thelee

have you tried DestroyWeaponInSlot ? edit - the downside would be needing to do iroll20s and disabling achievements

it might also be helpful to make it a universal upgrade, e.g. 100% miss->graze, 100% graze->hit, 100% hit->crit. That way it helps every attack roll in some way (except for ones that are already critting). duration would work, but there's something "nice" about the fixed number of hits. it seems like at such a low count (3) it was meant to be kind of a combo enabler, and having a luxury of time to set it up will work. it's just that right now it's so finicky to be worth the effort and even with the effort, there aren't many setups to make only 3 hit->crits that powerful to be a single-class-only spell (not to mention the extreme micromanagement you need so autoattacks don't eat it up).

there's an arquebus that gives you multiple shots per reload - that might be up your alley. it really feels like a double-barreled shotgun that you're quickly hip-firing. that's how they probably should have done eccea's arcane blaster - give it a bunch of shots per reload.

Do you remember what happened that might have caused the reaping knives to stick around? Devs aren't going to be around to help fix issues anymore, so we're on our own. But it sounds a lot like a similar issue I had where grimoire imprint spell stuck around and I couldn't get rid of it. Sounds like some clean-up isn't getting properly triggered in certain circumstances. One thing I would try if you haven't, is casting Reaping Knives again on Eder - maybe this time when it wears off it'll clean up properly?

definitely bring a long a chanter or cipher. priest also. chanter has huge amounts of persistence because their chants and invocations are basically infinite. with some good chants and a quality summon invocation they will basically carry any party through most of the megaboss fights. I recommend either a single-class or multi-class bellower or troubadour, mostly because they are both capable of getting 100% uptime on animated weapons or dragon, just via different mechanisms (though ingeneral troubadour is widely considered the best chanter subclass, or at least the most versatile). cipher for similar reasons - they have ancestor's memory which casts Brilliant for resource regeneration over long fights - only affects party members, but a cipher him/herself has a regenerating class resource. A single class cipher can also get Reaping Knives, which not only helps their focus regen, but can give you a massive DPS boost in some of the tougher fights (especially megabosses) where you might have an extremely hard time having enough PEN against the enemy armor. you also effectively have infinite healing via pain block. priest has plenty of support options (salvation of time is a big one, mentioned upthread) and there are degenerate options open to you if you have a source of brilliant (either via cipher or some other metagaming option) so you can use priest effects perpertually. you don't have to bring one of these along, but they make the tougher fights so much easier that these days i always have at least a chanter/cipher along with a priest.

yes. there might be some difficulty spikes near the end of SSS and FS, but normal is pretty forgiving. depending on your target difficulty, my recommended answers sort of vary in how much min-max-y or metagame-y they get. it also matters whether or not you do turn-based mode, which haplok alludes to.

What difficulty? On normal, probably almost anything would work, so you could just go with whatever sounds fun.

unfortunately no - i tested it myself a week or so ago. it's actually a little bit more broken than one might think - I thought it still might be OK for a non-dualwielded setup, but in practice it's not even great for that because the recovery bonus doesn't start applying until the next reload after it triggers, which means given its extremely short duration buff, you'll waste most of it reloading as normal, and then have like one shot with a short (still non-zero) reload.

have you actually visited the black isles and cleared the maze there? (there may be an alternate way to unlock that involves doing that, leaving, and then triggering an event, and coming back)

While I'm not as negative on the "choices didn't matter in the end" aspect of it, it does strike me as an oddly inconsistent tone with PoE1. PoE1 I thought was fascinating from a world-building perspective, because it was a traditional fantasy world was at the cusp of enlightenment/industrial revolution, as evidenced by the growth of renaissance-era gunplay, revolutionary sentiment in dyrwood, a nascent science (animancy) to replace the more traditional magic, and most relevantly a war in which a literal god was destroyed by a man-made bomb. If a god could be destroyed by man (not to mention the big reveal at the end), it upends all sorts of things in the world, right? It did strike me as odd that noone in Deadfire seems to care that the gods aren't real (I think I've raised this point several times in the past on this forum) and in contrast to what PoE1 was about, there's literally nothing you can do to stop Eothas's mission - you can change the ending slides a bit, but it feels a bit of a cop-out writing-wise. What you did at the end of PoE1 still felt impactful even if it was just mostly ending slides (to the extent that I was annoyed and repeatedly reported as bug that you didn't get Wael's blessing for pledging to do what Wael wanted, even if it only mattered for like the last 15 minutes of the game... it still felt very impactful and important).

