thelee

if this is the style of wizard you like to play you may find blood mage a bit less impressive - boeroer uses this as his common critique of the class. you'll be wasting a lot of time just whiffing on spell restoring the uses for those buffs when you could just empower or do something else. not as a big of a problem for prolonged fights. when i played around with blood mage the only buff i really cared about was deleterious alacrity of motion, and then i'd just focus on spamming the most abusive spell at the moment.

i mean, blood mage is just pretty danged good, i legit don't think any other wizard makes for a fair comparison. The only argument I can see against blood mage come down to playstyle difference - basically if you're not a fan of repetitively casting the same spells, abusing the blood sacrifice mechanic, then you should do something else. (even in non-prolonged fights the ability to game which spells you get back over and over is extremely powerful). objectively, evoker is pretty good - double cast bonus is pretty variable, but pretty great when it triggers (probably the best non-blood mage subclass bonus). if you want the most powerful wizard subclass, then like i said, i find it personally hard to argue against blood mage other than from a playstyle perspective. but if you want something fun, that just happens to pretty good, then I would focus just on the evoker's merits instead of trying to do a comparison with blod mage.

Man I must just suck with controlling the AC then. I feel like I was constantly triggering Vengeful Grief on Maia (which itself wasn't a total bad thing).

yeah, actually, come to think of it I think Wall of Thorns and Wicked Briars are like this - they don't have a poison keyword (at least not the tooltip) but their effects are preventable with antidote. Basically, my memory of my ancient DoT-er is that against naga they had very few options, which was annoying.

have to double-check. I mostly noticed this on Naga (especially SSS fights), it might be something specific to them. edit - huh, for some reason I thought Plague of Insects only had Beasts keyword?

from my experience, even though those (Insect Swarm and Plague of Insects) aren't tagged on the tooltip as poison or disease, enemies who are immune to poison or disease (i forget which specific one) are immune to them, which is annoying. I forget whether infestation of maggots is affected by this issue. It was pretty annoying with my ancient druid, who was specifically this sorta DoT build.

dang, guess I won't be the first tactician! congrats to mark twain, whomstever they are (not a forum goer I guess).

(Sorry for post formatting, it's real hard to selectively quote multiple things from a post) "How important is accuracy really? First thing you tell a new player on PotD is that they need to pump perception so they can actually hit things. Accuracy is king, they say." Who says this? Because they're wrong. Dex and int are kings. Perception is only slightly better than might, and that is pretty conditional. That being said... "Meanwhile, Rangers have effortless accuracy bonuses well beyond what other classes are capable of, so why aren’t they the kings? Either accuracy isn’t all that or Ranger aren’t being given the respect they deserve." The latter I agree with. It'd be one thing if rangers only got like a +5 acc bonus here or there, but they get so much accuracy that it overwhelms the sorta-marginal status of perception. It's not like any other class can get up to +50 dex or int (which would make them king), but even if perception/acc were weaker than it is now, a base +50 accuracy (stalker's link, marked prey, maxed hunter's claw, survival of hte fittest) would still be absurd just based on sheer quantity. "Animal Companions aren’t hard to keep alive! The number of times I’ve seen people recommend using Ghost Heart to ignore the AC altogether is absurd. " Animal companions are ridiculously hard to keep alive on PotD with upscaling on, even with Resilient Companion. IME you basically need to abuse Maia's pet's ability to avoid engagement or have a Bear + Hardy/Robust to really lean on your pet staying alive. Anyway, if people are really saying to use Ghost Heart to avoid the AC and this isn't a strawman, then this is definitely wrong. Ghost Heart's advantage is their pet ignores engagement, not that you don't have to worry about an AC. But! Sometimes the pet not staying alive is a feature, not a bug, thanks to various items and ranger skills that interact with a downed pet (and I don't think this works with Ghost Heart). "The Ranger skill tree is ridiculously bloated. Why are there FOUR animal companion perks at level 1, with bonuses as mundane as “do some more damage” and “be tougher”. It’s not like you’re investing in playstyle options with your AC – these are just sucking up ability points to make the AC better in utterly boring ways. Vicious and Resilient Companion shouldn’t exist – these should just be AC base stats. Have us choose the other two." I think this is purely an artifact of playing on upscale+PotD. On PotD Vicious and Resilent Companions basically become mandatory, whereas on lower difficulty they are much more purely playstyle choices. "Then there’s the completely unnecessary separation of some perks into two. " I think you're underestimating how viable a skill might be on its own without the upgrade, like Concussive Shot. Have happily used it just for the interrupt without upgrading it to do -30s (which while great, is really not that great if you have other sources in your party like Arcane Dampener, Arcane Cleansing, or even just Street Sweeper). "Wounding Shot and Arcane Archer imbue spells are permanently broken. Wounding Shot never did nearly as much damage as its description indicated and it still doesn’t. Why wasn’t this fixed? That’s the Ranger’s signature damage ability and it sucks. Imbue spells still don’t scale properly, so they are missing out on damage and penetration that they should have. That’s the subclasses entire thing and Obsidian left it broken even as modders at least patched the penetration. This is just neglectful." I suspect Obsidian never realized how broken Wounding Shot was - there's a lot of complex mechanics, they have fewer eyeballs and resources than the collective fanbase of forumgoers, so it probably just never rose to much prominence. Maybe they overestimated Wounding Shot being valued for triggering Predator's Sense, even though there are a bajillion other ways to trigger it. Does the community patch fix it? As for Arcane Archer, I was under the impression they did fix it - guess not. Kind of the problem with making such huge changes in a near-end-of-lifecycle patch. Anyway aside from those specific points, I do agree that people seem to undervalue the ranger, though I don't agree that Obsidian doesn't care about the ranger - they literally added several new skills ot the ranger over time, which is why the ranger is as awesome as it is today (hunter's claw line especially). I'm not sure any other class got straight-up new abilities.

