thelee

typically no easy solution - lots of micromanagement. i run in recklessly and use party-unfriendly spells (fireball, pillar of holy fire) to help drop down into bloodied to begin with. to stay alive and bloodied - easiest - barring death's door and salvation of time and don't give a damn bout how low my health gets. But outside of cipher/brilliant exploits, this only means about 20-30 seconds of carefree time and it comes pretty late. harder - using things like escape or invisibility to relieve myself of getting too much enemy hate if i start dipping too low. things like nemnok's cloak or that brigandine that gives you +AR as you get lower also help because you might start getting really tanky by the time you are bloodied already (though the trade-off is that wearing that brigandine lowers your dps potential a lot, but i found that on a tankier streetfighter you still get a lot of damage done). regardless of how much hate i get, if I drop into near death i almost always have a withdraw or lay on hands ready as an emergency (i just have to fall back into bloodied afterwards). or, better yet, i have revive the fallen which will just revive me but put me back into sub-bloodied for continuing my rampage. it also helps that over time, i've made sure that my streetfigthers have tons of health - dumping resolve (makes it harder to use sparkcrackers to trigger flanked anyway) in favor of constitution (as well as other dps stats) as well as picking up Tough. It makes it harder to get bloodied, but not that much harder with powerful party-unfriendly spells at hand, but more importantly it gives you lots of buffer room and room for error once you are bloodied. Anyway, micromanagement-intensive but feels really rewarding to pull off. i suppose in an ideal world you have exalted endurance or chanter's ancestor's memory and just remember to switch them off if you get too close to getting above bloodied, but it's one extra bit of micro i don't think it's worth (at least for me) to have to worry about. (the one time i ran a streetfighter with a chanter, i preferred the damage shield chant on a troubadour because the refreshing 10pt shield basically acted like regen, but in a way that didn't undermine my streetfighter and actually helped control how much damage they were taking).

i haven't played TB mode much, but for a big range of dex values and for typical fights, i don't think stride really matters that much. Sprawling fights are very rare, I can't imagine many circumstances where having the extra movement range is useful over, say, more int or might. (Though if you stealth around at the start of fights it might matter a lot more since your movement range is severely limited while sneaking.)

never happened to me on PC might want to add this to the console bug megathread, or report it to versus evil.

there's really no alternate way to access it? I know Matakau is normally available at start as part of pre-order, but if you don't have it you can loot it off a ship bounty.

you can equip grave calling in one hand and a single-handed ranged weapon in your off hand and you get dual-wielded attack speed but attack exclusively with grave calling. no problem with getting 10 stacks pretty quickly that way. (this is the same thing with scordeo's edge - is more mediocre if you're alternating with a different weapon--which is slower than just single-handed or shield style) while I agree that this is true for me as well generally, i think this is slightly different with streetfighter (and to a lesser extent when i'm metagaming human bonus). in such situations, i'm deliberately controlling damage being dealt to a character to get under bloodied and stay there as much as possible. if one is treating the bloodied aspect of streetfighter as a nice "extra" then I can agree with your standpoint, but I know with my various streetfighters I hate having a steady drip of healing that I don't have much control over (or is one extra thing to worry about switching off).

just adding another difficulty-dependent note. on higher difficulties (especially PotD+upscaling) where PEN/AR is more of an issue, crit is way more impactful because crit can move you up from underpenetration into doing full damage, which could be as much of a 300+% increase in damage on a crit. even when juggling multiple weapon damage types, there will be fights where it's just really dang hard to have full penetration on the enemy's armor. So because of that i don't completely frown on exalted focus's hit-to-crit bonus. It also stacks with other similar effects (just an oddity with how hit->crit and other similar effects work), whereas like you said the base +armor effect of endurance is really easy to be redundant with other similar effects. i would also point out that while the constant health regen of exalted endurance is really nice and can totally carry you in fights that you have no business winning, it's an anti-synergy with a streetfighter, since a streetfighter is best at sub-50% health and flanked. personally i extremely prefer exalted charge - bonus stride can totally save your clothies from being hunted down by enemy rogues, you can use it to kite, and the hit->graze defense bonus can do much more for you than the constant armor effect of exalted endurance without undermining streetfighter bonus. but it's not for everyone.

