thelee

I mean, now I think you're just being willfully obtuse. Brilliant isn't that relevant apart from megabosses solely because the rest of the game expects you to be able to beat it without using Brilliant, so yeah, you don't need it. It doesn't change the fact that it's super good. 70 focus and casting time - you can do that basically at the start of a fight on a wizard or priest or druid and just spam the #1 spell you have the rest of the fight; unless you're a level 20 party against xuarips, it's not bad action economy it is optimal action economy because now you can cast the perfect spell over and over, isntead of going from your #1 spell to your #2 spell, etc. Brilliant isn't borderline OP, it is OP. I don't think you fully thought this one out - this makes tactician even better than before. A wizard with slicken will have an effect far stronger than anything brilliant could've given them.

cipher is more balanced around regenerating resource - a caster like priest or wizard is not. so "just" transferring the regenerating resource is powerful. A standard SC psion takes 15 seconds to regenerate an AL9 spell - which are already weaker than other caster AL9s because they are balanced on being able to use them more than a couple times in one fight. Another caster with brilliant will regenerate an AL9 spell every 6 seconds and their AL9s are like Magran's Might, Call of Rymrgand, Missile Salvo, Corrosive Skin, Petrification, Tornado, Maelstrom, etc. We shouldn't be making balancing decisions based on megabosses. They are so far the pale of a typical encounter. The fact that you can use brilliant to make fights against them feasible says more about just how stupidly good brilliant is, because no other inspiration will carry you in a fight like that. To your point, these days for every megaboss fight, I bring along a chanter (or occasionally a cipher). I would not consider most of the chanters or ciphers I run with or provided by OBS to be very powerful or obscene (except for the one time I ran a herald), it's solely because chanter's ability to have infinite sustain and summons that overwhelms all other factors when you're talking about doing literally thousands of damage to an enemy. It says very little about the rest of the game, because most other fights don't last long enough where being able to summon a dragon or animated weapons umpteen times matters at all. Heck - I equip everyone with xbows or arbalests against HoW, and I literally would never would do that in the rest of the game. Megabosses shouldn't be considered normal, or really even fights - they're puzzles.

this isn't a solution, it's a hack. there's no "systematic" rule about why you should be limited to certain casts except under certain game rules. solo mode shouldn't get any special "breaks" just because you're playing solo - solo should just be the same game except, well, solo. solo's supposed to be hard, and as a party-based game there's no real reason to guarantee that solo is infeasible, frankly. i am honestly perplexed and don't get why for others who want to tone down infinite combos there's such a resistance in recognizing that the inspiration that regenerates resources is the problem here. are people just hooked on using brilliant's resource regen and still want it, even if one recognizes that it's broken? edit: brilliant has been broken from day 1 way before anyone discoveed any interactions with other effects. when the developers removed it from the chanter invocation but didn't change brilliant itself, it seemed like they made the same error that some people here are making. it wasn't any related ability that was the problem, it's brilliant itself. only very late did OBS seem to realize just how stupid brilliant was, because weyc's robe (by the time FS came around, near end of development cycle) grants an extremely short brilliant buff - only with super high intellect will you get more than 1 resource regened out of it. but short durations are no protection in a world of WoD and SoT. The only really meaningful solution is to nerf brilliant. Then you could balance brilliant on par with other tier 3 inspirations. put another way - if the only way--in a vacuum--to balance a brilliant effect is to give it an extremely short duration but you can give a much longer duration to swift or energized or robust, it's brilliance that is the problem.

huh? tactician's brilliant has no duration. of all possible broken entry points tactician is arguably the one that cares the least about SoT. blood mage maybe, but because they don't have to worry about brilliant per se (though all classes are helped by brilliant, even chanters, monks, and ciphers) which goes back to the fundamental issue - there's no world--SoT or no--where brilliant is a balanced tier 3 inspiration. you take virtually any setup, and you toss in brilliant and you can quickly make it degenerate. You tone down brilliant and SoT becomes weaker overnight. On the flip side, you get rid of SoT altogether and brilliant is still a stupidly good inspiration except you've eliminated one entry point to degeneracy. Remove SoT and WoD and brilliant is still stupid good, now it's just ciphers and tacticians who can exploit it.

