thelee

i haven't tested it again recently, but since they introduced the revised lash it's always listed a fixed +20% lash, and it's never actually done that. companions use your watcher's dispositions but obsidian-created npcs don't have any favored or disfavored dispositions (same with pallegina and vatnir) so that they can go into any party and be equally mediocre. also when you're computing lash % you have to pay attention to rounding and penetration. lashes do their own PEN check, so be absolutely sure there are no confounding variables. (xoti should have a 25% lash) edit - i've never actually tested xoti's spiritual weapon (i've used all PC-available spiritual weapon, but not xoti or vatnir, go figure), so it's also possible that xoti's spiritual is buggy and might not have any disposition scaling (not even the neutral +5% base bonus). edit 2 - if i have some time i'll do some tests tonight, in a separate game. (can't do it in my cheatyface run because magran's makes it impossible to evaluate combat log)

good to know going forward because i was getting sloppy with my act 1 time because i didn't think it mattered.

"You only have 3 days, 26 hours to finish Port Maje. You have 25 days to complete Hasongo. You have 26 days to complete Ashen Maw, and a similar amount of time to get to Ukaizo. This essentially limits your ability to explore, and really discourages you from searching abandoned settlements or burial grounds out on the world map. The time constraint is tight for the first act, but a little looser for successive acts (though not loose enough to go off and do all the DLC, at least until the final act). You can save some time and level up a bit by frontloading all the Nekataka quests in Act II (before going to Hasongo) since it only costs you a couple hours to go from district to district (versus days to travel on the map). This challenge also has the effect of requiring you to be much more deliberate about resting." i might have gotten this slightly wrong in my guide - in all my recent runs I have 27 days to complete Hasongo. I must've measured from getting the boat instead of from getting Oderisi's notes, because act 2 timer starts in the latter, even though you have no options to do anything other than go get your boat. do note that in practice the mandatory sailing just to get to crit path quest points eats up a good chunk of the time for all acts (one should try to invest in making their ship real fast). my discussion of all the challenges (except for the most recent one, the ultimate): https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/magrans-fires

that's extremely useful. all my successful de-aggro involves shadowing beyond back to where i engaged, but 150ft (~45m? i'm US but am used to all in-game measurements in meters) seems like a huge range that would basically cover many maps. i think shadowing beyond/untargetability--if there are no other targets for enemies to latch onto--removes all "not_friendly_units" from being in combat, so the third bullet point isn't even checked any more. that being said, as mentioned before there have been times with cheatyface that i can't get brilliant in the middle of combat despite apparently having de-aggroed enemies, and i wonder if there's a particular interaction with those three conditions.

what probably happens in turn-based mode is that DoTs and debuffs on a character don't progress don't advance until a character's turn. All DoTs do damage upon initial application as well. If the duration is not a multiple of 3, the last tick is a "partial" damage tick (so if you have a 1.5s duration tick left, it only does half the normal 3s tick damage). so maybe what's happening is that even with seconds->turn rounding, the game internally tracks how many ticks (including fractional ticks) of damage a dot does, and applies it correctly behind the scenes, which is why you might see a reduced damage tick at end of turn. like you say, this might have some odd interactions with TB mode.

if you de-aggro all the enemies in a fight, and you don't have a perception affliction/aren't flanked, that fulfills tactician's requirements to be brilliant: no one in your party is flanked, and all enemies are flanked (except there are no enemies, so this last part doesn't matter).

problem with temporal cocoon is that it doesn't block any damage over time effects. so while it's doable, it's riskier than withdraw, which both heals and blocks most damage.

the skaen priest is solely there for the infinite withdraw. consider me in the boat that will want to try an infinite withdraw approach until i can see that it's not viable (though dunehunter just gave me a big clue into a good priest-friendly approach) simply because it would erase a lot of the RNG involved in a higher-dps, finite withdraw build like SC monk or tactician/troubadour.

