thelee

you are right. going through my notes, i was a bit sloppy with the testing. i did some test with both smoke veil and shadowing beyond on what i thought were "instant" spells and got similarly bad results, that i gave up on using smoke veil and did the rest of my tests with shadowing beyond. it's worse/more confusing than that, i'm afraid. smoke veil -- it turns out -- also waits until you affect a target, but is less generous than stealth. so it's not that it lasts a bit longer than shadowing beyond, but it will wait until you affect something before it breaks. so how far or close that fireball is, doesn't actually matter. however, like i said, it's less generous than stealth: stealth doesn't break upon using potions or poisons. smoke veil does. bafflingly, even though smoke veil will wait until you affect an enemy before breaking invisibility, you still don't get assassinate bonus on some spells depending on some weirdness internally, even if you would with stealth. this confused my testing. (an example spell: divine mark will only get +25 accuracy from stealth. from smoke veil or shadowing beyond, it gets no assassinate bonus) edit - this is inconsistent. sometimes i get the assassinate bonus, sometimes i don't. edit 2 - smoke vile doesn't break from your hazards affecting enemies. stealth does. gaaaaah why didn't obsidian pick on one single implementation of invisibility. sorry. a lot of people when it comes to game mechanics like to say stuff based on intuition, without having actually verified it in-game. it's a pet peeve of mine ("theorycrafting"). accept my apologies. on the other hand, between the two of us, you were able to help identify how invisibiliy/assassinate is even weirder than i thought. at least though now this means smoke veil is a better way to trigger it.

you should test this yourself. for most forms of invisibiliy (including smoke veil), you become visible as soon as you do an action. e.g. as soon as a projectile appears at your finger tips. it's already way too late to get an assassinate bonus from that. actual stealth is more generous, because it doesn't unstealth you until you actually affect a target, so you get an assassinate bonus as a result. edit - keep in mind that i was testing even with spells that don't have projectiles. the timing pretty much has to be instant, which means it boils down to some incredible tedious details of how a spell animation and its timing is set up.

Just discovered this while I was trying to suss out some ambiguities for a prospective assassin build. Two critical insights - 1. the game dynamically updates your PEN and other stats for calculating spell effects as they change. this might seem obvious, but some of the ramifications of this were unobvious to me even until now. for one, this means that boosting your PEN or getting hit with Dazed can cause DoTs that you've already applied to enemies to change their damage. The game doesn't "snapshot" your stats upon casting, in other words. (I had previously thought that maybe PEN was snapshotted) 2. assassinate is a passive bonus that lasts only so long as you are physically invisible. Importantly, stealth and many forms of invisibility disagree on when your character should become visible. This can really mess up how you plan on using your spells with an assassin. This means: while stealth or invisible, an assassin/caster multiclass will appropriately see boosted accuracy and PEN for all their spells and tooltips, because you have an assassinate bonus and the game is updating you with what you have. however, for slower spell effects, you may already be visible by the time they happen, which means you are missing out on the full potential of assassinate. for example: if you apply a DoT, you lose the +PEN assassinate bonus because by the time the spell actually does damage (even the intial tick), you're already visible. This is true regardless of whether you are stealthed or invisible. For DoT or slower spell effects, the only way to benefit from +PEN is to become reinvisible after you've already cast the spell (and then that implies you pretty much just sit around doing nothing while giving you a slight penetration bonus). the rest i hid in a spoiler tag because it turned out from follow-up posts that it's mostly an issue with shadowing beyond, but i'm keeping it around so anyone who goes through this thread knows what on earth the next few posts are talking about. TL;DR: don't use DoTs, bounce, jump, or multi-part spells with assassinate don't use shadowing beyond to trigger assassinate, unless it's a weapon-based attack. smoke veil and potions of invisibility are your friend. inexplicably, hazard spells don't break stealth/invis, and (excluding shadowing beyond) even when they trigger they don't break invisibility, even though stealth would normally break. this has the odd consequence that a priest with good alchemy could drink a potion of invisibility and go to town just casting repulsing, warding, and searing seals, and all of them get a +25 accuracy bonus. then you finish it up with one good spell to break invisibility. not exactly the most powerful thing you could do with your time, but fun nonetheless. works less well with druid/wizard because the only hazards they get are walls that don't do too much per tick. (the really good stuff--like wall of many colors--aren't hazards) note; edited this post based on updated dat from follow up comments.

