thelee

absolutely, though they kind of vary from being niche-good to being all-around OP. you should look them up on the wiki if in doubt. ones with particular upgrades to look out for (imo): marux amanth - can be upgraded to have an insta-kill effect on near death foes. when dual-wielded with any other weapon this is a great way to finish off tough bosses since the full attack gives you two chances to land your instakill effect. for priests, marux amanth gives a 10% spell echo chance, which can be very nice depending on the build weyc's robe - when you empower an ability, every ally close nearby gains brilliant for a short duration. this can be an easy catalyst for several deranged infinite combos. modwyr - a pretty slick sword, with a +20% lash, immunity to intellect afflictions, a once/encounter stun ability, and bonus to action speed. the immunity to intellect afflictions can make modwyr an attractive weapon for berserkers wintertide bulwark - a large shield that upgrades to have a retaliation effect and a once/rest defense booster. good for tanky builds changeling's mantle - real slick on barbarians slayer's claw - upgrades might inspirations a tier. on barbarians (esp berserkers) and monks, this is an easy way to get tenacious or even energized. If you're interested in being a bit cheaty - you can just rapidly switch weapons back and forth and upgrade any might inspiration to energized (since every time you switch to using slayer's claw your might inspirations get upgraded).

i think it's worth pointing out that there are "steady states" in nature that are locally optimal but not globally optimal; they don't completely weed out for being suboptimal, so it's not that there has to be an "oppositional" force of nature. An over-simplified example I can give to clarify this is sickle-cell anemia and malaria. Concerning the gene that produces sickle-cell anemia, if you get one healthy one and one mutated one from your parents, you end up not having sickle-cell anemia at all and instead become resistent to malaria (a plus!). If on the other hand, you get two mutated ones, you get sickle-cell anemia (very bad!). Because of the way genetics works, one could easily reason that people with one healthy and one mutated gene have an advantage in malaria-prone areas of the world, but this necessarily means that you will always have people born with sickle-cell anemia (with a simple punnet square you would see two malaria-resistent parents have a 25% chance of producing a sickle-cell kid), which otherwise should be weeded out rather quickly. And in fact a perfectly healthy parent with a sickle-cell parent (if they managed to live long enough without modern medicine) would you get you children with that malaria resistance at 100% rate. So there doesn't need to be an "opposing force" per se the way you put it. In the world of Eora, "nature" has developed some sort of reincarnation process, and it only developed just enough to get it to work barely good enough, and the way it works is just well enough that it's not going to improve any further because it's stuck in a local maximum. You need some outside intervention (the Wheel) to get it kicked out of its local max and into a more globally optimal state.

you might have been doing it slightly wrong. you're not supposed to destroy the thing in the center. you destroy the things on the outside of the ring, and each time you destroy one they send a charge to the thing in the middle that launches an electric attack that stuns all the constructs. if you destroy the thing in the center, you can no longer do that. that being said, the constructs can be real bad. most players can brute force their way through one or two steel constructs, but several successive waves of them (along with some filler constructs)? that's pretty rough, and you really need to be prepared to deal with AR and have very good sustain or anti-fire solutions. edit: just want to add that many of the "Survival" challenges can be unfairly bad. Most fights in the game don't require you to slowly manage resources over prolonged periods of time, and suddenly have to deal with waves of enemies without knowing how many to expect can be extremely rough.

nature screws up all the time. a natural real life analogue would be infant mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates during childbirth) before the advent of more modern medicine and science. all "nature" cares about is doing just enough to propagate the genetic material of a species. nothing more. our bodies are filled with tons of "useless" genetic material that does god knows what. our feet are anti-ergonomic adaptations of primate hands that are extremely prone to injury. imagine that instead of "hollowborn" or "weak souls" and the engwithans creating the wheel and the gods, it was "cancer" or "alzheimer's" and cure for cancer/alzheimer's/hereditary illnesses and the engwithan perspective makes a ton of sense.

be careful about reading stuff online. things got heavily nerfed shortly after release. if in doubt, go for the weaker numbers you see online.

