thelee

i really get annoyed at these difficulty threads and these arguments. let me requote the important bits of my original post:

I would recommend a Blood Mage over Evoker. At the very least you can blood sacrifice Brilliant Departure back, and keep your health up with stuff like assassinate-bonus Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon. Plus, a lot of the synergies Boeroer mentions aren't available to Evoker (they are conjuration magic).

Yeah on PotD level 13 is a bit aggressive a level. It's doable, but I think you need a lot of sustain because there are so many ways for the enemies to summon help and iirc they also have a lot of druid heals for their own sustain. Make sure you're empowering spells and such. (I did it in my most recent party at around that level, but I was hravily carried along by the fact that I had Garden of Life that I could use for powerful healing after downing one or two naga.) The main loot is the same iirc, a unique item that you either loot off of Sugaan or Sugaan gives it to you after you talk your past them. If you're having a lot of trouble and don't feel like going elsewhere and leveling (and don't mind the role playing decision of not attacking them), I would say it's not worth the headache.

I mostly meant the merchandising/sheer-IP-overload that Star Wars pioneered. There weren't any James Bond rolexes and action figures or other tie-ins until well after Star Wars.

Star Wars came out in a different era where there "franchise" as a movie/media/entertainment concept didn't really exist - in fact it basically invented it. And LotR (if you're talking the movies) are absolutely successful because they had a built-in fanbase and mindshare. I don't think it would've been greenlit if it didn't have that. People do enjoy and recognize new things, but it's a pretty risky proposition these days. Hollywood is doing ok these days even with streaming nipping at their heels, but only because they're basically all franchises, remakes, and/or reboots. The riskier new stuff is on the streaming platforms where the risk is handled much differently. (The Irishman on Netflix is fantastic, but if it were a traditional theatrical release it probably would've flopped and/or never been greenlit.) edit - i wonder if this implies if you had some sort of netflix-for-games (Xbox Pass and Stadia aren't even close) interested in developing their own properties if stuff like Deadfire would do a lot better and get more support.

This isn't turn-based specific and has been the case since day one. You start with enough phrases to cast your most expensive invocation ignoring the effects of subclass changes. So what you start with is not even based on your level, if all you do is have one AL1 invocation, you'll never ever ever have more than 3 phrases to start (and you'll never accumulate more than 4 and only if you have a subclass that increases the cost of that invocation by 1).

What'll really bake one's noodle is how suppressing effects like Suppress Affliction and Arcane Dampener vs duration-reduction effects like Cleanse interact differently with durational effects. For the unaware, if you have a buff that is suppressed you can't refresh that buff. Casting it again won't do anything, and can mess up simple AI scripts because the AI will think they're missing an inspiration/buff and try to re-cast that inspiration/buff, only to no effect. If you have a custom AI script that has a 0 second cooldown on this kind of conditional, your character will happily eat through all their class resource trying to recast the buff. However, you can still interact with inspirations/afflictions that are suppressed via normal countering/overriding mechanics, even as they're suppressed. All this has some odd interactions; in some cases, Arcane Dampener and Suppress Affliction and Liberating Exhortation--despite being lower level effects compared to Arcane Cleanse or Minor Intercession or similar duration adjusting effects--are actually much better than the direct duration-adjustment effects: For example, some enemies have basically unlimited use of their buffs and will happily just rebuff if their effect is dispelled. If you Arcane Cleanse it away, you just spent a valuable AL9 casting slot only to just waste one of their actions to rebuff it. If, on the other hand, you suppress it, they can't refresh their buff while it's supressed. If you're in one of those fights where you're getting charmed/dominated a lot by the same effect, you're better off suppressing it then trying to counter it. Successive attempts at dominate/charm won't do anything (unless it's a different named effect). If you have afflictions on your characters that are actively suppressed, you can still counter them by casting a paired inspiration, so that when the suppression wears off they don't get the affliction back. Suppression can be a good way to buy yourself time to do some cleanup like this (since most suppression effects I can think of are very fast cast). Also, the only use I've ever found for Potions of Major Recovery (-10s to hostile durations) is to accelerate how quickly dampener wears off, because man it sucks getting hit with one.

