thelee

a bit of a thread necro but responding to Masticator and touching on something SenSx said months ago - personally speaking I played both BG1 and 2 when they came out. While i Iiked BG1 i could not get into it long enough to get past Nashkel mines. For some reason I picked up BG2 at release and then played it to death and only then did i go back to BG1 and enjoy it for its own sake (with a better appreciation of AD&D). I think BG1 is a lot more "old-school" RPG [meaningless random encounters galore! lots of early permadeath opportunities] and more tabletop-grounded, whereas BG2 did a lot more modern video game design innovations and polished the tabletop edges more. So BG1 is probably going to be rougher to get into from a modern standpoint, even with enhanced edition. I actually prefer BG1 these days precisely because of these old school charms, it's a pretty different experience. (Ironically that's the exact opposite dynamic with PoE and Deadfire, PoE1 feels more old school and traditional and I prefer Deadfire precisely because it feels a lot more modern and polished.)

i tried to double check some notes and my own guide and it's somewhere a bit below 1.5s. below that i had too much difficulty coordinating my clicks and timer to get an accurate measurement, so it's somewhere there. that might be low enough that you don't normally hit it unless you're also investing in dex and have some other action speed or recovery time bonuses on top of DW + rapid reload so you might be fine with imbued ammo.

might need to pay attention to what's actually happening in-game here. the attack speed penalty for imbued bullets might help the cap here, but from personal testing, there is a minimum reload time for all guns (despite what the attack/recovery tooltip might say) which corresponds to a bare minimum time spent in actual reload animation. it's pretty easy to hit this minimum reload time with DW + rushed reload with cloth/light armor, ignoring dex or other boosts. so, if you're hitting this level of speed or close to hitting this level of speed already with just either DW or rushed reload, then you're hurting your accuracy without any actual gain. but it's possible imbued bullets is enough of a penalty that you still benefit. again, needs some actual timing of in-game shots.

to add, none of the exhortations can target self. they are all only allies, which is unfortunate from a solo perspective.

i don't think you have a good way to do this, even perusing the "more custom ai conditions." your best bet is to add a cooldown, but it's not going to be perfect. i'm guessing you're trying to use bonded fury when there's no inspiration active on your animal companion. but there doesn't appear to be a way to sniff for a specific inspiration or affliction on a target in conjunction with an ability that doesn't take a target (like bonded fury), and also there's no way to specify a condition that only looks at your animal companion afaict.

iirc wizard's double requires an actual hit, but in practice this includes any and all things not just damaging effects (so like enemy chant auras). it's been a while since i tried to use it though, but i remember it being underwhelming in certain situations (with lots of ticking effects).

wow really? i do have some longish cooldowns (i think 120s i the longest i do), but i guess i've never really paid too much attention to how it triggers in successive fights in dense areas.

I wonder if one could AI script this? Something like 1. Always True -> Attack (cooldown of like 999 seconds) 2. Always True -> Switch to Weapon Set 2 (cooldown of like 999 seconds) 3. Always True -> Attack (etc) 4. Always True -> Switch to Weapon Set 3 (etc) 5. Always True -> Attack (etc) 6. Always True -> Switch to Weapon Set 4 (etc) with the idea that the AI script moves down the list with each check. Anyway, I agree that this might be of limited value past early/mid game. I found this handy with Kana in PoE1 (who started with extra weapon slot) because enemy health tended to be lower and encounters shorter (albeit more frequent) and you could easily take out or severely injure one enemy before settling into one weapon for the rest of the fight, and snowball it from there. In Deadfire encounters are long and enemy health way higher, it's quite the ability point/equipment tax for only a small boost that's only relevant early on. if your'e going with the stealth/ambush angle, you might want ghost-heart just to avoid having to worry about stealthing or keeping your animal companion out of combat.

