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I find power level to be extremely confusing. (Frankly, before doing in-game research and learning more about how it worked I thought it was a systems blunder by Obsidian due to how obtuse and confusing it is.) I'm posting this share my research but also gather comments on power level, because I can't find an updated recent thread that isn't locked to talk about it. I only have incomplete information from staring at combat logs and a limited set of spells/abilities, so others feel free to chime in. Power level scaling: affects all active abilities (including consumables). Weapon-based martial abilities get minimal and special power-level scaling (including special treatment by Empower, see end of post). Because weapon-based martial abilities are so special, this post will mostly focus on scaling done to other abilities. Note: this wasn't clear to me before, but adding this here -> all damage/duration bonuses you get from power level scaling are multiplicative with any other modifiers: they are applied first, and then all other modifiers are applied. What it does: for every power level you have that is greater than the native[1] power level of the spell, you get scaling bonuses. There are general rules about how spells should scale that I've found, though there appear to be exceptions. But what you see here should suffice for the vast majority of cases. [1] some classes get spells from other classes' skill trees. For example, if you have Xoti train as a priest or priest/monk, at PL3 she gets a bonus spell: "Vile Thorns." Vile Thorns is natively from the druid skill tree, and so it is treated as PL1 in terms of power level scaling. So that means at PL3 you get access to Vile Thorns and it already has some bonus damage, even though you don't have a power level higher than the power level Vile Thorns is on, because natively it is a PL1 spell, not a PL3 spell. General guidelines: First of all, tool-tip accuracy is inaccurate and inconsistent. The one you see when you right-click on an ability ignores ability and power level scaling. The one you see when you hover over the ability in your HUD ignores power level scaling, but counts ability level scaling. Anyway, regardless of power level, there is a scaling ability level accuracy bonus, which is equal to 2 * (power_level - 1) of the spell. So a PL3 spell will inherently have a +4 ability level accuracy bonus, whereas a PL1 spell will have none. There is also a scaling ability level penetration bonus, which is equal to +.5 per ability level. Second of all, the general way scaling appears to happen is, first, take the difference between your current power level and the spell's native power level. For simplicity's sake, let's just call this the "PL". (So casting a PL1 spell at PL4 you would have a PL of 3 for scaling purposes.) A. if a spell bounces or has projectiles, it gets an additional bounce or projectile every other PL. Spells used to have variable projectile scaling but it looks like that got nerfed at some point and they appear to get .5 projectile per PL. B. if a spell does damage/healing, it gets +5% per PL. Non-bounce, non-projectile damage/heals used to get up to 10%, but looks like that was nerfed at some point. C. if the spell has duration effects, it gets a longer duration of +5% per PL. D. if the spell has penetration, it gets an additional +.25 penetration per PL (rounds up to the nearest tenth). E1. if the spell has an accuracy roll, it gets +1 accuracy per PL. E2. if the spell primarily only has that accuracy roll (no damage/healing, no duration effect), it instead gets a +2 accuracy per PL. I'm not actually sure how many of these types of spells exist, but I noticed this while playing with Repulsing Seal (which only does a prone). Slicken is another example of a prone-only thing (though it also has a hazard duration, a hazard duration must not prevent a spell from getting +2 accuracy per PL). Empowering a spell gets you +5 PL to that spell when you cast it. Because some spells have multiple components to it that may touch on A, B, C, D, E some spells disproportionately benefit from power level scaling than others. Anecdotally, empowering a Minoletta's Concussive Missiles can be extremely powerful, because it is almost getting a boost in everything: damage, projectiles, accuracy, penetration. On the other hand, empowering a different PL4 spell like Form of the Delemgan will certainly give me a longer-lasting buff, but is not going to single-handedly swing a fight like empowering concussive missiles. Martial abilities: Non-weapon based seem to roughly follow the spell rules, but weapon-based (primary attack or full attack) abilities follow a special set of scaling, being only affected by B and secretly get an adjustment to their damage in A, but applied as a direct adjustment to the base damage roll, making it effectively a secret multiplicative damage boost. Because it is secretly applied, it's kind of hard to suss out what the bonus is, but my best guess from lots of force-attacking Eder is +5% to your roll per PL. Interestingly, doing an Empower-ed weapon ability manually adds a special damage, accuracy, and penetration bonus: +25% damage (additively combined with any inherent PL scaling), +10 accuracy and +2.5 penetration. I call this a special bonus because in the combat log, this accuracy/penetration bonus isn't attributed to power level scaling at all, it's attributed to the ability itself. And like normal power-level scaling, the Empowered damage bonus isn't actually listed on the tooltips at all, it is secretly added into the "roll" used for damage numbers. But it's there and works on weapon-based martial abilities that don't look like they have much power scaling whatsoever (i.e. Knock Down or Force of Anguish). Note that the way the base damage works means that the damage bonus is effectively a multiplicative bonus, making it more impactful than any other damage bonus in the game. Scrolls: function exactly like spells with one critical difference: instead of using your power level, it substitutes half your Arcana skill for it. Regardless of the spell on the scroll, the spell is treated as PL0. If you have a bonus to your power level (from items, potions, or whatnot), those also boost scroll power 1:1. Might, intellect, and perception have no effect on scrolls. (Note: I suspect it uses half your Arcana skill because scroll strength is already tied to arcana based on the minimum required to use one, so Obsidian didn't want you to get further insane scaling from a scroll of maelstrom, for example.) Potions/drugs: are influenced by your Alchemy skill. Like scrolls, if you have any bonus to your power level (from items, potions, or whatnot), those also boost potion/drug power level. Nalpazca monks effectively have +10 PL for drugs, which generally means +50% duration with drugs. Pre-1.2, all potions/drugs got their effect boosted by your alchemy skill, but this scaling has been removed with 1.2. (So no more broken uses of Potion of Impediment.) Might, intellect, and perception have no effect on potions. Explosives: are influenced by your Explosives skill. Bombs used to have a hidden native power level, but as of 1.2 they all have PL0 and have been rebalanced so that they scale appropriately from there. Like with other consumables, if you have any bonus to your power level (from items, potions, etc.) they also boost your explosives skill 1:1. Might, intellect, and perception have no effect on explosives. Reverse pickpocketing: from stealth, you can reverse pickpocket an explosive (can't be in your quick item slot). It gets a special version of "empower" when it detonates, which grants it +100 accuracy (all but guaranteeing a crit), and +100% to the base damage (multiplicative with other damage bonuses).' Traps: are weird~! They do their own thing when it comes to PL scaling. First, each point of Mechanics gives a +3 accuracy bonus to traps when they trigger. However, for each of your character levels, it gets a bonus PL, except this PL scaling does not affect damage, they only affect penetration, accuracy, and duration (this may be related to an issue where spells that create "hazard" effects do not do correct damage that scales with stats/abilities). Interestingly, trap duration is not affected by intellect, but trap accuracy is affected by perception. So a level 12 character with 10 mechanics would get a +30 accuracy bonus from mechanics, then another +12 accuracy from PL scaling (listed as an "ability level" bonus in the combat log). Then, if it's a trap with a duration, it gets +60% to duration, and if it's a trap with a penetration value, it gets +3.25 (rounds to 3.3 in display). Anyhoo, this effectively means that for people who keep using traps late game, they will primarily be useful for their debuffs (sorry, caltrops trap). Monastic Unarmed Training: is also weird! I did my research in a separate thread dedicated to fists. Additions welcome! I'll edit this post and add in corrections or extra details.

