thelee

to be fair, I thought it was way too good in poe 1. there was no reason to not always take it and blindly use it in every fight (other than fire absorption on the enemy, though i'm not sure if that existed in poe 1). i'm not sure the ability is bad (it's only really bad if you're trying to consider the paladin in isolation and not with support or consumables to keep them up), i think mostly it is just costed a bit too expensively when the paladin has plenty of exhortations and other abilities you want to use.

i'm not even sure if the paladin counts as a spellcaster for captain's banquet purposes. Any time you have a penalty, you need to invert it. You can't just subtract it. In this case, a -25% from voidward would actually be a -.33 adjustment. For your later example it would be .45 - .33 => .12, which is positive, so you don't need to re-invert it, so it's a +12% bonus. (the inversion basically tries to emulate how in multiplicative systems, penalties are more severe and harder to trivialize) Importantly, you should add-up all the bonuses and maluses that affect a number in one go (don't separate out the healing) because otherwise the order of operations with regards to inversions could really throw you off. The only situation where you treat modifiers in a different step is PL scaling (which are multiplicative). I'm normally a big fan of theory, but you should only use theory to guide actual real experiments and is merely saving yourself time from pursuing dead-ends, and that theory needs to be accurate to begin with. To wit, getting the inversion math is absolutely critical to getting an accurate model of what's happening, especially when you're talking about accumulating enough to cancel out self-damage (being off by a little bit means the difference between infinite sustain vs dying throughout a long fight). Plus, not only could assumptions be off, Deadfire having been a game implemented by human beings, there are plenty of exceptions and edge-cases and weird implementation issues. Personally speaking, I have one save game from an old character that's just sitting around in a tavern to recruit level 19 adventurers so I could verify any theory with an actual test character.

it would be one of {5, 10, 15} * (1 + [PL * .05]) * (1 + [might_over_10 * .03] + [wounds * .05] + misc_dmg_bonuses) a max-level bloodmage helwalker, with maxed out might, at 10 wounds, would be: {5, 10, 15} * 1.35 * 2.25 = one of 15, 30, or 45 damage to self, on average 30 damage per use. honestly a lot worse than i expected (normally my characters have around 10 might and aren't helwalkers) - my typical end-game beefy character would barely survive ten spams of it, and forget about trying to get back a tier 7-9 spell (only one in three chance each use, so on average 90 health just to get one of those back). probably might want to invest in barring death's door, the last stand potion, or a shieldbearer, all plus a priest for salvation of time, or a cipher for brilliant to spam those abilities back.

blue! or purple! seems appropriately nightclub-y to me

Ahem, requoting my post

on skaen's challenge it's fun using club modal with simple torches. it's as if the enemy is so baffled i'm whacking (and beating!) them with a torch that their willpower is destroyed. SPEAKING of which, what about a unique torch? even just a magical one? (no, st. drogga's torch doesn't count because it's a saber)

if you include megabosses, chanter is an absolute king, so healing wall build that @TheMetaphysician mentions will be fine. there are plenty of powerful metagaming options you can do with other classes and builds, but i feel like a chanter is an almost brain-dead easy way to support and take care of megaboss encounters. With a chanter you just need either the animated weapon summon, or the big dragon summon (not possible if multiclassed). if you feel like going single-class chanter, a bellower or troubadour for 100% uptime on the big dragon is even better than animated weapons. Animated weapons do good damage and can knockdown up to 11 times, but can die pretty easy. Big dragon has 1000+ health, various elemental immunity, and can literally facetank megabosses for you. You could probably just mix in whatever else for damage.

maybe should give this a try. i thought azure blade would be pretty fussy, but sounds like maybe not right - for a lot of weapons i'm sure there's a nice build or a nice way to use it, but it just doesn't tend to frequently overlap with how i like to play, and so the annoyance factor of pierce-only damage becomes more important for me in dissuading me from picking it up.

for me: spears, pollaxes, maces, stilettos, rapiers. spears and pollaxes because when i plan out my parties engagement factors in, and rarely am I ever in a situation where I've planned around using a weapon to give me engagement. spears also get the shaft because weapons that do pierce damage only are uninspiring because pierce immunity feels like the most common. maces - i think about PEN issues a lot, and while a mace could help a lot by debuffing AR by 1, these days I bring a long a chanter for shield breaks, have expose vulnerabilities, and otherwise am rarely in aistuation where debuffing AR by 1 helps enough characters (at least two, I think) to be worth using over just having the mace wielder use a weapon that grants +2 PEN. stilettos - just don't really find the unique that inspiring, and by the time i'm strong enough to fight rust for his poignard I can't be bothered. Am making an effort this time around. Also, pierce-only weapon damage is a lame choice for me because of immunities. rapiers - mostly because of the fact that it's pierce-only. in the past i would also put arbalests and crossbows as under-used weapons, but these days i give basically every member of my party either arbalest or crossbow proficiency as their last proficiency just so that I have an easier time with Hauane O Whe.

i would be fine without making it an AoE and just increasing the hit to crit count to like 10. part of the lameness is that attacks that crit for other reasons or attacks that can't get upgraded (because they graze) still appear to eat up the hit-to-crit count of entropy.

