thelee

yeah, that's just a question i can't answer. i just can't reconcile how i think about the tactician with a general fighter rank. sorry

to your latter point, that's exactly the reasoning I'm trying to avoid. A tactician doesn't make a fighter a game-breaking or overloaded class, because the typical fighter is nothing like a tactician. put another way, the category A and category B distinction is a false one. Tactician is so warping, that one chooses within the leveling tree before choosing the leveling tree. When I pick a tactician, it's almost accidental that I end up with a fighter, I'm picking specifically the tactician and it just so happens I end up with a fighter's skill tree. I have to adjust my earlier statement. While Skaen is really good, in retrospect what actually made is game-breaking in particular was multiclassing with, once again, Tactician, which let you recur Shadowing Beyond and BDD and SoT infinitely (also withdraw early on before shadowing beyond or in some other situations). Shadowing Beyond is still pretty good with the strand of favor cheese that eventually got discovered, but yeah it's really the tactician that enables skaen to be extremely good. Restoring resources with interrupt is extremely good and on its own is pretty overtuned. But the payoff for tactician brilliant is so good that it would warp a party into enabling it... which on the one hand is kind of the intent of the class design, but on the other hand is the problem of the class design, that the pay-off is so amazing that it's worth managing the rest of your party to enable it. that being said, even if you do nothing else, tacticians in a party are S-tier in any boss fight situation. it's basically trivial to flank a boss and then not be flanked yourself (though you may need to get a source of perception resistence for bosses that have persistent distraction), and then of course you have basically infinite interrupts to go along with your briliant.

it is essentially an arbitrary judgment call, but the idea is that the subclass is so transformative, that it needs to be handled as a special case. having tactician pull up the fighter into overloaded (if that's the basis) isn't representative of the "typical" fighter experience. it's basically a... sort of statistical artifact where tactician breaks the game so thoroughly it drags up the "average" fighter score, but the typical-non-tactician will have a much different experience. there's also a flip side where a particular subclass is just awful, but it shouldn't be used to discuss the class because you can just avoid the subclass. off the top of my head: tactician (busted) blood mage (obscenely good) mage slayer, corpse eater (extremely lame, notably worse than typical barbarian experience) skaen (notably better than typical priest experience) forbidden fist (wildly different from a monk, even if it might fit into the same tier) maybe it can be argued skaen isn't better enough, that it's mostly just better at a particular niche (solo-ing the game in a defensive manner), but i def stand by the first three bullet points. especially tactician. a tactician is just so unlike a fighter and enables so much cheese that it deserves a cordon sanitaire when discussing the fighter.

coming late to the discussion (that's what i get for being out of the country for a couple weeks), but have you considered pulling out just a certain subset of subclasses and treating them as full-fledged classes in this tier list? most subclasses aren't transformative, but some truly are. for example, i don't think fighter is overloaded, but tactician is game breaking, to the point that i actually do not touch it in any of my runs outside of the ultimate. similarly, there's chatter about priest being broken, but i honstly don't think priest deserves to be above "overloaded" unless we're specifically talking skaen, which is the only priest subclass that was used in any ultimate run that a priest popped up in.

the wiki seems deficient. there's supplemental books to both poe1 and poe2 that were part of backer content, maybe you can find pdfs, that can lend more insight into the lore. there's also additional lore dumps in-game. most notably, in FS, one of the "redacted" books you find talks about the orlan empire a tantlizingly brief bit (something like "they built an empire on compassion and for that they were punished")

do you happen to have a screenshot from when you tried? it's possible it might be coded wrong and doesn't have a 0 innate power level.

i dunno what "ACT" stands for here. but i think the two big problems is that 1) it would be too chaotic, and 2) a lot of the more interesting tactical plays really only work as an artifice of turn-based mode. as an example of the 2): you can shove enemies off cliffs because they're just patiently waiting for their turn. in RTwP they would be running towards you, the window of time to do a fatal shove is like a fraction of a second. another example (with a direct analogue to deadfire): blowing up barrels or creating surfaces near/on enemies. in deadfire, there are actually those essence batteries and barrels stuff that you can try to blow up, but they are mostly practically impossible to use in the intended manner. you have to basically tank an enemy right next to one of them, in such a way where your tanker is out of range but the enemy is not, because otherwise you have like 1 second to blow up the battery/barrel before the enemy gets out of range. in BG3, if an enemy is standing next to an explosive hazard, that enemy will politely wait for their turn while you explode it. as for the chaos in 1), as it stands a lot of people already struggle with RTwP. my honest take on this is that it's a skill issue - people aren't pausing nearly as aggressively as they "should." but ultimately the gamer is right because the gamer is the customer. if you add a bunch of environmental interactions and effects, you start to demand an awful lot from the player.

i think if you resolve Storms of Poko Kohara, you can resolve Terms of Trae later w/out having explicitly gotten it yet since it's tied up with the resolution of the adra crystal.

