thelee

Two druid multiclasses that I've tried and have thoroughly enjoyed: - a skald/animist theurge, i enjoyed it so much i even wrote a character build up on it (i have trouble searching the forums, so here's an alternate writeup) - a [non-shifter druid]/psion oracle. probably any caster with psion would be fun, but from a flavor perspective it was fun to have a great healer that could also stunlock enemies with telekinetic burst/mental binding/silent scream when not buffing/healing. once focus gen got up past 2/sec, the oracle was a pretty big carry for the entire party. I also like shifter, but in vanilla I worry that it might be too good in some setups. i think the community patch fixes its favorable boar DoT duration.

Keeping myself busy through pandemic times (now overlapping with Lent, wherein I foolishly gave up video streaming, so now I have tons of free time) by learning a new language, and I chose German. I've been thinking that an interesting way to exercise the skill--once I have enough basic competency--is to try playing Deadfire in German. But I've heard that the i18n isn't great, but I also heard that JE Sawyer (who knows German) checked some of the German translation. Basically - will playing Deadfire in German be effective, or will it actually make my German worse?

I don't think you get healing bonuses, I think it's fixed proc off of the damage done. However, if solo and enough alternate ways to shrug off super hard hits, I can easily (due to how stacking HoTs work) see that unbending can quickly give you >100% healing per tick. I've seen it happen with unoptimized enemies.

wow really creative, i love it. by late game are you mostly relying on unbending for survivability, or are you still using a lot of de-aggro and re-engagement? *jaw drop* did not know that.

grats! solo challenge is mind bogglingly difficult lol, I would not consider that lucky, she becomes an incredible bullet sponge. could be worse i guess

What's a butt hose? Best argument for xoti as a monk or contemplative tank is probably tuolito's palm combined with her free small shield proficiency, since tuolito's palm gets you defensive bonuses, wound generation, can be enchanted to provide even better defenses, and also gets monk fist damage scaling. As a second choice, her lantern is a pretty good tank choice because it helps with defensive buffs, healing, and getting mortification back on kills is pretty nice. Plus you can enchant it for either action speed or spell reflection. That being said, IME it takes a while for her to get really good at it. Even with a small shield her defenses aren't that great, and you'll need to rely heavily on AR, which is harder for her than other classes (paladins, fighters, even barbarians have better support to get to higher AR). Litany for the Body can help, but you only get one cast until level 13, and all you need is one sickened to take away her +2 AR support.

It's important to remember though that unlike explosives, scrolls never got the down-nerfing to be PL1 effects. So arcana scaling happens *on* top of already pretty powerful effects (i forget if they are identical, but this is still true even if scroll versions are weaker) when the powerful effects are already gated by having a high arcana. So while at low levels it is definitely the case that you miss out by not having might/perception/intellect bonuses, by late game +10 PL or more purely from arcana, plus whatever else bonus PL is available is pretty good on a greater maelstrom scroll, or any other scroll for that matter. you don't get the bonus AoE size of intellect, but you get pretty much anything else.

you can also just refresh the suppression effect or extend it with salvation of time if you want to avoid the timing problem. i never thought of this, but could you do some serious damage like this? or does the damage buff also stay suppressed

no, not Pillar of Faith (which does crush and is at tier two), but Pillar of Holy Fire (which does fire and is at tier six)

I know this is a dumb question, but you're definitely sure you're doing fire damage? I had some issues where I thought the bug wasn't going away, but it turned out the source of fire damage I was relying on (maybe it was Cinder bombs?) wasn't actually counting towards it, but other fire damage that I tried did. Failing that, if you've tried the unbind->unequip->save->exit->reopen->load->rebind path, I'm not sure what else you can do. At this point I suggest console commands. IF you're worried about achievements, there might be a mod that keeps achievements enabled.

to be fair, this is true of ciphers in RTwP as well, aside from psions or beguiler shenanigans. though i can imagine the action economy is a lot tighter in TB mode.

