youspoonybard

I've only played Xoti, but PL8's Symbol of Eothas is a really powerful spell - not just Party Friendly but Party Beneficial and it does a LOT of damage. Once she hits PL8 she switches from support to one of the higher damage dealers just tossing that out 1x / encounter. Likewise, Spark the Souls can be used with positioning and abused with multiple targets, like Summons, to buff, and Dismissal is a situational but powerful spell too. Really, PL8 is really strong, it's just in a different role from the previous levels where I like to use Priest spells to support. PL8 is about offense, and the spells are really good at it.

I guess making the game any better will improve sales, so it is indeed a cash grab. But by that logic the patch they are releasing is also a cash grab, hmm.... Making a game is a ca... Having a job is a cas... Participating in the economy is a cash gr.... Being born is a cash gra....

Am I the only person who thinks Driving Echoes is the best buff to your party's casters in the game? By a landslide? Yeah, but that's just one good power, and by the time you get it, the game is mostly over. The last three tiers are all like that -- one good active power and a bunch of dead buttons that aren't worth pressing. Tier VII, Stasis Shell is the best option and it's basically just a crappy paralyze for paralyze-immune targets. Tier VIII, Time Parasite is good, reaping knives should be redundant if you've built correctly (spending 80 focus to get back focus is usually a bad trade), and defensive mindweb is nerfed into the ground Tier IX, Driving Echoes is good, Haunting Chains is worse than a fifth-level wizard spell, 1000 cuts is . . .well, not awful against a boss, but compare vs. any wizard damage spell? The class is playable. It's not utterly broken. But the current implementation is always gonna be the weak link in the party. Not disagreeing with you; was only asking re:comment that "there is no reason to play pure cipher".

Am I the only person who thinks Driving Echoes is the best buff to your party's casters in the game? By a landslide?

Geez, people don't rely on crits to penetrate, especially when you have limited uses of things. So many people seem to be banging their heads against a wall instead of taking a step to the side and walking through the door.

There are differences between physical attacks and spells that you have to take into account, but the overall statement isn't false. a) Weapon modals lower FRW by 25 instead of 10 b) Base stats add +2 to each relevant defense and there are two of them to target instead of +1 and 1 stat on deflection. You can potentially lower FRW defenses very quickly. c) Are you complaining that you can't target strong defenses with no setup and reliably succeed? Why not use Fetid Caress if you're trying to hit a high will caster off the bat instead to take them out of the fight?

Apparently they are. Have not tested personally though. No they are not. Carnage does not transfer modal "afflictions" like Body Blows etc. What works is Charge (pre 1.1) and Clear Out (plus upgrades). Those are the only two abilities I could find that apply Body Blows (morning star modal) in an AoE. At least that's with game version 1.0.2 Heart of Fury (and I assume the Ranger T8 ability)? Pretty sure HoF was working for me, but my 1.1 Barb doesn't have it quite yet to confirm.

It doesn't work like that... I will consider the average situation where your accuracy equal to the enemy's deflection. That means your attacks will be: 15%misses, 35% grazes and 50%hits. If you add 20 accuracy it will become: 30% grazes, 50% hits and 20% crits. In the first scenario your average damage would be: base dmg * (.35 * (0.5 + dmg bonuses) + .5 * (1 + dmg bonuses)) = base dmg * (0.675 + 0.85 * dmg bonuses) In the second scenario your average damage would be: base dmg * (.3 * (0.5 + dmg bonuses) + .5 * (1 + dmg bonuses) + .2 * (1.25 + dmg bonuses)) = base dmg * (0.9 + dmg bonuses) In the case of a ranger/cipher how much dmg bonuses you can have? 60% from weapon, 20% soul whip and maybe 30% from might ie 110%. If we compare the two scenarios the dps increase will be: (0.9 + 1.1) / (0.675 + 0.85 * 1.1) = 2/1.61 = 1.24 That means only a 24% dps increase from +20 accuracy... He assumed 50% misses though, which puts him starting at an (Accuracy - Defense) of -35. I mean, the thing is both of you are touching the real conclusions - a) Accuracy (or more specifically Accuracy - relevant Defense) is a very potent stat, easily more powerful than Might or Dex at low starting values b) (A-D) at higher values drops in effectiveness harder than any other stat, making it much worse than Might or Dex once you reach certain levels of (A-D) (homework: can you calculate the values where this drop off occurs? It's probably lower than you are assuming! Extra credit: do it for attacks that can graze vs attacks that can't graze) c) (A-D) are the most manipulable stats in combat. You can get a Strong buff to add +5 Might. But you can flank an enemy and hit them with a pike for -20 Deflection, lower their resolve by another 10, etc. The aforementioned weapon modals are a huge PARTY WIDE buff to (A-D). Combat spells tend to raise Accuracy much more than Might, Dex, etc. Basically, there is a sweet spot that you want to hit for (A-D) and then put effort in raising your attack rate, might, etc, rather than pump more accuracy. Also, as mentioned, positioning and tactics in combat play a HUGE role here and should be emphasized.

