thelee

I mean, not to put a fine a point on it, but all you're saying is that it doesn't matter to you, when several other players are saying it does. I can say that I like to min-max a lot, and even then it still "weighs on my mind" about good or bad choices, vis a vis my character concept. And from watching more "normal" people play games likes Fallout, a lot of people make these decisions as well (i'll bet the cannibalism F:NV perk is one of the least picked perk). Plus I think it's more philosophical a choice than a gameplay feature. Is it really a "good" choice if people are motivated by material rewards instead of the moral rightness of it? Whether or not good outcomes got rewards or not has the same gameplay pitfalls either way - either it doesn't matter for some people that being bad is bad, or it doesn't matter for some people that being good is good, they just want the extra goodies they get from choosing a dialogue option. It's always bugged me as a fan of role playing games (and role-playing-adjacent games) that "good" choices were frequently much better than "bad" choices, which basically upends the whole moral system entirely - people are bad because they are incentivized to be bad. One of my major disappointments in this in modern gaming is Bioshock, because if you did the math and you always saved the little sisters, the amount of ADAM you give up ended up being quite minor, and you got a lot of extra rewards in the process (in particular some unique plasmids/tonics unobtainable by evil people)--so much for the "moral choice" aspect of it; just be good because you end up richer, not because it's "good" for goodness' sake.

just to add on to what a few others have said - outside of something like the ultimate or solo, you don't need to build up too much of a duration. with a weyc's robe party (robe wearer upon empowering a spell grants brilliant to nearby party members), i would maybe cast enough Salvation of Time to get up to 45-55 seconds and that didn't take too long, is easily scriptable, and is generally more than i needed for many fights. for longer fights, i'd just top up again when durations start running low. also, in addition to assassin/blodomage, you can also get efficiency with a priest of skaen/assassin. Because the priest also gets some rogue abilities as bonus spells. So with brilliant, you can also get invisibility up to every 6 seconds (shadowing beyond from priest) along with a point of guile, so you can really get a lot of assassinate bonii (but no vanishing strikes due to multiclassing).

you also need to make sure your foe is tanky enough to warrant such a long debuff at such a steep recovery penalty. though in one megaboss fight i stacked 8-9 on an add and that was a stupid amount of damage ticking every few seconds.

i think it is WEIRD that animated summons and I believe spiritual ally are like the only ones with scaling weapons, but i can't imagine putting that scaling on lower level summons and it being at all balanced (AL1 beckoner skeletons are frankly pretty good even with poor weapons). i think AL9 incarnate--if it doesn't already scale--and maybe higher-level druid summons and higher-level chanter summons could use scaling weapons. (maybe chanter ogres, if they don't already scale) edit - in a more in-depth evaluation, here are the summons that i feel like could use some help (with either autoscaling weapons or autoscaling weapons+armor): -> phantom -> 3 wurms -> ogres (maybe) -> dragon (maybe - just seems weird an AL9 summon has base 7 PEN) for druid: -> every summon from AL6 and up for priest: -> incarnate, if they don't already

the animated weapons can also knock down. there are three different weapons (four, with upgrade) and one of them has up to 11 uses of fighter's knock down. this is way better than any other summon i think (with exception of wisps, which have infinite). it's a little tedious, but back when i used animated weapons, i would pause, select the "fighter" weapon, hotkey the knock down with Q, and then pick one enemy and do "q shift-q shift-q shift-q shift-q etc etc" and then unpause. for the rest of the duration the weapon would just basically be constantly knocking down the enemy - the combination of scaling weapons and summon scaling means the weapon has pretty decent accuracy (enough that they were ace against even megabosses).

i think that's very true for druids - the difference between them all is basically "how long before the enemy is able to attack me again." i really like most chanter summons though. the wisps you can use to spam prones everywhere; the spore has infinite charm capability; the ogres are good cheap tanks and can prone; etc.

1. another drake should appear, but it's not a member of your party. it's "enraged" so i believe at best it's a member of your team, but not anything directly controllable. 2. the vast majority of summons are stuck with a really lame 7 PEN, with no upscaling - the only option to improve this is Animancy Cat. Even the AL9 "The great wyrm flew o'er the mountains" dragon only has 7 PEN. This means--especially on PotD--nominally powerful summons will be at like -75% underpenetration. This is what makes the animated weapons that @Boeroer mentions are so good - they are treated as being equipped with weapons, which DO scale upwards and get more PEN. Similarly I believe priest Spiritual Ally also gets scaling gear, making it notably better on harder difficulties/late game than summons from other classes that are supposed to be good at summoning (e.g. druid). edit - this also means that abilities that reduce enemy AR are really good for summoning-heavy setups (expose vulnerabilities, the shield cracks, even mass flanking) 3. Speaking of which AL9 dragon is another massively good summon, even though its basic attack is guaranteed to be at -75% underpenetration in most fights. It just has enormous amounts of health (~1000+ with some elemental immunity - i literally used this summon to facetank some megabosses for me) and its abilities have MASSIVE powerlevel scaling (something like +20 PL bonus) so even if it's basic attack only has 7 PEN, its tail lash can easily do 150+ damage per enemy with overpenetration bonus (same thing with its prone attack and flame breath). I used it on a bellower--the bonus PL from the bellower made the summon last *huge* amounts of time, basically giving >100% uptime. Even without PEN upscaling and some misses, most summons are still hugely good. I think expecting pure damage from anything other than the animated weapons summon is a mistake, though, and some summons (the 3 wyrms you mention as a fallback) are so clearly single-mindedly focused on (crappy) damage that they're hard to justify over even just the basic AL1 skeleton summon. Summons (esp chanter summons) tend to have a lot of supplemental effects, and if not that they may still be useful just as huge bodies to make the enemy waste their abilities and time. Fortunately, if a summon isn't working out for you - you can respec.

just to add here - the shaken and confused that get applied when you get flanked aren't on a timer - they're there as long as you're flanked, so forbidden fist (or things like suppress affliction or liberating exhortation) won't help here. (however, things like svef work like gangbusters) even without a cipher in your party, you can still get mileage out of a tactician because most hard fights are solo boss encounters, so with some perception resistence (to avoid bosses with persistent distraction's flanked) you'll very easily get permanent resource regeneration.

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.