thelee

Curious to know if anyone has made sense of the consumables. I see a lot of overlapping effects with varying durations - and I really just don't know how to make good use of them. I know medical skill unlocks more inhaler slots to plop items into, but I have like singletons of everything, so it's not like it's saving me that much inventory management because after one pop my second slot is already empty. And I don't know what I should be shoving into my extra inhaler slots anyway (does +200% passive regen really help out in a fight or is it mostly useful to eat on its own?)

spoiler alert?

either way it goes it's a bug potion of luminous adra (no duration) gives you +2 all skills that doesn't stack, until you go through a save/load cycle or something, at which point it stacks. (discovered this to my advantage during my ultimate run)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/stacking-rules The main rule is "active effects don't stack, passive effects do." The devil is in the details of what counts as "active" and what counts as "passive" and how you define a stacking "category." Example 1: all abilities on the left side of a class tree are active, no exceptions. This means that even effects that are on all the time (monk's iron body, paladin auras, fighter stances) are considered "active." Similarly, most abilities on the right side of a class tree are passive, with the main exception of chanter chants which are inscrutably on the right side of the tree despite not being passive. Example 2: most consumables bestow effects that are considered "active." So Potion of Piercing Strikes gives a +2 PEN that will be suppressed by Tenacious (+2 PEN) or overridden by chanter's +3 PEN invocation. Example 3: most item-based effects are passive (even conditional ones), unless the item is granting you an ability that you can turn off/activate, at which point some of them are passive and others are active. I believe the necklace that lets you +1 PL is a passive even though it's something you have to actively click to use. Example 4: Even if two buffs or debuffs are affecting the same stat, depending the bonus is determined it may or may not stack. The big example here are effects that grant +X deflection, versus effects that grant +Y defenses. Even though the +Y defenses also grants a deflection bonus, the two effects are considered "different" and so both will stack and apply to your deflection. On the other hand, as mentioned in this thread, there are sometimes buffs that are merely conditional (think hatchet's +3 deflection against melee; it's passive, but that's an example of a conditional bonus - you can even see it listed as such if you hover over your deflection). Despondent Blows is a -15 accuracy that is conditioned on a melee attack, rather than a -15 melee accuracy. So, it won't stack with Devotions (which is a -10 accuracy with no conditions) because it's the same "type" of bonus, even though it doesn't apply in the same situations. (edit - for this, it helps to read ability descriptions like a lawyer; it's mostly auto-generated so if an ability is phrased differently than another, chances are it's a different "type" for purposes of stacking) Example 5: For some reason, throw all this out the window when it comes to "hit->crit" "hit->graze" etc. effects as well as % chance to interrupt effects. They don't stack additively, nor do they suppress each other - they all function independently of each other (effectively stacking multiplicatively).

oh yeah i got my wires crossed - op mentioned hypothetical solo build and assumed briefly that you were talking about solo. shadowing beyond is a little less useful in party play, i would agree for party play wael is safer.

just wanted to add that outside of specific challenges, skaen can literally end a fight whenever they want to recharge (shadowing beyond) so I think it might be the safest choice.

yeah, i don't doubt a universalist can be good, that's what I was focusing on synergy. Outside of a solo run, the dilemma I keep facing is "boy it seems like I could do this way better with just a separate druid and priest"

iirc from tests, the base eld nary has 5 jumps + PL scaling (versus something like 12 jumps + PL scaling). You basically run out of bellower buff after just a few bounces (remember that you use up a lot of the time just from casting it). edit - even though bellower works with SoT keep in mind that you automatically trigger the buff upon starting (not even finishing) an invocation, so 99% of the time that fact is irrelevant, since you can't carry over a particularly large +PL buff to another invocation cast. (And chanter chants don't scale with PL, using character level instead)

