thelee

on turn-based, probably not at all. as boeroer alluded, they significantly expanded the graze range (to 0-50) so in fact on typical, non-PotD difficulties, you'll almost never miss. even on PotD maybe, but i think might and int would be more important. the frustrating answer is: it depends. The game keeps track of second durations behind-the-scenes, and then rounds/truncates it into turns (0-11.99 seconds is 1 turn, then seconds divided by 6 to get your turns). intellect thus has non-linear returns on turn-based mode. find what abilities you care about, and then optimize intellect just to put them over the turn cutoff. i would say it's less important outside of PotD (or veteran, to a degree), but still a light recommendation to do so. last i checked (all the way from 1.0), soul annihilation doesn't use the focus it generates for raw damage, though i guess follow-up attacks would consume that focus. you could use it as a default attack, but the returns are real crappy and i would rather primarily use fighter abilities, and then by the time you get around to abilities or soul annihilation you have a lot saved up. probably more useful since recovery time penalties aren't nearly as punishing. see above question about int. also, for the most part turn-based transforms those dots properly into turn-based - so you get lots of ticks from beam effects IIRC, and multiple ticks from DoTs as necessary.

not continuous, but way more often than just the two or so power strikes you'd get. i wouldn't call assassins underwhelming. with robes/no armor, high intellect, smoke veil will give you invisibility at 2 guile. if you need something that doesn't need you to be almost naked and a super genius, shadowing beyond gives you invisibility at 3 guile. Vanishing strikes needs dual-wielding, robes/no armor, high dex, and high intellect (and possibly ooblit and things like meppu for +beneficial duration) to really take advantage of, but gives you invisibility that doesn't go away upon an attack for 3 guile. a multi-class assassin who self-empowers will be able to shadowing beyond 4 times per fight, or smoke veil 6 times. a self-empowering single-class assassin can do vanishing strikes up to 6 times (you have to rest in wild mare or bathe in luminous adra for +1 guile) or smoke veil 9 times. this is ignoring initial stealth hit, or trigger from slippers, or potions of invisibility. however, the limits of multi-class assassinate does mean that typically to get maximum benefit out of it, you multi-class with a caster, since the +25 acc, +4 PEN, and crit bonus also applies to spells and an assassinate spell cast is way more impactful than a souped-up single attack.

ah thanks. clearly i've never really used it one thing to consider is that despite power strike being really heavy-hitting, it costs something like 4 discipline, so you are not going to be able to use it very often throughout a fight. you might therefore be better with a less-heavy-hitting power that you can use more often. getting invisible repeatedly to proc assassinate mid-fight is hard and/or expensive, but not impossible. a single-class assassin could do even better in terms of pure damage just with high intellect, high dex, dual-wielding, ooblit, and vanishing strikes. you'll get like 5-6x the attacks, which will totally dwarf the non-multiplicative +200% damage bonus from power strike.

keep in mind that damage bonuses are additive, so the numbers may not be as high as you think. that being said, you'd probably want to go with the highest-base-damage 2h weapons: 2h axes, great sword, quarterstaff, pike. a two-handed axe with bleeding strike modal enabled doing an sneak-attack, backstab, assassinate, power strike might have a tremendous and long-lasting DoT on the enemy so might be your best bet when your target is tanky. (it also has bonus crit damage, and the +25 acc from assassinate will really make it easier to crit, for even more damage. add in a poison--which also benefits from the assassinate bonus--for extra DoT damage). edit: rough numbers - 2h axe has average 21 base damage. +200% power strike, +100% backstab, +60% sneak attack, +60% legendary, +30% for 20 might, crit for +50% damage (using improved crit and axe bonus) => 113.4 average base damage, which translates into a 11 damage/three seconds bleeding cuts DoT on the enemy over 60 seconds (for an additional +231 damage over a minute), the DoT stacks with additional hits. You would also get an additional +22 damage over a short duration via rogue Deep Wounds passive. edit 2: wait, how are you getting an AL9 ability multiclassed with an assassin? you're capped at 7 (i even assumed as such with my sneak attack damage calculation) nm, you fixed it

