thelee

This seems to happen very occasionally. The way that seems to fix it is to unequip it, save the game, completely exit (or else something isn't properly cleared in the memory), launch the game, then load the game, and equip it. It should work after that. (There was an older post suggesting this - I can verify that this still works, because marux amanth glitched out for me a couple days ago and this fixed it.)

In addition, you should see a reload indicator on the enemy's side, but there's a display bug since forever where if it happens as the first action of a new turn, it doesn't show up. It's no coincidence that it seems that they fire at you right after hold position - if you're sailing full speed, they will frequently just wait until you stop moving to fire (not always, which is why it's good practice to move at full speed). This is still very good, because many enemy ships have a Dyrwoodan whatever-Hog, which reloads very quickly (3 rounds) which is its sole saving grace, so if you are able to use movement to slow down their rate of fire to you rown rate of fire (which may be slower but more powerful), you're still doing good. At lower levels where your captain rank is low enough that you're not constantly going first, you can abuse this AI a bit. When the enemy is first to act, you can try just sailing the entire turn, and as your last action, hold position. They'll have been waiting for you to stop sailing the entire time. But since you're last to act, the enemy won't have a chance to attack. In the following turn, there's a chance you might be first to go. Then you can fire. If you're even luckier, this will cause a negative event or cause injuries, which will delay the enemy's attack action even further as the AI tends to deal with these things at a higher priority than attacking.

Basic tips: 1. You need to kit out your ship a bit. 2. Pick on easy ships first. 3. Make sure you're in optimal range for your cannons. 4. It helps to HOLD POSITION the action before firing your cannons - gives you a huge boost in accuracy. 5. It helps to SAIL FULL SPEED when both you and the ship are parallel to each other - gives the enemy a penalty to accuracy (do this while waiting to reload). 6. JIBE-ing to me doesn't seem worth it unless you have very slow reloading cannons, or you have cannons with very different optimal ranges on either side of your ship. Jibe gives the enemy a minor accuracy penalty (depending on your helmsman levle I think) but nothing compared to sailing at full speed with good sails. 7. In case you don't know, the action right after you JIBE you have a massive penalty to accuracy for the immediate next action. For that reason it's not worth firing right after a JIBE most of the time - spend that action sailing full speed, holding position (for accuracy boost in next action), or using "report to..." to deal with any events that have occured. More advanced tips: 1. I like to use grapeshot the first few volleys - on lower-level ships ships, you can disable a lot of deckhands, helmsman and navigators. Surgeons on easy ships are very crappy so with fast cannons you can get the enemy to waste turns shuffling people into the ship's hold to be healed and then pummel their hull. 1a. Bonus: if in the middle of pumelling the ship you trigger events on the ship, and the AI sends sailors to deal with the events, sailors working on events count as "above-deck" even if they are normally below-deck (ship's hold, cannoneers, surgeon) so grapeshot will pummel them as well. 2. You don't need deck hands to deal with negative events - anyone will do. Just toss spare sailors up from your hold, or even cook or surgeons. 3. Cannoneer rank determines accuracy but also crucially how often they trigger negative events on the enemy when firing (which is 0% at rank 1, so getting up to rank 2 matters a lot). As such, if you find you can't even handle lower-level ships, it could help to do some world-map events or storms, just to get enough sailing experience so that your cannoneers get a rank under their belts. For more detailed breakdown of how thigns work: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/ship-to-ship-combat

Don't worry too much about making a "bad" choice, even on Path of the Damned. Just focus on what you want to play and optimize that. Your question otherwise is way too open-ended, and mostly just sounds like to me a concern that you are worried about making an unviable character.

Agreeing with dgray62 here, but adding on some extra notes: INT and DEX are basically king stats in general, but especially so for ascendant. The only thing that makes ascension last longer (without a priest or the Ooblit pet) is intellect. Dex--by making your actions faster--will let you squeeze more in during that ascension period. The returns here are effectively non-linear; the difference between four powers during ascension and squeezing an additional fifth might be just one more dexterity point. Perception and Might are roughly equal in most cases (so typically you want to balance them), but for a witch perception is much better - so much rides on you actually hitting the enemy that perception becomes more powerful (and with carnage actually gives you much better returns than might - barbarian is an exception where--contrary to most barbarian builds you'd naively expect--perception is much more important than might).

Keen Mind yes, virtually all the time. Greater Focus, less so (it might be obvious to say that the couple times I've played ascendant it is an anti-synergy, among other things). I was only giving one example with the puppet master from stealth.

