Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Yeah, but there's lots of flexibility there too depending on narrative. Even for the folks coming over from PoE 1, Eder and Aloth have had five years to pick up some new tricks. For me it's just that I don't like using hired adventurers because you miss the conversation interaction barks. In my current run I have Eder set to Unbroken / Trickster and Aloth set to Steel Garrotte / Blood Mage, mostly just because I wanted to try out those combos. It adds a lot to the replayability.

I got some requests to share my various AI scripts so here are some old ones from prior runs: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OVIGtegeMsycU0pOgMI2cC-bSry-wih8?usp=sharing At that point I was still microing wizard casts (now that I'm running Aloth as a blood mage I'm more flexible there).

I just went through last night and used the Unity Console mod to make Aloth a Steel Garotte / Blood Mage Arcane Knight. Ridiculously strong defenses, solid healing, endless casting. The real puzzle with an arcane knight is always whether to go full sword and board + defensive spells for absurdly high defensive stats, or go two-hander and use Citzal's to wipe the board.

hellwax mold! Hellwax mold! Ring of the Selonan, Telda's Ring, Seal of Faith Tall Grass Sanguine Plate The Disappointer edit: I just realized this post came off as somewhat peremptory, I was just too enraptured by the prospect of the mod and started spamming my keyboard with excited utterances.

What about the Magran's Blessing fire shield?

There does appear to be an actual piano forte in the Wild Mare.

One suggestion for an alternate trigger: One nice tweak would be if these faction ships appeared on the map after you had killed all other named faction ships of that faction. i.e., kill all the named Valian ships the Vailian enemy appears, etc. That way it would fit roleplay, would avoid the "ganging up on low level players" thing, and wouldn't run off an artificial construct like level etc. but would instead have a narrative justification in game.

Llendreth. Hot, sweaty, fuzzy, short. Or does that only show up if you have an Orlan PC? Is Llendreth a companion, ship's helper or ...? Is it romanceable? I did not understand the condition for this to happen? Omg no one is voting. U.U " Random ship event with a crew member. Llendreth is an Orlan npc crew mwmber you can hire in dunnage.

Llendreth. Hot, sweaty, fuzzy, short. Or does that only show up if you have an Orlan PC

It doesn't quite fit all those but a ranged cipher orlan build can get a LOT of mileage out of high perception and can do at least *backup* healing with Pain Block. Wouldn't dualclass well with Wizard though. Those two requirements are a little contradictory because you want high Per on strikers and generally your striker isn't your healer. You could do a Fire Nuke Priest build, there are a lot of good items for that. Hrm. One thing you could do would be swashbuckler Eder, Retaliation Build Morningstar Seraphen, Xoti or Vatnir Priest Nuker, Ydwin Cipher or Maia WIz/Ranger with +Per Items, PC.

Part of it may be that Hammers have a higher base penetration than flails. Different weapons have different pen values. https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Weapons_(Deadfire)

Yeah, there's Flanked. Perhaps i should start just always using the razor skewers but that seems exceptionally metagamey (and they're fairly expensive and don't help with spell pen). I agree that adding an armor debuff to the Constitution afflictions would be one good way to address the issue.

It's been a while since I did a full PotD run -- I keep restarting -- but the steel / iron golems for one, then a number of things in the Beast of Winter expansion. One frequent offender are pierce or crush immune enemies who also have high AR to the other physical damage types Most of the "high penetration' weapons like Arquebus or Stiletto etc are Piercing damage type, so those enemies effectively have amplified AR because you can't use the "designed to penetrate high AR" weapons against them, you have to use lower-penetration stuff. So then you stack Hel-Hyraf's, Expose Vulnerabilities, and the Mace modal; even if they all land, that only shaves off 5 AR or so (and only for the portion of the fight where the debuffs are active; EV has a limited duration). Look at something like a Steelclad Construct that has 15 (17 slash/pierce) DR -- shave five off, it's still at 10 AR, which means you're underpenetrating with anything short of an Estoc or Arquebus (except also not with an Estoc or Arquebus due to the higher Piercing resistance). If you get unlucky and your EV fails to land or your Hel-Hyraf's expires or god forbid you forgot to have both of those exact specific abilities in your party at all times, the fights get excruciatingly long and monotonous. I have pretty thorough scripting set up so after a certain point I know a fight is won, I can basically go AFK, the cipher will keep casting Brilliant and keep things going, but it can still take forever to just whittle whittle whittle whittle whittle away at a high armor enemy. And that's not even a particularly late-game enemy -- you can fight Steelclad Constructs as a bounty in Neketaka by about level 12 or so (so you aren't going to have late game enchants on your gear). Other problem enemies (just skimming the wiki for armor values) are Greater Blights of varying kinds, the Engwithan Titan (though at least it's relatively weak to Crush and Shock), Soul Collectors -- basically anything that has armor values over about 13 or so. At that point they're going off the top end of the scale and they either require very specific and limiting party setups OR they become tedious or both. It might be enough to just have PotD give +1 AR across the board instead of +2, or just leave it unchanged from the Veteran values. Part of the issue is that AR is a much less granular scale than anything else that changes between difficulty levels -- +15 deflection is like a 10%-15% boost, but +2 AR is closer to a 20% boost (especially if you're counting from debuffed values) -- and there are far fewer tools to shift it around. Every spellcasting class, just about, has accuracy buffs or Deflection debuffs, etc., often ones that stack, but there's a far shorter list of AR debuffs. EDIT: it's especially a problem with spell pen

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.

