thelee

funnily enough that is approximately how much health dorudugan has

i pull enemies back away from the sigils they are huddling around, and then later just nuke the sigils outside of combat. it's very rare where i actually have to deal with sigils in combat.

yeah, i'm trying to differentiate between "challenge" and "tedium." sigilmaster auranic mostly takes care of itself if you have resolve resistance and spell reflection and a few summons to throw her way, but there's basically no flexibility to the fight, so it's unenjoyably tedious and repetitive no matter the party or your build. if i knew my words better i'd differentiate between the holistic "how readily can i defeat this fight" dimension from the "how actually hard and skill-intensive is it" vs "how annoying is it". auranic ranks extremely low on the "how actually hard is it" but extremely high on "how annoying is it" and so i do it last. edit - as another example: dorudugan is pretty difficult, but i've beaten dorudugan with a wide diversity of parties and approaches, ranging from cheesy to the "normal" way. and i feel comfortable that any typical party i roll into with dorudugan there's an approach with that party that i can use to beat dorudugan. so it is probably extremely skill intensive (for non-cheesy approaches), but not very annoying by my metric. whereas every single approach to sigilmaster auranic pretty much ends up being the same, despite a few attempts to try something new. as such i am more eager to handle dorudugan early than i am with sigilmaster auranic, which may even require some party member shuffling and respeccing.

i don't know about turn-based, but typically my order is done in increasing difficulty, which is: 1. belranga 2. dorudugan 3. hauani 4. sigilmaster auranic the problem with sigilmaster auranic is that as far as i've been able to suss out, there's not much flexibility in how you approach the fight. i pretty much *have* to take out the sigils in a specific order, i pretty much *have* to have certain effects active (resolve resistance, spell reflection), and it's pretty tedious, even if it's not particularly challenging per se. whereas with the other fights there's more flexibility. belranga is "easy" enough that i typically have galawain's challenge enabled and still do belranga first. in fact, because belranga isn't poison immune, if she doesn't get the "unstoppable" buff from galawain's challenge, she kinda helps kill herself because at low enough defenses the spiderlings will be paralyzing her repeatedly. dorudugan is #2 because once you know how the fight works, it's mostly just a matter of doing it over and over again for 20+ minutes, and it's mindless enough that if you have the right setup and gear (and possibly AI script) you can just AFK for the fight. you can even just gouging blind it (also works for belranga). hauani has some easy outs (disintegration mostly), but i always stress out about it because in a "typical" approach i can still mess up and miss a critical interrupt and get a merge.

petrify is sort of a hard affliction to deal with, because dex resistance doesn't help you. aginst gaze of the adragan specifically, being blinded or having that small shield that gives you gaze protection would help, i believe it's actually keyworded as a gaze attack.

a dex inspiration would instantly solve petrify immediately, but you pretty much need a chanter for that. you have xoti -> minor intercession would reduce the duration of it. street sweeper (unenchanted, or enchanted to clear hostile effects) would also help.

are you talking about the hover-over that pops up in the top-left corner? Because you should definitely not be seeing something like Gauntlets of Accuracy in there. do you have mods?

heya! i can answer a few questions directly though opinions can differ the priest class is there not just for healing but also for BDD and Salvation of Time and getting to and staying near death for the +3 PL. Paladin can kinda do it if you pick the right subclass, but IMO because wall of draining comes so late, getting salvation of time slightly earlier has strong utility. a paladin can definitely spam heal a lot better than priest, but because the build focuses on being in near death in late-game fights, the paladin's death shield is less useful since it comes on top of healing and you can't separate the two. as for turn-based, someone else will have to comment. the perennial concern is getting favorable rounding cutoffs. i think with wall of draining you have to make sure you're hitting enough valid targets to meet the right cutoffs. getting a pet like ooblit or getting gear/food that extends beneficial durations might be pivotal. i still maintain that for blood mage you want CON more than other casters, simply because health turns into a casting resource. in fact, in turn-based, i would sacrifice dex to invest more in con and might because turn-based makes dex matter less (and i believe blood sacrifice is a free action) and more con = more blood sac early on and more might = more healing to get more health back. yeah the state of builds is pretty messy, there have been some patches that changed a lot, some that have not, and very few builds get updated for each patch and it's hard to tell from a glance which builds still work and which builds have broken. that's why on this forum when i post a build i explicitly label it as 5.0 so it's clear that it's up to date. at least in my guide they should all be updated to the latest patch.