since the old original post i watched some interesting youtube series about what it's like for a non-gamer playing a game. i'm not saying you're not a gamer, i'm just saying the video series made me appreciate the importance of proper scaffolding of game difficulty and game concepts. However much I like Deadfire, I have to concede that it doesn't do a great job of scaffolding information. As an example that I referenced on page 1 of this ancient post, is concentration/interrupts. The game very vaguely teaches you about concentration/interrupts, and then doesn't reinforce it with any major experiences of how important they can be. So for a lot of players, concentration/interrupts are just a murky side combat element that occasionaly frustrates your own spellcasting, up until they hit Neriscyrlas where the difference between one successful interrupt and a missed interrupt is a modestly hard fight vs an extremely annoying and difficult grind. So I think it's a reasonable criticism--especially given how difficulty between base game and DLC is balanced--that the game might be overly forgiving or lax about certain combat concepts before suddenly pulling the rug out from under you. I think it's a bit less of a problem with vanilla game because vanilla game can be beat even on PotD by like level 14-16 (even earlier if pacifist). But even if BoW and SSS can/should be done in the middle of the vanilla game, they clearly were developed after the base game, because they suddenly assume that the player is much more well-versed with a bunch of combat skills.

i actually don't trust my ability to get that right (not necessarily in deadfire, though it has happened). i've been bitten in the past where stuff i've added has not been correct, or there's some subtle interaction that direct-add doesn't do, so unless it's something i literally can't do without console (mostly for an item that i need to test or need to enchant differently) i do the extra tedium of recruiting a character just to make sure whatever i'm doing is what is "normal" for the game. I actually have two different saves, one with iroll20s on and one without, so any console-related stuff i keep isolated away from possibly polluting a "normal" test save.

you haven't gotten an event regarding the black isles (an earthquake or wave)? you might just be able to navigate manually - if the island has changed, you can just go down into FS without needing a quest or anything.

to be fair, I thought it was way too good in poe 1. there was no reason to not always take it and blindly use it in every fight (other than fire absorption on the enemy, though i'm not sure if that existed in poe 1). i'm not sure the ability is bad (it's only really bad if you're trying to consider the paladin in isolation and not with support or consumables to keep them up), i think mostly it is just costed a bit too expensively when the paladin has plenty of exhortations and other abilities you want to use.

i'm not even sure if the paladin counts as a spellcaster for captain's banquet purposes. Any time you have a penalty, you need to invert it. You can't just subtract it. In this case, a -25% from voidward would actually be a -.33 adjustment. For your later example it would be .45 - .33 => .12, which is positive, so you don't need to re-invert it, so it's a +12% bonus. (the inversion basically tries to emulate how in multiplicative systems, penalties are more severe and harder to trivialize) Importantly, you should add-up all the bonuses and maluses that affect a number in one go (don't separate out the healing) because otherwise the order of operations with regards to inversions could really throw you off. The only situation where you treat modifiers in a different step is PL scaling (which are multiplicative). I'm normally a big fan of theory, but you should only use theory to guide actual real experiments and is merely saving yourself time from pursuing dead-ends, and that theory needs to be accurate to begin with. To wit, getting the inversion math is absolutely critical to getting an accurate model of what's happening, especially when you're talking about accumulating enough to cancel out self-damage (being off by a little bit means the difference between infinite sustain vs dying throughout a long fight). Plus, not only could assumptions be off, Deadfire having been a game implemented by human beings, there are plenty of exceptions and edge-cases and weird implementation issues. Personally speaking, I have one save game from an old character that's just sitting around in a tavern to recruit level 19 adventurers so I could verify any theory with an actual test character.

it would be one of {5, 10, 15} * (1 + [PL * .05]) * (1 + [might_over_10 * .03] + [wounds * .05] + misc_dmg_bonuses) a max-level bloodmage helwalker, with maxed out might, at 10 wounds, would be: {5, 10, 15} * 1.35 * 2.25 = one of 15, 30, or 45 damage to self, on average 30 damage per use. honestly a lot worse than i expected (normally my characters have around 10 might and aren't helwalkers) - my typical end-game beefy character would barely survive ten spams of it, and forget about trying to get back a tier 7-9 spell (only one in three chance each use, so on average 90 health just to get one of those back). probably might want to invest in barring death's door, the last stand potion, or a shieldbearer, all plus a priest for salvation of time, or a cipher for brilliant to spam those abilities back.

