thelee

hm, i don't think this is possible. the only movement restriction that appears by default is the "can break engagement or not" checkbox. oof, that is a very good question. i think the conditional is sort of a poor-abstraction as to what's going on behind the scenes, because sometimes it just doesn't make sense. I think what happens is much closer to your last statement. E.G. if the block is "target health < 50" and you have as action 1. "restore target: self" and action 2 "divine mark, target: enemy, prioritize by: lowest deflection" with cooldown 10s. the fact that the two share the same conditional is meaningless - I think the UI grouping is a) purely a logical grouping for the user; b) to make it easier to gate common effects by a common cooldown and action priority. in practice, I suspect what ends up happening in the back end is that you create an action with UUID-1 "look at [target:self]; if [target:self].health < 50%, cast restore, activate cooldown TIMER-1" and then a second action UUID-2 "only if TIMER-1 not activated; look at [target:any enemy]; if [target:any enemy].health < 50%, add to [a list of targets]; choose target form [a list of targets] with [lowest deflection]. cast divine mark. activate cooldown TIMER-1." i think in cases where you add a non-targeted ability to a block that has a target (e.g. if in that same target health < 50 or whatever, you also added a "weapon switch" action), it effectively turns into a "always true" conditional, that just happens to share a logical group and cooldown timer with others that have actually have a relevant conditional. i think this could easily be tested more, but that's my best educated guess. edit: i crossed this all out, because upon reflection it contradicts something else i've been able to do with conditionals. i have to think about this more. it's one attack. red hand's 2 shot before reload is rare enough that i suspect you might hit bugs if you try to script anything special about its behavior. no, unfortunately, this is really only possible with inspirations/afflictions where you can negate a conditional about their existence. sometimes you can do "best target/threat" and that randomize a bit, or you can add a target priority that will have lots of ties and hope for a semi-random selection, but in situations like this I just effectively use an AI script to take care of hte first target for me, and then I have to micromanage successive targets (like with a long cooldown or a particularly restrictive conditional). get a mod?

Without a mod this is pretty impossible. There's no conditional to let you detect max focus or the ascended status. My only solution has been to micromanage the cipher a lot.

Pre-sales exceeded PoE1, but then post-release sales cratered. So there was definitely some sort of bifurcation in the market about people were enthusiastic about the game versus everyone else. i think people just have extremely selective memories on everything related to game releases. I think, at best, Deadfire could've delayed like a few weeks because their first patch was such a huge nerf hammer that it left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths - clearly they thought it was needed but for some reason could not bring it together quickly enough to make it a day-0 patch. that's about as far as i can see it. but aside from that, deadfire was an incredibly stable and polished game, and only got better from that. wasteland 3 (which i've been playing recently) is an incredible mess - ridiculously trivial things are busted [like keybindings, and even simple controller detection] and major tentpoles were/are nonfunctional at release [co-op]. even pathfinder:kingmaker, which has taken lot more sales than deadfire and many more years of patches is still jankier and buggier than deadfire. not everyone can be like bethesda, blizzard, or valve and have the luxury of constant steady revenue to allow them to endlessly tinker on a AAA product for years on end (and even then, bethesda still releases extremely buggy games). For a smaller studio, "just wait 9 months" can be a death sentence. That's the only explanation that I have, for example, that Wasteland 3 came out now when it did even with such basic things broken - they basically needed to keep the lights on in-house and they would have missed the last part of the summer, where game sales are easier. And for the record, both PoE1 and Deadfire *were* delayed for polish. What you got was actually the stable versions of the game. Both were slated for more like christmas releases, and both got delayed because of bug fixes and such. Obsidian was in such dire straits the first time around that Feargus told the leads at the time that if they missed the delayed deadline they'd have to quit on the spot. The version of the game one would be comparing against is the one that almost got released on christmas, not some hypothetical mythical one that came around another 9 months after their actual release. (By the way, many of the patch changes that came out after release were in response to player feedback, which is by definition not something you can do without a wide release. Some of the patch changes were intended to be after-release updates as well, to keep up player engagement, in the vein of "games as a service.")