With the game being released now, I have updated the speed calculator for the current v1.0 version. You can access it here: Attack Speed Calculator version 1.0.3, compliant with Deadfire v1.1.0 Additionally here's the aggregated info on this topic: PART 1: History. And what has changed since PoE1: PART 2: Formula. Or how the speed/time values for attack, recovery and reload phases are actually computed: PART 3: Weapon base values: For v1.1.1: For v2.0.1: PART 4: Action cycle, and phases: For usual weapons action cycle goes like this: For firearms, crossbows and arbalests, recovery phase is substituted with reload phase like this: Reloading is almost the same as recovery. The difference is: - recovery phase is affected by ActionSpeed and RecoveryTime effects. - reload phase is affected by everything that affects recovery; and in addition to that by all effects that specify reloading. - you can start a new action at any time, and reloading will resume when the character has time. While with recovery - you have to recover from previous action first. PART 5: Types of attacks: Weapon attacks can be of 3 types: - Normal (auto-attack) - the character alternates hits with main and off hands. - Primary Attack - the character makes a hit with his main-hand. - Full Attack - if you wield a single weapon, it's the same as Primary Attack; but if you dual-wield you hit with both weapons, in the following succession: The great thing about Full Attacks is that if you dual-wield you can effectively skip the recovery/reload phase of your mainhand completely. And yeap you can chain Full Attacks with something like two pistols, and your mainhand pistol won't require reload. PART 6: Mini FAQ on various related stuff: Q1. How does the math behind Armored Grace work? I don't get how the -25% armor recovery penalty from the tooltip factors in. A: It is a bit convoluted but works in the following way: - the game doesn't operate that much with [recovery_time] penalties for armors; Instead it stores and uses their speed coefficients. - for heavy armors it is: 0.645 (= 1/1.55) - for medium armors it is: 0.741 (= 1/1.35) - for light armors it is: 0.833 (= 1/1.20) Now, Armored Grace increases the armor speed coefficient by +0.1, which becomes: - for heavy armors: 0.745 coef => (1/0.745 = 1.342) => +34% displayed recovery time penalty - for medium armors: 0.841 => (1/0.841 = 1.189) => +19% displayed recovery time penalty - for light armors: 0.933 => (1/0.933 = 1.071) => +7% displayed recovery time penalty P.S. Yeap, tooltip lies. The actual value is 0.1, not 0.25. And it reduces recovery speed penalty, not recovery time penalty. Q2. Is Sure-Handed Ila working as intended for reloading weapons? A: Sure-Handed Ila chant has two components. One that lowers recovery time. And another that lowers reload time. In beta4 all effects that affected recovery now started to affect reload as well. This resulted in both components of Sure-Handed Ila chant to affect reloading time, basically granting you -20% reload_time x2; or in other words +50% reload_speed. [(1/0.8 - 1) + (1/0. - 1) = 0.5 Q3. Feel free to ask. Q4. ... P.S. If you find any bugs or inaccuracies feel free to PM me or post them in this thread.

An interesting concept to see added is a dynamic weather system that brings both additional challenges and perhaps special events. Building on this, weather can be broken up into five seperate categories: Sunny (normal), Heat waves (sizzling effect applied to players if not in shade, thirst is increased, dew drops no longer spawn during event, food spoils quicker, stamina is cut by half), Snow storms (coats the land in snow which could be used as a new resource to keep food from spoiling/smoothie ingredients, frosting effect applied to players if not around a heat source or inside base, dew drops and standing water ice over), Thunder showers (aesthetic-only lightning and thunder, rain can function similarly to underwater bubbles- drowning effect is applied inside raindrops, drenched effect is applied to players which causes them to move slower and slightly decreases stamina, flying bugs will not fly, maybe wind can be implemented to cause SLOW gradual damage to exposed base parts- example: 5% damage applied to overall exposed base part per each thundershower event), and Fog (visibility drastically reduced, increased creature spawn rate).

WHAT THIS IS Trying to do something different here. I'm going to discuss a character build that I had a lot of fun putting together and playing on 1.1 PotD (probably the most fun I've had in Deadfire so far), but I'm going to use it as an entrypoint to teach-by-doing various game mechanics and how to think about them and use them for your own builds. People already comfortable with min-maxing their way through Deadfire might not get much out of this, but hopefully for everyone else there's something useful here, because there's a lot of information scattered through this forum, reddit, and the in-game cyclopedia and I hope to consolidate some of it here and put them to actual use. In fact, I would say something like 90% of this is just going to be talking about game mechanics, because understanding the game mechanics thoroughly is key to understanding this character build. I hope you find this useful! Oct 2018 - Updated stats, items, build for 3.0+, added alternatives, and god challenges notes July 4 2017 - Updated stats for patch 1.2. July 3 2017 - Partially updated for patch 1.2. TABLE OF CONTENTS - Introduction - What does this build do - The build itself - TL;DR playstyle - Detailed playstyle - Details - Armor - Details - Weapons - Details - Surviving - Details - Consumables - Details - Miscellaneous spells and abilities - Details - Stats - Conclusion/Putting it all together - Alternatives - Rejected approaches - Notes for Magran's Fires - Appendix: Linear returns INTRODUCTION "What the hell is an 'Umezawa?'" Well, while I don't play it anymore, I still follow and am a big fan of Magic: The Gathering. And with one of the more recent sets out (Dominaria), I got to thinking about a couple of cards that struck me as particularly flavorful: The latter card is actually from a set more than a decade old and is/was so stupidly powerful that it's banned in one of the super-powered tournament formats (banned in Modern). The former card is just a nostalgic callback to the latter that was in Dominaria (which itself was a set all about nostalgic callbacks). It's not particularly tournament-worthy.(*) (*) If you're a M:TG lore purist out there, yes yes I know that the Umezawa on the left is not the Umezawa that the Jitte on the right is named for. Even if you don't play Magic: The Gathering, the takeaway here is a fragile, weak, but elusive hero, and a stupidly powerful tool-kit of a weapon that the hero is lorewise linked to. I liked the idea of taking a very blue (crafty, subtle, evasive) approach to stupid levels of power, and decided to personify it in Deadfire as a Streetfighter/Wael multiclass that I'll just brand here as an Umezawa build. WHAT DOES THIS BUILD DO This character is very versatile and mobile, tanking on huge packs of enemies or jumping around behind enemy lines to assassinate troublesome foes. This character is not going to be great at doing burst or area of effect damage (at least until you have a steady supply of explosives), but it will do frankly a stupid amount of sustained damage, maximizing uptime for the Streetfighter's special (at least without resorting to just being a ranged blunderbuss dummy). While this is probably not the most powerful Streetfighter build you can make (a Streetfighter/Monk is probably better for pure damage) and is fairly micromanagement-intensive, it can nonetheless be a very fun and engaging way to play. THE BUILD ITSELF Before diving into the mechanics of it all, let's just lay out the build order. UMEZAWA CLASS: zealot - streetfighter + priest of wael RACE: wood elf BACKGROUND: living lands + scientist STATS: 10 (9+1 living lands) might, 10 constitution, 17 dexterity, 16 perception, 18 intellect, 7 resolve SKILLS: roughly 2:1 ratio between Explosives to Alchemy. For your secondary skill, shove as much as you can into Religion, though you can respec out of this after a certain point. Be sure to pay 3000g each to train both Explosives and Alchemy. STORY ABILITIES: be clever at the first summons to the gods so you get Wit of Death's Herald ABILITIES: (active priest abilities with arabic numerals, active rogue abilities marked with roman numerals for their power levels, automatic priest spells in angle brackets, weapon choices in italics) Updated for 3.0: some skills reordered, dropped Searing Seal for Champion's Boon, weapon proficiency recs changed 1. Restore (1), Escape (I) <Arcane Veil (1)>; hatchet, blunderbuss 2. Fast Runner 3. Arms Bearer 4. Holy Meditation (2), Smoke Veil (II) <Iconic Projection (2)>; large shield 5. Weapon and Shield Style 6. Two Weapon Style 7. Despondent Blows (3), Riposte <Mirrored Image (3)> 8. Deep Pockets; mace, sabre, or stiletto 9. Prayer for the Spirit (3) 10. Devotions for the Faithful (4), Dirty Fighting <Llengrath's Displaced Image (4)> 11. Persistent Distraction 12. Pillar of Faith (2); mace, sabre, or stiletto 13. Barring Death's Door (5), Tough <Confusion (5)> 14. Champion's Boon (5) 15. Uncanny Luck 16. Salvation of Time (6), Smoke Cloud (V) <Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment (6)>; dagger 17. Rapid Casting 18. Pillar of Holy Fire (6) 19. Cleansing Flame (7), Deathblows <Gaze of the Adragan (7)> 20. Smoke Grenade (VII); remainder of mace, sabre, or stilleto or your favorite end-game weapon here IMPORTANT ITEMS: Sparkcrackers and Cinder Bombs as explosives. Deadeye, Potion of Ascension, Potion of the Last Stand, Potion of Deftness, Potion of Impediment, and Potion of Piercing Strikes for alchemical goods. Mix in other stuff as desired. IMPORTANT FOOD/DRINK: Meppu, Roe, Forgotten Night IMPORTANT GEAR: Miscreant's Leather, Cutthroat Cosmo (the special pig pet), Xoti's Sickle (early on), Marux Amanth (soulbound to priest), Fair Favor, Nemnok's Cloak, Entonia Signet Ring, Shorewalker Sandals RECOMMENDED GEAR: Pukestabber, Frostfall Mace, Rust's Poignard, Animancer's Energy Blade, Bronlar's Phalanx, Wintertide Bulwark, etc or whatever else floats your boat. TL;DR PLAYSTYLE Early on (when your health is super low, like levels 1-4) you are going to dual-wield a hatchet and a blunderbuss with Powder Burns enabled. You'll attack at range with a blunderbuss to trigger the Streetfighter's Heating Up bonus, then run in for melee. When the Powder Burns self-debuff has ~3.5 seconds left (first reload) or ~1-2 seconds left (subsequent reloads), you'll shoot at an enemy or ally 3-5m away and refresh the Powder Burns debuff. (Early on you may just run out of range manually and shoot your current target.) Once you have a bit more health and a bit more abilities under your belt, the playstyle is very aggressive. Instead of relying on Powder Burns, you'll rely on one of: blindly charging in and getting flanked; blindly charging in and getting your health pummeled really fast; or