thelee

yeah, i had a dim memory of incarnate being real good early on, but i was testing around some months back and it seemed a bit mediocre because you couldn't control any of them, so i stopped gunning for it. so probably it got nerfed at some point.

i would actually adjust your strategy and if possible use your DPS to take out the minions first while eder/pallegina/priest try to tank and survive through the oracle, since you won't get more minions until you drop the oracle down a health status. The oracle itself is not too bad, it's really all those delayed blast fireballs and walls of many colors that can really ruin your day.

1. Every time the oracle hits a new health status "injured, bloodied, near death" more minions appear. I actually got into major trouble in one attempt because an empowered minoletta's missile salvo took the oracle through too many health statuses in one go (without outright killing it) that i got swarmed and overwhelmed by minions. 2. the lanterns stun the oracle for a short duration when destroyed. If you have spare DPS or lots of AoE it makes the fight a tad easier to take out he lanterns periodically. But if you don't hav have the spare DPS (busy taking out minions, for example) don't go out of your way to do it - it's not worth the time spent in such a case. 3. The organic stuff I think just adds more Slog Zones through the map when destroyed. Annoying, but not a deal-breaker for the fight, i don't know why the AI prioritizes destroying it at times. 4. Arcane Dampener I don't believe will suppress hindsight or immunity to flanking. Duration-less buffs are hard to gauge, because many of them can't be cleansed or suppressed, but some of them *can* (if I remember correctly). But I can't say for sure because the Oracle has such high will defense that I'm not typically trying to do anything about it. I don't think Hindsight is related to immunity to flanking, because if Hindsight was bestowing flanking immunity, there wouldn't be a separate "immunity: flanked" entry. (Much like how some enemies have Immunity: Poison/Disease, but a paladin enemy might be immune to them as well via a passive buff, but they dont' show up with that immunity listing). I actually don't know what Hindsight does (or many enemy buffs) - the solution to find out would be to either dig through game files, or use console to spawn an oracle, have it join your party, and look at their character sheet to see what the auto-generated description is. edit - the latter wouldn't work because you can only examine abilities, not passives.

sorry, i haven't used incarnate in a long time, do you actually gain control of your summons?

what do you see in the combat log when you use lay on hands? can you pause and take a picture/screenshot?

yeah, it's been litigated before, but my general thought was "it's alright, not great, but i don't hate it." but given apparently how much of a money-sink and quicksand of a feature it was, i don't think "it's alright" was nearly worth the effort they put in just because someone (*cough* feargus *cough*) mandated it as a stretch goal.

Also one more comment - out of the 1000 hours I've played Deadfire so far, probably 900 of it was with a priest mainchar (I've literally played every priest multiclass combination, some of them more than once). Priests were nerfed compared to PoE1, but it's because essentially they were utterly brokenly good in PoE1 (Devotions of the Faithful and all the immunity defense spells especially). But priests are still good. You can get by without a priest, but you could also get by without a priest in PoE1. It just makes the game a whole lot easier to have one around, even if priests in Deadfire are not as overpowered as in PoE1. I think the perception problem is many players don't play on Veteran or PotD. On lower difficulties (even Veteran) you can pretty much just brute force your way most fights, but on higher difficulties, especially with upscaling and/or challenges enabled, fights last longer, enemies are tankier, and buffs/debuffs become more important compared to direct damage and healing. On top of that, once you're experienced with the game, the priest and certain priest subclasses are very good for multiclassing and metagaming. For example, with the right in-game knowledge, priest Salvation of Time is the most important spell in the game; for related reasons, every player who has done a successful Ultimate run so far (five total, myself included) has been a multiclass with priest of skaen.

