thelee

yep. they won't even switch weapons. even then I sometimes don't even have AI enabled - mostly for casters with extremely slow ranged weapons equipped, so I'm not worried that they'll be stuck in recovery if I need a super important spell cast right then (like healing).

just starting to go through this myself, and had an extremely minor note here - unique armor "effigy's husk" (which is skaen-themed) can be upgraded to provide perception immunity. i thought it was a fun flavor effect that an all-in skaenite can use this armor and revenge of skaen and be protected from the spell's close-up effects. i don't mind the range change (the aoe is still huge so the perception immunity would still be helpful), but i would lightly recommend getting rid of the add'l -20 accuracy penalty just so that the flavor is retained. maybe if you think it needs a buff give it a longer aoe duration or something?

sorry for late response - but yeah, 5.0 was their last hurrah. they said they'd only be back for critical bugs, but i don't know what would qualify as "critical" (II had issues with macOS and catalina and got no response and had to figure something out myself).

When you give a command, the AI should be respecting that (the only exception is using potions/poisons). Worst-case scenario, you can press "X" (or whatever hotkey) to stop your character and that also stops their AI script until their "Aggressive/Defensive/Defend Self" trigger is kicked off (but even then there's a delay). Do you have any mods that might be interfering with that? Or are your characters being interrupted and you're not noticing? Do you have cooldowns on your script actions? Spoken as someone who's clocked 1000+ hours on this game with AI scripts and haven't had this issue (except again, with potions/poisons post-4.0). Though in all but a handful of my runs, I leave casters without any AI script (other than auto attack) because I want to be sure to micromanage every single spellcast decision, since the default scripts are mostly terrible and the default unmodded AI scripting really limits what you can do with spells and conditionals.

I would also recommend a ranger/priest of magran. Any priest can cast Champion's Boon on their pet, which gives +3 engagement targets (among other things). With Stalker's Link, your pet can hold up to 4 enemies and grant you a +10 accuracy bonus on all of them (plus any other accuracy and damage bonuses from being a ranger). Magran has extra nukes it can use that would be great to get a +10 accuracy bonus to. (Other priests can also do this, but Magran gets the extra nukes.) My favorite build still remains a streetfighter/wael multiclass, which is basically a glass cannon martial/caster (it's in the pinned build list as the "umezawa" build). There are plenty of ways to build glass cannon martial/casters, I just happen to like this one a lot because of its use of barring death's door and salvation of time in a way that doesn't involve a degenerate infinite combo. A trickster is a way to get a martial/caster multiclass without actually having to multiclass (you don't get as many spells as a true multiclass, but you also can spam level 8 spells which no multiclass can do).

to be fair, the beguiler effect is extremely powerful. Also @Elric Galad is right. The comparison point is not with subclass features, but with other talents. Remember that Keen Mind (at 5) only gives you +10 and in a non-trivial fight with the right setup (lots of aoe or multi-target powers), this could give you quite a bit more. Though frankly I didn't know about the 33% proc chance - in a perfect world it probably should be tuned up. They really should've made the effort to auto-generate the odds of something happening within their tooltips.

They can't This is probably the worst part of the enchant system in Deadfire. There's basically no indication in-game just how valuable Adra Ban is - it doesn't help that random scroll recipes also use up Adra Ban, so it doesn't seem like a finite ingredient, but for all intents and purposes it is. I definitely squandered the enchants (and scrolls) of my first couple runs just because I had no sense of how valuable certain materials are. Too bad this is extremely tedious to do. Also doesn't work if you're on an Eothas challenge. lolololol yep. Pyrite is another material that I have squandered in the past. It doesn't help that Pyrite is also subject to RNG drops from more normal enemies and chests (whereas Adra Ban RNG drops are pretty rare so it's pretty much a fixed commodity), so I didn't fully appreciate how valuable Pyrite was until a run with minor bad luck and no drops. It also doesn't help that you can't "skip over" upgrades. You could have all the materials to do a Superb, Legendary or Mythic upgrade, but if you don't have 2-4x or however many Pyrites to do a silly normal->Fine and/or a Fine->Exceptional upgrade (and/or Exceptional->Superb for the leg/mythic cases), you're stuck.

it's basically half of POTD. POTD: +15 enemy accuracy, +15 enemy defenses, +25% health, +2 PEN, +2 AR Veteran: +7 acc/defenses, +12% health, +1 PEN, +1 AR The encounters in PotD are also beefed up - I don't know the specifics of it.