manually triggering your Streetfighter special by hitting yourself with Sparkcrackers or, in a pinch, Cinder Bombs. So depending on the situation, you might be tanking for your entire party, or you may be dodging back behind enemy lines to take out important casters. For boss fights, you'll drink a Potion of Impediment and try to pin the enemy down with repeated interrupts. DETAILED PLAYSTYLE This character is a "build-around" on the Streetfighter's special. To reiterate here, when you are flanked or bloodied, you get a special buff (Heating Up) which gives you a whopping -50% recovery time, along with a +50% damage bonus against sneak attack-enabled targets (effectively it is a souped up sneak attack damage bonus). If you are both flanked and bloodied, you get a special buff (On the Edge) which not only grants you the same bonuses as Heating Up but gives you a further +100% crit damage bonus. Both the damage bonuses are additive with other damage bonuses, so while they are certainly very good, it's not insane. The real star here is the -50% recovery time. -50% recovery time is equivalent to a whopping +100% action speed for your recovery, or the equivalent of getting +33 dexterity during your recovery. Furthermore, contrary to what you might think or read elsewhere, speed bonuses offer linear returns(*), so you can add on a bunch more recovery time reductions or action speed boosts and get to really fast levels (translating to high damage output). This is especially important for maximizing Potion of Impediment, which can really shine with a "Heating Up" Streetfighter's very fast attack speed. (*) Linear returns may end up being one of the most controversial things I'll say mechanically in this entire post, but is mathematically true and I will fight anyone who says otherwise . There'll be an appendix at the end that will go through the ugly math and details of it. Notably, unlike Pillars of Eternity 1, Deadfire distinguishes between action speed adjustments and recovery time adjustments and they are very different and expressed in different ways, and is responsible for a lot of confusion about how action/recovery works. The Streetfighter's bonus only applies to your recovery, leaving the attack part untouched. This means this bonus heavily favors weapon attacks, potions, and throwing bombs, because weapon attacks, potions, and bombs have very short attack times and the bulk of the time spent using them is just recovery. By contrast, spell casting has significant attack ("cast') times that will be left untouched by the Streetfighter's special. (Scrolls sit in between, having slower attack times than other consumables, but faster recovery than spells.) But the way cast times work in Deadfire is that they generally follow a pattern where spells with faster cast times have longer recovery, and slower cast times have shorter recovery; this means that, ironically, a very slow spell cast (6s) will have a much shorter recovery time (typically 2s) than even a very fast cast spell (0.5s cast, up to 4.5s recovery). (The standard progression for spell timing is 3s cast/4.5s recovery, 4.5s cast/3s recovery, 6s cast/2s recovery so the total action time spent doing a spell cast monotonically increases with slower spells, even if the recovery is less.) This means that we can still get some benefit out of the Streetfighter's special if we focus on casting fast (3s) and some average (4.5s) spells, because shaving off 2.25s or 1.5s off your recovery is still incredible (shaving 2.25s off a fast spell cast is roughly equivalent to a +42% action speed or almost like taking three stacking copies of the Rapid Casting passive talent, even though it's all weighted towards the recovery phase instead of the cast phase). The major downsides to the Streetfighter are twofold, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit downside is that while you are neither flanked nor bloodied, you get a +20% recovery time penalty. The implicit downside is that to maximize the Streetfighter, you have to be at least flanked or bloodied which is generally a very dangerous situation to be in. This character focuses on letting you survive in those situations while trying to not take away from the Streetfighter's strengths. DETAILS - ARMOR A really important piece of gear is actually your pet. The cosmo pirate pet (unlocked by doing the deadfire scavenger hunt or special non-achievement-disabling console commands) gives your main character a reduction in their armor penalty. The effect varies on armor, but this variance is because of the weird way it's implemented (which is identical to how a Fighter's Armored Grace is implemented). Internally, the game stores armor recovery penalties of +20%, +35%, and +55% roughly as coefficients of .83, .74, and .65. (What these numbers mean is not important right now.) Instead of applying a consistent effect on the listed recovery penalty, the cosmo pirate pet adds a flat .1 to these internal coefficients, which means these coefficients become .93, .84, and .75, which means the armor recovery penalty becomes +7%, +19%, and +34%. This means that the armor recovery penalty reduction is actually strongest for heavy armor, but that's not the important point here. The important part is the interaction with Miscreant's Leather (a light armor you can get for doing the first Principi quest by killing Benweth). Miscreant's Leather comes with a special enchantment that reduces recovery time by -10%. Theoretically, this was supposed to have the net effect of mitigating a majority(*) of the of the +20% light armor recovery time. However, with the cosmo pirate pig, your base armor recovery time penalty is +7%, which means the -10% recovery time enchantment makes wearing Miscreant's Leather actually faster than wearing any +0% recovery time clothing. (*) one of the ongoing confusions that one might have about recovery time is that you can't just add up your various recovery time adjustments and expect to get a sane answer. In fact, the best way to think about adjustments to your action time is that there is a different "native unit of measurement" depending on whether it's a bonus (either a +X% action speed or -Y% recovery time) or a penalty (either a -X% action speed or a +Y% recovery time). For bonuses, the native unit is "action speed," whereas for penalties the native unit is "action time." This is a weird distinction but is important for understanding how modifiers are combined. You can read the Appendix for further discussion. Anyway, for our purposes here what you need to know is that the -10% recovery time bonus needs to first be translated into its native unit as an action speed adjustment, or +11% action speed. The +20% light armor recovery time is in its correct native unit so we don't need to change it. Now (and for you people who took science classes in high school and pay attention to your bases/units this might hurt your head but is how Deadfire does it), you subtract the recovery time from the action speed and get a unitless -9%; because it's negative the effect is considered a recovery time penalty, and so the net effect of the -10% recovery time adjustment is that the armor effectively has a +9% recovery time penalty instead of a +20% recovery time penalty. TL;DR: a +20% recovery penalty combined with a -10% recovery time bonus does not equal a net +10% recovery penalty. In fact, the -10% recovery time bonus is actually more powerful than an equivalent recovery time penalty. This will come up again later, and I will go into further detail about the math then. So, as one of the few mandated pieces of gear, you should really have a cosmo pirate pig pet, and you should prioritize getting Miscreant's Leather. It will give you extra protection than cloth and be faster than cloth. Plus, it has a really useful enchantment for this build (Kidney Guard, which reduces received flanked damage by -10%). For the early part of the game before you get the leather, you should otherwise be in +0% recovery time clothing. If you're struggling a bit too much in early game, you can equip other light armor and the cosmo pirate pet. 3.0+ Update We now also have Epsilon as a good pet choice (available in Dunnage). In addition to reduced armory recovery time, its party-wide bonus is extra stride speed, which can be a much more useful bonus than Cosmo's firearms damage obnus. DETAILS - WEAPONS A hatchet and a blunderbuss (along with their proficiencies) are your absolute #1 priorities early on, followed up by a large shield. A hatchet is important because it provides a stacking +3 deflection against melee and its weapon modal applies a -10 accuracy (regardless of attack type) to the enemy, both of which you'll soon see is very important for this build. The blunderbuss is important because Powder Burns applies the Distracted affliction on you every time you attack, and conveniently for the Streetfighter, all Perception afflictions also apply Flanked which will trigger the Streetfighter special. (In fact, I'm sure many people have discovered you can create a stupidly good ranged attacker by just making a Streetfighter equip at least a blunderbuss.) Early on, using a blunderbuss at the start of the fight is a good, safe way to trigger the special, and the powder burns aoe damage is generally so low that it's ok to occasionally hit armored allies with it. Later on, Powder Burns is still a useful way to trigger your special in small fights or when you're isolated by yourself against important targets away from everyone else. An important pickle with gun reloads is that any adjustments to their reload speed is delayed by one reload. This means that after you fire your Powder Burns blunderbuss, the immediate next reload will not benefit from the -50% recovery time bonus. However, subsequent reloads will. I believe this also works in reverse. If you start reloading your blunderbuss while benefiting from the -50% recovery time bonus and Powder Burns wears off, you still benefit from the faster reload until the next time you need to reload (though by then you will already