thelee

If you upgraded those invocations, you need to look at a higher "tier" level, not the level that you originally got them at. This is just a thing for chanters - upgrades for invocations I think in the background are actually just new invocations that delete the older invocation, so they only just appear at the higher tier (even though they have a cheaper cost than expected for that tier). This does mean that if you have a keyboard shortcut for an invocation, you need to update them after upgrading it.

both accuracy (chance to graze/hit) and damage reduction get colored separately. yellow = penetration, or i believe 50-74% chance to graze/hit. green/blue (colorblind mode) = overpenetration or 75%+ chance to graze/hit red = everything else

Confusion is even a little worse than that, because enemy caster AI is so moronic that they will happily hit their own party members with friendly fire attacks, regardless of being confused. So confusion has even less of an effect in caster fights than one might intuitively think - mostly against enemy healers. It also doesn't help that the main confusion effects target will and casters tend to have good will defense. I actually find confusion more practical for barbarians, paladins, chanters more than actual casters - though making caster aoe and durations shorter is pretty good.

IIRC the construct is very very bad at finding you. You could have 0 stealth and just sneak around and be fine. I've literally never had a problem doing the rooftop.

This is not quite correct. In many skill checks, you can choose which party member to use, at which point you're not talking about diminishing returns; every point you put in a skill is a full point you get in that skill. Instead of having e.g. four supplemental party members that each put bluff 4, you're better off having one party member have 16 bluff, and the other three party members specializing in another skill each. In terms of bonus points to the watcher or other party members, the math is still the same, except now you have enough skill points in a single party member to pass a difficult check if needed. Though the hardest skill checks appear to be watcher-only.

more like "hardtack and water for ya!" them: -2 morale

i have not tried this, but my best guess is no - but i would strongly encourage someone to do the testing! it might be an interesting loophole around it. grimoire imprint are a little bugged. they don't work if they grab a spell you already know how to cast, if i remember correctly. it is also possible to get a spell permanently (in one run, one of my casters permanently learned Plague of Insects - very good considering it is infinite number of casts allowed; even despite rests and respec). for restricted schools, my best guess is that grimoire imprint would grab a spell, but then it would be greyed out as being unable to cast - but it is also possible that because it is added directly to your character as an ability instead of a spell, it'd be castable. hence why someone should test it (i'd do it but i gave up games for lent).

FYI as a reminder to everyone here - spiritual weapons scale from 20% lash to 31% lash depending on well you've been paying attention to dispositions. Neutral case is 25% lash. Obsidian-provided NPCs have no disposition, so they will always have neutral effects on anything that cares about disposition - so Vatnir will get a 25% lash (and a neutral Holy Radiance), which is plenty good. Truth be told, even being the worst role-player whatsoever, even a 20% lash on legendary weapons is pretty good, especially for a zealot that gets a lot of additive bonuses multiplied by that lash. 31% is pretty great though, arguably makes max-disposition legendary weapons some of the best in the game (especially woedica's). I really like Vatnir's priest subclass and really wish it wasn't just limited to him.

single hand pistol+modal is actually way better for ranged purposes than dual wield pistol+melee. there's nothing you can do with dual-wielding and a pistol that approximates single-hand pistol + modal. remember that recovery time bonuses don't add-up intuitively. so -30% plus another -15% from two-weapon style does not equal -45%. It translates into about a -38% recovery time bonus. an easier, linear way to understand it is to translate those recovery time bonuses into an recovery speed bonus, which translates into +60% recovery speed (equivalent to +20 dex during reload). modal is -50% recovery time bonus, which is a much bigger difference from the -38% net total you get from dual-wielding than you might expect - it is more apparent by converting into a recovery speed bonus, which is a +100% recovery speed bonus (equivalent to a further +13 dex during reload). You could be wearing medium armor (+35% recovery time penalty) and still be faster than a no-armor dual-wielded pistol. With one-handed style, your only cost is -3 accuracy, but you more than make up for it with a 20% hit to crit chance, even accounting for the weaker criticals on a firearm. on top of all this - even if you had a really high accuracy where -15 accuracy isn't so punishing on dual-wielding, switching the modal on gives you massive diminishing returns because there's a minimum reload time for all reloading weapons (not listed anywhere in game, strictly due to limits on animation). Single-weapon style, light/cloth, modal on is already skirting the edge of minimum reload time. With dual-wielding, switching the modal on might give you very little gains, at significant accuracy cost (and no hit->crit chance).

oh yeah, pistol modal + 1h mode is really really good. super fast attack speed (you'll get close to the cap for reloading weapons) hardly any accuracy penalty. probably the one area where 1h style is way better than other styles. edit: eccea's arcane blaster is also great. no crit synergy, but the fractured bullet enchantment will make other hit/crit effects better (like stunning shots). don't do bullet-time; with modal+1h mode it's sort of a trap enchantment due to minimum reload times.