lololol dual wielding skaen spiritual weapons, with avenging storm, is like 4 attacks per second, combined with deadeye and potion of impediment that is an expected 1.6 interrupts per second (who even needs mule kick at that point?), not to mention very rapid, abydon-proof damage. if this ends up working you're going to get 90% of the credit simply just for bringing it to my attention. the hardest part will just be keeping spiritual ally uptime without losing vela withdraw uptime. (and the second hardest part will just be creating an efficient path to pick up scordeo's in the real version of the run)

never really used the weapon - what's the cheese? edit: lol never mind i found an old video on the forums. that in itself can be a combined cheese with avenging storm. does it seriously remove any recovery, even in 5.0?

hm, i just discovered that avenging storm can be extended by salvation of time. i'm not sure it'll help enough, but something to consider for another night of testing. any weapons that can cheese with avenging storm particularly well?

doesn't matter. same trick as tactician. run in, shadowing beyond out, with a withdrawn vela, only instead of getting brilliant automatically you keep wall of flaming yourself until you get brilliant. upon further thought might not work as well because there's the very real possibility that once vela pops back out she just keeps walking into your wall of fire. *sigh* this is rough

nope. for my specific example, blood mage can blood sacrifice the fire wall back.

another class for consideration - blood mage + skaen. wall of flame might be an easier way to try to trigger the brilliant cloak, and i think bloodmage has pretty good megaboss options (crushing doom/slicken spam hauani o whe and most bosses, not so sure about bosses that can't be interrupted though, but maybe it doesn't matter in those other cases if you or vela can't die).

after spending all my spare evening with tactician + skaen against hauani o whe i'm pretty demoralized about its prospects. it just doesn't DPS enough. even with infinite withdraw, and constant uptime on brilliant by mule kicking hauani o whe (which also requires a boreal dwarf, gauntlets of reliability, potion of perfect aim, helm of hte white void, conqueror stance, disciplined strikes to actually land mule kick against 189 fort defense), and even with pre-buffing basically an entire-in-game day to get 1000+ duration on all my buffs, once i engage hauani o whe it's a one-way ticket to loserville, population: me. i haven't even been able to get it below healthy, much less get an opportunity to deal with its splits. the cleansing effect is too strong, too quick, and even with non-stop mule kicks (which hurts dps because i'm constantly graze-ing against such a huge fort defense), potion of deadeye, and potion of impediment, i can't really make that much of a dent in its ability to whack me and take -10s off my buffs every few seconds. maybe i'm just missing some good strat for face-tanking it. also - vela really sucks in this fight. even with infinite withdraw, if i let her pop out for more than a few seconds, over a long enough fight there's a good chance she gets hit by symbiote, and will terrified-walk around, generating oozes, which murders my ability to keep up brilliant for a while. i imagine this might also be a nightmare for an sc monk, who will not have as many withdraws, but maybe blade turning + resonant touch + wotw stunlock will be fast enough that it's less of a concern. i'm down, but not out. i have a few more ideas i'm willing to try before giving up on tactician + skaen and going back to trying with monk (or even troubadour).

i think you misread marigold's comment. the community is narrowing down on SC monk because WotW and Resonant Touch. edit: oh i guess paladin doesn't have regen resources. yeah, someone else tried herald and found that the paladin side really stunk with woedica's challenge on.

Note that for TB mode durations of less than 6s round up to 1 round, whereas all other durations round down. This means that there are some weird breakpoints and it is in fact extremely hard to get short duration effects (like linger) to last 2 rounds (because you have to get to 12 second duration). In particular int adjusts off base 3s linger, and troubadour is an additive 1.5s (50%) bonus off that base. To get to 12 seconds you'd need a separate, whopping +250% duration bonus on top of troubadour. For all intents and purposes the extra linger is pointless in turnbased. Come, come ticks for damage every 3 seconds so it would be one per half round. I think how it's handled in game is an implementation detail. For example if you enable brisk recitation, it means your chants only take half a round to sing and in practice means in tb mode two phrases per your turn (does not wait until enemy turn, for example).