Gambit doesn't even strike me as particularly great. One wall of many colors is probably better than several gambit hits. Not to mention the built-in synergy that trickster has with mirror image (which it can spam better than anyone else) with riposte/wall of flashing steel. It strikes me that maybe Wall of Flashing Steel triggers on any crit (not just weapon crits) and Wall of Many Colors could theoretically give you many opportunities to get a passive +10 deflection at 100% uptime (would have to be tested).

Cipher is probably ultimate snowball-effect class in the game (maybe chanter or debonaire after that). For example, being able to cast puppet master from stealth is an incredibly insurmountable advantage for the player. The mechanics of the two talents means that Greater Focus can give you the extra to do that in the first place (at the very least lowering the threshold by a clvl for a vanilla cipher), and Keen Mind gives you a shot of extra focus once combat begins sot that you can do something else with your essentially "free" post-stealth action. I haven't tried this with ringleader (i don't know if this is stealth-castable),

maybe blind + dazed ? seems a little more apt for a tier ix spell. effigy's husk can be upgraded for either might immunity or perception immunity. Maybe skaen's treacherous nature is that you have to pick which one to be protected from

yep. they won't even switch weapons. even then I sometimes don't even have AI enabled - mostly for casters with extremely slow ranged weapons equipped, so I'm not worried that they'll be stuck in recovery if I need a super important spell cast right then (like healing).

just starting to go through this myself, and had an extremely minor note here - unique armor "effigy's husk" (which is skaen-themed) can be upgraded to provide perception immunity. i thought it was a fun flavor effect that an all-in skaenite can use this armor and revenge of skaen and be protected from the spell's close-up effects. i don't mind the range change (the aoe is still huge so the perception immunity would still be helpful), but i would lightly recommend getting rid of the add'l -20 accuracy penalty just so that the flavor is retained. maybe if you think it needs a buff give it a longer aoe duration or something?

sorry for late response - but yeah, 5.0 was their last hurrah. they said they'd only be back for critical bugs, but i don't know what would qualify as "critical" (II had issues with macOS and catalina and got no response and had to figure something out myself).

When you give a command, the AI should be respecting that (the only exception is using potions/poisons). Worst-case scenario, you can press "X" (or whatever hotkey) to stop your character and that also stops their AI script until their "Aggressive/Defensive/Defend Self" trigger is kicked off (but even then there's a delay). Do you have any mods that might be interfering with that? Or are your characters being interrupted and you're not noticing? Do you have cooldowns on your script actions? Spoken as someone who's clocked 1000+ hours on this game with AI scripts and haven't had this issue (except again, with potions/poisons post-4.0). Though in all but a handful of my runs, I leave casters without any AI script (other than auto attack) because I want to be sure to micromanage every single spellcast decision, since the default scripts are mostly terrible and the default unmodded AI scripting really limits what you can do with spells and conditionals.

I would also recommend a ranger/priest of magran. Any priest can cast Champion's Boon on their pet, which gives +3 engagement targets (among other things). With Stalker's Link, your pet can hold up to 4 enemies and grant you a +10 accuracy bonus on all of them (plus any other accuracy and damage bonuses from being a ranger). Magran has extra nukes it can use that would be great to get a +10 accuracy bonus to. (Other priests can also do this, but Magran gets the extra nukes.) My favorite build still remains a streetfighter/wael multiclass, which is basically a glass cannon martial/caster (it's in the pinned build list as the "umezawa" build). There are plenty of ways to build glass cannon martial/casters, I just happen to like this one a lot because of its use of barring death's door and salvation of time in a way that doesn't involve a degenerate infinite combo. A trickster is a way to get a martial/caster multiclass without actually having to multiclass (you don't get as many spells as a true multiclass, but you also can spam level 8 spells which no multiclass can do).

to be fair, the beguiler effect is extremely powerful. Also @Elric Galad is right. The comparison point is not with subclass features, but with other talents. Remember that Keen Mind (at 5) only gives you +10 and in a non-trivial fight with the right setup (lots of aoe or multi-target powers), this could give you quite a bit more. Though frankly I didn't know about the 33% proc chance - in a perfect world it probably should be tuned up. They really should've made the effort to auto-generate the odds of something happening within their tooltips.