I would make a much stronger endorsement than Boeroer does. I'd say it's good enough, and special enough, that every fighter or fighter multiclass should pick it up, unless they are planning on equipping cloth or running around naked. While it's not going to break the game or make you win fights you couldn't before, the bonus is general enough and solid enough that pretty much any playstyle benefits.

i think pure monk would do it - monk has a Flagellant's Path/Launching Kick which is sort of like a fake flight. Plus you end up with way better punches when single-classed.

disclaimer: i only know about avengers from casually watching the movies. shouldn't it be war hammers, that poor neglected category of weapon? (edit - whoops, missed that Jayd already mentioned this) (Too bad there's no Crom Faeyr-style weapon like from BG2, that would be perfect). Also, if there was ever a RP build for the deltro's shock combo, here it is. I think early MCU hulk is berserker, maybe even a berserker with that unique weapon that randomly frenzies you. I think late MCU hulk is a druid of some sort, since in Endgame he's basically perma-hulk mode and doing stuff, which sounds a little bit like an ancient or animist (not shifter since you can't do anything other than smash while shifted). Maybe an animist + some priest so you can salvation of time cat flurry mode. yeah this is weird, because hawkeye doesn't really have any kind of companion, but the insane accuracy a ranger+companion gets would fit with hawkeye better. I guess you could consider the ghost heart spirit animal sort of a "second sight" to help aiming instead of a real animal companion. what about ant man? black panther? edit - actually, maybe black panther should be the shifter, especially with cat form. i have no idea how you could represent ant man in deadfire though.

so i definitely just did tests again, with more DoTs, with Soul Ignition and Disintegrate specifically as well (since I had just assumed their behavior before), with no mods, and can confirm that Takedown Combo does affect all apparent DoTs while active (this time I even explicitly tested multiple DoTs going on at the same time). It doesn't matter if Takedown Combo lands first or the DoT lands first and Combo comes after, as soon as Takedown Combo is present DoT damage increases. I still didn't test all the DoTs specifically, but I feel like with this even more comprehensive test I can more confidently conclude that in your case there must've been something else going on. And just to double-confirm, I did test hazard-type effects and they are definitely losers here. Getting only one tick at double damage and eating up the Combo is definitely the lamest possible interaction. Definitely going to go roll an itinerant for my "fun" run. Shining Beacon, Cleansing Flame as short-duration DoTs, plus a few high-impact damage spells (Pillar of Holy Fire, Divine Mark). Back to the OPs topic, Disintegrate would do well. I was doing triple-digit raw damage per tick the entire time Takedown Combo was active with Disintegrate with an extremely unoptimized Serafen, I even combined with Soul Ignition for even more damage. The only trick is that Takedown Combo doesn't last too long so you have to do a wee bit of micromanagement so that you're in the middle of casting a spell or have just landed a spell when you command your animal companion to do the takedown, so you don't waste the combo's duration. (Not to mention the micromanagement of making sure no one auto-attacks your target after you land the combo.) In my test case, takedown combo lasted ~12s, with Soul Ignition at ~20s and Disintegrate at ~15s, so I would cast Soul Ignition, cast Disintegrate, and then takedown combo, and watch a stupid amount of damage come out for the ~12s.

ok that's weird, i'll have to test more dots see if i also run into exceptions (i only tested like 4). is this any interaction with the community mod?

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.