thelee

- have you just tried using berath's blessing to bump up your level? barring that, my usual route is (sorry i'm missing specific quest names because this is just off the top of my head) - everything on maje island, this gets me to level 5 by the time i arrive on queen's berth and do the ghost puppet show - nekataka: in periki, trigger the fassina gloves quest, arkemyr quest, the degno's satchel quest, get tekehu, enter all the stores to get map xp and trigger fast travel later make your way up to kahanga palace to trigger the next step in the main quest. make sure to talk to prince to get the gullet line of quest. then go to muhai's estate and get muhai. go to sacred stair. complete muhai, advance eder's quest (if using), pick up bounty quests and area quests for later go visit the vailian trading company to get some XP and cash. also: do the luca quest do the quest where you can end up with 4 iron cannons at the end pick up sanza's first exploration quest <-- this gives you boatloads of XP for casual exploration pick up valian bounty quest resolve the first part of the family pride questline (just the duel) resolve the first part of the oathbinder sanctum questline (just to get the mission to go to oathbinder sanctum) get konstanten loot some luminous adra crates from the mill go to brass citadel and talk to the haza nui, you get XP just for doing so. go ahead and talk to atsura to get that poko kohara quest, going downstairs gets you map XP anyway. also: next part of fassina's glove quest visit all the buildings, pick up ship bounty quest go back to periki resolve the fassina quest go to luminous bath house to do the next part of degnos <- if you plan on being aggressive in this quest, don't do this yet, the fight is brutal at this level (which should be ~6) go to the gullet resolve all quests that you can here that does not involve going into the old city (though you can do the first part to get access to old city) you can make the biha-needs-transport quest easier if you don't care about getting all the kids off, or if you trick the goldpact paladin to go downstairs first, so the fight to kill them all is easier. full violence shouldn't be too hard. there'll be some back-and-forth depending, such as going to kapanga palace or sacred stair depending on how you resolve the food shortage, and also to kapanga to get the cornett of waves if you are using pallegina, having gone to sacred stair means you can also do the next part of her companion quest line in gullet (the hole, and then delver's row) the luminous adra crates are used here in the undercroft to resolve a quest, if you take this route for the food shortage leave nekataka - go to the island where you can recruit a xaurip, clear the island (gets you XP for sanza's quest, plus misc bestiary xp) - go to the island with the cannibals near maje island, clear it (gets you XP for sanza's quest, plus misc bestiary xp) - do any easy ship bounties or the early fighting bounties (porokoa and meryl are easy at this stage) - back to nekataka cash in any completed bounties, cash in sanza's - to fort deadlight resolve the benweth quest, advance serafen's (if using). <- might be too early if you plan on taking a violent approach to benweth - to dunnage resolve the drunken pirate quest, get all the bounty quests (incl the firebrand crew or whatever) talk to the principi head post-benweth to advance the questline resolve the play quest <- if you're somehow not level 8 yet, this will be too hard at this stage because of the ambush there might be other minor quests in dunnage that i'm forgetting about. do them - back to fort deadlight (you should've gotten contacted by the other princip leader, aeryn or whatever) you don't get experience for going back, but you get cash for divulging secrets At this point you should be level 8-9 and you didn't do anything particularly hard (unless you tried to duke it out with Degnos's related ambush which IMO is unfairly hard). Depending how I feel, I'd tackle Old City, Oathbinder Sanctum, the "Skipping Ahead" quest, maybe do more island exploration for Sanza for more XP, and then when Family Pride is no longer skulled, I'll tackle that. Eventually the Hanging Sepulchers for both the principi and berathian priest questlines. Eventually Arkemyr's infiltration and then pick up Fassina. Poko Kohara pops onto my todo list around level 10-11, which is also a good time for the next batch of sanza quests

can't speak for the community patch, but backstab should absolutely be working - my current run i used eder as a backstabber for maje island with out any issue - the main difficulty was just staying stealthed long enough to land a hit.

