thelee

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.

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.