to add my own opinion (which is similar but slightly different to aeonslegend), if you don't have a priest backup: i suspect a streetfighter has so many damage bonuses that dual-wielding tarn + grave calling gives you the best of both worlds and will blow out what aldris can do -- the aldris crit effects will get drowned out by the streetfighter's huge other damage bonuses (even undermining them due to the heal) that you're probably better off with a straight-up higher lash from tarn or grave calling (since it's multiplicative). depending on the difficulty you are playing with, it's also somewhat of a trick question, because animancer's blade will be one of the best sabres. the lower damage is made up for by the lower recovery time (basically cancelling each other out) and you can "dual-wield" it by putting a ranged weapon in your off-hand and never going at range, and you will output insane damage in situations where sabres' slash damage would normally suck. might be a good candidate for your second weapon setup. depending on the difficulty, i would still rate scordeo's edge highly. without a priest for metagaming the instant recovery duration, i think its big attraction is the possibility of getting up to +20 accuracy on any weapon, which in some situations (mostly on higher difficulties) might outweigh what you can get with any lash. with a priest and salvation of time, scordeo's edge is probably hands down the best weapon in the game. even with high dex, negative armor, and streetfighter recovery bonuses, having all recovery eliminated for 20-30 seconds (not counting ways to get more salvation of time) is still a massive multiplicative increase in dps - a streetfighter could melt an entire battlefield by themselves in that time. you'd have to "dual-wield" the scordeo's edge with a ranged weapon to maximize the chance you trigger blade cascade each fight though. edit - for comparison, my last streetfighter wielded daggers and with all bonuses taken into account had a recovery time of .9 seconds or so and an attack time of like .4 seconds... so roughly an attack every 1.3 seconds. even despite that speed, removing the recovery completely would still be a whopping 3x increase in damage.

i could see it kinda make "logical" sense if summons that visibly wield equipment scale, and others don't, though it doesn't make any gameplay balance sense. but to boeroer's point i think for a summon mod/tweak, simplicity should be the overriding factor. even if that means tweaking a lot of base stats to fix the broken balance that might result from having every summon get scaling gear.

The first time I summoned the Dragon my jaw dropped at how much health he had. I've literally used it to facetank all the megabosses for me, and even on my bellower (~45s duration) it runs out of duration before it dies (except when Belranga had like 100 stacks of her vengeance buff). It almost feels like a bug (in the way Vatnir's summon seems like it must be a bug).

this is absolutely incredible research, good job! I don't suppose there's anyway to extract the following data points a) whether or not a summon joins your party or your team b) any special abilities a summon comes with ?

chanter summon invocations are all fixed; the chanter chant ("many lives pass by" or something) which creates a new skeleton every time you sing it has no scaling though (though you create a skeleton so frequently with that that it almost doesn't matter that it doesn't scale, still does its main job of distracting the enemy and maybe contributing to flanking)

Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with Kaylon at all on this. I'm not sure "uptime" is the right metric for offensive invocations at all. If you're into lots of min-max metagaming, maybe a typical chanter is going to be too slow to have much of an impact, but chanters themselves are ripe for min-max metagaming themselves, since opening with an empowered offensive nuke with sasha's singing scimitar and weyc's gear can frequently let you clear out many fights on your own (especially with a bellower).

I'm not going to do the whole pro/con thing, except point you to my guide's info on the forms: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/druid But I will talk about two forms in particualr. Cat is by far the best all-around IMO. It comes with a once/encounter active ability that gives you a whopping +33% action speed for a short duration on top of already having faster attacks; the action speed buff even lasts past your spiritshift if you end it prematurely. Get a priest with salvation of time or multiclass with a wizard for wall of draining and you can stretch out the buff for an entire fight, emptying out your spellbook and pummeling enemies with great speed. Stag is the absolute worst. It doesn't have carnage, like it says it does. It has a lame active ability called "carnage" that attacks once for incredibly medicore damage. I believe this has to have been an erroneous implementation of it, and they never got around to making it function like in poe1 where it was like barbarian carnage except you had to turn it on.