vela will also stealth, but it's moot because enemies don't care (or even check) for her stealth level. enemies don't even care about her existence unless you have aggro-ed them, really (which is how the withdraw + shadowing beyond + tactician combo works so well). in my earlier posted youtube video starting at 35:20 (embedded again here directly to that time) you can see me sneaking past the enemies with 5 stealth with vela in tow

i think there's a significant overestimation of the availability and underestimation of the necessity of withdraw on the SC monk path. I could be wrong (i haven't actually tried act 2 or beyond yet, merely doing a lot of critical path mapping and testing/preplanning), but a) withdraw doesn't last nearly as long as you think, even in fights you are wrecking b) scrolls of withdraw aren't nearly as common as you think, especially since you can't just spam rest to refresh vendor supplies (recall your last run of pillars, how many scrolls of withdraw did you actually find? because you probably need tens of them unless you want to leave a lot of fights to the RNG gods. i don't remember finding that much) edit: i agree though that of the possible viable builds, monk is definitely a strong candidate. just personally i am erring on the side of low-risk, and to me infinite withdraw (or vela with infinite bdd+salvation) and low dps is much lower risk than finite withdraw with very fast dps. i think anyone attempting the ultimate should just go with what they feel is the best option, because we won't truly know what's possible until someone actually does it.

hm, i haven't tested it specifically, but Galawain's will sometimes add a durationless (e.g. tactician-style) tier-3 inspiration on beasts, and at least pre-5.0 the interaction was weird. if I remember correctly, it won't prevent you from applying an affliction, they'll just sort of co-exist, which is extremely weird. on occasion i actually managed to dispel the "permanent" tier 3 inspiration, but wasn't able to reproduce this consistently or have this happen more than a couple of times. edit: now that i think about it, post-5.0 i had a few early ultimate attempts with a forbidden fist monk, and enfeebled I could use to prevent robust boars from being immortal in the opening part of port maje island (probably the worst early game RNG you can get for an ultimate run is to have the boars have Robust on them). the enfeebled didn't dispel the robust, both effects just co-existed and the enfeebled just blocked the robust healing until the enfeebled wore off. my hypothesis is that something similar will happen: you'll still have brilliant, and a confuse/charm/dominate effect will also simultaneously affect your character. it will dispel any "normal" int inspiration.

wow, i didn't know that. good to know. worth pointing out though that specifically my level 4 tinny xix had 5 stealth and could sneak past the whisps and phantoms before Oderisi without filling up even half of the yellow circle, whereas my level 20 cheatyface had 6 stealth spent literally an hour trying to sneak past and could not. i eventually gave up and just did the brilliant trick to kill them all manually. level scaling is definitely a factor here for stealth.

I was testing with a cheaty tactician+skaen that i consoled to level 20 and came up with several findings: - Stealth success is based, in part, on enemy level. I was pulling my hair out wondering why my level 20 cheatyface couldn't sneak past the wisps and spirits in the engwithan digsite right before oderisi, but my level 4 Tinny XIX had no problem (I even consulted my own youtube video in case I forgot some critical pathing), and I eventually figured out that despite the fact that cheatyface had a slightly higher stealth (6 vs 5) the enemies had all level scaled up +4 levels, making it basically impossible to stealth past them. I'm not quite sure what to do with this information yet, but probably means that investing in stealth and leveling up needs to be very deliberate so you don't unintentionally make act 2 or 3 impossible due to upwards level scaling. - the de-aggro brilliant trigger doesn't seem to work 100% if done in the middle of combat. i need to do more tests (lest this happen during a a real run), but i don't have a functional theory as to what sometimes causes it to not work in the middle of combat versus the start (which has a 100% success rate). if there's some mechanic that doesn't let you reset in the middle of a fight, it could spell doom against arcane dampeners and auranic, because you basically need to do that to dodge having all you and vela's life-saving buffs suppressed/cleansed. - creating an AI script that just casts salvation of time with 0 cooldown and adjusting combat speed to fast makes buffing real easy. probably i'll get a stopwatch and set a specific time on my stopwatch to keep buffing based on cheatyface's tests, so i can replicate buffing perfectly when wael's challenge is back on. - with stealth you can start combat just at the edge of enemy detection, which means that you can stay just outside the enemy detection rate and buff yourself and vela. i mentioned this possibility before, but so long as you aren't surprised by enemies, it's easy to position yourself with vela to do this with 100% success. (you can even use halt to ensure vela stays well out of detection range so that you can start combat, and then run back to withdraw/sahdowing beyond and guarantee everyone stays out of range) - also, this is probably no surprise to people who played around a lot with tacticians before, but i seriously understimated just how friggin good a tactician is 1 v 1 (or even 1 v 2 with skaen spiritual ally) - mule kick basically guarantees 100% brilliant uptime due to disorient. it's making me feel a lot better about bosses and hauani o whe's early parts, because even if expert mode + magran challenge makes it really hard to actually interrupt an ability and get a resource refunded, the constant brilliant uptime plus time spent being knocked up and prone from mule kick is almost as good. With WotEP this could be fantastic. - brilliant trigger is great, but you have to be careful that you always have a spare level 2 and level 5 spell cast available. this might seem like a no-brainer, but with cheatyface i keep making errors (still not used to woedica's challenge) where I use level 2 or level 5 abilities in combat without letting htem get restored and in the next fight i'm missing a critical component of the combo. it's a shame because searing seal on AL5 is extremely useful, but if you're not careful (wael makes it harder to know how many AL5 casts you have) you can end combat before an in-combat brilliant has a chance to restore at least one AL5 cast. you can rest but you don't really want to rest unless you absolutely have to.

