thelee

blood mage - only restores mage spells. you need shroud of phantasm and self-damage (wall of flame is popular) to trigger brilliant, which you can extend perpetually with Salvation of Time. tactician - if you're invisible or withdrawn (and vela is out of combat or also withdrawn) you de-aggro the entire enemy party, but Berath's keeps you in combat. This puts you in a game mechanics loophole where you trigger tactician brilliant. You can buff perpetually with Salvation of Time. But you still need shroud of phantasm because there is one fight you can't actually de-aggro (Water Dragon). However, against bosses, mule kick plus perception resistance/immunity is a great way to have brilliant up perpetually regardless. (edit - the actual mechanics of tactician brilliant are more complicated then that. there's a distance check, for example, so it's possible to be too far away to trigger brilliant. some enemy AI--mostly in SSS--will still try to snoop around for you even when invisible and sometimes even when withdrawn!) helwalker - taking damage is irrelevant for most of the game because barring death's door obviates the need to worry about it. most of my ultimate run I was at 1 health.

i'm going to skim through the vid later, but extra congrats! i really thought monk would only be viable single-classed for wotw-based reasons, so happy to hear i was wrong.

is blood sacrifice a free action in TB mode? because blood mages could infinite-spam delayed blast fireball, which is much more powerful.

there should be a distance indicator on the ship combat interface, center bottom (in meters). you also get a slight visual clue in the art on the right, the closer you are the bigger the art

mostly just how one of their three main offensive abilities (in addition to frenzy and shouts) is expensive, underwhelming, and one of the upgrades is obsoleted by something even multi-class barbarians can pickup.

just here to chime in and say that this is the case. i thought they stacked in my last run, and ended up respeccing out of CB once I realized I wasn't getting stacking benefits. poor barbarians

of all platforms i expected to be the most stable experience, linux was not one of them, no offense. macOS also has this hitch (though after catalina broke everything i'm frankly amazed that deadfire runs at all)

yes i played with lots of mirror images. yes, it is annoying. the most annoying part is that the underlying game is still occurring - it's just the rendering that's frozen. so i've gotten into the habit of hitting PAUSE as soon as everything freezes for a bit, so nothing critical happens while the game is desperately trying to load in the mirror image (a lot can happen in PotD difficulty). though amusingly, i also used it as a "oh ****" detector because in one game i had aloth set up to auto-use mirror image in certain situations, so if the game suddenly hitched it acted as a "aloth is in trouble!" alarm i've discovered something similar happens while playing as a beckoner - i pause as soon as the summons get brought in, because the game is desperately trying to load some graphical effect and i pause to make sure nothing horrible is happening while rendering is happening. edit: it's clearly some engine inefficiency... maybe some sort of storage data seek? a really inefficient algorithm? because i've had this hitch on literally every machine i've tried it on, even an extremely beefy machine with a 2080 Ti.

1. if it all possible i would push it to 20 res. deflection has increasing returns, so you really want as many points as you can, and humans are one of only two races capable of hitting 20. i would drop a couple of perception so that you can hit 20 res (if you equip a small shield--like tuolito's--you can get very good accuracy anyway via the shield modal). do be warned that even with max resolve and a shield, on early PotD you will still be getting hit a lot due to enemies getting +15 accuracy. Things get a little better once you can get weapon and shield style, enchanted shields, +resolve or +deflection gear, but it'll be rough at first. when i roll a forbidden fist for the early part of the game, i tend to favor constitution as well for this reason. 2. i'm not a monk expert, but afaict there's nothing particular about forbidden fist that makes it good for wotw, right? i mean, wotw is a decent skill regardless. but you would have to be careful - you would probably want a shield, and even with tuolito's palm equipping a shield will reduce the damage potential of wotw.

worst-case scenario, you can just give a particularly squishy party member Rekvu's Cloak, which lets them turn that tiny fire damage into even tinier health regen, so long as they have an injury. but yeah, some heavy armor goes along way to making powder burns ineffective against your own party members. eder (and any other fighter) can also pick up unbending and some decent intellect and each of those powder burns hits will proc a small healing effect (that can heal more than what they are taking damage from with enough intellect/buff duration boost). ...unfortunately that also tends to apply for enemies as well. it's mostly useful against squishier mobs, but mostly combo-ed with other effects such as streetfighter or ones do something upon hit (the shield cracks [chanter] or combusting wounds [wizard]). otherwise it's kinda lame on veteran and up because of AR, unless you are able to pick up spirit of flame. the upshot is that in practice, hitting your own party members is not really a concern. it makes it harder to bottleneck enemies in doorways, but the dps boost otherwise can be metagamed to be worth it.