My personal point was that it was hard for me to see how @AeonsLegend's changes were better than what's already in place. To me, they all fail in terms of "realism" and it's all just abstraction, and I don't know why one's abstraction is better than the one already in place, especially by certain rules of trying to demurk combat. If you want to pare a proposed change down to just "this weapon will grant you +1 enemies to flank" I mean sure ok, but I don't know why this abstraction is so much better than what's in game that it warrants change. It ultimately just sounds like "I want to leave my mark on this game" which I mean sure go mod it and do it, but it's not like there's some major gameplay flaw in the base system that your'e fixing. There are actual gameplay flaws with flanked, but I haven't seen them mentioned here: 1. Flanked is sometimes a passive, sometimes an active bonus. 2. Perception afflictions shouldn't also provide flanked. (1) is a bug and sometimes means that Flanked stacks with AR reducing effects and sometimes not. It's murky, when the combat system is trying to demurk, and clearly by its arbitrary-seeming effect could not have been intended. (2) is simply because Perception afflictions are the only affliction class that automatically triggers Deathblows. This makes it way too trivial to trigger Deathblows and makes Rogues and Rogue multiclass really effective damage dealers (just by picking up Persistent Distraction for non-debonaires). It also has bad interactions with actual Flanked status and may contribute to (1). If you want to make Flanked weaker, I would argue that at the same time Flanked is weaker, Perception afflictions should get a different non-flanked effect that stacked with actual Flanked.

hm, that is true, but frankly i could go either way on it. Clearly a pistol or blunderbuss is a ranged weapon, but at no point does it make sense to me that even a person at point-blank range can help "flank" a target. what is mechanically different from a pistol/blunderbuss held at 1-2m away, versus a quarterstaff at 1-2m away? i mean this is a bit of a philosophical head-scratcher, but is part and parcel when you scratch at an abstraction too much. I don't know why reach weapons should prevent enemies from getting into range or prevent flanking anymore than their current implementation, it all just seems like different attempts at abstracting something and I'm not sure any way is better than what is already in-game (well ok, i can say that in relation to my earlier post, I'm not keen on making it "easier" to avoid flanking by having some effect that prevents enemies for flanking you; flanking should just be an un-murky, reliable mechanic. I view in the lens of sneak attack or sneak-attack-like effects - when all other afflictions run out or fail, you can at least flank the enemy. keeping enemies at bay is interesting, but is probably way too powerful for a simple weapon effect - you'd outrange most melee enemies in the game)

I don't know if you're aware and this was intentional, but - barbarians can be made harder to flank, and with certain items you can be made harder to flank (the range conferred by quarterstaff and spear also effectively does this). edit - from a game design perspective, flanking seems like a mechanic that should be the default. That is, if there are too many ways to avoid being flanked that are exceptions to the standard "flanking" rule, then it makes it a lot murkier and you can't really rely on it (this is the worst part of galawain's challenge - potentially getting unstoppable on a map full of beasts and having all your rogue and debuff strategy be pointless). It's bad enough that FS has a couple bosses that are immune to flanking and interrupts. I mean, I think it's fair to say that in this RPG mechanic, the abstraction lends itself to the flankee constantly trying to shuffle and divert their attention between the different flankers - hence why it's important that the target is actually "flanked" at approximately 180 degree angles. Simply being engaged by more than one foe from the front won't trigger flanked. Plus, one could argue that within the system, we already cover what you're talking about - typically the person attacking from the front is likely to be engaged, whereas the person behind is not (but only against foes who are properly trained). That is an advantage that the rear flanker has over the front flanker. Depending on the fight, this advantage goes away or reverses - e.g. there are some big beasts where it is actually far more dangerous to be the rear flanker, due to tail lash (some dragon fights, porokoa)

well, if we're going down this hypothetical a) poor scenario design if you actually have toddlers that pose a threat to you, or if for some reason you have 10000 toddlers fighting a dragon (5% of 10k toddlers critically hitting in one combat round could probably take down a dragon ignoring any damage resistance effects like 3e-style 5/+1) [though in the deadfire/poe-style system, 10k toddlers would appropriatley be slaughtered by a dragon without having landed a single blow] b) in practice, toddlers would have like a 1d1 damage die and probably be non-lethal damage and would probably have a crit multiplier for x1, whereas a seasoned battle veteran has multiple levels of fighter, a weapon, and a 2x or 3x multiplier. so no, a seasoned battle veteran and a toddler won't have the same outcome for crits and misses. anyway, back to OP topic, as kaylon said, the main abstraction i've heard about flanking is that it's basically an enemy is distracted by being flanked and yes that constitutes a benefit for everyone else attacking that enemy. i don't find "realism" a useful metric for a game mechanic. I find "does it lend itself to interesting gameplay" a better metric. You're talking about realism in a game when people are able to withstand endless amounts of stabs and gunshots without any healing or first aid, and you don't hobble off to recover for months after a fight in which you've sustained damage. You're talking about realism in a game where people are able to coalesce ambient energy into explosive magic or temporary conjurations - every attempt at casting a spell should instead cause a nuclear explosion. Obviously a lot of the game is abstracted away and fictionalized, so I don't know why flanking in particular is something that needs to be tweaked. edit: boy, ninja'ed by a bunch of other people.

