omgFIREBALLS

Wait what? You have to farm in some way, to expand your AI options? Keep EA out of this thread - new microtransaction concept. OP, regarding your healing concerns: Yes, a herald makes an excellent healer, tried and true. Exalted Endurance and Ancient Memory are constant passive AoE heals, and Lay on Hands is a powerful spot heal.

Actually some good things were made more than 20 years ago, for example the devs of bg2.

I can't say how it compares to those games, but yeah you can program your party's AI. It might look like IF (examples: have x class resource or party member below 50% health), there's also IF NOT THEN use ability y, and if it's not a selfcast you get to specify target (examples: nearest enemy or enemy with most adjacent targets or enemy with the lowest saving throw) You can also assign a cooldown to each command, if you don't want it spammed whenever its conditions are met. You can certainly automate a chanter this way by telling them to use invocation x when they have the phrases for it, and perhaps this invocation lasts a long time so you put a cooldown on it and tell them to use a different invocation the next time they can afford it. That said, using invocations is pretty much the only active part of controlling a chanter other than generic things like move here or attack that, or maybe changing your chants, but you already played Pillars 1 so I guess you know anyway.

I'm loving Contender's Armor with stacked Athletics for smacking stuff fast. You could add that to the mix. edit: It also has a bit of a tribal Huana look, which might be an aesthetic fit for your marauder. And, shameless promotion: The mod in my signature will help filter your buffs so it's easier to see Blade Cascade. I don't actually look for it myself, but since there's no Salvation of Time in my party, it's not nearly as important for me to react to it. Might be easier to simply see yourself swinging like mad.

I'm guessing that OP didn't like having a self-inflicted debuff last longer based on their int

I thought of that too, yeah. And as I said, it looks hilarious when my tiny kith knocks a giant over. It shouldn't happen much, but between the big fat accuracy on that fighter and the Brilliant spam, it... happens. I'm not even debuffing his fortitude. Still unsure about these, because it seems to me that Mule Kick also makes the target briefly untargetable, which is quite annoying. Are you certain it lasts longer?

I know this wasn't for me, but I consider Dorudugan the ultimate of all my melee grievances. He has sky high defenses and resolve. It's very difficult to land debuffs on him, and even if I do, they will have tragically short durations, so I can't really "get the ball rolling". I simply cannot crack him open, and that makes him a boring and depthless boss. But he's not without offensive capabilities, so he can't be blithely whittled down one weak attack at a time either, and so he goes from boring to frustrating. And yet, the fact that I killed this robotic incarnation of poor design choices on Deadly Deadfire PotD difficulty only yesterday, with a melee based party, is the reason I backed down from this argument. I had my tank and my two melee in a triangular formation around him, so that he was flanked without his cleave hitting more than one target. When he cast his fire rain, everyone but the tank ran. As noted, monsters are very good at respecting engagement, so he rarely chased and if he did, it wasn't far. (On the note of engagement, I would only find him half as frustrating if he couldn't trigger disengagement attacks while preparing to rain fire) While I did keep my tank out of fire too, I didn't bother trying to keep big D out of it. My parties are pretty much always five multiclassed Shieldbearer paladins. This comes with respectable defenses - even if this discussion may have made you believe it, I don't build glass cannons, and rather take pleasure in just basking in my tankiness from time to time - but also the cannot-die-Lay-on-Hands, which I can just keep up permanently at high levels since I have a psion in the party who knows that come level 19, she is reduced to an aurabot throwing out Brilliant inspirations. Outlasting is my fetish. A fun thing that is "easily" noticed with Dorudugan is that he can be knocked prone (I mean it's not easy to do, but it's easy to see when it happens, and also hilarious to watch). Maybe everything in the game can, I don't know. As far as I can tell, this will effectively interrupt the target and add some recovery. So, as we speak, I am working on my next iteration of this mass paladin party. The change this time is that the tank will have a new job for Big Bads: If they don't want to hit her, she will whip out a rapier (SINGLE WIELDED, you heard it here folks), modal on and just disrupt the boss with Knock Down repeatedly. Edér is welcome to try it as well.

Meh. I guess as far as PoE goes, you are correct. It's just that at the end of the day, bending over backwards to break engagement and run away is a frustrating effort when all the enemy needs to do is leftclick you again when you return to melee range. Also, do you know a "stereotypical" rogue build that works under these circumstances? I know I was in OP's situation in Pillars 1 and I got told to equip plate mail. It's not about wanting to trade survivability for damage, it's about wanting to survive through elusiveness rather than armor.