this might actually explain some odd behavior i saw with the theurge - if i empowered+least usntable coil and got energized, i could also then use the invocation to get energized again. typically the game simply overrides one or the other depending on which it decides is more powerful (or has a longer duration). but instead i had two energized's active. i would do this proactively because the least unstable coil inspiration duration might not be very long but the invocation might easily be >1 minute, so i'd make sure i'd have 100% uptime. [note: this did not work for inspirations of different strength. if i had acute active and i got brilliant from least unstable coil, it would override the acute] in hindsight, i wonder if this means i was actually double-stacking energized through this odd quirk? i never checked my stats to verify and frankly PEN was never an issue between raw damage from venombloom and just one energized +2 PEN plus the shield cracks for everything else, so if i got an additional +2 PEN i certainly didn't notice. i also had odd cases where i had energized but i was no longer interrupting enemies on a crit. re-using the invocation would fix it. i wonder when the least unstable coil energized was wearing off, the odd stacking here was occasionally screwing something up with the secondary effects of energized (adding to matters is that repeated ticks of venombloom might grant me further refreshes of energized and who knows how all that interacts with everything above). if there's ever a pillars 3, they might want to take a closer look at the stacking system again... the current system sounds simple on paper but can be extremely surprising or unintuitive in the details (i'm a big fan of pathfinder 2e's appraoch which is like D&D's named categories, except it's mostly limited to a narrow set of explicitly spelled out categories)

is it a matter of distance? i remember observing odd behavior in my ultimate run with invisibility buffing with tactician and brilliant that seemed linked to distance from enemies (too far or too close) edit: never mind i see in your first video that you went off the corner as well

hey, i wonder if this inspiration-counts-as-passive rule also works with tactician brilliant [since it seems like a passive class feature] or shroud of the phantasm brilliant [since it comes from an item]? i just assumed they didn't stack with intellect bonuses, but either might be a way to combine with duality of mortal presence to get +15 intellect (in addition to least unstable coil-generated brilliant). i'm sure there are other possible ramifications of the least unstable coil stacking interaction, this was one i just thought of while getting my exercise in

alright, i managed to squeeze in some time for a quick test to see what was happening. nature's bounty's stat bonuses don't stack. it's just an odd side effect of least unstable coil. the inspirations it grants come from an item and so i guessed are flagged as being "passive" and therefore stack with anything else. so against hauani o whe, the intuitive i had there stacked with nature's bounty +2 perception (getting me to 30). (the same would've been true for nature's bounty +2 might or devotions for the faithful +4 might vs least unstable coil's energized inspiration). however, if i had just used mien of death's herald for an intuitive bonus, it would not have stacked with perception bonus (and only gets me to 28) (and if i had just cast the energized invocation, it would not stack with devotions +4 or nature's bounty +2 might)

hm, on the one hand i checked might out of curiosity a while back and they don't stack. on the other hand, in my huauni video i posted i have 30 perception, and i actually can't figure out how i get there unless the +2 does stack (21 + 1outcast + 1galawain + 5intuitive + 2...?) i'm unable to test for a while, so the specifics are a mystery right now the potion heals a base of +20 health, on top of +20% action speed and +2 might/perception. the non-healing effects last for 20s base. all of the duration and the healing amount scales with alchemy skill. the healing is a nice bonus, but it's really mostly about the action speed IMO.