The char: devoted is great, just make sure you pick a piercing or slashing weapon (you already have blunt via your fists) for damage diversity. sounds like you were looking at swords, so you're already there (and sword and great sword arguably benefit the most from the devoted's +2 PEN). soul blade is less great. i think many people would recommend beguiler, but as a martial/caster multiclass a soul blade isn't a bad choice thanks to the concentration you can keep gaining and the ability to dump all your focus if need be (due to action economy constraints). perhaps in turn-based soul blade multiclass is even better than beguiler due to the more stringent action economy - you'll basically find it much harder to generate focus, use powers, and use fighter attacks due to turn-based messing up the action economy, but if all else fails you can just max out your focus and dump it in one big soul annihilation attack (might want to beef up your might since a devoted is not going to have many damage bonuses for it unlike, say, a rogue). In turn-based mode, dual-wielding is less all-around the best. You get a -35% inverted penalty to all attacks (not just full attack abilities), putting it roughly on par with 2h weapons, except dual-wielding is generally going to be -1 PEN compared to similar 2h weapons. Because of turn-based mechanics, while having high initiative isn't great it isn't nearly as bad as having high recovery time in real-time mode (because you're always guaranteed a turn per round). So while dual-wielding is still solid, it's no longer the general DPS king in turn-based mode. The party: what about sidekicks? with all the DLC they have decent reactivity (though not in base game, and nothing like reputations with your other party members). Mirke is a perfect fit for partyingpirating. Even though Fassina is vailian being a sidekick she won't ditch you for being treacherous. If you haven't played in a long while (welcome back!) Vatnir is an amazing sidekick, but comes kinda late. Also - why not principi? You can support Furrante if you want to go the slavery route, but I think you lose Maia at that point.

absolutely. i think Deadfire did a little better in that respect, but going from FS to main game, even for just the final content, is super jarring. As a min-maxer of sorts, the drop in difficulty is dramatic. And my non-min-maxer side notices that by the time they got around to doing FS, they really improved their story telling and level design skillz, and going back to their more "basic" design skills in base game is also jarring (sorry, even with 5.0 changes Ukaizo and end-game faction quests are still pretty lame and anticlimactic). edit: actually, i think the worst drop is from BoW. The story-telling in BoW is just so much better than base game (I've done the bridge ablaze section many times now and every time I love it), that being dropped back into the middle of the crit path is demotivating.

you know what, you're right, i misremembered. it wasn't even close between Throne of Bhaal/WM-style versus what I said.

If I were you, I'd go for Toxic Strike over Perishing Strikes and get someone else in your party who can add Enfeebled. Toxic Strike does a stupid amount of damage over a long duration.

Just to underline some points in this thread. 1. All dots scale with INT correctly. As Boeroer mentioned/alluded to, there were a few DoTs that didn't do this correctly, and those all got patched. (The technical details is that some DoTs use some weird formula--like Cleansing Flame or Disintegrate--that targets a total amount of damage over a base duration, as opposed to damage per tick, and they were buggily implemented when interacting with intellect. Don't ask me why some DoTs used this formula, but it's the reason why effects like Cleansing Flame and Disintegrate have very weird tooltips compared to e.g. Plague of Insects.) 2. All dots scale with might, but the aforementioned weird dots don't correctly scale with might combined with power level - they get less benefit than they should. This is an improvement from before, but it's still buggy: Math Is Hard i guess.

The DLC model changed I thought because they issued a survey to backers after PoE1 hit end-of-life and that was overwhelmingly what people wanted. And it wasn't "smaller, individual adventures" it was a mix of small-ish content interspersed at different points along the main game and small updates, which we mostly got (megabosses, cosmetic packages, DLC that targeted different levels and triggered at different points). In general traditional RPG-expansion-style DLCs aren't good investments, because they have such a smaller market by definition than the base game. That could be what you might be thinking of, or what might have been referenced. Between WMI & II vs FS+BoW+SSS I think they are collectively roughly the same size in terms of gameplay, so if it was really a cost concern, I don't think they succeeded in pruning those costs, especially since unlike WMI & II there is much less asset-sharing between the deadfire DLC versus the PoE1 DLC.

