thelee

Hard disagree. Due to how Holy Radiance scales in PoE1 (or doesn't scale, for that matter), a mainchar priest is worlds better than an NPC priest. You can literally 100+ damage to vessels and massive amounts of healing (with extra feats to make it even more extreme) on a mainchar, whereas it'll always be sorta medicore on Durance or anyone you recruit. from my poe1 guide:

an example here is the beach you wake up on. if you go get beodul first, you'll be forced into an aggressive option to tell him to get out of the cave. even with all UI options enabled, there doesn't appear to be any other dialogue choice. if, however, you go rescue the other pirate stuck on the ship first, she'll create a fire, and when you go to rescue beodul, you'll have an extra, non-aggressive option to tell him to go wait by the fire. i'm guessing because that option isn't linked to a skill or background or class or stat, it doesn't count for "show unqualified interactions", but it definitely exists. but again, to your point, such things are not telegraphed well to the player. but suffice to say i don't think i've ever played a priest variant where i was truly forced into an uncharacteristic dialogue option (this does mean giving up on certain "optimal" quest resolutions, though).

sorry if i skipped over this in the replies, but why +3 ? i'm not altogether convinced that there needs to be any resource regen from ancestor's memory. +3 PL is nice on its own, and meshes particularly well with casters, monks, anyone with monastic unarmed training, and to a lesser extent rogues and barbarians. if there is a resource to be regenned, maybe just +1 from the initial cast, or a random level 1-3 spell ? Svef and a few foods also basically eliminate tactician's dilemma downside. I personally do not feel that this is a big deal, because a drawback that requires metagaming to mitigate is still a cost (whether a perk point or specific item usage). Is there a way to have a cooldown on the resource regen? Like, interrupt restores one discipline, but once every 12 seconds or so an interrupt also restores a class resource. Or, interrupt restores one of each class resource unconditionally, but can only occur once every twelve seconds. It would still sort of keep the "feel" of the tactician without it necessarily being degenerate with things like Slicken or Clear Out. Might be too complicated a mechanic. Just spitballing.

good find, @Elric Galad! it means that if one wants to regen a level 9 spell it matters all the more to specifically game it, since this means you potentially have a brutal 1/27 chance of getting it back (worst case of having cast a spell from each spell level).

1. I don't know. I would console it into a test game and give it a try. I ran it with a fighter/berath and it seemed to work for something like mule kick, but you can never be too certain (I believe in fact some other effects did not get the bonus). 2. indirectly - might impacts the damage you do, which increases the healing you get from steel garrote/old siec. unbending, on the other hand, is only affected by intellect (though with decent intellect and/or salvation of time and/or wall of draining, unbending can give you super healing). 3. i think @Boeroer tested it, and amra does give you the exgtra carnage, but it's much weaker than a bararian's actual carnage (which scales with PL). 4. if you have an existing frenzy in place, amra's frenzy won't stack - it's like another active effect. if you have spirit frenzy/blood frenzy/berserker, i think amra's frenzy will just fail to apply (in the combat log it might say "stronger effect already exists") 5. yes. even weapon modals get a boost from int

part of what make mule kick great is that it *always* knocks up the enemy upon a graze, regardless of whether or not it actually "interrupted" the enemy (unlike prone). this can be misleading. if the enemy has concentration, or is immune to interrupts, they'll get knocked up by a mule kick (and lose a concentration if any), but they won't be "interrupted" to qualify for the discipline resource regen, despite the fact that you literally interrupted something they were trying to do (and in some cases the AI will abandon the ability it tried to use, just as if you had actually interrupted it). i suspect that might be what you're running into, more than timing. again, this is why supplementing tactician with another class or using an aoe weapon works great.