Yeah, if you hover over yourself or an enemy in combat, you'll see persistent effects in either the top ("beneficial") or bottom ("hostile"). That's what "beneficial" effect referring to, and it's pretty broad. On top of the exceptions that Boeroer mentions, the chant/linger duration of chanter chants are completely bypassed by beneficial effect modifications (e.g. if you have an amulet that is +10% beneficial effect, then you get no benefit even when the chant is affecting yourself). There's some override that happens late in the process for chant/linger that seems to only include intellect and chanter-specific effects (like troubadour).

The game does actually keep track of your old reputation/decisions a bit in a relevant way, at least in one major way I've found.

yeah silly me i never thought of that interaction, that's a fun little synergy.

as contemplative or pure monk though?

Notably Tenray (#2) actually completed the Ultimate again a second time while his first run was still being validated. It was with a priest of skaen/streetfighter. Either he didn't submit it for validation or you only get one recognition per person.

I'm not normally someone who likes to dump on theorycrafting, but for the Ultimate I think there's a huge risk of bad theorycrafting because there's a bunch of situations that can screw you over if you fail to anticipate it. I forget who it was, but chanter/ranger seemed wholly predicated on being able to discretely start fights and pull enemies carefully using companion (while still generating phrases for doing powerful summons) but there's at least one fight that is impossible to disengage [water dragon] and I honestly don't know how that mechanic would work with e.g. Hauani O Whe where you basically need to keep pressure on the smaller oozes or else their AI will happily merge while you're waiting and staying out of combat. I'm sure there are other worrisome situations as well. I'll never say never, just that I'm somewhat skeptical that someone could pull that off (or any non-priest build).

odd. yeah, there's no damage calculation, you have to hover over the "hit" effect and it tells you how much damage done with no context (kind of like how carnage works in the combat log). Even on a graze I remember getting very high numbers though (even triple digits i feel like). Maybe something weird happens on crits? Or something else? Maybe it's based in part on enemy health, like finishing blow? How does one decompile/look at the game code?

There's a good quarterstaff very late game (in forgotten sanctum) for caster/martial types - gives you 15% hit to crit buff every time you cast a spell, and gives you concentration everytime you crit. Something to consider. (Though honestly Street Sweeper--another quarterstaff--is one of the best weapons in the game IMO) If you're going to use a lantern, you should definitely stick to fists. While I agree in part with Boeroer's assessment in that you shouldn't over-index on just trying to land killing blows all the time, if you give up on it altogether Xoti is just a super underpowered monk. (The lantern's on-kill effect does work on non-melee attacks; it took me a while to realize that Blessed Harvest was the reason why I kept finding myself with spare Mortification.) If you're using the lantern, the only real way to make up for such a DPS deficit is to use fists (at least until you get some very good superb/legendary items with powerful damage buffs; multiclass monk fists while very good don't scale up as well as single class). If you don't care about using the lantern specifically but still want to use a small shield, I would use tuolito's palm, which gets buffed from the monk fists, and you can pair that with a non-fist weapon like a decent flail.

Just to add; Xoti's monk subclass is a little underpowered and really relies on you landing killing blows to do well (especially while using the lantern). The sickle just does so much less damage than normal monk fists and not dual-wielding fists reduces your attack speed so much that you start creating a negative feedback loop. Add-on additional action economy from casting buffs and you'll find a xoti contemplative a *really* mediocre monk experience. Hence ditch the sickle at the very least, and be more judicious about spellcasting. Regenerating mortification via the lantern is such a good effect that I'm partial to not ditching it, but if you can't reliably land killing blows you're better off ditching the lantern as well.

