DozingDragon

Druids are great! You can pick up Lord Daryn’s Voluge pretty early in the game, which can provide a boost to the PL of your storm-keyword spells. The Spine of Thicket Green is also another choice to boost the PL of some of your other spells. If you are looking for some possible multiclass ideas, I recently tested out an Arcane Archer/Ancient. There’s a minor accuracy penalty that can be mitigated by using certain weapons and/or Marked Prey, but it increases your casting options, provides reliable ranged weapon damage, and an animal companion to assist your summons. The only caveat at the moment is there is a bug affecting the scaling of many of the summoned creatures (they are weaker than they should be at higher levels), but hopefully that should be fixed soon. If you went that route, I would recommend using the Essence Interrupter from Port Maje with the Soul Diplomacy upgrade, as you should crit reliably enough to generate new temporary allies when you kill an enemy.

Arcane Knight (Paladin/Wizard) should provide plenty of healing between Exalted Endurance and Lay on Hands. Your high Perception will also be useful for landing Flames of Devotion.

I also do not see how Rangers are horrible, as they get some of the best accuracy bonuses in a game where stackable accuracy bonuses are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Have you done the BoW dlc yet? I am not sure if they are all fixed drops, but you should find a few in there.

Well, most parties can usually apply the Flanked effect (-10 Deflection, -1 Armor) with relatively little issue, either through Flanking or applying any Perception affliction, even during the early game. And Hot Razor Skewers (+2 Pen) are available to purchase in Neketaka as soon as the player arrives, which can push the high Pen weapons back into viability against high armor targets if need be. Then there are weapons and abilities that deal Raw damage in some form, consumables that lower Armor, and the general availability of other debuffs that make it more likely to Crit against a high Armor target to get bonus Pen. The only thing that I think is odd is how none of the Body Afflictions lower enemy armor. And for that matter, why does "Stunned" debuff the target's Pen, if Stunned also makes it so the target cannot act?

Players complained armor in PoE1 isn't doing enough. Now, in PoE2, it does. Is it also bad? Oh, I like the armor / pen system overall, I don't think it's inherently broken and in some ways it's definitely superior to the DR system. It just needs further balancing on PotD difficulty; too many enemies have AR so high that they break the system and there's no way to get AR down into penetrable ranges. So you end up monotonously plinking away forever and it gets boring. Which enemies do you consider to have AR that is too high on PotD?

So, any word on the novella?

Have one party member that you send after enemy casters at the start of combat. They could use abilities that interrupt, the crossbow or arbalest modals, or hard CC abilities (tier 2 or above resolve afflictions or intellect afflictions, tier 3 might and dexterity afflictions). While some classes have more interrupts than others, you should have at least one character in your party that has access to some decent interrupts.

I do not recall anywhere saying it would affect Eir Glanfath. In Deadfire, only characters with the Dyrwood background seem to be affected mechanically, i.e., they receive bonus HP.

Well, the Memory Hoarder does seem to be some sort of horrible abomination created through Engwithan animancy. So I'd probably chalk it up to that. Regardless, I am just speculating here.

I am paraphrasing here, but in the Beast of Winter, there is a line about how the soul only carries memories as the body interprets events, and therefore, a soul’s “memories” can be inaccurate because of the failability of kith’s minds. So I do not think the Memory Hoarder was consuming the souls of the captives of the Forgotten Sanctum, but rather, it was absorbing their memories to alter the soul’s recall to prevent the possibility of the captives regaining that knowledge if they ever awakened in a subsequent incarnation. That would also explain why the Hand Occult bothered to kidnap anyone as opposed to just killing them, as simply killing a person does not rule out the possibility of regaining the “forbidden knowledge” via awakening, you know, just like the Watcher did in Sun in Shadow.

There are scrolls of Withdraw, and you can prolong Withdraw with Salvation of Time.

Or, you could just play the game on Classic or Veteran, and ignore most of the advice here which is highly tailored to playing on Path of the Damned, which may not be very enjoyable if you are completely new to playing Deadfire. Either way, if you want to play with companions that can also summon, Tekehu as a single class Druid has access to many summoned creatures, including one of the best summons in the game, Watery Double. Other companions that can regularly summon include Pallegina (Herald), Maia (Geomancer), Aloth, Fassina, and Konstanten (Skald or Howler).

Or for a higher risk strategy with the sloop: max to medium range cannons on one side, and double bronzers on the other. Use the longer range cannons until your enemy gets withhin 350m, jibe, hold, and then finish off the enemy ship with your double bronzers. This strategy does not work well against Rathun Warships, but those usually are not a high priority to take off the map.

There is one actual file in the game's data titled "laxi_00_bs_book.stringtable," so take that as you will.

Not that it means much, but each free DLC has had lax+letter prefix in the game’s files. Turn-based mode has the laxh prefix, and there are some empty folders left in the localization directories with the laxi prefix. So maybe Obsidian is going to release another piece of free DLC during the console launch for Deadfire.

If your build for Eder has reasonably high deflection then giving him the Champion’s Helm from SSS results in the occasional free riposte, and it provides an action speed bonus based on the number of enemies engaged. I also prefer giving Eder the Blackened Plate, as the AR lowering aura hits automatically, and the raw damage aura helps provide a minor passive boost to Eder’s DPS.

There are quite a few random events that are tied to running a crew with low morale and/or low supplies. So running a cheap ship with hardtack might yield some more interesting events.

I think it is just a discount.

I think Eder and Aloth should return as companions, as I think they each have pretty good hooks for coming back (cleaning up Eothas’s mess/the destruction of the Wheel all goes back to Thaos, the Leaden Key, and the Engwithans). Pallegina could return, but it would definitely depend on where the game took place, and if her presence could be justified if it benefitted the Valian Republics. For the Deadfire companions and sidekicks, just about any of them could work, but I would appreciate having Konstanten return. His added character development was probably the best part of Seeker, Slayer, Survivor. And I would really like to see at least one oddball companion in a potential sequel. A spirit (Ryona, Muatu, Maerwald), a wilder (a xaurip Ranger with a grubling companion, or an exiled vithrack), or a vessel (Yseyr, make Ydwin a true fampyr, an animated suit of armor) could all work. I know there’s the concern about how gear would work for a special character like that, but if they they had a suitable bonus you could restrict the head-slot ala godlikes, and the armor issue for characters that aren’t rigged for changing equipment, but that could be resolved by making their armor an unequippable soulbound item that upgrades throughout the game, leaving only weapons to worry about.

I definitely missed this when I played Forgotten Sanctum. Nice catch!

Arkemyr’s Wondrous Torment and/or Miasma of Dull Mindedness and any ability that causes a status effect. Lower resolve equals longer lasting status effects.

Seconding the suggestion to make a Hunter (Fighter/Ranger). The bonus accuracy from the Ranger abilities will help you Crit more and take advantage of the bonus Crit damage from the Devoted subclass.

Stronger narrative hooks would have been nice, but seeing as we got the four megabosses as free DLC, I suspect additional window-dressing like that was out of the question due to voiceover and localization costs.

If it is just the beams, then try out potions of arcane reflection and/or the resting bonus for Konstanten’s Room at the Wild Mare (30% Spell Reflection), and any other items you have that give bonus reflection. Alternately, I do not think the Oracle is immune to interrupts, so focusing on interrupts should also help.