have refreshed it). For this character, you will want to dual-wield your blunderbuss with a melee weapon (early on, a hatchet). Because of game mechanics (even if it doesn't make logical sense), dual-wielding a melee weapon with a ranged weapon means that outside of melee range you only use your ranged weapon, and in melee range you only use your melee weapon, but you do both as if you were dual-wielding, so you get the -30% recovery time bonus from dual-wielding (plus an additional -15% recovery time bonus from two weapon style), even though you're just repeatedly attacking with the same weapon. In fact, in some parts of the game, you may have a melee weapon that is so good that you don't want to switch off with a weaker second melee weapon, which makes it a perfect candidate for pairing with a blunderbuss. In practice, it also means you can blunderbuss, melee, and then re-blunderbuss a ranged target (to re-trigger Powder Burns) without having to switch between weapon slots, which incurs a costly 2s recovery each time. This is a relatively painless (if micromanagement intensive) way to get 100% uptime with your Streetfighter special. Note that blunderbusses have a low range (4-5m, depending) so when you are in this melee/blunderbuss mode you should be cognizant of viable blunderbluss targets, particularly since for a good amount of that range your character will want to melee or take a step in order to melee. It is actually worth shooting your own allies (and positioning them close to do so) because for armored tanky allies they will take negligible damage that is well worth the continued uptime of Heating Up. In the worst case (if you're not engaged by your target), you can just step away from your target and fire at range. This downtime of running back and forth will still be outweighed by the significant damage boost you get from having constant uptime on your Heating Up effect. Do remember that for your first reload you need to give yourself 3-4s of time (depending on stats and gear) though subsequent reloads will only need a little more than a second. At level 4 you pick up large shield proficiency because this build has two very large weaknesses. I'll go into the second one later, but the first and most common weakness is enemy gunfire. See, this build leans on Arcane Veil heavily for protection, and Arcane Veil unfortunately offers no protection against "veil-piercing" attacks, of which enemy gunfire is the most common type. In such a situation, the large shield modal gives you an astounding defense against ranged attacks, -50% to ranged damage, on top of the natively large deflection bonus (coupled with Weapon and Shield Style) that will work against gunfire. It's such an extreme survivability difference that in any fight involving guns (at least early to mid game), you should switch to using a large shield and prioritize taking out the gunners. The downside to the large shield modal is that you are immobile, but fortunately we pick up Escape at level 1, which will let us hop around the map without having to toggle the large shield modal on and off (in addition to providing a nice, gun-effective deflection bonus for a short time). Note that even outside of gunners, many ranged attackers in Deadfire have stupidly high accuracy bonuses for their attacks that it may still be worth switching to large shield in ranged-heavy fights in early-to-mid game, both for the extra deflection, and for the significant damage mitigation. As you go up levels, you'll need to pick up some blunt weapon proficiency for damage diversity. I prefer flails and clubs for two reasons: they are fast (3s base recovery) and their weapon modals let you reduce enemy reflex or will by -25, which is huge. Clubs in particular are good because two of your most important spells (Despondent Blows and Devotions for the Faithful) target will. If you don't want your weapons lots to be oversubscribed, you can give a party member a club to do the debuffing for you. 3.0+ update With some of the rebalancing that has occured since this guide was first written (especially PotD enemy scaling) a weakness that glass cannon builds like this have is penetration. On PotD enemies can sometimes have substantial armor, and if you can't penetrate their armor, a glass cannon can't do the high damage output needed to balance out its relative fragility, which means you're just a fragile character with little upside. As a result, I no longer recommend fast blunt weapons, which lack penetration weapon modals. Instead I recommend diving into maces (which have high inherent penetration and whose weapon modal debuffs armor for everyone in the party), sabres (for access to Animancer's Energy Blade, which does raw damage; you don't technically need the weapon proficiency to take advantage of this, but sabres are just a good class of weapon to have proficiency with early on), and/or stilettos (high inherent penetration, access to Rust's Poignard). Both stilettos and sabres benefit from the Fair Favor hat, which this build already uses. In addition, as I'll mention later, I recommend picking up Champion's Boon instead of Searing Seal for the extra penetration from the Tenacious inspiration. This character will also pick up dagger proficiency. For reasons that I'll elaborate on in a moment, the weapon modal isn't too important, but what is valuable is getting the Fair Favor hat and getting a Marux Amanth soulbound to your priest class. Fair Favor gives you hit-to-crit and bonus crit damage with daggers (among other weapons). Marux Amanth has very useful abilities for this character when fully unlocked: Worthy Sacrifice (which is an instakill against Near Death targets if you hit them), Corona of the Soul (10% chance for a decent burn aoe effect), and Echoes of Faith (10% chance to re-cast any priest spell a half second after the initial cast). Echoes of Faith is a particularly good ability; 10% isn't very common, but when it does happen can be a tide-changingly good effect. We actually pick up certain spells basically because they would be really good to have duplicated (Pillar of Faith, Pillar of Holy Fire, Cleansing Flame). Still others get good benefit (Salvation of Time), and at the very least you get double chances to afflict enemies with Despondent Blows or Devotions for the Faithful. Corona of the Soul is also a decent ability and works well with this character because we will be attacking so fast that we'll be close to maximizing the number of times we can proc the burn aoe (which does ~10-20 in about ~1.5m) in any given amount of time(*). As an extra plus, imagine that the Marux Amanth is the Deadfire equivalent of Umezawa's Jitte from above . (*) Funnily enough, while trying to test some Deathblows-related issues, I discovered that Corona of the Soul has its damage boosted by damage modifiers that affect any weapon, including Deathblows itself (and any lash effect). This appears to apply to any weapon-based proc. (See below screenshots--click to enlarge--the left is a Corona of the Soul proc in the combat log and the right is a Sungrazer proc in the combat log, though unlike Corona of the Soul it doesn't have a special name in the combat log. I also tested some other procs and verified those get boosted, too.) This is both a general thing to keep in mind for your own builds, especially rogues who can sneak attack and Deathblows, but is especially good for a Streetfighter who can easily get an additional +50% from Heating Up and a further +100% from critting while On The Edge. As far as other unique weapons go, steal Xoti's Sickle as soon as you can, you'll be able to put better use to it. Not only does it have the benefit of having two damage types unlike other hatchets (giving you much-needed damage diversity), but its power-up effect (additive +5% plus .5% per religion skill to sickle damage until end of fight, up to 4 stacks) is very good and likely to trigger since this character will be doing a lot of finishing blows. I highly recommend you enchant it to have Urgent Harvest, which gives you 15% plus .5% per religion skill action speed bonus to Xoti's Sickle the moment any enemy dies anywhere, regardless of whether or not you did the killing blow. Importantly, due to stacking rules (which I'll go into further later), this combines with the Streetfighter special, with Potions of Deftness, etc so you can get stupidly fast attack speeds with the sickle. Mid-to-late game better hatchet options will open up. Acolyte's can be straight up better than a Xoti's Sickle because its Freezing Lash is always active (whereas Xoti's Sickle needs to power up upon kills) and is a multiplicative bonus with the total damage you did, which means a +15% freeze damage lash is worth much more than a +15% xoti's sickle damage. The combination of sneak attack damage (up to +60% additive) and Streetfighter special (another +50% additive) and possibly the Streetfighter On the Edge bonus (another +100% additive from crits) can make that lash worth more than a fully-powered up xoti's sickle. Later on when you have more survivability tools at your disposal and the +3 deflection bonus from a hatchet (or +6 from two hatchets) is less important and the -10 accuracy weapon modal more redundant, you can start ignoring hatchets all together. I like pairing Marux Amanth and Pukestabber together; when Pukestabber is enchanted with Mad Drunk, while under the effects of alcohol, both daggers will have +20% additive damage and +20% action speed; plus, both of them will benefit from the Fair Favor hat. Regardless of what weapons you choose, you'll have three weapon slots each with an important role: one that has a blunderbuss/melee pair, one for dual-wielding, and one for a large shield. Your dual-wielding one will be your main slot past the early game, but you'll need to be ready to switch to one of the other slots as the situation demands. And be sure to have damage type diversity, because this character will lose a lot of steam if you're stuck in a 25% No Pen situation against most of the foes in an encounter. In fact, I recommend keeping your high penetration backup weapon as your blunderbuss/melee pair - this is essentially your "boss mode" set up where you can both do high penetration and trigger self-flank at will throughout a long fight without having to repeatedly weapon switch. 