a bad situation to be in for a class as squishy as a rogue.

word of warning though - the concentration chant targets will. on potd i find that i need to debuff ner with a club modal and have a special song that is just the concentration chant in order to get decent uptime on it. (uptime is important because ner can generate more concentration through one of her abilities)

wow, new caster stat stick indeed!

holy moley did you made me cackle. i have similar thoughts about BG2 - i could not finish BG for the longest time but BG2 really had me hooked into the narrative with a killer opening. I didn't finish BG until long after I had cleared BG2 multiple times. I think the narrative in PoE2 is quite a bit tighter than in PoE1. I notice that you liked Tyranny, which also is lore-heavy. I wonder if the difference lies in how the lore-building is conveyed. Tyranny introduced the system where lore-topics were highlighted in-text, and you could hover over something for a quick summary or full details if you wanted, or you could just skip it altogether and just focus on what's going on, whereas PoE1 sometimes had extremely exposition-heavy dialogue. PoE2 uses the Tyranny system. If there's a steam sale you might want to give it a shot. You have a couple hours to give it a shot and still refund it. edit: I think JE Sawyer commented on Tyranny and said that Paradox owned the rights to Tyranny, so the likelihood of a sequel is pretty slim. If Chris Avellone is accurate with how Feargus handled dev with Paradox, there might be some bridges burned there so the likelihood of Obs developing any Tyranny sequel is even more vanishingly unlikely. edit 2: personally speaking, I recommend new people skip PoE1 and jump straight to PoE2. Don't get me wrong, I really loved PoE1 (before Deadfire knocked it out of the spot, PoE1 was my top RPG), but I personally think PoE1 is too dense and janky and frantic for people who aren't already hard fans of the IE RTwP genre for its own sake. Deadfire is a lot tighter and convincing in terms of narrative (I'm going to use the example that factions in PoE1 you just kinda stumbled into and after like two tasks for one faction you irrevocably pissed off everyone else without much warning; Deadfire has much more scaffolding and a better build up of the tensions). It also is more accessible in terms of overall systems design IMO (combat in particular). It also is just more "modern" in terms of design sensibility. If anything you might enjoy Deadfire a lot more than PoE1 for similar reasons, though obviously it's your money on the line, not mine.

i had a really rough galawain's challenge run once. the boars were volatile and the big drake was hardened. holy crap. a boar dying would take out a party member and i just severely underpenetrated the drake, and the fire breath has infinite uses just on a timer, which is horrible if the drake has a bajillion health and AR (relative to level 3-4 pipsqueaks). i think i ended up swapping out some party members for some hirelings that coudld just spam Charm or Hold Beast.

ironically on easier fights it's still not a concern because your crew members level up automatically as you do naval combat. kinda funny to imagine eld engrim kicking everyone's butt while a nude serafen (someone i perpetually sideline) just gets KO-ed

oh i don't think it's cheesy to hire specialized companions for a fight, but both brand enemy and gouging strike have hilarious consequences for the patient that i have to imagine was a bit unintentional. Esp with berath challenge, you end up with some pretty weird world events. Roving packs of bleakwalker paladin assassins, who all they do is point at someone and say "hey! you! yeah, you! you're my enemy now" and go hide out in a bunker for a week until their target dies. Entire kingdoms and revolutions are toppled by puny paladin pipsqueaks. Fireproof blankets are in high demand...

I can't speak about the community patch, but for vanilla game, I tried my best to sum it up here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/applyontick-vs-applyovertime

I ran a SC bellower and it was A+. It's not just the offensive chants that get nicely boosted (the lightning bolt one does amazing work, especially when upgraded), but even the buffs and summons. Plus, a single class chanter can get the Dragon summon at tier 9. A bellower (or a troubadour with brisk recitation) can get 100% uptime on that dragon. That dragon alone can carry you through all the megaboss fights: against dorudugan is immune to fire and can block your party members from being sucked in by Dorudugan's magnetic attack, can face tank Belranga and Hauane O Whe, and can absorb all of Sigilmaster Auranic's magic while you wait it out to take out the totems. I mostly agree but think this mix changes throughout the game. Early on, getting 2-phrase invocations is wonderful. Later on, regular crits can keep a steady supply of more powerful (even non-offensive) invocations.

for a less cheese-y approach, I think level 10-12 is very hard for PotD, but less so for normal difficulties. With a typical party for PotD I do the first fight at 13-14. The big thing is simply just being able to interrupt Llengrath's Safeguard or having a way to dispel it. Otherwise the fight can really drag, and even a powerful party might just run out of steam in such a scenario.

these fights also remind me that i wish obs had done slightly better combat hazard layout design. both the dunnage and degnos fights feature gunpowder barrels. i have managed to use them a few times, but it's extremely hard to pull off, since it's unclear how big the explosion is, and you need to somehow get everyone into position without taking a lot of free attacks (extremely hard in the degnos one). you also need to know in advance that you need a source of fire or firearm. i can see those fights being more doable in turn-based. (in degnos it's still worth blowing up a barrel even without proper prep because one wizard spawns right next to a barrel. obv works better if you can get more than a couple guys at once)