blue! or purple! seems appropriately nightclub-y to me

Ahem, requoting my post

on skaen's challenge it's fun using club modal with simple torches. it's as if the enemy is so baffled i'm whacking (and beating!) them with a torch that their willpower is destroyed. SPEAKING of which, what about a unique torch? even just a magical one? (no, st. drogga's torch doesn't count because it's a saber)

if you include megabosses, chanter is an absolute king, so healing wall build that @TheMetaphysician mentions will be fine. there are plenty of powerful metagaming options you can do with other classes and builds, but i feel like a chanter is an almost brain-dead easy way to support and take care of megaboss encounters. With a chanter you just need either the animated weapon summon, or the big dragon summon (not possible if multiclassed). if you feel like going single-class chanter, a bellower or troubadour for 100% uptime on the big dragon is even better than animated weapons. Animated weapons do good damage and can knockdown up to 11 times, but can die pretty easy. Big dragon has 1000+ health, various elemental immunity, and can literally facetank megabosses for you. You could probably just mix in whatever else for damage.

maybe should give this a try. i thought azure blade would be pretty fussy, but sounds like maybe not right - for a lot of weapons i'm sure there's a nice build or a nice way to use it, but it just doesn't tend to frequently overlap with how i like to play, and so the annoyance factor of pierce-only damage becomes more important for me in dissuading me from picking it up.

for me: spears, pollaxes, maces, stilettos, rapiers. spears and pollaxes because when i plan out my parties engagement factors in, and rarely am I ever in a situation where I've planned around using a weapon to give me engagement. spears also get the shaft because weapons that do pierce damage only are uninspiring because pierce immunity feels like the most common. maces - i think about PEN issues a lot, and while a mace could help a lot by debuffing AR by 1, these days I bring a long a chanter for shield breaks, have expose vulnerabilities, and otherwise am rarely in aistuation where debuffing AR by 1 helps enough characters (at least two, I think) to be worth using over just having the mace wielder use a weapon that grants +2 PEN. stilettos - just don't really find the unique that inspiring, and by the time i'm strong enough to fight rust for his poignard I can't be bothered. Am making an effort this time around. Also, pierce-only weapon damage is a lame choice for me because of immunities. rapiers - mostly because of the fact that it's pierce-only. in the past i would also put arbalests and crossbows as under-used weapons, but these days i give basically every member of my party either arbalest or crossbow proficiency as their last proficiency just so that I have an easier time with Hauane O Whe.

i would be fine without making it an AoE and just increasing the hit to crit count to like 10. part of the lameness is that attacks that crit for other reasons or attacks that can't get upgraded (because they graze) still appear to eat up the hit-to-crit count of entropy.

I agree with @Boeroer that wood elf is really useful on a mobile, high-risk reward class. I think monks in particular do well. Something that might not be super obvious is that resistences are checked first before dispelling any inspirations, and for wizard/monk this means all those hobbled effects you run into throughout the game won't dispel swift strikes' quick, or nimble from fleet feet, or swift from deletrious alacrity of motion. All those seem like really important buffs for a sage (especially swift, since it will let you basically avoid any melee engagement you don't want to take on) and something you don't want to lose because of incidental level 1 effects the enemy has. Human would be useful with blood mage/helwalker, but ironically you'll have so many damage bonuses and buffs at your disposal that it might not be very impactful (the damage bonus is additive with might and other bonuses, and you'll have a huge might in all likelihood (super easy to max out or get close to maxing out at 35 with a helwalker). The accuracy bonus is helpful, but as a blood mage you effectively have infinite access to Aware so it's also a bit less good (also dance with death). If you have a priest backup a death godlike might be better since the +3 PL bonus is effectively a multiplicative +15% bonus (along with a +3 to +6 accuracy and some PEN/duration), which would be even better with a huge might, but this interaction comes later (barring death's door + wall of draining or salvation of time) and is extremely high-risk/reward (one arcane suppression and you're basically screwed).

yeah if you use it with summons it's bad. i wasn't thinking of that. 50 instant healing to start, with huge effective area is pretty good. I'm not sure there's anything comparable from any other class, even just for the raw healing number, ignoring the range. Druids and lay on hands can heal more health over time, but if you need the health really fast (and on more than one party member), I don't think there's anything better.