thelee

crazy idea - try advancing the main quest a bit? a lot of people hav ecompalined about random events in nekataka not triggering, but it turned out some of them are gated behind main quest progress - i had a long time of no events, advanced the main quest, and then suddenly had a bunch. mutiny seems like an odd thing to be gated behind story, but you never know i got a mutiny once, but it was a while ago. unfortunately, due to regressions that popped up especially from 4.0->5.0 i would not be surprised if they broke mutiny as a mechanic and it's such an underexplored area no one noticed.

yeah, i missed je sawyer's reputation stream earlier so i just watched it now, and hearing him talk about the general approach to disco elysium got me excited about the possibilities, precisely for what you are talking about. i imagined a hypothetical world where you were trying to convince the bardattos and valeras to negotiate in deadfire, and you'd hover over the threshold indicator and see you getting like +1 because of diplomacy skill, -1 for resolving a quest badly, -1 because you're a goody two-shoes Benevolent and valeras hate that, +1 for keeping the duelists alive earlier, etc. i think an indirect benefit to a system like that is that designers and writers can focus their attention a lot more on specific mechanical checks and how things feed into that and really get the balancing right, versus a more abstracted system. so you get greater reactivity out of a few important impactful checks, rather than a diffuse, easy to max out system that sometimes seems a bit arbitrary or low-impact.

the problem is that the player-reward loop is pretty important. i remember in the early poe backer beta it was extremely annoying that you didn't get any XP at all from fighting monsters, which made everything feel like an utter waste of time (on top of most loot being uninteresting). the compromise approach of using bestiary to give you experience for a little bit was a good one, imo. there's a similar compromise with traps in deadfire - there's some "max" amount of xp you can get from traps and lockpicking in a given area and after a while you max out. so player who invest in these skills sufficiently are trained up a bit with rewards, but players who bypass it don't miss out on that much. in all the newer fallouts, the experience you get from passing speech checks is pretty minor, so it will never be a huge amount of xp, but rewards players who make the extra effort to do something that is by definition not normal (since you need to pass a skill check). however this works much better in new vegas than in save-scum fallout 3/4, and in new vegas reading a magazine and taking a drug just so you can get over a threshold makes getting that tiny drip of xp all the better and more appropriate since it seems like actual player effort went into it.

it seems to me that the diff between 16 and 18 is huge. with 16, body attunement/shield cracks (+ some other choices) with flanking means legendary weapons can do -25% or full damage with modal or a tier 2 inspiration (and stilettos can do full without either). at 18 you could easily still be stuck at -50% or even irredeemably -75% crush/shock will still be easier and may even allow for overpenetration in some cases, but right now it strikes me as incredibly dull and obliterating of 20 levels of gameplay choices because as is stands dorudugan effectively says "immunity to anything not crush, shock, or raw"

for future use, in turn-based mode dex (and armor) are much less important especially for non-casters. intellect is surprisingly useful for a monk as well (area of effect of torment's reach, duration of blade turning, duration of swift strikes) so intellect could use some if you plan on re-doing the stats. however, it's much harder to determine how good intellect is in turn-based mode due to hard rounding cutoffs - i remember reading something that 14 is a good all-purpose target to hit, but it can be really all over the place for turn-based mode. perception is also less useful in turn-based mode because the graze range is significantly larger - basically you almost never miss. you still benefit from hitting/critting more often though, though on lower difficulties on turn-based mode, the "balance between might and perception" shifts in favor of might. i don't think any of these are deal-breakers or reasons to re-roll, just providing that feedback.

