thelee

with even a modest amount of metagaming, riposte is useful (and by "modest" i mean "don't dump resolve and equip a shield"). it's free damage, even if it only triggers a handful of times in a given fight. it's on TB-mode where riposte basically requires massive metagaming to even have a marginal effect. edit: gah! ninja'ed by @Boeroer! i don't know why notifications don't always scroll me down

to clarify, for shifter restrictions and mage slayer disruption it seems like something counts as magic if and only if it came from a priest, cipher, chanter, wizard, druid or a non-kith equivalent (like xaurips or delemgan). any other source, even if they are functionally identical, doesn't count as magic. (obviously i haven't tested every single case, but that's my rule of thumb)

this++ for a healbot, a druid or paladin are better. priests are there for revives, mass buffs, mass debuffs, with healing as a minor. though in PoE priests were much stronger healers. it wasn't so much the absolute heal numbers, but the fact that you had a heal at almost every spell level mean you could cast heals all day long. also especially if you main-character-ed a priest, because holy radiance scaling was insane then. but in deadfire with paladins getting spammable lay on hands and stacking rules changing to make druid healing even better (plus lifegiver subclass), priests have definitely been refocused away from being primary healers.

not only does it not apply to shifter, but because you don't have proficiency with them, you actually get the penalties. tactician wouldn't be bad choice, but not a particularly great choice either. unbroken does give you bonus engagement even while shifted; not nothing, but again, not great. have you considered paladin? i haven't done a paladin/shifter (or really any paladin/druid) before, but some thoughts: you can use lay on hands while shapeshifted, in case you have some emergency heals and are in too dangerous a situation (or something else) to unshapeshift first flames of devotion would work pretty well with shapeshift claws, and as a kind wayfarer you would be spamming heals all the while (works per hit, so 2x heals for dual-wielded, like when spiritshifted). bleakwalkers also not bad. depending on your talents and specialization, you could choose to become very tanky. other than that, my only other Big Idea was trickster, but you said you wanted to avoid multiclassing rogue.

wooooo! congrats

oh boy , this just reminds me of a recent chaotic battle i had. it was in the hanging sepulchers, and for the first time in literally ever i was approaching the eastern poem tablet from the top, having climbed in via tree (normally i always go form the bottom, even if i came in via the tree). i was doing it this way because i thought i could dodge the wraith abduction. wrong! xoti got abducted to the bottom of the map anyway, only this time because I had gone in from the top, there were tons of upscaled mobs still in the way. after clearing the enemies around the poem, i ran my psion down the map, using summons and other party members to try and distract all the enemy mobs i was aggroing along the way, while xoti did everything she could to stay alive. by the time my hobbled psion made it down, she had accumulated enough focus to instantly pain block and then stun some of the enemies and save xoti's skin. would not have been possible with any other cipher, because the psion was accumulating all this focus just by walking down the map. i know it sounds like i'm trying to really hype up the psion, which i'm not. but i do think that people undervalue the utility of a psion, possibly because the mechanics are so different from all the other ciphers and from poe1 and because it didn't arrive until patch 4.0.