hm, yes that is very true. i suppose i assumed they were trying to be roughly symmetric (roughly like attributes) but failed. but i think i can sleep better at night thinking that they never tried to be symmetric in the first place

sure. it doesn't even need to be an AL9 spell. if the #1 spell you need to cast is another slicken, then that's what you're better off doing. in magic: the gathering there are plenty of effects that cost you mana and a card to get another card. they can be extremely powerful because they effectively thin your deck into the cards you actually want. similarly, a psion with ancestor's memory is an extra copy of N number of your best spells and effects and the cost is minimal (hence why i keep saying psion instead of generic cipher - psions have close to absolute resource generation, whereas a normal cipher has greater possibilities of getting screwed and unable to generate focus). They are your best spells and effects regardless of what they actually are - you can decide at the time what they are, whether it's just to spam some high level wizard spells, start off a priest combo, or just give your fighter/rogue extra interrupts. I'm not making an absolute argument here. Changing brilliant down (or increasing the cost somehow) reduces that N and can bring it into line: at 12s (or with restrictions) it's merely very good instead of the best cipher power available. Even just making it AL9 (that would constitute increasing the cost) would make it more balanced simply because you limit it to single-class ciphers (on top of the extra focus cost). (edit - but this all still dodges around the fact that Brilliant is the only tier 3 inspiration that requires such balancing - i would argue virtually noone would think a 12second robust inspiration with cast time on a single ally target would be so very good as an AL9 cipher effect) edit - as a historical note for the unaware, Brilliant used to regen a resource every 3 seconds. Imagine this on a chanter invocation that affects your entire party and one a multiclass chanter could even pick up - chanters in 1.0 were stupid (along with all items and consumables being OP). Given how much I generally respect JE Sawyer and the OBS crew, it was frankly stunning that anyone thought this was remotely balanced at any point. The six-second resource was the extent of OBS's efforts to balance it for when it came back as Ancestor's Memory. i appreciate this perspecitve but i want to use an analogy to blizzard's balancing efforts. they recognize that there are multiple "levels" of play, ranging from just-starting to esports-player. Different skill levels will get wildly different things out of e.g. starcraft 2 or warcraft 3 - rookie or lower-level players may play games/units/strategies that don't even register for esports players. They don't skimp out on a nerf or a buff that affects one tier if such skimping negatively impacts another tier. similarly - even if there are many (even most) people who are really unable to take advantage of a degenerate combo, it doesn't mean we should just ignore it if it poisons the metagame at the top. the best solution would in fact be to tweak tactician s.t. it still gets great rewards for newer/rookie players while not being degenerate for min-maxers. this is what shops like blizzard (and to a certain extent wizards of the coast) do when they're at their best - going back to magic: the gathering, wizards will make tons of cards they know will have no impact whatsoever on pro constructed play because they know it'll work great in scenes that lower-skill or more casual players play in (like commander, drafts, pauper, etc). but i would argue even without resource regen, tacticians really have a great ability already - fighter resource regen on an interrupt. this even works great in multiclass. though this all really hypothetical anyway because OBS isn't going to do any balance patching here, so like you say we're just talking about making voluntary balance mods.

I mean, now I think you're just being willfully obtuse. Brilliant isn't that relevant apart from megabosses solely because the rest of the game expects you to be able to beat it without using Brilliant, so yeah, you don't need it. It doesn't change the fact that it's super good. 70 focus and casting time - you can do that basically at the start of a fight on a wizard or priest or druid and just spam the #1 spell you have the rest of the fight; unless you're a level 20 party against xuarips, it's not bad action economy it is optimal action economy because now you can cast the perfect spell over and over, isntead of going from your #1 spell to your #2 spell, etc. Brilliant isn't borderline OP, it is OP. I don't think you fully thought this one out - this makes tactician even better than before. A wizard with slicken will have an effect far stronger than anything brilliant could've given them.

cipher is more balanced around regenerating resource - a caster like priest or wizard is not. so "just" transferring the regenerating resource is powerful. A standard SC psion takes 15 seconds to regenerate an AL9 spell - which are already weaker than other caster AL9s because they are balanced on being able to use them more than a couple times in one fight. Another caster with brilliant will regenerate an AL9 spell every 6 seconds and their AL9s are like Magran's Might, Call of Rymrgand, Missile Salvo, Corrosive Skin, Petrification, Tornado, Maelstrom, etc. We shouldn't be making balancing decisions based on megabosses. They are so far the pale of a typical encounter. The fact that you can use brilliant to make fights against them feasible says more about just how stupidly good brilliant is, because no other inspiration will carry you in a fight like that. To your point, these days for every megaboss fight, I bring along a chanter (or occasionally a cipher). I would not consider most of the chanters or ciphers I run with or provided by OBS to be very powerful or obscene (except for the one time I ran a herald), it's solely because chanter's ability to have infinite sustain and summons that overwhelms all other factors when you're talking about doing literally thousands of damage to an enemy. It says very little about the rest of the game, because most other fights don't last long enough where being able to summon a dragon or animated weapons umpteen times matters at all. Heck - I equip everyone with xbows or arbalests against HoW, and I literally would never would do that in the rest of the game. Megabosses shouldn't be considered normal, or really even fights - they're puzzles.

