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Good luck with that Outside of what Boeroer says, while Healing Chain and/or upgrading Sacred Immolation or Hastening Exhortation is not bad, it's not nearly as good as the extra synergies you can get from multiclassing a paladin. I mostly single-class paladin just to do something different (using pallegina), not because it's particularly powerful.

Blood Mage is really powerful. There are some obvious "tricks" that you can use that make blood mage particularly powerful for solo builds, but unlike some tricky solo approaches I know of (tactician mostly), the class doesn't lose much power when in a party... you just have different power. I haven't tried Blood Mage + Helwalker before, but it might be worth testing to see if Blood Sacrifice generates wounds. If so, then it seems to me that a Blood Mage + Helwalker would just be way better than vanilla wizard + helwalker, especially for a high risk/reward build. Not only would you be able to get spells back, but doing so would give you more wounds, which means more might and (eventually) more intellect. Sounds juicy.

I find all rogue-like enemies (including those Risen) are really brutal if encountered a little too early. On PotD it's very hard to get enough AR early-to-mid game to actually get enemies to underpenetrate (a little easier on veteran, but still hard), so these rogue types are doing full sneak attack damage to you, interrupting you, and using Finishing Blow on you. With extreme micromanagement you can run right out of range of their melee attacks as they start them, but some of them just switch to ranged weapons really quickly (which is actually sometimes worse because their AI targets squishies when possible, and some enemies get cheaty ranged accuracy bonuses on PotD), and sometimes (especially on PotD) there are so many enemies that you're likely engaged by someone else or there's no maneuver room.

my opinions: 1. PoE1 was almost unreasonably difficult in act i. especially on PotD even near the end of my 1000+ hours with it, I had to clear every single quest, recruit companions, and stealth through much of caed nua just to open up the map into act ii. Meanwhile Deadfire was pretty well-known to be undertuned difficulty-wise at launch (with extremely powerful items). Items and consumables got tuned down, and the higher difficulties got tuned up, especially PotD, but unlike PoE1--while you're still gated into a starting area (Port Maje Island)--the fights are more easily avoidable (plus you can pretty much stealth through the entirety of it if need be). 2. Ship bounties are an easy source of experience so you can try to overlevel combat encounters. Plus, even without overleveling, like others said multiclassing opens a lot more possibility for putting together powerful parties (though it's also possible to create weak parties, hence why the game frequently suggests that multiclassing is not for new players), whereas in PoE1 there was a tighter band on what you could do with your characters since you could only single-class. 3. PoE1 combat was also much faster pace. Once I discovered the "automatically slow combat speed" option in the menu within the first few hours of playing, I turned it on and never turned it off. Deadfire is balanced at a speed that is around PoE1's slow speed (I think this was mentioned in a developer update for backers). For people who played whatever the default speed option is, PoE1 could be almost comically frantic and challenging and by comparison Deadfire would be a lot easier to handle. 4. This +1000. A lot of enemies seemingly got retuned, probably to take away a lot of the PoE1 frustration factor. I remember taking my first min-maxed party into the The White March and being obliterated by constant paralyze poison, and god help the first time I saw a broodmother cast Minor Avatar. While paralyze poison still happens, lagufeth and xaurip skirmisher encounters are nowhere near the nightmares they used to be. I remember in PoE1 some pwgra-type could cast healing spells like Moonwell infinitely (just on a loop with other spells), which could be a nightmare for parties with insufficient DPS. Many more caster-types in Deadfire are actually more like casters, with a limited inventory of spells. 5. Effects got rebalanced. This might look like a "nerf" to the player in places - e.g. prone is now just an interrupt, Devotions of the Faithful is now just a +10/-10 accuracy adjustment, confusion merely causes your targeting to become foe+friend, etc. But because all of these changes are symmetric with enemy abilities, it also means getting hit with an enemy Pillar of Faith no longer prones half your party for 10 seconds (which would be like ~20 seconds in Deadfire combat speed) or getting hit with a level 2 wizard confuse doesn't cause your party to descend into chaotic mayhem. That being said, I think the hardest fights in Deadfire overwhelm the hardest fights in PoE1. I'd say the difficulty curve in PoE1 starts high and then doesn't really budge up, going down mostly after Act II starts and your options open up. There's a bit of a spike in The White March but with some poison/disease immunity you're pretty much set for what I think are the most annoying fights. In Deadfire it's more like a U - a somewhat (but manageable) rough start, smoothing out in the mid-game, and then an extremely high late and end-game (you can search through the forums for people complaining about the oracle fight, porokoa, or the megabosses). Considering that much of the late/end-game is optional, you might end up with a pretty laconic experience, difficulty-wise.

hey bad news @Loki85, the game is past end of life in terms of active support, so they have explicitly said no more bugfixes (unless it is extremely severe). because of that, i think reverse pick-pocketing explosives should be thought of as more of an "assassination" option against green-circle NPCs (blue-circle in colorblind mode) instead of as a stealthy combat option. I agree it would've been cool if we could reverse pickpocket anyone, but we gotta roll with the punches on this one.

