thelee

how did your character feel about kana? how did you end kana's questline in poe1? depending on how it goes, your character could either be pro-rautaui or anti-rautaui. (even if maia rua is with royal deadfire company, if you convined kana to be an isolationist in poe1 it makes more sense to not be pro-rautaui). judging from a quick skim, it sounds like the vailian trading company is your best bets, but which sub-faction choice you go for depends on your character's personality (both the principi and vailian quest lines have an internal struggle you can settle in different ways). For you, not only do the vailians invest in animancy a lot, they seem to value Hylea (one of the major patrons in Nekataka has Hylean influence, and Pallegina, well, you know), which might be consistent with your decisions in PoE1. Plus they like getting rich, which seems to be in your character backstory.

oh yeah, i forgot, getting some hirelings should've set you up with antidotes. i take those aggressively in the first fight (to protect against spores and spider). don't know what to tell you about the brine imps and ooze. they do have cheaty accuracy.

Are you level 4? That helps a lot. If you've done all the other side quests and cleared some of the other side areas of the engwithan digsite, you'll be level 4 for your non-hirelings. Honestly though, if you were able to clear Gorecci St and the Drake fight above the digsite, the brine imp and ooze are much easier fights IMO.

chants aren't flagged as "chanter?" what a world! but at least i'm glad other PL bonuses would work. i'll check when I can but it might be delayed. i think ancient memory tooltip shows scaling over its healing tooltip, either in the ability, or in the character profile showing you effects.

i feel like it's because it's where the vanilla base game basically ended. you could take on the guardian at ukaizo at level 12-14 and be just fine. it was honestly a struggle to get to level 19-20. they added more mid-high level content via the DLC, and they added megabosses (for level 20) but for the most part the main game only gets level scaling, so nothing fundamentally changes this inflection point. i mean, they tuned up PotD but it seemed over-optimized for port maje and nekataka: the early-mid-game quests are brutal to take on when underleveled. perhaps their min-max testers didn't have good gear for the later quests/encounter balancing, so all this means is that e.g. the guardian of ukaizo is always red skulled, but even after you kill all the megabosses and the guardian gets the 4x "the last megaboss" buff for skyrocketingly-high AR/defense/health, the encounter itself is still a mid level encounter and is rather easy to dispatch, just more time-consuming and tedious.

can you double-check this? when I checked chanter chant scaling for my guide, they scaled independently of power level (at every character level past 1) at a rate of +1 acc per level and +5% damage per odd level (not just using single-class progression). also they didn't benefit from bellower +PL, so I assumed that they didn't benefit from any +PL bonus. it's possible they changed this at some point between 4.0 and 5.0 (i did all this testing as part of trying to understand the bellower) but it's quite the change to make without a patch note.

Two things that might help: a) there is a portal right by where the bomb goes off and the quest to find waidwen soul piece starts. i personally completley missed this portal at first (i thought it was just a weird cosmic graphic and not something interactible) and wandered around everywhere else. b) there are parts of the bridge that are walkable, even though they look like they are floating around and destroyed. When in doubt, just look at your map at all the unexplored areas and head straight for them and you may be surprised at what you can walk on.

yeah, this sucks. i'm afraid that something is busted, because essence interrupter should be doing full shock damage to dorudugan. if you haven't complained, i would report a bug to versus evil (I believe they did the port).

i would personally lean towards a smaller deflection reduction but paired with some across the board AR drops, or at least AR drops for all non-crush, non-shock damage.

based on where I live in the states, this sounds about right (despite my best efforts sometimes I do this too - it's hard to resist cultural social pressures to be a helicopter parent). at the same time, i also live in a city where there is an "Adventure Playground" which is a normal playground that also happens to have a bunch of tools, nails, and kids have free reign to build and dismantle stuff and adult supervision is verboten. A kid can even check out their own hammer, all they have to do is gather a few nails and turn them in. So...

To wit - IWD2's spells system was much more robust to degeneracy than BG2, despite using the same engine and an equally complex ruleset (probably moreso, since IWD2 implemented 3e multiclassing). It's because OBS (who was then Black Isle) knew in advance to exclude certain spells or itemization. Turns out you can eliminate a bunch of degeneracy by just not having spells like Time Stop or (Chain) Contingency, or items like Vecna's Robe.

