thelee

what does the imp get? so when those xaurip plaguestrikers go invisible, they use the identical ability as player-created rogues? continues to be a mystery

since you're finding weird internal mechanics, maybe you could solve a riddle for me. Invisibility/untargetability for Shadowing Beyond/Enduring Shadows seems to break upon first action, right? Yet when enemies use it, it really seems like their untargetability lasts until the end of the innate duration--if enemies attack me in the middle of their shadowing beyond, they are visible to me, yet I literally can't target them with anything, so I just have to run away until their Shadowing Beyond/Enduring Shadows buff goes away. Do AI-controlled rogues/rogue-types have their own Shadowing Beyond/Enduring Shadows that is different from humans'? What's going on here? edit - it is utterly inscrutable to me what the intent of the deflection bonus is for shadowing beyond/enduring shadows. Long time ago, I thought it was so that any attacks that were still mid-flight could miss, but this was before I figured out that invisibility means absolute untargetability. It seems like it would be way too good if +50 deflection lasted the entire 10/20 seconds [though it is a 3 guile ability], but any other effect in between seems weird.

i literally have no idea how it happened - i suspect it had something to do with being knocked out or something, like some cleanup trigger didn't activate (maybe the druid i stole it from got annihilated by a crit - that tends to have odd interactions with other effects that rely on an "alive" target). it was actually rather annoying since i like my games to be "legitimate" challenges, and having unlimited access to plagues of insects--even if i could just refrain from using it--with no way to get rid of it was not ideal.

depends on the ability. abilities that can interrupt specify whether they interrupt on crit, hit, or graze, though due to the mechanics of some abilities the tooltip is wrong.[1] (enemy) rogues are the worst for this, since all their abilities interrupt at least on hit. late game (especially in forgotten sanctum), enemy monks are super annoying because their AI seems to love using skyward kick and that both knocks up and interrupts on a graze (so not only would you lose an item, but if someone was trying to cast a heal on the victim, the heal is wasted because the victim was temporarily untargetable; requires some quick micromanagement to cancel/reuse the effect). [1] magran's fire (the top-level priest spell) is one i can think of off the top of my head. it says it interrupts on crit, but the way it works is that it creates a tiny area that drops fire nukes into it (like a tiny meteor swarm or rain of holy fire), and each of those nukes interrupt on hit. You can literally interrupt-lock extremely tough enemies like this because of how quickly they are hit with these fire projectiles.

konstanten is a literally dumb character--i believe he has 10 or 9 intellect. this is obviously very bad for a chanter, but unfortunately that's what you're stuck with if you're using konstanten. pick up some rings of overseeing and intellect buffs (priest has several good ones). tekehu, vatnir, fassina, and even pallegina iirc can make for "better" chanters, though a skald is a pretty decent subclass and konstanten has the advantage that he and tekehu are the only ones that could theoretically single-class it [at least without rolling your own].

in fact, if interrupted, you actually lose the item anyway as if you used it. as far as i'm concerned, it's the main argument for concentration on front-line melee-ers.

yeah, i made sure to have a hotkey for the AI toggle, so whenever i need to use a potion i quickly disable, and then i just have to remember to listen to the "potion drunk" sound to turn it back on again. really annoying bug, a shame that it got introduced

oh sorry, i got my replies mixed up - i thought you were referring to the consumable usage bug, not the "stuck doing nothing" bug. my bad. yeah i very occasionally get the "stuck doing nothing" bug and x-cancelling does fix it.

i think it depends on your AI setttings and scripting. on some of my more aggressively scripted characters and/or with autoattack enabled in a situation where they want to auto-attack (e.g. aggressive, or defensive and being attacked), x-cancelling never works for getting consumables used.

i do not recall her coming aboard with dragons in the runs where i used that history, so no. in fact, i think the only indication you get that something happens is a mysterious earthquake/wave from the direction of the black isles.

wow i literally never noticed this before! i've been missing out an enchanting ingredient for god knows how long. that's because you must be using a poe1 history in which you did not kill llengrath. (she/he/it was a human in poe1. if you kill her she comes back in deadfire as an orlan)

that's because this was a bug introduced extremely late, unfortunately, like one of the last 4.0s or maybe even 5.0. it really ticked me off, because it was something they obviously broke with turn-based mode and never fixed - before using consumables was a rock-solid operation which was a huge improvement from poe1 where i have literally soft-locked the game via consumable usage.

i've had on occasion very odd bugs with companion skills - i've never paid much close enough attention to it to really figure out, but i suspect that it is a problem with auto-leveling (do you have auto-level on)? i think some companions have incorrect skills specified for a level or something. generally respeccing or waiting to a higher level resolves funkiness.

