thelee

I think that's an example of the "you can kill everyone" ethos done not as well. In New Vegas, it meant you burnt a lot of bridges but still had a viable path to finish the game. In Deadfire, it frequently amounts to "oh I still get a key off their body and/or their spirit talks to me and the quest goes on largely as normal." I still appreciate the freedom of the latter, but it's nothing like the former where there were real consequences to your actions but you could still beat the game. On the contrary, I think this is the place where crpgs have historically excelled. It's less about playing a psychopath, it's more about a game that is committed to the player as a Role Player that it will go to extreme lengths to accommodate the player's actions. The ultimate test of that is "can a player kill X NPC and still finish the game in some way?" I still remember the first time I accidentally killed a kid in Fallout 2 (burst weapons and such). In a modern game--ignoring the ethics of depicting violence on children (and, in some countries, legality)--what would likely have happened instead is that the kid is immortal or "essential" so will just stand up again after a few seconds, or everyone within like a 500 mile radius becomes irrevocably mad at you and fail a bunch of quests and the game basically breaks and you have to reload. In Fallout 2, while the town got pissed at me, I was still able to flee (no "you cannot leave/fast travel during combat" message), and the effects were: instant vilification reputation with the town massive negative hit to karma you get a special "perk" called "child killer" for the rest of the game you are hunted by serious bounty hunters who are out to avenge the town/kid As someone who had mostly played highly linear JRPGs up until that point, the mere fact that I could do that, and the game could still continue on, with plenty of in-game consequences was an astounding level of reactivity. It is unfortunately probably the high water mark of reactivity that I've seen in a game ever since. I'm not saying that I want a game where you can kill a kid (i think it's a little perturbing how some grognards fixate on literally this as a feature in particular), but I do appreciate an RPG that goes out of its way to try to accommodate player mayhem, especially if it's unintentional. For all the flak Bethesda gets these days, I remember watching my wife play FO4. The first time she phased into the institute and saw "Sean" and Father, she half-seriously yelled IRL "give me back my son!" and immediately whacked Father to death without letting Father talk (and without knowing that Father is in fact, your real son). I couldn't help but laugh out loud at that, but more impressive was FO4 adapted to that as a real option, and I got to watch my wife fleeing a very angry Institute and continuing on with the Railroad.

i thin kthere's an AI scripting mod that opens up alot of options, because as it stands you can't do this. i set up a script that has a timer cooldown of 3s and that is "good enough" for me.

yikes, the way the death shield might be implemented, it might only be checked at like, literal near death (much like watchful presence can interfere with death and heals you instead), which may be impossible if paralyzed. that sucks! i'll have to update my guide with this gotcha. it would appear to be a developer error - other effects (watchful presence, auranic activating last trick) completely ignore things like prone or afflictions, so clearly it's possible to script things so this wouldn't happen. i had a bizarre thing happen to me last night in FS, where mirke got hit with petrification at near death. i don't think the developers ever really anticipated players being hit with petrification, because boy oh boy did it suck. combat ended, but mirke was still petrified! after a save/load, i could move her around and she would respond to my clicks, but in combat she would have a full recovery bar that would never disappear. resting didn't help. suppress affliction didn't help. i had to take my pair of engwithan bracers and repeatedly re-equip it on mirke and that repeated resistance let me dispel it. if mirke had already had resistance, i think i would have just been screwed and mirke would've been effectively dead.

the likelihood that having a gpu in an insufficient bandwidth PCIe slot is so vanishingly low that the greater risk likely for the layperson is by opening up their PC they short some critical component.

it's frustrating, but probably best not to impugn malicious motives on devs who went above-and-beyond to support a game with less-than-stellar sales. someone speculated that it likely has to do with the fact that unlike poe1 there are weapons and effects that have their own AoE, so due to engine limitations it meant a tradeoff between seeing carnage visual radius or those other relevant radius. i don't know if phenomenon managed to find a work around to this, or if their mod simply made the tradeoff in a different direction.