xoti is a decent priest, if you haven't considered her. her AL1 blessed harvest is my personal pick for best level 1 ability in the game and her other unique spells ain't bad. but that's mostly just for consideration with ascendant. don't mistake this for a hard-sell in favor of psion, just pointing out some things about psion that might not be obvious or might not be apparent without having played with one: the focus regeneration for psion scales up with power level. every odd PL increases it by 1/second, so it starts off as a drip (1/s) and steadily becomes a flow and then a torrent (and with bonus PL can get huge). for multiclass, it tops out naturally at 4/s, for single-class 5/s (with prestige and one source of +1 PL it's easy to get to 6/s). it's never going to compete with an ideal (e.g. no underpen) optimized normal cipher, but it does pretty well especially considering the following bullet points. in my current run i have a psion/druid. in practice, i'm almost never short of focus, because casting druid spells is plenty of time--even at low levels--to accumulate a lot of focus. basically the only time i'm really short of focus is when i'm getting hit with DoTs or incidental attacks. even when you're using a cipher power, you are still regenerating focus. i know this sounds like an obvious insight to make, but it has the powerful ramification that a psion can spam focus powers in a way that normal ciphers can't (except for beguilers in mass debuff situations). their free level 1 telekinetic burst at 3PL or higher can be used virtually non-stop (this assumes a total of ~5s of action and recovery). coupled with club modal or other way to debuff will you can lock enemies out from doing anything important (great for hauane o whe) at 3PL or higher and some will debuffing and good intellect (and/or resolve debuffing), you can perma-paralyze a non-dex resistant enemy with level 2 mental binding. by the time your paralyze duration has worn off you've basically accumulated enough to immediately cast it again. (i literally slowly chipped down a triple-red skull steelclad construct by doing this. they would get off an attack every once and a while if i grazed or missed, but for the most part they were just standing helplessly) there are more examples, but those are some easy low-level ones. you can't really do these as any other cipher because at some point you have to stop to attack and regenerate focus again. (again beguiler does pretty OK here, particularly mass-debuff situations) psion is arguably more valuable on PotD+upscaling. underpenetrating the enemy? extremely high enemy defenses? no problem! you are still getting focus. had to escape with withdraw? protect with beetle shell? momentarily stunned or paralyzed? come back with tons of focus ready to spend.

have you considered using the berath's blessing that automatically levels you up to level 4?

it looks like you are leaning to beguiler now, but have you considered just rolling a separate priest? ascendant/priest can definitely be fun, but the Salvation of Time interaction comes real late in the game, and you run into serious action economy issues (you have to attack to generate focus, and while you're attacking you're not making use of priest spells, but while you're using priest spells you're not attacking and not generating focus). i did an ascendant/skaen and it was not bad (especially late game) but the action economy was real painful up until I started spamming disintegrates and other high-level powers left and right with salvation of time (but at that point why even be multiclass? just have another single class priest and you can get salvation of time earlier and you have fewer action economy issues). a beguiler is going to have less of that problem because you generate focus just from using powers on afflicted enemies (and you can set up those afflictions with priest spells as well), but it's still a concern. post-4.0 these days i would prefer actually psion to multiclass with a caster, if i'm expecting them to be more ranged/back of the line. i think whispers is always going to be good; IME in my typical parties i have no shortage of ways to blind or perception debuff (even just from cinder bombs) so eyestrike quickly loses impact after the beginning of the game. controversially, has anyone given much thought to tenuous grasp? it's absolutely aces against weakness: intellect targets, and confusing enemy barbarians, paladins, chanters, priests, and druids at significant range with fast cast speed for only 10 focus has surprised me in its utility. (also some enemy non-kith/xaurips are good consistent targets, too.) prayer for the body is extremely niche. I would only pick it up if you have nature godlike somewhere and you want an easy way to give them a huge duration +1 PL bonus (or if you are a dedicated healer and need a way to get rid of con afflictions). blessing isn't bad, but for a level 1 pick I would pick something more long-lived like restore, suppress affliction, or like interdiction or something (which would also help beguiler). blessing suffers in that it gets rendered redundant pretty badly by the priest later on. while it's still useful to keep around (especially in fights where blind gets tossed around a lot), i think it's a good idea to keep open the option of re-speccing out of it later (which you can't do if you do it as a level 1 pick). depending on difficulty, holy meditation is useful also just for the persistent concentration. it's not exactly a first-pick for me at level 2, but level 2 doesn't have a lot of flat-out great picks. you could just use this ability level to pick up passives and just lean on iconic projection from wael for the priest side (iconic is pretty good, especially if you're aggressive about repositioning to max out the heal and damage potential).

i am pretty sure that enemy starts are unadjusted on relaxed, it's just that enemy encounters are adjusted to be easier. i think story mode actually affects stats, but have no idea how. i gave up video games for lent so I can't test it, but if it's anything like veteran/potd you can figure out some of it by just rolling a new game and mousing over combat rolls in the log to see what modifiers get applied.

yeah, I actually like sidekicks quite a bit. A party of hirelings is really dull - walking quietly around the map constantly. Even the minor extra reactivity and flavor a sidekick adds over a hireling livens things up.

