thelee

well, as an example, an arcane knight (paladin/wizard) can be pretty tough. you get most of hte defensive buffs from the wizard (not a lot you miss from tier 8-9), and you also get up to +15 all defenses from the paladin. Coupled with a shield and lay on hands you could have insane survivability. for such a setup i would recommend a generic wizard so you get access to arcane veil, enchantment buffs, as well as some illusion magic for other sources of +deflection in case you're up against gunfire or arcane veil runs out. on lower difficulties wizard's double plus all the tankiness of a paladin with a shield can make you very very hard to hit, for the entire fight (since no one will actually hit you, wizard's double will stay up; because wizard's double has no duration, it can't be cleansed and i don't think it can be suppressed either.) a more esoteric example would be wizard + ranger (stalker). if you haven't looked too deeply into the ranger ability tree, there's ways to get tons of bonus accuracy that also applies to spellcasting, in addition to hunter's claw, which lets you get up to +20 acc against a specific type of enemy. It can be upgraded to either +20% damage as well, or +20 all defenses as well (the latter can be good as a survivability measure, as +all defenses stacks with +deflection bonuses since they are bonuses of different types; the stacking rules in deadfire are different than poe1). this requires quite a bit more metagaming and micromanagement, and while you miss out on tier 8 or 9 spells the bonus accuracy and damage can more than make up for it.

tactician is indeed mentioned because of how easy brilliant is to trigger in solo runs. it is harder and requires a lot more metagaming in a party situation, but is doable. having a cipher in your party helps a lot due to phantom foes, but with multiple party members you have to pay more attention to random flanking and perception afflictions. in solo it's easy to just have your mainchar topped off with a captain's banquet (immunity to perception) or svef (resistence to perception afflictions) to help keep brilliant up, but that also gets harder in party. i don't have a ton of experience with making it work outside a solo context, but i'm sure someone can chime in. i would personally recommend just going all in on a single-class wizard, and probably pick evoker, enchanter, or conjuration (those subclasses so that you retain access to enchantment school). enchantment comes with a bunch of buffs that help with survivability. if you stick with enchantment or evoker you retain access to a bunch of unique spells (some of them are from poe1, like crushing doom or ninagauth's various stuff). conjurer you lose access to evocation and a bunch of unique spells, but in return you gain access to transmutation spells, which include more self-buffs but also very useful spells like slicken, chill fog, and late game spells like petrification or corrosive skin. an evoker loses a bunch of utility from the conjuration school (not important if you don't care about summoned weapons), but gains a lot of useful buffs and debuffs from the illusion school (wall of many colors rocks). the subclass bonus for evoker and conjurer are really good as well, IMO. one of the reasons for my recommendation is that engagement is arguably more important to pay attention to in deadfire than in poe1 - enemies are more willing to break existing engagements to go after weak party members (including you), and one can move around while engaged as long as you stay in engagement range (whereas in poe1 any movement broke engagement). So your back of the line party members (such as ranged casters) are more vulnerable. One of hte best enchantment spells is Deleterious Alacrity of Motion which functions a bit differently than in poe1. In PoE1 it was a generic movement/recovery speed bonus. In Deadfire the speed boost is not as pronounced, but the big deal is getting immunity to engagement coupled with a movement speed bonus. It is basically one of the best survivability boosts in the game - anytime a melee foe thinks they are going to land an attack on you, you can just rapidly run out of range and make them whiff their attack, and because you move so fast there's nothing they can do to catch up to you. You can literally run circles around everyone, letting a party member engagement someone chasing you. why i recommend single-classing is because the tier 8 and tier 9 spells are very good, and importantly you get the opportunity to really power up your empowered attacks with perks (wizards are unique in that essentially you don't have to pick any late game [or any] ability and rely on switching grimoires [which is much less painful than in poe1] and just invest in lots of good passives). One empowered late game spell with all the empowered passives (+10 acc, +1 PEN, +15% dam, +15% aff duration) plus prestige (additional +1 PL) can single-handedly end most end-game trash fights (and even some boss fights). Retaining access to evocation spells is best for this, with Meteor Swarm and Missile Salvo as candidates, but there are plenty of other spells you can happily abuse like this. As an example, on PotD with upscaling and challenges, a single empowered missile salvo was enough to take out the first couple of Forgotten Sanctum boss fights.

