JerekKruger

Ectopsychic Echo is great. Foe only, does a total of 200-300 damage* over 10 seconds and if positioned well it can hit a lot of enemies. It works particularly well if you use a Barbarian/Fighter/Monk to use their charge/jump ability to get behind enemy lines, allowing you to get a really good beam attached to them. *Obviously this has to defeat the enemy's Crush DR ten times since it's ten separate hits, but it's still very good damage.

A minor point but I am fairly sure that Waidwen's Legacy is the cause of uncountably many soulless children, not (modern) animancy. Admittedly Waidwen's Legacy is itself caused by ancient animantic techniques, but since the vast majority of people aren't aware of this and these techniques are distinct from the modern animantic tradition I don't think you can really lump them together (certainly the people of the Dyrwood don't). That said I agree that animancy was badly handled. There was exposition where the benefits of animancy were extolled, but pretty much everything we actually saw of animancy was, at best, highly unethical science. I'm not sure I agree that it's unsalvageable, though perhaps the only way to do so would be to have in game recognition of the problems, for example a new organisation of animancers forming who specifically acknowledge the problems with animancy and make it their aim to "do it right".

Sigh... believe whatever makes you happy firkraag, I'm done with arguing with you over this.

The fact that many on this forum will agree with Boeroer is not sycophantism: it's because he is very knowledgeable, backs his statements up with evidence and is therefore very often right*. I can think of several situations when people have disagreed with Boeroer and turned out to be right (most notably regarding a Spiritshifted Druid's capacity to do single target damage). If you want people to trust you, demonstrate it with evidence. Don't just make statements like this. *He's also generally friendly and helpful individual as well, which is probably why people tend to be friendly in return.

Okay then sneak attack and deathblows need to be removed because we really can't rely on "what happens if we have two afflictions running". You can if the situation where one race gets the advantage is reliant on having another character involved (which you yourself have precluded) but the advantage of the other race isn't. I am fairly certain Boeroer is happy to leave you with Minor Threat, he's just pointing out that your insistence that Stalker's Link should be removed is hypocritical when you're including Minor Threat, an ability with exactly the same requirements. Twinned Arrows and Driving Flight are separate abilities. As far as I can tell Kaylon didn't include Driving Flight at all in his damage calculations, and Boeroer's previous calculating correctly modified the damage for Driving Flight arrows. No he hasn't. He has assumed two hits from Twinned Arrows For an average damage calculation this doesn't matter, since the average damage each arrow does (when you take into account miss, graze, hits and crit chances) will be the same as if you treat them as a single bigger arrow. In case you don't believe this let's give an example: suppose we have two arrows that do 5 damage if they hit (so they do 2.5 damage on grazes and 7.5 damage on crits). Let's also assume that the attack is made against an Accuracy 10 higher than the target's Deflection, so they miss 5%, graze 35%, hit 50% and crit 10%. The average damage when treated as two separate arrows is: 2*(0.35*2.5+0.5*5+0.10*7.5) = 8.25 The average damage when they are treated as a single bigger arrow is: 0.35*(2.5+2.5) + 0.5*(5+5) + 0.1*(7.5 + 7.5) = 8.25 So that's at least one affliction that we're not allowing for Sneak Attacks and Deathblows. Even more reason not to allow them in the calculations I guess. Rather than merely state this why not explain how they should be represented. Explain what is wrong with Kaylon's calculations in this regard.

Well if a mid-high level Wizard unloads his spells as fast as he can he'll do more damage than anything other than a Priest or a Druid doing the same. The sheer amount of high damage AoE spells you can dump in a short amount of time is huge. Of course you'll either have to rest afterwards, or be less aggressive with your casting. Cipher's don't have the ability to front load they casting as much, and you're going to have to auto-attack some of the time. Personally I prefer to use my Cipher as a crowd controller (Whispers of Treason and Mental Binding are both great) and buffer/debuffer (Defensive Mindweb = everyone's a tank), although by max level you'll have most the Cipher powers so you can be flexible. That said yes, properly used Cipher spells will increase your damage substantially. Even spells like Mental Binding will raise your damage due to increased chance to hit and crit. Honestly, if you don't intend to use the Cipher's powers I don't know why you'd even bring a Cipher. A Rogue or Ranger will be a better auto-attacker.

