Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

There are a lot of ways that (caster)(caster) combos can be made to work but generally you run into the "there's only so much time in the fight" problem. A priest can dump their whle spellbook pretty fast; a Cipher has to wait and do some physical damage first; a caster/cipher has to cast, do physical damage, *then* cipher. Chanters sortof avoid this problem with the passive phrase chanting and Paladins sortof avoid it with auras but even paladin/chanter heralds can run into the issue. So it's *generally* better to go caster/physical damage class, and I think caster/caster combo builds are *generally* less effective, but that's a trendline, not a law. Beckoner/Ghost Heart still seems like the worst outright to me.

Yeah, I think I remember the same but you should be able to find that back in the original Fig campaign one way or another. I don't get the desire for a "physical" game. Like, unless you live somewhere with no internet access, in which case how are you posting / how did you back the fig campaign

Oh oh an automated portrait maker that just screenshots your characters face as generated by the game engine, crops it to size, and runs it through some filters to generate a "watercolor".

While I can't agree with Boeroer on Umberto Eco, I definitely agree with both of you on Prachett. I just can't take those stories seriously, and they aren't really funny enough to be good comedy to me. I would say you are spot on about Original Sin as well, chapter one was actually pretty good. Everything after that? Not so much. I have already decided that when they make Original Sin 3 (sooner or later) it is a hard pass for me, because all the biggest problems in the first game are still there in the second. Weak story, blandish world past chapter 1, full time non stop silly and gags, yet I am supposed to take the world and it's events seriously? As a multiplayer game it is fine, because you have a buddy or two. As a single player game, it's a flop as far as I care. If you haven't gone back and tried the "remastered" edition of the first game they improved a lot of the narrative problems. Notice I didn't say "fixed," but improved enough that they may be within tolerances for you. But yeah I'm waiting on the "remastered" version of the second one to see if it improves.

What's the overall consensus on the forum via poll? I could be wrong but I feel it varies a bit class to class. Wizards and Monks everyone seems to agree single-class is a valid choice. Most other classes . . . well, it's a choice you can make. Generally I think most single-class builds are playable but not optimal. I still generally play single-class because I hate the feeling of "missing" top end abilities.

As I understand it, SA goes through phases of being viewable by subscriber only and phases where it's viewable by all. Not sure why exactly. We also have a Book Forum! https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=182

Dan Brown writes cargo cult Eco. Eco isn't for everyone though and that's ok. In his afterword to Name of the Rose Eco writes about how he deliberately made the "doorway chapter" of the book, where Adso steps across the threshold into the monastery and describes all the art and decorations around the doorway for many pages, almost impenetrably rich with history, art, numerology, etc., knowing that it would chase away a lot of readers. Thing is, if that chased you away, you weren't going to like the rest of the book anyway -- you had to either enjoy reading all that, or be willing to just skip it. If you were willing to do either one the rest of the book was for you but if you weren't it wasnt' and he wanted readers to figure that out right away.

oh goddam that's awful =(

Some of the single-class late game abilities could use improvement but there's no reason single or multiclass should be forced stronger or weaker than the other.

For the first 12 levels or so, red hand and a quarterstaff for your weapons, miscreants leather, acinas tricorn, baubles of the Finn, ring of the marksman, kuaru"s prize, the great escape cape, boots of the stone, gauntlets of ogre power / burglary gloves depending. After that switch to kitchen stove with the thunderous report enchant and whatever other unique pistols and blundys float your boat. edit: now that i'm not on my phone a little clarity -- Up to level 12 or so you can easily max your focus quickly by using a normal arquebus / red hand , with a quarterstaff as your "ranged" alternate damage type (crushing). Past about level 12-14 though you stop being able to max out your focus meter quickly with the Red Hand and you need AOE damage or multi-hit damage to do it. That means the kitchen stove/thunderous report and that means you need to respec from two-handed weapons to dual-wielding. Fortunately by level 12-14 or so you should be able to get some pistols or blundys with alternate damage types (fire in the hole, eccea's arcane blaster, thundercrack) or even a good scepter, so you can just start operating entirely at range. Escape cape is for when you get pinned in melee and don't want to be.

