thelee

I would cast a vote for +10. +20 is an awful lot for a flat-all-around bonus (whereas you have to pick a certain class to pick up the paladin/fighter defense talents), especially since stacking rules for passives are much more generous in Deadfire than in PoE1 (dwarfs in poe got +20 vs poison but stacking bonuses was more like D&D style). +10 is enough to matter.

Boeroer kinda figured this out, but charm on a player character is kind of busted. I think something about the AI scripting doesn't quite work right, because mostly it just means my characters stand around. So you really dominate for this to work. You don't even need Svef - Enlightened Agony will remove it. (Any inspiration of one type will cancel out any affliction of the same type, doesn't matter if they are different tiers.)

hm, i assumed you got everyone who could fight to join you, but perhaps it's capped by the max number of ship defenders the enemy has? you can't get more than 1:1 for each?

the fact that non-fists can be tagged in such a way that they benefit from fist-related things is such a subtle and rare interaction that it doesnt' surprise me that there's a bug here. interesting, though - i had just assumed by default that haymaker had no effect on tuolito's. edit - good research, but if you want to come off as less of a crazy person i suggest using a font other than comic sans

ditto i had perma-restartitis with BG1 and never finished the game. BG2's opening was so compelling it was the first IE game I actually finished without constantly restarting, just immediately tosses you into the mix, and unlike BG didn't keep you away from the main draw (the big city) for like 4 chapters. It was only after thoroughly smashing apart BG2 that I went back and finished BG and IWD. Bioware+Black Isle just really got into their element then.

SC monk double fists are arguably the all-around strongest weapons in the game. I think for fun metagaming purposes though, people like to think about items because the fists aren't "interesting." In terms of pure single-target damage though, it's hard to beat SC monk fists and you definitely cannot go wrong with using them (save for the crush immune enemies boeroer mentions, but every weapon type will face some kind of immunity).

lol at the ambiguous meaning of the word "patch" here given how freaking hard the ultimate is, i wouldn't be surprised if they had patches available for many years. it's been more than a year and they still have most of the patches remaining.

yeah had a run relatively recent and as far as I can tell the only thing any kind of empowerment does for WoW is give you more attacks, regardless of what empowerment-enhancing talent syou have. The way WoW is scripted, it appears that the free attacks it grants you are the only real "effect" of the ability, so there's not much for empowerment to enhance. (But WoW empowered for more strikes is still good, and WoW alone is still good.)

this appears to be a perennial problem with difficulty balancing. they did do a balancing run on PotD with someone on their team who likes to min-max, but I think the problem is that at mid-high levels you just have so many options that it becomes harder for the designers to know exactly where the player is at gear/stat/level-wise in order to good balance. at early levels you have so little options that they are really able to optimize the difficulty to be at a sweet spot of punishing (everyone talks about gorecci st and the digsite). that being said, I think combined with the DLC deadfire does almost best-in-class difficulty scaling - SSS, FS can be quite hard even at close-to-max or max level and on potd+upscaling+challenges can start filtering out suboptimal builds and it does so in a relatively "fair" manner. (megabosses are also extremely hard, but i consider them a little less fair because they're so technical). <meme>Ah, I see you are a man of culture as well</meme> yeah, it makes me sad that Deadfire underperformed sales because the polish on the RTwP is just so exceedingly great. I mean I already thought it was pretty good, but it took playing some other games to truly appreciate all the nice details--mechanically and even from just a UI/UX perspective--that went into Deadfire. A long time ago there was no special night-time music, and then a patch added it in. I was probably one of like a handful of people who hated the change (it sounds wildly different from the rest of Deadfire music to my ears) and how repetitive it was. We lost that battle, alas. I'd be curious to know why. I've never played it, but I have friends who love that game. Is it because it's turn-based vs RtWP? Or other factors?

turn-based has a place for me, but i picked up wasteland 3 on release (game pass is awesome btw) which has changed into an x-com style "each team has a turn" vs BG3/DoS2/D&D/Pathfinder-style "everyone has their own turn." I don't know how wide spread this style is (I've only seen it in X-Com), but as an RPG combat mechanic it works really well and is probably the best "compromise" I can think of between pure-turn-based and RtWP. Being able to fluidly move your own team and coordinate actions between them and having enemy actions happen simultaneously gives you kind of the rapid flow and tactical coordination of RTwP but the Action Points and "team-based" turn gives you room for the typical strategic consideration of pure turn-based. I still prefer RTwP or RtWP-like systems, but if the audience is really moving away from RTwP as a viable format, team-turn-based seems like an OK compromise. (it's not perfect, e.g. I still don't know how initiative works in a team-based turn format and it seems to be purely random which team goes first as a result, but I'm enjoying it much more than I thought I would.)