I don't think tactician is nearly that hard with the right metagaming. Phantom Foes will get you there in most fights. On bosses with some perception resistence (for the ones that have persistent distraction) you're set. Psion is just easy because you don't have to do anything but park far away from the enemy to get Ancestor's Memory. You don't need two psions - it just makes it easier. Just Ancestor's Memory the priest/wizard whenever it's up and you're set. Two psions simply just means you don't have to worry about getting hit. like I said it seems (and you are agreeing) that you are pushing a solution to mitigate a specific infinite combo, whereas it sounds like others are talking about completely eliminating it. i'm highlighting that what you're proposing won't eliminate it - it just makes it harder (and in the meantime changes how SoT works).

to clarify, i think your change is fine and interesting as a tweak to SoT on its own, but it was more in the context of "fixing infinite loops" - you either have to break brilliant or you have to break SoT/WoD, and focusing on SoT is wrong, because it's brilliant itself that's overly powerful. with your change to SoT, infinite loops are still possible, just a little less trivial (can't use weyc's robe or shroud of phantasm, have to use tactician or psion) one has to basically make a decision: 1. infinite loops are fine 2. infinite loops are fine if they are non-trivial 3. infinite loops are not fine. only in #1 or 2 would solely tweaking SoT be fine. Only fixing blood mage and brilliant would get you #3. it sounds like you personally are 1-2, which is fine. I'm approaching it from 2-3 - the blood mage is very powerful (probably too powerful) and brilliant is way too good. i don't particularly mind infinite loops if they require some work, but even without infinite combos brilliant is just way too powerful a buff - puts all other tier 3 inspirations to shame.

I really dislike the SoT change (aside from possible PL scaling). SoT is only broken because of Brilliant. SoT is only good because you can take powerful short-duration effects and make them much longer. A typical priest will add +30s to effects and that requires using up all AL6 casts and self-empowering for one more. As a mid-high spell that requires other effects to have any effect at all, that sounds about right. (I would also challenge people to list how many non-Brilliant effects they would or have combined with SoT. It's a pretty narrow spell, even if powerful when you line things up.) It's only when you start interacting with tactician or things like Weyc's Robe that SoT becomes utterly obscene. If Brilliant, for example, were changed to be +3 PL or whatever Boeroer suggested, and and even if SoT was tweaked to allow for PL scaling, it would make SoT more powerful but you'd no longer have a trivial infinite combo. I'm in the camp that one shouldn't need to worry about eliminating all resource regen. For the most part, resource regen isn't that obscene because it's limited to the class and most classes do not have access to a puzzle piece for infinite combo. It becomes more of an issue that either the wizard can regen a wizard spell (blood mage, brilliant) or a priest can regen a priest spell (brilliant). (there's also the cipher invocation that gives +1 resources, but it might actually be too slow to be useful) possible idea for rebalancing brilliant: instead of resource regen, gives a echo chance to all effects, maybe 20%: a rate low enough to be unreliable for a trivial combo, but high enough to be noticable in a typical fight (this might actually require buffing some brilliant-granting effects, like weyc's robe, as they have extremely short buff durations)

just to add on to what boeroer says - all this really says is that blood mage is an obscene class. i should've noted it instead of trickster in my older post. let's not forget that tactician already has what i consider a killer ability - successfully interrupting an enemy restores a fighter resource. with mule kick you can literally interrupt-lock enemies for the entire fight - with aoe interrupts it gets even better. the brilliant buff being as good as it is distorts tactician gameplay to maximize that aspect of the tactician. if brilliant gets significantly weaker, then managing flanked status still becomes important so that you're not just constantly shaken and confused, and it becomes a nice buff (still particularly in caster multiclass) if you manage it, but most importantly it no longer makes making tactician all about that brilliant buff. in addition to brilliant being extremely good - as argued extensively here - i think it's understated just how unbalanced it is. for a martial class, a top-level ability might cost 4 resources. it would take 24 seconds of brilliance to get that high level ability back. a caster can get a level 7-9 spell back in 6 seconds. i think it would actually help a lot if brilliance actually had to account for this somehow. if a caster had to wait 24 seconds to get back a powerful high level spell, that would go a long way to balancing brilliance on its own. but that's well past what can be done with modding i assume.