I just want to +1 what @Myrtillo said. I've played both a cleric (priest of berath/fighter) and a pure priest of berath and enjoyed them both and I think both are good alternatives to a templar (paladin/priest) if you want to stick with priest of berath. the best part of a fighter instead of a paladin is that the arguably four most powerful skills don't interfere with your action economy at all (the action economy is why you feel like you spend too little time actually swinging your 2h around). They would be: disciplined strikes (which you should upgrade to probably tactical barrage for the Acute inspiration) because it is literally instantaneous so doesn't interfere with your action economy at all. fighter stances (which are just always on). when i played a berathian cleric, i upgraded it/left it on Conqueror Stance for the massive +10 accuracy that applies even to spellcasting. confident aim (passive), which gives you a wonderful 30% graze to hit with proficient weapons. armored grace (passive), which reduces the recovery penalty of all armor and frees up your action economy even more. All those abilities also help compensate for weaker stats, so it makes it easier to shuffle stats around and still be competent. Intellect and dexterity are still super important for boosting your spellcasting, but a fighter makes having lower accuracy be more forgiving - disciplined strikes and confident aim in particular do a lot of work here - and the +5 deflection from conqueror stance (up to +10 when really hurt) and being able to wear heavier armor with less pain (thanks to armored grace), especially when combined with a pet that reduces your armor penalty, means that you can also shortchange resolve and constitution a bit, even though you're essentially a front-line caster even on PotD. I forget exactly what fighter subclass I chose. Morningstars are a great weapon pick regardless; the morningstar weapon modal debuffs -25 fortitude, which synergizes with fighter Knock Down/Mule Kick, which is probably my pick for best fighter ability. It also synergizes with some of the priest of berath spells that I mention below. You still have action economy concerns, so you have to be smart about what priest abilities you pick up. I.E. if you just plan on picking up a bunch of buffs, you're going to be spending all your time buffing and not really benefiting from all your fighter abilities. IIRC I used the fighter's very good accuracy and intellect boost (+10 from fighter stance, +5 perception and 50% graze to hit from tactical barrage, and +5 intellect and +1 PL from tactical barrage) to pick up some critical debuffs (e.g. despondent blows) and to supercharge some of the bonus spells I got as a berathian (touch of rot, spreading plague, rot skulls). Combined Spreading Plague and Interdiction, for example will debuff enemy fortitude so much that combined with morning star weapon modal and your accuracy bonuses, you'll basically be able to stunlock any enemy with Mule Kick, even most bosses. i'm not as wild about incarnate as myrtillo, but I think there's a massively good payoff to going pure priest with the AL8 spells. Symbol of Berath (all symbols, really) are super good party-friendly aoe hazard spells, and when empowered can completely wreck house. Hand of Wael and Woe is probably one of hte best spells in the game - the amount of damage and healing it simultaneously does is frankly insane. As I described it elsewhere, the healing is so intense even your naked party members will be able to facetank megabosses. Dismissal will let you end most vessel fights almost instantly (it's even better if you don't have upscaling enabled). the only problem I see here is that on PotD charging in with a squishy caster and a greatsword is not the best of ideas; a berathian priest--outside of the Barring Death's Door+Salvation of Time combo--has much less survivability than a wizard, for example. My priest of berath just picked up ranged weapons and spent their time plunking away or using Rot Skulls when they weren't casting spells.

yes, lay on hands works on PC, and not only that, it makes the paladin one of the better healers (i would put it better than priest) because of how efficiently you can spam it. if it doesn't work on PS4 that would be a major major bug. are you absolutely sure you're not seeing your health come back? you should get some amount instantly the moment lay on hands resolves, and then the same amount every 3 seconds after. this seems like it would be an exceptionally weird platform-specific bug if it doesn't heal.

right, i'm saying that from experience (having also set up a "self:has inspiration:perception" FALSE disciplined barrage script) that sometimes i've seen Eder use disciplined barrage like umpteen times in a row (burning up a significant chunk of class resource in the process). I don't know what causes it, but sometimes the AI gets evaluated repeatedly or does multiple things because it queues up a bunch of abilities because at the time the abilities are being queued up, the condition evaluates to true, and the condition doesn't get re-checked as the queued up abilities get used. I ended up having to put a short cooldown on these sorts of scripts to prevent this kind of multiple-use from happening. edit - another reason for cooldowns - things like suppress affliction can really mess up AI scripts that are based on looking for an inspiration or affliction. suppress affliction will make those evaluate as "not being present" but if the ability is used the inspiration or affliction won't get applied (because it's the same as a suppressed ability). without a cooldown, your AI script will happily keep using their ability on someone who's had the relevant affliction/inspiration suppressed. edit 2 - a much more mundane reason why you might see multiple marked enemies is because the enemy you marked gets withdrawn or stasis-ed or mule kicked or somehow else rendered untargetable, even extremely temporarily (mule kick and monk's knock up stuff only have untargetability for 1 second). which would get your AI script to mark someone else.

have you set a very long cooldown on your final thing to land a marked shot? just off the top of my head from my experience, with 0 cooldown sometimes the AI will queue up the action multiple times (this was extremely annoying with an "instant" ability like disciplined barrage).