i mean, this is my point. blade cascade has a 5% chance to proc, and you need to build up that lash buff. You also need to spend 3-ish salvations of time, which costs an empower point as well. you can also end most fights in less time and setup with a single empowered symbol. SoT certainly can be metagamed to be powerful (and can become degenerate), but let's anchor that a bit.

by default you only get +20s, +30s with self empower from one priest. (maybe +40s with some luck with echo effects). without brilliant, that might sound like a lot, but it's not. sure you can blade cascade your way through a trash mob, but an empowered high-level symbol will also do the same thing. even if you combine with other effects at the same time (e.g. BDD, Escape, aefyllath, wecy's hood, blade turning) to get extra mileage out of the stretched duration, you are certainly very powerful, but not--imo--that much out of line for multiple casts and an empower point of a mid-high level spell with lots of metagame setup. salvation of time is a very swing-y spell. it can certainly be powerful when metagamed, but it can also be utterly useless if not set up correctly. but it's not truly degenerate unless you can brilliant your way to stretching short effects to infinite duration.

fyi, minoletta's minor missiles strikes unerringly (no attack roll). ninagauth's killing bolt attacks fortitude - which is your lowest defense. no amount of deflection protects you against either. i believe killing bolt does raw damage, so no amount of armor will protect you against that, either. i'm guessing you're an inquisitor (trickster). invisibility can be a good way to get spells to whiff, though i don't know what specific build you may be referencing.

It's inversions. Basically - virtually anything in the game with a negative symbol in front of it gets "inverted" and is much stronger than positive values. A full, ugly dissection is here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions For your case, a -35% modifier from dual-wielding is equivalent to a -53.8% additive penalty (1/(1-.35)). Combine that with the other positive additive modifiers, and do any appropriute re-inversions and you end up doing 13.11-ish damage (rounded to 13.1). Inversions are basically the worst part of deadfire's mechanics in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness. edit2: the math is ugly. at this point I've done it enough that a few negative modifers I know exactly how to invert them off the top of my head. But for an approximation, you can say that a single negative modifier is roughly equivalent to it being a single multiplicative penalty, if you want to be able to do calculations yourself. (there are no convenient rules of thumbs for multiple negative modifiers and/or when combined with lots of positive modifiers) edit: when I say "virtually anything" I really do mean anything. Healing modifiers, area of effect modifiers, beneficia/hostile effect durations, health penalties from low con, even paladin and priest disposition scaling. There are many places in the game where you can tell that the designers themselves didn't quite grasp their own inversion system and the balancing is a little screwy.

it definitely was related to containers and items. the same game i had would get progressively worse the further i got in poe1. act i - fast area loads and saves. by white march - ages to load and save. you can even verify by looking at save game file sizes. for deadfire they are all relatively compact - in poe1 they would balloon (istr to hundreds of MBs). iirc it was because there was no culling of inventories anywhere, and they were stored really inefficiently, so the more you looted, your save file sizes and load times would grow basically without bound. deadfire apepars to handle this much better by a) having vendors reset their inventory and even ignoring that, with a gigantic stash deadfire still doesn't have the same problem.

weird! is it an older thread? i know there used to be issues where effects could instantly annihilate hauane o whe and prevent the split, and i thought they had patched them all. if not, i had assumed all annihilation effects were identical, but i guess that's never a safe assumption with deadfire.

but ooze still splits despite annihilation?

sounds like a bug, unfortunately. you don't have any mods? you're not at a point of talking to queen onekaza? just trying to think of anything that might be conflicting with the quest resolution.