one more thing - ime, the attack speed of 1h is really a bummer, so you should strongly consider going robes/light armor with high dex even on higher difficulties, on top of preferring lighter weapons (3s base recovery). it's not so much about the damage, but maximizing your crits/second and also maintaining responsiveness in combat. not a big deal for turn-based mode, but in real time mode having ~5-6s in between each attack (easily possible with a slow one-hand weapon and medium/heavy armor and low dex) makes you real slow to respond to events happening without the tankiness of a shield or the boost in baseline damage/PEN from 2h weapons that makes it worth it.

sungrazer is a good mob-clearer with the upgrade - can be upgraded such that killing an enemy on crit can cause a huge explosion; with high accuracy, you can cause a gigantic, room-clearing chain reaction. (there are other crit-based upgrades iirc but extinction event is absolutely a way to thrash easier fights i unintentionally discovered) griffin's blade triggers daze 50% of the time on crit. at high difficulty ,the -4 PEN from daze can be a huge survivability boost. aldris blade heals the wielder on crit - can be good. thing about scordeo's edge is that blade cascade applies to *all* recovery - so you can have that, salvation of time 2+ times, and then switch to any other weapon. (dual wielding + 2w style is actually best for maximizing blade cascade procs; you can switch to 1h after that) stunning shot on a high-crit build seems pretty good (haven't tried myself).

one thing the rogue suffers from is the general expensiveness of all their abilities, moreso than any other martial class methinks (at least a corpse eater can regenerate resources!). if you're going to go for invisibility, i would go so far as to say even 1-guile abilities--however uncommon--should mostly be ignored. in fact, the only non-invis rogue ability that i can think of that makes sense with an assassin+invisibility approach is pernicious cloud, simply because +25 acc/+pen/+crit dmg on that huge of an aoe is a big effect. but even a single-class assassin can dump points into arcana or alchemy and get some big scroll or poison hits. (explosives don't work because they interact very poorly with assassinate; they are multi-part attacks so the first, minor, part of a bomb explosion might get the assassinate bonus, but not the actual part you care about) if it was actually possible to re-sneak in combat (and smoke veil/shadowing beyond/enduring shadows were just easier/better ways to do that), a naive assassin build would be better, but because we can't the assassin definitely needs a bit of careful planning to get the most out of it. it might even be very close to a trap subclass on higher difficulties due to how lame it is just to assassinate+backstab a single enemy with, say, a dagger compared to the subclass's always-on downside.

yeah, smoke veil is not nearly as good because of this. Its main benefit is that it costs only 2 guile, but if you actually want to do something with that invisibility (instead of just dodging a spell or evading enemies), then Shadowing Beyond, Enduring Shadows, or Vanishing Strike are better (all 3 guile). Shadowing Beyond and Enduring Shadows have no recovery (unlike smoke veil) and last a long time (unlike smoke veil), and vanishing strike is actually a full strike that lets you stay invisible while attacking so even if it doesn't last long you get a lot out of it. You can still get stuff out of smoke veil, but you basically have to be high dex, low armor penalty, and not be in tb-mode (and not hoping to cast a spell). yep, this is why in general I find that you're better off multiclassing assassin with a caster - getting a few extra spells with +25 acc/+crit damage/+PEN can be *really* good, especially like an opening alpha strike. otherwise you have to metagame pretty hard to really get much benefit out of assassin (though can be pretty good - a forum member called a kitted-out single-class assassin's vanishing strike "god mode"). even with minimal metagaming, using poisons can be helpful, since poisons benefit from the assassinate bonus. though be warned you need to apply the poison *before* combat or *before* going invisible, since using the poison breaks most forms of invisibility.

i'm not sure it even counts as cheese if there literally is an item that lets you ignore interrupts with an injury. what possible use could it have had except to... let you ignore interrupts while injured?

this thread is old, so it probably predates the wild mind self-damage nerf. but that being said, in the margins stuff like this kind of wild mind matters a lot more than how it helps (viz fced's comment). more variance = bad for player. not true - his wild mind effects can be bad as buffs. even invisibility. long time ago, i got a party member buffed into invisibility which was actually a horrible outcome because i couldn't target them with a heal while they had a big dot active. they got knocked out. i'll say it again over and over: wild mind is a trap/garbage subclass.

leveling up is different in deadfire. you get one (sometimes two) ability points, and you spend it on either an active ability (on the left side of the skill tree) or a passive ability (on the right side of hte skill tree). passive abilities are to deadfire what "talents" were to poe1.