Sorry this isn’t too definitive, but I seem to remember similar such effects (like Blade Turning) triggering on non-weapon melee attacks like from beasts or blights however, it won’t work against ranged attacks in melee range. Confusingly, some “melee” attacks are actually ranged attacks with short range, or are spell-like abilities and also won’t work. no easy general rule I don’t think.

coming in late to the chatter here, but my top choices for scroll use: monk: dance with death => +15 acc with scrolls +2 PEN from thunderous blows swift strikes gives you action speed bonus (separate from not-relevant dexterity bonus) fighter tactical barrage gives you 50% graze to hit and +1 PL to scrolls (though maybe mathematically disciplined strikes is better, getting 25% hit to crit instead of +1 PL) conqueror stance gives you +10 acc with scrolls ranger subclass arcane archer is basically meant to be a scroll user. for benefiting scroll use in particular you have marked prey and your various other accuracy bonuses. not sure what specifically you're getting from furyshaper that you saw. action speed sure but that is probably the least important for good scroll use. basically IME accuracy is the biggest impediment to good scroll use, with penetration being second place. monk solves both problems, fighter and ranger solves one problem. (the accuracy problem).

if I have a spare-ish point I’ll pick up one for the defense that the character already is doing very well in. often, if I have a character that picks up weapon and shield style then the reflex one tends to also make sense. for a wizard, bc I rely on grimoire switching a lot, I have tons of skill points, and I’ll try to pick them all up.

Ah I actually once again misread your change. im sure the 1s tick will help but if you’re able to stack on the stacks a 1/3 division of damage only delays the inevitable. If we want to actually reign in that inevitable, a shorter duration would make it a lot harder to accumulate such a high number of stacks. maybe a harsher cut in duration coupled with your ticking changes? 3s plus 1s ticks? Can boost the damage to compensate for non-degenerate cases.

What if the duration of the damage debuff was reduced? You could even buff the actual damage. thats why it becomes absurd, because wit enough int and/or enemy resolve debuffs (or enfeebled) you can cause the dot stack to re trigger way too easily. A lower base duration would make it harder to do this edit: I’m an illiterate dummy; I missed Elric’s post that was exactly this suggestion 🙃

unlike a wall you can have as many aoe effects active as you want. each tick of venombloom only adds one CW stack, but you can have 2x venombloom, 2x wicked briars, a wall of your choice, 1x nature's terror (unclear to me if you can double-up), 2x relentless storm, and then whatever random aoe effects you bring over from wizard (though i don't recall if combusting wounds gets cancelled by ice effects); you also have more ways to debuff fortitude and resolve. when i melted neriscyrlas with my theurge it was because fassina landed a combusting wounds when i had a lot of druid aoes active, the CW ticks skyrocketed very quickly. (i think i might have crashed my game once due to too many stacks related issue when the fight ended) agree to disagree, but i think the best thing a wizard can do is spam interrupts, mostly slicken, and concelhaut's hammer, and debuff. maybe against the oracle or the memory hoarder in FS who are immune to interrupts.

eh, this is kind of an interesting point. i'm not sure if i know how to properly express myself in this respect. back in IWD, it was like the optimal way to play to slather the ground with web, entangle, whatnot and just nuke enemies to death with fireballs and such. it was so optimal that it was boring, and if you didn't do that, you felt super weak by comparison. CW is very very very good, but I don't feel like i'm nerfing myself by not doing it. and i don't think it's so good that it warps gameplay, it requires a lot of support to be good in most situations. though as you point out (and i hadn't considered) that a loremaster kinda covers much of that, with AR debuffing and fort debuffing and resolve debuffing (and maybe even PEN boosting with the energized inspiration). maybe we can say CW is a good trick in the bag for a loremaster. (probably also a sorcerer, if we're excluding entire party setups) for my typical party, when I have CW access, it is a nice damage boost, but it is not absurd w/out having to put more work into it. in that respect it definitely punches above its weight, but it's not on the same level as Salvation of Time or Brilliant in how easily it lifts the party and how consciously I have to avoid using them if I want the game to play "fair."