3.0+ update There have been some random changes to how dual-wielding a ranged weapon and a melee weapon work. First, you can no longer attack destructibles at range if you are main-handing a melee weapon; your ranged weapon must be in your main hand. Second and more relevantly for this build, you cannot actually engage enemies unless you are main-handing a melee weapon. This is important because a good crutch for this build was to main-hand the blunderbuss, so that the range indicator properly indicates the range of the firearm so you know how far away to go before it's too far when trying to trigger Powder Burns. You can still do that, but you can no longer engage foes if you do this. Since engagement can be pretty important, if you don't need the visual aid of the blunderbuss range indicator, you should main-hand a melee weapon and keep the blunderbuss in your off-hand. DETAILS - SURVIVING The basic point of this character is getting into dangerous situations to trigger the Streetfighter special and then surviving, which is a harder task when playing on Veteran or Path of the Damned. Before we dive into the many tools that we'll lean on, we need to talk about how effect stacking works in Deadfire. On the face of it, the rule is pretty simple, paraphrasing the in-game cyclopedia: all passive effects stack, but the highest active effect suppresses all other active effects. While the rule is simple, the devil is in the details and thinking through the implications of this is important for your own gameplay. A "passive effect" can be thought of as constant item effects (like a Ring of Minor Deflection), innately triggered item effects (like Xoti's Sickle's Urgent Harvest or its damage boost or Entonia Signet Ring's defense bonuses), and passive class abilities (anything in the passive column and always-on innate effects like the Helwalker's might bonus from wounds). Everything else is an active effect, including weapon modals, paladin auras, and stances. This is relevant because one of the ways that we'll lean on surviving in dangerous situations is by having a high deflection. Veteran min-maxers will know the finer points of getting your deflection to sky-high levels, but the important detail for us is that when it comes to defensive abilities we actually have a lot of redundancy, and surviving will involve avoiding that redundancy. Look at the following table for ways that we will make it harder and easier for enemies to hit us, and what active effects fall into each stacking category (this is not a comprehensive effect of all things in the game, just common ones relevant to this character): +Deflection | +Deflection from Resolve Arcane Veil (+50 vs non-guns)| Any resolve inspiration (+5) Escape (+50) | Ripple Sponge (+2) Mirror Image (+30) | Llengrath's... (+10) | dagger modal (+10) | Coral Snuff (+5) | ------------------------------------------------------------- -Enemy accuracy | -Enemy accuracy from Perception Despondent Blows (-15 melee) | Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment (-10, jumps to -5) hatchet modal (-10) | Any perception affliction (-5) Devotions for... (-10) | Blinded affliction (-10) | ------------------------------------------------------------- -Deflection | -Deflection from Resolve Flanked (-10) | Any resolve affliction (-5) This means that any given time, you can have around a 85-point net swing in your relative deflection to the enemy's accuracy. This is by combining Arcane Veil, a resolve inspiration, a Despondent Blows debuff on the enemy, and a perception affliction on the enemy, though you will likely also have a constant -10 from being flanked. Still a 75-point net swing after being flanked is still pretty huge and this is still ignoring stackable passive effects like the hatchet innate weapon bonus (+3 deflection against melee), Entonia Signet Ring (+2 all defenses per enemy engaging you [which is different from enemies that you engage]), a large shield with weapon and shield style (+12, +6, plus an additional +2 per large shield enchantment level), Cloak of Deflection (+7), Minor Ring of Deflection (+2), Shorewalker Sandals (+1 resolve), etc. However, this also means that if you have Mirror Image active, there is no reason to have your dagger modal active. If you've hit all the enemies nearby with a blinded affliction, there is literally no reason to have your hatchet modal active and casting Devotions for the Faithful could potentially just be a waste of time. Juggling all these various stacking effects will constitute a good chunk of the micromanagement of this character. You certainly could just leave your dagger or hatchet modal on all the time, but you'd be giving up a significant chunk of damage unnecessarily. Now, a big question is, say all enemies nearby are hit with Devotions for the Faithful (-10 accuracy); is it worth the opportunity cost(*) of casting Despondent Blows on top of that (it would be a net change of an additional -5 accuracy)? Similarly, if you are already protected by Arcane Veil, is it worth the time to get a resolve inspiration? The answer, my friend is that defenses offer increasing returns(**). Basically, look at the combat log. If the enemies don't have too much of a negative penalty to their attack roll, then it's probably not worth it. If they have a pretty huge negative penalty (but less than -75), then yes it's probably worth it. Even then, this guideline isn't perfect because if you're trying to get hit to get low enough health to trigger On the Edge or a perma-Heating Up (common later on in the game), then you may never find it worth it to cast even the hard-hitting stuff to begin with. (*) "Opportunity cost" is a crucial concept for this character, and an important concept for any other character. There's an idea that there's an "action economy" in games like Deadfire, that is, you only have enough time to do so many things before combat ends, one way or the other. You certainly could cast every single buff or debuff in your arsenal willy-nilly, but then you'll spend actually very little doing anything of import. When you eventually are able to attack about once/second for a significant amount of damage (40-50 a pop, with potential Corona of the Soul triggers), you'll have to judge very carefully whether it's worth instead spending 3-6 seconds (i.e. giving up 150-300 damage) by casting a spell or using an ability. (**) Defenses offer increasing returns because of the way attack rolls work in Pillars/Deadfire. The higher the relative defenses to an attacker, the more significant each additional point of defense becomes. A pair of examples illustrating this: let's say you have 0 defense against an attacker with 25 accuracy. What would the impact of 5 additional defense be? Well, with Deadfire's rolls, you'll go from being graze/hit/crit by the attacker 100% of the time to 95% of the time. Not much of a change in your total survivability. Now, let's say that you have 95 defense against that same attacker. What would the impact of 5 additional defense be? You'll go from being grazed 5% of the time to never being touched ever again. You will have gone from having finite--if huge--survivability to literally infinite survivability: that enemy could attack you until the heat death of the universe and they will never so much as reduce your health by 1 point, where with a 5% chance to graze they could probably kill you within an hour if you do nothing but stand there. This might sound like an absurd example, but for many types of "The Ultimate" runs for Pillars of Eternity 1 (beat the entire game solo on the hardest difficulty in iron man mode) some fights could literally last for more than an hour and the difference between being grazed 5% of the time and never being touched could be the difference between a successful run and one that fails after many hours of playing. Plus, when you are surrounded by enemies in melee and targeted by enemies at range, even a 5% chance to be grazed can be significant; when there are ten enemies on the battlefield one will be expected to graze you every other attack, which will quickly add up to something fatal if you aren't killing things quickly). You'll note that I list Escape as a source of deflection. And while it lasts an extremely short time (3s), with decent intellect and stuff like Meppu/Roe it can last almost 5s. Early on it can be a way to get some extra emergency protection without burning an Arcane Veil (especially since you don't have many other non-situational Guile-spenders you can potentially just chain together a bunch of Escapes to your current location since it has only a .5s base action time and no recovery), and at all points in the game can be used so that you can jump straight behind enemy lines and have a few seconds of unconditional +50 deflection protection to buff yourself or do something else. (If you want to be tricky, you can use Salvation of Time to extend the unconditional +50 defense of Escape by 20 seconds.) Now, it's important to highlight that this character is not intended to be an immortal riposte build. We could just leave a large shield equipped and stack on all sorts of bonuses to be untouchable, but frankly I find that playstyle boring (I did that for my own The Ultimate achievement run and while it was certainly impregnable it was also tedious). What we really just shoot for is enough defenses and debuffs to not be squished into oblivion within a few seconds of being flanked, so that we can go on a killing rampage. This character picks up riposte not because we are going to rely on it for as a centerpiece for our damage, but as an accent of some additional damage in certain situations (which we maximize by dual-wielding since riposte does a full attack). In fact, in the late game, we may just want to deliberately get to near death ourselves