i was only giving that as an example. on potd with upscaling/challenges, even 25% normal hp beckoner skeletons are as great in late game as early game.

i respectfully disagree... with ancient brittle bones it's pretty clear the main intent of the skeletons is to be pure trash, and at that they utterly excel. I particularly love summoning a swarm of them around a caster, because a caster will happily waste a lot of their valuable spells trying to clear out skeletons, spawning even more skeletons in the process. (and for trash fights, the casters have such low AR that the poor weapons actually massacre the poor casters) i think the flip side is that the phantom definitely needs an upgrade, because it's pretty hard to justify picking at the same ability tier a single phantom that is only kind of better than a single skeleton out of a swarm of 3->6 total skeletons (6->12 for beckoner).

this is basically what i've been saying - people are bad because they are incentivized to be bad. if the choice is between "join the looting of this store" vs "my children will starve to death" there's going to be a huge reason to go for the former. but anyone who's studied a behavioral science field for a while will know that internalized social norms are powerful things. this is why you need that incentive to be bad - because most people have internalized "good" cultural norms and those weigh heavily on their choices. to wit - there's some joke i heard in grad school that the only people who know how to choose efficient outcomes in small social "games" are economics majors. since we're talking about coronavirus, there's been a lot of talk about east asian cultural norms, chief among them a sort of deference to experts and authority figures. Which is a double-edged sword; yes, you get massive south korean population complying with government requests and health interventions, but it also means that when that horrible ferry ship sinking happened (which killed 480 people, 360 of which were young students) many people were just apparently quietly sitting around because the authorities [the ones bailing the ship] told them to sit around even with mounting evidence that they should bail as well. social norms ("good for goodness sake") can be powerful.

I'm not even really talking about that. To rewind to a more relevant example - in BG1/2 there's basically no reason to be evil. You get a crapton of downside (bounty hunters especially), unable to get some quests, good and neutral characters leave your party, you get worse rewards, and vendor items are way more expensive. If you are good, you get a lot of upside - and you even get some of the upside of being evil at times--you can still recruit evil characters and they are easier to juggle into your party than good characters in an evil party, not to mention neutral characters are much more willing to stick around with a rep 20 than a rep 1 character. it was so stark that you really wanted to play good regardless of anything else; you could still pick an evil alignment in the early game (if your subclass or mainchar abilities required it) and just play like a good character. what i like are "interesting choices." i don't see myself in my characters - i talked about character concepts. if it's so patently one-sided to do one sort of alignment than another, then it's not an interesting choice--and it undermines a game's brag about letting you role play or make interesting narrative decisions. i think at best, good and evil are just different axes of possibly multiple types of outcomes, and you can make "interesting" decisions about them, and it's not obvious to min-max a way through that. in this respect I think Tyranny does better than PoE or Deadfire, since factional reputation and ally reputation unlocks different abilities, and they are generally balanced enough that there's no "correct" answer, just different styles, so you have interesting decisions to make that intertwine role-playing and min-maxing. but from a philosophical perspective and the way most "normal" people want to play, I think JESawyer's stance of "goodness is its own reward" is an interesting one, more interesting than the typical "good is almost always the strictly best outcome" that game designers seem so eager to reinforce.

I mean, not to put a fine a point on it, but all you're saying is that it doesn't matter to you, when several other players are saying it does. I can say that I like to min-max a lot, and even then it still "weighs on my mind" about good or bad choices, vis a vis my character concept. And from watching more "normal" people play games likes Fallout, a lot of people make these decisions as well (i'll bet the cannibalism F:NV perk is one of the least picked perk). Plus I think it's more philosophical a choice than a gameplay feature. Is it really a "good" choice if people are motivated by material rewards instead of the moral rightness of it? Whether or not good outcomes got rewards or not has the same gameplay pitfalls either way - either it doesn't matter for some people that being bad is bad, or it doesn't matter for some people that being good is good, they just want the extra goodies they get from choosing a dialogue option. It's always bugged me as a fan of role playing games (and role-playing-adjacent games) that "good" choices were frequently much better than "bad" choices, which basically upends the whole moral system entirely - people are bad because they are incentivized to be bad. One of my major disappointments in this in modern gaming is Bioshock, because if you did the math and you always saved the little sisters, the amount of ADAM you give up ended up being quite minor, and you got a lot of extra rewards in the process (in particular some unique plasmids/tonics unobtainable by evil people)--so much for the "moral choice" aspect of it; just be good because you end up richer, not because it's "good" for goodness' sake.

