Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Whoa You know what? Sure, I'm in. It's time.

My thing is that some classes have a lot of items that boost their keywords, whereas other classes have none. I don't think there's a single item in the entire game that boosts any class-specific Cipher keyword, for example, whereas priests have a large number of +PL keyword items. So I'd like to see better keywording across the board just so more item builds open up for more classes.

For some reason I thought this got fed through the same double inversion as everything else. Of course it doesn't, and 3% is what you want in that case. Ugh, what bad design for the stat to have increasing returns on both effects. "Good" design in this instance would probably be to cut resolve entirely, but we had to have six ability stats for legacy reasons.

Ahh, I found some other suggestions I'd made in a different post, many of which would transpose well here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/105086-what-would-you-like-to-see-in-future-dlcs-and-patches/?p=2087105 Game could still use a few more unique wands, the ones that exist are either late-game or build-specialized. I'd replace miss-to-graze on flails entirely with a best of crush/slash damage -- it doesn't make a *huge* amount of sense but it's at least conceptually possible, there's a hole in the weapons that crush/slash could fit (warhammers being already crush/pierce), and miss-to-graze is so awful that it's basically not possible to make it good -- even at really high, like, 75% miss to graze bonus, you're still mathematically worse than any other weapon class bonus. It needs replacement not tweaking. I'd change the trigger to release the 'faction enemy" ships -- they're impossible for most people to see in most playthroughts due tot he weird way factions work. I would change them so they trigger and appear on the map when you have slain all unique named ships belonging to the respective factions. I'd still like to see a unique Vailian jacket style armor. I'd like the game to remember what speed I set the walking and the combat on when I start up the game. I agree on the mental binding improvement. Maybe even up to 8 seconds. Haunting Chains needs a large AoE. Compare with tier 5 Wizard spell Enervating Terror (1.5 m radius terrify, weakened). For Haunting Chains to be worthwhile it has to be, at minimum, an AoE terrify with the same radius as Secret Horrors, which is a tier 3 power with a 2.5 m radius.

Trinkets for other casting classes seems like a great idea for a mod, but not really "polishing" at this point. Yeah, this is something I was thinking but wasn't sure how to verbalize. Riposte needs an on-graze effect if you're going to use it in anything other than a maximally tweaked deflection build. If we're talking other general mods we'd like to see added, I'd *really* like to see the addition of a mod that unlocked all subclass options for the named companions. Let Eder be unbroken / trickster if you want him to be, etc. Let Aloth be a blood mage. So forth. There are individual mods for a lot of combinations but an across the board one would be great. The other mods I routinely use are 1) the one that reduces XP gain by 30%, pretty much a requirement if you're playing the DLC's 2) the one that makes all the "cosmic" command-line pets just appear on the beach at the start of the game so you don't have to type in the codes 3) there's an existing mod that attempts the keyword expansion above but it may not be complete. Cipher spells especially need elemental keywords added in many cases (acid, electric, etc.)

The stacking effect of Time Parasite is three-fourths of the joy of it =) don't break things that are working! I agree that Defensive Mindweb needs to break on *hit*, not on graze, and that's even after testing it with a fully specialized party built for it across the board. Haunting Chains is worthless unless it's a large-area AOE Even then it's probably insufficient. I'd tone down the across-the-board Armor Rating bonus enemies get on POTD because it blows out the scale at the top end for casters -- should be +1, not +2. Driving Echoes is probably *too* strong and should be, like, a +3 Penetration buff max, because the current implementation trivializes the entire ar/pen system (but make it a party AoE buff because you run into action economy issues using it). Oh, and the Enhanced AI Conditionals mod needs to be implemented into the game directly (along with some bug testing on it) if they want to make the switch to console happen with the RTWP mode at all.

Yeah, that's the other face of the problem -- "oh look, two soul collectors and the orb monster. Again. I'll hit them with Pull of Eora, Combusting Wounds and Mind Blades, again." Puzzles aren't interesting if you've already solved them.

I guess that I just don't get all this wailing and complaining about so-called trash mobs. They don't bother me a bit. Every battle can't be one boss fight after another. That's be annoying and frustrating and boring as all hell, at least to me. I don't mind them that much because I like the combat and play on POTD, but to the folks playing on story mode who don't like the combat, they're just a waste of time. Ideally you want every encounter to have some kind of story attached to it.

True that) Although the focus has shifted a bit... In PoE1, the player would often debuff enemy fort/will in order to land a stun/paralyze/petrify -> and thus lower enemy deflection and reflex. Otherwise many physical attacks would end up in misses and grazes... and that damage that goes through, would end up eaten by DR. In Deadfire though... targeting one defense in order to lower the other is occurring less often. Partially because of resistances/immunities, partially because stun and paralyze aren't decreasing defenses as strongly as they did. And partially because we have: - spells that lower enemy WILL (Miasma of Dull-Mindedness, Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment, Psychovampiric Shield, Borrowed Instinct) target Will. - stuff that lowers enemy DEFLECTION (Confounding Blind, Crushing Depths, Pure Class, Marking, Brittle Frost, Pike modal)... also usually targets Deflection. Unless you use those weapons with Knockdown or Clear Out, which target Fortitude... which is usually even higher than Deflection. Yeah, my general tactic these days is just to script an indiscriminate AOE spam of all afflictions, generally prioritizing Resolve (not so much for the direct debuff but so that other afflictions will last longer). I don't bother with chaining things, just try to hit with everything all at once and rely on the mess to shake out favorably (it usually does).

Yeah, partly it depends on the rest of your party -- if you have a Combusting Wounds wizard or Disintegrate cipher in your party, the Morningstar's fortitude debuff becomes amazing. If you want your PC to shine with massive aoe lightning damage, then the voulge. I generally give the voulge to tekehu though.

5. Like I've said a few times, I don't pay attention to debuffing with my brute force play style. About the closest thing I do is use Will based afflictions to either confuse/charm/dominate enemies, or hit them with resolve afflictions to take away their will to fight. I suppose that these things are doing some debuffing in the process, but that's not really my intended goal. I like using charm/dominate to get enemies to switch sides, because I enjoy getting my enemies fighting each other as a combat tactic. So it rather screws up my playstyle when certain enemies have INT affliction immunities. Normally, I will just brute force my way past them. But it just feels like these crocs are too much for a brute force solution, at least with only 5 people to do the fighting. Yeah, learning the basics of the buffing and debuffing systems are basically what makes the jump between a casual/normal/veteran difficulty player and a PotD player.

In theory, forbidden fist enfeeble should also lengthen the duration of Cipher parasitic buffs like time parasite, body attunement, etc. Generally things die before those buffs expire anyway though, and I haven't directly tested.

do you mean the naval minigame or the boarding fights if you don't know what the boarding fights are, close distance to the enemy ship and board it

It's a little more complicated than that since each point of Per gives miss to graze, graze to hit, and hit to crit, by shifting the whole attack calc up one point. But, yeah, basically, this is it, there's a functional cap. If you're playing on PoTD it's more valuable. Ditto if you plan on using guns since those have an acc penalty built in.

Ok, yeah, forgotten sanctum was great. The only downside is it could've been a little longer, but those would probably have just been trash mob fights, so that's ok.