PEN 9 is about as high as a spell normally gets. Keep in mind though that spells have higher PEN than the base listed effect due to ability-level scaling - the higher tier a spell is, the higher an inherent bonus it has to PEN, to the tune of +.5 per tier past one. So a PEN 7 tier 5 spell should have by default an additional +2 PEN on top of its base PEN 7 and any other PL scaling (using spellshaping to shrink the area of effect of a spell will give you an additional .25 PEN in addition to other bonuses, and depending on the sitaution that could mean bumping you up a penetration level). edit - i mentioned that sacred immolation has stupidly high PEN, and it's because not only is it a PEN 9 effect, but it also gets an additional +3 PEN just from that tier-based scaling. plus scion of flame and PL scaling I generally don't have any PEN problems in many fights (14 fire PEN) without needing to worry about champion's boon or other such pen boosts. also make sure you are picking up the various elemental PEN talents, if you use them a lot. the +1 PEN can make a huge difference. edit: minoletta's piercing burst has abnormally high PEN, at base 15. in some cases that's enough to get an additional +30% damage bonus on its already decent dmage just from overpenetration.

According to https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/afflictions-and-inspirations they are not. Mechanically they do identical things, but petrification is treated as a T4 effect, so resistance will only turn it into a normal paralyze. You can absolutely mess up even megabosses who only have resistances by using a petrification effect (i believe all of them are vulnerable to this, though whether or not you can surmount their defenses are another issue). edit: this is really obvious with belranga, who after enough minions killed will be periodically paralyzed by the minion spiders, who use their petrify poison indiscriminately. edit 2: this is really useful with the tier 9 wizard spell petrification, which petrifies *permanently* if used against a near-death foe, and this still works when resisted down to a paralyze. in practice it is not fully useful against hauane o whe and likely sigilmaster auranic, but i have definitely done a run which completely immobilized the oracle in FS, dorudugan, and belranga (with minor help against hauane). edit 3: hmmm i haven't tried it against auranic, but using petrification against auranic could soft-lock the game. auranic has a death shield until she uses last trick or all obelisks are dead, so permanently paralyzing auranic while an obelisk is still up (and shielded) might lock you in the fight.

it is extremely relevant to point out that Grounded is a co-op/multiplayer game primarily focused on survival/building, which means you need to have the third-person character animations and assets perfected anyway and switching between the two cameras doesn't have as much of an impact on game mechanics. Having a third person camera then seems minimal work. A single-player game is different, especially where combat is super important. Playing FO3/NV/Skyrim/FO4 in third person is obviously worse and clunkier than single-player. (Similarly, if you take a good third-person game, you can't just put the camera inside their head and expect it to work.)

anecdotally i've seen people complain --even with SSDs-- about console load times. so it's possible.

yeah, it doesn't solve the general problem, it is more of a "soft-landing" for when you don't meet the thresholds. in deadfire, sometimes a near-miss means you get the same outcome but with an injury, or missing out on some extra reward or something like that, or failing the check but you get one injury instead of two. yeah, intuitively in deadfire/poe/disco elysium misses seem less bad. in fallout/skyrim it can be *extremely* frustrating if you just leveled up and you miss a hard check by one point.

it is certainly odd to fail a check, without warning, just because you're at 74 speech instead of 75 speech. those kinds of situations are frustrating, because unlike an enemy (where in many RPGs you can quickly tooltip their level and basic stats), there's no real warning about how hard it is to convince someone of something. i was thinking that there could be "near-misses" or "partial success" which deadfire occasionally does for scripted events and lockpicking (3 lockpicks isntead of 1). but this requires a lot of planning to be meaningful, but could be nice.

this is not even a thing in many table top systems, and they tend to be full of dice rolls and chance. notably, at least in 3.5e/pathfinder, skill checks by default cannot critically fail or critically succeed. because tying your shoelaces is not something someone fails miserably at 1/20 times, and trying to recall an obscure piece of arcane lore is not something a random peasant can do 1/20 times.

this would be more credible if your other complaint in the other thread didn't reveal that you assume incomplete quests are a bug. i'm very curious to know what people who think deadfire is filled with bugs are doing or what they think are the bugs. i get maybe... one crash bug every few runs. the only thing i run into really is just the can't-use-potions-without-disabling-AI bug (which is annoying, but has an easy workaround).

