omgFIREBALLS

Add Amira's Blessing to the list! +2 dexterity. You get it from solving the Neketaka burning house scripted interaction in a certain way.

Edit: Ok wow, this was easy, but I actually don't see it mentioned anywhere how to get it. Been datamining and scratching my head over this for two hours now. It's not a very tricky thing so I'm sure loads have done it, just haven't shared it with the internet. Step 1: Examine the house, doesn't matter if you fail the perception check. I don't know what the ability check here is, so can't speak for it. Step 2: Enter the house. There are two ability checks available here as well. You don't need to do them. Might even be bad to do. Step 3: After entering the house, you notice the bodies. All you need to do now is flee the house, not pursue the arsonists. You can do all the other things if you want, even try to loot the bodies, as long as you choose to flee the house in the end. Step 4: A priestess of Amira (Hylea) will ask you if anyone survived. If you tell her to check for herself [Cruel], you get nothing. If you say nothing (no disposition) or that you're afraid not [Honest], you get a Huana Charm Belt and Amira's Blessing: +2 dexterity to your party until you rest. And if you find yourself having a dilemma... the arsonists drop nothing special.

I agree with your arguments but disagree with your conclusion. I am playing a video game. I have a computer at my disposal to run intricate calculations in a matter of milliseconds (less? nerds chime in). I therefore want to utilize this power to create a good combat system, and care little about how smooth it would be to replicate it with (or derive it from) dice, pen and paper. Obviously P:K, BG2 etc started in the other end (a TT system that was computerized), but the point remains that I am happy Obsidian did this. PoE combat has, to me, far more nuance (attack roll outcomes, durations) than d20-based systems. I may never understand what the hell double inversion means, but I can still appreciate that this system is simply more enjoyable even if all I get is "more accuracy = more hits". It may not, as you suggest, have appealed to the broader audience, but I hope in the long run gamers will grow to appreciate a system that creates better combat over one that we can still use if we are nuked back to the stone age, even if the exact mechanics are very tricky to grasp. Perhaps in ten years, PoE will be considered an investment in better RPG systems, one that embraced the power of computers instead of making them automate very simple calculations.

I want to make a case for the paladin Lay on Hands upgrades. Originally, they also cost 1 zeal, and I took Greater Lay on Hands everywhere. Since they made it cost 2 zeal, I don't take it at all. I just do not find 8 seconds of Robust being worth paying twice the price. Of course we can't make it cost 1.25 zeal, but I needed to say it... Something I would really like is if an upgrade could make you ignore recovery and cast LoH. I don't mean cast a LoH with 0 recovery, I mean cast a LoH even though you are in recovery. I would pay 2 zeal for that. Oh also, Hastening Exhortation is a pale shadow of its Pillars 1 counterpart. Are you sure you need to lower its duration?

You say glitch, I say par for the course. Unless my character sheet is lying to me, it's stacking just fine here. With everything. In multiple parties. I tend to start my no-rest shortly after reaching Neketaka (because I want one party member to eat shark soup), and have that ceremonial meal in the wilderness on the way to Nomu the Marauder. I kill him, then I go steal dust at the mill, then I go to the herb shop to buy the other stuff, and whip up five potions. But I have done it in different ways and can't recall ever having problems stacking them.

Wait, I think I can turn this into a BG2 anagram as well. Just give me a minute. I'm pretty sure I have it, I just can't formulate it.

Not much more complicated than that. Here's a premade AI setting: Here's one I made myself that I turn on to make my crusader just derp out offense:

As long as it's not turn based, I expect I will binge it. Every RPG is a beautified spreadsheet for me to outsmart and turn into medieval carnage. By the way, you know what came before BG3?

This is an anagram of Action Used, and you know a game in which actions are used? BG2.

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.