res is not that important for RP / story, most of that is handled by your passive skills (bluff, history, etc.), and when it comes to stat checks, resolve is probably about as important as any other stat. the main RP part where resolve matters is just if you're interested in picking up a specific soulbound mace, which requires an intellect check to figure out how to pick up the mace, and then a resolve check to fight back its efforts to resist you picking it up. you don't have to dump res, but it's not very useful for non-melee-ers. and on veteran or potd, due to boosted enemy stats, it's pretty much an all-in deal to get much out of it (but it can be extremely good with heavy investment). if you're new to poe, the system is very forgiving. it's really hard to do a "bad" stat setup. there's more room to screw up in deadfire simply because multiclassing explodes the possible choices to make, and you can't respec stats or your level 1 abilities, so there's greater possibility that you get a suboptimal combination. i'm one of those people who know how to min-max but i still consciously choose not to (at least, not all the way) simply because it's not as "fun", and not dumping res has never prevented me from clearing the highest difficulty with challenges and with megabosses. as a rough outline - intellect and dex are king stats. might and perception are roughly equivalent and are better off being balanced (for offensive characters at least). con and resolve always suffer in games like these because high defense is not really rewarded in most situations. but again, it's hard to do a stat combination that won't work out. i think if you dump intellect and dex and invest them in resolve/con for a ranged caster you might have a harder time, but otherwise i would just go with what you're comfortable with. there are lots of micro optimizations if you wanna dive deeper into it that become class/role-specific, but for someone facing indecision i wouldn't worry about it. think of it more as something to worry about if you do a second or third run, after you have more experience under your belt. also, +1 to @Scrapulous's post. though one thing to add: i'm only really familiar with monks from dnd, 3e/pathfinder and if iirc in those games a monk is mostly an evasive glass-cannon (getting lots of AC when lightly encumbered, for example). the monk in poe2 is more about taking a lot of pain to power your abilities. depending on your preferred playstyle/narrative that might be quite a change, because in most situations being highly evasive is actually bad for you.

i raise this because some of the eotan chants affect party members, which would add to the party tooltip. but if you're just hiding buffs i's not a concern

i just finished watching several youtube videos doing a huge retrospective on fallout 3 DLC and on fallout: new vegas DLC and I was reminded of just how much better Obsidian's DLC was compared to Bethesda's DLC (oh god, I remember actively hating most of the fallout 3 DLC; fallout 4 isn't much better). I don't know what it is about obsidian's development culture versus others, but they definitely seem to do well with their DLCs.

it's been a while since i actually sat through the credits, but i am almost positive they are sorted alphabetically. are you sure you are looking at both first and last name sorting? (I forget which one it uses) edit: just rewatched my own ultimate run video at the end and jesus you're right, they're not sorted at all. sociopaths! how did i ever find my own name??

duration is short and it uses quite a bit of wounds. things like ooblit, the +intellect duality of mortality mode, salvation of time can be extremely good here, on top of being inherently fast (to reduce recovery). it even works when you're fighting one melee enemy solo, they'll just bounce attacks back at themselves. do note that at some point (i think 4.0) it got nerfed so that the moment you move blade turning disappears. it used to be abused against disengagement attacks.

What about the special chants that eoten chanters use? I think those are special enough that you shouldn't hide those. Personally, very nearly all of them I want to know that they exist. I just finished a run with a celebrant and very nearly every chant I found useful to know when it was actually active (especially Mercy and Kindness so I could time heals). Simply looking at what song is active on your chanter's little UI isn't enough because it doesn't take into account linger, suppression, cleansing, or duration extension. doesn't leave any kind of buff on the chanter.

symbols are different from traps and seals. symbols are more like persistent aoe effects and have huge radius, doing foe-only damage and debuffs. you don't need to set them up in advance or anything like that to get mileage out of them. get a tank or two to hold back some enemies and drop an empowered symbol on them. all the enemies swarming around the tank will be brutally hurt tick after tick or round after round.

literally lol'd

just to add - it's totally not clear from the description, but the DoT this applies does not stack, so you're best off intermixing attacks with rot skulls and spellcasting, or switching up targets. also, i semi-remember the attack being keyworded as disease, so won't work on disease-immune enemies. i could be misremembering. if you plan on actually takin advantage of your death godlike's +3 PL when near death, you will pretty much need to use Barring Death's Door + casts of Salvation of Time. personally i think berath's symbol is extremely baller, probably second-best after eothas. all the symbols can wreck house (especially if you empower) but adding weakened to the mix makes it easier for many of the other stuff in berath's kit to hit (-10 fortitude) and also effectively amplifies how much damage you do. i highly recommend supplementing your berathian priest with a morningstar somewhere in your party. so much of what you want to land is fortitude-based and a morningstar or two can really help. willbreaker is probably best choice, because it also debuffs will, synergizes with berathian's free tier 4 resolve affliction, and has +10% action speed. i multiclassed a fighter/berathian and really enjoyed it. there were some action economy issues, but Tactical barrage (for +1 PL and 50% miss to graze), mule kick (synergy with fortitude debuffs), armored grace, and confident aim for my morningstar was a nice package, with fallback on the spiritual weapon for slash-vulnerable or low-deflection foes. didn't really optimize rot skulls, it was just there in case there was a doorway or tight hallway that i couldn't squeeze next to enemies and needed a ranged weapon. i also did a single-classed berathian at range and also enjoyed it quite a bit. used a lot of perception just to help debuffs land, and rot skulls is a nice ranged attack. and again, once you get the symbol and pick up empower talents you can basically single-handedly clear most trash fights with just that. regardless of what you do, helm of the white void seems like it'd be of particular use. +10 acc to mind/body afflictions potentially covers a bunch of stuff that you'd want to cast for a damage+debuff oriented priest. just be sure it's a spell that actually has an affliction (and isn't just a random debuff).