Whatever effect Grave Calling uses is not a normal affliction, so it appears to bypass resistances and even immunities. Definitely seems like one of them bugs in the player's favor.

don't forget sun & moon flail, it has +2 fire spell PL. since it can be bought, you might be able to get it even earlier.

i'm actually a little bit less front-loady with buffs. i have like one or two i always cast, but the rest i treat more situationally so i can keep spell slots reserved in case i need something else. it's easy to empty out a priest's spell casts with nothing but buffs, but there are plenty of options. it may be a little less "optimal" but it feels more fun to play because it's far less rote (it also helps with action economy since i'm not just trying to go down a huge list of spells before combat ends). as an example, i might open early level fights a lot with dire blessing, but by the time i pick up devotions, i might just rely on devotions and only use dire blessing if i need to get rid of or protect myself from blind/disorient. champion's boon i almost always treat conditionally, either to boost up a tank with mob stance, give someone more engagement, or help with penetration. never an all-in buff. even triumph, i don't bother with in easier trash fights, or in really hard boss fights. regardless of all that a martial priest MC like xoti might have more action economy issues because her bonus spells aren't like skaen or wael which are fast and easily usable (except for harvest), so regardless of what else you do trying to be competent at martial abilities and competent at casting might feel constrained. BDD + Salvation of Time are definitely potentially degeneratively good, but unless you are specifically gearing or metagaming for it is not a particularly huge power spike on its own. I've had plenty of priests that don't rely on that combo that are still plenty effective. and like haplok said there are plenty of SC power spikes. I like CoP much better at higher levels. Early on (e.g. right when you unlock it) I find the duration a tad too short, but PL scaling helps make it a good boost in survivability.

Aha, I suspected that it might (mentioned it in build notes). In that case, as a possible alternate option wizards would have better overall offensive spell coverage, but as an empowered spell it's hard to compare to Holy Fire imo, except when trying to interrupt bosses or a single hard enemy (Holy Fire also has synergy with the other fire stuff). And yeah, priests with weyc's is nice. I tried to avoid calling out or encouraging weyc:s robe because with full party brilliant perpetually, pretty much any build becomes "nice"

lol, i ended up getting a gaming keyboard that let me create macros, so now i have a few macros set up for the always-start-of-fight-party-buffs. obviously not always an option for people, but it was also my i'm-working-from-home-during-pandemic-because-america-sucks-at-dealing-with-this keyboard so i considered it a productivity investment as well. yeah i always found fireball kind of an underwhelming spell, but it's popular. it's not like in the older games where it would scale generously to higher levels (if you ever played baldur's gate and its ilk). you definitely need to be dropping things like delayed fireball, ninagauth's shadowflame, torrent of flame in late game if you want to keep your damage up. it also doesn't help that beast of winter is the first time you really hit bullet sponges so damage spells in general become less relatively effective. you might want to look at other low level spell options. some good low-level effects you might try exploring: - slicken (repeating interrupt) - rolling flame (fire damage, interrupts, in closed areas you can bounce it for multiple hits and interrupts) - ryngrim's repulsing visage (excellent debuff but you have to be close range) - kalakoth's minor blights (a way to get ranged fire damage for long times... at level 20 it scales generously to legendary) - arduous delay of motion (the -33% action speed debuff is rather unique way to make enemies weaker; will stack with dexterity penalties) it really depends on how you set up your character. i rolled a single-class bellower (who uses up all their invocation whenever they use an invocation which means a lot fewer invocations in general) but still had plenty of invocations and chants that i always found a use for, even if it was a situational song i'd switch into for a minority of fights, but it was a lot of advance planning to make sure i wasn't picking up redundant or super niche effects that didn't fit in well. if for example you only pick up the damaging invocations, you might find yourself preferring one all the time. if you pick up like two damaging invocations and a few buffers, then you'll end up spreading them out. similar things with chants. if you pick up every single chant, you'll find half of them never get used. but if you focus on picking up some "core" chants, and then some more niche ones you switch into on occasion (the anti-beast, fire, anti-contentration, and various resistance chants are good candidates) you'll get a lot of mileage out of all them.

not as much. early on there's not much durational effects that are super important you want to extend (maybe when you get blade turning). i might consider trying to rest in wild mare, or eating swordfish (+1 pen to spells) to help spellcasting, or maybe things that help early survivability since you have less tricks up your sleeve (fresh fruit, yolk bowl, mariner's porridge)

i think both are pretty irrelevant for this build because it'll only be used as a backup (and early on when you don't have as many spells you won't have access to this weapon), though in general i think living pyre is better. the healing is soooo small. one cast of restore or -- if you have old siec chant in your party -- one offensive spell cast will do way more healing. i definitely recommend cloth or light because most of the time you're at range so you want minimal recovery versus more protection. weyc's robe could be a degenerate one - you're always going to be empowering every fight or so with salvation of time follow-up, and this will grant 20+ seconds of brilliant to everyone in your party (more with regenerated casts). if you want something more "fair", I would recommend High Harbinger's Robe, Pale Hide (with nocturnal upgrade), Swift Hunter's Garb, Miscreant's Leathers, Cabalist's Gambeson (with the +10% beneficial effect buff), or for more survivability, Fleshmender. DoC is pretty good, but the bonus to power pool is wasted on a partial caster.