wuh oh - does versus evil have a bug report forum? they might be the actual ones in charge of the port.

dumb question - i thought wall of draining always worked, regardless of whether an enemy had a buff or not, so long as it hit?

is this solo? on SSS, it is possible in one of the encounters to accumulate enough injuries that you die (the bridge). i think this could also happen in the kohekana (?) expanse. SSS's encounter scripts are very generous with the injury-giving. is this the ultimate? if not, then there's the opposite of a "trap choice" where you can completely skip the fight with porokoa, but you need to have sent souls to the island at least twice, and you need to have a decent prior relationship with galawain (e.g. you did not betray him in poe1). i had the pro-galawain background, was real chummy at every encounter, apologized for breaching into the statue, and talked my way out of having to fight porokoa.

i have no specific comment on the pricing here, but when the switch was getting a bunch of ports of older games at release, they were all at full-price, too. i think this is just the world of console-release pricing. (it also means they could sell it for a lower, more reasonable price 40USD/EUR and call it a "33% off!" sale. it's lame, but it works, psychologically. some game devs even got caught redhanded raising their game prices jsut before the steam summer sale so they could claim massive discounts, when it was barely any amount off at all.)

wow i've literally never gotten that sequence of events. still learning new things about this game

30% hit->crit is not a lot for something you actively spend resources on (versus a passive or item buff); the expected value of the bonus crit damage from barbaric blow is still pretty mediocre, only barely above crippling strike in terms of damage potential and ignoring the other benefits to crippling strike. you get way more form the bonus pen as a situational underpen ability than trying to rely on critting. even at 1 cost, alluded above crippling strike serves several other in-class synergistic functions, including enabling sneak attack when needed, and debuffing reflex, so it's even more than just it's on-paper effects. barbaric blow only barely has that - with interrupting blows the hit to crit can be useful, but still worse than just "interrupt on crit" which itself is already extremely mediocre compared to "interrupt on hit." more to the point, spending resources for just a little bit more damage is not an ideal use of limited resources - you really want either a lot of extra damage (finishing blow, gambit) or synergistic enablers (wounding shot, all the upgrades for flames of devotion) so i think the risk that it's too good at 1 is not very significant; it would be on-par with fighter's penetrating strikes, or un-upgraded flames of devotion e.g. niche extra damage ability. probably the bigger concern is that a barbarian has very little in terms of active offense, so at 1 cost it becomes a brain-dead easy default pick because what else are you going to spend it on until heart of fury?

I speculate that Barbaric Blow is bad because the game designers fundamentally just didn't understand how carnage worked. If carnage had the area of effect of PoE1, was capable of critting, and picked up (weapon-based) damage bonuses like a normal attack, maybe it's fine at 2 rage. Instead you get an ability that is essentially a full attack, with a +20% damage on those attacks with a slightly higher chance to crit, and maybe you get like an extra enemy in carnage for 8 extra raw damage. Maybe that's worth it at 1 rage, but definitely not 2 (and god help you if you're a corpse-eater). Hence the only worthwhile upgrade is the one that eliminates the cost if you land a killing blow, then you could use it as a really crappy version of finishing blow that is occasionally free. i'm not going to argue that sap is amazing, but 30s base duration on an affliction that the rogue doesn't over-index on (rogue has too many perception afflictions and dexterity afflictions) for only 1 guile isn't bad. 30s is a really long time, and getting it in early on a critical enemy can really eff with the fight. Also it's 1/3 the cost of toxic strike and other abilities, and 1/2 the cost of everything other than crippling strike. i've been frustrated enough with a rogue trying to proc deathblows against perception resistant/immune enemies that it makes me value the abilities that provide something different a little more (smoke bomb, the bell attack that staggers/dazes, withering strike even without toxic strike upgrade, and sap).