this has been discussed before, with evidence, but basically: hardly anyone ever finishes any game all the way through. steam achievement rates for other RPGs are similarly extremely low (even as sequels sold well). you can't really conclude anything based on poe1's.

yes. The untargetability of knock-up lasts for one second, and then they spend one second standing up, for two seconds total out of commission. Yes, you can't do anything to them while they're untargetable, but it means an extra second to gear up for an attack or let a resource recover. You can see me using this on the un-interruptible Oracle of Wael as part of my ultimate run below. (note - as a plus, this worked especially great for a tactician because while they're untargetble they don't count as being in combat, so a tactician (or a party with a tactician) against a solo perception-immune enemy would be repeatedly triggering Brilliant, which is actually better than just one prolonged Brilliant, since just activating Brilliant gives you resource back)

In practice I find that enemy AI doesn't do this a lot. If you're able to get the enemy AI back onto a tank via some mechanism, it's sticky for a while. I don't know what the internal workings of the AI is, but I have to imagine there's some sort of internal cooldown on changing targets. So there's that. It would be extremely annoying otherwise. On the topic of the enemy AI going after squishy targets - it's a double-edged sword. That's why rogues have so many escape abilities, and also why you can metagame this by taking advantage of this fact. It would be way worse if the AI enemy was actually more like a human, e.g. deliberately avoiding the high-defense riposte or blade turning squishy because they know they'll just get punished. I can see the virtue of the WoW/MMoRPG style aggro system, but it can also be extremely mechanically reductive. In Tyranny some of my parties boil every fight down to "taunt - taunt - taunt" while everyone dps-ses. In this vein, mule kick is better. The "knock up" effect also still works, so you effectively significantly increase the length of the time these uninterruptible enemies are quasi-interrupted. Dorudugan has sky high fortitude defense though, so I would be surprised you could do this consistently even with the -25 from morning star and bonus acc from mule kick. The only other uninterruptible enemy I can think of is the Oracle of Wael and they also can be proned/knocked-up. Must be a weird thing for designers to keep an eye on - no matter the enemy they have to add a prone/standing up animation.

@AlyMintChip sounds rough dude. Might just be some bit of RNG you have to hope goes your way (I mean, it seems rather unlikely to fail so maybe second times a charm?). If it makes you feel any better, Ashen Maw was a major bottleneck point for me as well. @Boeroer's trick could work depending on how quickly you're taking damage. three weapon slots, only two with lethandria's. stay on the third while you take damage and then only periodically turn on the ai script to switch between the other two to rapidly heal and then switch off before the blight can hit you. then you don't have to worry about lethandria's taking much damage (if any)

oh yeah, i was confused - i thought you were talking about one of the fire blights on the bridge, not the one that spawns from self-damage, so I was confused how you'd be able to end the fight just from dealing with one fire blight. is getting rekvu's cloak feasible? requires a detour to the north of the map and requires some hard fights, but once you have that plus one injury you never need to worry about lethandria's regen again IIRC because you'll just heal the fire blight damage. also: what build are you?

yeah, RNG sucks. my big worry was scordeo's breaking, and i had some backup plans in case in case i couldn't proc blade cascade, but there were some places where I just had to hope that scordeo's would proc before breaking. my practice run actually broke scordeo's or had to fall on a backup plan twice, but fortunately that never happened in my real run. (it also happened in one of my planning runs, but that was pretty suboptimal in terms of how I handled proccing - i didn't carry over the buff from fight to fight which meant many more times to buff and many more chances to break scordeo's) how would scrolls of withdraw help with trying over and over again? you can't leave the fight and you can't repair mid-fight. do you just need lethandria's for the regen? are there other sources you could use that doesn't require something that needs repair? edit - silly me, it's probably to heal vela. my bad. worst case you could do something like what armaxy says and just aggressively switch your weapon slots to avoid ever taking damage while having the shield equipped.

that's the reason why i bumped it out of my top five. it seems like a really obvious design oversight, given how much scaffolding and flexibility there is everywhere else.

