thelee

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.

interdiction is great, and unlike arkemyr's dazlzing lights is party friendly. it also has a larger aoe. the duration is short, though, so until you get a lot of PL scaling and can boost intellect it's not going to be as effective, but it's still useful. fighter gets into the fray, but i feel like you rpetty much need a morningstar to land it on foes you really want to daze. that's pretty much it for the early game. for mid-game cipher mind plague IMO is amazing, as it hits enemies all around the battlefield, lasts a super long time, and also confuses. imo it's one of the best arguments for single-classing cipher because it gets you access to it that much faster - my survivability increases dramatically once i can start using it. just to second this and add on, if you're really wanting to put the work in and don't mind right clicking on grimories all the time during fights to keep track of spells, a wizard can basically spend no ability points on spells and the rest on passives or a multiclass. my current aloth is a battlemage (fighter/mage) and has basically taken three wizard spells, just so that they are always available: spirit shield (for the +3 AR), bulwark against the elements (for another +5 AR to use in fights with elemental attacks), and deleterious alacrity of motion (for faster actions). i rely on grimoires for everything else. that saves a lot of ability points to use on his fighter side and caster passives, making him extremely tough as nails but still as good a caster as normal.

A lot of stuf! Responses inline: I assume this is Eder, not Aloth. I would say Gorecci St is the hardest fight in the game with just three. You'd have to split the encounter in two. Even with two hirelings, I still split the fight, and a few unlucky hits from the crossbow can be a nightmare. Gorecci is pretty well-known to be brutal though, so no shame in stealthing past it. This is roughly my experience. I don't use mods in general, so by default there's no easy AI trigger on when to hit ascendant. When I tried an ascendant out (it was an ascendant/priest for salvation of time shenanigans) it was alright, but it definitely meant me hyperfocusing on my ascendant at the expense of everyone else (even with aggressive pausing) just so I could make sure I could squeeze everything out of ascencion. Ciphers just have this larger action economy issue, simply because they *have* to attack to generate focus, and that takes time. Ancestor's Memory is very good in the right combo builds, but can be a waste if all you do is get back a few mediocre spells or one high-level martial ability on a party member. Reaping Knives is much better - the opportunity cost is really not so bad because on one of your front-line characters you get back the focus you spent on it pretty quickly; on two party members (helps to have a high intellect) you can easily keep your focus topped up. These days I really like the psion, even single-classed, because they are basically immune to action economy issues - they generate focus even when using cipher powers! It won't be as strong as an idealized cipher attacking enemies in melee, but it is definitely much more consistent, and can do things that a normal cipher can't (at mid to high level you can endlessly spam their tier 1 interrupt power or something like mental binding, which a normal cipher can't do because they eventually have to stop and attack for a while). A beguiler should be able to do some setup to generate a ton of focus in big fights though. fun fact: AI scripts can see through any hidden health. If you set up use of consumables/second wind or party member healing on health thresholds, they'll still be activated even though you as a human being cannot see your character's health. xoti makes for a highly cromulent monk. Not always the most ideal monk subclass, but monks in general are consistently good super stars. a single-class monk xoti pretty much carried my last party (whispers of the wind + ajumaat's stalking cloak + dance with death + +3 wounds upon a kill; even hauane o whe the megaboss goes down pretty fast). you're playing potd with upscaling on, and that's going to be par for the course for the early to mid game. the +2 PEN and bonus accuracy that enemies get (for more crits at 1.5x PEN), coupled with consistent extra boosts as they scale up means that there's an arms race between your armor and their PEN that you basically cannot win for a while. Heavy armor is rare early on, and magical heavy armor even rarer. So what heavy armor you do find will likely not give you much damage reduction, if any (the fact that heavy armor has weaknesses as bad as medium armor doesn't help), all while giving you huge recovery time. Prepare to quaff a lot of potions and heal a lot, and things that give you AR (hardy, zealous endurance, ironskin potions, spirit shield potions) and things that reduce the enemy PEN (dazed mostly) are very important. Eventually things get better with more talents such that even medium armor (properly enchanted/leveled) is good, and heavy armor makes you tough as nails. But it takes a while to get there and you have to be diligent about upgrading your gear because however much a spike in defense some exceptional heavy armor might be in mid-game, in late game it might as well be unenchanted medium armor for what it does for you again high-level upscaled enemies. shields are also extremely important. medium shield and higher can do an awful lot for your survivability especially early on - the medium shield modal is a straight 30% weapon resist, which isn't nerfed by difficulty, which can make it pretty invaluable for surviving hard fights involving weapons. the bonus deflection (with weapon and shield style) can be huuge. i manually use it coupled with shared flames to keep a bit of uptime on the shared flames buff. make sure you properly specify in the AI script dialog box how to determine what to use. A simple thing to do is to put the paladin AI script first, and then the fighter, and then make sure you select "by list order", this will basically guarantee you'll use from the paladin script so long as there is a valid paladin action to do, only falling back on the fighter if there's nothing to do from the paladin script. If you have both of them in the same script, make sure the FoD trigger is higher up on the ocnditionals than the knock down trigger. pallegina works better not as a front-line tank but as a sort of mid-line short stop. That way she has flexibility to move in and out of healing range because lay on hands is such a limited range ability. pallegina also has miserable dexterity (a flat 10 iirc) so she's going to be really slow. Using medium armor and armored grace goes a long way to letting her be more responsive in fights; give her some rum/rymsjodda lager (+drunkard's regret optionally) or koiki fruit to help. Paladin and especially paladin/fighter are so inherently tough as nails that by middish game that by that point I just put Pallegina in light armor (on top of action speed-boosting food if I can swing it) and that erases most of my issues with her responsiveness. make sure your other party members have potions and/or athletics, or else you may find yourself forced to make xoti a heal-monkey. One that thing that doesn't help is that obsidian NPCs don't get any reputation scaling, so xoti's holy radiance won't do as much healing as a mainchar or hireling priest's holy radiance (not as big a deal as in poe1, but just tossing it out there). judging by what you're saying there are also some real action economy efficiency issues. litany/prayer of the body isn't great just for clearing status effects - pretty much only worth it to clear enfeebled on someone who is going to need healing, and litany to help someone put enemies around them into underpenetration. litany/prayer for the spirit is better all around, but typically you shouldn't be using it to wipe out confusion, and possibly not even charmed (the enemy AI is bad enough that a charmed party member may not even stay charmed for long, and it may not even do much). how are you gearing eder? between constant recovery, a fighter's inherently higher deflection, superior deflection, armored grace + medium or heavy armor (properly enchanted), and the option to put on a shield and switch to e.g. defender stance (along with a perpetual -5 accuracy debuff to enemies if you have persistent distraction), and possible escape support (for +50 deflection), swashbuckler eder should be pretty tough mid-late game.

