thelee

so the way i recall it happening a few hours ago is that the tooltip number that shows up in combat log upon landing an effect is unaffected. it doesn't show the effect of takedown combo. what i did notice was the red numbers; i was about to give up, but it was actually the jump on cleansing flame (my first test) that clued me in, because the jump to a random other enemy did way less red number damage. so the numbers appearing above the enemy's head going up dramatically (exactly 2x (+100%) in my tests for something like concelhaut's corrosive siphon, a little bit less than 2x with something like cleansing flame - i assume stacking rules with might since i had different characters doing the attacks). i didn't exhaustively test everything DoT because I assumed once I had a few tests of each type of DoT effect that everything else is pretty consistent, but I did make sure to pay attention to when Takedown Combo was up and when it was not to prove that it specifically was ramping up damage (Concelhaut's Corrosive Skin was helpful here because of the fact that it ticked every second, making it extremely obvious when it was benefiting from extra damage and when it wasn't).

same here, lol. itinerant was like one of my first ever class in 1.0. this time i'm going to do it right

So this may be a change in recent patches (5.0 or so), but I just did some testing (because I was curious if the weird DoT for Cleansing Flame functioned differently), and while Takedown Combo isn't consumed by DoTs, it does affect DoTs while active. I tested both the normal kind of DoTs and also the weird Cleansing Flame/Disintegrate/Wounding Shot style DoT. It absolutely does affect DoTs. Effects like Chill Fog or beam spells are the definite loser here, because they'll consume the Takedown Combo and only affect one tick. But seriously: wow. I've literally never before seen a tick for like 120 damage before, but I was absolutely ticking for that much with Cleansing Flame. As soon as Takedown Combo would wear off, the dot damage would drop down dramatically. Gonna really enjoy an itinerant now. The real winners are high-impact short duration DoTs like Cleaning Flame or (to a lesser extent) Disintegrate, and Concelhaut's Corrosive Skin - because unlike other DoTs this one ticks every second, which gives you a lot of ticks at essentially double damage (whereas otherwise if combo wears off before the next tick, you don't get pro-rated the extra damage on the tick that happens after combo wears off). edit - the weird interaction here with takedown combo is if you do affect them with a DoT (or multiple DoTs) you definitely don't want to touch that enemy until takedown combo wears off, because then the combo +100% effect will wear off too quickly to get much benefit out of it. And ironically depending on how the spell is structured, spells that do initial damage followed by a DoT may underperform, because the initial hit will eat up the takedown combo and then the remaining DoT won't benefit (so spells that do most of their damage up front will be OK but spells that do most of their damage as follow up will suffer)

I had actually just been wondering about a related interaction for an itinerant I'd been thinking about rolling (I need a Deadfire party to play for fun just to break up the ultimate slog). How do DoTs interact with Takedown Combo? I know that dot ticks don't consume it, but does the initial attack roll consume it (essentially wasting it on the first tick only)?. I do know that there are a limited number of spells (Disintegrate, Cleansing Flame... Wounding Shot?) that instead of specifying X damage for Y ticks does a total X damage over Y ticks. Does the whole damage get boosted by Takedown Combo in those cases? Would be a pretty nice interaction with Disintegrate then.

can't tell if that 'lösh' was intentional, but i found it humorous nonetheless. only problem with enduring dance (my original idea as well) is that it won't stack with hunter's claw, whereas the +5 PER/25% hit to crit from tactical barragedisciplined strikes would. enduring dance would add more consistency, but in practice i didn't find it too hard to rest and ramp up hunter's claw with maia whenever I expected to run into a consistent batch of enemies (edit - though actually would be a little bit more annoying in a multiclass just because of fewer ranger resources per fight). if consistency is desired, adding in a priest for devotions might be better. hard to say no to lightning strikes (or whatabout swift flurry? does that work with ranged? you'd be critting left and right) though.

the problem with that logic is that the inverse doesn't work - foe/friend spells means the caster has no ability to control the targeting. and yet invisible people would be able to dodge that completely. personally i wouldn't think about the in-universe logic to that too hard, mostly as artifacts of the gameplay mechanics. Invisibility (including the stealth variety) is just such a really bizarre and inconsistently implemented mechanic.