holy crap, does Vs Evil just have like one part-time developer doing this? the game hit end-of-life like two years ago

i personally liked tyranny's thematic starting point and wish it had absolutely no "good" option, because it seems like a bit of a cop-out rather than forcing players to engage with being an instrument of evil. i wish it would have embellished it more and shown more of the banal aspects to it. but the system is pretty blah. for all its faults, sometimes i find myself wanting to go give P:K another attempt. I dont' do that with tyranny. even with greater narrative replayability, if this is the best a classless rtwp has to offer, count me out. it's just very samey, even with wildly different party members. i'm kind of in the same boat as OP. Periodically I go looking around for another great crpg to get into, but it's really kind of a wall. I got Tower of Time off a steam sale, but haven't been motivated enough to start it. Many of the AAA "rpgs" seem rather samey; got Horizon Zero Dawn on PC in the same sale and while it sure has some nice visuals and world-building, the mechanics are the same-ol no-contraints "stealth, combat, craft/foraging/misc" identikit skill trees as every other AAA action rpg. Disco Elysium was a nice bright spot, but for more of an action-bent there doesn't seem to be much out there. I really hope Avowed does something different (I could kill for a class-based action rpg).

dont sell yourself short, this is good stuff here. i think "casual potd solo practioner" is a bit of an oxymoron

the problem is that it seems that the ability either is really crap or really too powerful. even if it was 40 focus, i wouldn't use it 99% of the time, except in the rare case where i am set up where it's essentially party god mode for 40 focus. btw is it actually the case that any damage knocks a party member out of the web? i thought it was just "hit" rolls. if it really is any damage, then it is even worse. defensive mindweb was pretty good in poe1, it seems they drastically overcorrected for deadfire.

omg lol what a cheese, hilarious. edit - does soul annihilation not use up all the focus? it looks like you were able to do it twice

can you hit yourself with fugue spores poison attack?

boeroer mentions driving echoes, but also i would argue reaping knives and death of a 1000 cuts are real fun powers, but a little niche or require quite a bit of setup to really take advantage of it. i think SC psion is the best argument for an SC cipher, because the extra power levels increases psion focus generation quite a bit over multiclass. it's not hard to get PL11 (PL9 normally, +1 from prestige, and +1 from numerous possible sources) which gives you +50% focus generation over an equivalent PL8 (PL7, +1 from same source) multiclass psion (6/sec vs 4/sec). at the same time though, psion/caster multiclass is just extremely effective/efficient with action economy and resources. so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would highly recommend giving one of the newer post-4.0 subclasses a try in some shape or form if you haven't already. A lot of them are really interesting and some of them very transformative to the class play experience (like psion, where you could do psion/caster and unlike a normal cipher it really works well). Interesting post-4.0 subclasses of note that I can vouch for: Furyshaper, Debonaire, Psion, Ancient. Blood mage and tactician obviously, but they strike me more as straightforwardly "powerful" rather than "intriguing" edit - very recently I did a Furyshaper/Stalker companion that I just threw in on a whim that ended up surprising me with how effective it was. Interrupting blows + carnage with ranger accuracy is very nice, and the stalker +1 AR plus barbarian thick skinned on a fire godlike meant that I was surprisingly tanky even with frenzy active. Having fury totem and fear totem at hand was real nice, too.

there's also a setting - i forget which - that when disabled has the twin side effects of drastically improving your video performance, but also making some areas a lot darker. i used to have it disabled on my budget PC and it made some areas inscrutably dark even with my relatively good eyes (and torches didn't help). maybe it's "glow effect?"

be real careful about tossing around nary in that fight - nemnok can use arcane reflection at will (limited only by an AI script timer), and many of the warlocks can use it once or twice. it is highly likely you hit someone and got it bounced.

yeah, as Boeroer, Kaylon, etc have said, Firebrand is fun because of the synergy with scion of flame and ring of focused flame so you can do a little more with it than say most priest spiritual weapons. For a warden (figher/druid) a devoted fighter set to great sword would be a fun pick (with some arcana to use scrolls in case battles run long or you get arcane suppressed), though I would also pick up monastic unarmed training as a backup source of crush of damage with your fists: it's the only other free proficiency you get as a devoted; spiritshift claws don't count unfortunately. Also important to note that for some odd reason, firebrand doesn't do slash damage, like other great swords. it does pierce/burn. (i guess it's so hot that if you swipe attack, it cauterizes wounds instead of cutting baddies open?)

the duration doesn't change, but you will get reduced healing and such. PL-scaling for duration appears to be fixed at cast.

they absolutely scale to legendary. they do so at the same rate as single-classed. this is firebrand scaling to legendary on a multiclass theurge:

i mean, @Waskialready has one under their belt, right, so why not? Blow some OBS minds because I don't think it's a well-known cheese.

@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.