thelee

upgraded abilities get both more generous ability scaling and more generous lower-base treatment for PL scaling? didn't know that. either way, the numbers seem too low to me. I used 7 PEN mostly as a baseline comparison to how spellcasters handle PEN. Even when I'm futzing around with a test level 19 char in The Hole of all places, I'm under-PENing with pernicious cloud. Either the effect needs to be much easier to use or its PEN needs a buff. It either should be a really great interrupt/distraction tool that incidentally does damage, or it should be a high-risk high-reward weapon. Currently it's neither.

This is also a problem with Smoke Cloud and Smoke Grenade - that trio of abilities just has weird targeting behavior. ISTR that even confusion doesn't interact with it properly. In all cases only the rogue is excluded from the targeting. (add this to the sap upgrade in how it has messed up targeting). As a result, I prefer using Smoke Grenade even if pernicious cloud can do a lot of damage; simply being able to target it makes it a lot more useful. I think it would be reasonable to make all of them foe-only. I don't even know why it's the way it is right now - I bet the (probably buggy) targeting is an artifact of them trying to make a friend-and-foe effect that somehow still ignores the rogue, but in terms of systems design making them friend-and-foe makes the non-smoke grenade effects quite weak (esp smoke cloud given its guile cost) and hard to use. edit: i would also argue that in practice pernicious cloud doesn't do enough damage. it has like 9 PEN by default (7 + 2 scaling) which is very low and they don't really have good ways to increase that without very specific help. for spellcasters, 7 PEN base is a "low pen" effect, and spellcasters also have +1 PEN passives and spellshaping [which sometimes help] and several spellcasters can buff their inherent pen (cipher with +1, furies get +1, priests can buff with tenacious, chanters can buff with energized) or have enough effects to try and target vulnerable AR (druids and wizards especially). in PotD you could go through a lot of effort to carefully position your rogue and use the ability only to do piddling amounts of damage.

being a damage shield means you can "pseudo-heal" through effects that normally are blistering for healing (sickened, weakened, enfeebling, injuries). this is a neat interaction that comes up occasionally. Another benefit is that the damage shield is instant protection, whereas ancient memory takes time. Having Her Courage first means that when you switch to it, you immediately get 10 pts of damage protection, whereas to get the same with a typical AM would take almost the entire chant/linger; there's a time-based discount factor to consider here. But by far the most powerful aspect of the damage shield is that it refreshes when the chant is re-applied to people. Ancient Memory doesn't do much when refreshed - you still get a steady drip of health, same as always. However, the more often you refresh the damage shield, the more powerful it becomes. For example: troubadour with brisk recitation and a song that is solely "Her Courage" can almost carry an entire party against Hauane O Whe; normally you have to worry about Symbiote (which normally does 9.6 raw damage/tick forever or until you move and spawn enough oozes, the latter which also functions as a distraction and for the less skilled can be a major merging liability). However, refreshing a 10pt damage shield every tick means you never have to worry about that dot ever again. That's an extreme example. But even in less optimized cases (e.g. just a normal chanter who normally uses invocations) the instant refresh can give you outsized benefits in a typically challenging fight. Obviously you want healing as well, but the combined effect of a recurring damage shield *and* other healing can really feel like more than the sum of its parts. TL;DR - 25 pt damage shield would've been entirely broken IMO. 10-pt can feel weak in some situations, but can be extremely powerful in others. 25-pts would make it powerful in all situations and entirely broken in others.

yeah what i didn't make explicit in my post of example songs is that the third song is a "nice to have" esp for a skald (come, thick, [the third one which is so incidental that i forget]). if it happens, it happens, and if it's something like "thick grew their tongues" then all you need is one or two procs to have a lasting impact on the battlefield (in the case of come, come, it's some helpful drip of regen throughout the fight and for that build can also trigger interrupts). but the first two songs are the ones you want (almost like a power scale - the first song super important, and the second song like half important)