i would strongly bet that obsidian just outsourced it to a third party and the translations were done by some thankless workers who couldn't circle back with the designers. because it's cheap. i work at a major web company and internationalization is part of my job. we do string tokenization the way sawyer does. we also have to provide context on each sentence or string to give the translators some remote clue what on earth we are talking about, because a sentence in abstract could mean a lot of things. even then, i get reached out to by the translators themselves (they have that authority and capability to do so) to get even further clarification on where a piece of text might be seen, and what other text might be nearby, to further get a better translation. and our translations are merely adequate (apparently we are known to be weak in some cultures where there is a gap between the formal language and every day use of the language, especially if a pidgin english is part of it, because our translators focus on getting the formal language correct isntead of what is actually spoken), and our text is pretty simple. there's no complex lore to encapsulate or prose to handle, just "this button does this." make the text more complex and go for a cheaper interantionalization business structure and i could easily see the translation going off the rails bad. kotaku did a huge series on FF7's original japanese -> english translation, and i suspect that's pretty much how obsidian ended up. hopefully now that they have microsoft resources future internationalization work can be much better.

this version of the guide is very slightly out of date (sorry). a more up to date version is on gamefaqs. a couple of differences: - slightly lower resolve (and no longer using shorewalker sandals) to increase the chance of affecting yourself with sparkcrackers, and increasing the duration of both sparkcrackers and blunderbuss modal - slightly higher constitution to be able to stay below bloodied more safely post-5.0: - using helm of the white void (instead of fair favor) for +10 accuracy with sparkcrackers (along with a few other abilities/explosives) - using ring of focused flame (instead of entonia signet ring) for +10 accuracy with sparkcrackers (along with a few other fire-based abilities/explosives) - use ooblit as a pet to increase the duration of arcane veil, escape, BDD, and a few other misc buffs. i forget if i mentioned in this guide, but there was a stealth nerf to this build post 5.0. It used to be that sparkcrackers had a very slight aoe duration, which meant that with enough explosives skill you could get multiple attack rolls, all-but guaranteeing you a solid hit and upping the chance for a crit. This isn't the case anymore. So the build adapted a bit to maximize the chance that you get hit in the first place thanks to the +20 total accuracy you get with them (not counting a possible additional +10 from devotions for the faithful). the other thing is that sparkcrackers requires both a deflection hit and a will check to succeed. if you have arcane veil or escape active, you will very likely miss because of having a super-high deflection. the general approach i settle on these days is that i use sparkcrackers as an opener (sometimes before combat, so i can try multiple times to get a good hit if needed, plus the sparkcrackers noise can lure enemies to my party), and then when in fight rely on trying to get flanked or to bloodied (the extra constitution in the newer version of this build helps a bit). arcane veil/escape and such help me moderate how well i can stay at bloodied or less. i then use sparkcrackers or the blunderbuss modal opportunistically either if my health dips above bloodied or if i'm below bloodied and want to trigger on the edge. sometimes i don't need to worry about later sparkcrackers because i use some nukes (either my own or from a party member) to lower my health to bloodied and the initial sparkcrackers just helps me get set up and do some initial DPS. hope that helps. edit: there is a pair of gloves somewhere (i forget what it's called) that grants you two uses/day of "sparkcrackers." only they forgot to stealth nerf this sparkcrackers, so it still gets multiple attempts with enough explosives (and unlike actual explosives also benefits from stats). you can get these gloves as a failsafe.