what difficulty are you planning on playing on? on lower difficulties penetration is less of an issue so long as you keep up with your gear, but on potd with upscaling i would definitely pick up some alternate weapons for PEN. on potd+upscaling i would also pick up hel-hyraf->shield cracks on your herald. it wouldn't hurt to diversify your weapon damage types - i know there are some slash immunes out there, but i forget how common they are. at the very least, taking out sigils is most effective with blunt weapons since they are pierce/slash immune. i personally don't think FoD is worth going out of the way for PL scaling. if you plan on picking up sacred immolation then that would be more worthwhile with PL scaling. for either purposes though, you should pick up ring of focused flame for whichever paladin would load up on this stuff. for offense it might be worth going bellower (i like the bellower quite a bit) and picking up things like the lightning invocation, the maggot invocation, and of course the ice bolt invocation (many invocations would be great with the bonus bellower PL). you can still pick up ancient memory, zealous endurance, mercy and kindness and load out with a regenerating shield for defense.

they do - in fact this is is one way to get around some of the non-stacking rules when it comes to food. koiki fruit, rymsjodda lager, and brew battered ysae are really great because they reduce recovery time, which is rare for an active buff to do so i can stack it with nature's bounty/potion of deftness/frenzy/swift strikes/etc (whereas using rum, captain's banquet, etc. won't work because they are all action speed bonuses (this ignores the cheese of turning food bonuses into passive bonuses)) edit - rymsjodda lager is really useful with rymrgand's challenge enabled because it also lasts 14 days. rymrgand can really change how you think about exploration - i had some notes listing all koiki fruit vendors i ran into throughout deadfire since that only lasts 3 days but is more useful than the lager.

this is a good point. the only times i've done this deliberatley is in my ultimate run (berath's) and in my most recent run, which had five god challenges on, including berath. i don't see how one could buff up like this outside berath's. there are a few fights where you specially cannot leave combat, but they are few and far in between. Aside from SSS arena fights, I can only recall sigilmaster auranic (and is the only one i explicitly rely on this behavior outside berath's challenge, so i can exhaust her spells with summons without being relentlessly pummeled with sigils). either way though, i feel at the very least that an enemy stepping on a trap *should* trigger combat for a few seconds, but it sounds like even that is not happening. @karemas how did you actually end up doing buffs before your current issues? did you actually stay in combat while stealthed and not actively hunted for by enemies?

yep. typically in end-game i would have nature's bounty, frenzy ward, and shroud of phantasm's action speed buff all active, and they all stacked. edit: oh and for hard fights i would empwoer venombloom, which would get me swift for further action speed boost (+5 dex) as i got more used to playing the build, the action economy wasn't as bad, because it mostly becomes about evaluating when it's worth getting all the disruption stuff going, or when just being a theurge who can Ben Fidel + debuff enemies [with maybe one wicked birars or venomblom for damage as oppossed to disruption] is more useful. i should probably do an editing pass on the OP.

i don't suppose you can put a save game in a dropbox or something and share a link with me? i find myself very vexed by this bug.

sorry you hit that bug. i believe there is a console command that you can use to force the advancement of the soulbound item though

huh? did you previously change something? the chants should scale with PL. i feel like it was even you who pointed this out to me

does warding seal start combat?

one other thing - did this happen after hitting a certain level? i'm just curious when this started happening, if there's some sort of key trigger that can help narrow down the problem.

that's such a bizarre bug! what an odd thing to break. in case you want to diagnose it further, i would also suggest using sparkcrackers to lure enemies past the trap (not just onto it), maybe something different happens with AI. do you have like some particularly high stealth skill? i guess i'm particularly interested because my ultimate run definitely relied on this behavior for triggering some fights, and if it's possible for the AI to break like this then I feel like spooked that my ultimate run could've hit a huge hiccup without knowing about the possibility.

do you have any special gear that could mess with this? i literally don't know what could be causing this - traps+damage should absolutely be starting combat.

??? yeah that's weird. are you just in one area? or everywhere? what enemies? what traps? any screenshots?