i continue to find it frankly baffling that some folks can actually play the game fair (even for just the earlier parts of the game) when solo. neat build

this. i've definitely had some builds that were objectively good but just mind-numbingly boring to play because they were so uninteractive. i had no problem abandoning them. the biggest one was a barbarian+fury that was geared up with PLs and every fight would just go frenzy -> all relentless storm -> all returning storm and then just dump out any the other spells. there just wasn't much to it at all, not even much movement, and there wasn't much enemies could specifically do to require decision-making on my part other than being lightning immune. one of my early builds i posted around was the streetfighter+priest of wael combo ("umezawa" build i called it) and that stands out in contrast to the above of not only being a good build but also a blast to play because of how interactive it was.

well, the question can't be answered by directly comparing abilities and tiers between games, the question really has to be answered by how the classes actually perform within the context of their games. relative to poe1, i don't think druids had anything remotely like tier 9 spells in terms of overall impact in poe1, which makes them better in poe2. same thing with their heals - in poe1 their heals had problems with not stacking with each other or with vaguely similar abilities (barbarian regen and even fighter recovery iirc), whereas in deadfire they stack with everything if they're not just robust inspirations, which makes them much better as healers in deadfire. maybe it's different? i definitely ended up installing the BPM (bugfixes only) as a fix, and it's listed as one of the things that it fixes. it could be that the priest of berath spell always worked correctly.

tier 6 priest is better than anything because that's where they Salvation of Time which unlocks so much cheese . if you play fairly, I think tier 6 druid is still very very good. venombloom and garden of life are primo. rot skulls is great if you install the deadfire BPM (bugfixes at least) so it doesn't have 0 PEN. the other spells are still decent (i made a lot of use of blights in one of my last runs, they come with repeating abilities that can be very handy; sunlance isn't as good as in poe1 (no lash) but still can do a great amount of single-target damage). you're right that tier 8 you pretty much only have avenging storm in practice, but even if you play it "fairly" it's very very good IMO. the reason why pollen patch is so good is because if you empower it while wearing least unstable coil, each heal tick procs another inspiration (and you can proc extra heal ticks through some interactions with movement), eventually netting you brilliant. and the way empower on buffs works, if you re-cast pollen patch normally, the game still "remembers" the original empowered status, so you have a built-in perpetual resource regeneration. great for solo, extremely great in parties (since the entire time you're proccing inspirations you're also healing your party). if you play fairly, not too useful solo, but still very very good for parties, it's an immense amount of total healing that also revives, great for longer fights (where greater maelstrom might not finish off the fight). tornado is still a great level 9 spell, it's just that it gets utterly demolished by greater maelstrom (as does pretty much any other spell IMO in terms of ending fights). if you want to do something "different" it's still a great alternative choice. i think the only real loser is the shapeshifting one at tier 9.

i have strong disagreements with this. Great Maelstrom, Tornado, Pollen Patch are absolutely abusively powerful tier 9 spells. A single-class druid can carry a party in the way a single-class monk can. They're so powerful they honestly make the game boring, even on PotD with challenges. Avenging Storm is obviously very cheesy. The only tier I think there are gaps is tier 7.

either/or. this unfortunately has been an issue since 1.0, believe me i've personally reported it multiple times. even without modifiers, the damage that seals do in practice is under what the base tooltip is. i think the root cause is that seals create hazard effects, and hazards are handled really really really weird in the game. Walls are also hazards and behave weirdly (like they get partial assassinate bonuses from assassin and don't break stealth), but seals in particular are very weird because walls at least do their stated damage. The biggest thing is that yes, they do a fraction of the tooltip damage, and I don't know why. For this reason they are mostly useful for their secondary effects (prone for repulsing, interrupt for warding, and blind for searing) and the ability to cast them from stealth outside of combat (which lets you refresh a spell slot).

hi, i don't think your question makes sense? You have to go through Berath in order to start Deadfire.

slight thread necro, but Kingmaker and especially Wrath of the Righteous are extremely inaccessible IMO. Very relentless curve to learn the extremely complicated mechanics quickly and very punishing for suboptimal builds. Some people are really into that aspect, though. I ended up having to watch a ton of youtube build videos (despite being familiar with 3/3.5e, the PF1e ancestors) because I was getting extremely overwhelmed by the mechanics and decision points. i only played a couple of casual 5e sessions, but imo BG3 is better thought of as an immersive sim RPG (immersive sim = think like the Prey remake which had very open mechanics and world exploration) that just happens to have a D&D 5e flavor, than a D&D 5e game. Lots of very important mechanics that are Larian specials and not D&D rules (the massive interactions with surfaces of various types, extreme verticality, interesting itemization [I don't think stuff like Lightning Charges or Arcane Acuity are D&D]). Even when they are D&D rules, Larian adapts them in a way that make them pretty special or distinct (jumping is a lot easier, the extreme verticality makes athletics a very valuable skill, etc). Combat in BG3 is legit great and is a great argument for turn-based, i don't think it could possibly work as well in RTwP. edit: put another way, if I spend an hour in a single battle in pathfinder crpgs, or classic BG, it's extremely annoying or something has gone really badly. Spending an hour in combat in Deadfire or BG3: very satisfying.

