thelee

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).

Does taking a bath in the bathhouse clear it? I think it clears "clear on rest" effects.

genius! for megabosses you just need to sub in that blinding shot upgrade that perma-DoTs the enemy. (won't work too well for hauani o whe though, but 3/4 ain't bad)

not to judge - but what is even the point of a build being a glass cannon or not if you just use cheats? just roll 5 blood mages with everything other than con and resolve maxed. you're done. or, roll 5 normal mages and in the end game, just have them all empower Wilting Wind or the AL9 minoletta spell or meteor shower (empower helps with any PEN issues). Don't even need to bother with targeting if you don't need to worry about them dying.

The last game I really saw this at play was Oblivion. Even though FO3 and F:NV had the same engine, they didn't nearly do it in spades or try to plug in as much emergent gameplay. (In Oblivion you could leave a poisoned apple around and put it on top of someone's plate and wait for them to eat it; it was a bit janky, but there's no equivalent in games hence basically. Also in Oblivion, much like the Ultima games of yore, you could follow NPCs around and watch them go about their day. Though you do have to hear their short bark dialogue all the time "HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE HIGH ELVES?" In FO3/NV/Skyrim/FO4, unless they are one of the explicitly-intended-to-be-regional-merchants, they basically do a small orbit in one of a few rooms that may or may not involve a bed.) Like Boeroer says, there's a huge cost component. I would also venture to say the vast, vast, vast majority of players in Oblivion never noticed or took advantage of the "real world" elements of gameplay (as evidenced by how buggy and janky the poisoned apple mechanics could be), so I don't think people really are missing out on anything. Deadfire is more reactive than PoE1 in this respect, and you could tell how far we are from the RPGs of yesteryear by doing a google search for something like "Where is Una in Deadfire?" People just aren't used to the idea that a merchant might actually go to sleep at night. Also, despite the fact that I have nostalgia for Ultima games (though mostly 7 and Underworld), I'm pretty ambivalent about this frankly, even the little bit that is in Deadfire - even though it's just a few button clicks and a short wait, I find it a bit annoying to have to wait for daytime so that some of my vendors appear (anecdotally, my wife--who is really into first person open-world RPGs and never grew up playing the old cRPGs--really hates ever having to wait for anything or trying to remember people's schedules). As another example, rain introduced RNG and almost botched my Ultimate run (and screwed up another; rain causes people to seek shelter; if you're planning on trying to steal or sneak and it's time sensitive, having everyone seek shelter right next to the thing you want to steal is extremely inconvenient). I admit I was a bit surprised by how both PoE1 and Deadfire were generous with quests. You could flat out refuse a quest, and you'd still get a journal entry. But players hate botching quests or missing out on content because they didn't do the right RPG voodoo (either correct dialogue response or right stats). I think this is part of the continuing "streamlining" of game mechanics in an effort to lower barriers and broaden appeal across much of the RPG genre while reducing costs. Unlike the immersive component above, this is one aspect that I am decidedly less ambivalent about and miss more. I think stats and decisions should be meaningful, and that should pertain to more than just combat or ending slides - I want more explicit tradeoffs like the Bardatto vs Valera questline, or hard checks to even get a quest like in Fallout 2.

i have hated games like FO76 and FF8 but I still put tens of hours into them, in the hopes that they would get better or because I just wanted to finish them and be done with it.

what could have helped a lot more if there were some formalized "trusted" feedback people to help filter out the noise. i could imagine as a random obs community manager, trying to find the signal out of the noise of all the feedback (especially when frequently the feedback can be objectively wrong and based on misunderstandings, non-actionable, or reliant on knowledge of how the game is coded) is very hard, and hard too for developers seeking to avoid toxicity. it's not exactly a democratic system, but over time (between poe1 and deadfire) i had a pretty good track record of getting responses to bugs and getting the bugs i reported specifically fixed. i have to imagine that some combination of detailed reporting and helpful analysis/suggestions built up some incremental good-will with whomever was triaging stuff. i have to imagine paying more explicit attention to people like MaxQuest or the modder-types could have helped pre-release and backer beta. i don't know how this would actually work in practice, but it sounds like devs are essentially doing this anyway by relying more on SA or discord than the obs forums.

yeah, it blew my mind in terms of content that you'd have all this stuff to explore, and then you got to the endgame and there was essentially a whole other city to explore full of stuff. a similar example is FF7. You spend so much time in Midgar, and then you finally get out and there's literally a whole entire world to explore. (I don't put Midgar on any "top cities" list because it really didn't feel like a city so much as a gigantic collection of garbage with a skyscraper at the center)