adding on to an earlier post by phyriel: reading this discussion, i wonder if a better thing when talking about single-class or multi-class to look for is simply "unbalanced" holistically. a lot of the stuff that people are bringing up as OP don't strike me as OP per se, but more just combos and stacking which feels different to me (just lots of metagaming). because given a more general "unbalanced" take i would argue that trickster or trickster/x strikes me as a strong candidate for being an unbalanced subclass. it always struck me as extremely weirdly under-used through much of deadfire history - even before it got significantly buffed the downside was extremely minor (was starting +10% sneak attack damage, now +20% sneak attack damage) because it gets trivialized by PL scaling and deathblows, and you get a crap ton of extra utility and survivability. you barely need to metagame at all to get extremely strong outcomes from rolling a trickster, and with a bit of metagaming you can get extremely powerful multiclasses, even if you don't quite get to degenerate-combo level of powers that others have mentioned (or have been used in ultimate runs).

this is less forced than you think - there are more options than that, but it sounds like you got into a dialogue tree that limited your options. (i say this having played tons of priests of different alignment and managing to not messing up roleplay dispositions). in general, there are many resolutions to quests, even if the choice can be binary how you get there might have flexible nuance. however, to your point, this is not always telegraphed to the player very clearly, so sometimes i've found out to avoid a forced choice just by reloading an earlier save and doing something subtly (i quicksave aggressively). this is one that really grates on me. If you played Deadfire earlier, this was rock-solid. Then they added turn-based mode (4.0 or so) and clearly didn't have the right testing or staffing for it, because they broke a lot of things that used to work. It annoyed me that however rock-solid Deadfire consumable usage was versus PoE1 (which even soft-locked my game on a few occasions), now it's almost as bad. I'm sure they thought turn-based mode was some sort of hail mary to boost sales or interest, but I'm really annoyed at how much existing stuff they broke, and how while they fixed a lot they still left like 5-10% of the regressions unfixed by the time the final 5.0 patch landed. Before 4.0 i never worried about toggling AI, now I literally have it as a hotkey just to help use potions.

Congrats! They really should - it's their fault (bug) not yours. Here's hoping it gets approved.

for anyone who's not aware, one of the reasons why i think this spell absolute rocks is that--contrary to what the tooltip says--the actual little projectiles that hit the enemy interrupt on hit, not crit. in addition to doing some nice damage and stripping away buffs (in a way that can't be reflected), you are essentially stunlocking the enemy the entire time - only enemies immune to interrupts will be able to do anything while being hit with this (and there are only three off the top of my head: memory hoarder, oracle, and dorudugan). in this way it's much better than an actual hard cc effect like paralyze or stun (and ironically, it's the slower pace of the projectiles versus e.g. minoletta's spell that really makes this work so well) agree on this. afflictions are kind of a dime a dozen (even though they're nice), but +15 all defenses [which stacks with deflection-only bonuses] really makes your front-line characters tanky. edit: but also agree that eothas as SC isn't great. the eothas symbol is more of an argument for single-classing xoti as a priest of gaun and bringing her along, who gets a symbol of eothas and a bunch of other useful spells.

the only thing i'd add to boeroer's note is that if you don't pick your spells in a complementary way, you may find that in late game you'll have so many spells that you won't really be doing much attacking, kind of wasting your weapon choice/investment. though wael (and skaen) are a bit more resistant to martial/caster action economy because so many of their bonus spells either have no recovery and/or are very fast cast (arcane veil, mirror image, llengrath's, escape, finishing blow, shadowing beyond). though for any weapon-based "dps" priest, i'd try hard to do something that relies on a summoned/spiritual weapon. the lash is very very strong (up to +31%), and if you roleplay your character correctly you could arguably one of the strongest weapons in the game at your disposal (woedica arguably has the best weapons in the game! at level 16-20 you get legendary monk fists and with a +31% raw lash is extremely hard to beat) edit: for chromoprismatic staff you may do better with e.g. magran, because the +1 fire PL gives them huge benefit across the board.