That's actually a pretty ingeniusly simple solution. It gets rid of the most egregious combos and roughly balances martial and caster effects from brilliant. There are still a few disproportionately powerful spells to come back so easily but at this point it's probably a problem more with those spells. It's not perfect, but I think the simplicity is nice because it's easier to reason about and less brainspace to devote to the mechanics of it. Honestly if OBS had done that with brilliant, I'd be mostly happy with it as an inspiration.

lol i just had a zany thought about making it symmetric with a streetfighter. if flanked, or bloodied/below you get +50% recovery. if both, you also get some major other malus. just a silly idea that i liked from a flavor perspective (a streetfighter is reckless and wants to be flanked and/or hurt, but a tactician is super cautious and really hates both). i think you're right that hurt or below is better than bloodied or below. i think it also has the side effect of making the fighter regeneration more important for early parts of the fight. i would still think it's a good idea to double-check what happens to recovery upon repeated re-application of flanked. my concern is that you'd get an instant shot of extra recovery, with bad outcomes.

i'm not wild about it but understand there are probably difficulties and limitations with modding. it seems like ideally it'd be something related to the interrupt ability that a tactician has, just so it's one less thing to remember. "or afflicted" might be a bit too chaotic. I'm thinking about persistent distraction enemies. I'm also thinking about random incidental afflictions. What was "neat" about tactician was that flanked status was one you could largely manage (except for perception afflictions and very very occasionally an enemy cipher with phantom foes), which really lent itself to the "tactician" aspect of a tactician. Including all afflictions seems like it dilutes that and makes it more like a random debuff that is outside your control. there might also be a mechanical issue, because ISTR that recovery penalties from things like blind are applied immediately, but recovery bonuses from blind wearing off or streetfighter kicking in don't occur until the next recovery. i'm worried that in a typical mid-to-late game fight where afflictions might be flying around, even the best dispelling/avoidance stuff will still be murked up with persistent +50% recovery penalty even if you nominally have nothing on you. my own suggestion would just be "flanked => +50% recovery". it seems punishing enough, and flanked status is a bit less murky and more controllable that the lag time in avoiding a recovery penalty might be less bad. If you haven't tried it out, though, it seems like something worth testing, because there might also be potential extremely bad outcomes of interrupting a persistent distraction enemy - the moment you get flanked you'd get +50% recovery penalty, and i'm not sure what would happen if you interrupted the enemy (which causes them to drop persistent distraction on you temporarily) - your recovery would likely not be restored in that interim, and i don't know what would happen once the flanked status is re-applied.

is this solely an inconsistency with keyword interactions like fire/water, or is this also implicitly true about antidote v poison and inspirations/afflictions and it's just not noticable because the hostile/non-hostile part is generally correct?

mm, nope.

I'm actually going to hazard a guess that it doesn't benefit from confident aim. The fact that it gets a +2 PEN from haymaker I think is just an artifact of an implementation detail that also lets it benefit from Monastic Unarmed Training. (I think it's just a bit or keyword that gets set) I suspect it would function more like Rot Skulls or druid spiritshift claws, which have no explicit weapon type, and therefore wouldn't benefit from confident aim.

ah lol i misread that statement

note: devs ain't coming back to check on bugs, it's just us here. uh oh - have you done this on a plain beguiler? has this always been bugged and we've never noticed?

unfortunately i think you either have to juice up with a faction to get their special ukaizo-trip-survival-thing, or you have to get the special hull and sails, which used to be just an items you could buy, but now is a mini-quest in and of itself to find the different components.

Hard disagree. Due to how Holy Radiance scales in PoE1 (or doesn't scale, for that matter), a mainchar priest is worlds better than an NPC priest. You can literally 100+ damage to vessels and massive amounts of healing (with extra feats to make it even more extreme) on a mainchar, whereas it'll always be sorta medicore on Durance or anyone you recruit. from my poe1 guide:

an example here is the beach you wake up on. if you go get beodul first, you'll be forced into an aggressive option to tell him to get out of the cave. even with all UI options enabled, there doesn't appear to be any other dialogue choice. if, however, you go rescue the other pirate stuck on the ship first, she'll create a fire, and when you go to rescue beodul, you'll have an extra, non-aggressive option to tell him to go wait by the fire. i'm guessing because that option isn't linked to a skill or background or class or stat, it doesn't count for "show unqualified interactions", but it definitely exists. but again, to your point, such things are not telegraphed well to the player. but suffice to say i don't think i've ever played a priest variant where i was truly forced into an uncharacteristic dialogue option (this does mean giving up on certain "optimal" quest resolutions, though).

sorry if i skipped over this in the replies, but why +3 ? i'm not altogether convinced that there needs to be any resource regen from ancestor's memory. +3 PL is nice on its own, and meshes particularly well with casters, monks, anyone with monastic unarmed training, and to a lesser extent rogues and barbarians. if there is a resource to be regenned, maybe just +1 from the initial cast, or a random level 1-3 spell ? Svef and a few foods also basically eliminate tactician's dilemma downside. I personally do not feel that this is a big deal, because a drawback that requires metagaming to mitigate is still a cost (whether a perk point or specific item usage). Is there a way to have a cooldown on the resource regen? Like, interrupt restores one discipline, but once every 12 seconds or so an interrupt also restores a class resource. Or, interrupt restores one of each class resource unconditionally, but can only occur once every twelve seconds. It would still sort of keep the "feel" of the tactician without it necessarily being degenerate with things like Slicken or Clear Out. Might be too complicated a mechanic. Just spitballing.

good find, @Elric Galad! it means that if one wants to regen a level 9 spell it matters all the more to specifically game it, since this means you potentially have a brutal 1/27 chance of getting it back (worst case of having cast a spell from each spell level).