the literal definition is that "gibs" is short for "giblets": internal organs. more colloquially, in video games "gibs" (or being "gibbed") is what happens in certain games where you kill something and they explode into tiny chunks of meat and flesh. i guess the idea being that instead of the enemy just falling over dead, their internal organs are blowing up everywhere. more specifically, in deadfire, if you have "gibs" enabled, when you kill an enemy with a critical hit, instead of leaving a body behind, they explode into a bunch of bloody chunks. This mirrors the behavior of the old games Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale (or to a certain extent, the original Fallouts). For deadfire, there is actually a mechanical effect - it is not purely for looks. Some effects[1] rely on enemy corpses, and if an enemy is "gibbed" they don't leave a corpse behind. So if you want to maximize those types of effects, you should disable this option in deadfire. [1] examples: you can't use chanter invocation to blow up corpses, you can't use druid "Garden of Life", even many cipher "transfer" effects shut down if the corpse is annihilated via a "gib".

i've had several psions by now, and the stop-when-damaged is not tedious and much less of a big deal than one might think, so long as you aren't being silly and building a melee psion. i think--again--multiclassing psion is beneficial because then you just switch to doing casting more from your secondary class while you wait for focus to start regen again.

nice! i need to try this

Can confirm. I have a psion/animist right now and they have de facto become my healbot. Can only imagine what a psion/lifegiver would be like. Alternate druid heals with ancestor's memory and pain block and they pretty much carry the party. Without ancestor's memory there's still a bunch of options, even if it's just to keep interrupting or dominating scary enemies

Do you have any mods? You can't click on the little glowing purple orb at all? Sanity check by comparing with this video of mine (video loads to the correct timestamp, don't worry about the length): Note that in my video I had to move my character to interact with the soul, otherwise the game thought I was trying to select my character.

Adding to what Boeroer said, it doesn't help the confusion about the lack of a guardian because of how accidental it can be to skip the fight, since it was related to a seemingly unrelated decision in a distant quest. Also, if you have dug around the developer notes a bit, they actually consciously made Ukaizo thin and easily skippable because of how many players complained about the final part of Pillars of Eternity 1 after you jumped down into the pit. I think it's fair to say that most people agree they overcorrected. Even ignoring how easily you could skip the guardian fight altogether, originally the guardian was extremely easy and not even really a "boss" per se. (Most of my criticisms of the ending--mechanically--are gone now that there are high-level DLCs and the guardian gets boosted up as you kill megabosses, but at release it was incredibly anticlimactic to be able to kill the guardian on PotD without breaking a sweat at like level 12-14, despite the fact that all the gods seem to be speaking about the guardian in hushed tones). I think it's definitely possible to have a good, engaging story where the protagonist is ultimately powerless. Raiders of the Lost Ark is my canonical example - Indiana Jones is absolutely worthless in that movie - the Nazis end up getting the Ark of the Covenant, and then God (?) destroys all the Nazis. If Indiana had just stayed at his university teaching classes and grading papers the narrative would've gone the same way. But it was and is still a blast of a movie and story to watch. I think there's a lot in the game post-release they did (like the Woedica book, some of the tie-ins with DLCs) where they tried to fix it up and improve the overall ending narrative, but similarly I think it's fair to say that maybe they cut things too aggressively or didn't quite get the factions to tie in well enough.

to be fair, very few things work on bosses like Dorudugan, I'm not sure that should be the filtering criterion. also, morning stars are your friend. all the -25 defense debuffs are great, but for some reason the effects i really want to land seem to be fortitude...

nope, geomancer maia. no other spell effects on her. edit - though she was using xefa's empirical explication with all upgrades, and an aefflyth ues mith fyr chant, for a total of 3 lashes on each bullet. if each lash counts, that would definitely explain the huge surge in refreshing defense!

there appears to be a lot of places in game where the designers forgot that over-time effects also apply upon initial application, and not just every tick thereafter. This ends up messing up the calculus for all ApplyOverTime effects (of which I assume Unbending uses). (In particular it means that Disintegrate and Cleansing Flame in particular do way more damage than stated in tooltip.) edit 2 - fyi in case anyone isn't aware about applyovertime i added a new section summarizing some stuff https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/applyontick-vs-applyovertime edit - i just did a fight the other night in SSS (the "challenge" before you go find artifacts) and the fighter there had unbending. I had to get my characters to stop attacking it because they had accumulated enough stacks of unbending that they were healing literally like ~100+ health per tick (dude surged from near death to healthy while konstanten was trying to gear up his instakill invocation). I didn't think it was possible in typical situations for unbending to heal > 100% of damage dealt like that, but there you go. i suspect something funky might be happening when combining unbending stacks because that in particular seemed outrageous. on a related note (while we're talking about random mechanics) - refreshing defense and concussive tranquilizier interact in a way that favors refreshing defense. in that same fight, i could not clear the fighter's refreshing defense. concussive tranquilizer nominally clears 30s away, but with maia using a blunderbuss each hit with concussive tranquilizizer added a gigantic amount of time to the refreshing defense duration. mathematically, even if each bullet added 5s to refreshing defense and only the initial bullet cleared 30s of duration away, it still doesn't work out to how it ended up being (should've been a net loss of -10s to the buff). I have no idea how the mechanics of that actually played out. I ended up with like 500s of refreshing defense on that fighter despite all my attempts at trying to use concussive tranquilizer on him. if that's something you can dig into, that would be great