oh yeah, for barbarians, perception is real important especially since you said you play on harder difficulty. i would actually say it's more important to max perception than might for a barbarian. it's because carnage only triggers on weapon hits (not grazes) and itself needs to at least graze enemies to do anything (and it's considered like a spell, so it doesn't get the same accuracy bonuses as a weapon attack). That essentially means that for a barbarian's main form of damage, each point of perception or accuracy does double-duty - increasing the chance you hit (to trigger carnage), and increasing the chance again that you get good carnage out of it. matters less when you have high chance to hit/graze but (more commonly on PotD) at lower accuracy, you essentially get exponential returns from perception. it also helps that barbarians have an easy way to boost their damage capability (frenzy, one stands alone, blooded) but not their accuracy. so perception seems to matter a lot. edit - actually, because of the above, 1h style might actually be decent for barbarian because of the +12 acc bonus, so long as it's a high-based-damage weapon (like an axe). i haven't run the numbers on this specific scenario before, and i've only played a couple of barbarians so can't say for sure. my hypothesis is that it works out extremely well early on, but might pale in comparison to dual-wielding or 2h by mid-late game (where your accuracy starts getting better and better).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, given that the marketing for the console release is significantly downplaying the pirate/ship-sailing elements of the game, I think it's safe to assume that at least the console port developer agrees with this line of reasoning. (Or as someone else said, this is something they can change at this point in time, so they are.) When I reflect on this, I think this is an area where JE Sawyer has a bit of denial, because he said in post that he didn't really think of Deadfire as a pirate-themed game. But on top of whatever marketing leading up to release, they literally had a couple of small DLC that added various forms of booze, new beards, new sailors, new ships, new ship-gear, and Mirke (literally a drunken pirate) as a sidekick. They were obviously leaning into it pretty hard at first. But in retrospect, it might be telling that when the small DLC evaporated after a few months - they either decided to pivot and focus on the bigger story DLC, and/or maybe they were already realizing that the pirate theme wasn't working out for them. Maybe PoE1 was a better balance in setting? I loved the shift to renaissance era, but the shift was subtle enough that (like you mention) maybe a lot of the more "conservative" players wouldn't have noticed (except for the guns, and even some D&D campaigns had guns). A similar approach would've been to set a lot of Deadfire in a more traditional medieval RPG setting and then have only parts of it in the more polynesian Deadfire. (A home base in Old Vailia and you sail out with the Valian Trading Company, maybe?)

This is the constant, fundamental concern that I think a lot of people with "less big-picture" theories are missing. It's one thing if the question was "why did Deadfire sell 5% less than PoE1 instead of exceeding its sales?" At that point, pretty much everyone's theories might be right, even ones that I would consider to be more fringe (e.g. Avellone no longer being on writing staff); I could easily see each critique cumulatively leading up to >50k sales lost (out of a million), along with some other big picture stuff that would have prevented Deadfire from exceeding PoE1's sales as a sequel to an ostensibly-well-received IP. But that's not the question. The question is "why did Deadfire sell a mere fraction of PoE1, and even a fraction of Tyranny?" coupled with the known constraints of positive critical reviews and positive user reviews. There are also related data points! That I'm going to repeat again - Like P:K having worse reviews and bigger stability problems, but selling far better than Deadfire. Tyranny being based on no established IP whatsoever which still outsold Deadfire, though apparently still disappointed. Everyone is going to have their pet gripes about the game. I have my own pet gripes. But it's one thing to have a pet gripe, but if you're going to claim that that pet gripe is the cause of Deadfire's revenue woes, it has to be capable of explaining a massive sales expectation miss and be congruent with the known data points we have out there. For that reason I'm not going to come in here and say "power level scaling is real confusing and murky. that's the reason why Deadfire sold poorly!" even though that is my main gameplay critique of Deadfire. edit - pretty much only one person actually tried to make a case that all the smaller gripes people were talking about added up collectively to explain the massive sales drop, but it's a pretty fairly unconvincing theory (and for kanisatha's accusations about being unwelcome, the person proposing this was way more hostile than anyone else in this thread). For one thing - many of the gripes generally requires people to have played the game, and that would somehow be reflected in user reviews. For another thing - occam's razor. "Big picture" stuff explains why the audience might have shrunk significantly but left a core of enthusiastic, happy players--which explains a massive sales drop but is still consistent with high critical/user reviews--and big picture stuff requires you to assume far less than a collection of smaller picture stuff that requires a lot of scaffolding and rationalizing away of the known data points (such as - users are not actually happy but something about them prevents them posting unhappy reviews... even though for example P:K had plenty of mediocre unhappy reviews but still tons of sales). Occam's razor would suggest you go for the hypothesis that requires you to take the fewest leaps of faith and rationalizations. (Also three: it's unclear that these different smaller theories are independent of each other, which requires even more heroic assumption-making about the impact of any specific gripe since they would have to carry more weight.)