Definitely doesn't stack, but like Boeroer suggests I imagine many people use Devotions mostly for the +10 acc, and the -10 acc is just frosting on the cake if it lands on anyone, so it's not as redundant as it seems. Keep in mind though, that the -15 acc for despondent blows is for melee only, so devotions still has use in making spells/ranged less accurate, even when they are overlapping. (And it's not like the difference between +15 deflection or +15 all defenses, which stack because they're a different "category" of bonus, here it's the same category of bonus it's just that one is "conditional." Stacking rules, amiright?) Divine Mark is alright, but not good enough to really center on (duration is short) as a "replacement." Personally of all the priest multiclasses, I have a real hard time getting a good synergistic (more than the sum of its parts) outcome for universalist (celebrant is the other). I would actually lean towards some sort of x/Skaen or x/Wael multiclass. Both skaen and wael give you unique survivability capabilities that a druid doesn't have access to otherwise (and skaen Finishing Blow on a shapeshifted, wild-striked druid might be half-decent). For solo, Skaen might be supreme (due to Shadowing Beyond). Just whatever you do, you probably don't want to pick up Shifter: Even for things like Finishing Blow or Escape--which are ordinarily rogue abilities--by virtue of being on a skaen priest, they count as spells, so you can't use them while shapeshifted. Also, keep in mind that cat form has an amazing ability (an ability that gives you a huge action speed bonus) that can be enhanced with Salvation of Time. A late game universalist combo, but with something like +33% action speed (along with rapid casting perk) you can dump out spells very very quickly. You can't be a Fury to do this, however. (Ancient or Lifegiver would be better choices here). I did this with a party where I had a single-class Ancient and Xoti, coupled with Triumph of the Crusaders my Ancient was a non-stop invulnerable killing machine even on PotD+upscaling+challenges. (Note that this combo isn't exactly a synergistic multiclass since you're likely better off having a separate druid and priest to pull it off.) edit - also, despondent blows is really good debuff. it also has a crit-to-hit debuff component which is very very useful on PotD with upscaling difficulty.

last two spots. welcome to deadfire

clarification: are you just trying triple crown, are you also going for the ultimate in deadfire? very different things to worry about

This is not a selective memory issue, but a fundamental gameplay issue, I'm not trying to overcomplicate, I'm trying to draw an analogy to another very similar case. In general, you are expected to win close to every fight. This is just a fundamental aspect of game design, because otherwise the game is impossible. On PotD, I will have to occasionally reload a fight if a fight goes south, but I can say without ego that most of time I can just win a fight. K can also definitely say that the number of wipes or loads I had to do with Serafen in my party went up dramatically. Sure I don't internalize the fights where it helped me, but at the same time winning a fight 15-20s sooner is a very different outcome from having it impossible to have a party member healed, a catastrophic miscast (admittedly not as bad as at release), etc. Serafen's cipher subclass is decidedly unique in this respect (actively losing you fights), and I'll call it a garbage subclass as a result.

Is it? I admit I didn't pay too close attention to the damage numbers in my test (I was specifically testing the jumps). I don't know why it wouldn't be an issue without empower either. also, side note - here's where it's weird that the bellower buff is created at the moment that you start an invocation, not upon cast - Eld Nary is also hurt by having a long cast time (4.5s base) so you actually eat up a huge chunk of the bellower buff (even with huge intellect) just from the cast (has base duration of 6s)

Ugh, too useful. I haven't really played since BC, but I remember having to farm mats for hours (especially Black Lotus) in order to do some competitive high-end raiding.

Just leaving this as a note, because I see recommendations about this around the internet, and I also speculated in the forums here that it was a good idea. TL;DR: eld nary doesn't work well with bellower. But Eld Nary is pretty good anyway. Basically, the idea behind combining the two is that Bellower gets a lot of +PL when using an invocation, and Eld Nary has basically every single dimension that could possibly be boosted by +PL. However, Eld Nary's projectile travels slowly and it jumps very slowly, so I think either Boeroer or MaxQuest here pointed out that the damage will actually drop off after a few jumps because the Bellower's +PL buff will wear off. It's worse than that, the number of jumps you get is calculated dynamically, and isn't fixed at cast. And due to how long Eld Nary takes to cast, and how slowly the projectile jumps, it's basically impossible to get extra jumps out of Eld Nary especially the upgraded one (unless you are using Salvation of Time or Wall of Draining or that pet that grants +3s to beneficial effects). So basically, Eld Nary is too slow for the bellower and most of hte benefit of the bellower's +PL will be lost and not apply. But Eld Nary is still an incredibly good invocation (especially upgraded) and I think people around the internet are just coincidentally discovering how good it can be in the context of having a bellower, even though a bellower isn't too relevant to how good it is. If you want to do Eld Nary shenanigans, you're probably better off with a Troubadour or Skald. Anyway, I'm back to the drawing board on my bellower build.