also let's remember that poe1 was a per-rest system, not a per-encounter system. Helig just hasn't figured out how to have a good night's rest yet, so all his good stuff wasn't available yet

depends on whether it's a multiclass or not. in either case, maxing out intellect is very good, and then i would put points into dexterity and perception. if you're a caster or someone who can stay safe, i would pull points out of resolve to put elsewhere, though on higher difficulty i would put a couple into constitution. for someone who's closer to the front line, it's a bit more up in the air about whether or not you care about resolve, you might even just want more dex. example: 10 might/15 dex/12 con/14 per/18 int/8 res i also tried a single-class berath caster variant that didn't put too much into dex, which is occasionally contra-indicated by most people since dex is so generally useful. the reasoning for me not investing in dex was based on the fact that i was playing on the highest difficulty with lots of challenges enabled and for most of the game this means i run out of spells far before the fight is over, so all dex means in many cases is just running out of spells faster. being a ranged caster also meant that i wasn't as worried about my spellcasting getting interrupted. the stats looked more like: 11 might/10 dex/8 con/13 per/18 int/17 res this version used a small shield and a pistol or blunderbuss for extra safety and to make sure weapon attack recovery didn't interfere with spellcasting. in either case, i would recommend choosing a background that gives you +1 intellect (old vailia iirc) because intellect is so useful for a caster. if you're not interesting in that, then +1 perception or +1 dexterity backgrounds are nice too.

just a reminder that death godlikes also get an additive damage bonus against near death foes. so it's not just the +3 PL. may be pretty small on average (+5% from full health to near death, on average) but just another additional angle. for most abilities, the human +7 ACC is superior. +3 PL generally translates to +3 ACC, with +6 ACC in a few small cases. (edit - i realize now you probably just meant "you get more accuracy" not "it gives you more accuracy than human") +3 PL really screams for jump and multi-projectile spells (e.g. the minoletta's spells). it's basically yet another multiplicative factor on top of damage, duration, and PEN; you get +.5 jump or +.5 projectile per PL (rounded down). examples include chain lightning, firebug, cleansing flame, el nary, or minoletta'c concussive missiles.

i think i was probably like 1 out of 100 who really really liked the speechcraft minigame in oblivion

being the "first" lich doesn't mean "only," though. he had apprentices in poe1, so clearly unlike traditional d&d liches, concelhaut doesn't mind sharing his knowledge if it furthers his own ends. plus, liches are immortal--who knows how long concelhaut has been around; plenty of time for more liches to arise. even though llengrath has also been around for ages, concelhaut might precede even them since llengrath definitely came about post-wheel, whereas like boeroer points out, concelhaut may have preceded the wheel altogether.

i was wrapping up my most recent run and noticed on steam they've had a new welcome message since last spring. I wonder if Deadfire getting is getting a kick in the pants in long tail sales because of covid-19. separately, i was looking up articles on some new RPGs to play or keep an eye on, and deadfire cropped up on them, whereas before (even well after deadfire was released) at best only poe1 might be mentioned. i wonder if people are finally getting around to the game (or past the pirate marketing). if they get deadfire on xbox game pass that would really help with the "long tail" imo.

wow, ok. not being snarky, but honestly sounds like they got a lot other stuff going on in their life hope they find some peace somewhere else on the internet

oh i like ship-to-ship combat and i like the endless paths, and full VO is nice. it's just a matter of whether or not it was worth the cost, which it sounds like they definitely weren't. (endless paths may have been worth it). especially since people like us appear to be a minority or at best a slim majority. people did want multiclassing, some demurk of buffs/debuffs, and slower combat (i don't know if people were explicitly asking for this, but tons of people played at slow mode for combat, so OBS made it the default). though that wasn't really quicksand. i do agree for a poe3 they should probably keep the system in place (basically like the de facto official "ruleset"). though i think that however much i enjoy AR/PEN, in practice that would be one area they would have to revisit for a poe3. combined with inversions it is a frequently confusing and surprising aspect of deadfire (and a lot of people apparently do not enjoy having to pay close attention to PEN on weapons and stuff). edit: worth pointing out that I was using the term "quicksand" the way JE Sawyer was using it, e.g. a pit that you keep tossing money and time into and it devours it up without giving you much back in return (he used this to describe ship-to-ship combat in particular). I have no doubt multiclassing took a lot of time to get right (and I remember the iterations it went through in some of the backer beta updates), but I wouldn't qualify that as "quicksand" because the multiclassing in the game is truly phenomenal and a big draw to deadfire over poe1 and better than competitor systems as well imo.