also an important thing to remember is that the cipher can't self-target with pain block. if you're running a vela challenge, you also can't target vela with pain block.

what choices did you make at Motare O Kozi? "Unfinishable" quests don't exist - if you made it impossible, it should become a failed quest. If it truly is unfinishable, it's a bug.

have you played much potd before? IMO you really need a healer class of some sort, so tekehu single druid would be a good pickup for fifth. Without it, all you've got left is some weak mid-late game minimum sustain from troubadour and mid-late game robust from ydwin, which combined imo is nowhere near enough, even with potions and scrolls. (especially because if you rely on a cipher for healing and it's not a psion you are utterly screwed when you don't have good PEN)

true - i did carve out important on-hit effects as exceptions where stacking isn't relevant (i cited toxic strike and marux amanth as big examples). i think this is a YMMV - over time the type of gear i use doesn't generally rely on that many important on-hit/crit effects so it's less of a huge advantage for dual wielding. it's also important to note that while two handed weapons have +1 PEN over equivalent one handed weapons in general, many two-handed weapons have no way of further increasing their PEN, only estoc. So in practice, one-handed weapons might do better in low-PEN situations than two-handed weapons. (though estoc is pen king). again, these days my parties tend to be so planned ahead in advance that i have ez solutions to PEN/AR problems instead of it being an ad-hoc problem to solve (e.g. some source of tenacious inspiration, potions, etc.) this is very true, but for me mostly means i don't use two-handed weapons (or atleast avoid using them) on casters or caster hybrids, unless i have a lot of action speed bonuses. i don't think this is that big of a deal for more pure martial characters, at least once you have a few levels (and therefore more health [edit: to withstand some sluggishness when you need to heal]) under your belt.

Two handed weapons have +1 over "equivalent" slow one hand weapons. Great sword does two damage types and does high damage, which puts its equivalent as the sword, which has 6 PEN.

was gonna say, streetfighter + beast of winter set sounds very effective with perception afflictions. i tried it myself, but my streetfighter playstyle was heavily based on flanked and <bloodied health (instead of perception afflictions per se) that it didn't work out as well i'd like (though it was pretty decent). blunderbuss modal would be pretty useful for this, but you'd really have to make sure that it expires before you refresh it if you want to maximize the beast of winter gear payoff (which is actually semi sub-optimal for a streetfighter due to how recovery bonuses have a delayed effect)

Ooo that's a clever use of that. I should do that, to get those annoying back-line enemies within easy reach.

precisely i've found that it seems like a lot of players don't bother with explicit interrupts of spells, at least based on some of the posts i've seen.

you don't need one tank to do all the engagement in the world, though it can be nice. I'm a little less sanguine about using terrify (or other effects) in place of actual engagement, but there are plenty of easy ways to get +1 or +2 depending on what you need based on how many semi-tanky melee-ers you have. my main concern though is that any tank multiclass that relies on a caster for survivability sounds extremely flaky to me against arcane suppression. it's do-able but i feel like players need to be aware of this going into it and that it requires a little bit more skill and metagaming to not just be utterly crushed in fights where a caster has access to arcane suppression (and very rarely, arcane cleanse) edit - though i'm not sure ironskin is suppressable? it doesn't have a duration.

Depends on your definition of "strong" I suppose. The metagaming possibilities of great swords are limited enough (e.g. no real degenerate combos) that even a single-class streetfighter would make for a powerful great sword build.

nope. there isn't an ultimate steam achievement. it's a whole other thing. people complained a lot in poe1 days about obsidian making nigh-impossible challenges steam achievements (some people just like to get to 100% achievements - full disclosure that is literally the only reason why I did the ultimate in poe1), so obsidian didn't put any of the really hard stuff as steam achievements for deadfire.