i have nothing that's really skald-specific. it's more setups that emphasize the first song in particular, for the same reason that @Jayd pointed out in #3 (skalds are more likely to reset their chants than others); I haven't built like a wildrhymer or harbinger or some other setup that really leans into the skald's melee martial focus. (i've used konstanten as a howler, but honestly i think his stats suck too much to be a good howler or skald) my personal skald/theurge's favorite song was: the fox from the farmer... -> the long night's... -> come, come... This only worked because I had a lot of disengagement-related bonuses, so I could get a pretty steep like 80-pt swing in enemy accuracy, it'd also be the first one to activate after an invocation, or switching chants. long night's combos into come, come. i also had side chants for resistance songs. in my current party, i'm building tekehu as an SC chanter that has more of a tanky focus, and a couple of songs I set up: silver knight -> ancient memory -> thick -> ... with the intention eventually of doing something more like silver knight -> the arrow sings -> with all your strength -> ... i also have another song that's like her courage -> ancient memory -> [i forget]... and various resistance songs. it's not very skald specific, but the principles would work well with a skald. If I'm in trouble, I switch out of "tanky mode" and put on the "her courage" one. By being the first song, I instantly get a 10pt damage shield, and a few seconds after that, get a regen effect. As a skald, it would work better because with mroe frequent invocations, you'll refresh the damage shield more frequently and get closer to 100% uptime on ancient memory even with a third song in there. You can also switch to resistance songs. I've mentioned in another thread that I really really like "One Dozen" (con/res resistance) and there's nothing quite like it activating, resisting down a terrify/frightened or a weakened, using an invocation, and then a second later, having the song reactivate and have everything resist down to nothing.

I think chanter and cipher both suffer from a problem in which they talked about it a lot in the backer updates prior to PoE1, and afterwards have just assumed you understand the mechanics without much handholding. (For example, IIRC it is not made clear anywhere in PoE1 that ciphers have an inherent damage bonus as part of their focus regen; in fact I think I forgot about it in my PoE1 gamefaqs guide. At least Deadfire has the little soul whip explainer in the skill tree.) I half-expect a decent number of players don't even know you can make songs and might be missing out on compiling non-trivial sequences of chants.

quick question to the OP: did you have hirelings? Going in is extremely brutal without a full party. i think there are a few more after port maje that give gorecci st and digsite a run for their money, but the difference is that you can try to overlevel or work around the other ones - port maje you're just stuck. Family Pride almost always kicks my butt at around the time you are expected to do it (one skull and oftentimes no skull). If I don't want a slog I consciously overlevel it. Similar thing with the Hanging Sepulchers - when you can do it first without a skull, those Risen wizards and rogues and priests (with minor avatar wtflol) and teleporting wraiths absolutely make the fight brutal, especially if I don't have a priest myself for an easy source of heal/damage/interrupt (holy radiance). Similarly, oathbinder sanctum is very very very brutal if you go there right when it's no-skulled and you actually want to fight the woedican cultists at the bottom. Especially with the 4.0 patch changes where they added in the steel garotte and woedica priest subclasses, you can just get overwhelmed with Garrote spamming (and getting repeatedly hit with writ of consumption sucks). I have to have a pretty powerful party or I just overlevel the dungeon. On a related note - early fights with enemy paladins suck. High defenses, spammable healing, and an aura = a pure slog.

I might be mistaken. The big difference is that the shifter's boar form's DoT lasts the same duration as the spirit shift form, (which can be gigantic tens of seconds). Either the CP or some other balance patch fixes it to bring it into line with the other forms, because otherwise the boar is a monster DPS machine in vanilla against non-pierce immune folks.

for me, shifter makes one very specific sequence of actions more annoying, which is to shift into cat form, activate cat flurry, and then cast spells. with shifter, you have delay induced because you can't immediately re-use the shifting modal after shapeshifting in order to get back to spell-cast mode. i actually found it quite annoying in my early beastmaster shifter days before i unlearned the instinct to use cat form as just a spell dumper.

well lol the textbook I'm using focuses on "practical vocabulary" and its definition of "practical" appears to be "college-educated people talking about research and needing to get around the city" because I still don't know the months of the year and only learned yesterday [sitzen] but I do know assorted academic and statistical terms. I took a quick glance at a german newspaper, forgot which; definitely not ready for that level yet, but while I couldn't understand most of the headlines I did understand all the covid stats.

reading the responses I think what I'll do is work up enough competency to read some german newspapers first, and if I'm getting comfortable with that, move on to Deadfire. It definitely would not be my primary learning resource (currently just duolingo + a textbook + barking bilingual commands at the kids) but it seems like I should probably establish a good baseline in case Deadfire gets too weird even with a translation mod.

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.