with even a modest amount of metagaming, riposte is useful (and by "modest" i mean "don't dump resolve and equip a shield"). it's free damage, even if it only triggers a handful of times in a given fight. it's on TB-mode where riposte basically requires massive metagaming to even have a marginal effect. edit: gah! ninja'ed by @Boeroer! i don't know why notifications don't always scroll me down

to clarify, for shifter restrictions and mage slayer disruption it seems like something counts as magic if and only if it came from a priest, cipher, chanter, wizard, druid or a non-kith equivalent (like xaurips or delemgan). any other source, even if they are functionally identical, doesn't count as magic. (obviously i haven't tested every single case, but that's my rule of thumb)

this++ for a healbot, a druid or paladin are better. priests are there for revives, mass buffs, mass debuffs, with healing as a minor. though in PoE priests were much stronger healers. it wasn't so much the absolute heal numbers, but the fact that you had a heal at almost every spell level mean you could cast heals all day long. also especially if you main-character-ed a priest, because holy radiance scaling was insane then. but in deadfire with paladins getting spammable lay on hands and stacking rules changing to make druid healing even better (plus lifegiver subclass), priests have definitely been refocused away from being primary healers.

not only does it not apply to shifter, but because you don't have proficiency with them, you actually get the penalties. tactician wouldn't be bad choice, but not a particularly great choice either. unbroken does give you bonus engagement even while shifted; not nothing, but again, not great. have you considered paladin? i haven't done a paladin/shifter (or really any paladin/druid) before, but some thoughts: you can use lay on hands while shapeshifted, in case you have some emergency heals and are in too dangerous a situation (or something else) to unshapeshift first flames of devotion would work pretty well with shapeshift claws, and as a kind wayfarer you would be spamming heals all the while (works per hit, so 2x heals for dual-wielded, like when spiritshifted). bleakwalkers also not bad. depending on your talents and specialization, you could choose to become very tanky. other than that, my only other Big Idea was trickster, but you said you wanted to avoid multiclassing rogue.

wooooo! congrats

oh boy , this just reminds me of a recent chaotic battle i had. it was in the hanging sepulchers, and for the first time in literally ever i was approaching the eastern poem tablet from the top, having climbed in via tree (normally i always go form the bottom, even if i came in via the tree). i was doing it this way because i thought i could dodge the wraith abduction. wrong! xoti got abducted to the bottom of the map anyway, only this time because I had gone in from the top, there were tons of upscaled mobs still in the way. after clearing the enemies around the poem, i ran my psion down the map, using summons and other party members to try and distract all the enemy mobs i was aggroing along the way, while xoti did everything she could to stay alive. by the time my hobbled psion made it down, she had accumulated enough focus to instantly pain block and then stun some of the enemies and save xoti's skin. would not have been possible with any other cipher, because the psion was accumulating all this focus just by walking down the map. i know it sounds like i'm trying to really hype up the psion, which i'm not. but i do think that people undervalue the utility of a psion, possibly because the mechanics are so different from all the other ciphers and from poe1 and because it didn't arrive until patch 4.0.

xoti is a decent priest, if you haven't considered her. her AL1 blessed harvest is my personal pick for best level 1 ability in the game and her other unique spells ain't bad. but that's mostly just for consideration with ascendant. don't mistake this for a hard-sell in favor of psion, just pointing out some things about psion that might not be obvious or might not be apparent without having played with one: the focus regeneration for psion scales up with power level. every odd PL increases it by 1/second, so it starts off as a drip (1/s) and steadily becomes a flow and then a torrent (and with bonus PL can get huge). for multiclass, it tops out naturally at 4/s, for single-class 5/s (with prestige and one source of +1 PL it's easy to get to 6/s). it's never going to compete with an ideal (e.g. no underpen) optimized normal cipher, but it does pretty well especially considering the following bullet points. in my current run i have a psion/druid. in practice, i'm almost never short of focus, because casting druid spells is plenty of time--even at low levels--to accumulate a lot of focus. basically the only time i'm really short of focus is when i'm getting hit with DoTs or incidental attacks. even when you're using a cipher power, you are still regenerating focus. i know this sounds like an obvious insight to make, but it has the powerful ramification that a psion can spam focus powers in a way that normal ciphers can't (except for beguilers in mass debuff situations). their free level 1 telekinetic burst at 3PL or higher can be used virtually non-stop (this assumes a total of ~5s of action and recovery). coupled with club modal or other way to debuff will you can lock enemies out from doing anything important (great for hauane o whe) at 3PL or higher and some will debuffing and good intellect (and/or resolve debuffing), you can perma-paralyze a non-dex resistant enemy with level 2 mental binding. by the time your paralyze duration has worn off you've basically accumulated enough to immediately cast it again. (i literally slowly chipped down a triple-red skull steelclad construct by doing this. they would get off an attack every once and a while if i grazed or missed, but for the most part they were just standing helplessly) there are more examples, but those are some easy low-level ones. you can't really do these as any other cipher because at some point you have to stop to attack and regenerate focus again. (again beguiler does pretty OK here, particularly mass-debuff situations) psion is arguably more valuable on PotD+upscaling. underpenetrating the enemy? extremely high enemy defenses? no problem! you are still getting focus. had to escape with withdraw? protect with beetle shell? momentarily stunned or paralyzed? come back with tons of focus ready to spend.

have you considered using the berath's blessing that automatically levels you up to level 4?