thelee

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.

Update:

one of my very early builds with a berathian + ghost heart itinerant. A priest of berath gets a lot of extra DoTs, which synergizes with ranger's predator's sense. (flavor-wise it seems to work pretty well to have a "ghost pet" as a priest of berath) since then, the ranger part has gotten better with new abilities and balance changes, and we recently figured out that takedown combo (from ranger) will boost DoT damage, so long as the combo happens after the DoT lands, and the berathian, in addition to having lots of DoTs, also has Cleansing Flame, which is a short-duration-high-damage DoT that would benefit a lot from takedown combo.

Yeah, this is the reason why even effects that trigger all the time nevertheless has a description that is "chance of X" or, if they were feeling bold, "high chance of X". Who knows if in some balance patch they need to knock it down from 100% to 80% without needing to an entire localization pass. (I was recently privy to some budget details of a (non-game) translation effort needed for a tech project also based in California and even for one language on a small scale it was literally thousands of dollars. So yeah, translations don't come cheap.)

consider playing as a paladin order or a priest subclass that has favored dispositions that forces you into things you might not normally do. bleakwalker, steel garrote, skaen, and woedica, for example, both have cruel as a favored disposition. (bleakwalkers also have aggressive, for extra "fun" - you might end up getting into lots of extra fights). start from there and do a build-around in terms of race and background. i focused on cruel because cruel path is probably under-explored by most players, and being forced to be cruel for gameplay purposes leads to some interesting new outcomes.

I think if the game designers were willing to be a bit less "systematic" they could front-load the weapon proficiencies a bit more earlier on, maybe like 1-3-6-9 and then that's it. Picking up a weapon proficiency at level 16 or 20 is virtually pointless, because by then you probably already have figured out what weapons your characters are using, and you've probably already seen most of the content in the game. Also, count me in the club that was disappointed early on to learn about how stacking rules mean that the +2 PEN from modals doesn't stack with with Tenacious/Energized or the Potion of Piercing Strikes, as well as dagger's +10 deflection for defensive magic. It makes the Mace's -1 AR modal and wand/hatchet's -10 accuracy a bit better by comparison. Though in general, I rarely have enough coverage of Tenacious/Energized/Piercing Strikes to make those modals completely redundant.

do you have AI on aloth enabled? maybe an AI script is bad.

do you have some other effect that is causing damage to aloth? one of the effects of that weapon is that spell hits have a chance to charm their target. if there's some weird (spell) effect on aloth that is causing that damage, it could also charm him (though it should also be turning him into a pig).

wow, I've only ever recruited wizards from pubs or as companions (fassina or aloth), so I've never noticed arcane assault before. It can't be completely new - the upgrade to "Called to his bidding, the ancient instruments of death" gives you an extra animated weapon that has arcane assault as its unique ability. I just thought it was an ability unique to chanter (ironically, given its role in poe1). not to be self-aggrandizing but i thought my list was pretty complete (aside from arcane assault). there's also Maura's Infested Grimoire lvl 7, conjuration - Maura's Grasping Tentacle

"Belranga has too high defenses, so will prevail against anything else than Hauni O Whe. Unless of course if her minions are spawned too." Without minions, Hauani O Whe runs away with the fight, eventually. Belranga might be able to CC the first form, but Belranga won't be able to CC multiple oozes spread out. With minions, I think it's actually a toss-up. Belranga will literally kill herself in such a situation (in some of my practice ultimate runs this is basically what happens), but lots of spiderlings = lots of attempts at petrify, resisted down to paralyze. You might be able to keep the various forms cc-ed enough at Greater/Massive, and at Greater ooze and below the spider and spiderlings can rip them to shreds easily. The only complication is that HoW would be tossing symbiotes everywhere, but I actually think the random aoe attacks of the spiders/spiderlings would be killing the spider/spiderlings before they can do much moving around to spawn more oozes. Dorudugan is also weak to corrode, which coincidentally is hauani o whe's specialty. While Dorudugan can do a lot of damage and in a huge area, in practice the numbers from the explosions are only in the hundreds of damage. Dorudgan can stunlock Hauani o Whe pre-split, but after that, I think the fight pretty much steadily runs away from Dorudugan in favor of the ooze. The AI would have to be smart enough to position Dorudugan to interrupt all the oozes with each swipe, which it won't be. Depending on how Belranga's consume ability is implemented, I think Belranga could beat Dorudugan. Given enough dead spiderlings, Belranga will be extremely fast and have a really powerful consume effect - in a practice ultimate run the fight ended up becoming impossible because Belranga was healing so much health from each consume, and even with immunity to interrupts Belranga's consume ability still knocks you down for several interminable seconds. (Fun fact: because of how this practice run ended up going, I actually counted the number of spider/lings killed in my real run to make sure I didn't wait too long to really press the offense against Belranga.) If Belranga is able to knock Dorudugan down (I think this is possible; I seem to recall using a knock up ability on Dorudugan during the early days of megabosses) and effectively use consume, eventually the fight against Belranga will become impossible for Dorudugan to surmount.

can you have one megaboss join your team and just hide your actual party somewhere? anyway, my money's on hauani o whe stomping on every other boss.

yeah that sounds about right - depending on how the trinket is implemented. IIRC (boeroer probably remembers better) that stone of power is an "active" bonus that still stacks for +1 PL (items are sometimes weird like that). The ooze trinket might also stack.

All potions and food are considered active bonuses (with a caveat) so they don't stack with other active bonuses. However, corpse-eater food bonus appears to be set up so its gated for just corpse-eater - this also means it stacks with other active bonuses because it's a different type of bonus. The big caveat is that a save/load cycle appears to change the status of a long-lived food/rest bonus from being "active" to "passive" so you can force food bonuses to stack. So technically you can stack food/rest bonuses like this, though it's up to the player to decide whether or not this is legit.