1. I don't know. I would console it into a test game and give it a try. I ran it with a fighter/berath and it seemed to work for something like mule kick, but you can never be too certain (I believe in fact some other effects did not get the bonus). 2. indirectly - might impacts the damage you do, which increases the healing you get from steel garrote/old siec. unbending, on the other hand, is only affected by intellect (though with decent intellect and/or salvation of time and/or wall of draining, unbending can give you super healing). 3. i think @Boeroer tested it, and amra does give you the exgtra carnage, but it's much weaker than a bararian's actual carnage (which scales with PL). 4. if you have an existing frenzy in place, amra's frenzy won't stack - it's like another active effect. if you have spirit frenzy/blood frenzy/berserker, i think amra's frenzy will just fail to apply (in the combat log it might say "stronger effect already exists") 5. yes. even weapon modals get a boost from int

part of what make mule kick great is that it *always* knocks up the enemy upon a graze, regardless of whether or not it actually "interrupted" the enemy (unlike prone). this can be misleading. if the enemy has concentration, or is immune to interrupts, they'll get knocked up by a mule kick (and lose a concentration if any), but they won't be "interrupted" to qualify for the discipline resource regen, despite the fact that you literally interrupted something they were trying to do (and in some cases the AI will abandon the ability it tried to use, just as if you had actually interrupted it). i suspect that might be what you're running into, more than timing. again, this is why supplementing tactician with another class or using an aoe weapon works great.

hm, yes that is very true. i suppose i assumed they were trying to be roughly symmetric (roughly like attributes) but failed. but i think i can sleep better at night thinking that they never tried to be symmetric in the first place

sure. it doesn't even need to be an AL9 spell. if the #1 spell you need to cast is another slicken, then that's what you're better off doing. in magic: the gathering there are plenty of effects that cost you mana and a card to get another card. they can be extremely powerful because they effectively thin your deck into the cards you actually want. similarly, a psion with ancestor's memory is an extra copy of N number of your best spells and effects and the cost is minimal (hence why i keep saying psion instead of generic cipher - psions have close to absolute resource generation, whereas a normal cipher has greater possibilities of getting screwed and unable to generate focus). They are your best spells and effects regardless of what they actually are - you can decide at the time what they are, whether it's just to spam some high level wizard spells, start off a priest combo, or just give your fighter/rogue extra interrupts. I'm not making an absolute argument here. Changing brilliant down (or increasing the cost somehow) reduces that N and can bring it into line: at 12s (or with restrictions) it's merely very good instead of the best cipher power available. Even just making it AL9 (that would constitute increasing the cost) would make it more balanced simply because you limit it to single-class ciphers (on top of the extra focus cost). (edit - but this all still dodges around the fact that Brilliant is the only tier 3 inspiration that requires such balancing - i would argue virtually noone would think a 12second robust inspiration with cast time on a single ally target would be so very good as an AL9 cipher effect) edit - as a historical note for the unaware, Brilliant used to regen a resource every 3 seconds. Imagine this on a chanter invocation that affects your entire party and one a multiclass chanter could even pick up - chanters in 1.0 were stupid (along with all items and consumables being OP). Given how much I generally respect JE Sawyer and the OBS crew, it was frankly stunning that anyone thought this was remotely balanced at any point. The six-second resource was the extent of OBS's efforts to balance it for when it came back as Ancestor's Memory. i appreciate this perspecitve but i want to use an analogy to blizzard's balancing efforts. they recognize that there are multiple "levels" of play, ranging from just-starting to esports-player. Different skill levels will get wildly different things out of e.g. starcraft 2 or warcraft 3 - rookie or lower-level players may play games/units/strategies that don't even register for esports players. They don't skimp out on a nerf or a buff that affects one tier if such skimping negatively impacts another tier. similarly - even if there are many (even most) people who are really unable to take advantage of a degenerate combo, it doesn't mean we should just ignore it if it poisons the metagame at the top. the best solution would in fact be to tweak tactician s.t. it still gets great rewards for newer/rookie players while not being degenerate for min-maxers. this is what shops like blizzard (and to a certain extent wizards of the coast) do when they're at their best - going back to magic: the gathering, wizards will make tons of cards they know will have no impact whatsoever on pro constructed play because they know it'll work great in scenes that lower-skill or more casual players play in (like commander, drafts, pauper, etc). but i would argue even without resource regen, tacticians really have a great ability already - fighter resource regen on an interrupt. this even works great in multiclass. though this all really hypothetical anyway because OBS isn't going to do any balance patching here, so like you say we're just talking about making voluntary balance mods.