background: the obsidian crowd got quite a bit of complaints about having steam achievements tied to very hard things to do in PoE1, so decidedly in Deadfire they refrained from linking any of that to actual achievements. (Some people just like to collect achievements.) The only "hard" stuff you can get credit for now are the god's challenges, which get a check mark. I'm surprised actually you didn't just go for Triple Crown, which is basically what you did.

yeah, stock AI is dumb as hell in general. this doesn't just go for party members in ship-combat, but all AI, mostly caster AI. you probably notice it more for your own companions in ship-to-ship combat more because your builds aren't as optimized for bad AI. example: very nearly every enemy mage that has Torrent of Flame in their grimoire will happily use it even if there's no one in range or only enemies on their side in range. i'm pretty sure stock caster AI just goes down a checklist of all spells they have and casts them.

easiest way is to be a nature godlike and use swift strikes to get a body inspiration for +1 PL. this would be enough to get you to better-than-legendary as multiclass. You'd need a further +2 PL to get to better-than-legendary. easiest is probably potion of ascension, which is +2 PL for the entire fight. other way is to eat some food that gives you +1 PL and then use a Stone of Power to get +2 total PL (+1 from food, stacks with +1 from necklace) for the fight. IIRC there will only ever be one chant of any kind active. I think the most that happens is that if the chant that is already on someone has a shorter duration than the new chant, the duration gets refreshed, but that's it. (most chants don't do much if they could stack anyway) That being said, most (all?) offensive chants need to roll against enemy defense to check, so it might be worth doubling-up on a single chant if you really need a chant to land (I do this with Thick Thick Grew Their Tongues, because when I need to get rid of enemy concentration, I need to do it urgently, so even if it doesn't stack, it gives me multiple attempts at wiping out enemy concentration). the only exception is "Many Lives Pass By, Each Leaving Footprints" which creates summons instead of buffs/debuffs. There you could have a party of five chanters summoning skeletons all the live long day. Not sure it'd be effective (the summoned skeletons from this chant don't scale with your level) but it sure would be silly

The subtle reality is that it's not truly a lie; the inner workings is that the chant has a 10 second duration, but is overridden by the chant/linger mechanics. This matters for exactly one case that I can think of: the "Many Lives Pass By, Each Leaving Footprints" chant. That chant summons a skeleton, but because it's a summon, can't be affected by the chant/linger override. There it actually does have a summon duration of 10s that is extended by intellect as one would expect. Even with Brisk Recitation on, it doesn't shorten the summon duration (which means troubadours can create a frankly stupid amount of trash summons).

truth be told, there's not really that much of a point having a lot of different spells to cast, even if you had no limits to spell casts per encounter, simply because of the action economy. in any given situation, there's a #1 best spell to cast, then a #2 best spell, then a #3, etc... Mostly what having more spells does is extend how large that list of spells is, and not necessarily increase the quality of your actions. (this is especially true for priests, who are less like a spell-casting toolbox in the way druids and wizard can be; druids and wizard have different damage types, for example, so diversity can increase your spell quality by improving the odds that your #1 best spell is really effective in a given situation.) Typically with priests especially is that I pick up generally at most two spells per tier (and sometimes just one), because combined with the bonus spell, you're already set for spells you want to cast most of the time. In rare situations, I'll pick up another if there's a particular niche that just isn't fulfilled otherwise and is all-or-nothing sort of thing (so even if it's situational and rarely ever the #1 best spell to cast, those situations in which it is useful are extremely impactful, like the various revive effects). Otherwise, even though single-class priests don't have particularly amazing passives, a weak passive that is active all the time is a much better use of finite level-ups than an extraneous spell you pick up and is almost never used.

See my original comment. Though omgFireballs is right. Psions have infinite interrupts and are also handy to have (though imo is a role that could be fulfilled by any other class with a crossbow or arbalest).