They can't This is probably the worst part of the enchant system in Deadfire. There's basically no indication in-game just how valuable Adra Ban is - it doesn't help that random scroll recipes also use up Adra Ban, so it doesn't seem like a finite ingredient, but for all intents and purposes it is. I definitely squandered the enchants (and scrolls) of my first couple runs just because I had no sense of how valuable certain materials are. Too bad this is extremely tedious to do. Also doesn't work if you're on an Eothas challenge. lolololol yep. Pyrite is another material that I have squandered in the past. It doesn't help that Pyrite is also subject to RNG drops from more normal enemies and chests (whereas Adra Ban RNG drops are pretty rare so it's pretty much a fixed commodity), so I didn't fully appreciate how valuable Pyrite was until a run with minor bad luck and no drops. It also doesn't help that you can't "skip over" upgrades. You could have all the materials to do a Superb, Legendary or Mythic upgrade, but if you don't have 2-4x or however many Pyrites to do a silly normal->Fine and/or a Fine->Exceptional upgrade (and/or Exceptional->Superb for the leg/mythic cases), you're stuck.

it's basically half of POTD. POTD: +15 enemy accuracy, +15 enemy defenses, +25% health, +2 PEN, +2 AR Veteran: +7 acc/defenses, +12% health, +1 PEN, +1 AR The encounters in PotD are also beefed up - I don't know the specifics of it.

That's actually a pretty ingeniusly simple solution. It gets rid of the most egregious combos and roughly balances martial and caster effects from brilliant. There are still a few disproportionately powerful spells to come back so easily but at this point it's probably a problem more with those spells. It's not perfect, but I think the simplicity is nice because it's easier to reason about and less brainspace to devote to the mechanics of it. Honestly if OBS had done that with brilliant, I'd be mostly happy with it as an inspiration.

lol i just had a zany thought about making it symmetric with a streetfighter. if flanked, or bloodied/below you get +50% recovery. if both, you also get some major other malus. just a silly idea that i liked from a flavor perspective (a streetfighter is reckless and wants to be flanked and/or hurt, but a tactician is super cautious and really hates both). i think you're right that hurt or below is better than bloodied or below. i think it also has the side effect of making the fighter regeneration more important for early parts of the fight. i would still think it's a good idea to double-check what happens to recovery upon repeated re-application of flanked. my concern is that you'd get an instant shot of extra recovery, with bad outcomes.

i'm not wild about it but understand there are probably difficulties and limitations with modding. it seems like ideally it'd be something related to the interrupt ability that a tactician has, just so it's one less thing to remember. "or afflicted" might be a bit too chaotic. I'm thinking about persistent distraction enemies. I'm also thinking about random incidental afflictions. What was "neat" about tactician was that flanked status was one you could largely manage (except for perception afflictions and very very occasionally an enemy cipher with phantom foes), which really lent itself to the "tactician" aspect of a tactician. Including all afflictions seems like it dilutes that and makes it more like a random debuff that is outside your control. there might also be a mechanical issue, because ISTR that recovery penalties from things like blind are applied immediately, but recovery bonuses from blind wearing off or streetfighter kicking in don't occur until the next recovery. i'm worried that in a typical mid-to-late game fight where afflictions might be flying around, even the best dispelling/avoidance stuff will still be murked up with persistent +50% recovery penalty even if you nominally have nothing on you. my own suggestion would just be "flanked => +50% recovery". it seems punishing enough, and flanked status is a bit less murky and more controllable that the lag time in avoiding a recovery penalty might be less bad. If you haven't tried it out, though, it seems like something worth testing, because there might also be potential extremely bad outcomes of interrupting a persistent distraction enemy - the moment you get flanked you'd get +50% recovery penalty, and i'm not sure what would happen if you interrupted the enemy (which causes them to drop persistent distraction on you temporarily) - your recovery would likely not be restored in that interim, and i don't know what would happen once the flanked status is re-applied.

is this solely an inconsistency with keyword interactions like fire/water, or is this also implicitly true about antidote v poison and inspirations/afflictions and it's just not noticable because the hostile/non-hostile part is generally correct?

mm, nope.

I'm actually going to hazard a guess that it doesn't benefit from confident aim. The fact that it gets a +2 PEN from haymaker I think is just an artifact of an implementation detail that also lets it benefit from Monastic Unarmed Training. (I think it's just a bit or keyword that gets set) I suspect it would function more like Rot Skulls or druid spiritshift claws, which have no explicit weapon type, and therefore wouldn't benefit from confident aim.

ah lol i misread that statement

note: devs ain't coming back to check on bugs, it's just us here. uh oh - have you done this on a plain beguiler? has this always been bugged and we've never noticed?