CW is very very very good, but as far as cheese goes, IMO it's actually kind of niche. You need to warp your party a little bit to take advantage of it the most, and even then you still need to actually land CW, which targets fortitude (so a bit non-trivial to do), which bosses tend to have loads of, and on PotD you really need PEN boosts or AR debuffs to get it to work best (and resolve debuffs to make it work better even still). Plus, it's very one-note - it only lets you do one thing. Which gets boring after a while. In terms of cheese you can do a lot better with greater versatility. That being said, watching a boss's health bar deplete rapidly in real time is neat to watch.

neat, so there actually is a benefit to the evoker echo and a magran marux amanth echo on flame shield. not exactly a ton of damage but still something

i think this is kind of the limits of some types of theorycrafting. i think we're trying to come with "average" cases and coming up with different things, but what that average means really constitutes a lot of wild variance. for example, when i was thinking of EAB, my main mental model was against bosses and megabosses where penetration is a huge concern and consistent crits out of the realm of possibility. so having steady raw damage (extra raw damage from extra bullets and extra generous damage even on grazes from imbued bullets; i don't know what the pen on the imbued bullets are, but istr that i was doing full damage against dorudugan, so it's clearly generous or at least has generous scaling) is very good. obviously it seems that depending on the setup EAB doesn't perform as obviously good (even mediocre). maybe we should try to break down into more specific scenarios and talk about that? e.g. low defense/AR situations, high AR situations, 1v1, 1vmany? (in a truly min-max situation, instead of picking one weapon, we'd switch weapons depending on the situation)

that's pretty true. what also helps is that EAB can do the single-weapon-style + pistol modal trick (really effective with the special bullets thanks to that inversion math on the recovery time bonus) that other ranged weapons would be hard-pressed to compete with. maybe EAB isn't a good baseline because it's too good 🫠. it would even be better on maia than any other player-created SC ranger for the bonus interrupts. so i guess it's like "ok, for your first ranged attacker, it's hard to do better than EAB with crits. but if you have a second ranged attacker, then crits become better"

For non-warbows, I do think penetration is a rather important factor for crits on PotD. Warbows get a modal for PEN so suffer less, but still take an overall dps hit. but otherwise, yeah, also most of the accuracy stuff can be had by MC anyway and then your accuracy bins can synergies with other stuff. In terms of crits, SC’s main advantage imo is getting the passive that lets you interrupt on a crit, which gives crit non-damage utility in stuff like boss fights.

it sounded like what they were saying is that the ironskin and spiritshield would still trigger, which was confusing. it seems unlikely that there would be two different types of health triggers. regardless, upon reflection, i doubt the item is implemented in a way that you could one shot yourself and still get BDD up.

that's weird, so even after a fresh rest, you'll just blow past the barring death's door? are you willing to change your party just to bring a priest along? vatnir or xoti, or roll your own. then you can have them manually cast BDD, while you blast yourself with wilting wind.

i don't think it's listed anywhere in-game, but the barring death's door trigger (as well as the other ones) for nemnok's cloak functions only one per rest, so you'd have to rest in between doing this.

adding onto this - on paper do1000c can do crazy things, but when i actually ran a party with a SC cipher that did this (i think ydwin) it was extremely underwhelming. on most enemies and in most fights, it's completely overkill - a disintegrate is cheaper and will do basically the same thing. i would rather disintegrate more enemies than try to set up a single do1000c + antipathetic field on one target (that's almost enough for a second disintegrate). (edit: i guess with an ascendant you could do a lot more dumping of do1000c on enemy mobs, but you could also do other insane stuff with an ascendant and i'm not sure do1000c spamming is the best use of it) on most bosses, it's close to overkill as well - a disintegrate is cheaper and requires less setup. it's really, really painful to miss or even graze do1000c, and then you actually need some enemy to help trigger a shred combo - or you need to somehow be generating tons of focus and consistently landing a different shred spell... it's kind of a waste of a cipher's action economy honestly. in the end it was mostly just useful as a secondary disintegrate for after when i'd already hit disintegrate and other debuffs on the boss. also it's lame that the tier 3 beam spell is tagged as echo and not shred

the hand mortar-style blunderbusses should apply weapon/rogue abilities in aoe, though i haven't tested it recently, i know it got buggy at some point but the final patch should've fixed it. @Boeroer is probably the resident expert on WotEP mechanics, so i'm tagging 'em for visibility.