Rekke gets minor but lore-wise surprisingly impactful reactivity in FS and a little bit elsewhere. (Stuff to do with Yehuza's involvement with the gods.) You can also talk to him. I think the coolest part of Rekke is that he starts off being utterly unable to communicate with you and he picks up more common (?) over the course of the game, even in base-game. I actually thought he was the most reactive/interesting companion before DLC.

in theory the deadfire stacking system makes sense, but in practice a more explicit D&D style "named" bonus type (where only the highest of a type is used, but different types stack) would be better. that's effectively what's happening right now, except the "name" of a type of bonus isn't really clearly surfaced anywhere, leading to unintuitive outcomes like marked prey.

hey @louisdulac2000 sorry to hear about this. are you gaming on desktop? or console? because if desktop - the game is pretty much end of life with no support. sorry that sounds like a particularly bad bug too, and should be nonexistent or extremely rare (1000+ hours clocked and nothing like that happened to me). because if console - you should go yell at Versus Evil, they are in charge of the port and working on patches.

hi, i think my current run (as well as the last few runs where i brought along maia) would like to talk to you. edit: from my guide and my own tests: "Marked Prey (AL1): interestingly, the +10 accuracy bonus here is implemented not as an accuracy bonus on yourself against a specific enemy, but as an effect on the enemy that triggers an accuracy bonus on a specific character targeting it. Sounds real subtle, but this has the ramification that the accuracy bonus from Marked Prey stacks with other active accuracy bonuses, so long as they are not implemented in a similar "marked" mechanism (and I don't think any do; the only other marked mechanism I can think of is the paladin's Sworn Enemy and that one instead boosts damage)." edit 2 - the magistrate's cudgel also bestows a "marked" accuracy bonus, but being from an item i'm not sure whether or not it stacks with marked prey.

i wouldn't say it's "more important", it's a parallel source of survivability. i said that defenses have increasing returns, which means that you get rewarded for heavily investing in deflection. (the flip side is that if you have low deflection, a few points extra of deflection will feel notably weak). but you can get even more survivability if you combine high deflection with always forcing your enemy to underpenetrate, it's not necessarily either-or. though typically in my PotD+upscale experience it is rather hard to get enemies to consistently underpenetrate even heavy armor until mid-late to late game. it is different for veteran or lower, with no upscaling. since your character build here is a riposte build that already focuses on maximizing deflection, heavy armor seems redundant because you'll typically have enormously high deflection, especially on difficulties lower than PotD. while i suggested casita samelia's legacy as an alternative choice, you probably don't really even need that for veteran or classic. for example, my current party on PoTD+upscaling, my mainchar is a celebrant 20 resolve, superb small shield (xoti's lantern) with weapon+shieldstyle, cloak of greater deflection setup (no entonia signet ring or ring of deflection) and they can get away with just wearing robe and they typically have much better survivability than my two actual, heavier-armor wearing tankier types (a monk and a skald); if my mainchar is getting way too much attention i can cast arcane veil or mirror image and be basically untouchable for a short while. but they sorta melt if damaging spells are being tossed around, so it's a bit of a trade-off.

just tested; can confirm that dagger modal is a standard deflection bonus that is conditional, which means it does not stack with things like arcane veil or mirror image.

no, it was changed in 5.0 (or something close to it) to end on movement. it was to patch away an easy TB "i win" button since the micromanagement of "engage lots of foes, blade turning, run away" is a lot easier in TB

