gkathellar

I KNEW IT ahahahahahahahahaha *cries*

Didn't they fix it in PoE, though? Or am I just imagining that. I ... guess that makes sense as a bug. Like, I can see how that would happen, from a coding perspective. I am willing to be sympathetic! But the real question is, does enemy resolve also accelerate those abilities?

Paladin is also kind of boring a lot of the time. Spam Flames of Devotion, pew pew THATS RIGHT I SAID IT

Caster/Chanter is pretty sweet in general, fwiw

There's BDD and Salvation of Time. But yes their level 8 and 9 spells really do take them up a notch, and you also get all the spells faster. Unless your aim is to self buff on a martial character, I agree there's little reason to multi them. It's telling that the best priest multiclasses - Wael and Skaen - are also the ones that function as a mini-wizard and mini-rogue, respectively.

Mostly because it pretty much couldn't happen by accident. YMMV, I suppose. What do you mean by accident? Did pre 1.1 recovery on DoC breastplate happen by accident? If its possible to stack defenses so high that it makes a player untouchable, how figurines, per rest bonuses, and empower matter? I do not understand what matrix you use to determine what needs to be balanced and whatnot. Seems to me it does not have a rational base. Clarification: it couldn't happen to a player by accident. The only way a run like this would realistically happen is if the player made a conscious choice to do so, at which point you're really metagaming so intensely that you may as well be allowed to see what happens. (As a general word of advice, I would hesitate to ascribe motive to an opinion without a significant base of evidence, were I you.) As a general advice, I would hesitate to use strawman in an argument. What motive? If there is rational base feel free to present it. Cute and fun is not rational base. Not sure what the strawman in this case is, but my premise, which I suppose I failed to clarify, is that imbalances in a single player game are primarily an issue if they can happen to the player by accident. That is to say, gameplay traps are bad and unfun. But something like this is not a trap, is not something failing to work as advertised, and is pretty much only going to happen to the player who goes out looking for it. At that point, in a single-player game, I stop caring about the balance question entirely, because it's not hurting anyone's play experience. If that's how someone wants to play, more power to them.

There was a thread a while back documenting the way they depend on the Watcher's dispositions. I didn't pay super-close attention, but my understanding was that it's not a really big deal for priests, as the effects on Holy Radiance are pretty small. Boeroer or thelee could probably tell you more. Frermas, IIRC, do not have any associated dispositions, so Pallegina's Faith and Conviction will never vary based on your disposition. You can test this on custom paladin companions (again, iirc).

Pretty good on a soul blade, even. But for an ascendant, it's just making your life harder.

Several reasons, most of which have been mentioned, but I'll give my spin on: By high levels, single-class casters already generally have more spells than they can use during any given fight. This means that at the top end, multi-class casters are often ending fights with a slightly less than half of their resources untouched. At this point, you start to wonder if all of those ability points you spent on spells might not have been better-spent on passives which their classes tend not to have. Conversely, in the kind of marathon fights where a double-caster can start to really stretch their wings, caster/martial or caster/Chanter builds in particular are ... also going to be able to really stretch their wings. PL tends to be a pretty big deal for offensive casters (it is for everyone, but they stand out), and so the reduced PL-progression, while not life-ruining, is painful. This could be at least eased with PL-boosting itemization, but since Druids, Priests and Wizards all have their own set of spell schools, many of those items tend only to benefit one half of their build. Subclass synergy, due to the aforementioned separate classification schemes for spells, is nonexistent. A Lifegiver/Priest, for instance, is not the phenomenally good healer that one might expect given their multiclass. You might think an Enchanter/Priest would get to punch above their weight in terms of buff spell durations, but noooope. An Evoker/Fury cannot blast as well as a vanilla Evoker (or arguably, even a vanilla Fury). I expect this was done for balance reasons, in order to prevent the Law of Unintended Consequences, but it does mean that potentially interesting caster combinations are not what they could be and people don't jump to experiment with them in the way that they do with non-caster subclass combinations. Finally, the loss of top-level spells is a one-two punch in terms of play style and fun factor, because people really like having them top-level nukes. Missing out on those can take away some of what makes a caster desirable in the first place, whether or not it's actually a big problem in terms of their effectiveness. Druids are great! They get some excellent PL 8 and 9 powers Two things: Deadfire's casters are also already pretty versatile. Unless you want very specific combinations of spells, you can often achieve the same ends with a single-class caster that you could with a multi-class caster. Reduced spell progression means that you are, in other respects, less versatile for most of the game. Less of a thing at level 19, but a significant portion of the game is spent getting to level 19, not already being there.

wait are you telling me that the 3 Int Deep Wounds Rogue from the first game's release actually works here that's ridiculous

It's not strictly bad, it's just that it will never be a major component of any build, and will only ever be useful to Deflection-stacking builds, mainly Tricksters. Manveru mentioned Holy Slayer, and Swashbucklers and Shadowdancers can also make respectable use of it. I'm sure other builds can as well. This is just sort of a logical consequence of the way Deflection works: there's such a short list of ways to increase it meaningfully that only the very few builds that get most or all of them can get serious mileage out of stacking it.