I can't speak for solo, but that dunnage fight becomes a lot easier (ignoring overleveling) when you realize that no one other than eamund has engagement. With micromanagement you run circles around all the rogues while taking out the ranged guys, and then you just need to make sure you have one tanky guy who engages eamund at the start. (optimally you wait for a rogue to wind up an attack like gouging strike, and then run out just before it connects, so they also waste resources) there's a very similarly hard fight after you get the task to get degnos's satchel. you get ambushed on the way back to queen's berth. you can take a violent path. it is extremely hard at the level you are expected to do this on potd. but similarly, only the main guy has engagement, so you can run circles around all the rogues while trying to focus down the ranged guys before they nuke you or swarm you with tentacles; it takes the fight from "for all intents and purposes impossible" to "barely possible with an optimized, rested party." edit: in my ultimate run i was an abject coward for the latter and just completely skipped the quest in the former

upgraded abilities get both more generous ability scaling and more generous lower-base treatment for PL scaling? didn't know that. either way, the numbers seem too low to me. I used 7 PEN mostly as a baseline comparison to how spellcasters handle PEN. Even when I'm futzing around with a test level 19 char in The Hole of all places, I'm under-PENing with pernicious cloud. Either the effect needs to be much easier to use or its PEN needs a buff. It either should be a really great interrupt/distraction tool that incidentally does damage, or it should be a high-risk high-reward weapon. Currently it's neither.

This is also a problem with Smoke Cloud and Smoke Grenade - that trio of abilities just has weird targeting behavior. ISTR that even confusion doesn't interact with it properly. In all cases only the rogue is excluded from the targeting. (add this to the sap upgrade in how it has messed up targeting). As a result, I prefer using Smoke Grenade even if pernicious cloud can do a lot of damage; simply being able to target it makes it a lot more useful. I think it would be reasonable to make all of them foe-only. I don't even know why it's the way it is right now - I bet the (probably buggy) targeting is an artifact of them trying to make a friend-and-foe effect that somehow still ignores the rogue, but in terms of systems design making them friend-and-foe makes the non-smoke grenade effects quite weak (esp smoke cloud given its guile cost) and hard to use. edit: i would also argue that in practice pernicious cloud doesn't do enough damage. it has like 9 PEN by default (7 + 2 scaling) which is very low and they don't really have good ways to increase that without very specific help. for spellcasters, 7 PEN base is a "low pen" effect, and spellcasters also have +1 PEN passives and spellshaping [which sometimes help] and several spellcasters can buff their inherent pen (cipher with +1, furies get +1, priests can buff with tenacious, chanters can buff with energized) or have enough effects to try and target vulnerable AR (druids and wizards especially). in PotD you could go through a lot of effort to carefully position your rogue and use the ability only to do piddling amounts of damage.

being a damage shield means you can "pseudo-heal" through effects that normally are blistering for healing (sickened, weakened, enfeebling, injuries). this is a neat interaction that comes up occasionally. Another benefit is that the damage shield is instant protection, whereas ancient memory takes time. Having Her Courage first means that when you switch to it, you immediately get 10 pts of damage protection, whereas to get the same with a typical AM would take almost the entire chant/linger; there's a time-based discount factor to consider here. But by far the most powerful aspect of the damage shield is that it refreshes when the chant is re-applied to people. Ancient Memory doesn't do much when refreshed - you still get a steady drip of health, same as always. However, the more often you refresh the damage shield, the more powerful it becomes. For example: troubadour with brisk recitation and a song that is solely "Her Courage" can almost carry an entire party against Hauane O Whe; normally you have to worry about Symbiote (which normally does 9.6 raw damage/tick forever or until you move and spawn enough oozes, the latter which also functions as a distraction and for the less skilled can be a major merging liability). However, refreshing a 10pt damage shield every tick means you never have to worry about that dot ever again. That's an extreme example. But even in less optimized cases (e.g. just a normal chanter who normally uses invocations) the instant refresh can give you outsized benefits in a typically challenging fight. Obviously you want healing as well, but the combined effect of a recurring damage shield *and* other healing can really feel like more than the sum of its parts. TL;DR - 25 pt damage shield would've been entirely broken IMO. 10-pt can feel weak in some situations, but can be extremely powerful in others. 25-pts would make it powerful in all situations and entirely broken in others.