this isn't a solution, it's a hack. there's no "systematic" rule about why you should be limited to certain casts except under certain game rules. solo mode shouldn't get any special "breaks" just because you're playing solo - solo should just be the same game except, well, solo. solo's supposed to be hard, and as a party-based game there's no real reason to guarantee that solo is infeasible, frankly. i am honestly perplexed and don't get why for others who want to tone down infinite combos there's such a resistance in recognizing that the inspiration that regenerates resources is the problem here. are people just hooked on using brilliant's resource regen and still want it, even if one recognizes that it's broken? edit: brilliant has been broken from day 1 way before anyone discoveed any interactions with other effects. when the developers removed it from the chanter invocation but didn't change brilliant itself, it seemed like they made the same error that some people here are making. it wasn't any related ability that was the problem, it's brilliant itself. only very late did OBS seem to realize just how stupid brilliant was, because weyc's robe (by the time FS came around, near end of development cycle) grants an extremely short brilliant buff - only with super high intellect will you get more than 1 resource regened out of it. but short durations are no protection in a world of WoD and SoT. The only really meaningful solution is to nerf brilliant. Then you could balance brilliant on par with other tier 3 inspirations. put another way - if the only way--in a vacuum--to balance a brilliant effect is to give it an extremely short duration but you can give a much longer duration to swift or energized or robust, it's brilliance that is the problem.

huh? tactician's brilliant has no duration. of all possible broken entry points tactician is arguably the one that cares the least about SoT. blood mage maybe, but because they don't have to worry about brilliant per se (though all classes are helped by brilliant, even chanters, monks, and ciphers) which goes back to the fundamental issue - there's no world--SoT or no--where brilliant is a balanced tier 3 inspiration. you take virtually any setup, and you toss in brilliant and you can quickly make it degenerate. You tone down brilliant and SoT becomes weaker overnight. On the flip side, you get rid of SoT altogether and brilliant is still a stupidly good inspiration except you've eliminated one entry point to degeneracy. Remove SoT and WoD and brilliant is still stupid good, now it's just ciphers and tacticians who can exploit it.

I don't think tactician is nearly that hard with the right metagaming. Phantom Foes will get you there in most fights. On bosses with some perception resistence (for the ones that have persistent distraction) you're set. Psion is just easy because you don't have to do anything but park far away from the enemy to get Ancestor's Memory. You don't need two psions - it just makes it easier. Just Ancestor's Memory the priest/wizard whenever it's up and you're set. Two psions simply just means you don't have to worry about getting hit. like I said it seems (and you are agreeing) that you are pushing a solution to mitigate a specific infinite combo, whereas it sounds like others are talking about completely eliminating it. i'm highlighting that what you're proposing won't eliminate it - it just makes it harder (and in the meantime changes how SoT works).

to clarify, i think your change is fine and interesting as a tweak to SoT on its own, but it was more in the context of "fixing infinite loops" - you either have to break brilliant or you have to break SoT/WoD, and focusing on SoT is wrong, because it's brilliant itself that's overly powerful. with your change to SoT, infinite loops are still possible, just a little less trivial (can't use weyc's robe or shroud of phantasm, have to use tactician or psion) one has to basically make a decision: 1. infinite loops are fine 2. infinite loops are fine if they are non-trivial 3. infinite loops are not fine. only in #1 or 2 would solely tweaking SoT be fine. Only fixing blood mage and brilliant would get you #3. it sounds like you personally are 1-2, which is fine. I'm approaching it from 2-3 - the blood mage is very powerful (probably too powerful) and brilliant is way too good. i don't particularly mind infinite loops if they require some work, but even without infinite combos brilliant is just way too powerful a buff - puts all other tier 3 inspirations to shame.

