thelee

I think these revised spell selections are pretty OK (and my thumbs-up to the no-dominate, charm-version of woedica). My only concern is that putting Garden of Life at tier five for Gaun is maybe too good. Garden of Life is a really powerful spell and Gaun is already imo a decent subclass. (I already weight towards Xoti over Vatnir as a priest/backup priest a lot in my parties, and I'd basically never take Vatnir if Xoti got garden of life at tier five. Heck picking a druid would be a hard choice.) edit - haunting chains is too good at tier six imo. just becuuse wizards get a stupidly good terror effect at tier five doesn't mean we should move all other terrify effects up :). if you wanted to keep it in the priest bonus spell tree, i think making it inaccessible to multiclassing is best, but i can also get that you want a symbol spell for all the subclasses. (i think haunting chains at tier eight would actually be pretty good level, and woedica already loses an incarnate at tier nine so it's not a big deal to me that they don't get a symbol. the writs and a top-notch spiritual weapon are what they get instead of symbols and incarnate)

hm, nuts, it must've been a stealth nerf in one the last patches. at least it's one less exception to remember.

no modwyr?

chanter/bm can also cast two fingers of daylight for resolve immunity. hey i sense a zany build idea!

good job! that fight in SSS is one of the fights that strikes me as fundamentally "unfair." glad to see you solved a solo version of it. even a full-party run can be a nightmare for me if i don't have the right passives going in.

an enchanter will naturally have dex immunity the first time they get an affliction. there is also sandals of the water lilly which grants dex immunity at the cost of a penalty to deflection. similarly village fool cap will give you resolve immunity but everyone will get a deflection penalty (you and enemies). this deflection penalty is actually not bad in certain fights, but as a general thing might be too punishing.

Stone of Power does stack with everything. It's a case where an item-generated user-initiated ability is an exception to the normal stacking rules. I'm guessing there's some flag or bit they forgot to set in the game files, or maybe the designers themselves weren't in complete agreement on how to treat stacking for non-persistent effects coming from items. (In, fact I think it was @Boeroer himself who pointed this out to me and he was right.) but in general PL bonuses obey normal stacking rules. However, there is a separate bug where resting bonuses transform from active to passive effects, so it is possible to stack PL a bit extra in this way using some foods.

so i think i need to backtrack, i got myself confused by overthinking it. i was trying to generalize from a phenomenon with some defenses: robust/hardy/potions => generic +AR barkskin => conditional +AR. if you get hit by a shock, you don't get both the generic and barkskin bonus against it, you just get the higher. versus: arcane veil => +50 deflection moonwell => +10 all defenses if you get attacked by an arrow, you get both. so what really matters is not conditional/specific/etc. it's just category. Hunter's Claw is a generic bonus, ultimately, it doesn't matter if it only is active agaisnt certain creature types. It will not stack with other generic accuracy bonuses. Marked Prey is not a generic accuracy bonus, it's a marked effect. It's not a "specific" effect, it's different 'category' of bonus.

For understanding stacking I think a better way to think about it is that there’s generic, specific, and conditional, on top of active v passive. Hunters Claw is active+conditional+generic, so it will not stack with other sources of active+generic, but will stack with passive or active+specific.

what exactly is a "specific" accuracy bonus in the way you are using it?

PS4, on top of defaulting to an HDD, is also a 2013 system, and I don't recall it being a a cutting-edge processor for 2013. Relevant because IME on playing Deadfire on many different machines, the graphics can be tuned to be ok for many different systems, but it is consistently cpu constrained (unlike DOS2). PS4 is an old platform. PS5 is a 2020 machine and defaults to an SSD. I would imagine that the difference between Deadfire on a PS4 vs a PS5 might be night and day.

I didn't think I'd have much of an opinion on this, but Berath's portfolio isn't *anything* death-related, it tends to be death in terms of stoic inevitability and cyclic death (the reps are rational and stoic), and prayers to Berath may be to merely delay the inevitable. While it's hard to express that exactly with spells, I feel like we lose a bit of flavor by getting rid of the stoic-seeming Holy Meditation and the delaying Salvation of Time. Adding Death Ring at the expense of either of them would make Berath more like Rymrgand (Vatnir gets Death Ring) and make Berath feel more "primal" and less reserved. As for Wael's tweak - while I think Iconic Projection is kind of a weird choice in vanilla (but I mean Wael is inscrutable so who knows), I think bumping all the spells up and adding capricious hex would make Wael too good as a subclass, highlighting its strength as an add-in for glass cannon builds or being a glass cannon itself. Earlier access to Mirror Image, and earlier access to multiple casts of Mirror Image is very good. Uniquely, priests also get a pair of slippers that grants +1 to tier two spell casts, which would give Wael a huge boost if they get Mirror Image at tier two. Instead of moving all the spells up, I would instead recommend simply changing the tier two bonus spell. As an idea: "Bewildering Spectacle" seems like a subtle enough effect (with a very Wael-y name), though this might dilute the wizard too much. Maybe even just changing it to another priest spell? Not a lot of very compelling/in-theme picks at tier two though. edit - Woedica's Fealty is a dominate ability, no? From a systems perspective I disagree with this choice. Ciphers are supposed to be the dominators, and letting priests do that dilutes the cipher too much IMO. edit 2 - for similar systems reasons, I'm not wild about Smoke Veil for skaen. As it stands in vanilla, Skaen basically has 12 guile worth of rogue abilities. Smoke Veil would be another 4. At the level that it is proposed, it would also be accessible for multiclassing. I think it dilutes rogue too much. (And also excacerbates a rogue/skaen oddity - a single self-empower would restore an enormous amount of effective guile)