And the result of this is your melee squad is reduced to a bland mix of semitanks. I much prefer the WoW PvE experience here, where aggro is predictable, monster attack damage is balanced around the assumption that they're hitting a sturdy tank, and they have an array of abilities that bother the whole party or even specifically everyone but the tank, so that nobody gets away with being squishy (and/or inattentive). (We don't need to take the WoW-ness as far as for mobs to religiously chase the tank if they try to kite, however) I mean, monsters (most of them) already have a deep respect for engagement and distance. You can send in a tank to handle "the bulk" of the enemy force, while you surgically pick them off with your melee who will only be attacked by a few of them. This is good design to me, but if the AI were being "reasonable", it sure would ignore that tank. The problem comes when you fight a Big Bad, like in the OP's situation. There is only one monster, and it hits hard. It also has resistances, immunities and saving throws so high that you can't feasibly keep it locked down. Too, it's comical in a tragic way to talk of ways to get out of melee range without eating a disengagement attack. Okay, your melee got out of harm's way, but now they're not doing anything, and if they rejoin the fray, the Big Bad will just say, oh this is a squishier target, yay! (upvote for the poetry) An idea that came to mind as I pondered this whole situation is the following ability. Threatening Gaze Fighter, 1 Discipline, Accuracy vs. Will Intimidates an opponent for X seconds, making it wary of shifting its attention away from the fighter. If the enemy changes target, it will have its accuracy reduced by Y for Z seconds. This penalty is greater the more spare engagement slots the fighter has. So, firstly, even though it says intimidates, it has nothing to do with your intimidate skill, nor is it a resolve affliction. Moving on, I would really like you to look closely at the last sentence. The traditional tank wears a shield, which is +1 engagement, and so this ability encourages that. But if you are tanking many mobs, you have little/no spare engagement, and so it gets narrowed down the the Big Bad handler ability I want it to be. Alternatively it could also be that the ability itself has higher accuracy the more spare engagement you have. So if the Big Bad switches to your melee, at least you get a grace period during which he will have a hard time hitting, and you can prep some defenses or plan your escape. In typing this I realized that Take the Hit is actually a pretty good solution to all I've talked about here, other than being a high level single class fighter ability.

This is something that's been bothering me throughout both PoE titles and all their DLC's. The fact that some fights vs. a Big Bad are reduced to, if you're melee, enjoy facetanking the boss because it's just going to target the squishiest thing it can find at a convenient distance. Anyway, it's a long story with a moderately happy ending, but it won't help you much. So let's address "disengage safely" instead. Any might affliction will make the target unable to engage, and thus be unable to throw disengagement attacks at you. It might help a bit.

What's above your characters' heads? Is it cogwheels or three periods (...)? If it's three periods, they genuinely believe they are supposed to be doing nothing, based on their AI instructions. If it's cogwheels, they are being stupid for no reason. This happens to me as well. If you press the stop button, they will immediately start acting based on their AI. The default keybind for this button is S, so you can just select all and press S when combat starts. Yeah, I wish I had a better solution, especially for a problem that has existed since launch as far as I remember.

Yep. Maybe this can help you pop it. The fact you're saying you downloaded it is what has me confused. It's built into the game, although I believe there's also a mod with similar functionality. All you need to do is press the right key on your keyboard, really. I usually switch to English keyboard layout to pop consoles so I don't have to figure out what key it is on my default.

Okay, I can't speak for Unity Console. It's separate from the game console... right? It's a mod, right? Anyway, I created a custom history where I sacced Devil of Caroc to the blood pool, and was able to give myself her breastplate with the game console just fine. Disables achievements and all that, yes yes, but anyway. After enabling cheats with iroll20s you just enter GiveItem Breastplate_Armor_U_Devil_of_Caroc_Breastplate and that's it.

They actually did change the name, but I already have her ("BOON_Ungwith_SE_AllSkills")

Hello fellow no-resters. I take it you're all used to filling up your buff list to the point that it relays almost no useful information in combat. With the help of @Kvellen I wrote a mod to address this. Please help me make it awesome.

With much thanks to @Kvellen for laying the groundwork, I have created my first mod, one that in three different steps reduces the combat tooltip clutter. See mod page for details. When you've done that, I would appreciate some assistance in making it better. Weird strings - I saw references to a courtesan possibly named Nisanga, who gives +1 to all attributes. Can anyone make sense of this? - There are some Magran's Blessing strings that do not seem related to the shield, for example "Boon_MagransBlessing_SE_CritWatcher", again, can anyone make sense of this? I'm hung up on these two because I've been filtering a ton of things that begin with "boon" (generally Watcher buffs), but I couldn't explain what these were about. Additional things to filter While I probably nailed most of the beneficial auras (please point out any I missed), I'm sure there are tons of item buffs that I haven't addressed. Any that come to mind, please mention! Of course, also goes for buffs that slipped through in any other way. Buffs I chose not to filter I elected to leave the following buffs untouched: Nalpazca reactions to being drugged or not, Street Fighter health level reactions, Stalker Companion Bond, and Psion Soul Mind. If you have strong opinions, make them known. Also, being my first mod, I might have unknowingly not observed various NexusMods customs, so feel free to point out errors like that too.

