thelee

yeah, after SSS/FS you can come back and roflstomp nemnok/the shimmering isles/the final act, and even try your hand at the megabosses. that's pretty much how i route my party (unless i need something specific from nemnok or the fampyrs) so I can play around with some of the shiny treasures you get late.

in real time mode they are actually pretty great for locking down bosses and casters, though you have to micromanage the shooting a bit. i haven't tried them in turn-based mode, but I imagine that they would be better at damage and worse at interrupting. The action economy constraint on their firing would be gone, but at the same time it seems like it would be harder to optimize your firing to interrupt or bosses. If you don't care about that, then just use them for the higher damage rate.

both SSS and FS are late-game DLCs. You can do SSS earlier, but I know people here have complained in the past about the difficulty spike when playing sub-level-19 parties. If you're interested in just getting some gear, you can try it earlier and just bail on doing the final few fights. FS is definitely end-game DLC. You can try to do it earlier (level 18 or so), but I'm pretty sure it's just straight-up targeting level 20 parties. Even at level 20 with a pretty-OK party it can be rather brutal on PotD. There's a lot of good gear, but "bee-lining" towards them might not be feasible. In SSS, Least Unstable Coil and the special soulbound axe are good picks. There's also a great xbow/arbalest (forget which). In FS, all of the weyc's gear is pretty good, but it pretty much requires you to do the entire DLC to get them all.

normally i would agree with you on this, but the bellower mechanics are such that I found it to be *extremely* worth while to get the enchant that gives you full phrases instead. you have to rest a lot more, which can be annoying if you have good bonuses or are on a challenge like eothas or rymrgand, but bellowers benefit from having full phrase count way more than any other chanter imo. keep in mind also that unlike other chanters, bellowers lose all their phrases when they use an invocation, which means that the expected value of free phrases for a bellower is much higher than for other chanters when using the "full phrase" enchant on sasha's.

holy necro thread, batman! iirc, the loot from sinking a ship is pre-determined whereas the boarding loot is a combination of predetermined and natural loot tables, which in certain instances can mean getting a ton more weapon/money drops. IME my biggest money windfalls come from doing hasongo and huana quests, and then later forgotten sanctum. True to what Helz says, the naga seem to carry tons of exceptional greatswords (and there are lots of naga in hasongo and underneath the watershapers') and I always end up with a boatload of money. Also, if I have one critique of forgotten sanctum is that when completed it utterly destroys whatever semblance of a balanced economy vanilla deadfire had. when almost every single fight involves enemies dropping superb gear and you're tripping over valuable scrolls and potions, it's hard not to end up extremely rich afterwards, even if you wastefully drop lots of money on upgrading ships and items.

is it a macbook? I think OBS (and similar software) is only lightweight because they can do something with the GPU directly as it renders. If it's a lower-end macbook (which uses integrated graphics) it might not do as well. But! It's better than nothing. I used OBS at first, and then it was just easier to use my GPU's native recording software.

I'm a huge fan of the bellower, so I approve this. With Sasha's Stinging Scimitar, her revenge might be a better trigger than Holy Fire for least unstable coil, even in late game, for non-critical ubertough fighters (basically excluding fights where you definitely want brilliant, which rain of holy fire is much better at). Imagine this: bellower empowered her revenge -> nice damage, 66% chance of brilliant, your chants pass 50% faster (using weyc's robe), sasha's scimitar restores all phrases, and immediately spend it on another invocation of your choice (maybe the shield breaks so that all of magran's damage spells land well). if you got brilliant triggered, you could start stretching out that faster-chant effect while you also start magran mayhem at +3 PL, so you'll have souped up invocations for the rest of the fight. You don't get the faster chants if you empower rain of holy fire. if you didn't get brilliant but still want it, you could use the watcher ability for it.

ironically this ended up happening in my ultimate run. i was not aware of this bug until i was practicing a section and noticed that i was able to pass some checks that, on paper, i wasn't supposed to. so don't think the ultimate is immune to this beneficial bug

it might have been worth continuing on this party into late game and DLC. DLC can sometimes crush parties you might be doing well with; base game difficulty scaling sort of peaks at 12-14 with possible limited exception with nemnok and the fampyr island. even with the patch tweaks for balancing, base game difficulty mostly just means more health without any appreciable harder challenge after a certain point. meanwhile a FS-end-game oracle can facetank a couple empowered evoker missile salvos (and you actually probably just screwed yourself since you triggered a lot of enemy spawns in the process). ironically, aside from spamming missile salvos end game, I personally don't find evoking spells particularly powerful on potd upscaling. Frankly, Slicken is OP and is a transmutation spell. maybe you're just used to using evoking spells a lot so it "feels" powerful through familiarity? (shadowflame, crushing doom, and missile salvo are all very good evocation spells, but that's a small subset) I always use some of the Fires for some extra challenge. I only tried once and don't plan on ever using Eothas/Abydon and I will never again switch on The Ultimate and only ever use Magran for turn-based mode, but I always end up mixing some subset of the others. Ondra is very nearly always on for me, because it makes exploration a bit less mindless and makes it harder to use early ship bounties as a "free" xp bump [which means it's harder to outlevel earlier quests and encounters, at least initially]. Galawain is a solid choice for challenge - it can really wildly change up some fights (I had a run become extremely difficult in BoW because every "scourge" gained Unstoppable; I had a Belranga fight become quite a challenge because an entire cohort of spiderlings gained Bullish). I also like Skaen as a subtle party-nerf (you basically have to give up a weapon slot for a torch if you want to improve your stealthing or avoid getting hit by things you can't see, and even then you'll still find situations where enemies will be able to attack you from out of your line of sight). Those are my top three, but I mix and match the rest for a given run. Rymrgand can seem tedious by its description - but I didn't find it so - you basically just stock up on some foods when you would shop elsewhere. What it really means is that it's much harder to get good resting bonuses when you're out and about, and you end up leaning more on alcohol or limiting your rests away from an inn.

any thing that involves an attack roll against the marked enemy for you or your animal companion will get the accuracy bonus. includes spells, bounces, aoes, explosives, scrolls, etc. fwiw, in some cases you *do* see a higher accuracy number when you hover over a marked enemy, but it is really inconsistent and I don't know what causes it to work sometimes. and yes, you would just add 10 to whatever number you see (numbers higher than 100 still improve your chance to crit).

It should stack with nature godlike, because that is passive. The issue is that it (stone of power) is treated like an active buff now when before it was a passive buff. So it wouldn’t stack with e.g. Litany for the Spirit or Potion of Ascension (Having tested and verified the stone of power stacking myself before upon a suggestion by boeroer I will swear that it was indeed some stealth nerf.)

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.