thelee
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Posts posted by thelee
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On 10/6/2023 at 2:39 AM, Constentin Lévine said:
versatile Blue-Black-White magic sorcerer.
love to see MTG concepts here
On 10/27/2023 at 5:43 PM, tackthumb said:Meanwhile, Illusion spells like Wizard's Double, Mirrored Image, and Llengrath's Displaced Image provide straightforward and effective defensive buffs while also being available much sooner than the aforementioned Enchantment alternatives.
you know, originally i had this issue with conjuration, but i think in practice you just play them out differently. summoned weapons all have reach or ranged, so the illusion magic is less critical (and you still get arcane veil for emergencies, though i'd rather just slicken or pull). i like illusion magic for non-reach martial/glass cannon builds.
yeah, the PL bonus is kinda squandered on a lot of conjuration spells, and there is a rough anti-self-synergy where you can't benefit from familiars and also actually use some of your conjuration spells (i wish familiars were "free" summons). IME conjuration school is more about what schools you get overall, with a slight boost from your familiar - you retain access to spells like swift, slicken, walls, combusting wounds, pull of eora. i think the guaranteed at least +1 PL from your familiar across the board gives it an edge over a generic wizard if you have a specific "flavor" or "theme" that's in those schools.
put another way, transmuter would be better at some really impactful spells, but you end up dropping enchantment, and swift is so good for a martially-oriented caster that i would never. enchantment gets you access to a lot of useful evocation spells, but you drop transmutation, so it's quite a trade-off. it's basically this level of back-and-forth that means i frequently end up liking conjurer anyway for certain caster builds, warts and all.
though fassina's character really annoys me because her loremaster setup invests in summons for the first skill point, which--at least without a mod--you can't get rid of. just really excacerbates the anti-synergy of relying on your familiar.
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On 10/24/2023 at 1:09 PM, Konst said:
It means if knockdown (not push) satisfies topic starter request - it happens very often with "sun and moon" + "1-handed style".
nah, i know knockdown/prone is effective. i was trying to figure out ways to make "push" specifically effective. though there are some pretty good ideas in general in this thread.
22 hours ago, tackthumb said:I notice on occasion when under pull or push effects, the target will sometimes get "stuck" on an object where they will be in the push/pull animation and sort of continually hover in place.
yeah i was half-hoping for some push cheese like this, i've definitely seen this happen (very annoying when it happens to party member).
17 hours ago, NotDumbEnough said:Pull of Eora spam with Arcane Archer can very easily lead to enemies being stuck in place for more or less the entire fight. The more you stack the more likely it is that the enemy will just get permanently stuck in the ragdoll animation and be entirely unable to act.
yeah i was originally going to roll a druid/arcane archer because between the two of them that's tons of push effects and arcane archer also gets web and binding roots (like halt on steroids), plus an animal companion with engagement to keep pushed foes away from squishy folk. not knowing about cheesier push options like what constentin suggested it sounded effective. but i've rolled two other beastmasters in the past so i wasn't keen on rolling a third.
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1 hour ago, Konst said:
For example, and this is just example, how Carnage + Soul Annihilation works?
imma stop you right there.
Carnage isn't a physical attack. Carnage is a "spell-like" ability that is triggered by your weapon strikes as a barbarian, and the damage is keyed off very few things, basically just: your base weapon damage, might, and power-level scaling.
it doesn't interact with things that modify your weapon attacks or are based off your weapon attacks. it's basically a whole other thing. this is why i call it "spell-like" - it's like a spell in what few things actually boost it, it just so happens that the damage is based on your primary weapon as opposed to a fix number like for an actual spell.
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42 minutes ago, Constentin Lévine said:
The red hand (Twin Slugs, 4m push on hit) is really an equivalent but with auto-attack. In other hand, Efficient Anguish can be used with AoE weapon to push many targets.
i completely forgot about red hand having a push enchant, lol i just never bothered with that enchant in the past.
the universalist build in my OP was previously going to use xefa + 1h style to get a persistent source of push mid-late game, but red hand's push on hit is going to be way way better. didn't think of arterial strike, but just tanglefooting enemies and knocking them around with each shot of red hand is going to pretty much be repeated hard cc on melee targets.
also lol fighter clear out with xefa is hilarious
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Revisiting deadfire after playing around with BG3 and anyone who's played much BG3 knows that an extremely effective tactic is simply to push enemies into chasms (via athletics or push effects).