it might require actual testing, but in general "automatic" bonuses from items are passive, so they stack with other sources, so it should stack. that being said, the proc chance is pretty low and the duration is pretty short so i wouldn't really lean on it to be very impactful in most fights. there's also a hidden issue in that the axe is bugged and won't properly count carnage damage as raw damage for purposes of unlocking a soulbound level for the barbarian. it makes the process of unlocking much more tedious and requires you to use other mechanisms to get raw damage. not game-breaking, but definitely annoying. i would personally bind to paladin. my thinking is that conditional short-duration PEN bonuses aren't too helpful because many fights in PotD you want more consistent answers for PEN and AR, whereas even just one or two procs of the hostile effect suspension can be a good boost to your survivability, and mess up enemy AI to boot.

it is set in the world of eora, that much is certain. i don't think anything else about "PoE" will be kept, though I hope some of the mechanics are retained (in much the same way a lot of the fallout SPECIAL mechanics were kept in some shape or form into Fallout 3 and New Vegas before being thoroughly altered in 4 and 76).

@Elric Galad i managed to get some time to test chanter chant scaling, and you're right, they scale with power level and seem to be affected by power level adjustments. digging up my old notes i also tested non-bellower PL bonus sources and they didn't work (they definitely do now); i can't say anything about my scaling testing because my notes aren't that detailed for that. my only conclusion is that between 4.0 -> 5.0 there was some combination of bug fixing and/or personal error that led to my currently misleadingfindings. good find! time for another round of updates to my guide.

It really depends. There are some faction resolutions that will result in your party members leaving permanently. Without letting out spoilers it's hard to say. There are some faction resolutions that involve destroying another faction, and the party member who aligns with that faction will leave. However, there are other factions that--while not the same as the party member's faction alignment--won't require you to destroy that party member's faction, so while the party member may not be the most pleased, they also won't leave. For the most part, with one exception, it's only this final faction quest that causes party members to leave, so while they may broadcast some suspicion or be displeased as you go adventuring, they generally won't leave until the very end. I think it's even possible to piss off multiple faction/party members into leaving at the same time, though my memory is hazy on this. In general, I pick two-ish story companions, and fill in the rest with sidekicks or hirelings. I've only rarely ever dealt with party members leaving when I wasn't expecting it, and it was always Pallegina for some reason (it doesn't help that Pallegina will also leave if you botch a relatively early-mid game quest, which is the one exception to the "only end game quest causes party members to leave" that i can think of). If all else fails you can go the "anarchists" path and don't align with any faction and just build up your ship to brave the final area by yourself. No one gets pissed at you and leaves. (Also principi is a pretty safe faction to align with, in tems of pissing people off.)

how did your character feel about kana? how did you end kana's questline in poe1? depending on how it goes, your character could either be pro-rautaui or anti-rautaui. (even if maia rua is with royal deadfire company, if you convined kana to be an isolationist in poe1 it makes more sense to not be pro-rautaui). judging from a quick skim, it sounds like the vailian trading company is your best bets, but which sub-faction choice you go for depends on your character's personality (both the principi and vailian quest lines have an internal struggle you can settle in different ways). For you, not only do the vailians invest in animancy a lot, they seem to value Hylea (one of the major patrons in Nekataka has Hylean influence, and Pallegina, well, you know), which might be consistent with your decisions in PoE1. Plus they like getting rich, which seems to be in your character backstory.

oh yeah, i forgot, getting some hirelings should've set you up with antidotes. i take those aggressively in the first fight (to protect against spores and spider). don't know what to tell you about the brine imps and ooze. they do have cheaty accuracy.

