thelee

@Elric Galadi was doing some testing and got some funky results with wildstrike frenzy - the first kill I'd get +4s as expected, but after repeated kills the amount of time I'd gain on spiritshift would go up to extreme levels (in my limited testing I got up to an extra minute per kill). Anything you've seen in your tweaking that could explain this? This might also affect similar effects like blood storm or that chanter invocation.

i'm actually surprised vanishing strikes persists past combat - i assumed all non-item-based buffs cleared at end of combat. is it just something special about vanishing strikes, or is it something about how you buff by attacking vela out of combat?

looooooooooooooooooooool amazing

sorry for the nub question - but i'm not totally familiar with this cheese, so the mechanics aren't totally clear to me. does time passage not reduce vanishing strikes duration? because i skipped over to hauane o whe and it appears you already have all the buffs active, despite being preceded only by travel time. have i missed something obvious about buff durations?

oh nice, i don't know why i never realize that re-equipping strand of favor stacks its beneficial effect duration lengthening. also lol at the display bug that causes the orlan to grow to and shrink from human size in the process. edit: also, i cannot imagine being such a glutton for punishment to do the ultimate more than once. more power to ya edit 2: @Waskimind pointing out where the cheese magic starts? i'm skipping around, so i don't know at what point you apparently become perma-vanishing striked

i guess the one big thing i can think of is - are you pulling back to the entrance to let the sigils do their thing? i can see trying to tank the sigils while auranic attacks you is pretty brutal, but the entrance is out of range of auranic. this is part of why auranic is simulatenously easy and also extremely tedious for me, because most of it is just waiting for things to happen, in a pretty fixed order.

the intent was actually to avoid overpenetration against the missile salvo - since you can't kill it via reflection, it takes longer (at least for my typical parties) so you end up getting exposed to it a lot more. what mods do you have? you don't have a difficulty-increasing mod by any chance? if you're able to post a video we might be able to point out improvements. it might be something simple that we're missing for you.

i would add that the deadfire approach to maps results in truly beautiful environments and ages very well, but is also extremely hard to optimize. pathfinder: kingmaker has load screens too, but because it's all polygons and reused texture assets it's easier to stream and optimize loads versus unpacking gigantic images so the long tail of slow loads for a game like p:k is shorter than deadfire. that being said, if I/O is the problem, then an SSD (or even bettern an nvme drive) basically erases it. I had an SSD (later an nvme) and never had a loading screen complaint, even back when I was just playing on my budget CPU or a very underpowered macbook. by contrast, even with nvme, pillars 1 would get such bloated load screen times that i basically don't bother to play it anymore because my time is precious. so in this respect, i think the programmers did manage to make deadfire pretty well-optimized, but because of the nature of the game there are some hard (and hardware) limits on what they can do.

also cleansing effects like street sweeper or tranquilizer shot. i think arcane dampener might be worse, because once the suppression wears off, the sigil will come back IIRC. in practice though, i rarely ever needed this. it might be useful if you are able to shut down the cleansing sigil before it procs, because then you can force auranic to move onto another sigil without needing to rebuff.

I think mechanically what’s important to note is that iirc chain lightning and chaotic orb still bounces even after being reflected. So the difference between 50% and 50%x30% can be huge in terms of compounding reflections and damage prevention.

are you able to pick up konstanten's resting room bonus? between 30% spell reflection from konstanten's room and 50% from improved arcane reflection, i just stay back near the entrance and the lightning sigil will literally kill itself in about two reveals; i don't need to do anything. the tayn's chaotic orb, similar (though more like four or so reveals). I might need to top up an unlucky party member who doesn't proc many reflections with a heal, but nothing much. remember that most arcane reflection wears off from spell levels, so you should make sure to refresh (konstanten's is good because it won't go away or get suppressed). aloth can just use a grimoire that has tons of spell reflection to spread more arcane reflection potions around to other party members. even imperfect arcane reflection is good, if you're short on the improved ones. unless your mod lets you stack resting bonuses, you'll give up captain's banquet. but you can use svef instead for everyone. you'll want to bring a stack for each party member, since if the fight drags on, you'll need to refresh your svef after time the cleansing sigil goes away. the missile salvo one won't kill itself from reflections due to underpenetration, but it also typically doesn't do too much to me either. what armor do you have for your party? if everyone is wearing light armor or cloth, you might get overpenetrated into submission even despite passive reflections.

ah you're right. i assume 2x salvation of time, which is long enough to end most fights without needing to worry about a re-proc.

as a side note - if you go the scordeo's edge route, because it gets rid of recovery and the main reason to dual-wield is to reduce your recovery, you're best off single-wielding scordeo's edge or dual-wielding scordeo's edge with a ranged weapon until you proc blade cascade, then switch over to a different weapon set where you only have the one weapon you want to land as either single-weapon style or two-handed style. (in other words, it's not great to have scordeo's edge and the weapon you want to use in one weapon set, it'll dilute both your proc chances on scordeo's edge and also make blade cascade a bit weaker)

what challenges do you have enabled? since you mentioned beraths fyi, i know you figured out the arcane dampener thing, but berath's shouldn't interact with knock out. in berath's challenge when you get knocked out, you get a timed debuff that causes you to permadie when it expires, so it distinctly differentiates from knockout. more to the point - if playing solo, you'd get a game over from being knocked out right away, regardless of the time left on the berath's debuff.