as i mentioned chain lightning will not bounce back to enemies you've already hit. So if there are three enemies: A, B, C and you target A, chain lightning will bounce to B and then to C and then be unable to find another target it hasn't already hit, and give up. some abilities will bounce repeatedly. If you cast firebug, then what will happen is: you target A, firebug will bounce to B, and then to C, and then bounce again randomly to A or B and then again, and then again, etc until all bounces are exhausted. So the number of bounces you see on the tooltip for Chain Lightning is not what you'll see in practice, unless there are lots of enemies. Some abilities bounce to enemies they've already hit, some don't, there's no real pattern, and there's no way to really know without just manually testing.

if you're playing assassin, i might actually suggest might instead of perception (or skip both and just do dexterity). Sneak attack doesn't boost druid DoT damage, and the assassinate bonus will make up for deficiencies in accuracy, just make sure you hit enemies from stealth and only use smoke veil or potions of invisibility (don't use shadowing beyond in combination with spells, it's very flaky, see here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/invisibility-vs-stealth or the assassin section here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/rogue) but intellect is definitely highest priority. i've actually been thinking of doing a similar build myself, and personally i think i'd move away from the lance or the spine despite the overall druid benefits. there are some other stat sticks to use that might be more in sync with a rogue's martial capabilities, like griffin's blade (enchanted to offer +10% spell damage) or azure blade (ancient's mushroom summons will help keep the accuracy bonus procced, and the interrupt chance works with spells: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/126748-list-of-weapons-whose-properties-are-not-limited-to-themselves-ii/) though if you do stick with druid's reliable quarterstaff or pike weapons, they might make for good backstab candidates

it's very possible that the PL adjustment is applied directly to the roll. This happens with martial abilities most obviously (the ones that say "full attack" or "primary attack"), if you empower them there's no evidence of a damage boost in the combat log calculations but you'll definitely be rolling numbers well outside what should be possible. i haven't tested scrolls extensively, but ISTR that they should be getting all the correct PL bonuses and it might be that they just get the damage adjustments directly to their rolls. it's cumulative with inversions, which is similar (but not as strong as) to combining multiplicatively. So the last bounce will be really weak. (This hurts the druid's Firebug a lot, which has a -25% malus, so after just a few bounces you're doing piddling damage.) IIRC, all bounce effects in Deadfire continue to bounce even if one bounce misses. This is different from PoE1 where a miss would stop all bouncing (very annoying). However, abilities in Deadfire vary on whether or not they are allowed to re-affect an enemy they already hit. Chain Lightning will not bounce back to an enemy it already hit, so very often you'll get way fewer hits than you expect. (By contrast, the aforementioned Firebug will happily bounce back to foes it already hit, which helps make up for its massive malus.) If I had to hazard a guess, I would say most bounce effects re-affect an enemy, Chain Lightning is just among a handful of exceptions, probably for balance reasons (I would guess Cleansing Flame also doesn't re-affect enemies).

note - OP is asking about BG1 and 2, not BG3.

no kidding. dorudugan has just collapsed from being a tough puzzle to crack for any given party, to being the easiest megaboss, that literally any setup can take on (with enough time). no needing to worry about resource management or generation, or stacking on defenses or accuracy bonuses, or timing knock ups, dodging fireballs, etc

"many lives" is a chant that automatically plays, bypassing normal action economy and recovery. so you'll be creating skeletons even if you're busy weapon switching (albeit weak skeletons).

To me, it's very very hard to compare the games. They're basically separated by decades. BG1 & 2 are great games, but even the enhanced editions really show their age. BG1's writing is pretty torturous (a lot of faux-middle-ages dialogue), and you'll do tons of aimless wandering through identical-looking and vast, empty wilderness (i basically keep a walkthrough open so i know where to go on any map for the interesting stuff). BG2 has much better writing and better area design, but the system is just creakingly dated compared to more modern CRPGs. to the actual meat of the question, you should just go for Deadfire for now. Then if you're still hankering for more party-based iso-style CRPGs, I would do Wrath of the Righteous or Kingmaker. And if you're still trying to scratch the itch, then go for Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. like xzar_monty said, even if you play a lot of these games to death, there's only a handful of them with no time horizon for more, so you'll probably eventually find your way to Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 in the end. though personally I would skip straight to 3 unless you really want the isometric experience.

wow awesome. this might be the easiest dorudugan tech yet. you don't even need blackjacket for this, am i right? because unlike the recovery reduction stuff, you don't care whether or not your blackjacket (or whomever) ever gets a turn again, you're just dedicating whomever has this weapon to just perma-extending the recovery of the enemy, even if they're forever stuck trying to recover from weapon switching.

i don't understand these. what do you mean "riposte"? and what do you mean "engagement bonus will stop enemies at range?"