thelee

i just gave this a test and alas, crits do not keep any persistent PEN bonus - they just constantly track your current effective ability PEN and the target's defensive AR and forget any effect that's not currently active - they don't even remember that you empowered them for purposes of PEN (but they do remember you empowered for purposes of PL-based damage bonuses [not the +15% empowered damage passive though]). So crits on DoTs are *only* useful for multiplicative duration increase. In a way, this makes sense within Deadfire-rules, because DoTs also do not wake up sleeping enemies from Call to Slumber or eliminate Takedown Combo - better to think of DoTs primarily as debuffs with a certain effect that causes health loss rather than as a damage effect.

oof that's a tough tradeoff then. -10% recovery is pretty sweet, even if conditional.

i've never ever paid much attention to dread howl before because that hit to graze was so juicy, so it's good to hear that it is much better than i expected; namely - large aoe, long duration, and per encounter. will have to give it a try next time.

Hm, this is worth re-testing. I did some playing around with Pernicious Cloud back in the day (huge corrode aoe makes it easy to hit a lot of enemies and players and get lots of results), don't remember how that played out, and then checked my guide, and based on the wording I put I don't actually remember what I intended to mean about how DoT + PEN works or if i just had some oversight. I suspect the boosted PEN lasts the entire time, and dynamic adjustments to your PEN while the DoT is going will adjust the base that the crit is based off.

yeah this right here is key. i played a debonaire and really enjoyed it but if you're not going to try to ambush enemies with charm (which is great fun and is where debonaire shines at wrecking enemy kith encounters), the accuracy penalty is really going to work against your desired playstyle. different named DoTs will stack. (some DoTs will stack with themselves, but they are less common) toxic/gouging/nannasin/deep wounds will all stack. i think the things that many people will find underwhelming about poisons on a higher difficulty is that a lot of easy to make ones target fort (which, while not as annoyingly high as in poe1, still tend to be hard defenses) and there's a severe action economy to them in combat, coupled with a bug where you have to consciously disable AI [or be in stealth which implicitly disables AI] or your character will ignore your usage of potions and instead do whatever their autoattack or AI script dictates. on potd especially you need a lot of alchemy points to get favorable accuracy/damage/duration scaling on poisons, they've been hit so hard with the nerfbat. however, i find that Corrosive Soul Essence is a good all-purpose poison - extremely easy to make [spirit residue is real easy to come across] becomes super plentiful with BoW, does raw damage (less sensitive to needing lots of PL to penetrate enemy AR) and targets will, which you can easily debuff in a bajillion ways - a simple way is just to have your rogue use a club with bewildering blows [and clubs are +5 acc and are fast weapons]. (note: the wiki says it needs a mushroom too, but in my memory it only needs spirit residue and rune powder, which is why it's so easy to make. worth double-checking in game). if you apply it before ambushing an enemy with an attack (careful application makes noise), or if you apply it combat while still stealthed (and you get a -85% recovery bonus) you get rid of the action economy problems of trying to use poisons in combat, and dodge the buggy AI issues. other poisons can have their uses but are more niche or harder to make so i use them more sparingly, and hopefully with a morningstar debuff. edit: direct PL bonuses are a real good way to improve poisons - they get around the half-PL-per-alchemy penalty so effetively are worth double their value in alchemy points, and poisons do scale generously (all of damage, duration, PEN, accuracy) you can try weapons that are not axes but also have a dot. dagger -> true love's kiss, for example (and is slashing dmg). assassin's slippers are great for any stealth/ambush build. it's hard to get re-invised in fights, and assassin's slippers gives it to you for free. even just once in a fight can be huge.

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.