Got me thinking if there's any creative way to use push effects in Deadfire. Always kind of a "meh" effect IMO but maybe there's something that can be done here (if not instantly-trivializing-encounters level of power like in BG3).
I just have a random build right now as universalist skaen/animist (despite swearing off skaen forever after doing the ultimate) - using Escape as mobility tool, and using Halt or Tanglefoot + Winter Wind to keep melee enemies away from the front line. Moderately effective, probably will get more effective at mid levels and Halt is less likely to graze or miss and I get more push effects from the druid side. (This is similar to a universalist built i posted here a while back where I argue Halt is extremely effective hard-CC for melee foes - adding in a push effect here means that Halt is effective even after the front line is already engaged.)
any ideas?
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do you really want to lean in towards a fire theme? or you just like the flavor of Magran? like Constentin said there's a decent chunk of fire immunes, but with a universalist you can pick up tons of frost/water spells. Not particularly in-theme if you just want to be a fire-nuker-type, but gives you probably maximum versatility (fire immunes tend to have a weakness to frost and frost immunes [there's a DLC full 'em] tend to have a weakness to fire).
i would also pick up Marux Amanth - when soulbound to priest you get a 10% chance to echo priest spells. 10% is not a lot, but is a pretty nice event when it triggers, especially given that Magran gives you some nukes (fan of flames and torrent of flame). dual wield with either sun and moon or magran's favor as constentin suggests.
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late reply, but just wanted to chime in on some other thoughts -
1. by itself, druid is pretty jack of all trades. that means that w/ multicalss you can angle it pretty effectively towards either a martial or caster bent, but there are occasionally some gotchas (for example, devoted + spiritshift is a trap, monk + spiritshift can be awkward b.c. spiritshift claws don't count as unarmed).
2. there's some great cheese opportunities (esp w/ single-class druid thanks to avenging storm, as boeroer mentions, but also pollen patch), if you're into that.
3. requires a bit of metagame knowledge, but druid has some good item-based interactions that can sometimes be a focus for builds. i actually had a martial-oriented wizard/druid centered on the second-tier flaming sword spell, strange as that might sound in that summary. it's because ring of focused flame (ez to buy or steal) gives +10 acc to fire-keyworded spells (a lot of druid spells), but also the flaming sword (normally summoned weapons don't interact much with keywords). combined with the high base damage of a great sword, the dual damage nature of the sword, the lash, and near-instant-cast wizard buffs (especially deleterious alacrity of motion), was extremely effective. other items incl helm of hte white wind (+10 acc to tons of druid spells), unstable coil (several ways for druid to generate lots of tier 3 inspirations), lord darryn's voulge (huge bonus to storm-keyworded spells, which is basically just druid-only), lance of hte midwood stag (good power level bonus, if you have a plant or beasts effect, of which the druid has several ways).
4. a neat all-purpose trick is that for non-furies, spiritshift cat comes with a buff that you can use to give a huge +33% action speed bonus for a little bit. importantly, it's not just limited to cat attacks, or even cat form. so for whatever build you do, you can make yourself extremely effective by picking up cat form, and then spiritshifting into cat and activating the +33% buff. (shifters have to do a little more effort to shift out of cat form to cast spells.) it's so easily effective that i deliberately no longer do this just to change things up.
boeroer has good suggestions, to add on, i recommend giving a psion/lifegiver a try if you want to be a very capable support caster. you get insane healing capability, and the psion is busy generating focus while you're protecting/healing your allies, so when you're done with that you have focus ready to dump on enemy-affecting spells.
i don't know how much you care about summons, but druid summons are... eh. there's a community mod that improves the blights a bit, but nothign compares to how good a chanter can be at summons, but summons won't really be much more than a damage soak until you get to tier 7 spells and up (lashing vine, fire stag, oozes).