this is a late response, but 1) yes. druids have always had a different damage niche than wizards. depending on how long of a hiatus it's been, and what difficulty you're playing on, enemy AR has gone up and enemy upscaling has become more aggressive, so the fact that the "default" spell PEN is only 7 might be a lot more relevant compared to when you last played.

my main concern is that as far as game mechanics go (which the DLCs didn't have to do), je sawyer has been the driving force for every major decision i've liked with since icewind dale 2. i'm sure the institutional strength at obs is good, and jes taking a back seat would happen inevitably, but it does make me a wee bit nervous going forward.

lolwut happened here

IIRC grounded has an active core team of like 12 people, which is seriously impressive. i'm sure other people will surge in as it nears release and bits and pieces are being picked up by others as the need arises, but that seems very smart and the success so far seems like they are punching far above their weight. i think some of the deadfire burnout will have to recede into the distant past before obs feels like picking up poe3 as a project, but it seems like they could do a smaller project, smartly, and well. i think step #1 is avoiding crowdfunding which would have them making promises that end up not making business sense but still have to keep. alot of the vestigial quicksand features i can think of in poe1 *and* deadfire seem purely like a result of early ideas for a crowdfunding that they had to keep (poe1 stronghold, golden-plated npcs, poe1 having two quest hubs, and then of course obviously deadfire ship combat and VO, among othe rthings).

for a wood elf (adjust as necessary) 10 might/13 con/19 dex/10 per/18 int/7 resolve then take deadfire archipelago as a background for an additional +1 dex make sure to pick marked prey as your ranger skill, you absolutely cannot go wrong with it and you will never respec out of it. i would take escape as your rogue ability because the mobility and bonus deflection will be very helpful in avoiding danger and getting into range and you can lean on other party members to help debuff early on. pick up blinding strike as your main rogue offensive skill later, you can upgrade it to confounding blind to utterly punish foes you are ganging up on. with 18 intellect it should last a decent amount of rounds to let you pile on the deflection penalty. (this incidentally is an ability that is utterly a nightmare to be on the receiving end of.) for skills i would choose explosives. cinder bomb, sparkcrackers are easy to make and will help you debuff foes. at high skill levels, stun bombs are an amazing lifesaver. (there are also some nice gloves that give you free sparkcrackers to use per rest, and another set that boosts your explosives even further). the other bombs are plenty useful too. pick a passive skill that fits with your theme, and if you have no idea, pick religion or survival for the synergy with saint omaku's mercy (a pretty decent war bow) now, stop lurking on the forums and go play the game!

depending on your ranger build, if you want to be completely optimal, perception is actually not that important. rangers get so much bonus accuracy (+10 marked prey, +5 marksman, +10 stalker's link, possibly +10 survival of the fittest, up to +20 from hunter's claw/fang/beast's claw, all stacking with each other) that you're better off boosting other offensive stats (dex, might). but that sort of depends on how much micromanagement you're willing to invest in the character. hunter's claw requires metagaming and prep work (not a lot, but consistent amounts). stalker's link requires you to use your ghost pet effectively. but if you just do marked prey, marksman, and survival of the fittest, that's already +25 accuracy right there. similarly, rogues get so much bonus damage that you're better off boosting one of the other offensive stats (dex, perception). (the mathematical reason why you want to invest in other stats is for the same reason why if you want to maximize the area or volume of a quadrangle or cuboid, you draw a square or a cube. damage, accuracy, and dex are the three different "axes" of damage, so given a fixed total for all three to distribute, to maximize the "volume" (damage) they should all be as equivalent as possible (a stat "cube").) that pretty much leaves dex as the king stat to invest in. intellect is always a good choice since you probably have lots of abilities you want to last longer (could also be very important for getting past rounding cutoffs in turn-based mode). you could sprinkle remaining points however much you want (might/dex gives you roughly linear returns so is always worth investing in). some con might be useful just so you can survive incidental spell hits or enemy rogues that like to escape to the backlines. as for skills, it's really your call. marked prey is the only big one i suggest everyone get from a ranger. i like arterial strike for rogue (it is great for opening fights and kiting enemies with), but may not be as effective in turn-based mode. deathblows is extremely powerful so you want to make sure you have a diversity of debuffs to trigger it; perception debuffs count as two afflictions (flanked + the actual perception affliction itself) so blinding strike (+upgrades), or debilitating strike are good to have. ranger gets a few debuffs that are useful. (diversity of debuffs is handy if you run across perception resistent or perception immune foes and can no longer rely on a simple distracted (or any perception affliction for immune foes) to trigger deathblows) edit: better than skills recommendations, i have two anti-recommendations. as i mentioned before, sap and shadowing step require a melee weapon for rogue, so you should probably avoid those. hunter's claw also requires a melee weapon for ranger, but it's so good when maxed out that i just equip two melee weapons for my ranger for a few fights to build it up before switching back to ranged.