Really Priest/Cipher in general in godawful. Didn't they fix that in the last patch? I'm not saying it's good now, to be clear. But IIRC you're no longer locked out of your rogue illusion powers.

My take on Rauatai-as-American is more about its internal politics, as described by Kana in the first game. According to him, there's a big fight going on between the globalist imperialists, the isolationists, and the globalist progressives. This has been a pretty central theme of foreign policy thought in American history, to the point that American polisci circles sometimes refer to these broad schools as Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Wilsonian. As Taevyr said, the Dyrwood and Readceras draw on actual American history and many atmospheric elements. But I can't help hearing Kana's description of the Rauataian political situation and thinking, "yep, that's home."

There's also a ring on the Deck of Many Things that gives you resistance to all mental afflictions in return for -8 Int. That's a bad trade and you shouldn't go for it, but it does exist.

I'm not sure I understand why. The Bleak Walkers are mercenaries and siege experts - they believe in ruthlessness and preemptive use of force as a way of bringing conflicts to an end quickly and preventing drawn-out fights. Does some part of that doctrine fit better with one or the other of the Principi factions?

No, I don't see much of that at all. Nowhere maps to anywhere in particular, but there's a lot of coding - Ixamitl has pretty strong Mesoamerican cues in its language and some of what we know about its mythology, for instance. I really don't see where you're getting your take on Rauatai from, and if you're referring to Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea, that's not really how it played out at all (plus, if you really want giant cannons, you should look towards Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire). Personally, I take Rauatai as a vaguely-Polynesian twist on American politics. Re: Iceland, bear in mind that the Living Lands is described as having extremely varied climates. Iceland is a volcanic island covered in alternating glaciers and fertile grasslands.

IIRC, yes. However, positive dispositions for Rymrgand are Honest and Rational, so you don't have to be a huge jerk to get the benefit.

Hmm not even slap a full attack between the Blade Turnings? Like, would a Votary be able to alternate between Blade Turning and FoD while dual-wielding? Because if not, then don't you think Shattered Pillar would offer better wound generation than the Nalzpaca? Since all you can do is quickly auto-attack. No. One automatic wound every 3 seconds, plus 5 additional points of Int via duality of mortal presence, plus more Turning Wheel damage, is much better than one wound every 30/25 damage dealt with basic attacks. And if you're using Tuotilo's Palm, which you should be, the difference is even bigger.

This is a good point!

I knew I forgot to mention something! Yeah, arguably a ranger gets most of it's really amazing powers around PL 7+. The biggest issue with the class is actually that single-class rangers don't have enough tricks until fairly late in their careers, and multi-class rangers never get access to some of the really cool tricks. This makes the class appear a lot less interesting than it can actually be.

Unless there are some really amazing defensive buffs in Conjuration and Transmutation that I haven't noticed, you're mistaken. Evokers keep Enchanting and Illusion, which is where you'll find just about every wizard defense buff other than Arcane Veil. And notably, most of those buffs have 0 recovery, meaning you don't even suffer that penalty. EDIT: I checked. Arcane Veil is the only Wizard buff that is not an enchantment or an illusion spell.

Tooltips that appear when you mouseover your weapons show the action/recovery/reload time reduction. 21 DEX provides +33% action speed bonus. Which is the same as -25% action time (1/1.33 = 0.7518). 19 DEX provides +27% action speed bonus. Which is the same as -21% action time (1/1.33333 = 0.7874). So seeing 25% reduction was correct when you had 21 DEX. And seeing same 25%, was not correct when you had 19 DEX. Or the game was already taking those extra 2 DEX in account. It sure is good how committed this game is to mechanical transparency!

Eh, it's fine. You miss, what, summoned weapons, arcane veil, and chill fog? Phantoms, too, I guess. Those are all good, but it's nothing ruinous if you'd like to do a little more blasting. Vanilla wizard is still better, mind. But Evoker is perfectly serviceable.

As Haplok and Boeroer mention, Barbarian is fantastic for casters, who take away huge benefits from Frenzy and its many passives. It's worth noting that most of the Priest subclasses play as something like a minor multiclass. Skaen makes you a mini-rogue, Wael makes you a mini-wizard, Berath makes you a mini-druid, and Magran and Eothas are trash do something, I'm sure. Rogue is solid in combination with Druids in general, in addition to Ciphers. I'm not convinced that Citzal's Spirit Lance makes Wizard worth multiclassing with cipher, since you still have no attack abilities to use it with and, despite your strong resource economy, your action economy is really weak unless you're only using Wizard for buffs. But there is a case to be made for it as a sort of highly-magical faux barbarian.

Well, location aside, at this point I would like some New Weird-influenced stuff, more along the lines of what Mask of the Betrayer was doing. Ixamitl seems like a good place to do that, or maybe Old Vailia if we want to play up the whole Fallen Rome angle. Barring that, gimme a big Renaissance kerfluffle in the Vailian Republics.