i would say for hybrid support/dps as caster you're best off with berath or magran. berath: you get touch of rot and rot skulls. the former gives you something useful at AL1, and rot skulls is just a pretty good effect and gives the priest some damage diversity in both type and defense. you can lean on your other priest spells and berath comes with some useful support spells for free. magran: i really enjoyed it as an offensive build. you get tons of extra damage spells, and even though any SC priest can pick it up, magran's might at AL9 is a really amazing single-target spell and fits in thematically. only problem here is that against fire immunes, fire absorbers, or high-fire-AR you're kinda screwed. you can't even really fall back on spiritual weapon because the lash is fire. these might be good times to become more of a support caster. by the way, magran combines particularly well with Marux Amanth (10% chance for priest spells to echo) since echoing spells is more useful when they are something like fan of flames and not, say, devotions for the faithful. there's plenty of other gear that boosts fire-keyworded spells so you can really lean in to this as an offensive caster pretty hard. (if you don't care about SC or the AL8/9 spells, multiclassing with evoker has the odd effect that the few evocation spells the magran priest gets as a bonus also benefit from the evoker's 15% echo chance (works multiplicatively/independently with the marux amanth, with the very low chance that you can actually get double echos on a cast), though not the bonus PL) also, if you haven't seen it: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/priest

hey i'm only human i'll have it fixed in the next update (i'm almost positive that i used mule kick and greater lay on hands as tests, which apparently are two of a handful of exceptions)

lololol probably the worst i've ever felt in an RPG was in Fallout New Vegas - I created a character that picked up a perk that let you terrify NPCs in dialogue, and also one that let you eat corpses. I figured I was some sort of psychopathic maniac. Early on, after I used the terrify option on some random innocent stranger, and then shot him, and then ate his body, I felt so bad about that I abandoned that playthrough.

oh man, i've gotten pretty good of getting past the "hoarding" feeling about limited-use items, but that one-use effigy summon? how in the heck am I supposed to decide "ok, this random fight is the fight i'll use it on"?

C.LE. on gamefaqs. You'll find that I have a very specific type of game I like to write about https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599 Reflecting more, I think there's a lot to be said about the downside of overwhelming the player with choices. I think having an artificial constraint or theme might indeed be helpful. Also there's a real "art through adversity" that I believe in, where having restrictions can help you be more creative/explorative than you might have been otherwise. Lord knows I've spent a lot of time on the celebrant (second hardest priest multiclass to crack after the universalist), but I finally found a build I was satisified with and is fun to play (if not the most powerful), and is not something I would've ever discovered if I was just trying to min-max the most interesting/powerful build without any constraints.

some of it is part of normal banter, but some of it is a pause-the-game-and-this-char-will-talk-to-you bit.

yeah, the romances are really underdeveloped in this game. i got maia and xoti to hook up, and xoti and eder to hook up, and eder to really crush xoti's spirits. i'm sure there's others. all of that amounts to a brief conversation with mainchar, and some specific banter between the NPCs (also possibly ending slides).