If you're using the expanded AI conditionals mod, it's relatively straightforward to script casting ToTV at casting enemies (who don't have arcane reflection active). With a blood mage, you could also add in a script to replenish your spells whenever above 90% health, and if the party has enough passive healing, no more worries on the spell front. I'll have to use Slicken more, I tend to avoid spells with friendly fire because I can't sscript them as easily. Still, Slicken and ToTV are both in the Grimoire of Disruption, so that's perfect.

There's also a mod that unlocks all backgrounds in character creation, you'd need to restart though.

Yeah, since this would be as a tank for party play I figured the rest of the team can balance out the offense. That was part of the reason I was thinking a rapier might be good, too, just for the inherent accuracy bonus.

Yeah, right now it's possible with the tilde key console or mods but I'm not sure how much of an option those will be on console.

{"Difficulty":"PathOfTheDamned","HealthMultiplier":1.25,"AccuracyBonus":15,"DefenseBonus":15,"ArmorBonus":2,"PenetrationBonus":2,"LevelMultiplier":1, "RecoveryTimeMultiplier":1,"DisengagementAccuracyBonus":0,"HostileEffectDurationMultiplier":1} Well then, https://i.imgur.com/05QX74O.jpg At the risk of an overly simplistic solution, I'd suggest trying out just setting the armor and penetration bonuses to the same as they are on Veteran instead.

How does the PotD adjustment work? Is everything hand-tweaked or is it an across the board thing like "+2 all AR values" that could be changed by changing the modifier? The other part of this is it really hurts ranger pets because they either can't keep up on AR or they can't keep up on PEN or both, they need to scale like the NPCs do.

depends on if the guns have any special passive bonuses that you can combine, but yes, in general you are correct. in fact, if you have a particular gun or one-handed ranged-weapon that you like to use a lot, it is optimal to wield it with a one-handed melee weapon instead of a lesser second gun, if no full attacks are in play. Yup. Theoretically no difference, but in practice almost always a huge difference, if only because it's a lot easier to enchant one blunderbuss up to "Legendary" (or even "Mythical") and then hold a stat stick like Griffin's Blade in the offhand than it is to enchant two different blunderbussi up to similar levels.

My general take on the penetration system is that it's more a difficulty level issue than a problem with the system itself. There was a brief window where it worked "well" -- after beta, before PotD was upscaled in difficulty, most fights had challenging Pen/AR but if you used buffs and debuffs appropriately you could get around the system and make it work for you. PotD definitely needed the upscaling in difficulty but they changed lots of things at once, and one of the things they changed was increasing enemy AR dramatically across the board. Net result, you now had to engineer every possible Penetration buff in a stack just to scratch anything, you'd often still underpenetrate or graze even after stacking every possible armor debuff, and the practical result was that the optimal approach was to bypass the AR/Pen system entirely via things like the combusting wounds / mind blades combo that just stack huge amounts of tiny damage dot's until it doesn't matter whether you're penetrating or not. Problem is the fix for that would be to go through the whole game and renorm all the AR levels encounter by encounter back down again to sane levels -- basically, AR shouldn't scale with difficulty level the way other stats do. All the other buffs and debuffs are a lot more granular but there's only so many points the AR scale can move on and the current PotD values are an overcorrection to the point of annoyance. I mean, I literally plan out my parties beforehand with a spreadsheet to make sure I get every available bonus and damage type and so forth and I still routinely run into PotD enemies where I'm better off just CW+MB than I am even attempting to bother to reduce their AR to manageable levels.

How do you have maia set up? ranger or ranger/wiz or what? Generally I give her the Red Hand arquebus and a lot of ranger actives. If I dual her I don't take any wizard spells, just let her cast from a grimoire -- Grimoire of Disruption is a good choice, as is Slaver's. You could also swap her out for a different class. Tekehu has a good damage build here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104571-companion-build-t%C4%81whirim%C4%81tea-the-god-of-storms/ Have you done the Family Pride questline -- valeras and bardattos? Two good armors from that depending on how you resolve it.

Hrm, taking a look at this for a potential run with it on Eder. Any thoughts on going Cadhu Scalth / Rannig's Wrath (Insistence, 10% chance to recover immediately when missed in melee) ? There's also Casita Samelia but that much deflection might end up redundant, I'm not sure what the "effective ceiling" is on deflection overall (I want a character in the party with absurdly high deflection, to see if it can make Defensive Mindweb useful). It's a shame it doesn't have any additional enchants beyond the basic. It's base enchant is actually perfect for this build, it just doesn't add anything worthwhile beyond it. Meat with no gravy.

If you haven't, steal everything you can in Neketaka and on the beach in Crookspur. If you use stealth and some sparkcrackers you should be able to do so without alerting guards or having to kill anyone, and you should get some gear upgrades if you haven't. Or if you're feeling moral you can spend money, like a bourgeois. Past that though yeah you should be able to upgrade armor you've found by now. One thing a lot of party setups neglect is making sure you've got someone who can use the different modals -- mace, morningstar, flail, club, pike -- to reduce enemy defensive stats, which can make a big difference in terms of landing other debuffs etc. (Aloth can do pike with Citzal's Spirit Lance). There's a thread in the mechanics forum on the stacking rules; https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104896-the-big-post-of-stacking-rules/ Make sure you've read through that and understand it, once you do, you can dramatically increase your defensive abilities by stacking different buffs (for example, xoti's circle of protection will stack with Aloth's mirror images). If you can debuff the enemy and buff yourself then all the fights will get dramatically easier.