If it's gated with a significant cost it seems OK for a high-level (expensive) armor. Maybe it provides a con penalty or something?

Tinny! (a mash up of my daughters' names) this is a shameless way to get me to use your mod, isn't it

i feel like there definitely needs to be more brigandine - all my tanks feel samey because they all seem to converge on plate armor or Reckless Brigandine. Also in general, i think there should be "caster-enabling" heavy armor, even if it's not ideal, i think there's a lot of game design space here. I'm thinking of a slow, ponderous "battleship" combat (slow, ponderous, heavy-hitting) caster approach - the full +55% recovery penalty but maybe some bonus concentration or bonus spell keyword PLs to reward or enable the slow casting. ok, maybe even like a "crit on spell cast removes next recovery" thing. Not a lot though (at most two), just to provide some options because in general Deadfire tries to open up a lot of options, but heavy armor + casting is definitely one they don't even seem to try to enable. there also needs to be magical clothing. I hate that for my +0% recovery partymembers, after customizing their aesthetics and color choices, after like an hour of playing the game they are all looking nearly identical by wearing robes. One thing i miss about PoE1 is being able to take some clothing that I like the look of and manually enchanting them into something custom and nifty. I would even accept existing robes just re-branded into some variety of clothing. Similarly, I would also prefer armor to not be so eager to override your color choices - especially annoying with robes since even the neon-pink characters my daughter helps create end up looking the same when wearing Effigy's Husk or Humility. Lastly - more keyword interactions! There's tons of keywords everywhere, and I think it makes for more interesting game design if those keywords are used or referenced. Not just the standard fire, frost, etc. keywords, but priest or druid keywords, even monk or chanter keywords (e.g. some pacifist themed-armor that grants +1 or +2 non-offensive invocation PL).

ooo, least unstable coil might be tagged as quest item - though i thought the final version you get wasn't tagged as such?

everything static is 2D i think. they use pre-baked in information to indicate things like interactable objects, places where the background should be translucent (to create the illusion that your characters are behind something), where are legal pathways (in fact in both poe1 and deadfire there are places where they clearly got this wrong since you are unable to walk "behind" a wall in places even if you could a few steps earlier), elevation levels, etc. i *suspect* (but am not sure) that everything animated and/or moving is a 3D object. In BG/2 it would have just been a pre-baked animation, but because of the dynamic lighting involved I suspect it's real-time 3D.

i don't agree with any of the poll options, but i second boeroer's opinions. i think a lot more interesting stuff could have been done with keywords and aren't. it's a shame decay has hardly any keyword interaction. (similar thing for priest keyword like "cleansing")

yes, the one to the far right (all the "per encounter" abilities) with infinite use is the spell you steal. you can't steal more than one. don't quote me on this, but i believe grimoire imprint works like cipher "transfer" effects (where you debuff an enemy and gain a linked, simultaneous buff). so if you imprint one caster, and then try to imprint another caster, nothing will happen, you'll just stick with the first one until the original enemy dies or the effect somehow ends. it's not like poe1 where i think you could steal more than one spell (in poe1 i think you could get up to three).

yeah, there were some dev updates where they actually showed it. they also talked about the difficulties of doing dynamic lighting and reflections in deadfire, because they basically have to do a lot of "fakery" since the world has no actual depth. it was actually astonishing to see one of these updates because it seemed like a whole lot of work to emulate the low-tech IE engine in a decent way. (Kind of reminds of the lego movie looking like being made completely of legos but having been made with top-of-the-line CGI rendering farms)

minoletta's was tested on page 1 and didn't work. but missile salvo is implemented like meteor swarm/rain of holy fire, except the missile comes from a point above the caster, instead of off-screen above. so it's the same weird multi-aoe effect, but i forgot about it. and given how many projectiles missile salvo produces, wizard is probably actually the best for exploiting least unstable coil. you're probably as close to guaranteed as possible to get all six tier 3 inspirations (and not just brilliant). though frankly this might be a moot point since an empowered missile salvo already clears out most fights in the game, even some bosses.