@Elric Galad do you think it makes sense to also take a crack at ancient memory (whoops) and align the tick rate as well? it's a bit strange that regen effects are everywhere in how they implement the regeneration rate. it's not like it's even a rounding issue, since AFAICT all hots and dots do one final "tick" at expiration to take care of any rounding issues of having a non-whole number of ticks.

parenthetical side note - one of the deranged outcomes of health/endurance system is that i hated infinite constant recovery. in some fights i would be deliberately trying to knock out eder so that he wouldn't be in permadeath risk by having too low health compared to endurance. i would argue that this is more a case to be made that bloodmage should have capped self-heal, but in practice i think the drip is so low that in most fights the fighter will do better. i don't know about ancestor's memory + exalted endurance though, that's rough from a balancing perspective. one advantage of durational effects is that they can itneract with suppression, cleansing, meppu, ooblit, intellect, etc. i find that more interesting, mechanically. maybe if you want to tune up constant recovery, you just increase the base duration? even ancestor's memory can be stymied by an arcane suppression (which will block refreshing chants). i think the real problem may be the infinite versions of those effects (including but not limited to the regenerating belts). just my thoughts

I don't know about where you live, but if I and four of my friends stood around in place for days in front of (or in) a store, periodically looking in to see if the inventory changed, we would probably get the authorities called on us

ah yeah, i don't know anything about modding deadfire, so i assumed there was just a simple "timeout" parameter somewhere on the abilities, since they come so regularly in that fight. too bad if not.

Making the battle shorter, does also make it "easier" without trivializing it because it becomes less tedious. This is why I'm going to go back and suggest reducing defenses (AR mostly, but you can also reduce other defenses) more so than reducing HP. The net effect is similar (Dorudugan dies faster), but the "psychological" effect is that more party builds and character setups will be capable of doing a not-frustratingly-low amount of damage with a not-frustratingly-low hit rate. (Maybe for the rare person who plays megabosses on normal difficulty, you can also provide a small HP nerf as well.) Dorudugan is the megaboss that reminds me most of the classic WoW raid bosses of old, and not in a good way. A huge HP sink and a very minor technical dimension that once you can get down you do ad nauseum with little challenge (in fact, Dorudugan reminds me a lot of a boss like Thaddius in WoW--pay attention to some icon or visual effect on your screen, and then run to a specific location). I'm not sure what you get from having the player do this over 30-45 minutes instead of, say, 20 minutes. My separate (and slightly related) suggestion of making the special fire attacks and vacuum attack more frequent (in concert with making Dorudugan killable in a fraction of the normal time) is based on the idea that the battle would be much shorter and thus more viable for various parties, but also much more "intense" whereas right now you have fire attacks spread out with a long series of melee attacks which--by necessity by the length of the fight--you have to metagame into being trivialized, which not only limits party viability but also means once you have metagamed it properly it's just a long tedious sequence that is relatively uninteresting.

I personally wish in inns and such you were allowed to bring your own food and drink (maybe paying a corkage fee), because especially later in the game I might have food or drink bonuses that I prefer to what's nearby (especially in SSS) but it's a little annoying to leave the area each time I want to rest. This matters extra on Rymrgand's challenge because sometimes the travel time to outside (e.g. Nekataka) might cause food to decay. Also it's a little odd that you can't rest in a lot of cities, but you can wait in place for endless amounts of hours. Clearly the rest restriction harkens back to the Baldur's Gate days, but back then you also couldn't wait in place. RPG logic... (other RPGs are also violators of this logic)

lower resolve doesn't seem like it would matter. dorudugan just has an enormous amount of health, that basically nothing matters except just damage or resource regen simply because the fight is so damn long. and wow, i was going off the wiki which put dorudugan's health at ~6k (~7.4k on potd). no wonder my 200+ stacks of resonance didn't do much on my last attempt... way for the wiki to be off by an order of magnitude. this is my general opinion on dorudugan. I've never heard Titan Souls, but it sounds about right. The hardest part (and the "trick") of dorudugan is just being able to position your characters appropriately to avoid the fireballs and the ground explosions, and to gear up appropriately to survive the vacuum/fire explosion attack at <bloodied. the fact that dorudugan has so much health just makes it tedious, when most players have already demonstrated that they know how to survive the fight after a few of each attack. maybe dorudugan should have like half the health and slightly lower defenses, but use their abilities more often. players would still need to handle the main "tricks" of the fight, but they wouldn't have to do it over a huuuuugely long play session. with lower health and slightly lower defenses, maybe some buffs and debuffs would actually be useful without needing brilliant backup. edit: as far as the other megabosses go, i dont' think they need much tweaking. my last attempt was slightly more optimized (using a monk and a beckoner) and i could clear hauane, sigilmaster, and belranga rather quickly (wotw with ajumaat's stalking cloak is stupid against hauane). however, even being more optimized for megaboss content, there's just no getting aroudn the fact that i have to set aside like half an hour to an hour just to tackle dorudugan, even though the basic trick of the fight is muscle memory at this point.