just to add on to what a few others have said - outside of something like the ultimate or solo, you don't need to build up too much of a duration. with a weyc's robe party (robe wearer upon empowering a spell grants brilliant to nearby party members), i would maybe cast enough Salvation of Time to get up to 45-55 seconds and that didn't take too long, is easily scriptable, and is generally more than i needed for many fights. for longer fights, i'd just top up again when durations start running low. also, in addition to assassin/blodomage, you can also get efficiency with a priest of skaen/assassin. Because the priest also gets some rogue abilities as bonus spells. So with brilliant, you can also get invisibility up to every 6 seconds (shadowing beyond from priest) along with a point of guile, so you can really get a lot of assassinate bonii (but no vanishing strikes due to multiclassing).

you also need to make sure your foe is tanky enough to warrant such a long debuff at such a steep recovery penalty. though in one megaboss fight i stacked 8-9 on an add and that was a stupid amount of damage ticking every few seconds.

i think it is WEIRD that animated summons and I believe spiritual ally are like the only ones with scaling weapons, but i can't imagine putting that scaling on lower level summons and it being at all balanced (AL1 beckoner skeletons are frankly pretty good even with poor weapons). i think AL9 incarnate--if it doesn't already scale--and maybe higher-level druid summons and higher-level chanter summons could use scaling weapons. (maybe chanter ogres, if they don't already scale) edit - in a more in-depth evaluation, here are the summons that i feel like could use some help (with either autoscaling weapons or autoscaling weapons+armor): -> phantom -> 3 wurms -> ogres (maybe) -> dragon (maybe - just seems weird an AL9 summon has base 7 PEN) for druid: -> every summon from AL6 and up for priest: -> incarnate, if they don't already

the animated weapons can also knock down. there are three different weapons (four, with upgrade) and one of them has up to 11 uses of fighter's knock down. this is way better than any other summon i think (with exception of wisps, which have infinite). it's a little tedious, but back when i used animated weapons, i would pause, select the "fighter" weapon, hotkey the knock down with Q, and then pick one enemy and do "q shift-q shift-q shift-q shift-q etc etc" and then unpause. for the rest of the duration the weapon would just basically be constantly knocking down the enemy - the combination of scaling weapons and summon scaling means the weapon has pretty decent accuracy (enough that they were ace against even megabosses).

i think that's very true for druids - the difference between them all is basically "how long before the enemy is able to attack me again." i really like most chanter summons though. the wisps you can use to spam prones everywhere; the spore has infinite charm capability; the ogres are good cheap tanks and can prone; etc.

1. another drake should appear, but it's not a member of your party. it's "enraged" so i believe at best it's a member of your team, but not anything directly controllable. 2. the vast majority of summons are stuck with a really lame 7 PEN, with no upscaling - the only option to improve this is Animancy Cat. Even the AL9 "The great wyrm flew o'er the mountains" dragon only has 7 PEN. This means--especially on PotD--nominally powerful summons will be at like -75% underpenetration. This is what makes the animated weapons that @Boeroer mentions are so good - they are treated as being equipped with weapons, which DO scale upwards and get more PEN. Similarly I believe priest Spiritual Ally also gets scaling gear, making it notably better on harder difficulties/late game than summons from other classes that are supposed to be good at summoning (e.g. druid). edit - this also means that abilities that reduce enemy AR are really good for summoning-heavy setups (expose vulnerabilities, the shield cracks, even mass flanking) 3. Speaking of which AL9 dragon is another massively good summon, even though its basic attack is guaranteed to be at -75% underpenetration in most fights. It just has enormous amounts of health (~1000+ with some elemental immunity - i literally used this summon to facetank some megabosses for me) and its abilities have MASSIVE powerlevel scaling (something like +20 PL bonus) so even if it's basic attack only has 7 PEN, its tail lash can easily do 150+ damage per enemy with overpenetration bonus (same thing with its prone attack and flame breath). I used it on a bellower--the bonus PL from the bellower made the summon last *huge* amounts of time, basically giving >100% uptime. Even without PEN upscaling and some misses, most summons are still hugely good. I think expecting pure damage from anything other than the animated weapons summon is a mistake, though, and some summons (the 3 wyrms you mention as a fallback) are so clearly single-mindedly focused on (crappy) damage that they're hard to justify over even just the basic AL1 skeleton summon. Summons (esp chanter summons) tend to have a lot of supplemental effects, and if not that they may still be useful just as huge bodies to make the enemy waste their abilities and time. Fortunately, if a summon isn't working out for you - you can respec.

just to add here - the shaken and confused that get applied when you get flanked aren't on a timer - they're there as long as you're flanked, so forbidden fist (or things like suppress affliction or liberating exhortation) won't help here. (however, things like svef work like gangbusters) even without a cipher in your party, you can still get mileage out of a tactician because most hard fights are solo boss encounters, so with some perception resistence (to avoid bosses with persistent distraction's flanked) you'll very easily get permanent resource regeneration.