I don't think stats go down for easy/story mode. I think the encounters are just simpler. As for level-scaling, it's slightly more complicated than that (slightly). It's not based on enemy level - areas themselves have an "encounter level" and that goes up and down with your mainchar's level. This is important because especially on PotD you'll see enemies with one or more skulls above their head, and even if you were to come to this area a level higher instead, they would still have the same number of skulls. That's because the entire area got one level harder, which means increasing the levels of enemies that were already one level higher than you as well. Other than that, yeah, it's just +3 acc/defenses/some HP. I think the level scaling is capped to a maximum of four levels up or down (if you don't have "only upscale" enabled). For that reason, level scaling might keep an encounter challenging if you're one level above the target level, but even just two levels above and the difficulty starts dropping off pretty quickly; enemies aren't getting any new abilities, and a Xaurip is still just going to be a Xaurip, just ever-so-slightly tankier.

nope. bear is definitely decent for survivability, but other pets are viable. resilient companion helps, so does just healing your pet. worst case, just spend 2 bond to revive your pet (with the ability). hunter's claw is amazing. it does require a wee bit of metagame knowledge, but you can sorta tell what enemies you're going to face as you enter an area. and "race" here means one of kith, wilder, vessel, spirit, beast, primordial. primordials are probably the one that's uncommon enough that it's not worth really stacking up with (except for megaboss, since hauani o whe is a primordial). but otherwise it's so good it's worth dual-wielding melee weapons [since when dual-wielded you double your potential hunter's claw stack speed] and just spamming only that, plus self-empower for extra uses, just for the first few fights after a rest to max out your bonus. (and technically, it's bugged, so if you save/reload you can stack infinitely). +20 accuracy is huge and applies to everything you do (including spells, if you're a multiclass). same with +20% damage (it also applies to spells). the +20 defense option is good for a tankier build since by being an "All defenses" bonus it stacks with deflection-only bonuses like mirror image, arcane veil, or even a dagger modal. basically hunter's claw is so good that you would have to have a very good reason not to pick it up on any and all rangers. (note: do not combine a hunter's claw build with the woedica god's challenge as you'll have a very bad time) strictly speaking, given that you can get up to +50 accuracy (+10 marked prey, +10 stalker's link, +20 hunter's claw, +10 survival of the fittest vs <50% health targets), you could completely dump perception altogether and still crit enemies left and right. but personally i don't like dumping stats below 5 or 6, and it takes a while for the ranger to really ramp up all their accuracy bonuses, and on PotD enemies have high defenses, so as a general rule on PotD i really try to avoid pulling perception below 10 at all, doing so only if it's a character that is not really offensively minded (a buffer, a healer, or a tank).

i don't think it's that hard to aim it right. imo there's not much of a point of being a geomancer is you're going to cast something like martial power and remove most of the benefit of being part wizard (i think citzal's martial power can be a bit of a trap if used poorly). i'm sure there's some yummy stuff you could do with the phantoms though.

boy oh boy, if this is true i've been under-utilizing my high-deflection character setups. unless boeroer speaks up to confirm for sure, this definitely needs testing. there are two ways this bonus could be implemented - as a +10 deflection bonus that is conditional against melee, or a +10 deflection bonus vs melee. sounds subtle, but the former is the same "type" of bonus as a mirror image bonus, just conditoinal, and would get overriden. the latter would be a different "type" of bonus and would stack. i ran into a similar surprise when someone (boeroer again?) pointed out that the +15 all defenses bonus from things like circle of protection or symbol of eothas stacked with deflection bonuses. (the difference between "+15 to deflection, +15 to will, +15 to fort, +15 to reflex" vs "+15 to all" if that makes sense)

it's similar to PoE1 in that there are more enemies on as you go up - on PotD notably enemies can get "upgraded" into more elite versions of themselves. on top of that, on Veteran enemies get +12% health (multiplicative bonus I think?), +8 accuracy, +8 all defense, +1 PEN, +1 AR. This is basically half of what they get in PotD, which is +25% health, +15 acc, +15 all defenses, +2 PEN, and +2 AR.