that's an interesting idea. for a big shock damage bonus lash, it might be worth the extra micromanagement and no longer being a nature godlike to set that up with a helm and a friendly wizard. if not nature godlike, probably human would be a good choice, for the +7 acc/+15% damage bonus when bloodied or less.

Thought I'd try my hand at another one of these. I call this a 5.0 build because it incorporates a lot of metagaming-related stuff that as a community we only really figured out 5.0 or so. Basic build outline: stats Nature Godlike, 18 might/8 con/15 dex/10 perception/19 + 1 intellect (old vailia)/7 resolve. Hardcore min-maxers can tank con and resolve more to increase dex and perception. Classes: helwalker + magran Level-by-level guide (with free spells in brackets, optional picks with asterisk): Swift Strikes | Restore [Fan of Flames] Lesser Wounds* Interdiction* Dance with Death | Iconic Project [Spiritual Weapon] Long Stride Clarity of Agony* Swift Flurry | Watchful Presence [Ray of Fire] Two Weapon Style* Blade Turning* Duality of Mortality | Scion of Flame [Shining Beacon] Enduring Dance Spell Shaping The Long Pain* | Revive the Fallen [Fire Shield] Champion's Boon Rapid Casting Uncanny Luck | Salvation of Time [Pillar of Holy Fire] Tough Turning Wheel* Accurate Empower | Rain of Holy Fire [Torrent of Flame] Penetrating Empower Gear Weapon slot 1: Magran's Core | Weyc's Wand (soulbound to monk, not priest) Weapon slot 2: Chromoprismatic Staff Other items: Ring of Focused Flame, Sonorous Ring, Least Unstable Coil, Necklace of Power, Vithrack Slippers, Firethrower's Gloves, The Maker's Own Power Pet: Otto Starcat! Possible alternatives - Flame Naga or Nemnok or Ooblit. Misc In the alchemy lab in the top-left corner of the map, boost your might permanently. How the build plays For most of the game this is just a glass cannon nuker that uses Dance with Death's generous up to +15 accuracy, Helwalker's up to +10 might (passive stacking) and up to +10 intellect (active, not stacking), and Priest of Magran's nukes to destroy things. Swift strikes and Nature godlike gives you +1 passive PL, and you accumulate various things that make all your fire (and a few evocation-keyworded) abilities more powerful. Where this build really comes into play is late game, and is why you're not a wizard. Rain of Holy Fire, empowered, plus Weyc's Wand plus Least Unstable Coil = +3 PL (that you extend with Salvation of Time) and almost certainly every single tier 3 inspiration in the game. As far as I can tell, multiclassed wizards can't do this - they need Missile Salvo or Meteor Swarm to pull off the same Least Unstable Coil interaction (there may be another spell that might be able to trigger this interaction that I haven't tested). Priests get salvation of time that they can spam forever if needed thanks to Brilliant, and wizards are limited to a Wall of Draining that has been somewhat nerfed (though there are items you can use to make it consistent, like Jester's Cap). Between Magran's Core, Nature Godlike, Weyc's Wand (again, very important to not soul-bound it to a priest, despite priests getting a unique effect... it's not as good as the default effect), and possibly Otto Starcat and Stone of Power, you get +8 PL to your fire spells, up to +9 PL for Fan of Flames, Ray of Fire, and Torrent of Flame since they are evocation as well. That's an astounding +8 acc, +2 PEN, +40% damage (multiplicative!), +40% duration (multiplicative!). This is on top of any inherent PL scaling you already have, the +75% damage bonus from maxing out might at 35 (18 + 10 helwalker + 5 might inspiration + 1 maker's own power + 1 alchemy lab), +15 accuracy from dance with death, +10 accuracy from ring of focused flame, and a +100% duration bonus from having 30 intellect (20 base + 10 from duality of mortality). Not to mention that compared to a "normal" caster you have an additional +2 PEN on all your spells from either Champion's Boon or a Least Unstable Coil-triggered Energized inspiration. Against fire immune or fire absorbing enemies, you can fall back to be more of a conventional monk using Long Pain to attack safely from a distance and keeping your allies alive with heals. Iconic Projection is a decent heal that happens to also hurt enemies using frost damage, and Watchful Presence effectively gives everyone a death prevention shield with an automatic huge heal (all that PL scaling and might makes for a huge heal instead of death). All the bonus PL you get that is not fire-keyword-limited (from weyc's wand, nature godlike, and necklace of power) will supercharge your monk fists to do tons of damage. Because you have so much intellect, you can probably frequently use spellshaping to shrink your spell aoes for an additional +1 PL with minimal loss in coverage of enemies affected! Possible party members A chanter's old siec chanter will also work with spells cast, making the firedancer able to heal themselves for enormous amounts from spell casts. With shield cracks, a firedancer might be able to get even more damage out due to overpenetration. A paladin with shared flames can buff the firedancer with a +15% fire damage lash on their spells (which means multiplicative, which can also be stretched with salvation of time!). Complement with exalted focus for more damage, though be warned that only the 5% hit to crit will be useful since the +5 will be suppressed by your superior dance with death buff. Possible alternatives If someone discovers a wizard spell at tier 7 or lower that also triggers least unstable coil multiple times, a wizard (especially an evoker or blood mage) could be a viable replacement for the priest half. The only spell I haven't thought to try that might do this is Concelhaut's Crushing Doom. Druids can also do this with good aiming of Twin Stones, Venombloom, and I believe Returning Storm and Relentless Storm. Only problem is that in terms of pure fire damage output I find even a priest can do better than a druid, plus priests (and wizards) have an in-built way of stretching out the duration of Least Unstable Coil and the Weyc's Wand buff. But druids might have a better backup plan against fire immune or fire absorbing enemies compared to an all-in priest of magran. this build is optimized for RTwP, for turn-based mode you'd probalby want to drop dex in favor of perception. Ooblit might be more important so that you hit critical rounding breakpoints to have enough time to wreck as much as you can. edit: early on, when you have fewer spells, i recommend a) resting in the wild mare for +1 spell cast, or bathing in the bathhouse for a similar bonus and b) using quarterstaff, pike, or a ranged weapon so that your dance with death can accumulate you to high accuracy and might in relative safety.