Only way to debuff in an area is using whisper of endless paths or Wahai Pōraga ( unique pollaxe). Carnage doesn't work anymore as poe 1, now it do only raw dmg on area, no status effect Heart of Fury...

Josh has posted that a new Enchanting interface resolving these problems will be included soon.

Kill them is the easiest way.

If you have metaphysics (8 or 9ish, forget exactly what) you can siphon some of the dragon's strength to the wards and free him, allowing the Watershapers to preserve their strength, then free the dragon.

Ship boarding is bugged right now - what should be enemy corpses are being spawned as living enemies, so if you try to board them you can get overwhelmed, especially before you have other party members to assist in the battle. Don't judge difficulty off these boarding fights.

Blood Pit also works.

It took my crew months to mutiny but only hours after I ran out of food to suggest to me who they'd like to feast upon. I guess they had someone in mind already.

Is the Luminous Adra potion on a similar per-rest treatment? I didn't see a timer on it when I used it but it did fade eventually.

The Bluff check works.

He fell into the ocean and drowned.

I mean, you pretty much summed it up in your response. There are many situations where you can get significantly more than +2 pen by switching weapon types. Crit damage is OK but the option to switch weapons to overpen on every swing is significantly better than it. And that's not counting being able to support the party with Club / Flail / Morningstar / Mace / Pike / Hatchet / Wand modals or Blast AoE. Devoted lets you avoid engaging with these systems and gives you a weapon that's good enough to always contribute. To me, it's the "Charge ahead!" option on ship encounters - I understand why it's there for other people, but I *like* engaging with these mechanics, and can't see myself ever choosing the subclass. You are looking at it only from a mechanics perspective. And from your gameplay experience. Let`s say I want to play a character that only uses rapiers. Devoted lets me do that and get some value out of it. With pros and cons, like a subclass should be. Actually, this is the criticism I would do to many people on this forum: They only look at balance from a pure mechanics perspective with a munchkin idea of their character. And I think this is a side-effect from the multiplayer culture where you have to be better than the other player, giving absolute precedence to the mechanics. I am not an advocate of "single player means balance doesn't matter". Balance does matter. But quite obviously Deadfire has been balanced around giving you the ability to play the character you want, not the character you have to. And I think devs did a really good job on that. All the subclasses pointed out as "useless" are not. Maybe for some of them the cons are bigger than the pros in the majority of situation, so what ? The purpose of the sublass is not to be stronger than another or a base class but to create a different gameplay experience, that fits with what you want to do with your character. I do disagree, and especially disagree in this case. If you as a player decide you don't want to switch weapons because you don't enjoy doing so, that's fine. If you decide your character is a master of only one weapon type, and they never switch weapons, that's fine too. But you are fully capable of just picking a fighter and never changing weapons. Why should you get mechanical benefits via a subclass to support this? Sure, mastering one weapon is a common archetype. But why is that supported over, say, a Fighter who bashes with shields? Or one who learns to wield 2H'ers in one hand? What about a grappling character? These characters aren't supported by the standard Fighter class and would make for interesting subclasses in my opinion. As we are constrained by the system, we do have to judge them on their mechanics. Would you be happy if Devoted was "can't use any other weapons / proficiencies, gain 3 max health" because the subclass mechanically makes a person who only fights with one weapon type more effective than a standard fighter doing the same? I never said that Devoted is useless. In fact, I stated their use clearly - they are for players who (for mechanical or roleplay reasons) do not wish to engage in the penetration or modal aspects of combat. That gameplay is not interesting to me.

