thelee

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).

i don't think it has anything to do with boeroer's edit. i just remove the trivia section to see, and i still had the problem

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)