if i remember correctly, queen's berth has some, i think either one of the outdoor vendors near the docks or the tavern owner in the wild mare stocks a couple sugar. i might be mistaking it for salt (icons are too similar), but in my last run i always did a shopping trip in nekataka and found myself always able to make stuff like glazed pork.

what does "directed" here mean? stuff like relentless storm won't be affected?

no, i believe i tested it, but it's been a while, but i'm pretty confident it doesn't apply to spells. it's complicated. on items, yes they can stack, but because they are negative numbers they are combined using inversion rules. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions on stacking: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/stacking-rules

immolator, grenade, and concussive bombs aren't actually bad for dealing damage, especially with lots of skill points in explosives (at 20 explosives, it's +100% multiplicative damage, +100% duration [for grenade's/incerator DoT], +5 PEN, and +20 accuracy). the main problem is that grenade and concussion push around enemies so much so it's hard to keep enemies in range of successive hits (works better indoors), and immolator has such low starting PEN (6) that it has a real hard time being useful on veteran or PotD until mid-late game. edit: like @powerotti says cinder bombs are good from start to finish. easy to craft, you craft them in multiples, blinding is always useful, you get multiple attempts to blind per bomb, and does an ok amount of damage for a bomb (frankly, cinder bombs are a lifesaver in the starting areas on potd). make sure to hoard spice to keep crafting them.

in fairness, there's not that many sources of hostile effect reduction, and i think if you have only one negative number it ends up being very close to a multpilicative system (good enough for back of the envelope math and determining how to cancel out penalties, i do this for penetration/AR numbers). it can get really ugly pretty fast with multiple negative numbers (action speed/recovery time is the worst offender since there's so many modifiers). e.g. at -75% PEN you need +300% damag emodifiers to cancel that out, which is very much like a multiplicative system. Combining -75% PEN and -50% graze and now you need +400% damage modifiers, which is very different from what you'd expect from a multiplicative system.

sorry, to disappoint, but i'm almost 100% sure it's the double-inversion fiasco. i had a max-resolve character once. 35 resolve (19 starting + 1 background, +5 cloak of poverty, +1 ring of solitary wanderer, +1 chameleon ring [priest], +1 shorewalker sandals, +2 token of faith, +5 a resolve inspiration) = -75% reduction ring of solitary wanderer: -35% when far away from allies Almost any negative number (regardless of what it is, e.g. con healthy penalty, int aoe penalty, reputation effects on deep faith) undergoes inversion. So what actually ends up happening is (1/(1-.75)) + (1/(1-.35) - 1 = 4.54 => 4.54 is > 0, so 1-1/(1 + 4.54) = -82%. this is not as good as a purely multiplicative effect, which sould have been 1 - .25 * .65 => -83.75%. (edit 2 - though the closer the numbers involved are to 100% and the closer any positive modifiers are to canceling out the inverted negative numbers, the more closely it approximates a purely multipliative system) edit: what's important to keep in mind is that the resolve effects on duration are applied during the same step as intellect bonuses, they don't happen in isolation. so if an enemy has +100% duration to their effects, having your hostile effect reduction this high doesn't merely reduce it to +18% duration bonus, the double-inversion overwhelms that +100% and you still end up with something like -50% duration penalty (ballparking, because i'm too lazy to do the math) effect reduction. in the combat log, the duration of effects you see is the "final" number, and if you hover over it you get the number of what *would* have happened ignoring resolve effects altogether.

are you sure? i could have sworn i was able to get the chain. you need an item that is essentially from each of the DLCs, or triggered by an ambush following completion of a DLC.