Wow, the woedica temple is a level 4 area?? Where does that number come from? On PotD+upscaling that final fight is so brutal (garrotes everywhere, an enormous amount of sustain, hard-to-hit paladins) that I don't attempt it until like level 8.

that's the problem, unfortunately for you. as alluded before, the raging debate over difficulty in Deadfire has sort of been resolved against being able to roflstomp everything at max level - the fact that you could do this in PoE1 was generally considered to be a bad thing. Personally, I still think the difficulty curve is a little light at the end (it's not helped by the fact that the actual main endgame didn't get any major bumps even as SSS and FS had significantly amped-up difficulty), but as one of those people who argued vociferously for a much harder PotD all the way to the top-end of the curve, I'm pretty happy with where it stands. SSS will definitely test your skills, and FS even more. I've done it with plenty of parties so you aren't required to metagame to specific solutions, but there are certain setups that are dramatically easier, for example (having a paladin or two for the changeling encounter for example, since you don't lose the auras when shapeshifted). I think megabosses are far guiltier of requiring specific metagaming - for example I can't imagine doing Hauane O Whe without either a paladin or chanter, and lots of crossbow/arbalest proficiency (or a specifically built monk). if you want a "harder" experience that maps onto PoE1's PotD i think veteran is actually a better fit - you can add in god challenges to mix it up a bit. Deadfire PotD+upscaling can be way more punishing than anything in PoE1, and at this point it's by design.

ironically, berath's challenge makes it even easier to become immortal, because you can de-aggro enemies but still stay in combat, which is valuable for tactician, but also valuable for Shroud of the Phantasm since you can still whack yourself with a fire wall or summons to trigger brilliant (1% chance on being hit on the cloak). In my experience, you want to avoid combat because: combat (mostly buffing) can take a really long time. Probably most of the time passed in my run was just buffing. Pre-buffing for one of hte megaboss fights, for example, easily took half a day. When you have Eothas's challenge on limiting the # of days you have, you don't want to waste time if you don't have to. I ended with probably ~10 days left, but I needed a cushion of a few days in case something didn't work out. A few unnecessary fights and that really starts eating into your window. combat is the main place you can fail. It is possible to make mistakes. For example all you need is for Vela to become un-withdrawn while you're in the middle of recovery or something and BLAM end of run. because combat is the main place you can fail, why expose yourself to fights if you don't need to? the interrupt thing is not a big deal - if it is messing up your run, all you need is rekvu's helm (easily bought in Delver's Row) and an injury. Tons of ways to get an injury easily. Outside of combat if you self-target a spell and knock yourself out, that doesn't count as gameover, you just stand back up with an injury (what I did in my run to collect an injury).

ironically, the actual BG games had your items disappear from the ground and many containers (hence why a stronghold was useful). in the manual, it even provided an in-universe explanation (people are coming by and taking items), so it's not like people coming from a nostalgia angle had an in-built explanation about items lasting forever. it could have lent itself to soft-locks if you left behind an important quest item, but IME that's a solvable problem (Deadfire definitely makes sure quest-important items stay on your party at all times; i've had characters equipped with quest items get annihilated [stupid disintegrate] and while everything else falls into a pile on the floor like loot, the quest item explicitly goes into my stash). whatever, Deadfire doesn't have the problem, so that's good enough for me.

PoE1 had long load times because of a bug where the more items you collect (even if you sell them) the save file inflates dramatically. Deadfire doesn't have this issue, and at least on PC/macOS has much faster load times as a result. I in fact will never touch PoE1 again because the load times were just so awful by comparison.

oh i just meant that the fury gives you a special spiritshifting from ("elemental") that i would never voluntarily choose for any kind of caster. given that the fury is geared towards offensive-casting, the fact that a Cat-form animist, lifegiver, or ancient could all dump out offensive spells better (ignoring PEN issues) is kind of ironic.

in case boeroer's note isn't clear the cat flurry ability gives +33% action speed for a short duration. you can extend it with a priest's salvation of time. if you care about your weapons more than cat claws, you can immediately shift out of cat form and the cat flurry buff stays on (it's not contingent on cat form). importantly, this means you cast spells hugely faster, so it's not just a weapon-attack benefit. because of this, i generally always pick the cat form for my druids - the fact that the fury sticks you with an elemental type makes it ironically quite bad for casting DPS

related, with BG-style games, the problem is that you are loading in one gigantic map, so i'm not sure there's as much streaming/segmenting that you could do compared to a shooter. and it's not like an RTS where it's essentially tile-based with assets and design optimized for fast load. it would be "clever" if obsidian did some smart predictive thing and started to stream in areas as soon as you clicked on an exit indicator (like a door or map edge), but ehm given the developer bandwidth they have this might have resulted in even buggier behavior (there was a pernicious issue with quicksaves/quickloads not correctly restoring state, which would be the closest analogue to this smart-streaming idea). edit: but sweet jesus, 1.5m to 2m for a single area is insane. are you sure you don't have a failing storage medium? even on my ancient haswell-based PC i don't have load times nearly that long.