The entire notion of "physical copies" seems kinda silly these days. "Sorry, yeah, I'm still installing the game. My arm is getting tired swapping out seventy separate CDs" I think i'm getting a box so I hope I can fit the maps and figurines etc in it for storage.

I'd edit this a bit -- I'd add the word "weapon" before "DPS", and maybe add a clause to the effect that it's not overpowered presuming you don't do meta-gamey stuff with it like passing it around the party to give everyone the bonus. My hope is that any upcoming tweaks it gets focus on removing the metagamey stuff and not just nerfing it down into the floor. The arquebus already suffers vs. bows due to only being single-damage-type and the prevalence of pierce-immune enemies.

I'll admit I'm potentially disprovable on this, but I suspect that if there were any Red Hand builds out there using Scouts or Wanderers or other builds specifically optimized for the Red Hand, and those builds were capable of results similar to the builds posted, someone would probably be posting demo videos about those builds. I have yet to see a better Red Hand build than the ones shared in those posts. It's certainly possible that one exists but assuming the existence of same seems premature.

That's also a fair point. There's definitely still a role for the Red Hand against single targets who have high AR and are not pierce-immune -- that is, boss fights, or well, some boss fights. But 99% of the game is not boss fights. And if the argument is only "The Red Hand is a strong choice for boss encounters" that's far different discussion from claiming that anyone using it will "out DPS anyone in your party no matter what their build is," or that it's clearly overpowered, etc.

The Aamina's Legacy bow posts do specifically address the "more weapon DPS" though. That said, you make a fair point, but isn't "overall damage done by the build as a whole" a much more important question than " weapon damage done" specifically? Weapons are just part of a build -- if the most powerful builds don't use a supposedly "overpowered" weapon, then it probably isn't actually overpowered. I get the distinction you're drawing and it's a fair point but I think framing the question as overall build damage, rather than as only weapon damage specifically, gives the better analysis.

Mathematically, because the "graze" range is so small, "graze to hit" is just dramatically worse than other bonuses -- for example, to be as good as the +5 accuracy bonus that rapiers get, you'd need something like 40% graze to hit, not just 10%. It's by far the weakest bonus of all the weapon specials. Anyway, additional suggestions cobbled from other threads: Make the Arquebus do crushing damage (bows do slash/pierce already) Remove the bonus AR that enemies get on POTD (it forces use of high-penetration builds exclusively and causes real issues with spell penetration -- make PotD difficult in other ways) Cipher powers still need at least one more upward balancing pass (the same is probably true of druids and priests) The weapon modals could use a general tweaking pass too -- some are good but most are of only marginal utility Do a general keywording pass -- Ciphers don't get a lot of bonuses they should because their powers lack appropriate keywording (fire, acid, etc) and there are no items in game that contemplate CIpher keywording (there are plenty of +water items but no +shred items etc). make the game remember that I set it on "fast" movement and medium-slow combat on a reload

Oh yeah? What was KC: D like upon release? Basically this: To be fair I genuinely liked the game and I've recommended it to friends but it was a horrorshow of bugs. Small studio, first game, so forgiveable. I will admit that the bugs Deadfire had on release stung in a way that doesn't really make intuitive sense. I lost a week-long run of the game in KCD due to quest breaking bugs and just was "well, I'll come back later," but the import history bugs in Deadfire were somehow much more annoying even if they were far less consequential. I'm not sure why. Cutting edge RPG's have always had catastrophic bugs though it just goes with the territory -- Darklands was proverbial for it back in the day and has some bugs that still aren't fixed 20 years later. The real difference is that with modern RPG's and Steam there's ongoing support so you know the bugs will probably be fixed a few months down the road.

Yeah, I'm in the states and still "shipping soon" also. I suspect it's because I got the painted miniatures.