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On 10/9/2023 at 12:05 AM, Shai Hulud said:
As for nemnok could be a number of reasons not penetrating. Lot of spells tend to have poor penetration which could be an issue, depending on your tactics. I don't recall his armor values and they aren't on the wiki unfortunately.
Pretty late response to OP, but Nemnok has legitimately high defenses. I recall for my Ultimate run using spiritual weapons at legendary with skaen (so, legendary stiletto and club) and underpenetrating significantly, possibly max.
Nemnok is supposed to be tough fight. For goodness sake, the imp has a spell rotation that gives him infinite uses of meteor swarm!
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lol is that a party full of rangers?
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On 8/15/2023 at 2:06 PM, ValkyOfApocrypha said:
Hey all,
I just wanted to say that my run was officially verified today! \o/
It seems like a lifetime ago, but I am really looking forward to receiving that badge - probably another couple of months down the road haha.
Hope you're all doing well and enjoying the summer!
been slammed with BG3 so this is a bit belated, but many congrats!
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"in practice", what exactly does that entail? because many of the higher checks are not, strictly speaking, required, to complete a quest or interaction a certain way.
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18 hours ago, jintegrity said:
but even when I was playing I noticed how often Aloth would run out of slots to do anything where Pallegina could keep on contributing long after.
it's part of the power curve of casting in deadfire. single-class casters eventually accumulate enough spells (and of immense power) that you don't really concern yourself with running out by mid-end game. you can trade-off and be a caster/caster multiclass if you want (aloth can't), you get tons more spells earlier on with the trade-off that you don't get the super peak experience.
also keep in mind that unlike poe1, in deadfire everyone has the same baseline accuracy and deflection (edit: except fighters, who get +5 deflection to start) and weapon modals. so while a deadfire caster probably can't exert in one fight like a rest-spam caster in poe1 can, when they're out of spells a caster can still put in decent work with just weapons whereas iirc in poe1 a wizard is down like -10 accuracy and deflection compared to a martial, pretty brutal. (in fact if you run through deadfire for the first time on a high difficulty, you might be surprised by how much damage an enemy wizard just auto-attacking can do)
edit: in fact, at low levels the main difference in offensive power between aloth (as wizard) w/out spells and pallegina (as paladin) w/out resources is literally zero, so offense just comes down to stats and how you gear them. eventually paladins get more martial-oriented passives and scale enough better health to really matter.
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relatedly i think mostly that black jacket is more skill-intense and metagame-intense to take advantage of. devoted and tactician are pretty straight-forward and easy to reason about.
that being said, when i'm doing a custom fighter, 90% of the time it's a blackjacket. the other fighter subclasses are way too transformative for generic fighter needs, and the downside is not too bad and even without much metagaming or micromanaging the benefits are still nice to have that it function better as a generic fighter than the generic fighter IMO.
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1 hour ago, Raynel said:
Cipher (although Cipher seems restrictive to me since I have to focus some time on hitting things and can't take talents like Aspirant's mark, since that's a loss in action economy)
you should consider a psion.
extremely early game their focus generation lags, but once you start getting 2 focus/second, it's great. it's not too hard to avoid the downside of having their focus generation shutoff, so long as you don't want to also melee.
there's also stuff you can do with beguiler to easily generate lots of focus from using powers, but psion is more flexible and can pull stuff off that no other cipher can.
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2 hours ago, Raynel said:
Gaze of the Adragan is very short
Gaze of the Adragan is still very powerful even with a short duration - and with intellect and possibly some sources of PL you can get some nice duration out of it.
Confusion is lame, yeah. For one, most enemies are already dumb enough to hurt their allies with spells w/out needing to hit them with confusion.
Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment is actually really good IMO - use it on bosses to enable all sorts of other debuff-based strats (such as a Gaze of the Adragan) or degenerate Combusting Wounds strategies. The fact that it drops Resolve so much for so long is really powerful, and because it targets will, it's easy to enable (club modal + willbreaker, for example).
not sure i helped any with your indecision/restartitis, but I personally prefer to play Wael priests both because of the flavor and the mix of spells. In terms of debuffs, Berath only gets a couple unique spells (Rusted Armor and Spreading Plague) and honestly Rusted Armor isn't that great compared to what a priest can do at that tier and non-berath priests still have other good options at tier 3 (despondent blows is a personal favorite, but that divine mark or whatever spell is great against tough foes or bosses).