and not worry so much about defenses, which leads me to another aspect of the survivability equation: CAN NOT DIE EFFECTS If you played Pillars of Eternity 1 with a priest, you'll be forgiven for ignoring Barring Death's Door and similar effects in Deadfire, since the effect in Pillars 1 was pretty lame. All they did was prevent you from dying, and dying in Pillars of Eternity 1 meant getting knocked down to 0 health (as opposed to 0 endurance), which would have been a permadeath instead of just a knockout. What Barring Death's Door and similar effects do in Deadfire is prevent anything from reducing your health below 1 (even instant kill effects from something like Death Ring). Fortunately for the Streetfighter, one way to trigger Heating Up is to get Bloodied or lower, and the only way to get On The Edge is a combination of being Bloodied or lower and being flanked. Both Barring Death's Door and Potion of the Final Stand give us a nearly foolproof way to trigger Heating Up and sustain On The Edge. But both Potion of the Final Stand and Barring Death's Door have low base duration. It's for this reason why we pick up something like Prayer for the Spirit (+5 intellect means an extra +25% of base duration for Barring Death's Door), invest in Alchemy (+5% duration per point in Alchemy to Potion of the Final Stand), and love food/drink like Meppu/Roe (+15% beneficial effect duration, additively stacks with intellect and power level scaling) and importantly why one of our most important late-game spells is Salvation of Time (+10 seconds to beneficial effects but as of 1.2 actually grants +20 seconds at least the first time you cast it per encounter). This stuff also helps Arcane Veil--which has a fairly short duration as well--but is more critical for these "can not die" effects because the moment they wear off with you at 1 health, you are probably going to be knocked out. This leads to the second of this character's weaknesses, and it is Arcane Dampener. It's not too common for much of the game, but during the Paradise of the Mind quest and Nemnok the Devourer quest, literally every enemy wizard will try to hit you (and especially this character) with Arcane Dampener at least once; will Arcane Dampener temporarily suspend any current protections for a long time. You can try to hope that your will defense--which will be sizable thanks to a high intellect (buffed further by Prayer for the Spirit)--protects you, but this hope is dangerous because even a graze will dispel all your protections for a few seconds, which is more than enough time for you to be interrupt-locked to your death. You have two main approaches. First, you can try to use Smoke Veil to go invisible the moment you see the Arcane Dampener icon appear above wizards' heads (they tend to all cast it at the start of the fight, so if you see one you will probably see a lot) and let the enemy wizards re-target it to another member of your party who is less reliant on spell protection for survival. Second, you can try to use Smoke Grenade/Smoke Cloud or something like Grenades or Concussion Bombs to interrupt them while they are trying to cast it. This is very risky because if you miss you don't get another chance to interrupt them, so generally prefer the first approach. Either way, you should then eliminate the enemy wizards with extreme prejudice, because some of them will hang on to their third level spell cast to try again later. DETAILS - CONSUMABLES In addition to blunderbussing with Powder Burns or charging in to get flanked/brought to Bloodied quickly, an additional way you are going to get uptime with Heating Up and On The Edge is with explosives. Sparkcrackers is the way to do it for much of the game, since it will afflict you with Distraction and with a high explosives skill can last ~30s on a hit. The catch is that it needs to hit deflection first, so it will not work very well if you have already buffed your deflection or are in the middle of an Escape. A smaller catch is that your Intellect and possibly your Resolve are high, so your will defense will be high, making it hard for Sparkcrackers to hit, so only do this if you're desperate for a buff or are under the effects of Deadeye, Potion of Deftness, or something like Potion of Perfect Aim (all of which will give you a modest boost to accuracy). Do note that with a modest intellect, Sparkcrackers will attempt to hit you twice: one upon contact and once again a second later; its distraction effect triggers every second and Sparkcrackers actually has a base aoe duration of 1s.(*) (*) Note that patch 1.2 significantly weakened the effects of Deadeye and Potion of Deftness (no additional accuracy from alchemy) and somewhat weakened Sparkcrackers (no extra duration scaling from intellect). If all else fails, you can use Cinder Bombs (or rely on a friendly wizard to cast something like Chill Fog). Unlike Sparkcrackers, Cinder Bombs don't need to hit deflection first and instead of targeting will targets reflex which may not be as high if you have a perception affliction. Note that the blinded affliction is much worse for you than being distracted, because in addition to being flanked and losing 5 perception, you will also have an additional -10 accuracy penalty and a severe +50% recovery time penalty. However, even though the +50% recovery time penalty has the same magnitude as Heating Up's -50% recovery time bonus, the recovery time bonus is much more powerful than an equivalent magnitude penalty, and so you will still gain a significant speed up from being blinded(*). Cinder Bombs can also be used suicidally in a pinch if you want to lose some health to either trigger On The Edge or get into Heating Up in the first place, but do pay attention to that ongoing damage because it would be stupid if you ended up actually killing yourself. In higher-level fights, Cinder Bombs can also be a useful protection since if you're blinded you cannot be hit by Fampyr's Dominating or Charm Gaze. (Theoretically, blinding enemies also blocks them from using gaze attacks, but as of 1.1.1 this is bugged and doesn't work.) (*) This point comes up again and seems confusing, and is a minor disagreement I have with MaxQuest's otherwise excellent work on action speed; in the pinned post he asserts that all maluses (through something he calls "double-inversion") are stronger than their equivalent magnitude bonuses. This may be true for damage, but is not quite the right way to think about this in terms of action/recovery because action/recovery has different "native units" depending on whether it's a bonus or a penalty. The true complexity is left for the appendix, but for here it serves us just to remind you that because of the different "native units" a -50% recovery time bonus is not countered by a +50% recovery time penalty. Instead, if you are at all familiar with investing or finance, it's related to why if your investment loses 10% of its value one year, you actually need more than a 10% gain the following year to make up for it, because you're starting from a smaller base. In fact, let's stick with this investment analogy and swap in numbers from Deadfire here: imagine you had $1000 worth of stocks that lost 50% of its value one year. What return would you need the next year to make it back? If you lost 50% of your $1000, you are down to $500. So you would actually need a 100% return (doubling your money) the next year to get your money back. And in fact, this holds true for the blinded/Heating Up interaction. For the blinded affliction to cancel out the -50% Streetfighter recovery time bonus, it would need to be a +100% recovery time penalty. Sure enough, you can verify this in-game by looking at your weapon recovery time and then blinding yourself. Even though you have a +50% time penalty from being blinded your recovery time will go significantly down. To get the magnitude of the specific effect, we have to convert to our native units; -50% recovery time bonus is natively a +100% action speed during your recovery; a +50% recovery time penalty is already in its correct native unit; we take the +100% and subtract the +50% recovery time penalty; the answer is positive, so we treat it as an action speed adjustment of +50%, or a net recovery time bonus of -33% which is still significant. Yes, this math is weird. Other than those explosives, you should load up on whatever else floats your boat. Remember that, like weapons, explosives have a short action time and a longer recovery, so the Streetfighter with their special will be able to spam explosives like nobody's business. because of this Grenade and Concussion Bombs are a little less useful than others because spamming bombs is a little harder to do when Grenade and Concussion bombs are knocking everyone around. For alchemical uses, Deadeye and Potions of Deftness are mostly there as accuracy bonuses (though the action speed bonus from the potions of deftness is a nice plus), not just for landing Sparkcrackers but also because even with 17 perception there's a high likelihood that you have a perception affliction, so you are going to find that sometimes you need the accuracy help. Note that once you get Devotions for the Faithful, you can just use that for a powerful if slower accuracy boost (though it may be too slow for just trying to trigger Sparkcrackers early on since you'll have to go through at least one slow spell recovery from Devotions before attempting a Sparkcrackers).