@n00biwan that is a rough call my dude, sorry to hear about that. it's especially rough because it's not like you were trying to do some lame cheese that bugs out 10% of the time, it looks like just a relatively non-deterministic outcome of a fairly normal world encounter.

for the wand, without any other source, i think the expectation is that the very weak on-hit chance to confuse the enemy is your source for intellect afflictions. really lame, i know. there's also a poison you can make that confuses the enemy, but i'm honestly scratching my head for a good alternate source if you're not wael, a wizard, a cipher, a chanter, or even a druid facing beasts for robe of weyc upgrade, you have to actuially empower an ability. you can't self-empower. but other than that, it's pretty straightforward.

As for maintaining challenge, you could always reduce the delay before the fireballs and the ground explosions go off.

I don't think you should do this. Any single target that can be interrupted is trivially dealt with. The other megabosses have other mechanics that make their interruptibility not debilitating (e.g., auranic has uninterruptible final attacks and a death shield before she releases all the sigils, making it basically required that you deal with all the sigils first; belranga has all the spiders and really high defenses at first; hauane o whe splits and merges so you should be able to interrupt as part of the fight). I think less HP and defenses are fine. If you can survive each of a few of Dorudugan's attacks, then its massive health is mostly just tedious. Alternatively, keep the health but lower defenses, so that more weapon types and approaches are viable at doing any reasonable amount of damage. Idea: lower its engagement limit or give it no engagement. More parties become capable of maneuvering around the attacks without being demolished by disengagement.

@Elric Galad excellent find and explanation!

one thing that hasn't been explicitly mentioned yet is that part of the reason why this is not going to work so well is that barbarians have an inherent -5 deflection penalty (starting them off lower than everyone else) and you are heavily incentivized to take frenzy (further -10 deflection while active) and dual or 2h-wield (no shield bonus). so you are not only going to get hit a lot more, you are also going to get crit a lot more. barbarians really need to rely on armor rating and sheer health for survivability. (and on potd+upscaling, it's extremely hard to win the armor arms/penetration arms race against enemies until mid-late game so you really need to rely on things like Dazed to help out) if you had like a barb/trickster or barb/wael or barb/wizard you might be able to get enough deflection to cancel out all those penalties and make offensive parry worth it, but I think it would honestly be suboptimal. mind plague is very good - ciphers can make their powers pretty accurate (don't remember off the top of my head if it's available to MCs), and the bouncing effect of mind plauge--even if slow--means you can end up hitting enemies far away from the barbarian/cipher in one cast, whereas with e.g. interdiction or arkemyr's dazzlign lights you are extremely limited in whom you can affect.

I mean, the x-factor in this discussion that people need to keep in mind is that Tyranny sold better than Deadfire, despite being a completely original IP with limited commonalities, mechanically, with either D&D or PoE. "Mild disappointment" with various aspects of PoE doesn't seem to explain how Tyranny did way better than Deadfire. It would have to be people actively avoiding the poe name at that point. I'm still partial to the "nostalgia well drying up, very hard to bridge nostalgia with a new audience" angle. It would explain successively declining sales. P:K seems to benefit from a much-better-known IP. Other possible factors - Deadfire setting/pirate theme, P:K leaned even harder into nostalgia (not even bothering to try to update for modern audiences, not that they have as much flexibility to do so), and terrible marketing. (I still see youtube comments on various videos about people who didn't even know Deadfire existed and loved PoE1). Maybe a P:K approach of just leaning harder into the nostalgia may have worked, but I think it would've put a finite cap on sales especially with an original IP; plus I think with an original IP trying to really ape an old system/world Deadfire would've been rather mediocre. (But then again, I love a game that barely broke even, so what does my opinion matter?) edit - though I've mentioned before that I think that PoE1 had a much more frenetic yet obtuse system and a slower crawl in terms of story and exploration. I've tried to advise people interested in the series to skip PoE1 altogether and just leap into Deadfire because I really think it is a much punchier, overall better designed system and narrative. I've definitely had at least one friend start on PoE1 regardless of that and then get meh-ed out of it.