thelee

yeah, this has been an eternal problem with d&d-style games. relatedly, it always feels like levels 5-12ish (almost universally regardless of system) "feels" the best, and it's probably because you hit the point where you aren't so low level that you're just overwhelmed by RNG and d20 [and you're not so high level that balance starts getting thrown out the window]. i haven't paid too much attention to d&d post-4th edition, but it always struck me as nonsensical that all the versions leading up to it, most level 1 characters have just enough health to basically be wiped out by one unlucky combat round. like WTF. especially poor wizards with a d4 hit die, not even a particularly unlucky combat round, just the median expected value from a crossbow bolt (a d8). hope the enemy's d20 rolls go your way! notably, i picked up some pathfinder 2e materials and have generally liked it much more than pathfinder 1e and what i've skimmed of d&d 5e, but i did not know until this twitter thread that take 10 is a separate feat in that system. yikes. poe/deadfire still is subject to the rng a bit, but uncontested skill checks is a great design choice, and honestly even if it is mostly psychological dressing for a much more generous check, "grazes" are a real nice way to smooth out some of the RNGness while still having randomness in the first place.

What do you mean it doesn’t work? Are enemies actually triggering the traps?

you know, i wonder if it's worth an @Elric Galad-type to look at the conjurer pet and implement it kind of like the "pelt of many kinds" rebalancing effect where a random familiar is automatically spawned at the start of fight as a pet. i don't know how to fix the transmuter special though - that transformation is pretty bad, even if it didn't cancel your spellcasting ability.

I use a familiar if I plan on casting, and I use a summon if I plan on weapon summoning and brawling. It’s a little bit of a micro/overhead but it works out pretty well for my purposes

Huh? A conjurer can use chill fog.

just popping in again to say that this build is exceeding my expectations with regard to megabosses. anything that isn't interrupt-immune is basically a done deal from the start (and even dorudugan ended up going down pretty easily). just for fun i recorded the hauani o whe fight to show how the build works at peak effectiveness. i didn't need to do any prep work for hauani (unlike dorudugan), in fact i made some dumb mistakes (e.g. i still had some AI script settings leftover from the dorudugan fight by accident, forgot about salvation of time positioning for quite a while). once the build gets going, there's no stopping it. i don't think hauane gets more than a few actions off the entire fight (including all split oozes). the hardest part was just getting all the buffs going at the start and stripping hauani's concentration (too high fort to get plague of insects to land). megaboss fights are so long i use brilliant, but in typical fights you don't need that to wreck the enemies. recommended for viewing at 1.25x or 1.5x speed due to its relative length.

just saw those tweets. awesome!