if you're not talking exclusively about single-class, many of the tricks that other classes get to speed up can also apply to priests: frenzy from barbarian, swift strikes from monks, and DaOM from wizard. the base cast time also matters - wizards can feel real fast because they have almost an entire school of instant cast spells, but priests have very little of that and a lot of their good buffs are in the "slow" category--4.5s. Not only is that slow, but some of the big tricks only shave off recovery time, so won't affect that long cast time. (And a couple spells even fall into the "very slow" category of having 6s). i had a priest that was basically as fast as one could get naturally (scordeo pistol, scordeo sabre, almost 30 dex when buffed, rapid casting) and even then 4.5s and 6s spells definitely still feel slower. i think it's just the price you have pay to have some extremely powerful buffs and other late-game effects which you might not notice as well when doing solo (devotions for the faithful is good but may not feel like it earns its 4.5s cast time unless you're in a situation where you're buffing an entire party). basically what i'm saying is that if you want to feel faster, you can also try to focus on 3s cast time effects or mix more of them in, which absolutely do feel quick compared to 4.5s. there are some pretty good ones in there (triumph of the crusaders, iconic projection, consecrated ground, despondent blows, etc.). as a plus, due to how spell casting times work, "faster" spells also have larger recovery times, which means the various recovery time buffs mentioned upthread (scordeo's, miscreant's leather, etc.) have a greater impact on the fast spells.

shared nightmare + bombs isn't bad, but i'm not sure the interaction is strong enough to be worth going for a cipher on its own. explosives are fun, but not really strong enough to be a build-around. i don't have much experience on what makes for a solo build, however. at first blush, fighter ranger and rogue all also have good synergy with explosives and might perform better at solo. fighter can use disciplined strikes or tactical barrage; the stat boost won't help, but the graze to hit chance, the hit to crit chance, and +1 PL will all help. rogues can hold more items, and dirty fighting will also boost exploives [and having smoke veil or shadowing beyond to go invisible can help a lot with soloing]. ranger has tons of ways to boost generic accuracy and damage, which will help explosives.

what does "bomb" mean here? do you mean using lots of explosive items?

I always get this error when I play with the console. I think it's just a spurious error. I think Boeroer misspoke, it's "FindGameData" probably.

unfortunately, there's no real way to do this, which sucks. best bet is just paying close attention to the combat log and mousing over rolls and effects for clues. i think for the extremely dedicatedly curious, you can use console commands to give your own characters the abilities and read the auto-generated tooltip.

Sorry this happened to you. FS is probably extremely brutal on trial of iron, because it throws in a lot of possible instadeaths at you, on top of disintegration effects. I think on top of Disintegrate, it might be Death by a 1000 cuts (which cipher-types in FS love to use) that might be triggering disintegration if someone dies. I can't say for sure since it's not mentioned in the ability, but anecdotally my last run I felt like I was getting disintegated left and right and it seemed like the only culprit could have been death by a 1000 cuts. Luminous Spores also have an effect that I don't remember that can act as an instadeath effect IIRC that can come out of nowhere if your'e fighting off other possible disintegration effects. I think Death Cloud might annihilate as part of its instakill. Important to know that the actual damage tick of a Disintegrate isn't necessary to disintegrate you - so long as a party member has a disintegration or disinstegration-related debuff, if anything else would knock them out they are instead annihilated. Also your disintegration can in fact be reflected. Many of the vithracks and other enemies in FS will create an arcane reflection shield - it's basically not worth using any targeted effects against them unless you can strip them of this reflection shield via street sweeper, arcane suppression, arcane cleanse, or concussive shot. In addition, I feel like there are some enemes in FS that have some inherent spell reflection. Nothing to prevent disintegration. The main way to protect against it is to also protect against death/instadeath. Keep your party members above near death will protect you from instakill effects, and something like Barring Death's Door or Shieldbearer's Lay on Hands will give you a death prevention shield which will guard you against from being suddenly blasted. You could try to use potions of major recovery, but -10 sec duration is nothing compared to typical durations of distinegration effects i think. I think Veilpiercer (or somet other bow) has a unique effect that in addition to cleansing benefical effects, also cleanses hostile effects in a wide area, but it's 1/rest. Street sweeper enchanted to do -10 sec hostile effects may help. Arcane reflection and other spell reflection can help, but are only useful for wizards or wizard multiclass since otherwise the effect is too rare, too expensive (potion of perfect arcane reflection uses adra ban iirc), or too inconsistent (imperfect only gives you a 50% chance and konstanten's resting bonus only gives you a 30% chance). but enemies *will* happily bounce disintegration and death of a thousand cuts back onto themselves. You just have to pay attention to ensure proper uptime because it's not easy to AI script "cast this whenever the reflection wears off" and disintegration effects are high spell levels so will eat up your arcane refleciton pretty quickly. not as far as I can tell. sorry, not that I'm aware of. But I can say in FS beware of all cipher-types, beware of luminous spores of all types, and beware of wizard-types (due to Death Ring, which may annihilate on instakill). That's a lot of enemies. edit - FS is the main problem area that I can think of for disintegration. I think Concelhaut's fight might have some disintegration risk (I seem to remember being surprised once). There are a couple of high-level cipher encounters scattered throughout where they will use disintegrate on you. sorry, i can't remember where they are. but I think FS is the only place where you'll see death by a thousand cuts being used. Luminous Spores and sporelings are the worst because they can periodically use an extremely painful effect that does IIRC a buttload of damage and importantly does an arcane cleanse effect (-1000s on beneficial effects), so barring death's door or lay on hands won't protect you against death/insteadeath/disintegrate when they're around. also be careful - frightened child and a few others in FS will use petrification (the tier 9 wizard spell) on you. All the anti-death and disintegration proactivity in the world won't protect you against a permanent petrify at near death. You can't suppress it or cleanse it and it doesn't wear off at end of combat. The only solution is to repeatedly re-equip an item that bestows dexterity resistance, have a chanter chant that bestows dex resistance, or a party member who can buff dex (i think limited to just chanter or paladin). edit - rats! ninja'ed by @Waski