yeah, i would go on the flip side and say that if something is only useful for e.g. the four megabosses, then that doesn't make it a strength. my easiest example would be chanter. if it was just up to how influential a chanter can be for the hardest fights, i would put troubadour at the top, easy-peasy, and just spam animated weapons all day long while having one of the several sustain-or-sustain-assist chants on all the time. however, that doesn't strike me as very meaningful, because even on PotD most fights simply don't last long enough where such perpeptual sustain and weapon uptime is really that strong of a factor versus the many other factors that might be useful... at which point having to break out by roles and interactions with itemization becomes important. edit - personally, again, it's some "intuitive" system of weighting. i don't completely ignore megaboss fights because i hate switching out party members, but i also don't overoptimize just for the 1% of extremely hard fights. because of this, chanters do get more representation in my parties than i would normally do without megabosses, as do certain items and setups (Marux Amanth has been a staple in most of my runs because of how effective it is at instakilling megabosses when dual-wielded; even these days when I'm not constantlly rolling a priest variant as a main I'm heavily incentivized to bring along a priest anyway just because of weyc's + salvation of time combo because of the few megaboss fights) edit 2 - i guess the problem with my interpretation is that there really is no way to consider classes "in a vacuum" to reason about their strengths. They basically rely on metagame knowledge. Going back to Marux Amanth as example, that item alone upgrades rogue, priest, and paladin because of its existence, but at the same time that upgrade becomes weaker if you flip on a rest-limiting challenge (Eothas and to lesser extents Rymrgand, Woedica). And Marux Amanth is valuable solely because of tanky HP-sponge enemies. If this were PoE1, for example, an item like marux amanth wouldn't be nearly as useful.

absolutely not, because this is a party-based game, and classes by design fulfill different roles. if a given class can't solo very well, that says nothing about it's quality/strength because solo play is essentially a whole other type of game. you can certainly try to rank classes by their strength in their ability to solo, but it's not a general ranking. example 1: in poe1, i completed the ultimate with a high-resolve paladin. i would never ever rate that as a very strong party-based build, because its sole strength was simply the ability to grind out fights via high defenses and sustain; it would basically be useless in any reasonable party because everyone else would DPS the enemy down way before the paladin's tankiness would ever become needed. example 2: tactician/skaen is probably the second best ultimate build, but i would consider it a supremely parasitic build for party-based build, because so much of what makes the class powerful relies solely on the mechanics of solo play and related challenges, and they literally don't work at all in a party-based build (unless everyone else is a */skaen or /*rogue of some sort). combos can certainly elevate the quality of a party-based class, but the more a class relies on that combo to be playable, the worse the class actually is (because maximum viability is a stated goal of the game design). If this were magic: the gathering with perpetual support and more aggressive balancing, wizards of the coast would step in and ban combos that are too good. from a party-based perspective, i think how you assess a class's strength falls into these questions: what is the class's nominal role(s)? (primary weight) how well does the class fulfill this/these role(s)? how necessary are these roles in a party? how well does the class interact with the metagame of equipment and other such (secondary weight)? for combos (and secondarily itemization), how reliant on these combos is a class? how viable are they without? (tertiary weight) for all of the above, is it weighted towards specific levels? (for example, if a class is only good at a role and can metagame well for a specific role by like level 19, this might make the class pretty bad for the role because much of hte game is weighted towards earlier levels and multiclasses may not ever reach the necessary ability level; tertiary weight) in my gamefaqs guide i tried to do #1 with some of the casters. e.g. from the perspective of healing, i'd go lifegiver->kind wayfarer->shieldbearer->other druid->other paladin->priest->troubadour->other chanter->(way way at the bottom)cipher. for resurrection, i'd go priest->troubadour->other chanter->paladin->druid. for party-buffing, i'd go priest->troubadour->shieldbearer->other paladin/chanter->druid. In other words, there's no catchall "best ranking" for classes because needs are different, and there's not even a "best ranking for defense" because there are different aspects to that that classes have varying strengths and weaknesses as part of balancing and diversity. so if you're thinking purely of a 'what is the best support class?' it's not a good enough question. you can probably assign some weights to how much you care about the various aspects of being a support class, but you need to split out their roles. and it becomes more of a question 'for this party, i'm missing healing and don't care about revive capabilities. which class should i put in?' At the same time, the answer to some of these actually change on difficulty. For normal difficulty, for example, i would rate "party buffing" as a very weak and unnecessary part of a party, and consequently any class that relies on fulfilling this role and any slot in your party for this role becomes worse and rankings shift in favor of just brute-force damage. On the other hand, on PotD party buffing and enemy debuffing I find to be much more valuable; consequently such spots in a party become more valuable and classes that are good at buffing or debuffing also become comparatively better. edit: for a combo like brilliant + duration extension, because it is so accessible to any class (all you need is a priest, not even a cipher) it's not actually worth considering as a factor in determining class strength anyway, unless the party role you are trying to fulfill is "i want to extend powerful buffs" at which point the ranking is sc priest->mc priest->(way way way down)non-evocation/transmuter wizard.

it also kinda helps the ghost heart along that the sharpshooter subclass is decidedly niche due to how strong of a downside a categorically universal recovery time penalty is, and the stalker which--while can be strong--arguably requires a lot more micromanagement and really leans further into bonded grief as a mechanic.

just to add, the confusing part about the initial roll-to-hit-an-inanimate-corpse doesn't show up anywhere in the combat log, it's completely invisible. with expert mode off (obviously not a choice in the ultimate challenge), you do actually see the to-graze/hit odds when hovering over a corpse, which is extremely helpful (because sometimes one corpse will be a better choice than another simply because of their defenses... again, don't ask me how an inanimate corpse can dodge a spell)

for casual players - not having to worry about bonded grief i bet. it's a really rough penalty and very few other (sub)classes have something like that where it actively punishes the player for poor micromanagement or metagaming. but that nonengagement is sweet. maia has like the best ranger subclass and pet combo, and ghost heart gets you some of the way there. an itinerant was my second choice for a run-through (after a bunch of nerfing happened) and between speeding my AC past the front line towards squishes and potions of impediment and concussive tranquilizer i was a better mage slayer than the mage slayer subclass.