In the least combative, most curious voice possible: What then is your explanation for Pillars 1 being more of a success, if they both had the same problem? Is it that people simply noticed in Pillars 1 that the complexity level was too high and didn't bother with 2 after that?

I'm curious to hear if anyone has any strong opinions on how to do this. The options, to save y'all some time, are: Thermally Stable (+15 defenses against Fire/Frost) --> Bronze Core (also +15 defenses against Acid) vs. Nonconductive (also +15 defenses against Electricity) and Arcane Interference (+15% resistance against Evocation/Conjuration/Illusion) --> Apostatism (also +15% resistance against Punishment/Condemnation) vs. Arcane Suppression (upgrades the original 15% against Evocation/Conjuration/Illusion to 25%) It's currently the go-to shield for a tanky crusader who just ties down as many enemies as there is space around her to engage, but it could also be the plan B for a melee who needs to bunker up if given too much attention (uses Nerian's Ward for that right now).

Deadfire is "done". Chances of a content patch are pretty much inexistent, chances of a bugfix patch... quite tiny I think your best bet is spawning Benweth with the console, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it. Note that doing so will disable achievements for your playthrough. Failing that, you could probably set the quest outcome with the console and give yourself his loot while you're at it, if killing him is the solution you have in mind. And while I'm here, not to sound too preachy... in the standard encounter Benweth has like five goons helping him. You worked your way to ambushing him alone, and probably had a full party, so the two skulls wouldn't have helped him much I mean he's actually terrified of you in that situation and doesn't even want a fight.

Every time (Suppressed) I feel (Suppressed) like playing (Suppressed) some Pillars 1 (Suppressed), there's (Suppressed) this one (Suppressed) part (Suppressed) of it (Suppressed) that makes (Suppressed) me not.

Oh, that is AWESOME. Thanks! I'll get to work on it, and if all goes well I'll try to make it a full mod, rather than just something that covers only the classes I tend to play. I've made quite some progress, and had like four hours of troubleshooting because of sloppy c/p skills. Might be I can figure all of this out without further help...

Ciphers can rarely cast any of their spells (even the buffs) on themselves, and I doubt you can even cast Soul Ignition on allies. You wouldn't want to outside shenanigans like the one you have in mind, so the game won't let you.

Cheers! I don't think you are correct about the rest though. This isn't merely about the displayed accuracy on the scroll, this is about what I'm seeing in the combat log details. From nuking a bunch of Vailians (I said eccosi so it's fine): 1) The damage was always within the scroll's displayed intervals. I only checked hits and not those that overpenetrated, to keep it simple. Frankly, it's very easy to see given that if the fire levels helping non-burn damage were a tooltip lie, my minimum damage would in fact be my maximum for the crush/freeze attack. The burn/shock attack has a wider damage range, but nonetheless I caused shock damage that wouldn't be within the interval if the fire levels weren't helping. 2) The accuracy was the same for all waves, with the exception of +10 for the burn/shock instances from the ring. Again, no matter which type they actually went for. The only thing I can't figure out is the penetration. All damage instances gain the same amount in the "Level" category, but the shock/burn has a base penetration of 9 whereas the crush/freeze is 7. I don't have Scion of Flame, and if I did, it shouldn't show as base anyway, should it? I thought perhaps Devoted mechanics were playing a trick on me, but even with my favored weapon equipped they are still 9 vs 7. Is this innate to the scroll/spell? If I check the penetration score it lists 7 base. I suppose it's possible that it's just too nerdy for Obsidian to list the different values on the scroll. That could also explain why the scroll itself does not mention the Ring of Focused Flame - the pen/acc displayed is that which pertains to the crush/freeze attack. Do you know of a +water PL item? ^^

That made me think of the Deltro chestpiece with its +2 electricity PL. Turns out that this boosts the spell in its entirety, including the crush/freeze attack. So, Great Maelstrom has a bunch of keywords: Elements, Wind, Electricity, Water, Fire, Storm and since it's a scroll, Scrolls. Items that add PL(/acc/dmg/pen) to these would be awesome. Notably, Magran's Favor is just as good as the Chromoprismatic Quarterstaff (+2 fire vs. +1 fire +1 electricity) and the tooltip doesn't change when I swap these. Just need something useful in the offhand for the axe to be better. Pozzi pet gives +1 fire >:)

Peter works, the hat did not Wait, never mind. Had to equip the hat, then it worked. Who woulda thunk?