I think there's several things to unpack. 1. Direction. I used to have this problem a lot. These days I pick a strong "theme" inspired by some other thing I really like (mostly Magic: The Gathering color wheel, but also a bit of Warcraft 3 since I picked up reforged) and that helps me stick to a direction, to a fault (where I hate extraneous party members who don't fit into my theme and am eager to replace them). If something else catches my eye, I just commit to doing it on another play through. 1b. Another thing that helped direction for me is that I created a self-goal of eventually having run a party with every single variation of a priest (preferably as mainchar)--because I enjoy priest classes. So it becomes less "which is the most interesting party I can build"--which can be overwhelming ("paradox of choice" or "prison of freedom" as you say)--and more "what is the most interesting thing I can do with this very specific, narrow constraint", such as "my main PC must be a priest/barbarian of some sort" (in this case I ended up deciding on a skaen/corpse-eater. Wasn't great, wasn't bad either.) For reference, I still have not done a single-class woedica, a thaumaturge, and a universalist. I may never get to universalist or SC-woedica; just not interesting enough. 2. Hoarding. This is hard thing to do, and part of it is influenced by game design; not a lot of games get item usage and consumable usage right. For Adra Ban, it sounds like FOMO. Again, if I miss out on something, I just commit to doing it on another play through. Having a strong theme in #1 helps, because I do a lot of advance planning on the Deadfire wiki unique items list (unique weapons, unique armor) and plan out which items I want the most, and plan to upgrade all the way. 3. Increasing your explicit knowledge. On top of reading high-quality information (not random ****posting about mechanics), probably a lot more experience and lots of q's asked and tests. My gamefaqs guide goes into a lot of details of the mechanics, but I feel like in all situations in life, you actually need to actually put the theory into practice to really internalize it. Even with all the stuff I've written there, and all the stuff forum members have posted here, there's tons of implicit knowledge about stuff and still tons of interactions yet to test. I think just more playthroughs will start giving you a sense of what interactions might be interesting, and what to look out for to test and to mix with. YMMV. I've played Deadfire for 1000+ hours, and still am not sick of it. I think if you're fixated on getting just one run or two right, you may stress out more than if you just plan on playing however much you want to play, but that kind of long-term play commitment isn't for everyone (not even close). Over those 1000+ hours, I've made some parties that stunk and I didn't particularly like, and some that have been really great. Sometimes I've been playing and have already had ideas for three more parties to run. I don't run through all of them (some ideas I get tired of before I get to them), but I'm never too frustrated about doing something wrong or making the wrong choice. Plus, after 1000+ hours, I know most of the mechanics like the back of the hand, but even then I can still get surprised by new interactions just from chatting on the forums; it wasn't until hour like 900 that I tried a barbaric retaliation thanks to @Boeroer. If you also just like cycling through a lot of parties, I don't think it's too big a deal to just do that. A lot of people have restartitis. Maybe eventually you'll find a party you'll take all the way. This was basically me back in the BG2 days - kept starting new parties until eventually I think my first PC that I finished was a random thief character after originally thinking I would want to play a bard or wizard (I ended up liking the thief experience so much I wrote a gamefaqs guide to the thief class). That was a surprise to me because I tend to be a caster person through-and-through, but something about playing a thief just happened to click in my brain that I ended up finishing BG2 with it. Maybe something similar could happen to you.

can trigger some romances, or anti-romances but either with or without those it matters purely for banter.

I had a post a long time ago where I judiciously pick-pocketed every single non-hostile NPC. TL;DR - in base game, it's not worth the skill investment. It's useful only for a few thousand gold over the course of all the pickpocketing--nothing really special otherwise (might be useful early on, but doing a few mid-game quests quickly trivializes those returns). You don't even need a high sleight of hand for that due to how much of that is in the form of money and the game undervalues money for pickpocketing difficulty. You actually need stealth more than pickpocket. This is true even for reverse pickpocketing bombs. I basically wrote a manifesto calling sleight of hand a trap choice (especially since it's in the same group as much more relevant combat skills like alchemy or arcana) - and it was utterly nonsensical... sometimes you need like a sleight of hand of 7 to pick pocket a piece of hardtack, but then on another NPC you can get a fine-enchanted weapon with a sleight of hand of 1 (someone much later did some deep-diving and it turns out sleight of hand difficulty is based in part on the enemy level; which makes no sense from a player's perspective). Like @AeonsLegend says, with Loaded Pockets it's more interesting, it's low chance of getting some moderately good magical gear [and potentially some useful crafting mats] and it's randomized, but that means now I actually want to judiciously pick pocket again (in my most recent game I got some good magical gear in Port Maje, which was a nice boost). You still don't really need a high sleight of hand, though. Just moderate stealth and in a pinch some spark crackers to distract NPCs.

that's funny, because my only attempt where i tried that it failed miserably, so i consider interrupts much more reliable. might just be what kind of micromanagement you can handle (with 4/5 party members equipped with crossbows/arbalests, interrupting HoW is pretty easy; i'm sure you'd say something similar about body blocking)

IME, interrupts aren't THAT important in base game. The dragons, guardian, giant cave grub, and engwithan titans can all be made much easier by interrupting some majorly telegraphed attacks (especially ones that summon extra enemies) but you can largely brute force your way through them, especially since the base game basically maxes out in difficulty at around level 16 or so and you can still easily get to 20. I still think it makes the game much easier to interrupt enemies while concentrating your party, but it's not crucial. With DLC, the difficulty curves amps up quite a bit, so there's not really as much room for overleveling and just brute forcing your way through fights. Because of that, combat tactics (like interrupts) start mattering more than just hoping to roflstomp enemies. Edit: also, interrupts are basically mandatory for one of the megaboss fights (Haune O Whe)