you also forgot the hunter's claw line of abilities. with a bit of metagaming, you can get +20 generic accuracy (but is active so doesn't stack with other active bonuses). Combined with Marked Prey, Marksman, Stalker's Link, and Survival of the Fittest you can have an insane amount of accuracy (albeit only against one creature type, against everyone else you get less, but still insane, accuracy). edit - the game is a little glitched about hunter's claw and it is actually possible to stack hunter's claw arbitrarily large without much effort. it's so easy to do this that whenever i use a ranger, i have to consciously make sure i stop at +19 or +20 to avoid getting cheaty.

fyi, it's not looting that triggers the encounter, there's a button on the wall that opens all the doors in this dungeon which does trigger the encounter. if you have figured out a way through the dungeon without closing off any paths, strictly speaking you don't even need to press the button and you can get out of there without a fight.

If we're not just limiting ourselves to friendly/party buffs, this is my mandatory plug that rangers get enormous amounts of +accuracy bonus (to just themselves). Much of it stacks. edit - just as in case it needs clarifaction for OP, the un-upgraded adventurer's stance still gives you +5, and conqueror's stance will still give you +5 below 50% health.

ranger's Takedown Combo is an under-appreciated combo (literally), because I think as a community we just discovered it relatively late. Basically, takedown combo will increase +100% the damage done by DoTs as well, but doesn't get consumed by a simple DoT application or tick (it will get consumed by a DoT that has an initial attack, but you can just use the takedown combo after the initial application then). Works great with Disintegration and Cleansing Flame. I'll bet it would also be amazing with CCS since it ticks so frequently for decent damage.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions

yes, your summary is my suspicion. though it doesn't explain your observation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

so there's some sort of delay, and I think there are several causes. I haven't tested it extensively. At the very least, I think if you do an action manually there's a brief delay before the game realizes it should pick up on the AI script again. As for other possible mechanism: I have noticed something funky with my forbidden fist AI scripting. I initially put a 5s cooldown, a "safe" duration for forbidden fist. This was too much! As you might have noticed, it seemed like there was some additional delay. So I was missing opportunities to land an additional forbidden fist, well after the existing debuff wore off. I essentially fixed it by setting a 1s or so cooldown. That works just fine. (I forget the reason why I didn't just have it at 0.) At the time, I chalked it up the following reason: the AI decides on the next action as it completes the current action, not when it's about to do the next action. Example: monk dual wielding. Uses forbidden fist, triggers 5s cooldown. Auto attacks a couple times. On the n-th auto-attack, the forbidden fist script cooldown will expire in .1s. However, the AI script is evaluated right now right as the auto-attack completes, so it queues up another autoattack. So even though the forbidden fist action is ready for the next attack by the time recovery is finished, the AI has already decided to commit to another autoattack, and won't change its mind until it completes this queued up action (or you interrupt it by doing something else). So it's not recovery time per se, but just when the AI commits to an action (so it's not a cooldown, since interrupting it [edit - even literally an actual interrupt on the character] and resuming AI would queue up the correct action regardless of remaining recovery). Though please don't take this as a source of truth - this was a working explanation had at the time, and I didn't test it anymore because setting the cooldown to 1-2s was "good enough" for my purposes. It would make sense with what you're experiencing/your hypothesis, though.