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On 6/24/2023 at 12:53 PM, Vasvary5050 said:
For me, the cooldowns remind me of playing MMORPGs like world of Warcraft.
you know what that is a much better description than mine.
tyranny also had taunting as well. very MMO-like, trying to manage enemy attention, especially since tyranny AI wasn't like PoE/Deadfire AI and would aggressively break engagement, which made it a lot more important to have a clearly-defined "tank" role in your party.
actually that led to a major gameplay "trap" that I didn't like about Tyranny. Taunting accuracy is dictated by Athletics, which is extremely hard to train if you're not deliberately training for it, so your tanky characters (incl Barik) might be actually extremely terrible at tanking. You could do a lot better with magic (yes, I agree, magic is too dominant in Tyranny) and the Emotion school, which provides an easy taunt.
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On 6/24/2023 at 6:17 AM, Shai Hulud said:
The amazing megadungeons like Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep seem lacking in any recent video games including Deadfire. POE1 did have Endless Paths, wish Deadfire had something like that.
I consider Forgotten Sanctum to be a "dungeon" DLC and to that end it's part of why I like it so much - nicely focused with lots of interesting challenges and rewarding loot. I actually thought Endless Paths were a little flat in PoE1, it didn't quite have the "epic dungeon grind" feel (some of the levels were really tiny) and it didn't have much to do or IIRC to loot other than grindy trash mob fights.
by contrast, WoTR's most recent "rogue-like" DLC is very unsatisfying - some decent loot but also endless uninteresting trash fights. a solid dungeon-type experience is hard to do I guess.
On 6/24/2023 at 12:53 PM, Vasvary5050 said:Is your full Deadfire guide online?
yep!
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Yeah, I've played both Tyranny and Deadfire and I think your criticisms hit the nail on the head. For reference, my Deadfire guide has slowly ballooned to a 700K text file, whereas my Tyranny guide has pretty much stayed at like two pages. It reflects both my interest and also IMHO the relative system depth between the two.
1. Absolutely. I know some people were big fans of the cooldown approach at the time, but it really gives Tyranny the feel of an ARPG that's been shoe-horned into a RWtP framework. There's no scarcity or management, you're just spamming whatever cooldowns you have as soon as they're available and not much more. To me, for martial classes this can be OK, but for caster classes, as you say, you only have a handful of abilities that actually reflect your "caster"-ness and you're just cycling between them, which is not very interesting. I also have a more fundamental problem in that the cooldown system, as designed, make it possible for battles to enter a stalemate - everyone has infinite spells and health and abilities so long as their cooldowns are set up right. I actually had this happen in a hard fight where I was knocked down to one character, and there was one enemy left. Lantry had just enough healing to not die, but also not enough offensive power to really take down the final enemy with any speed. Lantry leveled up like thrice before I finally managed to end the fight. Some people might find that "neat," but PoE and Deadfire have mechanisms that help battles be a lot more decisive, even if it's just the number of abilities you have running out.
2. Absolutely. It reminds me of final fantasy-style JRPGs in a bad way - where every spell's primary focus is on damage, and everything that doesn't do damage is garbage. In terms of the party-based RPG, BG and somewhat BG2 remains my ideal, where you had plenty of damage spells, but also all sorts of other spells, including "fluff" spells that the game actually incorporated (using Charm Person to get extra details out of NPCs, Detect Evil for the days back before gamefaqs and walkthroughs were easy to look up), and non-traditional spells that opened up interesting gameplay opportunities (Farsight to control summons from a distance, Limited Wish to get a special quest, etc.) Most CRPGs today are a little bit too combat-focused, but it's a compromise I accept if it means the available options are more fleshed out (some things in BG/BG2 just flat-out didn't work or were too fluffy, like "Know Alignment"). But Tyranny goes way too far in the extreme, and it's just not as interesting a system to me when the choices are just "damage, healing, or damage with extra steps."