yeah what i didn't make explicit in my post of example songs is that the third song is a "nice to have" esp for a skald (come, thick, [the third one which is so incidental that i forget]). if it happens, it happens, and if it's something like "thick grew their tongues" then all you need is one or two procs to have a lasting impact on the battlefield (in the case of come, come, it's some helpful drip of regen throughout the fight and for that build can also trigger interrupts). but the first two songs are the ones you want (almost like a power scale - the first song super important, and the second song like half important)

i have nothing that's really skald-specific. it's more setups that emphasize the first song in particular, for the same reason that @Jayd pointed out in #3 (skalds are more likely to reset their chants than others); I haven't built like a wildrhymer or harbinger or some other setup that really leans into the skald's melee martial focus. (i've used konstanten as a howler, but honestly i think his stats suck too much to be a good howler or skald) my personal skald/theurge's favorite song was: the fox from the farmer... -> the long night's... -> come, come... This only worked because I had a lot of disengagement-related bonuses, so I could get a pretty steep like 80-pt swing in enemy accuracy, it'd also be the first one to activate after an invocation, or switching chants. long night's combos into come, come. i also had side chants for resistance songs. in my current party, i'm building tekehu as an SC chanter that has more of a tanky focus, and a couple of songs I set up: silver knight -> ancient memory -> thick -> ... with the intention eventually of doing something more like silver knight -> the arrow sings -> with all your strength -> ... i also have another song that's like her courage -> ancient memory -> [i forget]... and various resistance songs. it's not very skald specific, but the principles would work well with a skald. If I'm in trouble, I switch out of "tanky mode" and put on the "her courage" one. By being the first song, I instantly get a 10pt damage shield, and a few seconds after that, get a regen effect. As a skald, it would work better because with mroe frequent invocations, you'll refresh the damage shield more frequently and get closer to 100% uptime on ancient memory even with a third song in there. You can also switch to resistance songs. I've mentioned in another thread that I really really like "One Dozen" (con/res resistance) and there's nothing quite like it activating, resisting down a terrify/frightened or a weakened, using an invocation, and then a second later, having the song reactivate and have everything resist down to nothing.

I think chanter and cipher both suffer from a problem in which they talked about it a lot in the backer updates prior to PoE1, and afterwards have just assumed you understand the mechanics without much handholding. (For example, IIRC it is not made clear anywhere in PoE1 that ciphers have an inherent damage bonus as part of their focus regen; in fact I think I forgot about it in my PoE1 gamefaqs guide. At least Deadfire has the little soul whip explainer in the skill tree.) I half-expect a decent number of players don't even know you can make songs and might be missing out on compiling non-trivial sequences of chants.

quick question to the OP: did you have hirelings? Going in is extremely brutal without a full party. i think there are a few more after port maje that give gorecci st and digsite a run for their money, but the difference is that you can try to overlevel or work around the other ones - port maje you're just stuck. Family Pride almost always kicks my butt at around the time you are expected to do it (one skull and oftentimes no skull). If I don't want a slog I consciously overlevel it. Similar thing with the Hanging Sepulchers - when you can do it first without a skull, those Risen wizards and rogues and priests (with minor avatar wtflol) and teleporting wraiths absolutely make the fight brutal, especially if I don't have a priest myself for an easy source of heal/damage/interrupt (holy radiance). Similarly, oathbinder sanctum is very very very brutal if you go there right when it's no-skulled and you actually want to fight the woedican cultists at the bottom. Especially with the 4.0 patch changes where they added in the steel garotte and woedica priest subclasses, you can just get overwhelmed with Garrote spamming (and getting repeatedly hit with writ of consumption sucks). I have to have a pretty powerful party or I just overlevel the dungeon. On a related note - early fights with enemy paladins suck. High defenses, spammable healing, and an aura = a pure slog.

I might be mistaken. The big difference is that the shifter's boar form's DoT lasts the same duration as the spirit shift form, (which can be gigantic tens of seconds). Either the CP or some other balance patch fixes it to bring it into line with the other forms, because otherwise the boar is a monster DPS machine in vanilla against non-pierce immune folks.

for me, shifter makes one very specific sequence of actions more annoying, which is to shift into cat form, activate cat flurry, and then cast spells. with shifter, you have delay induced because you can't immediately re-use the shifting modal after shapeshifting in order to get back to spell-cast mode. i actually found it quite annoying in my early beastmaster shifter days before i unlearned the instinct to use cat form as just a spell dumper.

well lol the textbook I'm using focuses on "practical vocabulary" and its definition of "practical" appears to be "college-educated people talking about research and needing to get around the city" because I still don't know the months of the year and only learned yesterday [sitzen] but I do know assorted academic and statistical terms. I took a quick glance at a german newspaper, forgot which; definitely not ready for that level yet, but while I couldn't understand most of the headlines I did understand all the covid stats.

reading the responses I think what I'll do is work up enough competency to read some german newspapers first, and if I'm getting comfortable with that, move on to Deadfire. It definitely would not be my primary learning resource (currently just duolingo + a textbook + barking bilingual commands at the kids) but it seems like I should probably establish a good baseline in case Deadfire gets too weird even with a translation mod.