(*) (*) As of patch 1.2, Devotions for the Faithful's +10 accuracy bonus is the best active common accuracy bonus that I can immediately think of. This is because patch 1.2 significantly nerfed all consumables but in particular Deadeye and Potion of Deftness by no longer letting their accuracy bonuses scale upwards with your alchemy skill, so Devotions's +10 bonus got significantly better as a result. In addition, Devotions is special because most other accuracy bonuses come from being perception inspirations (like Fighter's Disciplined Barrage), so the +10 accuracy will stack freely with other perception inspirations and importantly for this build won't counter perception afflictions. Potions for the Final Stand are a good, if uncommon, supplement to Barring Death's Door (and your main option--aside from a friendly Shieldbearer Paladin--before you get Barring Death's Door). Potion of Impediment meshes extremely well with the Streetfighter's ultra-low-recovery rate for weapon attacks; as of 1.2 you no longer get effect scaling with alchemy but with a 30% interrupt chance and a fast attack rate you can still prevent a dangerous enemy from getting much done (interrupts, in addition to countering any active ability adds a little extra time to their current recovery). And lastly, a major weakness is that the Streetfighter/Wael lacks a lot of good ways to penetrate enemy armor (you won't be picking up any weapon modals that give you bonus penetration, and there are no armor penetration skills), so when you can, keep a Potion of Piercing Strikes ready to give you bonus penetration for big, hard fights.(*) For much of the game, you'll also want Potions of Minor Healing (nothing stronger) just to help you when your health gets too low. (*) Due to the fact that damage maluses are significantly stronger than damage bonuses due to double-inversion, under-penetration can lead to severe loss of damage. 25% underpenetration cancels out upwards of +300% worth of damage bonuses (it's a similar situation to a -75% recovery time bonus requiring an equivalent +300% recovery time penalty to cancel out), which is well more than what even a Streetfighter that is On the Edge and critically sneak attacking can put out. Even just going up to a 50% underpenetration (which only cancels out +100% worth of damage bonuses) can actually more than double your damage output. E.G. a neutral might, level 20 streetfighter/wael on the edge, sneak attacking, critically hitting, at 25% underpenetration would have a net damage adjustment of almost -40% (-3 + .6 + .5 + 1 + .25 = -.65 => 1/1.65 = .61 => -39%) whereas just managing to go up to even 50% underpenetration would have a net damage adjustment of +35% (-1 + .6 + .5 + 1 + .25 = 1.35 => +35%) which is a 2.25x increase in damage. Shows you how important penetration can be. DETAILS - MISCELLANEOUS SPELLS AND ABILITIES As mentioned before, we pick up Pillar of Faith, Pillar of Holy Fire, and Cleansing Flame just to do some extra damage and cause some interrupts (for Pillar of Faith), and hopefully trigger a Marux Amanth double-cast. Remember that opportunity cost is very important; make sure with all of these that you are doing something that, on its own, is worth giving up the melee damage you are foregoing by not auto-attacking instead. For Pillar of Faith, that means trying to interrupt several enemies in one go (remember that the prone itself targets Fortitude whereas the damage targets Reflex). Pillar of Holy Fire against groups of enemies (and potentially yourself if you're trying to trigger Bloodied). Cleansing Flame to eliminate enemy buffs and when it looks likely you'll get some good jumps off of it. Holy Meditation is just for some early resolve inspiration if needed, and later on as a way to cancel out a growing number of ways that enemies can Terrify your party. This character doesn't have many offensive abilities, so Frightened is not actually that big a deal, though the resolve hit can be a liability. Searing Seal is there as an additional source of blind and a way to lure enemies and blind them for free. That's because if you cast a spell outside of combat and you stay out of combat for a few seconds, you get that spent resource back. For many abilities this is not too useful. Seals, however, have a long duration. So you can cast it, wait for your resource to come back, and either lure enemies into it or wait for them to walk over and be hit by it. In fact, so long as you cast it a decent distance from enemies away, but still close enough to alert them by its noise, they will walk over the seal and be affected just after you get your 5th level spell cast restored. Because your 5th power level of spells is going to be oversubscribed (Barring Death's Door is just so good in this build), an opportunity for a free blind is too good to ignore. 3.0+ update I no longer recommend Searing Seal and instead recommend Champion's Boon. Champion's Boon solves several problems for us. First, it gives us +2 penetration from its Tenacious inspiration; this won't stack with a sabre or stiletto weapon modal, but will stack with the mace effect (because the mace gets extra penetration by implementing it as a debuff on the enemy, not as a buff on yourself) and importantly is the only consistent way we have to boost the penetration of daggers. In fact, for daggers this is better than a weapon modal because most other bonus penetration weapon modals give you a significant recovery penalty, whereas Tenacious gives us the +2 penetration without any drawback. The second and smaller perk is that Champion's Boon gives us +3 engagement. Combined with Persistent Distraction, this means up to four nearby enemies will be Distracted. Combined with the inherent Resolute inspiration Champion's Boon gives you, this is a net 10-point hit chance swing in your favor, in a way that stacks with accuracy penalties from Despondent Blows or Devotions of the Faithful or the hatchet weapon modal. It also means your Riposte attacks have an easier chance to hit on virtually anyone attacking you. The downside to this choice is that we no longer have a "free" spell like we did with Searing Seal. Because Barring Death's Door is so important for survival, you really should evaluate your combat situation carefully and weigh whether or not you are going to need the bonus penetration or you're going to need to prevent death/trigger On The Edge. We pick up Smoke Cloud solely as a prerequisite for Smoke Grenade. And we pick up Smoke Grenade for two reasons: as an additional fast interrupt, and as a way to help enable Deathblows. Persistent Distraction will take care of Deathblows for you automatically (the free flanked that perception afflictions bestow counts as a second affliction), but Smoke Grenade will be useful for triggering Deathblows on enemies you are not able to engage and for situations where the enemy is resistant to perception afflictions (you get the weakened effect from Smoke Grenade, and then rely on either manual flanking or some other explosive or party member to apply another affliction). If you have no problem with keeping near 100% Deathblows up-time without Smoke Grenade's help and don't mind the friendly fire, you can pick up Pernicious Cloud instead for the extra damage. 3.0+ update I added a story choice to the build--to be snarky at the gods when they first summon you after leaving Port Maje. This is because this unlocks the Wit of Death's Herald upgrade to your Death's Herald watcher ability (it also fits in with Wael's preferred disposition of being clever, coincidentally). Wit of Death's Herald adds on an intellect inspiration to the base effect, so is a "free" way to cast Prayer for the Spirit once/rest without using up a PL3 slot. DETAILS - STATS The last part of this is just the easiest: why are stats the way they are? Intellect is the only mandatory max-out, because you want to squeeze as much duration and area of effect out of everything you have. Resolve/deflection is an important stat, but after the consumable nerfs of patch 1.2, this build really needs the accuracy help due to perpetually being hit with a perception affliction (and no longer able to rely on Deadeye or Potions of Deftness with a high alchemy), so we actually skip resolve and invest in perception instead. We'll eventually get Shorewalker Sandals for its +1 Resolve to get up to 10, but we don't actually want more than that, because patch 1.2 also weakened Sparkcrackers' duration, so having too high of a resolve will negate many Explosives skill points. Basically we'll rely on deflection-boosting buffs, enemy-accuracy-penalizing debuffs, and Holy Meditation for our survivability instead of requiring a high inherent resolve. If things are too rough for you early game, you can put on a Cloak of +7 Deflection or some resolve boosting gear or some such, but as you get more tools you will generally want to dump some of that stuff just so that it can be easier to self-Sparkcrackers when you need to. (By contrast, we like Entonia Signet Ring because its defense bonus only occurs while you are actively engaged by enemies and you frequently are going to be doing Sparkcrackers while you aren't actively being engaged yet. Perfect for this build.) A lower resolve means we're going to get hit more regardless of what we do, so we don't dump constitution anymore. We don't have the spare points to invest in it, but we also don't want to make ourselves squisher than we need to be. In fact we pick up Tough later on for extra buffer room against high-impact enemy spells/abilities, but it's really a double-edged sword. More health means you can stay at Bloodied or below for longer, and there's more room for mistakes (like not paying attention to the fact that your Arcane Veil just ran out or that your Arcane Veil isn't doing anything because the enemy is using guns even while you melee them), but it also means it takes a lot longer to get to Bloodied. Whatever might adjustments you make here will be generally dwarfed by the huge amount of damage bonuses you'll get from a Streetfighter sneak attack (the base +30% plus power level scaling, plus the +50% from the Heating Up special). We opt for a neutral score to put the points elsewhere (and we want to avoid a penalty because damage penalties are stronger than bonuses). We put points into dexterity because action speed stuff has linear returns (see appendix) so we'll be able to be even faster, and importantly our spell cast times aren't affected by the Streetfighter special (just their recovery), so dexterity is the main way we'll make our spell casts a little more nimbler. (Picking up Rapid Casting later on will help, too.) Wood elf background is pretty important for its Dexterity affliction resistance. This character really wants mobility, and being able to shrug off hobbling, and convert a near-lethal Paralyze into a not-bad-at-all Immobilize is pretty valuable. You can find gear that provides Dexterity resistance, but this way you can reserve those inventory slots for more interesting stuff. CONCLUSION/PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Whew! That was a lot of text to read. If you made it this far, congratulations! And I hope you learned a thing or two. If this build still sounds really abstract to you, here are a couple typical examples of mid-to-high level encounters and how an Umezawa would handle it. SCENARIO: mixed group of melee 0. already affected by deadeye. 