Strictly speaking, in newer D&Ds this should be a skill or stat check. Attack roll is supposed to abstract all the luck and shuffling around of combat. For hitting a truly inanimate mundane object, you really should just pass a check (which can neither critically fail not succeed). To paraphrase 3e DM guidance I've read, tying your shoe laces is not something that everyone critically fails at 1 out of 20 times, and rocket science is not something an idiot gets right by dumb luck 1 out of 20 times. Edit: from a game design perspective there is a good argument to be made in favor of critical hits and misses. They basically create a min and max capability for everyone. Doesn't sound like much, but in PoE1 I played a virtually untouchable solo character which just grinded out fights, but in IWD2 even with infinite deflection a large band of heart of fury kobolds will eventually kill you so you couldn't neglect damage.

what the-?? this sounds like the rare "item loses all abilities" bug, except affecting an ability? that's insane i wonder if there's some save-file or game-file corruption that can happen

oh man, by analogy i just have to quote the old BG2 sorcerers.net spell reference on zone of sweet air: "Stationary area damage is easily turned against your enemies because of your vastly superior tactical insights... Right? Be grateful when someone casts Cloudkill, do not get rid of it." Slicken is always good. Even if you have troubles with friendly fire AoE, you don't even have to hit your front-line - just toss it at some casters in the back and remove any spellcasting support from your enemies for much of the fight. With spell-shaping, it gets even better, since against bosses (who have a large size) you can shrink the AoE so that it only affects them, even when surrounded by your own party members, with additional +1 PL to boot. With blood mage or brilliant, honestly one of the most powerful things you can do is just spam Slicken every 6 seconds.

first thing i tried, it didn't. i also tried shuffling the character out of the party and back in again. i also tried various self-induced knockouts. i also tried grimoire imprint again, in case if it wore off it would take plague of insects away with it. didn't. it was really permanent. there's an exploit waiting to be found where someone figures out how to reproduce this bug and triggers it whenever they steal a decent spell (maybe even an ultimate challenge option to exploit a permanent, infinitely available Withdraw?)

hey now - maybe this is dumb and obvious to everyone else but does this mean that summons automatically scale with Veteran and POTD? I always recorded summons as having generally 7 PEN, but this only makes sense if they are getting +2 from PotD scaling (and skeletons get a further -1 from poor). They also get +15 accuracy/defense from PotD? Also a health boost?

I'm like 99% positive that against most (if not every) enemy rogue-type (Xaurip Plaguestriker was just a specific example I could immediately think of, instead of random rogue kith #125) that uses Shadowing Beyond, their first attack dispels their visual invisibility, but they remain untargetable until SB naturally wears off. I'm only 99% positive because Xaurip Plaguestrikers have slow attack speeds so it could be related to not having had a second attack roll yet, but I know I have to constantly run my clothlings away from enemy rogue-types because they have no way of interacting with them. It's so consistent that I just assume that I cannot target an enemy rogue that has just used Shadowing Beyond. I'm actually astonished that apparently no one else has noticed. It can't possibly just be me, right?

i remember back in the day when unity console was implicated in a lot of performance and stability bugs, so i'm not touching it.

ok, so upon reflection maybe +50 deflection for lengthy time for 3 guile is reasonable (I just now thought of doing 3x Escapes, which I have definitely done). I do note that as someone who has used arcane veil and escape a lot in his deadfire career, i value escape's unconditional effect a lot. there are a surprising amount of enemy gunfire (along with veil piercing attacks) in deadfire. So I think Arcane Veil is more vulnerable than just "a couple of veil-piercing attacks" and so an unconditional effect should be weighted more expensively. it's ironic because in poe1 arcane veil was a more fundamental ability but enemy gunfire was so rare (and they didn't target wizards opportunistically) that its veil-piercing vulnerability was irrelevant. here in deadfire it feels way more relevant (and the AI punishes glass cannons more), but it's only available to a specific priest subclass and as one out of many AL2 wizard spells.