Kaylon explained how the Aamina's Legacy bow gives superior DPS to the Red Hand here: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104928-ansalons-ranged-weapon-tier-list/?p=2085783 Other players have run tests and showed that builds using the Kitchen Stove and other non-red-hand weapons can dramatically outperform Red Hand builds and posted the data in these threads: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104892-build-witch-the-banshee-build-very-high-damage-berserkerascendant-rdps-caster/ https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104924-dps-tests-of-some-classesmulticlasses/ Presuming you don't exploit the fact that you can swap the Red Hand around the whole party to give everyone the buff, and just use it "normally" on one character, then the Red Hand is a second-tier ranged weapon at best, but makes up for it in ease of use -- it doesn't require a complex build or positioning micromanagement, and it's got very high Pen so you don't have to think about that part of the game much either. It's not so much overpowered as it is convenient. I like it on low to mid (8-15) level ciphers before you manage to collect Eccea's and the Kitchen Stove and other guns that do non-piercing damage, because it's easy to carry an arquebus in one weapon set and a quarterstaff in the other and have two solid "ranged" damage type options. Late game though it's deprecated because the damage boost it gives is insufficient to top out your focus bar on an alpha strike -- you need AoE or fly-through multitarget to do that. I'll agree that the persistent Red Hand bonus should vanish from a character if the weapon is placed into inventory or equipped by a different character. But that's the only nerf it really needs.

We went over this in the other thread, but this is just flat out mathematically false. Aamina's Legacy flat-out outperfforms the Red Hand mathematically in DPS terms and several other weapons dramatically outperform it with specific builds. You do need to lose the buff from it when you unequip the weapon (not just switch to a different weapon set).

The main mod I'd like to see, that I thought someone would have already written by now, is a mod to let companions have subclasses (i.e., Eder is now a Trickster etc).

Yeah, I get the sense they don't want to directly increase the durations or strength of the CC powers, though, so that only leaves so many options. The casting/recovery times could be decreased (helps ascendants more than anyone else), the accuracy numbers could be increased (functionally increasing average durations), or the areas of effect could be increased. Or the damage components could be improved.

Better than average for a new release. Kingdom Come: Deliverance was much worse, for example. Hell, a lot of the same bugs in Deadfire were also present in the new Battletech game because they both used Unity.

My current problem with ascendant is that when I reach max focus, I don't really feel that ascended. I can spam powers, but the result is not really better than what I can do with evoker or fire-priest. Yeah, I suspect it's partly because of the lessened importance of CC in Deadfire --- so much of the Cipher's role is CC, and a lot of the balance changes between I and II were made to diminish that over-reliance on CC, but the net result is that CC based characters are just less effective. The main class-envy I get is vs wizards just because of the flexibility of the grimoire mechanic and the length of their power roster. There are so many wizard spells in this game and they can swap around endlessly; any random wizard with almost any build can pick up the Martial Masteries spellbook for 9k gold and instantly outmelee even a melee-specialized cipher. How many times have you Ascended and then just spent the whole time spamming Pain Block on the rest of the party because that was literally the most useful thing you could do? Meanwhile, Tekehu takes care of that in a single cast . . . The root issue, to me at least, seems to be that the overall Cipher power list is still relatively weak and relatively short, mostly due to "legacy balancing" from the first game where CC was more potent and the focus mechanic more useful. A lot of cipher restrictions (most buffs only working on party members but not the ciphers themselves, for example) only really make gameplay sense as ways to counterbalance things that were strengths in the first game but are now weaknesses. Why on earth is Valorous Echoes single-ally-target, for example?

Wouldn't work -- you can get to level 10 or so without any significant combat just by doing Neketaka sidequests, and at level ten you can have 16 mechanics fairly readily (10 levels +2 rogue or cipher + 2 putty +2 gloves) not even counting lockpicks. Plus, the Red Hand has most of its effectiveness at lower levels -- above 16 or so it's less effective at least for Ciphers as it won't top out your focus meter with its initial salvo (this is why kitchen sink + thunderous report is superior, it can do so in one blast).