thelee

Believe it or not, that's how it works. It was a conscious game design choice so that players didn't have FOMO if they picked up an interesting new weapon - short of niche situations that the modal would've been used for, every one can use the weapon as well as any other. It also means it doesn't "prescribe" certain build approaches - people who wanted to make battlemage types in poe1 had to accept they were always going to be a bit crappier in terms of landing hits (It was already a big deal in poe1 backer beta when everyone had separate melee/ranged accuracy and rangers had crappy melee accuracy - people got pretty pissed about being "forced" into playing a ranged ranger or a melee rogue, so the designers scrapped the separate melee/ranged accuracy. taken to its logical conclusion, the designers scrapped any differentiation in accuracy). In PoE1, martial and caster classes were differentiated in part by different starting accuracy/defenses (and casters had special caster accuracy for spells). In Deadfire, martial and caster classes are differentiated moreso by (optional or automatic) passive abilities: e.g. Fighter's Confident Aim, Barbarian Carnage or Thick Skin, Rogue Sneak Attack or Dirty Fighting, etc. Casters rarely have passives that actively boost their auto-attacking (cipher and chanter are sort of hybrid classes so they get some passives [chants for chanter]) which in the end tends to make martial classes better suited for grindy auto attacking. The flip side is that casters tend to have way more active abilities to use (monks being an exception). Do note that classes are still differentiated by health and defenses (mostly non-deflection). So there's still a rough guideline on how you should be using the classes; the tankier classes are therefore still barbarian (extremely high health) and fighter (only class with a bonus to deflection). Nope No, that's a deliberate tradeoff for all multiclasses - you lose out on power level and high level abilities in exchange for diversity and more abilities. Sometimes this tradeoff is hardly a tradeoff, because multiclasses can sometimes create insanely synergistic outcomes. A mindstalker (cipher/rogue) for example gets so much extra weapon damage from sneak attack that you end up supercharging your focus generation.

If people are wanting to critique TOW for having "fetch quests" they should go back to the 90s cRPGs (or just play some MMORPGs or "rpg-like" grindy games) to find out what "fetch quests" were/are really like and why people hate them and use them perjoratively. Incredibly low-value, no-story, no-narrative, low-impact, low-reward, "go pick up this random item or X random items" from an unclear location or unclear enemy. Back when I first started hearing the phrase a lot it was in BG, they were literally filler (admitted as such by bioware) because they didn't have enough content going on (BGEE makes it better because they updated the journal tracking into something semi-modern so you don't have to dig through random journal updates just to find out that you were supposed to not sell that random bottle of wine you found in that house). BG2 still objectively had "fetch quests" in that you had to go to locations and retrieve something, but bioware pretty much solved most of the "fetch quest" criticism because they interweaved with the main story, had reactivity, developed your companions, meaningful outcomes or rewards, had something interesting going on, etc. You could say "boy that just sounds like fetch quests with extra steps" but in terms of cRPGS it's those "extra steps" that make all the difference. edit - also for some of the comparisons I see to borderlands for aesthetics (and the marauders running at you in TOW do seem very borderlands-y), the borderlands franchise has tons of fetch quests, and some of them in an extremely grindy capacity. No, "random voice over that chimes in after you collect X out of Y widgets or animal body parts" doesn't count as "interesting quest design" to me.

Oh yeah, this is a solid combo. You can also use soul ignition as a weaker version of this combo early on, so it's not just a late game interaction. As a side note, cipher DoTs work well predators sense (though with takedown combo you don't want your pet attacking and dispelling the combo). If you're going for a melee cipher/ranger setup you could also maybe get some mileage out of soul annihilation as a sort of finisher with takedown combo.

fakc is exaggerating, or is leaning way too hard on companions without good personality or leadership skills. as for your point, i'm playing on hard (life is too busy for supernova's limited saving) with high charm and lots of investment in leadership, and my companions roflstomp most everything (and i get lots of XP from the +50% companion kill XP perk). however, if there's a big enemy (a mega raptidon/raptidon colossus) or if it's a prolonged fight and i'm slow on the inhaler, companions will still go down. so i think companions could easily be effective without as much of an investment, just not as much of a roflstomp (as would be expected since you'd be leaning on yourself more). but yeah, the supernova interaction seems unbalanced to me. A couple hits from a mega raptidon is enough to knock even my beefier companions out on hard, and I would be ragequitting the game if that meant I permanently lost a companion or lost a half hour's worth of gameplay to reload a save.