I agree with @Boeroer that wood elf is really useful on a mobile, high-risk reward class. I think monks in particular do well. Something that might not be super obvious is that resistences are checked first before dispelling any inspirations, and for wizard/monk this means all those hobbled effects you run into throughout the game won't dispel swift strikes' quick, or nimble from fleet feet, or swift from deletrious alacrity of motion. All those seem like really important buffs for a sage (especially swift, since it will let you basically avoid any melee engagement you don't want to take on) and something you don't want to lose because of incidental level 1 effects the enemy has. Human would be useful with blood mage/helwalker, but ironically you'll have so many damage bonuses and buffs at your disposal that it might not be very impactful (the damage bonus is additive with might and other bonuses, and you'll have a huge might in all likelihood (super easy to max out or get close to maxing out at 35 with a helwalker). The accuracy bonus is helpful, but as a blood mage you effectively have infinite access to Aware so it's also a bit less good (also dance with death). If you have a priest backup a death godlike might be better since the +3 PL bonus is effectively a multiplicative +15% bonus (along with a +3 to +6 accuracy and some PEN/duration), which would be even better with a huge might, but this interaction comes later (barring death's door + wall of draining or salvation of time) and is extremely high-risk/reward (one arcane suppression and you're basically screwed).

yeah if you use it with summons it's bad. i wasn't thinking of that. 50 instant healing to start, with huge effective area is pretty good. I'm not sure there's anything comparable from any other class, even just for the raw healing number, ignoring the range. Druids and lay on hands can heal more health over time, but if you need the health really fast (and on more than one party member), I don't think there's anything better.

Good luck with that Outside of what Boeroer says, while Healing Chain and/or upgrading Sacred Immolation or Hastening Exhortation is not bad, it's not nearly as good as the extra synergies you can get from multiclassing a paladin. I mostly single-class paladin just to do something different (using pallegina), not because it's particularly powerful.

Blood Mage is really powerful. There are some obvious "tricks" that you can use that make blood mage particularly powerful for solo builds, but unlike some tricky solo approaches I know of (tactician mostly), the class doesn't lose much power when in a party... you just have different power. I haven't tried Blood Mage + Helwalker before, but it might be worth testing to see if Blood Sacrifice generates wounds. If so, then it seems to me that a Blood Mage + Helwalker would just be way better than vanilla wizard + helwalker, especially for a high risk/reward build. Not only would you be able to get spells back, but doing so would give you more wounds, which means more might and (eventually) more intellect. Sounds juicy.

I find all rogue-like enemies (including those Risen) are really brutal if encountered a little too early. On PotD it's very hard to get enough AR early-to-mid game to actually get enemies to underpenetrate (a little easier on veteran, but still hard), so these rogue types are doing full sneak attack damage to you, interrupting you, and using Finishing Blow on you. With extreme micromanagement you can run right out of range of their melee attacks as they start them, but some of them just switch to ranged weapons really quickly (which is actually sometimes worse because their AI targets squishies when possible, and some enemies get cheaty ranged accuracy bonuses on PotD), and sometimes (especially on PotD) there are so many enemies that you're likely engaged by someone else or there's no maneuver room.

my opinions: 1. PoE1 was almost unreasonably difficult in act i. especially on PotD even near the end of my 1000+ hours with it, I had to clear every single quest, recruit companions, and stealth through much of caed nua just to open up the map into act ii. Meanwhile Deadfire was pretty well-known to be undertuned difficulty-wise at launch (with extremely powerful items). Items and consumables got tuned down, and the higher difficulties got tuned up, especially PotD, but unlike PoE1--while you're still gated into a starting area (Port Maje Island)--the fights are more easily avoidable (plus you can pretty much stealth through the entirety of it if need be). 2. Ship bounties are an easy source of experience so you can try to overlevel combat encounters. Plus, even without overleveling, like others said multiclassing opens a lot more possibility for putting together powerful parties (though it's also possible to create weak parties, hence why the game frequently suggests that multiclassing is not for new players), whereas in PoE1 there was a tighter band on what you could do with your characters since you could only single-class. 3. PoE1 combat was also much faster pace. Once I discovered the "automatically slow combat speed" option in the menu within the first few hours of playing, I turned it on and never turned it off. Deadfire is balanced at a speed that is around PoE1's slow speed (I think this was mentioned in a developer update for backers). For people who played whatever the default speed option is, PoE1 could be almost comically frantic and challenging and by comparison Deadfire would be a lot easier to handle. 4. This +1000. A lot of enemies seemingly got retuned, probably to take away a lot of the PoE1 frustration factor. I remember taking my first min-maxed party into the The White March and being obliterated by constant paralyze poison, and god help the first time I saw a broodmother cast Minor Avatar. While paralyze poison still happens, lagufeth and xaurip skirmisher encounters are nowhere near the nightmares they used to be. I remember in PoE1 some pwgra-type could cast healing spells like Moonwell infinitely (just on a loop with other spells), which could be a nightmare for parties with insufficient DPS. Many more caster-types in Deadfire are actually more like casters, with a limited inventory of spells. 5. Effects got rebalanced. This might look like a "nerf" to the player in places - e.g. prone is now just an interrupt, Devotions of the Faithful is now just a +10/-10 accuracy adjustment, confusion merely causes your targeting to become foe+friend, etc. But because all of these changes are symmetric with enemy abilities, it also means getting hit with an enemy Pillar of Faith no longer prones half your party for 10 seconds (which would be like ~20 seconds in Deadfire combat speed) or getting hit with a level 2 wizard confuse doesn't cause your party to descend into chaotic mayhem. That being said, I think the hardest fights in Deadfire overwhelm the hardest fights in PoE1. I'd say the difficulty curve in PoE1 starts high and then doesn't really budge up, going down mostly after Act II starts and your options open up. There's a bit of a spike in The White March but with some poison/disease immunity you're pretty much set for what I think are the most annoying fights. In Deadfire it's more like a U - a somewhat (but manageable) rough start, smoothing out in the mid-game, and then an extremely high late and end-game (you can search through the forums for people complaining about the oracle fight, porokoa, or the megabosses). Considering that much of the late/end-game is optional, you might end up with a pretty laconic experience, difficulty-wise.