Are you level 4? That helps a lot. If you've done all the other side quests and cleared some of the other side areas of the engwithan digsite, you'll be level 4 for your non-hirelings. Honestly though, if you were able to clear Gorecci St and the Drake fight above the digsite, the brine imp and ooze are much easier fights IMO.

chants aren't flagged as "chanter?" what a world! but at least i'm glad other PL bonuses would work. i'll check when I can but it might be delayed. i think ancient memory tooltip shows scaling over its healing tooltip, either in the ability, or in the character profile showing you effects.

i feel like it's because it's where the vanilla base game basically ended. you could take on the guardian at ukaizo at level 12-14 and be just fine. it was honestly a struggle to get to level 19-20. they added more mid-high level content via the DLC, and they added megabosses (for level 20) but for the most part the main game only gets level scaling, so nothing fundamentally changes this inflection point. i mean, they tuned up PotD but it seemed over-optimized for port maje and nekataka: the early-mid-game quests are brutal to take on when underleveled. perhaps their min-max testers didn't have good gear for the later quests/encounter balancing, so all this means is that e.g. the guardian of ukaizo is always red skulled, but even after you kill all the megabosses and the guardian gets the 4x "the last megaboss" buff for skyrocketingly-high AR/defense/health, the encounter itself is still a mid level encounter and is rather easy to dispatch, just more time-consuming and tedious.

can you double-check this? when I checked chanter chant scaling for my guide, they scaled independently of power level (at every character level past 1) at a rate of +1 acc per level and +5% damage per odd level (not just using single-class progression). also they didn't benefit from bellower +PL, so I assumed that they didn't benefit from any +PL bonus. it's possible they changed this at some point between 4.0 and 5.0 (i did all this testing as part of trying to understand the bellower) but it's quite the change to make without a patch note.

Two things that might help: a) there is a portal right by where the bomb goes off and the quest to find waidwen soul piece starts. i personally completley missed this portal at first (i thought it was just a weird cosmic graphic and not something interactible) and wandered around everywhere else. b) there are parts of the bridge that are walkable, even though they look like they are floating around and destroyed. When in doubt, just look at your map at all the unexplored areas and head straight for them and you may be surprised at what you can walk on.

yeah, this sucks. i'm afraid that something is busted, because essence interrupter should be doing full shock damage to dorudugan. if you haven't complained, i would report a bug to versus evil (I believe they did the port).

i would personally lean towards a smaller deflection reduction but paired with some across the board AR drops, or at least AR drops for all non-crush, non-shock damage.

based on where I live in the states, this sounds about right (despite my best efforts sometimes I do this too - it's hard to resist cultural social pressures to be a helicopter parent). at the same time, i also live in a city where there is an "Adventure Playground" which is a normal playground that also happens to have a bunch of tools, nails, and kids have free reign to build and dismantle stuff and adult supervision is verboten. A kid can even check out their own hammer, all they have to do is gather a few nails and turn them in. So...

To wit - IWD2's spells system was much more robust to degeneracy than BG2, despite using the same engine and an equally complex ruleset (probably moreso, since IWD2 implemented 3e multiclassing). It's because OBS (who was then Black Isle) knew in advance to exclude certain spells or itemization. Turns out you can eliminate a bunch of degeneracy by just not having spells like Time Stop or (Chain) Contingency, or items like Vecna's Robe.

@Elric Galad do you think it makes sense to also take a crack at ancient memory (whoops) and align the tick rate as well? it's a bit strange that regen effects are everywhere in how they implement the regeneration rate. it's not like it's even a rounding issue, since AFAICT all hots and dots do one final "tick" at expiration to take care of any rounding issues of having a non-whole number of ticks.

parenthetical side note - one of the deranged outcomes of health/endurance system is that i hated infinite constant recovery. in some fights i would be deliberately trying to knock out eder so that he wouldn't be in permadeath risk by having too low health compared to endurance. i would argue that this is more a case to be made that bloodmage should have capped self-heal, but in practice i think the drip is so low that in most fights the fighter will do better. i don't know about ancestor's memory + exalted endurance though, that's rough from a balancing perspective. one advantage of durational effects is that they can itneract with suppression, cleansing, meppu, ooblit, intellect, etc. i find that more interesting, mechanically. maybe if you want to tune up constant recovery, you just increase the base duration? even ancestor's memory can be stymied by an arcane suppression (which will block refreshing chants). i think the real problem may be the infinite versions of those effects (including but not limited to the regenerating belts). just my thoughts