thelee

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.

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)