i believe you have to activate the berath's blessing merchant to get the ring of greater deflection. you can get a cloak of greater deflection. the way to do it is to rescue the lone adventurer in old city, then pay him a visit in port maje afterwards. it's not an official task or quest or anything, but he gives you a cloak of greater deflection and some jewels iirc. (my current run definitely does not have berath's blessing merchant enabled and my mainchar has the cloak.) heavy armor is extremely slow. plus, while +3 AR vs PEN sounds great on paper, on PotD with upscaling, heavy armor can actually not be very effective, especially early on, because enemies have +2 bonus PEN from PotD which can safely put them out of underpen range unless you have things like hardy/robust or spirit shield active and/or coupled with PEN debuffs (dazed mostly). add to that, heavy armor is extremely weak (as weak as medium armor) to two damage types, so depending on the context heavy armor doesn't get you any advantages over medium armor and only downsides (much slower recovery). with lots of buff/debuffing and enchantment/looting heavy armor eventually becomes aces for survivability, but imo is decidedly kinda mediocre at first (except to specifically metagame certain encounters). also, due to the increasing returns nature of deflection, the +9/10 deflection of casita samelia's legacy can be worth literally +infinite AR. edit - imo, for potd+upscaling, armor is mostly about managing overpen for much of the game, until you start leveling enough that upscaling can't keep up with your improving enchants/gear (~level 10-12 or so). for much of the game my rule-of-thumb for armor types is: cloth: "i'm ok with with being overpen-ed by virtually everything" light: "i'd rather not be overpen-ed, and i'll take my overpen chances with spells [depending on armor]" medium: "no overpen anywhere exept on crits, with the option of like -25% damage every once and a while with buffs and support" heavy: "i want a little bit of survivability, with the option to become a god with lots of support" i don't know actually. but of the dual-wieldable ranged weapons only wand has a -10 unfit for melee penalty. so you can safely keep hand mortars in your off-hand. dagger modal wouldn't be great, because the +10 deflection would be overridden by all the vastly superior defensive buffs a trickster can get (escape, mirror image, llengrath's displaced image) the modals that reduce damage are just like another modifier, but it undergoes inversions, so -25% penalty can cancel up to +33% worth of buffs. i did mention that having two hatches might be really bad for dps (-25% damage on an already low-damage weapon), but a rogue is better positioned than other classes to have that modal on all the time since their sneak attack bonus can get huge and overwhelm the penalty. i mostly bring it up because a combined net +16 deflection bonus (+3 times two from dual hatchets, plus the effect of -10 accuracy on enemies you hit/riposte with them) could potentially give you such a huge survivability boost that it might be worth the reduced DPS (and it might not be that much of a reduced DPS if you're riposte-ing more because the enemy misses a lot more).

some alternate approaches (i'm not saying these are better than what you have, just things for others to consider as possible tweaks). armor - casita samelia's legacy. gives you +5 deflection, plus +.25 deflection per point of intimidate. ring - ring of (greater) deflection; either +2 or +4 deflection back - cloak of greater deflection for +7 deflection. for weapons, it might be fun to dual-wield hatchet - xoti's sickle and acolyte's. the +3 melee deflection bonus stacks, and the -10 accuracy from modal is effectively another +10 deflection for yourself. this hurts your dps a lot though, so maybe one hatchet (xoti's) with modal on plus kapana taga or a heavy hitter like an axe with bleeding cuts. for abilities, it might also be fun to consider glorious beacon. blinded affliction provides an additional -10 acc penalty (doesn't stack with hatchet debuff) that acts as another way to boost your defenses. for pet, might be worth considering ooblit. the +3s duration plus escape after many power levels means being able to spam for +50 unconditional deflection (unlike arcane veil which is +50 except against veil-piercing) can almost make you into god-mode. only worth doing this if you're in a situation where mirror image isn't good enough (or has been suppressed). lastly, riposte can also trigger full attacks from ranged weapons. if you have a hand-mortar in your offhand, you can trigger aoe attacks as part of your riposte (works real great in dense fights, though be warned that you need a decent GPU to keep up with all the explosions).