gkathellar

How much is the necklace of power nerf? Down to +1? That would get us to ... 22 with a potion of ascension, food, necklace, death's usher, and an intellect inspiration. Pretty cool. Given the Woedica buff doesn't appear to be achievable, I suspect it's cut content. You can't pledge to Woedica, but I saw the option to not pledge at all (was it even possible?) IIRC the gods will still help you get to Sun In Shadow even without making a promise to any of them, so long as you do one of their quests in satisfactory fashion. You just won't get a relevant boon.

Putting aside practicality and whether it's actually worth it to do so, how ridiculous can we make the core monk ability? I'm curious. 9 + 1 Prestige + 3 Death's Usher gets us to a baseline of PL 13 with a death godlike monk while near death. We can get any of several boosts for elemental abilities via Lightning Strikes and Turning Wheel, but afaik those won't apply to Transcendent Strikes itself. What other PL increases are available?

Nope. It's an enormous oversight.

I tend to agree with Esajin about the PoE1 fighter, whose play revolved around the timing and sequence of ability use at pretty much every level, and whose abilities could afford to be strong specifically because you could not spam them. Even a very basic Knockdown + Charge fighter had a surprising amount of strategic play when you took into account that it would probably be able to fire all of its abilities, and that you needed to figure out when to do so.

Ondra implies that this incident is the reason for the pact, as it made the gods collectively blink and take a step back.

I would say the biggest problem, compared with PoE1, is the nerf to afflictions in general. Ciphers had serviceable damage, but truly excelled via alpha strikes and tossing out long-duration debuffs early in a fight. I'm not sure they can be fixed in a way that makes them distinctive from other classes without tuning up afflictions. The only other thing that spring to mind is letting them self-target with Echo spells, but that seems wrong. The only reasons to use one are (a) Charm/Dominate, and (b) Soul Annihilation.

I think it's probably fine. With lesser wounds you'll get about 2 wounds per hit and 3 wounds per crit endgame on your normal attacks. Hit the enemy from 1 to 2 times after torment then do it again, if he's stunned for 6 seconds you can still stunlock him. The main problem for that is that torment targets fortitude which is often the highest enemy defense, but that was a problem before too. The issue is more that a multiclass shattered pillar can't get wounds off of their non-monk attack abilities. That sort of discourages them from using said abilities, ever.

Hm. How does the wound-generating ability work with Shattered Pillar?

I had that level of insight when I first talked to konstanten. did get the option to get him to join me. Maybe it was a perception check? Mainly I remember being able to recruit him immediately.

You don't need to finish Lost Dues In Good Faith for this. All you need 3+ Insight.

What do they even actually do? Is there a write up I can find somewhere?

? Ciphers are amazing this build, both as a single caster or multi because they have early access to charm/dominate. Charm, dominate, summons and explosives make every encounter much easier. There's a term for that, unfortunately: "One-Trick Pony." And chanters also get an AoE charm effect at Tier IV, actually earlier than Ciphers get Ringleader. OK, but it still a pretty great trick! One could argue many of the classes are "one-trick ponies" (see Barbarians for example). There's a categorical difference between, "when I attack things, it causes an AoE," and "I have 20-something powers scattered across 9 levels, and 3 of them (all of which do pretty much the same thing) are worth using."

Poe's law applies.

... I honestly don't trust Obsidian to do not!Spelljammer right. I don't see "aggressively wacky" as being in their wheelhouse. Like ... Obsidian comes up with a lot of clever ideas, but I don't think they would ever come up with scro. It's the wrong kind of clever.

You can probably get Bittercut around level 7-8. 6 if you're really good, maybe. Helwax Mold is, like all stronghold items, a bit of a crapshoot: stronghold adventures are received on every 8th stronghold turn, and the rank of the quest is determined by a roll of 2d50+Prestige. A named adventure of the appropriate rank will then be randomly chosen from among the named adventures of that rank that you haven't yet completed (you can only get generic adventures if you roll a rank and have already completed all of its named adventures. The Helwax Mold is granted by completing "The Waxmaker," a Grand Adventure, requiring a roll of 100-124. The mixed news here is that while 2d50 has results between 2-100, the graph of probabilities is a pyramid, so your odds of rolling a Grand Adventure rise steadily with Prestige unless until they peak at 74 - with a modest Prestige of 30, you should get a Grand Adventure roughly 25% of the time. The possibly-good news is that my experiments with saving and reloading seemed to indicate that the 2d50 is only pseudorandom, so if you save before turning in a quest and get a Grand Adventure, you should be able to save-scum through various adventures of that rank until you get the Waxmaker. Even if you're not looking to save-scum, however, odds are good that you'll get the mold well before finishing the game, so long as you're efficient about stronghold management and do lots of quests: at 100% completion, the game gives you 210+ turns. Also note that you may want to hold off on using the Mold until you get a Kraken's Eye or Sky Dragon's Eye, in which case you'll be in much less of a hurry.