I mean, you pretty much summed it up in your response. There are many situations where you can get significantly more than +2 pen by switching weapon types. Crit damage is OK but the option to switch weapons to overpen on every swing is significantly better than it. And that's not counting being able to support the party with Club / Flail / Morningstar / Mace / Pike / Hatchet / Wand modals or Blast AoE. Devoted lets you avoid engaging with these systems and gives you a weapon that's good enough to always contribute. To me, it's the "Charge ahead!" option on ship encounters - I understand why it's there for other people, but I *like* engaging with these mechanics, and can't see myself ever choosing the subclass.

See, to me, Devoted is the lacking subclass. It's basically "I will take a hit to bypass the armor / penetration / proficiency system". I don't know why you'd play a Devoted over any of the other three available fighters.

Hello! As soon as my rogue engages a Cipher I get hit with Psychic Backlash. Seeing as I am not using any Will-targeting attacks (my only offensive actives are Confounding Blind and Finishing Blow), I'm guessing that it's Persistent Distraction that is triggering the stun, but this doesn't really target Will ...

Wait what? Doesn't reload time become recovery when u cast a spell after a shoot?? Really? If you swing a sword / cast a standard spell / whatever, there is a period of time after the swing where you can't do anything (but move around). This is recovery. You can queue up your next action but it won't fire until recovery is over. Firearms have zero recovery, so you can shoot then immediately use another ability (like I said in another thread, Blunderbuss with modal to trigger Streetfighter bonus, then Escape in to melee, which also has 0 recovery, so I can start slicing right away). Now, you will still have to reload the gun before you can shoot it again, but you can cancel the reload at any time to cast a spell as well. You can interrupt an auto-attack cycle with a gun at any time if you need to switch over to casting quickly.

As long as you have the money, all you have to do is sail to Sayaka. It's really good.

Oh definitely, but to be fast requires a certain amount of specific strength/endurance whereas I think a lot of people imagine it'd be easy to wield a rapier and easy to be fast whereas a two-handed sword would be hard work and slow (a longsword ain't slow at all), but we can blame movies there as well. You can more specifically blame Dungeons and Dragons as well as other early fantasy settings for confusing people. Your average D&D player has probably never even looked at actual armor and weapons used in the Medieval Era and other time periods which are emulated by these fantasy settings. The fallacy that full plate armor is absurdly heavy and restrictive to movement is borne from this same problem. Players who have "learned" everything they know about these weapons and armor types from video games and tabletop RPGs will have a great many erroneous notions. Full plate armor was not insanely heavy and restrictive to movement unless it was jousting armor or ceremonial in nature, otherwise it would have been useless on the battlefield. Your full-plate wearing combatants had trained and conditioned themselves to wear the heavier armor to the point of being quite agile in it, they could run, jump, swim, do push-ups and other mundane activities just fine. Another example is the longsword vs the shortsword in D&D. The "shortsword" is actually the arming sword or the broadsword, also known as the most commonly issued and used armament of soldiers and warriors. The "longsword" is actually a very unwieldy weapon that took a higher-than-average strength to wield with one hand and was often wielded as a two-handed weapon with less reach but more versatility than the claymore (greatsword) or other similar two-handed weapons. The recent FPS Kingdom Come: Deliverance gets this stuff right. It has a lot of other issues but it put a lot of work into getting this stuff correct. Fast weapons are actually the highest dps overall, and even better now that you can't reasonably and consistently lower recovery to zero. Not sure if Brilliant enabling you to spam abilities makes a big enough difference to counter this. Accurate weapons are a solid choice - they're really good at the beginning, only dropping off when ways to buff your accuracy / debuff opponent's deflection really start kicking in. Daggers, Clubs and Rapiers are some of the BEST weapon types in the game, use the one whose type of damage you need. Clubs even have an amazing modal as well! Flails, now, that 10% conversion is not good. The modal is good, but Reflex is usually used for AoE damage; how useful is lowering one mob's reflex score in a pack? Maybe it's good with a HoF barb to debuff ... but really, there is little reason to pick up a flail instead of a club. I agree that the high pen weapons are in a weak place - you're always better off lowering enemy armor and making sure you're using the right weapon.