this is correct however, i think the game poorly handles excessive injuries. this is how i suspect i got my soft-lock - when i get a past-fatal injury, instead the game just locks me in the middle of the ability, as if it's trying to give me an additional injury but can't.

wow that sucks dude. i have no idea what would cause that. Theoretically SoT/BDD stops any kind of death. Are you absolutely sure your buff duration was still up? It didn't momentarily lapse and you died in combat? I don't suppose you have Vela (Hylea's Challenge) enabled or something? The only SoT+BDD issue I've ever had was a soft-lock for an injury-related abilities that the ukaizo dragon uses. I've never seen a death-related issue. So consider it an extremely weird/rare outcome.

in berath's challenge i gear up and level my companions once i discovered that companions that help during ship fights can also perma-die despite them not being under your control

i think i get it. i don't think fire blights will work at all, because you have to end combat to do dialogue, and ending combat will end all non-item-based effects on you or vela (which would include binding web), even if normally you can cast those effects outside of combat. i think relatedly, (this is some speculation), the periodic effects from binding web and pull of eora will halt when you enter dialogue, so you'll only be relying on the last debuff that binding web managed to apply to vela, which isn't very long compared to a decent halt (which is like 30s, versus binding web will be less than half that, which is definitely not enough based on my experience with grazed halts). you might just have to fight the beast of winter while keeping vela withdrawn somehow via scrolls or something. how did that single-class blood mage do it? are their replays anywhere?

sorry i'm being a nub here, but is there an important reason to why the blight is triggered *before* the fight begins, and not after? the combat ending is probably what's messing things up.

as someone who stealthed the tablet I do not recommend it if you can try something else instead. it is by far the hardest stealthing you'll ever do, and i rehearsed that damn thing a bajillion times and got clicks and timings down to a precise art and i still was in a state of near-panic during the real thing. at level 16 i would just blow as many high quality consumables (do you have summon items?) as you can to do the fight. (edit: i assumed OP was on ultimate because why on earth would you be doing magrans challenge :), but if you're not doing ultimate and you're extremely patient you could just make a bajillion individual saves and inch your way through a stealth approach. note - don't use the same save slot, because amusingly obsidian made loading the game a "noisy" effect, so a moment where you may have been safely stealthed may instead be one where a lot of enemies are converging on you when you reload) what helps is using a scroll instead (longer range than sparkcrackers) and doing it twice. as long as the enemies aren't fully on their way back, they'll get re-distracted. but indeed the margin of error is extremely small.

hm, are you using a scroll of binding web? this is wild speculation, but it's possible that effects stop during dialogue, and scroll of binding web relies heavily on shorter duration immobilizes except the effect ticks periodically. if the binding web ends during dialogue, then you don't have a very long immobilize

there's no way it could have been done with a previous patch version. there was no ultimate before 5.0. i do the same thing as well in my own ultimate run. are you saying that you are starting in the bottom-right of the map? if so, you might be too far away and the game might be relocating vela when the beast of winter triggers (i think everyone is suppossed to be on the "island" that forms when the beast of winter breaks the bridge). note that in my run, i noticd that my halt "grazed" vela, so i ended up halting her again. in practice runs it was critically important for vela to be at least hit by halt, or else it wouldn't last enough to last through the beast of winter appearing and starting the fight and vela would end up right next to the beast.

this is just a wild idea and is not guaranteed to work, but i would try creating an empty Player.log file and then use whatever your OS does to make it read-only (right-click in windows, use chmod on macOS/linux). there's a chance that the game will just give up trying to write to that file and not write anything at all.

frankly deadfire didn't sell enough to warrant such prolonged support - it only barely broke even well after patching support stopped. at some point you have to put your staff members on projects where they can make bigger bucks. given how much attention obsidian's other games have gotten (grounded, outer worlds) it makes business sense. even for games that have extremely high sales, it's more cost-effective to stop support and work on something new. skyrim has been re-released like a bajillion times but hasn't had a balance or content patch in ages, despite the fact that it's so buggy that the unofficial skyrim patch is always something i recommend people install before starting the game. that's just the reality of the game industry.

I don't think you're missing anything. I am personally a bigger fan of Encore in my typical chanter setups. If you're doing a no-rest or Eothas challenge run, Refreshing Finale might be more of a pain. But personally I find that having to rest every 3 major fights (not counting insignificant fights where I don't empower), or 4 with great soul, is not a big deal at all, even with Rymrgand's challenge enabled (which causes food to decay as time passes). Maybe other people covet specific resting bonuses and don't want to lose them.