sorry we are probably overwhelming you with jargon. tuolito's palm is a special small shield that everyone likes for monks or for the talent "monastic unarmed training" (which gives other non-monks kinda-monk fists). it gets all the special damage bonuses that monks get. so not only is it a shield, which you can enhance with "weapon and shield" weapon style, it also is a weapon so you can benefit from "two weapon style." It also has an advantage in that you just buy it at a store, so you can buy it as soon as you have enough money instead of waiting to do some high-level quest. a quick-and-dirty and totally-not-optimized example of the monk/rogue suggestion might be a trickster/helwalker. level 1: escape (rogue), swift strikes (monk). Pick as your proficiencies: spear and small shield level 2: fast runner (rogue) level 3: lesser wounds (monk) level 4: two weapon style (rogue), weapon and shield style (monk) etc... trickster gives you some bonus spells that help you debuff enemies and also protect yourself: mirror image and ryngrim's repulsive visage are extremely helpful, because helwalker can get extremely squishy. you would max out your dexterity, and put some into resolve (prefer resolve, because defense has increasing returns and becomes more valuable the more you have) and int. helwalker gets huge bonuses to might so that's less important. forbidden fist might also be a good monk choice because it synergizes with the need to use a shield and have decent resolve, but i think it might be a bit too skill-intensive for a new player since you could easily kill yourself (though tbf the same is true for helwalker).

i guess a question for OP is what thematically or for RP purposes they are going for? something tankier? something more like an agile skirmisher? unbroken/trickster does sounds like a good synergistic build but would not be great if what one wanted was something more like a fast shock troop instead of more a tank. edit - also a target difficulty. i'm used to running potd so my mind skews heavily towards addressing penetration issues, which is much less of a big deal on normal difficulty (and important but not as important on veteran). in my experience pen is the biggest impediment for a decent spear build on PotD, even with stalker's patience in tow. (same goes for some other similar weapons)

just as a first blush for some ideas to chew on, i think the biggest concern you'd have is that spears don't have a modal that gives you bonus PEN, which can be a big deal. monks and berserkers are the only classes i can think of that have an easy source of tier 2+ might inspiration. chanters and priest can also get one, but it comes later. you'd have action economy issues with a priest, though, unless you pick up skaen or wael as a subclass (either of which would be good for a mobile glass cannon-y build). if you're starting with rogue (with shield!) that also implies a riposte build. tuolito's palm would work monk or any build using monastic unarmed training to let you dual-wield with a spear and a shield. there are other brawling shields as well, tuolito's is just a popular pick because of its synergy with monk fists and monastic unarmed training.

