thelee

what challenges do you have enabled? since you mentioned beraths fyi, i know you figured out the arcane dampener thing, but berath's shouldn't interact with knock out. in berath's challenge when you get knocked out, you get a timed debuff that causes you to permadie when it expires, so it distinctly differentiates from knockout. more to the point - if playing solo, you'd get a game over from being knocked out right away, regardless of the time left on the berath's debuff.

this is correct however, i think the game poorly handles excessive injuries. this is how i suspect i got my soft-lock - when i get a past-fatal injury, instead the game just locks me in the middle of the ability, as if it's trying to give me an additional injury but can't.

wow that sucks dude. i have no idea what would cause that. Theoretically SoT/BDD stops any kind of death. Are you absolutely sure your buff duration was still up? It didn't momentarily lapse and you died in combat? I don't suppose you have Vela (Hylea's Challenge) enabled or something? The only SoT+BDD issue I've ever had was a soft-lock for an injury-related abilities that the ukaizo dragon uses. I've never seen a death-related issue. So consider it an extremely weird/rare outcome.

in berath's challenge i gear up and level my companions once i discovered that companions that help during ship fights can also perma-die despite them not being under your control

i think i get it. i don't think fire blights will work at all, because you have to end combat to do dialogue, and ending combat will end all non-item-based effects on you or vela (which would include binding web), even if normally you can cast those effects outside of combat. i think relatedly, (this is some speculation), the periodic effects from binding web and pull of eora will halt when you enter dialogue, so you'll only be relying on the last debuff that binding web managed to apply to vela, which isn't very long compared to a decent halt (which is like 30s, versus binding web will be less than half that, which is definitely not enough based on my experience with grazed halts). you might just have to fight the beast of winter while keeping vela withdrawn somehow via scrolls or something. how did that single-class blood mage do it? are their replays anywhere?

sorry i'm being a nub here, but is there an important reason to why the blight is triggered *before* the fight begins, and not after? the combat ending is probably what's messing things up.

as someone who stealthed the tablet I do not recommend it if you can try something else instead. it is by far the hardest stealthing you'll ever do, and i rehearsed that damn thing a bajillion times and got clicks and timings down to a precise art and i still was in a state of near-panic during the real thing. at level 16 i would just blow as many high quality consumables (do you have summon items?) as you can to do the fight. (edit: i assumed OP was on ultimate because why on earth would you be doing magrans challenge :), but if you're not doing ultimate and you're extremely patient you could just make a bajillion individual saves and inch your way through a stealth approach. note - don't use the same save slot, because amusingly obsidian made loading the game a "noisy" effect, so a moment where you may have been safely stealthed may instead be one where a lot of enemies are converging on you when you reload) what helps is using a scroll instead (longer range than sparkcrackers) and doing it twice. as long as the enemies aren't fully on their way back, they'll get re-distracted. but indeed the margin of error is extremely small.

hm, are you using a scroll of binding web? this is wild speculation, but it's possible that effects stop during dialogue, and scroll of binding web relies heavily on shorter duration immobilizes except the effect ticks periodically. if the binding web ends during dialogue, then you don't have a very long immobilize

there's no way it could have been done with a previous patch version. there was no ultimate before 5.0. i do the same thing as well in my own ultimate run. are you saying that you are starting in the bottom-right of the map? if so, you might be too far away and the game might be relocating vela when the beast of winter triggers (i think everyone is suppossed to be on the "island" that forms when the beast of winter breaks the bridge). note that in my run, i noticd that my halt "grazed" vela, so i ended up halting her again. in practice runs it was critically important for vela to be at least hit by halt, or else it wouldn't last enough to last through the beast of winter appearing and starting the fight and vela would end up right next to the beast.

this is just a wild idea and is not guaranteed to work, but i would try creating an empty Player.log file and then use whatever your OS does to make it read-only (right-click in windows, use chmod on macOS/linux). there's a chance that the game will just give up trying to write to that file and not write anything at all.

frankly deadfire didn't sell enough to warrant such prolonged support - it only barely broke even well after patching support stopped. at some point you have to put your staff members on projects where they can make bigger bucks. given how much attention obsidian's other games have gotten (grounded, outer worlds) it makes business sense. even for games that have extremely high sales, it's more cost-effective to stop support and work on something new. skyrim has been re-released like a bajillion times but hasn't had a balance or content patch in ages, despite the fact that it's so buggy that the unofficial skyrim patch is always something i recommend people install before starting the game. that's just the reality of the game industry.

I don't think you're missing anything. I am personally a bigger fan of Encore in my typical chanter setups. If you're doing a no-rest or Eothas challenge run, Refreshing Finale might be more of a pain. But personally I find that having to rest every 3 major fights (not counting insignificant fights where I don't empower), or 4 with great soul, is not a big deal at all, even with Rymrgand's challenge enabled (which causes food to decay as time passes). Maybe other people covet specific resting bonuses and don't want to lose them.

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.