I really dislike the SoT change (aside from possible PL scaling). SoT is only broken because of Brilliant. SoT is only good because you can take powerful short-duration effects and make them much longer. A typical priest will add +30s to effects and that requires using up all AL6 casts and self-empowering for one more. As a mid-high spell that requires other effects to have any effect at all, that sounds about right. (I would also challenge people to list how many non-Brilliant effects they would or have combined with SoT. It's a pretty narrow spell, even if powerful when you line things up.) It's only when you start interacting with tactician or things like Weyc's Robe that SoT becomes utterly obscene. If Brilliant, for example, were changed to be +3 PL or whatever Boeroer suggested, and and even if SoT was tweaked to allow for PL scaling, it would make SoT more powerful but you'd no longer have a trivial infinite combo. I'm in the camp that one shouldn't need to worry about eliminating all resource regen. For the most part, resource regen isn't that obscene because it's limited to the class and most classes do not have access to a puzzle piece for infinite combo. It becomes more of an issue that either the wizard can regen a wizard spell (blood mage, brilliant) or a priest can regen a priest spell (brilliant). (there's also the cipher invocation that gives +1 resources, but it might actually be too slow to be useful) possible idea for rebalancing brilliant: instead of resource regen, gives a echo chance to all effects, maybe 20%: a rate low enough to be unreliable for a trivial combo, but high enough to be noticable in a typical fight (this might actually require buffing some brilliant-granting effects, like weyc's robe, as they have extremely short buff durations)

just to add on to what boeroer says - all this really says is that blood mage is an obscene class. i should've noted it instead of trickster in my older post. let's not forget that tactician already has what i consider a killer ability - successfully interrupting an enemy restores a fighter resource. with mule kick you can literally interrupt-lock enemies for the entire fight - with aoe interrupts it gets even better. the brilliant buff being as good as it is distorts tactician gameplay to maximize that aspect of the tactician. if brilliant gets significantly weaker, then managing flanked status still becomes important so that you're not just constantly shaken and confused, and it becomes a nice buff (still particularly in caster multiclass) if you manage it, but most importantly it no longer makes making tactician all about that brilliant buff. in addition to brilliant being extremely good - as argued extensively here - i think it's understated just how unbalanced it is. for a martial class, a top-level ability might cost 4 resources. it would take 24 seconds of brilliance to get that high level ability back. a caster can get a level 7-9 spell back in 6 seconds. i think it would actually help a lot if brilliance actually had to account for this somehow. if a caster had to wait 24 seconds to get back a powerful high level spell, that would go a long way to balancing brilliance on its own. but that's well past what can be done with modding i assume.

adding on to an earlier post by phyriel: reading this discussion, i wonder if a better thing when talking about single-class or multi-class to look for is simply "unbalanced" holistically. a lot of the stuff that people are bringing up as OP don't strike me as OP per se, but more just combos and stacking which feels different to me (just lots of metagaming). because given a more general "unbalanced" take i would argue that trickster or trickster/x strikes me as a strong candidate for being an unbalanced subclass. it always struck me as extremely weirdly under-used through much of deadfire history - even before it got significantly buffed the downside was extremely minor (was starting +10% sneak attack damage, now +20% sneak attack damage) because it gets trivialized by PL scaling and deathblows, and you get a crap ton of extra utility and survivability. you barely need to metagame at all to get extremely strong outcomes from rolling a trickster, and with a bit of metagaming you can get extremely powerful multiclasses, even if you don't quite get to degenerate-combo level of powers that others have mentioned (or have been used in ultimate runs).

this is less forced than you think - there are more options than that, but it sounds like you got into a dialogue tree that limited your options. (i say this having played tons of priests of different alignment and managing to not messing up roleplay dispositions). in general, there are many resolutions to quests, even if the choice can be binary how you get there might have flexible nuance. however, to your point, this is not always telegraphed to the player very clearly, so sometimes i've found out to avoid a forced choice just by reloading an earlier save and doing something subtly (i quicksave aggressively). this is one that really grates on me. If you played Deadfire earlier, this was rock-solid. Then they added turn-based mode (4.0 or so) and clearly didn't have the right testing or staffing for it, because they broke a lot of things that used to work. It annoyed me that however rock-solid Deadfire consumable usage was versus PoE1 (which even soft-locked my game on a few occasions), now it's almost as bad. I'm sure they thought turn-based mode was some sort of hail mary to boost sales or interest, but I'm really annoyed at how much existing stuff they broke, and how while they fixed a lot they still left like 5-10% of the regressions unfixed by the time the final 5.0 patch landed. Before 4.0 i never worried about toggling AI, now I literally have it as a hotkey just to help use potions.

