omgFIREBALLS

I hope you don't mind if I use this thread to share some comparable science. I started a lightning wizard, and had to start over Dawnshore because it bothered me too hard that I hadn't nearly optimized it. Judging from your post and the 3 Awakened Adra upgrade requirement, you played on some easy difficulty, I'm guessing for science. This is from a PotD perspective (where upgrading armor or 1h costs 5 Awakened Adra). In one's quest to ever upgrade one's gear, one will be limited by either Adra, skeyts (money) or herbs. If you're limited by iron etc, that's just a matter of restocking shops, which with the right mod means you won't also be limited by your desire to stay sane. It's no cheat - spam resting is free, except for the enjoyment cost. So, let's consider this. In order to minimize the money problem, I made sure to not loot a single skeyt until I had the necklace for +20% looted money. Next, I wanted to get out of Dawnshore with Exceptional armor and weapon and as much Adra on top of that as possible. To do this, I needed to acquire 15 Adra without looting uniques. Looking at what options are available for that, in retrospect I can't see how I managed to do it but apparently I did. It involves looting Adra directly (both ogre bosses drop it for example) or buying it from shops. Anyway, I bought Fine plain armor, then looted a Fine unique armor. At level 8, I upgraded my materials and then that armor to Exceptional. Then I could loot the remaining three unique armors, at Exceptional, getting me 3 Awakened Adra from scrapping them. Next up I looted a Fine unique onehander, but given that I need 5 Awakened Adra to get it to Exceptional, I had to get 6 more plain Adra, and at this point my options were mostly looting unique weapons as there was barely any plain Adra left from other sources. By the time I had an Exceptional onehander, I had only two weapons left to loot, but they were (on purpose) twohanders, which scrap into 2 Awakened Adra each. (If you want to step out of Dawnshore with an Exceptional twohander the optimal way, upgrade a onehander to Exceptional, then loot the twohander. Sorry.) So, Dawnshore end result was: Exceptional onehander (Common grimoire) Exceptional armor 4 Awakened Adra ~10k skeyts What I could have done better is to not loot herbs until I had Scavenger 1, and to demand payment for a few quests. I've also completely disregarded the ability to purchase uniques, either to use or to scrap for Adra. I simply didn't have that kind of skeyts to spend. Anyway, this strategy kind of snowballs and it gets easier and easier to keep doing it, meaning in Emerald Stair I bought my Exceptional grimoire, upgraded it to Superb and then looted all the weapons, until I could afford to upgrade my armor to Superb, etc. My story is a little skewed by the fact I don't use a unique grimoire, so I need less Adra but more plants. Now I am not even halfway done with Shatterscarp and I need no more Adra, ever. That's also with very little purchasing of Adra in Emerald Stair or Shatterscarp. Also, I'm not using the bonus money necklace anymore. So, if you've been paying attention that means I'm not limited by Adra or skeyts but by upgrade herbs. And that has kind of sapped the joy out of it, since there is very little strategy involved. Explore for herbs, hope for Scavenger proc (I share your assessment that it doesn't seem save scummable) and hope for chests to grant herbs. I'd like a system where we can convert Adra into herbs and vice versa. Some people seem to be getting herb restocks in shops, but that doesn't seem to be intended. And given this, I certainly agree about no template weapons. Herbs are your most precious resource. I could have optimized my strategy by not upgrading my grimoire and just waiting to buy a Superb version in Shatterscarp, and had more herbs that way. And lastly, an idea someone shared on Discord that I haven't been able to test: Iron Fists instead of spending money on a Fine weapon, but I don't know if that makes you loot Fine uniques.

In-game your saves are grouped by playthrough, so clearly the game can make sense of it. I see no cause for concern.

I don't think you can, but is there a mechanical reason for this to be important? Or do you just not want to see them there? The best I can think of is respeccing and not learning the skill the next time. Here's something that worked for me: I respecced Marius, teaching him a new skill. Then I used that skill to replace my 5 bind. Then I respecced him again and took the skill away. Now my 5 bind is cleared. You can probably do a bunch of variations on this, maybe even involving companions you aren't using. If you never use Kai, pick him up, replace all offending binds with his abilities, then replace him, and maybe those slots will be empty. As proof of concept, here's an entirely empty action bar resulting from teaching Marius Shadow Step, binding it to 1 through 6 and then retraining him to take it away again:

This keeps getting suggested and I've been opposed to the idea because, well, why would you ever NOT use your custom grimoire? Let me go off on a tangent here. With any other weapon (as in, "goes in your hands slot"), your best equipment is always uniques. Ain't nobody writing a guide for a barbarian-themed character and saying, and don't forget to pick up your endgame weapon, Superb Greataxe. But, with grimoires, you may actually prefer a plain one. Only unique grimoires can become legendary, gaining even more cost and cooldown reduction, but that's only exciting if you actually want that arrangement of spells. I'm working on a lightning-themed wizard and I fully expect to end the game with Superb Grimoire of Storms in my off hand. So, I don't think it would be too bad if instead I were stuck with some other superb grimoire, tailored to my build. As long as this custom grimoire has some sort of catch to it so that it's actually an interesting choice (as per my opening question), I'm supporting the idea. One catch is it doesn't go to legendary, or is extra expensive to get that far. Maybe Starmetal could allow it - that would be awesome. One chunk each for Legendary +0/+1/+2/+3. WRT grimoires possibly granting bonuses to all spells, not just the ones in them, here we run into the problem of the miserably small action bar, which encourages you to stick to spells in your grimoire. If not for that, I think it'd be a cool idea if Grimoire Mastery had the added bonus of conveying some percent of your grimoire's bonuses to spells that aren't in it. And remember, then we all get to be confused by percentage-of-percentage mechanics too, which is a mandatory annoyance in every RPG! But in case I wasn't clear, I'm not supporting the idea if it simply leads to ignoring all other grimoires.

Shadows of the Past isn't about going to Galawain's Tusks. It's done in a ruin in Scattersharp.

Hi, thank you for your kind words. Unfortunately I have very little interest in working on the calculator right now.

Maybe I am reading too much into your post but this doesn't sound as much Berath as it does Woedica. Minus the mercy part. Have you ever known Berath to be bothered by murderers or corruption? Raedric, who was devoted enough to Berath to return as a death guard, had a bunch of undead in his basement, and then a bunch of undead at his disposal when he decided to stop being dead. People who go for immortality does seem to bother Berath OTOH, based on their Teir Evron quest in Pillars 1.

It was like that but it's been patched so shield-parries trigger those effects. Yeah, dual wield has too much "rule of cool" in CRPGs. Single wielding doesn't get enough credit. One bonus could be better grenade throwing, given you actually have a spare hand. Or that you could hold your weapon up to block attacks while drinking potions.

Yes, as soon as you have an item in need of it, you learn the recipe to upgrade Adra. If you have a Fine +3 item, you learn how to combine 3 Adra into 1 Awakened Adra. And then at Exceptional +3 you learn how to make Corrupted Adra and then finally Adra Bán. Note that this also seems to be exempt from any Scavenger mechanics. The upgrade always costs 3, with or without Scavenger.

Yeah, at this point I'm thinking Dawnshore uniques should always drop as Fine, Emerald Stair always as Exceptional, etc. For most part this would buff players, but the system becomes way harder to mess up or exploit - the exploit being something particularly degenerate like not looting Dawnshore uniques until you have Exceptional gear.

I tried nuking the same target with the same spell with various upgrade levels on my wand/grimoire and saw the same damage. But, seeing how my melee damage scales, there must be some form of spell scaling (other than might) or spells would be extremely weak in the endgame. Maybe just character level.

I'm chalking this (and a number of other issues) down to not having enough buttons on the gamepad, so parry cannot be a separate bind even for people with a keyboard and dozens of spare binds. Yeah, it bothers me too. Though parrying doesn't feel that great to me in Avowed.

Someone shared the tip you can power attack with a wand to make it briefly light things up, but yeah. For most part the game just decides to light up when I enter dark spaces. My headcanon is that I have bioluminescent growths on my face.

Eh, I think something in-game told me, but I can't find it. This article says 35% too.

I believe it's not considered bad, but you have to manually alternate between the weapons, and you can't block/parry. Haven't heard good things about them, I'm afraid. But also, it seems you can make every build work right now, so it's just a question of OP vs. more OP. You deal bonus damage to unaware enemies, and in fact if you try to melee them you will automatically use a special ability that does very high damage. But, once in combat enemies stay aware and there's no flanking debuff. It's possible to drop combat and try to land another Divine Thorn, but your companions (which you are forced to use) generally view your sneak attack as a go signal, so you'll have to wait for them to get knocked out before mobs will relax. I don't think Shadowing Beyond lets you use it in combat... I hear better things about guns, but I haven't tried playing an archer/gunner myself.