I always took a weapon focus. After all, to build focus to use powers you need to do damage, and to do damage you need to hit. That said, last time I played a Cipher Psychic Backlash was still utter garbage, whereas it's not bad these days apparently.

Huh, the question on Josh's Tumblr suggested he was narrative lead for Pillars. Obviously the questioner was mistaken.

I enjoyed Pillar's narrative well enough.

Indeed. Boeroer has a build (admittedly for the Rogue, not the fighter) which is completely designed around the idea of a non-Wizard using scrolls and bound spell items.

Well idle animations for non-companions will add a lot of character to towns and cities in the game. That said I don't disagree that they aren't all that different. All I can say is that for me, personally, a walk toggle wouldn't get any use at all whilst idle animations will be somewhat appreciated. Had Obsidian not included idle animations I wouldn't have cared all that much however.

I actually liked Devil's voice acting. I think the only one of the companions whose VAing I didn't like was Maneha. The American accent thing didn't bother me at all. In fact, as a Brit, I often find the use of British voice actors jarring, particularly when they have regional accents as it attaches lots of baggage to the voice I can't shake off.

In particular, since the OP specified human enemies: no you don't get any xp from killing human (or any other kith) enemies and this is intended. In fact you don't directly get xp for killing non-kith creatures either, you just get xp for completing their bestiary page which happens whilst you kill them (but there's a limit to this).

If Josh being bad at his job gave us Pillars I can only hope he gets worse

Oh they probably don't, I was just trying to think of an answer to Lampros's question about other affliction weapons to pair with Godansthunyrs, though Strike Hard is a fine choice of course.

The (hopefully) good news is Obsidian have acknowledged the bad difficulty scaling on Pillars and have said they'll try to improve it in Deadfire.

What I meant was does the fact you're using two Stunning weapons increase the chances of Stunning an enemy, or would it work the same as if you were using Godansthunyrs in your main hand and Shatterstar in your off-hand?

I believe so yes. The adds might also be tougher variants of their kind, for example if the Alpine Dragon has a mixture of ice blights and greater ice blights defending it on normal, it might only have greater ice blights on hard. I can't really comment on specifics though since I gave up my first normal run because it started getting too easy so I've only ever fought bosses on hard and PotD. If you're looking for a challenge for your next run, and don't want to use PotD, I'd recommend trying a smaller party e.g. only take four characters rather than six. You'll probably be disappointed if you expect hard to pose much more of a challenge than normal did.

Ah right. Yeah she might be able to, although considering that even Galvino couldn't repeat his feat it's not a given. Yeah, there is a little overlap between the two which isn't explained well. I'd tend to assume that Watchers are, in a sense, innate animancers. Where animancers need all sorts of scientific equipment to measure various properties of souls, Watchers can interact directly with souls. But who knows, perhaps a sufficiently brilliant animancer could find a way to communicate directly with a soul.

Would Helwaxed Godansthunyrs be good? It'd increase the rate of stunning from auto-attacking and being a weapon the +1 Might stacks. What I don't know is how would the stunning interact with full attacks like Flames of Devotion? Would it result in a higher chance to stun?

I don't think being an animancer would allow her to communicate with the captured soul, that's really the domain of Watchers.

You'll need the same defences for hard as you did for normal. The enemies don't have higher accuracy, there are just more of them and occasionally better variants of them (elder lions rather than lions). Most importantly, the toughest enemies (dragons etc.) remain unchanged from normal to hard. Only PotD actually buffs enemy stats directly.

Yeah, the only way I could see companions getting added in expansions us if did expansions were stand alone a la Throne of Bhaal. This way all companion-companion interactions would be new, rather than having to integrate a new companion into an already complicated web.

It's quite possible that firkraag doesn't realise that crits aren't multiplicative, given he said earlier 'real (damage) not base who cares what the hell are you on about'. Fifteen percent extra crits would be a lot better if that were the case.

How much difference is there with the XBox version? I ask because almost everyone who plays the PC version would agree that the early game (act I and early parts of II) is the hardest, and the game gets easier after that (barring the really tough fights). Might it be scaled differently in the port? In any case the difference between easy, normal and hard is minimal since enemy stats don't change. On hard you'll get more enemies and/or tougher variants (elder lions rather than lions say) but it didn't make the game noticeably harder in my opinion. Only PotD and story mode really change things significantly.