I think you missed my point that unless things changed (and they could have, as I said, I basically stopped using Serafen after like 3.0), the targeting for those effects are not limited to enemy vs ally, they depend on the targeting of the spell that triggers the wild mind (except for self-effects, like the empower usage changes). So for example, I wouldn't consider inspirations "positive" or invisibility "negative" because they depend on the targeting of the spell that triggered them, and hence I would just call it "even more variance, which is bad" (again, I don't know how to look up the scripting to verify, but I also have a memory from before I abandoned Serafen of granting Swift and another time Brilliant to an enemy--though Brilliant is not that much different from Acute on most enemy targets, still unpleasant though) To another point, PL boost up/down has to be asymmetric to be balanced, this feeds back into the "more variance is bad for the player" point. I feel like I could copy-paste my guide on the wild mage in BG2 discussing the finer points, but a +X PL may help you kill an enemy faster or disable them more, but you were expected to to win that fight anyway, whereas an -X equivalent PL could mean a pivotal inability to accomplish something. For BG2/EE I used the point of using magic missiles to dispel mirror images; getting +5 spell level doesn't matter because you were going to knock out all the mirror images anyway, but getting -5 spell level means leaving some mirror images still up, which could be a critically bad swing in the battle (especially due to how spell interrupts work in BG2/EE). I don't know if +5/-3 is "balanced", but I do know that +5/-5 even in Deadfire wouldn't be, and it's certainly not clear that it's a net positive for the player in terms of practical game impact. edit: to rephrase it in BG terms, if Wild Mage only gave you the wild surge and +-spell level effects, I would also consider it a trap subclass, even considering BG's more generous wild surge list (though to be fair, the downsides of a wild surge are deeper than the downsides of a wild mind). The reason why a wild mage works at all is because they get generous other benefits; the wild surge and added variance are essentially the "Cons" of the class, and the "Pros" are the extra spell per spell level and the unique spells that let you skew odds in your favor, and not to mention the level 1 spell that lets you basically cast any spell out of your spell book (albeit with a surge). Wild Mind is basically a Wild Mage without any comparable Pro. Without some retooling, I can't recommend it to anyone. (Though if the targeting has been limited, it's less of a garbage subclass, just a mediocre one.)

You can verify this with the scripting, but in my experience the things you call "positive" and the the things you call "negative" are not truly so because they don't appear to differentiate between what kind of target the spell is. I have turned my allies invisible, for example (which was still bad when I needed to heal an ally but could no longer target them). But I haven't used Serafen since like 3.0 so maybe they restricted the targeting. Even then, I don't understand how you call that "slightly positive" on average. Are there different weights for them? Because it looks like even in your charaterization, the negative outcomes outweigh the positive outcomes

There are very few "trap" builds, but serafen is very close to a trap character if he is part or full cipher. Wild Mage in BG2/EE was fun, and the outcomes tended to be in your favor, and there were many ways to skew it in your favor - you also got the benefit of mage specialization (+1 spell cast/day per spell level) without the downside (excluded school). Wild Mind does not do that - as far as I can tell, the outcomes are symmetric, with no way to influence them, and there's no extra perk to boot. That means all Wild Mind does is add variance to your fights. In general, more variance = bad for player, because in general the player is expected to win in general, variance gives the enemy more opportunities to triumph. All this is to say that especially on PotD+upscaling, Serafen can single handedly take a fight you were winning to a fight that is going catastrophically poorly all from one poorly timed Wild Mind trigger (back before his aoe effect got nerfed, he literally once single-handedly wiped my party). I would strongly urge either rolling Serafen as a barbarian, or just using Ydwin for a cipher.