yeah, i haven't played much turn-based but for the most part it seems optimal to load virtually everyone up on heavy armor. the only exception is if someone has some powerful snow-balling power (mostly charm effects where you can really snow-ball a fight by charming someone before all the bad guys get a turn). outside of turn-based, though, i don't think flat-footing or something similar makes sense. it happens to make sense in P:K rtwp because everything is still stuck in a "round" format, so the first "round" is still very turn-based because of initiative.

on the flip side, playing p:k made me think that turn-based mode in Deadfire could be very easily tweaked by adding a "flat-footed" mechanic. i had no idea if initiative would ever be relevant in a RTwP version of 3e/pathfinder, but in practice being flat-footed and having an initial delay is immensely powerful (maybe mostly on higher difficulties, where it could mean the difference between your party snowballing a bunch of sneak attacks on otherwise-sky-high enemy AC or getting hit by a bunch of wolves first and tripped and attack-of-oppornitied to death in a round or two). i wonder if something similar was added to turn-based deadfire over night you'd buff up the importance of dexterity and initiative/recovery (which currently has a hard time mattering).

this is very similar to my complaint. when googling around about this, apparently the philosophy for a lot of encounters was "come back later". I'm playing on hard, so I expect quite the challenge. But what invariably happens is that I'm in an area clearing mobs without much problem, and then--in my most recent case--my level 6 party suddenly comes across three level 18 mobs. In tabletop, this would be inexcusable - each enemy alone would be CR18 iirc, way out of reach for a level 6 party (though in the same area there was a single level 17 monster which also felt inexcusable but I gave it a pass because it felt like a boss fight since it was the final part of a quest). Three level 18 mobs combined, out of nowhere, as part of nothing, I don't know what the game designers were planning. And I did end up beating the encounter, but I had to cheese the bad AI, which left a bad taste in my mouth. And the loot reward for doing this? A +1 weapon. Even as a "come back later" encounter, the loot is basically balanced around a level 6 party, which just makes no sense. it's just so deeply frustrating to be playing a game normally and everything comes screeching to a halt out of nowhere, and I'm stuck in between wondering whether I'm just an idiot, or the encounter is intended to be literally (or at least very close to literally) impossible at your current setup. I'm fine losing and having party wipes (lord knows I've had a lot in PotD Deadfire), but it has to feel like a "fair" loss. The 3x level 18 encounter was just the final straw on the camel's back.

the old IE games: the same sentence in PoE/Deadfire: Prose and flowery language can be nice and I do like the indulgence at times (Grieving Mother in PoE), but sometimes less really is more.

actually was contemplating flipping on turn-based mode before i gave up. p:k rtwp is kinda janky to me -- it made me really appreciate all the UI/UX "niceties" that deadfire and poe1 had. i could kill for just a simple "threat range" indicator (like the engagement indicators), since i've triggered AoO even when i thought i was safe.

yeah, i finally gave up on P:K after about thirty hours - the encounter design is just too frustrating for me and the writing isn't saving it. But I really gave it a lot more effort than I should because I really enjoy rtwp crpg genre, and i wanted to support it because it really seems extremely niche these days: I noticed that P:K added a turn-based mode in a relatively recent patch. At this point it seems like table-stakes that any PoE3 in the future will have to at least have an optional turn-based mode at launch. (Actually, some aspects of the pathfinder rules now work better with turn-based mode [I mean I guess it's not surprising since pathfinder is turn-based], because now you can actually do a 5-foot step to avoid AoO... i think it could have been technically do-able in rtwp but for whatever reason they didn't want to [same thing with how broken flanked/sneak attack is in p:k rtwp but is totally a solved problem in deadfire]).

also just wanted to add an extra note - i haven't played a steel garotte, but i have played several priests of skaen, who feature cruel as one of the dispositions. in deadfire, you actually get some skaen-specific dialogue given that you follow a deity that has a portfolio that includes overthrowing slaveowners and violent revolution. in that sense, some cruel options works out in an RP sense as caring about people, but definitely not caring about people with power. i'm sure there's some good RP reason for cruel options with a paladin order that followed woedica as well (it would be kind of the flip side to skaen i imagine, being cruel to people outside the boundaries of norms and law)

if it helps, there are a couple of "cruel" options that are just more "i'm sometimes a jerk" versus "i'm a sociopath." i don't know if it's enough to get to a high cruel disposition, though. an example is you can be a jerk to queen onekaza for some major cruelty points, and depending on how you've been RP-ing, your response is less like "i'm a candy-stealing jerk" and more like "i'm definitely going to be siding with a different faction than work for you, lady"