not bad, i would point out that to get the most out of kind wayfarer you'd have to be close to your party members because the aoe on wayfarer's flames of devotion healing is small. you'd also want to dual-wield ranged weapons to max it out (dual-wielding weapons and the spammability of flames of devotion means you could be be among the best healers in the game just by spamming it over and over as needed) i think vanilla rogue is fine. trickster has a lot of abilities which tend to be more useful if you are closer to the enemy (mirror image, repulsive visage, displaced image) so if you're not going to get much mileage out of them (and they all compete in guile usage with normal abilities), you can still debuff and pummel foes without sacrificing some sneak attack damage. (and the ghost heart has their own set of abilities to help debuff enemies, espeically since you may not be relying on your pet ghost to do as much)

a sc chanter is extremely powerful, but you have to be OK with turning them into a summoner/sniper, which it sounds like you aren't keen on (avoiding ranger pets). trickster, debonaire, and vanilla rogue work great for a chanter MC. streetfighter requires a lot of metagaming and i'm not sure they're nearly as good in turn-based mode. my current run is a mixed melee/ranged debonaire MC and absolutely wrecks in any fight involving kith. if you want to combo, chanter gets a charm invocation, which will let the debonaire land (mostly) free critical hits on lots of foes even when not fighting kith. edit: an assassin/chanter MC would be extra bad because your chanting will almost immediately break shadowing beyond, and depending on the chant may almost immediately break smoke veil. there's not a lot of "trap" choices in deadfire, but that's arguably one of them.

i'm not a cipher expert, but i can try: i think mostly people who voice this concern are thinking about real time, not turn-based, out of a concern that two handed weapons tend to be less responsive in fights than dual-wielding. barely matters for turn-based. i don't know the specific reason why whispers would com eup. it also behooves to keep in mind that deadfire is a game that is very forgiving to different choices, so when people talk about "best choice" they're not saying that "if you don't do X the game will be miserably hard" which can be the case for other systems (especially older D&D style systems), they're talking micro-optimizations or possibly degenerate metagaming combos. i would not put too much attention to people who stress a lot about a specific build point. for psyblade, devoted would be an excellent pair with a cipher if you're gungho about using two-handes words. +2 PEN would solve two-handed sword's main weakness, which is low inherent penetration. Disciplined Barrage will give you a perception inspiration to help land two-handed sword hits with the modal active (which otherwise penalizes accuracy) in addition to boosting cipher power accuracy. On turn-based mode, chance to hit is more generous so the higher damage potential of a two-handed sword with modal on will really help with focus generation. ciphers--especially on turn-based mode--seem to have an extreme action economy issue - they have to attack to generate focus, and then you have to spend a turn to actually use the powers. as a result, i might stay away from an ascendant and steer you to a beguiler (whom you can set up to generate or recover focus just from using powers) or soulblade (who can dump all their focus into a single attack if need be, in addition to getting cheaper shred abilities). i would also not stress too much. while your class and first level abilities and stats are fixed, you can respec everything else. if you're struggling a lot, just go with your gut of what seems like it would be the most fun, don't worry about getting it wrong, and just say "**** it." it took me a lot of runs of deadfire to really figure things out back and forth, and i just made peace with the fact that all my runs would be sub-optimal in some way (and most of the time i put together builds that are thematically fun rather than optimal, so they are sub-optimal anyway, and it's not a big deal if they are sub-optimal because that's not my angle. i can still beat the game and megabosses on the hardest difficulty with various challenges enabled, so being sub-optimal does not lock content away from me). garotte is extremely close distance. it does not use your weapon or weapon range, it's a special attack at close range. rogues can make for great snipers due to the ability to inflict tons of sneak attack damage at range, and most of their attacks are agnostic about what weapon they use (pay attention to ability descriptions though; sap and shadow step require a melee weapon in your primary slot iirc). in fact in my experience, on higher difficulties some of your worst fights will be against rogue archers who stay out of reach of your party and sneak attack and use things like finishing blow or blinding strike with a crossbow or some such. so i can imagine that doing that yourself would be pretty effective. chanters are also decent support snipers imo. they come with a great chant for ranged attacks, and being at range gives them the flexibility to move in and out of range for chants and invocations. don't pick up a skald though because the skald chance for critical hit only applies for melee weapons. monks and monk MCs can make for surprisingly good snipers because of dance with death, which will generate wounds without needing to get hit and give you up to +15 accuracy. swift strikes will make you fast. i dont' think swift flurry works with ranged weapons, but lightning strikes will add a lightning lash to your ranged attacks. at high levels you can use long pain or instruments of pain to use melee weapons as if you were a sniper, which is really powerful (ranged weapons typically are balanced to be weaker than melee due to their relative safety, so using melee weapons at long range is an improvement in dps). if you merely just don't want a permanent pet, a ghost heart ranger is an excellent choice. instead of a pet, they have a fast-cast summon that you can send suicidally to distract enemies or go for squishy mages in the back line.