you might be mistaking it for wizard's double, which is 1 hit or crit. speaking of my previous post - salvation of time extends Escape pretty obscenely. when your ~10s (with lots of int and PL scaling) short-term +50 deflection turns into 30-50s (one or two priests) you become pretty hardy. i love SoT in these kinds of glass cannon setups.

ranger/fighter probably. you miss out on stunning shots from ranger, but you still get driving flight and all the acc bonuses. Mixing in a fighter lets you get tactical barrage (boeroer rightly corrects this as disciplined strikes), which gives you 25% hit-to-crit and +5 additional perception (accuracy). at that point with all ranger bonuses active even on upscaling PotD you would be doing mostly crits against enemies (up to +50 accuracy from ranger, +5 perception, and then the remaining hit chance you have 25% of it converts to crits). if you want to mix in subclasses, a sharpshooter/devoted might do even better. Sharpshooter gives you hit-to-crit at range; fighter's Armored Grace can mitigate the sharpshooter's recovery penalty when wearing light or better armor (doesn't do anything for you if you're wearing cloth). In addition, Devoted mitigates PEN concerns and you get a +25% crit damage bonus, which would be rather sizable with such a huge crit rate. while you don't get a rogue out of any of that, you can pick up the Stalking Cloak mid-game and stun enemies every time you come out of invisibility. problem with backstab is that you have to be pretty close to trigger backstab, so unless you're real good about staying in range you would squander that aspect of being rogue or part rogue. side note: it's a little annoying that everything wael-related is so inconsistent. Eye of Wael is a scepter, but priest of wael's spiritual weapon is a rod. Priest of Wael's spiritual weapon's lash is shock, but the Symbol of Wael spell does frost damage. Or maybe that's not inconsistent, it's intentional and part of the MysTeRy oF WaEl.

no one mentioned beckoner/priest? 8x animated weapons + spark the souls of the righteous = mayhem. It would also be a nightmare to micro. though at that point, I'm not sure you even need to do anything other than block off the enemies with your weapons and let a bajillion overlapping sparks happen. true you can do this with two single class characters, but it constantly frustrates me that spark the souls is just out of reach of a celebrant multiclass. this is a derangedly specific interaction. shouldn't normally come up though, since it would be impossible to cast salvation of time on your self and have vanishing strikes. i wonder if targeting yourself is treated the same in-game as a self-cast (e.g. like drinking a potion or casting Mirror Image) which bypasses untargetability? If you're including Arkemyr's (Brilliant) Departure, though, you should also include Shadow Form from those slippers. Only Vanishing Strike would really let you do anything useful with that extended invisibility though (ark and shadow form only let you buff without breaking invis, sorta like stealth).

when I'm finally finished moving I should be able to resume progress again. I think it's pretty straight-forward at this point, but there's one tricky stealth section and a couple of places where RNG messed up my practice run. Other than that though, hopefully I'll be on the plaque soon. and if this run botches, all my notes are written down (plus I have the videos I've recorded so far) so it should be easy (if annoyingly tedious) to just go back and go through it again.

Salvation of Time. After being really kind of lame in PoE1, Salvation of Time in Deadfire really tickles my metagaming brain in a satisfying way.

So anyone know if @Tenray ever got credit for either of their attempts? I've been moving so haven't had time to make much progress.

oh yeah, i forgot about that - i think 1000g reward. i'm so obsessive about not letting my hired companions fall behind that i never even consider doing that first. probably originally intentional - obs was a lot more deliberate with the game economy this time around (at least up until the lewt-bomb of doing e.g. FS kinda wipes that out)

typically I only have money for two custom companions at the moment I arrive i Port Maje, and that's with hiring level 1 adventurers (only 250g). You can probably scrounge up a bit after some questing on the main island (though level 1 adventurers would be falling further behind at that point). with the gold blessing you can obviously get a whole lot more/higher level.