I tend to be someone who values might more than dex in certain situations but even where when we're talking BM, dex really trumps other stats. Might only really makes sense for damage or healing casters because casters have a really finite amount of abilities, so there are cases or builds where you'd want more quality out of each spell rather than simply running out of spells faster. Blood mage doesn't have that problem. In fact, they are essentially rate-limited by just how fast they can spam spells and blood sacrifice, which makes dex the larger constraint for blood mage to achieve their potential. Let's also be clear about the math to make it easier to compare. Might is listed as 3%, but in practice is closer to 2% net increase in game, because it's an additive bonus, which means that e.g. crits diminish the impact of might. This is actually on par and in fact slightly behind perception (net effect is also about 2% net increase in damage per point, though this is weighted towards PotD where enemy defenses and AR are higher). So the "3%" number you see for might overstates the damage impact that you are likely to actually see. By contrast, dexterity is very close to the listed 3% per point in terms of net impact in damage (it effectively is purely multiplicative with other ability-boosting stats since it's on a separate dimension). For all intents and purposes, dex is a king stat, and then after that is perception, and then very slightly behind that is might. Only for flavor, niche builds, or lower difficulties does might really win out versus even perception. My personal recommendation for a BM would be to prioritize dex, and then roughly balance perception/might with perception ahead of might. But intellect is even more important, and bm has basically infinite access to Aware inspiration, so as a result I wouldn't bother investing in might and only marginally in perception.

Sometimes it's contingent on being high enough level not just simply "have I been putting all my points points here." Some of the shrines are considered or are in higher level content, so they would expect you to be higher level to pass the check. In other words, there's a difference between a level 5 person putting all their points into a skill, and a level 20 person putting all their points into a skill. Notably, even if you put 100% of your skill points into one skill up to level 20, there are skill checks you will still fail unless you also have consumables, items, an appropriate background, an appropriate class, and/or other party members who also have that skill and can therefore give you a party bonus. Some checks are just intended to be hard.

it's worth pointing out that consumables in Deadfire used to be extremely good and then got hit with a nerfbat really hard (too hard, in my opinion, for some consumables). poisons used to scale 1:1 skill to power-level, and all potions used to have their effects get stronger based on alchemy (in addition to any PL-scaling). and all consumables (incl bombs, scrolls) benefited from perception, might, and intellect. for me, deadfire isn't quite the level of BG2 where i'm too hesitant to ever use a consumable ever, but it's not where it used to be, where pretty much every consumable could be something to put your character over the top. (now there are some potions which really don't have much value without the alchemy scaling) i think the hard part from a game design perspective is that consumables are essentially available to everyone, so there's a fine line between "so good it can obviate character build decisions [which was obsidian's justification for nerfing]" and "not good enough so you would never bother."

to be clear: the skill is "religion" which is a topic. it's not "religious", which is a description of how someone can adhere to a religion. that n and s make all the difference. (and yes just to add, i grew up in the american bible belt, so i know a lot about a particular religion (i have 20 points in evangelical protestantism), but am not particularly religious. eder and pallegina both speak to me as characters as a result.)