adding on, most mythic stuff is pretty much limited to post-megaboss equipment upgrades (aside from the special berath's blessing, the only source of mythic upgrades is in fact from one of each of the four megabosses). mythic is so utterly unnecessary that by the time you can upgrade a good portion of your stuff to mythic, the game is already over. mythic is more of a trophy than anything else. marux amanth is also stuck at superb, but it's still worth using, particularly for a priest. most of what makes the soulbound items good are their extra abilities - so the fact that some of them may get stuck at superb is less relevant compared to the abilities they gave you.

absolutely, though they kind of vary from being niche-good to being all-around OP. you should look them up on the wiki if in doubt. ones with particular upgrades to look out for (imo): marux amanth - can be upgraded to have an insta-kill effect on near death foes. when dual-wielded with any other weapon this is a great way to finish off tough bosses since the full attack gives you two chances to land your instakill effect. for priests, marux amanth gives a 10% spell echo chance, which can be very nice depending on the build weyc's robe - when you empower an ability, every ally close nearby gains brilliant for a short duration. this can be an easy catalyst for several deranged infinite combos. modwyr - a pretty slick sword, with a +20% lash, immunity to intellect afflictions, a once/encounter stun ability, and bonus to action speed. the immunity to intellect afflictions can make modwyr an attractive weapon for berserkers wintertide bulwark - a large shield that upgrades to have a retaliation effect and a once/rest defense booster. good for tanky builds changeling's mantle - real slick on barbarians slayer's claw - upgrades might inspirations a tier. on barbarians (esp berserkers) and monks, this is an easy way to get tenacious or even energized. If you're interested in being a bit cheaty - you can just rapidly switch weapons back and forth and upgrade any might inspiration to energized (since every time you switch to using slayer's claw your might inspirations get upgraded).

i think it's worth pointing out that there are "steady states" in nature that are locally optimal but not globally optimal; they don't completely weed out for being suboptimal, so it's not that there has to be an "oppositional" force of nature. An over-simplified example I can give to clarify this is sickle-cell anemia and malaria. Concerning the gene that produces sickle-cell anemia, if you get one healthy one and one mutated one from your parents, you end up not having sickle-cell anemia at all and instead become resistent to malaria (a plus!). If on the other hand, you get two mutated ones, you get sickle-cell anemia (very bad!). Because of the way genetics works, one could easily reason that people with one healthy and one mutated gene have an advantage in malaria-prone areas of the world, but this necessarily means that you will always have people born with sickle-cell anemia (with a simple punnet square you would see two malaria-resistent parents have a 25% chance of producing a sickle-cell kid), which otherwise should be weeded out rather quickly. And in fact a perfectly healthy parent with a sickle-cell parent (if they managed to live long enough without modern medicine) would you get you children with that malaria resistance at 100% rate. So there doesn't need to be an "opposing force" per se the way you put it. In the world of Eora, "nature" has developed some sort of reincarnation process, and it only developed just enough to get it to work barely good enough, and the way it works is just well enough that it's not going to improve any further because it's stuck in a local maximum. You need some outside intervention (the Wheel) to get it kicked out of its local max and into a more globally optimal state.

you might have been doing it slightly wrong. you're not supposed to destroy the thing in the center. you destroy the things on the outside of the ring, and each time you destroy one they send a charge to the thing in the middle that launches an electric attack that stuns all the constructs. if you destroy the thing in the center, you can no longer do that. that being said, the constructs can be real bad. most players can brute force their way through one or two steel constructs, but several successive waves of them (along with some filler constructs)? that's pretty rough, and you really need to be prepared to deal with AR and have very good sustain or anti-fire solutions. edit: just want to add that many of the "Survival" challenges can be unfairly bad. Most fights in the game don't require you to slowly manage resources over prolonged periods of time, and suddenly have to deal with waves of enemies without knowing how many to expect can be extremely rough.

nature screws up all the time. a natural real life analogue would be infant mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates during childbirth) before the advent of more modern medicine and science. all "nature" cares about is doing just enough to propagate the genetic material of a species. nothing more. our bodies are filled with tons of "useless" genetic material that does god knows what. our feet are anti-ergonomic adaptations of primate hands that are extremely prone to injury. imagine that instead of "hollowborn" or "weak souls" and the engwithans creating the wheel and the gods, it was "cancer" or "alzheimer's" and cure for cancer/alzheimer's/hereditary illnesses and the engwithan perspective makes a ton of sense.