No way to do it I'm afraid. This is one of my great sadnesses in deadfire. They are basically only useful for in-map skill checks, but many (if not most) of the hardest skill checks are in interactive events that are triggered from the world map.

by default, this is not really possible. as someone who has played lots of priests, this is my curse (holy radiance and consecrated grounds are the biggest AI scripting misses here). the only thing I can think of is to preface all rejuvenation and "spine of thicket green" effects with the same conditional (e.g. self: health < 50%) and preface all storm and "lord darren's voulge" effects with a different, exclusive conditional (e.g. self: health > 50%). then you could have your weapon switch be the top conditional block and have a cooldown of 1s so your character always switches to it if needed before doing anything else. (the trick here is that the conditionals have to be truly exclusive, even when considering target types of the abilities. for that reason i think "self" conditionals are the easiest since there's no ambiguity about the target) unfortunately, this is not ideal, but what you're suggesting is probably too sophisticated for vanilla AI scripting. neither do i. chanters are the one class I don't AI script at all, just autoattack.

oh yeah, this one: i'm not very familiar with mods and generally don't use them. i'm like the worst person to ask. i do know that there has been some "full AI scripting" mod or two out there that greatly expands what one is capable of. In some of my more frustrated moments, this is the mod I most contemplate actually installing. (In the past I've used a few bug fixing mods.) I actually don't know about achievement-disabling. Normally I care about this a lot, even if i have all achievements, because it suggests to me I'm doing something I shouldn't :). But I clearly didn't have much of a problem of using a few bug fixing mods in the past. So maybe not. Again, I'm like the worst person to ask on this front

i don't have much experience with scripting the attack command, i think the biggest risk here is that there's no way to do a delay, so assuming that this is a "always true" conditional, what could happen is that you do smoke, then you trigger an attack, but before your character has a chance to do an attack, another smoke is triggered, and then you do an attack. i honestly don't know. this is something that i think you basically have to test yourself to see if it works. if it works, great. if it doesn't, maybe you could gate #4 and #5 on having a target with <100% health (which would happen after 2 and 3, assuming this all happens at the start of a fight). probably i would choose different priorities for the target, e.g. nearest target, lowest health, lowest fortitude, hoping that they apply to different enemies. you could also try "best threat" or whatever that is, that might be semi-smart targeting.

ok, i've been busy at work so i can't really test this in-game, but after some reflection, here's my best explanation that is consistent with what i've done in the past. i think what happens is that the game is checking all the conditionals in order of priority (so if a conditional is "target" it is looking at all possible targets, ally or enemy). if a block matches a conditional, it evaluates each ability in order, and passes it a list of targets that met the conditional, filtered by target type, and ordered by priority. The only exception is "target type: self" which always passes the target check targeting yourself. so here's an example, semi-nonsensical block (using my own conditional to be illustrative): conditional: target health < 50% cooldown: 10s abilities: cast:Restore, target type: ally or self, prioritize by: lowest health cast:Holy Radiance, target type:self, prioritize by: lowest health cast:Divine Mark, target type: enemy, prioritize by: highest health so if in a fight, let's say some silly enemy casts delayed fireball, and it explodes and puts enemies A into near death and B into bloodied and party members Xoti into near death, Eder into bloodied, but You are still healthy. The game checks the conditional and gets a list of targets, e.g. [A, B, Xoti, Eder]. Because it has a non-zero number of targets, it moves to the abilities list. It checks against ability #1 and sees whether anything is possible. Restore gets as valid targets ordered in priority [Xoti, Eder]. so it'd cast restore on xoti. Let's say you don't have a restore available. It moves to ability #2 and sees whether anything is possible. Now you get Holy Radiance cast on self, which always has a valid target, so you'd get Holy Radiance cast (even though you're healthy). Let's say you already have Holy Radiance used. Then you get the final slot, which is Divine Mark cast on [B, A] in order, which would mean Divine Mark cast on B. So I believe you're right in the sense that the meaning of "target (not) <50%" changes from ability to ability, but really what's happening is that the game tosses a list of *all* possible targets to the ability, and the ability target type and ordering is responsible for filtering it down to a non-empty list (and if it's empty, the ability is skipped, unless it's target:self targeting). Ordinarily we're not mixing ally/self target types and enemy target types in the ability lists so this ambiguity doesn't frequently crop up. So for your example, I think what that means is that you would use Smoke/Invisible as soon as any target exists with {not} <50% health, regardless of what your own health is. If you don't have smoke/invis avilable, then you would shoot you arquebus at one of the targets with {not} less than 50% health, prioritized by your priority selection. This is my best guess, consistent with how I've used scripting in the past. Notably IIRC the default priest-cautious scripts hae two separate healing blocks, one that conditions on target health, and another on self health, simply because of how generous the self-targeting spell cast rules are, so either the default scripts (or the copy-edits I made, I forget which) want to make sure you're not just casting e.g. consecrated ground when you're out of range of anyone who's actually hurt. edit: this would explain why my wizard script of "target: is spellcaster -> cast arcane reflection" is basically equivalent to "always true -> cast arcane reflection". from the perspective of the game my party always has a spellcaster (the wizard) and there's nothing in the ability list to further filter to enemies only, only a self-cast that is always valid.

i did my best to answer some of those questions, but unfortunately the vanilla AI scripting--while useful--is pretty limited. I think for some of the more sophisticated stuff you want to do you will definitely have to go with a mod.