that's an interesting idea, for myself I honestly never considered it. Part of that is the fact that up until level 16 I literally need every weapon proficiency that I pick up, so for most of my planning I never even contemplated a non-core weapon. Plus, even though after BoW I had more money than I knew what to do with, up until then every single coin mattered (for repairing Scordeo's, for buying mats, and most importantly for having 20000g to buy off the imp so I don't have to fight it in BoW, all keeping in mind that I may be surrendering lots of cash to ship fights). From my practice run (since I couldn't tell how much money I actually had in my real run), it wasn't until after BoW that I started building up my cash (though by the end of FS I had 100000g+). Having to worry about replenishing or repairing magical axes (or even just "not selling axes") would have been very bad for my bank account. It would've either slowed down BoW or worse threatened the run (if I couldn't afford the mat for a critical scroll or potion). There are also several problems though that I see: 1. Even with Brilliant the number of attack abilities you can use is very low (keep in mind with Scordeo's you attack every like .5s, which is 12 attacks before you get a resource back) 2a. Being solo + Scordeo's Edge really eats through your weapon durability super fast. When I was practicing Auranic, I tried one version with Morning Star (Saru-Sichr) and Scordeo's to just keep her permainterrupted and hope for an insta-death kill (because the sigils were jsut super tedious to deal with, I had hoped I could keep her perma-interrupted the entire time... spoiler alert, it's extremely hard to interrupt her near-death self-buff that gives her permabrilliant and reveals all sigils, and even if I had a decent chance of success (I didn't) "mostly consistent" was not good enough of a solution). Anyway, that version of the practice attempt flopped pretty quickly because I took the Saru-Sichr to almost broken just from taking out the two barbarians, much less actually hurting the megaboss. 2b. Given how quickly you wear out weapons in any major boss fight, the added damage from the DoT--regardless of the number of stacks--is not going to have much of an impact as far as I can tell, versus sticking with a summoned weapon or fists the entire time. 3. Interactions with Shadowing Beyond or Withdraw when trying to de-aggro. I don't remember if DoTs break invis, but it was certainly not something I wanted to risk (or waste time during a practice run) doing. Long-lived effects can also subtly alter enemy AI - wouldn't matter for the blood mage runs, but with tactician there are ways to not have any enemy aggroed, but you still don't trigger Brilliant, and there's some subtle interaction with AI state that results in this. My run is extremely conservative by nature, and if there's an outside chance that I fail to deaggro the enemies when I need to, then I'm not gonna do it. Over the course of months of doing the ultimate, I sort of had a working knowledge of how the game determines that you met the conditions for Brilliant de-aggro, but it wasn't 100% consistent, more like 95% consistent. That remaining 5% almost threatened my run in the Belranga fight when Belranga failed to de-aggro enough to trigger Brilliant; I had to re-aggro and then de-aggro again. I put in the video notes that I don't think I can express how insanely close to failing the run I was just from pure AI flakiness. So adding anything to increase the chance of that kind of outcome happening was not desirable. (The number of times I needed to de-aggro in the middle of a fight were low, but when I needed to, I needed to with basically 100% success rate. I suppose I could have just no used an axe for those fights, but that would have just been one more thing to remember/note.) 1. the reason why I personally use sparkcrackers, traps, and in one occasion a scroll (it's either sunbeam or plague of insects) is their small AoE. I've definitely failed some stealth practice runs because I accidentally hit an enemy with the aoe of one of those effects (even sparkcrackers); remember that this has Skaen's challenge with Expert mode on so even with a torch you might not have visibility of where you need to lure enemies to (and thus what you're targeting). Fireball (or any other larger AoE) would be worse. Traps are basically guaranteed not to aggro enemies because they don't walk onto the trap, just up to it (except for Searing Seal). 2. Using any AL 2 (repulsing seal) or AL 5 spell is basically a non-starter. You almost always want both withdraws available at the start of the fight (either as insurance or because that's the way for this fight you need to de-aggro), and at least one Shadowing Beyond (sometimes more). I learned this the hard way. (This feeds back into the "flakiness" aspect of tactician brilliant - sometimes Shadowing Beyond is good enough, sometimes you need to Withdraw, and sometimes you don't know you need to withdraw until after you've shadowed beyond.) Maybe some of the other spell levels would've been OK, though for myself frankly every single spell I picked up was important up until the end game (where most things are irrelevant compared to just buffing Scordeo's Edge), so I didn't really have a spare spell to pick up just for luring.

Not validated yet, but at this point it was so much work I'm just happy to be done. I don't know how other people went about it, but the way I did it was to break the run up into small, easily-rehearsable sections, and run a character in parallel to my real run so I could practice each section before doing it with my real character. It was a hell of a lot of work (I probably in aggregate did the ultimate many times over), and it required a massive amount of note-taking, down to all relevant dialogue choices: If I were to go back in time, I don't know if I'd do it this way again. On the other hand, this was my 23rd attempt (though only the 3rd since I started this method), and I'm not sure I would have had the time or patience to start over from scratch every time I messed up, versus simply mindlessly rehearsing each section until I had it down pat. edit: if you're actually watching, i recommend clicking through to youtube - i have comments on most of the later section that let you jump past the buffing sections (of which there are a lot).

Check mark means I completed it edit: The final video is finishing uploading, I'll have playlist shared soon. At this point I don't even care if it gets validated or not, I'm just glad I finally finished it.