be careful about reading stuff online. things got heavily nerfed shortly after release. if in doubt, go for the weaker numbers you see online.

the literal definition is that "gibs" is short for "giblets": internal organs. more colloquially, in video games "gibs" (or being "gibbed") is what happens in certain games where you kill something and they explode into tiny chunks of meat and flesh. i guess the idea being that instead of the enemy just falling over dead, their internal organs are blowing up everywhere. more specifically, in deadfire, if you have "gibs" enabled, when you kill an enemy with a critical hit, instead of leaving a body behind, they explode into a bunch of bloody chunks. This mirrors the behavior of the old games Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale (or to a certain extent, the original Fallouts). For deadfire, there is actually a mechanical effect - it is not purely for looks. Some effects[1] rely on enemy corpses, and if an enemy is "gibbed" they don't leave a corpse behind. So if you want to maximize those types of effects, you should disable this option in deadfire. [1] examples: you can't use chanter invocation to blow up corpses, you can't use druid "Garden of Life", even many cipher "transfer" effects shut down if the corpse is annihilated via a "gib".

i've had several psions by now, and the stop-when-damaged is not tedious and much less of a big deal than one might think, so long as you aren't being silly and building a melee psion. i think--again--multiclassing psion is beneficial because then you just switch to doing casting more from your secondary class while you wait for focus to start regen again.

nice! i need to try this

Can confirm. I have a psion/animist right now and they have de facto become my healbot. Can only imagine what a psion/lifegiver would be like. Alternate druid heals with ancestor's memory and pain block and they pretty much carry the party. Without ancestor's memory there's still a bunch of options, even if it's just to keep interrupting or dominating scary enemies

Do you have any mods? You can't click on the little glowing purple orb at all? Sanity check by comparing with this video of mine (video loads to the correct timestamp, don't worry about the length): Note that in my video I had to move my character to interact with the soul, otherwise the game thought I was trying to select my character.

Adding to what Boeroer said, it doesn't help the confusion about the lack of a guardian because of how accidental it can be to skip the fight, since it was related to a seemingly unrelated decision in a distant quest. Also, if you have dug around the developer notes a bit, they actually consciously made Ukaizo thin and easily skippable because of how many players complained about the final part of Pillars of Eternity 1 after you jumped down into the pit. I think it's fair to say that most people agree they overcorrected. Even ignoring how easily you could skip the guardian fight altogether, originally the guardian was extremely easy and not even really a "boss" per se. (Most of my criticisms of the ending--mechanically--are gone now that there are high-level DLCs and the guardian gets boosted up as you kill megabosses, but at release it was incredibly anticlimactic to be able to kill the guardian on PotD without breaking a sweat at like level 12-14, despite the fact that all the gods seem to be speaking about the guardian in hushed tones). I think it's definitely possible to have a good, engaging story where the protagonist is ultimately powerless. Raiders of the Lost Ark is my canonical example - Indiana Jones is absolutely worthless in that movie - the Nazis end up getting the Ark of the Covenant, and then God (?) destroys all the Nazis. If Indiana had just stayed at his university teaching classes and grading papers the narrative would've gone the same way. But it was and is still a blast of a movie and story to watch. I think there's a lot in the game post-release they did (like the Woedica book, some of the tie-ins with DLCs) where they tried to fix it up and improve the overall ending narrative, but similarly I think it's fair to say that maybe they cut things too aggressively or didn't quite get the factions to tie in well enough.

to be fair, very few things work on bosses like Dorudugan, I'm not sure that should be the filtering criterion. also, morning stars are your friend. all the -25 defense debuffs are great, but for some reason the effects i really want to land seem to be fortitude...

nope, geomancer maia. no other spell effects on her. edit - though she was using xefa's empirical explication with all upgrades, and an aefflyth ues mith fyr chant, for a total of 3 lashes on each bullet. if each lash counts, that would definitely explain the huge surge in refreshing defense!