tangential update on this build: i'm cleaning up the megabosses now, and I unintentionally discovered the second or third-easiest method for clearing dorudugan (the first-easiest is definitely scordeo's + bleeding axe modal, there are some BDD-related shenanigans that may or may not be easier depending on how you define "easy"). this build has so much accuracy thanks to the maxed perception and helm of the white void (and extra hit->crit), that with some modest buffing and debuffing, you have an extremely high hit rate with Embrace the Earth Talon on Dorudugan. You need body blows modal (-25 fort), a dedicated chant with just "the long night's..." (-14 fort), devotions (+10 acc), holding onto keeper of the flame (+4 acc from aura), intuitive (watcher's ability), potion of perfect aim, +4 bonus PL (stone of power, potion of ascension, acute/brilliant) on top of hte base gear (helm of the white void and gloves of accuracy, i also recommend switching out ring of focused flame for kuaro's prize for the bonus perception). all easily do-able for a level 20 party. the problem is that dorudugan has a gigantic resolve (max 35) so anything you land lasts for but a blip, and improving your duration via intellect and PL is minimally effective due to inversions. the trick is to reduce dorudugan's resolve instead. wizard (in my case aloth): knows gaze of the adragan, arkemy'rs wondrous torment. set up an AI script to just spam them whenever they are availble. this theurge: set up an AI script to just spam embrace the earth talon and ben fidel's. priest (in my case xoti): knows spark the souls of the righteous. set up an AI script to spam salvation of time if they have an intellect inspiration. some random other party member with weyc's robe. i used two party members with morningstars for redundancy. at start of combat, drink all your potions and set up your buffs, and start empowering an ability to trigger weyc's robe's brilliant. in the mean time, your wizard should be manually spamming arkemyr's wondrous torment (or miasma of dull-mindedness), optionally helped along by an empower or a club modal. eventually one will land (mine landed on the first try at ~30% hit rate with no club modal), and thereafter all future attempts will land very easily due to a vanishingly low will from the debuff [especially with a club modal mixed in]. after everyone gets brilliant, have your priest cast spark the souls of the righteous and move everyone into melee range of dorudugan, make sure the morningstar modals are on. have this theurge use the shield cracks until it lands. after that, it's autopilot. your wizard's AI script will keep refreshing arkemyr's wondrous torment, while your theurge will keep using embrace the erath talon and ben fidel's. earth talon normally despite all the intellect and PL under all these circumstances lasts only 2.9s or so against dorudugan's massive resolve, but with arkemry's wondrous torment in place will instead last ~9s or so, and will have an exceedingly high hit rate. your wizard will have a lower hit rate with gaze of the adragan but they are just there as backup. the shield cracks will make spark the souls of the righteous do tons of damage easily, which will also keep refreshing shield cracks. i almost could've AFKed at that point, but i stuck around to manually force the theurge to use ben fidel's or embrace the earth talon in situations where i thought one was more important than the other. dorudugan died very quickly (well, by dorudugan standards) and it never got off any of its special attacks. it got about two or three melee attacks in at the beginning and never acted again after that. i occasionally had eder (in my party also) use mule kick as a safety measure, but it was never actually necessary. this dorudugan clear isn't specific to this build (all the components can be done piecemeal in other ways), but it was a nice unintended discovery from running with this build. and i don't mean to over-sell this build in particular - just as important as having a high-accuracy petrify effect+shield cracks+ben fidel+long night's chant was also arkemyr's wondrous torment and spark the souls. edit: (meanwhile belranga was a dream scenario for this build, to the point i had to hold back a bit because my first attempt the game crashed because there were too many wicked briars going at the same time; once about ~40 spiders died belranga basically stopped being capable of doing anything due to constant interrupts)

for inspiration purposes, there's already an in-game analogue for this, via galawain's challenge. unstoppable - can't be interrupted, can't be affected by afflictions bullish - knock back and interrupt on hit i wonder if just having both on you as part of citzal's would be ok?

this is an issue with all the mage subclasses. you really have to lean hard into their particular subclass - if you do so, then you're basically a wizard with +2 PL and a free perk. if you don't, you're going to feel extremely limited because of all the missing spells and the extra recovery. personally, conjurer is one of the main wizard specializations i would pick up anyway (evoker is probably the other one): the conjure familiar bonus spell is really great - guaranteed +1 generic PL on top of miscellaneous other bonuses [so even with the spells you have at +10% recovery, you can cast them at +1 PL which is a trade-off i'm happy to take; +1 generic PL also helps item usage]; have simultaneous access to slicken and deleterious alacrity of motion; and the recovery downside is only half-strength since many enchantment spells have no recovery. so fassina is an easy pick for me.

i'm having flashbacks to diablo 2 attack speed breakpoints

i kind of expect this to be true, which is why in general i limit myself to only one custom companion (just so i can flex my creative muscles a bit each time without overpowering game balance). the obs-made companions are not super-optimized, even for ones that have particularly strong unique aspects (e.g. tekehu druid or maia ranger subclass). they are also in some ways suboptimal (xoti, vatnir, pallegina don't get reputation scaling. i will forever hold that serafen as a cipher is terrible.) it is possible to put together a custom party that is min-maxed worse than what OBS made, but even the one level penalty that boeroer mentions (which is not much of a penalty if you hire them right out of the gate in port maje) a modicum of thought will supercharge your adventures IMO.

lol, for me either on mobile or not-mobile the three dots menu only has "report" and "share", except on relatively recent posts. i guess this means now i have to put a disclaimer at the top of any future guides that it's not going to be the definitive place to find it. good thing i already moved some of my guides to gamefaqs.

maybe i'm missing something, but what makes cloak of death so uber that it is an easy pick over citzal's for a melee-focused wizard? when i use citzal's, minoletta's piercing sigil (plus everything else) is very good, but i do also occasionally self-empower if i also want to add cloak of death on top of everything else. don't get me wrong, cloak of death is nice, but it doesn't seem that super uber to me.