I'm not aware of one, but it certainly sounds like an interesting idea (I had a spear+shield build in Tyranny, and I just finished watching a Bronze Age youtube video). I'll try to work on one today, and I'll also keep tabs on this thread in case anyone else chimes in before I do again.

People aren't using windows 7 "as an explanation for every problem." Obsidian did provide support, but it's end of life. They provided support for a little over a year, and then they were done. They have absolutely said as much. They are only coming back for extremely major game-breaking issues, but I think that was just a diplomatic way to say "sorry we're done," since Deadfire has some extreme struggles starting up on macOS catalina (a brand new OS) and they haven't provided much support on that issue. They are not here anymore. Much like how Windows 7 is also end of life (it was released in 2009; it's ancient). Microsoft sold it and distributed, but it's literally not supported anymore, not even for enterprise solutions iirc, which typically have extremely long support time horizons. The age of the driver is irrelevant. I have used nvidia and amd gpus with way better coverage than a discrete sound card and have had issues with drivers that were days or weeks old. (GPUs are also much more complicated beasts, but that's a different issue). If Windows 7 has nothing to do with it, it's extremely easy to prove us wrong - install Windows 10 on your machine and verify that you still have the sound clicking issue. And you're right, I'm not helping, because I don't think there's much we can do to help. You're using an old OS that was not significantly supported to begin with (e.g. I would bet you money that Deadfire was developed on Windows 10 machines), and you're talking about an issue that I don't think I've ever seen or heard of in the years I've been on this forum and reporting bugs myself. And I'm just someone who tries to help people who find themselves in this forum unknowingly talking into the void, even if it's just to tell them that their issue has no known fix and they need to find a workaround or live with it because of the lack of support; I don't have special access to the code or anything and your issue is definitely not something fixable with a mod. You don't have to like my answers, but sorry, that's the reality. edit - minimum/recommended specs are marketing fluff, always have been since the days where I was told I could play some cutting-edge 90s 3D game on a 486. All they pretty much guarantee is playability. That's it. Windows 7/Vista are both dead OSes despite what the minimum specs say and expectations should be appropriately matched. It is certainly possible that Windows 7 has nothing to do with this, but given how uncommon this issue is and the main distinguishing feature is that you are using Windows 7, that seems to be a driving factor. If you have a better theory, we're all ears. Like I said it could also be sound/driver issue, but that's much harder to verify/test, unless you have a way of doing sound without your discrete sound card.

you get "your content will need to be approved" until you've made a few number of posts, and in practice your posts will still get through relativley quickly. it's mostly an anti-spam measure. deadfire is at end of support cycle, so sending in in bug reports isn't going to go anywhere, unfortunately. i think the most is that the console port might be getting some patches and fixes, but hard to say. as for your particular issue, it very much sounds unique. while minimum specs do list certain OSes and hardware as supported, in practice minimum specs don't guarantee a *good* experience, only a playable experience. I've never heard of anyone having this issue, and I can only suspect that either having Windows 7 or old hardware/old drivers is a major driver of the problem. (more to the point, microsoft doesn't support windows 7 anymore.)

I mostly mean that if the first time you played a cipher you picked up party-boosting abilities and only very few enemy-affecting attacks, the "turns invisible" effect would not have been very noticeable, since you would have minimal exposure to it and would mostly be doing it on your party members (which is much less of a memorable outcome). Even if you pick up whispers or puppet master. If you pick up mind blades, however, you might have the entire enemy party being turned invisible, which is supremely annoying and much more memorable.

did you have him as a cipher in your first playthrough? did you change up any of hte abilities? the wiki is a little deceptive, because unless they changed something in recent patches, the "positive" or "negative" effects aren't really that well-categorized, since they apply to whomever the wild-minded power is targeting, ally or enemy. so it's possible you might have turned your allies invisible and thought not much of it.

I seem to recall during one of my ultimate attempt practices against the Oracle, having one of the enemy mages get dominated messed up my ability to immediately bounce back from being dominated. I could be misremembering, but I definitely prioritized killing the adds in the real run. so the game might treat dominated/charmed enemies as part of your party for (not) triggering brilliant tactician.