"So we'll have the evil-looking ones, the pretty ones, the nature-y ones, and the ones who run around screaming 'MY HEAD IS ON FIYAH!' Sound good?"

It depends? thelee made a point about Diablo 3 above which is worth acknowledging: if you just buff everything, you end up with number bloat that can cause a system's internal math to fall apart. In general, I think many of the nerfs are deserved, but the approach taken to them feels wrong in many instances, and some are frustrating because they're solutions to problems that were foreseeable. WotEP is a really easy example: the problem was that the AoE damage was too valuable (which should have been obvious, given there's an entire class built around the premise of reduced-damage melee AoEs), so they ... cut the single-target damage in half? lolwut

They work completely differently? Carnage is an every-attack AOE hit, now 33% of your base weapon damage, in a radius around the target you hit. Cleave stance is after you kil a mob you get an attack on enemies near you (or after the patch, 1 nearby enemy). AFAIK, carnage should proc off of the attack(s) from cleaving stance, there's no reason why they wouldn't that I'm aware of since they're just normal attacks.. That's a meaningful difference, but I sort of agree with AeonsLegend insofar as it doesn't feel meaningful enough. Without multiclassing, I suppose there'd be a fairly good reason for it to exist, but since you can just make a fighter/barbarian these days, it just feels out-of-place.

... they're from quebec?

Not gonna lie, I'm just imagining a dude with an anvil for the top of their head here. Racial trait: Your robes are fresh washed and creases-free. But something like this could be more suitable for crpg: Okay, now it's an anvil-headed dude with Taika Waititi's voice. >_>

This. And of course, a central component of the problem is that nerfing deflection options simply decreases the number of builds that are going to bother with it at all, since the investment in achieving good or even middling deflection becomes unmanageable. If the pattern continues (and it's a pattern that's been ongoing since Patch 2.0 of PoE1), eventually deflection will reach a point where the only builds willing to invest in it are the ones that can still become functionally invulnerable. Ultimately the only remotely plausible way to even pretend to have fixed the issue is to implement better stacking restrictions ... which PoE2 has largely dispensed with, so lolwut. Agreed (and I remember these psychological mechanisms from my studies.) However, one thing is to react negatively to nerfs because they are nerfs—which can certainly happen, but it's not what the majority are doing on these boards AFAIA; another, rightfully pointing out that some abilities were over-nerfed, others (and most items) were nerfed with no need to. Beta patch 1.1 went way overboard with the nerfs, and frankly I don't see the benefit. Sure, I could spend a few hours cherry-picking nerfs I agree with and restoring everything else, but I didn't back this game to be appalled by monkey work. I backed it to have fun, which certainly won't happen for as long as recovery remains as slow as it is (it was barely acceptable in 1.02 already.) YMMV, but me, I'm pretty bummed. But also this. To oversimplify, there are two reasons people get enthusiastic about options: they're strong, and they're cool. If an option is too strong, it makes sense to nerf it - but this shouldn't be done at the expense of what makes the option cool.

Not gonna lie, I'm just imagining a dude with an anvil for the top of their head here.

I don't think so. The Scarlet Chorus don't need Amelia to renounce her right to rule, they need exactly the opposite: an heir to the land must live so that the Edict of Storms would remain in force. That's why Nerat keeps the girl alive even though he kills Amelia. There is simply no use for the legal loophole because the Chorus' situation is entirely different. Now, the fact that you can't say "Screw you, I'm going solo" and betray them, saving the baby AND her mother, is indeed strange. But it's not the only such instance in the game. My suspicion is that they blocked out the plot in chunks, and so they couldn't allow you to change sides mid-chunk or the plot would have broken. Or, as you put it earlier: railroading.

Probably not. It's possible that one type of godlike is created by various gods, however. Honestly, I preferred when it was an open question of whether the gods were even actually responsible for the godlike.

I remember you could get one of the courtesans from the Salty Mast to come back to Caed Nua. Was convenient. Can you do the same thing here? (I swear I'm not a bad person.)