I just tested more thoroughly - and I think it's just chanter DoTs. They definitely don't get boosted by hound's courage. But I tested with Shining Beacon and Cleansing Flame (two different kinds of DoT spells) and they both got boosted by Hound's Courage, even showed up in the spell tooltip (not just combat log). Maybe for some reason chanter chants don't count as spells? Because they were getting a +3% bonus (not much, but enough to go from 2.7 to 2.8 for come sweet winds) from the curio necklace my test character had. I think chanter chants in general are weird and should just be treated as their own thing. They don't do PL scaling like normal, and they aren't affected by something like intellect in a typical fashion.

ok, just tested it. it's apparently as i suspected. the initial cast of the spell counts as one spell effect, and then each falling fire projectile counts as another spell effect, so you trigger least unstable coil twice upon initial cast, and then repeatedly retrigger it as the spell continues. it's not completely obvious that it's doing so because as you accumulate more inspirations, it becomes more likely that you're just refreshing the duration of existing inspirations, but it's definitely happening. i didn't test it with meteor swarm, but did confirm rain of holy fire and also tested magran's might, but i have no reason to suspect meteor swarm is different. glad to know least unstable coil isn't just busted with chanter! it's arguably even more busted on priest or wizard because empowered rain of holy fire and meteor swarm create many more procs for the coil, and both wizard and priest have arguably stronger ways to exploit e.g. a brilliant trigger. (only downside is that the interaction comes much, much later than an AL1 or AL3 chanter invocation, but then again least unstable coil will only be available late for most people)

no eld nary only triggers it once. the coil interacts with the lightning invocation because the lightning invocation appears to be implemented in the game engine really weirdly (basically as like 3 to 6 separate spell effects), which all trigger the coil each. if what Pharmacist is saying is true - something similar must be "busted" about rain of holy fire - that it's somehow implemented as more than one spell effect. if rain of holy fire is broken, then the other spells that have similar effects like rain of holy fire should also be bugged in an advantageous way.

an example of poor BG2 balance. the normal and bounty hunter thief traps change as you level up, but it's not well-balanced. there's a sweet spot at like level 10 or so (i forget exactly which, it's been a while), where the traps do an un-resistable, un-savable poison effect for several rounds. even though the highest-level normal trap can instakill (but at +4 saves) and the highest-level bounty-hunter trap can un-resistably, un-savably maze enemies, the poison effect can annihilate enemies that would otherwise shrug off everything else (even higher-level traps). a level 10 thief with the patience to rest-spam a bit can wipe out a room full of dragons, liches, and iron/adamantine golems.

You can also convince Wael's avatar to go destroy Eothas as well.

Yeah, I agree with both points. I don't think it's impossible to have done this - already in-game if there's supposed to be some very important scripted interaction, you're either blocked from accessing certain areas, or you get interrupted mid-travel. But it's definitely non-trivial.

PoE1 also suffered from an issue where the more items you find, the bigger your saves bloat, causing loading times to become excessively long the longer you get into the game. Deadfire doesn't have that issue (I think in part because it dumps items that have been sold to vendors). On my pretty-nifty gaming PC Deadfire loads are pretty consistently on the order of seconds, whereas on the very same machine a late-game PoE1 save can literally take upwards of a minute. (I've mentioned before this is literally the primary reason I will never play PoE1 again now that I have Deadfire. Life is too short for long load screens, I get it.) That being said, on PC there is a very weak fast-travel system where in cities you can directly click on the name of a landmark within a district (mostly useful for Nekataka, Port Maje, Dunnage, and to a very limited extent Tikawara/Sakuya) and when you travel to that district you'll warp directly into that landmark. Not sure if you can do this on console or if people already know about this, but even on my gaming PC it saves me a lot of tedium to be able to warp directly into e.g. Dark Cupboard or Radiant Court instead of having of first having to load in the district, walk a bit, and then load in the shop.

how does it do so? is it per fire "bolt" that falls? if so, i wonder if it would also work with magran's might and meteor swarm.

the +10% spell damage from griffin's blade does nothing for DoTs? uh oh (literally just started a character that wanted to use this interaction)

Not trolling here, but I think this is way too extreme. Fundamentally, I think virtually all time travel is flawed, because the inherent concept is going to produce paradoxes, no matter how much you try. But as a popcorn-logic lark (and slowly disseminated across several movies and not some writer coming up with it in one day as you allege), it's fine. But I mean while I agree with Boeroer that Interstellar and Arrival did it pretty OK, it's not because they "solved" it or carefully thought about it, it's because they deliberately under-explore the time travel in those movies, because thinking about it too hard is going to be weird. In both Interstellar and Arrival there is some future "thing" that is able to solve the problem for the present-day characters in either case if you think of it for more than a few seconds, you realize that there is essentially a deus ex machina (even bigger than the plot device of time travel) solving the problem for everyone, and there is a gaping writing hole in which they never actually connect present-day to future-day, and instead the problem has essentially always been solved, which is rather unsatisfying. There's literally no way to do time travel plot device that holds up for more than a few minutes of careful thought unless you abide by the laws of physics, at which point no information in the present can influence the past and no information in the future can influence the present (at least at a rate faster than the speed of light), at which point it's not really time travel anyway. Anyway, all this is to say - while pop-time-travel can be fun (hey, back to the future is completely nonsensical but is still fun to watch) I like PoE's serious world-building and its internal consistency, please don't hurt my head by introducing time-travel to it.