thelee

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.

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)