What I value Tyranny for is: great world-building and reactivity. The latter, including with companions, is imo unmatched by any CRPG that follows. What I did value Tyranny for, but is no longer special: this was like the first RTwP i really played that had big technical fights. PoE was pretty static, but in Tyranny in the latter end you had to watch for bosses with big wind-ups, big visual signals to maneuver around, etc. But Deadfire does this a bit too, and is generally better in every other way, so I don't really miss it.
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i've seen this happen with weapon modals (i end up with multiple weapon modals) - is it related/similar?
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historical lesson - this "only in combat" effect was introduced in an early patch because apparently it was considered an issue that it was hard to keep parties including island aumaua together, because the island aumaua would get way ahead of everyone else.
i don't really agree with that decision, because a lot of people were confused by it (and still are, apparently), but that's why it's the way it is.
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if you don't want to rest-spam by vendors (i frequently use magran challenges that make this annoying), rathun (fire giants) are good sources for pyrite - you can go sailing and blast them and gather some this way as well. (though they have very annoying sailing fights - they charge at you and you have a massive penalty to your own attacks)
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the action economy is looser in higher difficulties, because enemies will have higher defenses and health so you'll have more time to do stuff.
but yes, even then there's still action economy concerns. adding on to something boeroer said, for this reason i generally stay away from most generic caster/caster multiclasses. really early on, the extra casting on a caster/caster can be a life saver, but by mid-game you just have so many spells and so little time, and if you made one caster double up on two roles you could be in an extreme pinch trying to decide between healing or debuffing, for example.
Exceptions to that rule are generally setups where you can avoid action economy clashes. I've done a few wizard/caster multiclasses, and the wizard side focuses on fast-cast (near-instant) buffs and only occasionally other spells. this limits how much action economy constraints i have while still giving me the benefits of having add'l casting pool. psion/caster is another favorite multiclass, because with a psion you naturally have phases where you're not doing anything with the cipher because you're generating focus.
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16 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:
Like pretty sure I've run into risen priests that had minor avatar. And I know Katrenn has cast Concelhaut's Crushing Doom on me. She's meant to be level 12 so shouldn't have it.
interesting. i have the same experience, but i just assumed that those characters were set that way, not that they gained spells from scaling.
edit - so it would still be limited to kith-like enemies, though. no matter what level I do SSS on (probably the only thing I really change up in terms of order), the e.g. beasts always have the same abilities. -
On 5/21/2023 at 3:46 AM, Vasvary5050 said:
In you opinion, with upwards level scaling, is it harder to deal with maps at the expected level, or doing the maps upscaled by about 4 levels, or is it about equal either way? In other words, does having the abilities, gear and stats from 4 more levels more than (or less than) compensate for the 4 levels of enemy upscaling?
as you probably know, the scaling is limited to accuracy, defenses, and health (and occasionally increased enchantment levels on gear). that means like... a spider is going to be the same overall spider 4 levels higher, just with slightly more health and accuracy.
so the scaling isn't nearly as powerful as true "levels." everytime you gain a level, you gain accuracy, defense, and health (and correspondingly better gear), but you also gain new abilities, those two combined give you your true power impact. meanwhile a xaurip priest will never learn new high level abilities*, even though a player priest will gains tons over 4 levels.
so anyway, upscaling doesn't really help areas stay challenging, it just mostly makes it a little bit harder to easily out-level areas** (which is all i really want anyway).
*apparently with enough scaling, some (kith-like) enemies will pick up new abilities, but i've only heard of this happening with a mod that unlocks the current limited scaling to be unlimited.
**the one exception is that without upscaling, the priest Dismissal spell becomes really good. at a point in mid-late game, you overlevel all constructs and most vessels and you can just wipe them all out. with upscaling on, many constructs and vessels stay atleast at your level, so dismissal becomes less an auto-win in many fights.
Test results for the Wizard subclass PL bonus with weapon-sourced spells and Substantial Phantom
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted · Edited by thelee
ah neat! i thought it persisted only if you cast another familiar. so that's nice then.
edit: was gonna update my guide to this but then i realized that i had already known this at some point and forgotten it -_-. replacing familiar with familiar only important for stacking the stat buffs.