I don't know if people know, but if you have mid-teens mechanics or stealth, 14 dex and 8 athletics, you can cross the bridge no problem without any specific class support or without burning any time. (edit: the dialogue tree would go -> examine, use stealth/mechancis, carefully cross the bridge (new option appears after examining the bridge with enough skill), and then you're done (you just click through a dex and athletics check).) I ended up manually looking through the game conversation files for this encounter because this encounters is so poorly documented and could've been a dealbreaker/huge-waste-of-time for my tactician/skaen (who does not have access to web or the druid spells). edit 2 - though honestly it's not that big a deal to brute force your way through the bridge with insufficient dex/athletics, so long as you don't have any injuries (iirc you can accumulate up to three just from a "successful" crossing). you can always quaff a luminous adra potion after, or leave them in place if you have rekvu's.

as a perpetual waelite, I found that extremely annoying in PoE1 - some wael-only options were marked as "honest". Sometimes I think the writers just forgot what they were doing.

i think it was kilay just messing around, because they were also trying to add dispositions to pallegina's paladin class. either way, xoti's disposition at last check is not actively checked by the game, so I don't think we can take any gaun dispositions (if they do exist) as canon.

that's a fair observation. i think in that sense giftbearers are probably the best representation of her "church" per se, which does seem to be a bit more [shady, benevolent]+ which is an odd combination. it does raise the issue of what happens when there are multiple churches/aspects/observations, though... you'd think gaun should have different dispositions that eothas because of that. (though in terms of in-game mechanics, xoti doesn't have any dispositions.)

no way ondra is benevolent, she keeps lies if it benefits her and she literally committed a crime against humanity. i'd say she's more calculating and serious: +[rational, shady], -[honest, clever]. i mean, when in any dialogue with her does she crack a joke or enjoy one of yours? as for galawain, not being actively benevolent is not the same thing as hating benevolence. the guy thinks survival of the fittest is the best way to improve everyone, and in poe1 he's part of the faction that wants you to give the souls to the benefit of the kith (also an option in SSS). he's also not cruel, in the sense that nature isn't cruel, it's just uncaring. i'd also say he's not that clever or fun-loving. i'd say +[aggressive, passionate] and -[diplomatic, stoic]

that first ultimate thread is like an entire novel unto itself at this point

wow, i never realized they kept upgrading themselves. i always ended up with watcher upgrades that were a mix of inspirations, instead of one that just kept getting stronger. even if it's per-rest, i had so much time at the end that having a foolproof brilliant buff as backup would've been nice.

wait what?? am i a moron and missed something obvious?

It's a shame, I wonder what's up? What did you go with for priest/rogue? Still Skaen? Or maybe not because now rogue gives you lots of invisibility options? (I'm assuming this build is also brilliant cloak-dependent.) Is Smoke Veil decent or is the duration too short compared to just picking up Shadowing Beyond? I have to imagine that given that brilliant+bdd based strategies keep you at approximately 1 health for entire fights that Streetfighter would be an incredible pick, even with scordeo's buff in tow. edit - dang, was gonna try to DM @jesawyer to get some attention on your run, but his privacy settings are locked down a bit. (i was going to tweet, but an earlier tweet-response I got from @jesawyer about the ultimate got deleted, so I think they're trying to avoid saying much publicly about the ultimate runs.)

i didn't watch that part until just now, though i did end up doing that for the sigils in auranic. my practice run ended up clearing with tons of time to spare (14 days). meticulous notes with every consumable and path plotted out and fight strategies that are pretty RNG-proof. hopefully in a couple weeks i'll also be getting validated. the only thing i'm particularly worried about is bad RNG with scordeo's (fortunately I have lots of coping strategies, it'll just add some time) or a game-breaking soft lock that happened once to my practice character against the ukaizo dragon. also - holy hell with 4 megabosses down, the ukaizo dragon is super tanky, mostly because of stupidly high AR.

lol, yeah i had a bit of tunnel vision. literally like 30 minutes ago, I was like "wait I got several scrolls of maelstrom from FS". a few high level scrolls + holy fire wiped most everything out and then i could just keep concelhaut mule kicked until they died. i forgot that most of bekarna's observatory targets a much lower level and everyone has pretty low defenses and health compared to some other areas even with upscaling.