also you'll probably recruit more help if there's a specific build type you're going for - some theme, some class, etc. an open-ended question is just too overwhelming in possibilities.

i use a nice pencil, eraser, and notepad there is a quick level 20 cheat - i think you just give yourself like a million xp. if i need to run tests i have an old game with a save in an inn and i just recruit a level 19 adventurer.

unfortunately i think the type of people who frequent these forums a lot or are active on wikis probably prefers the RtWP mode. and just by the nature of the beast, most of the videos and stuff were made early in deadfire's lifecycle, before turn-based mode got added. i think also part of the problem for other people updating builds is that between turn-based and RtWP some builds barely get affected at all, whereas other builds might get dramatically affected, so it can be frequently hard to tell what builds need attention. be the change you want to see! try putting together a build and write it up and get feedback.

yes, but i think it was dropped for BG2? i do very much remember being surprised the first time i ever knocked someone out. oblivion also has non-lethal damage, and as a result both fallout 3 and new vegas also have non-lethal damage. however, it might have only really been close to balanced in new vegas - in oblivion it was either completely useless or utterly broken.

not familiar with gothic; ideally it would be a solution that's not save scummable. because even with oblivion/morrowind (and daggerfall?) you could just not bother with the consequences by save/reloading. again, we're circling back to something that speaks to thresholds "uncontested" rolls. either you succeed or don't, maybe with some near-miss. there could be some abstraction/minigame layer in between to make it more immersive or involved for the player. i could probably spitball some mechanics or stealing minigames that i think would work better, but eh i don't think avowed's dev team is going to be reading this thread for an idea from some rando

obviously everyone has their limits, and that limit is going to vary. even if the reactivity is very thorough, it could be so extreme that it's not worth keeping - a typical fallout 2 playthrough i would just instant reload if a random NPC or child wandered into my burst range; for whatever reason i was just game for whatever consequences happened (same with my wife and whacking father). on the other hand, if there are too many guardrails, then RPGs lose something special that makes RPGs RPGs. veering slightly off topic, i think this is a perennial problem with theft. in earlier RPGs, the reactive consequences of being caught were so severe that there was effectively no consequence - you just save-scummed or didn't bother. in modern RPGs, theft is such a minor problem (tiny reputation hits, bribery of guards) that it similarly has effectively no reactivity and no consequence - it doesn't matter that you get caught. on that note, i think probably oblivion-ish and earlier elder scrolls handled it the best with a jail sentence and some stat punishments, but nothing terribly severe or terribly trivial. but even then, it's kind of eh... i would love someone to "solve" theft/pickpocketing as a mechanic.