possibly silly question, but for tight, overlapping areas, does that correspond to multiple hits on a target? or is it one hit per target regardless of how many area of effect lines there are?

there is a cipher talent that gives you a low chance to get some focus back everytime you crit an enemy, so it can help with that as well.

have you tried with scourge of bezello? that's the only other one i can think of (it's in FS)

I absolutely love the scripted interactions. Even the simpler ones. Reminds me of table top/choose your own adventure. The ones that you get just for entering a dungeon on the world map are pretty lame, like you say, but I still enjoy them for the added flavor. The ones that stand out really stand out, and I think it's a funny coincidence that in both PoE1 and Deadfire it's in the DLCs. Like you said I thought the White March scripted interactions were really good, very challenging, with many approaches, and no easy answers. In Deadfire, the scripted challenges in SSS really stand out to me - punishing, a lot of hard skill checks, and many different ways to go about it. In fact, while I liked SSS interactions already, I didn't fully appreciate it until I was doing advance research for my The Ultimate attempt and dug through the files and learned of all these alternate solutions and conditional triggers that I never knew about, simply because I generally don't play with certain classes/setups/stats. My one criticism is that I really wish the game would let you use those skill-boosting consumables in a scripted encounter (like thief's putty, oil of allure, that stuff). So much of the really important and harder skill checks happen on world-map or inter-travel scripted encounters, so you are unable to prepare for them by using those consumables.

MC fist progression isn't as good as SC monk, but SC monk's fist progression is insane, so second-place is still pretty good if you have just one source of bonus generic +PL a MC monk still gets to post-legendary fists (hint: you can just buy foods like shark soup or hot razor skewers at a food vendor in sakuya or in periki's overlook, which give +1 PL in addition to other good bonuses). Even at just "superb" level, they still have an additional +5% dmg, +2 acc, and +1 PEN over comparable superb fast weapons. And the fact that they are "fast" but have the base damage of a slow weapon is essentially equivalent to a +30% lash. unless i desperately want a -25 reflex/will/or fort weapon modal debuff, I would still use those fists over most unique weapons in the game. and like i said, it's really easy for an MC monk to get to legendary scaling, which arguably makes MC fists the best weapons in the game, second only to SC monk fists.

the shield can also be enchanted to either provide bonus offense or spell resist to your party as an aura depending on how you resolve xoti's quest, in case you haven't done that yet. that on top of the +2 inspiration and restoration PL makes it a king support-priest shield imo.

the funny thing is, it didn't even strike me to combine all the winter gear onto a single character. i end up using most of it, but always spread out across my party.

i don't have experience with a ravager, but in abstract pure fists sounds the way to go. carnage is heavily predicated on base weapon damage, and fists are high base weapon damage (while being very fast). i'm sure there are some stat sticks you could find if you wanted to do fist+something else, but it seems like a waste to go with monk and put on a two-handed weapon

large shield and barbarian seems like an extremely unpleasant mix. barbarians in particular suffer a lot from accuracy penalties due to how carnage works. i'd probably ditch the concept unless you're really dedicated to it. i think large shield + pure forbidden fist might have had better potential, simply because you're so incentivized to invest in resolve that you would be a pretty decent tank and you'd get some wounds out of dodging attacks (on top of a small riposte effect). using the mace would still suck compared to normal monk fists though. i think a straight-up fighter would probably have been better - higher inherent deflection, easy access to an aware or intuitive inspiration to help cancel out the -8 accuracy, plus confident aim, plus armored grace to make the heavy armor less punishing, plus refreshing defenses to really get you up there. it'd be a tanking setup more than anything else.

Wow I had no idea it was based on anything. I thought it was a fixed fight based on your chosen faction. Good find.

oh yeah i completely forgot about this. easy to get early on and extremely good. i always underestimated it until i realized it was once/encounter, not once/rest like most abilities. early on you could kill a lot of foes with it alone.