how long has it been since your last potd playthrough? if it was before the difficulty buff, you might be in for a rude surprise... personally i think you need more aoe dps or some utility support.

wow, you still can't edit posts after a certain amount of time. oh well.

i think it'll be OK, but nothing particularly special. on rtwp, because of how interrupts work, once I get going in a big fight, I basically shut down the enemy from doing anything for the rest of the fight. if i empower venombloom or wicked briars in a non-interrupt immune fight and have energized up, the fight is already pretty much done at that point. (and forget about it if you have least unstable coil) on turn-based, i strongly suspect that you'll end up being an OK aoe damage dealer, but you won't be very able to prevent enemies from getting their actions each turn since instead of your interrupts happening all over the place, they'd all pretty much just be happening in sync with your turn iirc. the skald component would fare worse because of action economy with physical attacks - you're probably better off using troubadour. nature's bounty would also be way worse. +20% action speed is great in rtwp, not so much in tb mode.

lol, i just recently ran into this and panicked pretty serverely because it was a pretty long fight. fortunately switching grimoires again restores all the missing the spells. i'm skeptical on the idea of buffing citzal's. i think in a vacuum (e.g. if you just plopped it onto a cipher or chanter ability tree maybe) citzal's is on the underpowered side for a tier nine spell, but it works pretty well as part of a wizard package (minoletta's piercing sigil, ironskin, arcane reflection [being in punching range makes it more likely casters toss spells directly at you], self-empower to cast cloak of death as well, either of the phantoms, etc.). i think at most bumping them up to be fixed at spawning at mythical might be OK. as it stands though, i generally like how most of the wizard conjured gear remains competitive throughout the game, filling different niches, and already as it is citzal's has an edge, only counter-balanced by the fact that it eats up a tier nine spell cast. push it too far and i wouldn't want to use anything else, which maybe some folks are fine with for a tier nine spell, but is not quite my tastes.

you know, if any thing, the effect is subtle and uncontrollable enough that upgrading it is kind of a trap. i actually liked to use finality's claim on occasion, especially against hauane o whe (it has a chance to reflect hauane's acid attacks). but adding a double-edged sword kind of makes it a bit less "safe" to use. oh well

never mind again - it DOES affect allies. i think i needed a save/load cycle for the game to properly initiate the aura in combat. edit: the description says the aura only activates when engaged, and my original test subject (bekarna) had no engagement, so it didn't trigger the aura. it's unfortunate it affects allies, but the aura range is so small (1.5m) in practice it's pretty easy to keep allies out and have it only affect engaging enemies.

never mind - it *DOES* affect enemies. it's just smart enough to remember that bekarna was not originally hostile to me, so it didn't affect her when i force-attacked her. sorry bekarna

upon testing - it doesn't appear to affect allies. bad news: i'm not sure if it affects enemies, either. there's no combat tooltip indication for this aura and -7% when time dilation is maxed out is very hard to measure on a casual level. maybe someone more skilled at looking at this stuff can verify if it's scripted correctly? *hint hint*

Did you know you can upgrade Finality's Claim? I didn't. For the first time ever, I noticed a "combine shards" button at the bottom of the tooltip. It gathers void shards that you pick up in BoW (always wondered what those did). All three, and I got a Time Dilation III aura attached to the ring, which slows action speed of all nearby by -7%. Not great, but not bad for a surprise upgrade. Just leaving this note here in case you, like me, foolishly missed an obvious button. It's not documented by the wiki, so I figured it couldn't be that well known.

in addition, the listed PEN understates it because spells/abilities that are higher up get an innate "ability level" bonus that is more generous than PL scaling, +.5 PEN per ability tier (and +2 accuracy per ability tier) a tier five PEN 7 spell will inherently start off at PEN 9 and +4 accuracy. innate PEN 7 is not great, but keep in mind that a higher PEN is not necessarily better because the game is balanced such that higher PEN spells tend to do lower damage (iirc many cipher/druid spells off the top of my head are PEN 9+ and low damage). btw, champion's boon is A+ precisely for the +2 PEN that you can toss around to anyone who needs it (whereas monk limits their tenacious to themselves). it's useful on almost anyone you want to deal damage with on PotD.

enfeebled is treated almost identically as if you had +10 additional intellect, applied immediately, so it's additive with int. also an intriguing option!