I don't know what the bug reporting practice here is (mostly used to reporting PoE or Deadfire bugs), but this was 100% reproducible for me: 1. when to phineas's lab to get shrink ray 2. first time in phineas's lab. If at any point I open my inventory, game crashes. That's it. I eventually figured out to avoid opening my inventory (had to suppress the urge to examine the shrink ray) to get in and out, and this issue has only ever happened in phineas's lab.

I just want to add that with text-size considerations, I also hope this includes icons. On my big screen TV not only can text be hard to read, but it is extremely hard to differentiate between the various icons for status effects and debuffs.

Welcome! Monks can be wandering types (like Zahua in poe1, and "Wanderer" is literally one of the multiclass types), and what better way to wander than by boat?

What in your opinion was misguided about FS? And I agree with Bridge Ablaze. I can count only a handful of times where a story beat in a game just really stunned me, and Bridge Ablaze is one of them (some of the others are also Planescape Torment for me). Both from a writing perspective (fleshing out and humanizing an aspect of lore that I never expected to have/want fleshed out) and just from an art direction perspective.

that's interesting! i hadn't even thought of that. how would this work in turn based? Does the game wait for eld nary to finish? or would you just sit and wait with your next character until eld nary finishes. either way, that solves the problem pretty effectively and would make for a great turn-based build, imo. just make sure to have sasha's singing scimitar or blightheart so you don't have to wait 6 turns to cast another eld nary

maybe it's just me, but i haven't had a great time mixing ciphers in with ranged builds - the dps output is much lower than melee (not to mention pierce is the most common immunity, which eliminates a huge chunk of ranged weapons in some fights), and especially so for rangers where a lot of your dps is supposed to come from your pet (you don't get credit for damage your pet does for focus gen). this is a worse problem for ascendant where you really want to hit max focus as often as possible. in addition, due to how your focus pool works, multiclassing an ascendant isn't really effective unless you have a priest backup. i know you said you don't care too much about min-maxing, but I think this is a particularly significant gimp of the cipher: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/cipher full quote for context, last paragraph is most important (emphasis added): A ranger won't get enough of a huge boost in dealing weapon damage I think to make the significantly reduced ascendant efficiency worth it, IMO. Have you considered psion or beguiler? A ranger will be better than others in avoiding damage (good for psion) and for spam interrupt it won't matter as much that you'll be whacking your pet by accident.

Mostly I found the list useful in the early days where the wiki was in a real sorry shape, and this and ansalon's other tier lists were a good way to see alot of unique weapons and their basic effects broken down in one page. That being said, I do agree with Blunderboss in that the metagame for Deadfire is such that most weapons don't really fall into a neat "tier" list due to the variety of interactions and builds, and was (sorry) obviously built by someone new-ish to the game and not fully aware of certain mechanics or challenges in combat. It's funny, looking at this list now, I'm astonished that Street Sweeper is in the trash category, as it's the one weapon I am guaranteed to always want to pick up in any normal run. Neriscyrlas pulled off a Llengrath's Safeguard? Porokoa did another Robust? A few whacks and it's gone for good. I even sometimes don't bother to enchant one way or the other, because having both a -5 debuff and -5 buff effect means I can swap to whacking allies who are hit with an insane attack or debuff (disintegrate, stuck in wall of many colors). Given how good it is at -5s (-10s with enchants), it's crazy to me that this was considered trash tier even back when it was -10s (-20s with enchants), which was stupidly good.

Oh thank God, I thought I had to manually keep reslotting similar effects. Thanks!

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)