In my opinion, focus. It's much easier to tell a compelling story that takes place over a few hours of gameplay, versus a story that has to span multiple tens of hours and bridge all sorts of competing gameplay needs (like juggling factions, non-linearity, etc.). I also think they get more used to their engine and toolset and are willing to take more risks with how they tell the story than in the base game, partially helped by the fact that DLCs being addendum they don't have to worry about "gating" players behind a peace of gameplay that doesn't pan out. I still think the bridge ablaze time-travel mechanic is a really wonderful gameplay setpiece and I feel like they only did because they were comfortable with the engine and could spend a lot of (relative) time on it, since it was a major part of the DLC instead of just one extra dungeon compared to all the others in the base game.

I'm very confused by @Haljamar post. There was the adra dragon in the endless paths, there was the alpine dragon in white march, there was the sky dragon in twin elms, and the two dragons with llengrath. Deadfire has the water dragon, the fire dragon, two fights with the dragon lich, and an adra dragon (if that's what you want to call it). By my count both poe1 and deadfire have equivalent numbers of dragon encounters (counting the two dragon lich fights as one). and like @wingedchocolatecake suggests, I don't recall the poe1 dragons using any spells whatsoever - they had lots of breath attacks and such, but the only magic i can recall come from adds (e.g. the xaurips along with the adra dragon, llengrath). by contrast, neriscyrlas is semi-notorious for its magic use (high AR and defenses from llengrath's safeguard plus concelhaut's siphon = hard to damage; similarly the guardian of ukaizo has lots of magic-like special effects). In my recollection, the dragon fights are a little more differentiated in deadfire than in poe1 to boot (in poe1 it was the same ol' same ol' except for llengrath, who was a fight unto itself). edit: in general, i would say in the above that a significant improvement of deadfire over poe1 was in encounter design--i think in addition to all the hover-over stuff, encounter design is another improvement they picked up from in tyranny. poe1 really had the feeling that they were just tossing a bunch of enemies together onto a level (like adra dragon is the adra dragon and a bunch of xaurips and adragans), whereas in deadfire you have multi-phase fights, positioning concerns, or other technical aspects (thinking of how the water dragon has those protective spheres, or how the guardian has multiple phases and can punish melee badly if you don't have interrupts)

lolwut

oh yikes, the thought of adding multiplayer/networking functionality to a game engine that wasn't originally built with it in mind is giving my programming-brain a massive migraine. if we thought adding turn-based mode added a lot of instability to the base game...

items and abilities didn't get useless. for people who care about good game design, imbalanced/broken gameplay is as bad as non-critical bugs like buggy stacking. i think the bigger question is that they spent a lot of time implementing turn-based which, while interesting, really should've been staffed better, because it definitely increased the bugginess of the game. there are lots of stuff in 5.0 that were working just fine all the way from 1.0->4.0 but then broke as soon as the turn-based beta appeared and never really got fixed. before turn-based mode i would've considered deadfire a generally rock-solid experience, post-turn-based mode less-so.

enfeebled is only +50%, not doubling, fyi. still pretty good. whynotboth.gif

depending on your difficulty settings. stealth is based in part on enemy level, which means to sneak around harder enemies you need progressively higher stealth. there are diminishing returns once you get really high above enemy levels, so it's mostly about not being insta-detected by hard foes. the difficulty settings comes into play because if you enable enemy upscaling, there's sort of an arms race to keep your stealth up, or else it'll fall behind enemies as they level up with you (though they only go up to like +4 levels). i had to do some touchy stealth in my ultimate run, and the hardest one I was at like 13-14 stealth, and I still didn't think that was enough (i feel like 3-4 more points would have increased my margin of error).

I agree. Sap also has the hidden bonus that its interrupt is a prone. I actually think Confusion is a pretty good debuff on a melee rogue, because my main problem with Confusion is that my normal confusion-casters (cipher/wizard, very rarely priest) rarely are in range of the targets I really want to confuse (druids, priests far behind the enemy lines, though occasionally barbarians are ok), but a melee rogue can zip around much easier. but man, that upgrade. (for the unfamiliar everyone hit by a perplexing-sapped enemy, including your own party, gets confused) I reported it as a bug a long time ago, and a dev mentioned that it was one of the abilities they needed to retool significantly, but i guess they never had the spare engineering time for it.