Congrats! They really should - it's their fault (bug) not yours. Here's hoping it gets approved.

for anyone who's not aware, one of the reasons why i think this spell absolute rocks is that--contrary to what the tooltip says--the actual little projectiles that hit the enemy interrupt on hit, not crit. in addition to doing some nice damage and stripping away buffs (in a way that can't be reflected), you are essentially stunlocking the enemy the entire time - only enemies immune to interrupts will be able to do anything while being hit with this (and there are only three off the top of my head: memory hoarder, oracle, and dorudugan). in this way it's much better than an actual hard cc effect like paralyze or stun (and ironically, it's the slower pace of the projectiles versus e.g. minoletta's spell that really makes this work so well) agree on this. afflictions are kind of a dime a dozen (even though they're nice), but +15 all defenses [which stacks with deflection-only bonuses] really makes your front-line characters tanky. edit: but also agree that eothas as SC isn't great. the eothas symbol is more of an argument for single-classing xoti as a priest of gaun and bringing her along, who gets a symbol of eothas and a bunch of other useful spells.

the only thing i'd add to boeroer's note is that if you don't pick your spells in a complementary way, you may find that in late game you'll have so many spells that you won't really be doing much attacking, kind of wasting your weapon choice/investment. though wael (and skaen) are a bit more resistant to martial/caster action economy because so many of their bonus spells either have no recovery and/or are very fast cast (arcane veil, mirror image, llengrath's, escape, finishing blow, shadowing beyond). though for any weapon-based "dps" priest, i'd try hard to do something that relies on a summoned/spiritual weapon. the lash is very very strong (up to +31%), and if you roleplay your character correctly you could arguably one of the strongest weapons in the game at your disposal (woedica arguably has the best weapons in the game! at level 16-20 you get legendary monk fists and with a +31% raw lash is extremely hard to beat) edit: for chromoprismatic staff you may do better with e.g. magran, because the +1 fire PL gives them huge benefit across the board.

i would say for hybrid support/dps as caster you're best off with berath or magran. berath: you get touch of rot and rot skulls. the former gives you something useful at AL1, and rot skulls is just a pretty good effect and gives the priest some damage diversity in both type and defense. you can lean on your other priest spells and berath comes with some useful support spells for free. magran: i really enjoyed it as an offensive build. you get tons of extra damage spells, and even though any SC priest can pick it up, magran's might at AL9 is a really amazing single-target spell and fits in thematically. only problem here is that against fire immunes, fire absorbers, or high-fire-AR you're kinda screwed. you can't even really fall back on spiritual weapon because the lash is fire. these might be good times to become more of a support caster. by the way, magran combines particularly well with Marux Amanth (10% chance for priest spells to echo) since echoing spells is more useful when they are something like fan of flames and not, say, devotions for the faithful. there's plenty of other gear that boosts fire-keyworded spells so you can really lean in to this as an offensive caster pretty hard. (if you don't care about SC or the AL8/9 spells, multiclassing with evoker has the odd effect that the few evocation spells the magran priest gets as a bonus also benefit from the evoker's 15% echo chance (works multiplicatively/independently with the marux amanth, with the very low chance that you can actually get double echos on a cast), though not the bonus PL) also, if you haven't seen it: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/priest

hey i'm only human i'll have it fixed in the next update (i'm almost positive that i used mule kick and greater lay on hands as tests, which apparently are two of a handful of exceptions)

lololol probably the worst i've ever felt in an RPG was in Fallout New Vegas - I created a character that picked up a perk that let you terrify NPCs in dialogue, and also one that let you eat corpses. I figured I was some sort of psychopathic maniac. Early on, after I used the terrify option on some random innocent stranger, and then shot him, and then ate his body, I felt so bad about that I abandoned that playthrough.

oh man, i've gotten pretty good of getting past the "hoarding" feeling about limited-use items, but that one-use effigy summon? how in the heck am I supposed to decide "ok, this random fight is the fight i'll use it on"?