ugh seems to justify my hate on insight/streetwise. the latter is content no one has ever seen, the former is definitely fluff afaict.

that's right. i ended up juggling food/drug bonuses quite a bit to avoid stacking conflicts. i also was SC so was not concerned about swift strikes. Example: if I had rymsjodda lager or koiki fruit, i'd use that and use some coral snuff. -15% recovery time bonus plus +15% action speed bonus = great. If I had rum, I'd use taru taru chew, for +15% action speed bonus and net +2 dex (along with other stats).

the effect is centered on the fury, like the other wildstrike frenzies - is it possible that you're out of range? (imo it's that fact that makes it useless for furies) for my fury research and as part of a guide update i tested the fury out a bit, and it indeed procs, just in a small area around the fury, which isn't terribly useful.

?????

great work! personally i tried a SC fury for a while and got a little bored of it - i think it's mostly because for much of the game it's just the same damage-spell casting that i could just script it all so it was very uninteractive. a few comments: way back in the day every ability and item had some sort of native ability level, and if you were below that you got negative scaling (with inversions). they re-normalized everything at some point so there's no negative scaling. they must've forgotten about storm's rage. the ring of focused flame imo is a vital item for a fury and it would give burst of summer flame a good alternate use vs blizzard for a tier two spell. imo the fury is so lacking in repeatable options at PL8 that fire stag can become decent. the explosion can be useful, but i think the PEN is pretty low on it. just to second what elric said: abilities at higher tiers get an inherent PEN bonus at +.5 per tier above 1 (better than PL scaling). tornado also has a high inherent PEN because of this (but not as easily boostable as great maelstrom due to fewer keywords). deltro's cage is great. the fury is more weighted towards wanting to cast slow spells (6s cast, 2s recovery) they are not as badly affected by hulking armor recovery than other casters. even 4.5s/3s recovery is managable with a decent dex and some coral snuff. it's the 3s/4s casts and the autoattacks that can be really brutal (i disabled auto-attacking for my sc fury in fact). i found it to be well worth the +2 PL bonus to electricity spells. boras is great. it comes late, unfortunatley. the obsidian wurm (might be a deluxe/backer item only pet) gives +3 acc vs flanked targets, which is a great early pet if you have party members that can blind or flank easily. depending on your party, a fury can benefit a lot from drugs because there's not a lot of self-buffing outside of specific multiclasses. in particular, coral snuff (for the action speed bonus), svef (for the perception bonus), or one of the stat boosters (+3 might/con/dex or +3 per/int/res) are great assets and can last a long time. for food--this goes along with a possible ring choice [drunkard's regret]--alcohol is very useful. rymsjodda lager gives you -15% recovery time bonus and is easily accessible after BoW; rum is OG though at +15% action speed bonus. (brew battered ysae is very good, but may be hard to sustain because of all the ingredients; in addition i tend to play with rymrgand challenge so prepared foods become less viable for me)

wowowow i never knew this.

does it get more generous PL scaling? I know carnage gets +10% per PL instead of +5%, so perhaps it was an ability that missed the PL rebalancing or deliberately has more generous damage scaling. the order of operations might also be generous. in your screenshot you have +3 PL based on your acc/pen bonuses; you also have 15 might at least (from devotions of the faithful). 120 * 1.3 * 1.15 => 179, and then i could see troll being further than just at near death to get around 160+

would it be a terrible idea to just limit the spells that can be regenerated to 1-3 ? it is good, but not necessarily buh-roken for martial classes, and in past discussions it seems to me that hte major problem is being able to get like a tier 9 spell back every 6 seconds, which would be roughly equivalent to 4 ticks or so for a martial class (in terms of how abilities get costed). plus, the more abusable caster effects are higher up (salvation of time, petrify/paralyze effects).