a few thoughts: i had a similar experience in one of my first run or so. the sickle is a trap. it's decent, but not on a monk. use fists instead, at least until you get (if you bother going this route) the upgrade that lets you use melee weapons at range. i think sickle/lantern is a better choice for xoti as pure priest; but even then i would ditch the sickle and give it to someone else more martial-y, and if i need damage diversity i'd pick up spiritual weapon instead, which gives you a sickle that autoscales and has a lash (but no companion-related upgrade). multiclassing with a caster (especially a support class like priest) really requires you to find the synergies. otherwise you'll run into a feeling like what you're feeling, where you just feel worse at being a monk and worse at being a priest instead of something that is more than the sum of its parts. On PotD especially, putting a priest that close to the front line and in a position where they need to take damage to power the monk half is going to make you feel *real* fragile and feel like you're running into action economies a lot. some basic ideas: ditch fists altogether for a while and use a reach weapon (quarterstaff or pike) for safety. then use dance of death. dance of death will give you huge accuracy bonuses that also applies to spellcasting. priest part will rely more on debuffing (which requires accuracy rolls) instead of buffing. use xoti bonus spell blessed harvest to help get finishing blows to gain wounds for free which the bonus accuracy will help with; the bonus accuracy will help with xoti's other unique spells (vile thorns, wicked briars) mid-game pick up duality of mortal presence and switch it to the intellect version. getting up to +10 intellect makes you real good at casting spells. (won't stack with prayer/litany for the spirit so don't bother) pick up priest spells that really help the monk side in particular; dire blessing will really help you land efficient anguish. salvation of time you could use on blade turning a couple times to face-tank huge mobs; run in and out a few times to force disengagement attacks that get bounced. (be warned that devotions of the faithful won't stack with dance with death) unfortunately, xoti's contemplative isn't really a top-tier contemplative you can put together, but i've gotten good mileage out of her on PotD + challenges so she's viable.

These days (after getting thoroughly used to the re-balanced PotD difficulty) I'd say the hardest fight is the Engwithan Digsite + Galawain's challenge. For many other later fights you can just overlevel them if necessary, and the megabosses tend to mostly be technical fights for metagaming (e.g. solve the puzzle, and you can win). But you have so little options so early in the game, so a bad roll on the buff for the young drake and the wyrms can hurt you real bad. My current run my party absolutely roflstomped Gorecci St without having to split the enemy up, and I even took the violent option against the looters for extra fighting, but it took me hours and most of my consumables to finally get my way through the digsite, because the Young Drake had spawned with Hardened and that is a really brutal buff for a low-level party to handle.

do note that the table is slightly inaccurate these days after several patches. I hate to be self-aggrandizing, but a more detailed and up-to-date version is here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/afflictions-and-inspirations

I actually kinda agree with a lot of your table. The one thing that stood out in particular is soundtrack (combat music). The PoE1 combat music is a running joke in my household because it had such a repetitive and unpleasant theme (coupled with my long playtime) that my wife will just periodically go "dun dun... dun... da-da-da-dun..." to sing out the beats of Combat C. Deadfire on the other hand, is perfectly fine (and personally I really enjoy the mostly-drums battle music).

I need to end my own posts this way. Maybe I'll just borrow from The Mandalorian. I have spoken.

For whatever people talk about "Bugsidian," BG2 was a pretty buggy game at release, and without all the fan fixes it was astonishingly easy to break scripted encounters and the like. BG2EE came with a lot of those fan fixes built-in and a lot of other quality-of-life improvements as well. Also, at least for me, for a long time I got the quest Delon gives you if Minsc is in your party (ranger stronghold quest) with the trademeet bounty, because they sounded so similar. That contributed to a "what on earth is this Trademeet icon on my map, not going there" early on.

Does Flydian actually approach you or do you have to talk to him? It's been a while so I don't remember, but like I said I remember completely missing Trademeet in my first few runs, and I'm pretty sure I went out through the city gates in those runs for various reasons. (For similar reasons, the first time a friend told me about Jan Janssen and all his unique gear I thought he was off his rocker. Somehow I had completely missed him in the government district.)

This is how I used to clear gorecci st all the time on PotD, using sound to lure one group of looters further away before starting the fight.

This. I loved Athkalta, but I also really liked Trademeet. I actually didn't even uncover it until a later run, because I only did a subset of the stronghold and stronghold-adjacent quests at first. I was actually blown away that there was so much to do there, a whole market (with unique-to-Trademeet items, whereas small towns in like BG might not have anything going for them in terms of vendors), the elven chain mail, and getting the statues was also real great. And yeah, questlines that I didn't even realize had continuations into Trademeet (like the whole tannery business from the Bridge District). Really, BG2 did a lot of things great with area design. No wonder it blew out BG in sales (and all other IE games).