you might want to consult the bottom part of my guide for the specific mechanics about how faith & conviction work: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/paladin the tl;dr is that you need to get both your two favored dispositions up to at least three to max it out, you can't get away with just one disposition. neutrals don't help and are essentially just "safe" options for RP purposes. negative dispositions hurt you one for one against positive dispositions, though a total "negative score" isn't as bad as one might think because of how badly the designers messed up inversion math for this. however, unlike poe1 where you could take a talent to reset your negative dispositions, there's no such option in deadfire so you need to be more careful. FYI, i'm not sure if you meant this, but you seem to indicate that it was possible to max out faith and conviction in poe1 with just a single disposition - this is not true. You needed at least 5 total favored disposition scores to do that, and you could only get as high as 4 in any given score. you might be confusing it with the effect of faith and conviction on hired adventurers, which didn't benefit/suffer from disposition at all (but they are affected by disposition in deadfire, so you have to be careful to only hire compatible paladins and priests. this doesn't apply to obsidian-created NPCs). FYI I also have a pillars of eternity 1 guide that goes into this a lot more: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/687020-pillars-of-eternity/faqs/72035 (it's older, so it's in text and you have to do a search for "Faith and Conviction" to find the details) final note - "favored" dispositions doesn't mean "only correct" dispositions. There's no problem for RP purposes in picking a neutral option - your deity or order doesn't mind. They only mind if you pick a disfavored reputation.

slicken and whatever you got for damage. i'm mostly just focusing on solving the "they keep seeming to get away with a merge" problem. iirc hauane is weak to frost - on gigantic form and lower you might be better off using something like freezing pillar to do lots of damage, in an area - also helps for the smaller oozes because there can be a lot of them, they will merge aggressively at 100%, and you want to get rid of them as fast as you can. but keep in mind i don't have alot of experience solo-ing megabosses, all my efforts (except for a tactician/skaen) were party efforts, so i don't know if it will necessarily work out well for you.

have you tried slicken? slicken would be extremely easy to recur with bloodmage, and you can target both gigantic oozes at the same time with each slicken. at gigantic and below, slicken should be fairly reliable at interrupting (it is so on potd, on veteran it should be even more reliable). i would argue slicken is in fact much better at the hauane fight than crushing doom. edit - you could even set up lots of slickens on hauane itself near the end so that when it dies, you already have slicken standing around to start interrupting the oozes. can't do that with crushing doom. edit - also, a slightly flaky strategy is to go off to the top-right side of the map, then when they split, use a summon to keep one gigantic ooze busy and lure hte other to the opposite side (bottom-left) of hte map. if you do it right, when your summon disappears the gigantic ooze will stay on that right side of the map and will just be uninvolved for the rest of the fight (no merge attempt). it's kind of flaky, but i've pulled it off a couple times. might be an idea for a last resort.

iirc, there were always some myths about the gods, tons of them - but no gods actually existed. when the engwithans created the gods, they fulfilled existing archetypes and then went on an inquisition making sure only their archetypes existed as a cohesive religion. not all engwithans died to create the gods. otherwise, there would have been no engwithans left to conduct their inquisition to eliminate other belief systems. however, the mass casualties from creating the gods and the fact that the inquisitors were basically sworn to die in secrecy (i think something is mentioned like this by whats-her-face at the end of poe1) probably meant the civilization collapsed over a short period of time. edit - there's some specific additional lore about glanfathans and ondra crashing a moon into eora and what that meant for the engwithans, but i don't remember all the specifics. the engwithans who arrive on ukaizo are the ones set to build the wheel and create the gods.

no, not always. it was a nerf like in the 2.0 or 3.0 patch range to bring dual-wielded full attacks more in line with at least 2h attacks. (it's almost the exact negative inversion modifier you need to make the expected damage identical between a dual-wielded full attack and an equivalent 2h full attack) dual-wielding has always been a little bit too good; it's still very good, now just a little less so.

yes, this bugged (sic) me quite a bit. i ended up googling it and realizing that that was the result of an extremely trivial quest to resolve. it was not at all obvious to me that that was the trigger for that perma-fatigue. (edit - and a lot of search results suggested that a bunch of other people were confused by it as well)

i feel like if you are only playing with sidekicks, you should invest in a healer or party support mainchar. the only sidekick that fills this role is vatnir, and he comes in real late, like level 12 at the earliest feasible, still gated behind a very-hard-at-level-12 boss fight. edit - when you do get vatnir, it won't even be redundant, because vatnir's subclass gives him a bunch of offensive heft. plus you can never go too wrong with double healing/party support on potd. edit - fassina can be a helpful early companion with healing and support, but i think a conjurer/druid is a suboptimal multiclass.