wow the whole gang is back together again

Problem with that spreadsheet is that it doesn't appear to really highlight when the breakpoints are important. (Reminding me of the joke about the statistician who drowned while trying to cross a river that was on average only 3 feet/1 meter deep.) I only have an intuitive sense based on experience: Intimidate is extremely important for one armor (extra deflection) and you need like 20+ for a non-violent resolution to pre-porokoa SSS. You also need high metaphysics (and possibly arcana?) to solve the three beings the most "correctly." Metaphysics is also useful for several items. Religion is somewhat important depending on items (off the top of my head, a great sword, a bow, xoti's sickle, the fire flail) but is otherwise mostly flavor. History is very important if you want to maximize the cloak that gives you +all non-deflection defenses, but is very weak flavor everywhere else Survival is important for many world map encounters, but I don't think you need more than 10 or so. IIRC Survival/Alchemy on the scale of 10-15 is needed to have a peaceful resolution with the fungi in FS. Athletics is notably useful for that island with the bridge crossing, though honestly sometimes I create a sacrifical character. Diplomacy is useful, but if you have ~10 that solves most of the places where you can use it help with quest resolution. (I don't know what the 17 check is in that spreadsheet, sorry.) I'm not sure the high Bluff checks actually help with quest resolution. This is sort of the problem - sometimes there's no alternate outcomes or a redundant alternative outcome so you just get some extremely difficult-to-hit fluff. At least in Fallout: New Vegas you'd get experience for succeeding at difficult but irrelevant checks. Insight, Streetwise have little to no value to me. edit: i did some research for SSS and FS breakpoints as part of my ultimate run planning but I honestly can't find them anywhere. If I was more motivated I'd dig through the ultimate thread or go through my videos, but eh...

ironically despite my support of priests/chanters i've only done a celebrant fully once, and it was more of a tanky/summon build. (i find it's very hard to satisfyingly mesh them because there's so much party-role overlap) my most recent run i was doing vatnir as a celebrant, but got bored with mainchar-ing a fury and restarted with a beastmaster. but i did enjoy vatnir as a celebrant way more than other possible priest-chanter combos because vatnir's subclass is so unique. nothing terribly exciting, but what i had going: long night's chant + ben fidel's neck was exposed => much better priest-side spell casting (lots of fortitude targeting from vatnir's bonus spells) their companion plus champion's boon => much better PEN and damage for priest-side spellcasting (both for redundancy since a stun/daze will wipe it out). their companion will also let you interrupt on hits, though it wasn't a focus the shield cracks + freezing pillar => some partial synergy with the damage from freezing pillar extending the shield cracks, though this wasn't the strongest synergy. eventually i was planning on mixing in mercy and kindness to enhance spot heals. #1 was more effective than i thought - vatnir ended up doing quite a bit of damage despite his short time in my party. it also helped that i picked up his spiritual weapon and would use that in conjunction with shield cracks (if i had planned it better i would've picked up aefyllath); dual-wielded spiritual axes is pretty slick (+25% lash for being an npc, but very nice with the bleeding wounds modal; the auto-scale to superb and legendary at mid/high levels is very nice). sasha's is always an easy way to enhance any chanter setup like dgray62 suggests, though my eventual plan was to empower priest spells so the synergy wasn't there. he was definitely going to be a weyc's build instead.

there's some items that give you dexterity resistance. you could equip one of them so you're merely immobilized when proccing reforge the flesh. then you can just repeatedly re-equip the item to cheese it down to nothing at all.

oh lol i didn't even know about this interaction. i guess i can finally make use of that +1 might/resolve per party member knock out accessory.

oh yeah, this is great. it used to be a lot better before they broke the chant somewhere along the way between 4.0 -> 5.0 (the skeleton no longer scales with level). before, a lone troubadour could probably attrition out any fight in the game. now, you can't quite do that, but the skeletons help flank, and every spell or melee hit that takes out a skeleton is a wasted enemy action, and ironically because of their low defenses/health now they tend to be extra-favored for targeting. i wonder if it would be extremely effective on turn-based mode: the action economy is so much more constrained so having enemies waste it on garbage that you resummon for free 2x every turn sounds neat.