You definitely want to dual-wield, or use 2h weapons. 1h style is very bad for DPS and is only useful for specific niche approaches. I don't have a lot of experience with turn-based, but am actually thinking that a lot of barbarian stuff is not going to be very useful for turn-based, because a lot of it is focused on action speed/recovery (frenzy, bloodlust) and action speed is much less useful in turn-based mode where you all have one turn per round regardless. You might want to focus on the shouts and the straight-up damage and accuracy bonus passives (one stands alone). If you're single-classed, I think the dazing shout path is extremely good - you do a lot of decent area of effect damage and daze the enemies for a long time, which can be a huge survival boost. @Boeroer seems to be the resident barbarian expert here, so I'm paging him.

i'm honestly perplexed by this being the attitude of a self-described social/behavioral scientist. even biased or non-representative samples are useful if you know what the bias is, because you can adjust them with weights. this is what happens all the time with political polling or survey analysis because good luck getting a perfectly representative response rate. with (2) you would have to have a hypothesis that the nonresponse rate for people who did not like the game were different from the nonresponse rate for people who did like the game - and i mean the spectrum of weak to strong feelings; you may argue that people who are weakly negative on a game may be less motivated to write a review, but i don't see why this would be a different phenomenon from people who are weakly positive. frankly, i would be more concerned about user reviews not being representative if they diverged in any significant way from critical reviews, which they don't. hence why a lot of the recurring theories (and je sawyer's own statements to this effect) revolve around the assumption that people who did play deadfire generally really liked it, and so the issue is not really about what's wrong with deadfire per se and more about what would cause the audience to shrink so much (essentially a glorified funnel analysis from PoE1). Hence - things like setting, poor marketing, higher competition, satisfied nostalgia demand, etc. Many of us are trying to answer #1, and you seem to be trying to answer some variation of #2 and trying to rationalize it with a lot of other scaffolding which is honestly rather unconvincing. The theories that keep persisting are the ones that generally require us to do less discounting/rationalization of what data we do have. I mean, for example, P:K has way more mediocre reviews than Deadfire, but sold way better apparently.

The gist is that anything that's a bug or loophole that you take advantage of is fair game, because it was Obsidian's fault that it exists, not yours. (I forgot where this was said, but I think this is straight from JE Sawyer's mouth.) Also, while it wasn't intentional, I did end up having a Hylea + Luminous Adra stacking for part of my run (in fact this is how I discovered the stacking bug) and I ended up using it to pass several encounter checks. Didn't disqualify me. PS. best of luck!

steam should have an option to show FPS in-game. mostly i'm wondering if there's a CPU bottlenecking happen that would show up in a frame rate drop despite low gpu utilization. that's the only thing i can think of causing sound to cut in and out (basically you're struggling to stream in sound data). anecdotally, i have had sound cut in and out before on my beefy gaming cpu, but only once in a while and doesn't seem connected to performance issues, so i'm pretty much grasping at straws here. also try verifying your install.

Alas, no disrespect to Obsidian (this is more a complement to Blizzard), WoW and other blizzard games are designed to be run even on almost literal potatoes, so being able to run WoW just fine is no indication. Haswell is kind of pushing it, but honestly I have a broadwell (only slightly better haswell) with a 1060 and have no problems running at 1080p aside from maybe slightly longer load times and a bit more jitter than my main gaming PC, so i feel like a haswel with 1050ti should be fine. Are you running through Steam? GOG? Any mods? Can you pull up performance numbers (FPS mostly)?