I know this is not a good general solution, but do there exist localization mods for deadfire?

if you fully read my post, you would see that what i'm talking about are minor, capped rewards. Roleplaying games should encourage meaningful choices when roleplaying. Lacking proper reward loops isn't equity in choices, it actively makes certain choices punished because players have to put in more effort than other players for the same net reward; you are in effect punishing certain players for their preferences by a logic that is frequently obscured to them at the outset. Sometimes this lack of equity is meaningful within the narrative itself - like being good means turning down rewards so that "goodness is its own reward." Stuff like that. But I think typically the bigger risk is improper or insufficient reward loops. this is literally a line of argument i also make. (though here i reference far cry's use of generous rewards for being completely stealthy versus going in unseen to basically punish players who don't want to play a stealth game) i'm not actually sure what XP balance problem you're referencing? Again, I'm not talking about varying how much XP we get from quest rewards. That would be design suicide in my book, because then there obviously is a "correct" way to resolve each quest. My examples are the minor, capped "bestiary" rewards from kiling enemies, and the minor, capped "locks & traps" experience from picking locks and disarming traps, and--relevantly for this thread--the extremely minor incidental experience for passing a speech check in F:NV (in the 10s of experience, when quest completions can be on the order of thousands). in the long run these things don't matter at all for character advancement due to the sheer difference in magnitude, but in short bursts they are an acknowledgment that the player did something special, and in the minor instances where they make you level up a hair faster than someone else can feel very satisfying. edit: deadfire adds a lot more special one-off bestiary rewards for many bosses and boss-type enemies. i'm more dubious on that, but it's also still part of a reward loop.

ok, better example - benweth in deadfire. if you take the violent path you get some pretty rough (at least at the recommended level) fights and the loot is still pretty standard fare/minimal. out of all my runs, i did it twice. now i just always rig the piano to blow up.