1. i believe it does 2. no, enemies still attack. 3. afaict, confusion doesn't change targeting limitations, it only changes the foe/friendly-friendliness of aoe or bounce. 4. sure, any hard CC could help protect vela. but for context, even at level 20 some low level wisps can kill vela pretty quickly. also, IME when i was doing my hylea run, the bulk of vela deaths were due to two cases: a) incidental AoE (this was exacerbated by the no-level-scaling bug at the time) which a lot of hard CC is not going to help you with and b) the AI script of many rogues and rogue-likes who, when reduced to bloodied, will Escape or Shadowing Beyond or Shadow Step behind the front line (you) to go after the weakest character (Vela) - and unlike for you the player, Shadowing Beyond's untargetability doesn't go away when they make an attack - so hard CC won't help here unless you have 100% uptime from right before bloodied to death on any and all rogue-likes (including skeletons, risen, xaurip plaguestrikers, kith rogue-types, etc.) this is just to say that "enemies lumbering over to attack vela with lots of warning" was an extreme minority of cases - running forth at the start of combat to be the front line was generally good enough to keep enemies uninterested in vela. it was the out-of-nowhere stuff (there were some BoW enemy aoes that I was surprised to learn actually did damage in addition to afflictions, for example; the damage was so minor it was irrelevant to my party but extremely lethal to vela after a couple casts) that would kill vela. (Escape/Shadowing Beyond/Shadow Step is extremely hard to disrupt even when you don't have expert mode on... and their AI will keep making them attempt it until they run out of rogue resources.)

it sometimes works with melee abilities that do full attack so long as you have a melee weapon combined. i think that's the magic with WotW and various weapon interactions. i thought that's what you were talking about with mule kick back when i didn't realize you were talking about the weapon proc (but mule kick is a primary attack so many levels of my mistake). still would work with the shroud of phantasm and using those skeletons to attack yourself first (before using them to trigger a bajillion chill fogs, but like i said boy is it tedious to get that brilliant trigger in the first place.

what i was going to try (when i have an evening free to experiment) was for hauani o whe to pre-buff a lot (a lot a lot, because of the small cleansing effect on each hit), and then use grouping/searing seal (because the ooze only resists perception afflictions) to try to trigger brilliant during combat, so i can spam mule kicks as needed (which will also flank), clear out if i need to interrupt two oozes at the same time. having storm of holy fire active via brilliant spamming (or scrolls of tornado) to help dps down greater/lesser oozes since they spam merge when they appear. since the tactician auto-restore resource upon successful interrupt works less well with Expert mode on because it's much, much harder to correctly time ability interrupts, actively having brilliant on somehow would help a lot.