hey bad news @Loki85, the game is past end of life in terms of active support, so they have explicitly said no more bugfixes (unless it is extremely severe). because of that, i think reverse pick-pocketing explosives should be thought of as more of an "assassination" option against green-circle NPCs (blue-circle in colorblind mode) instead of as a stealthy combat option. I agree it would've been cool if we could reverse pickpocket anyone, but we gotta roll with the punches on this one.

If it's gated with a significant cost it seems OK for a high-level (expensive) armor. Maybe it provides a con penalty or something?

Tinny! (a mash up of my daughters' names) this is a shameless way to get me to use your mod, isn't it

i feel like there definitely needs to be more brigandine - all my tanks feel samey because they all seem to converge on plate armor or Reckless Brigandine. Also in general, i think there should be "caster-enabling" heavy armor, even if it's not ideal, i think there's a lot of game design space here. I'm thinking of a slow, ponderous "battleship" combat (slow, ponderous, heavy-hitting) caster approach - the full +55% recovery penalty but maybe some bonus concentration or bonus spell keyword PLs to reward or enable the slow casting. ok, maybe even like a "crit on spell cast removes next recovery" thing. Not a lot though (at most two), just to provide some options because in general Deadfire tries to open up a lot of options, but heavy armor + casting is definitely one they don't even seem to try to enable. there also needs to be magical clothing. I hate that for my +0% recovery partymembers, after customizing their aesthetics and color choices, after like an hour of playing the game they are all looking nearly identical by wearing robes. One thing i miss about PoE1 is being able to take some clothing that I like the look of and manually enchanting them into something custom and nifty. I would even accept existing robes just re-branded into some variety of clothing. Similarly, I would also prefer armor to not be so eager to override your color choices - especially annoying with robes since even the neon-pink characters my daughter helps create end up looking the same when wearing Effigy's Husk or Humility. Lastly - more keyword interactions! There's tons of keywords everywhere, and I think it makes for more interesting game design if those keywords are used or referenced. Not just the standard fire, frost, etc. keywords, but priest or druid keywords, even monk or chanter keywords (e.g. some pacifist themed-armor that grants +1 or +2 non-offensive invocation PL).

ooo, least unstable coil might be tagged as quest item - though i thought the final version you get wasn't tagged as such?

everything static is 2D i think. they use pre-baked in information to indicate things like interactable objects, places where the background should be translucent (to create the illusion that your characters are behind something), where are legal pathways (in fact in both poe1 and deadfire there are places where they clearly got this wrong since you are unable to walk "behind" a wall in places even if you could a few steps earlier), elevation levels, etc. i *suspect* (but am not sure) that everything animated and/or moving is a 3D object. In BG/2 it would have just been a pre-baked animation, but because of the dynamic lighting involved I suspect it's real-time 3D.

i don't agree with any of the poll options, but i second boeroer's opinions. i think a lot more interesting stuff could have been done with keywords and aren't. it's a shame decay has hardly any keyword interaction. (similar thing for priest keyword like "cleansing")

yes, the one to the far right (all the "per encounter" abilities) with infinite use is the spell you steal. you can't steal more than one. don't quote me on this, but i believe grimoire imprint works like cipher "transfer" effects (where you debuff an enemy and gain a linked, simultaneous buff). so if you imprint one caster, and then try to imprint another caster, nothing will happen, you'll just stick with the first one until the original enemy dies or the effect somehow ends. it's not like poe1 where i think you could steal more than one spell (in poe1 i think you could get up to three).

yeah, there were some dev updates where they actually showed it. they also talked about the difficulties of doing dynamic lighting and reflections in deadfire, because they basically have to do a lot of "fakery" since the world has no actual depth. it was actually astonishing to see one of these updates because it seemed like a whole lot of work to emulate the low-tech IE engine in a decent way. (Kind of reminds of the lego movie looking like being made completely of legos but having been made with top-of-the-line CGI rendering farms)