1. main tank charges in, unstealthed, while Umezawa is still stealthed. Targets self with a Sparkcrackers with ~70% accuracy (which is almost a guarantee to graze/hit, and the will effect will be likely to at least graze), if the main tank pulled right maybe an enemy gets affected too. 2. Escape towards the bulk of the enemies. While you still have the +50 Escape bonus active, make sure hatchet modal is enabled (in case Riposte procs you can debuff enemy accuracy), and then self-buff with Prayer for the Spirit and then cast Despondent Blows before disabling your hatchet modal and then casting Arcane Veil. 3. DPS everything down. Throw some bombs if you feel like it. Re-cast Arcane Veil if necessary. If fight is still going on and you're out of Arcane Veil, self-empower, chain Escapes together, use Mirror Image, etc. SCENARIO: high-level mixed group of melee and casters 1. Charge in. Notice that casters start casting Arcane Dampener. 2. Use Smoke Veil to go invisible. Continue to run Umezawa towards the back while the Arcane Dampener gets retargeted to your other party members. 3. Unstealth by throwing Sparkcrackers at point-blank range with one of the back casters, hopefully affecting yourself with Distraction. Cast Prayer For the Spirit, then Barring Death's Door as enemies reconverge on you. 4. Let them bring you down to 1 health and flank you while you DPS the caster down (you can also self-target with Pillar of Holy Fire to help bring your health down), and Escape to target the next caster. If you see another Arcane Dampener start getting fired, use Smoke Veil or Smoke Grenade. 5. When all the casters are gone, DPS everything else down. Use Salvation of Time for extra Barring Death's Door time. If you're in a situation where Riposte could be relevant and you're already at 1 health, go ahead and use Arcane Veil just for the added damage from your counterattacks. If you run out of Salvations of Time and Barring Death's Door, self-empower for another round of both. SCENARIO: "deal with it" nemnok fight. 1. Let main tank unstealth and trigger everything. 2. While stealthed, Umezawa either Powder Burns or self-Sparkcrackers. 3. Carpet bomb the area with Lightning Bombs and whatever else you got (Immolator, Frost Bombs, Blister Bomb) and mix in a couple of Smoke Grenades to lower enemy fort/reflex and reduce their ability to heal back from this hellscape you're creating. 4. Watch the entire enemy fight disappear under a hail of bombs exploding every other second. SCENARIO: single-enemy tough fight 0. Start off with deadeye already enabled. 1. Start off with your melee/blunderbuss weapon slot, the melee weapon being a fast (base 3s recovery) weapon. If you are able to land a non-graze self-sparkcrackers, switch to your dual-wield. Otherwise stay with this weapon slot and just find ways to keep Powder Burns uptime for the rest of this scenario. 2. Drink Potion of Impediment. (The interrupt chance from this and Deadeye are multiplicative with each other, so you'll have a net 40% [1 - .7 * .85] chance of interrupting with any given attack.) 3. Attack the enemy with a fast weapon. While as of 1.2 you won't completely interrupt-lock the enemy, attacking almost every second with a 40% chance to interrupt will turn down the danger level of any given tough enemy a lot. 4. Use Salvation of Time if necessary. Use Cinder Bomb, Pillar of Holy Fire, or other explosive to get your health down if you also want to be On The Edge while doing this. ALTERNATIVES After having dug up how monastic unarmed training works, I suggest two alternatives that rely on picking up Monastic Unarmed Training instead of Fast Runner. (You can pick up Fast Runner later in lieu of e.g. Holy Meditation or Pillar of Faith). TL;DR: Monastic Unarmed Training gives you potentially extremely fast, high-penetration weapons, but you need to find bonus sources of PL to really get mileage out of it (ideally at least +3, hopefully even +6). Option 1: Nature Godlike Until you pick up Champion's Boon you are going to a friendly party member who can buff you with a body inspiration, but you get +1 PL, and then you can get up to another +2 PL from either food (+1 PL) or a Potion of Ascension (+2 PL). +2 PL is enough to get you better-than-superb fists pretty early on, though not quite enough to get better-than-legendary, so you'd need to start crafting/buying Potions of Ascension on a regular basis to get to better-than-legendary scaling (at level 19). This is the "consistent" option, but is dependent on party composition. Option 2: Death Godlike For much of the game you won't get much bonus PL, but once you unlock Barring Death's Door, you can hover around Near Death for +3 PL, with the possibility of another +2 PL form either food (+1 PL) or a Potion of Ascension (+2 PL). +3 PL is enough to get you better-than-legendary fists by the end of the game (level 19), and conditionally +5 PL will get that for you by level 13. Unfortunately I don't think there exists another way to stack on another +1 PL to get better-than-mythic fists by the end of the game, at least without exploiting a bug(*). If there does exist another source, do let me know (it would have to be a non-class/keyword-specific PL bonus that comes from an item). This is the "spikey" option, but doesn't require you to have a body-inspiration-buffing-capable party member. (*) The Heart-Chime Amulet (reward for Pallegina's quest) is supposed to give you a variable bonus as a godlike or watcher, but is currently bugged to always give you the bonus that a Moon Godlike should get, which is a +1 PL stackable bonus. You can use it here to get +6 PL, but be warned that Obsidian will fix this bug and it's only a matter of time before this loophole goes away. In either option your main dual-wielding set of weapons will be your fists, which you can treat as fast blunt weapons with bonus inherent accuracy, damage, and penetration and a +30% damage lash. The weapon modal proficiency for fists is an additional +2 penetration, so you could theoretically re-drop Champion's Boon and bring back Searing Seal. You'll have a strong early game due to how the monastic unarmed training talent works, and the bonus PL will help ensure that you continue to scale at a reasonable pace. Though you need to be a Death Godlike comfortable with dancing with Barring Death's Door to really take advantage of it; fortunately for this build lots of good things happen at near death, so you'd be really leaning into that "glass cannon" philosophy. You're giving up a head slot, but this build was mostly using it for Fair Favor, which you don't need if you're busy punching everything in the face. REJECTED APPROACHES One immediate alternative approach to an Umezawa build you might think of is to pair a Streetfighter with an Illusionist, or at least a Wizard. You get a lot more opportunity-cost-worth-it damage spells and ways to afflict enemies. You also get Infuse With Vital Essence with is like a super-charged version of Prayer for the Spirit (since you are mostly using it as a self-buff in this build anyway). Plus, the Wizard has access to Wizard's Double, which, with a sufficiently high deflection, its duration-less unconditional +40 deflection is the best defensive spell you can use. The problem is that the Wizard actually has its defensive spells inefficiently distributed for our purposes. Both Arcane Veil and Mirror Image are at PL2, which means a Priest of Wael actually effectively gets twice as many casts as the wizard, since for the priest Arcane Veil is at PL1 and Mirror Image is at PL3. The fact that Arcane Veil is a PL1 is also a bigger deal than you may think. For one, early-game (Port Maje) 1.1 Path of the Damned is a fair challenge, and a wizard multiclass won't get two casts of PL2 spells until level 7, which is after when you probably most desperately need it. In addition, there are several resting effects in the game that give you a bonus +1 level spell cast (The Wild Mare and the Luminous Adra Bathhouse immediately come to mind). This is great for a Priest of Wael because it potentially means 3 casts of Arcane Veil, plus an additional 2 upon a self-empower. There's basically no equivalent for a wizard. And while Wizard's Double is good, it won't be that good for much of the early game because your deflection just won't be high enough to really milk it for what it's worth, and by the time you can take advantage of it, the Wael version will be picking up new tricks. Speaking of which, wizards lack the following spells that really help tie the Umezawa together: Despondent Blows, Devotions for the Faithful, Barring Death's Door, and Salvation of Time. It makes for some great general party utility and combat versatility. While I'm sure there is a great Streetfighter/Wizard build out there, I am fairly confident that for this specific playstyle (as opposed to an immortal high-deflection riposte build, which a wizard could do better) Streetfighter/Wael is the way to go. The Umezawa build as of now is also not a solo PotD build. A soloable version of Umezawa would be closer to an immortal, high-deflection riposte build, because the way this build is now the Umezawa is a team player. Frankly, without a lot of delicate pulling of enemies or just constantly equipping a large shield, there's just no way that the Umezawa can sustain all the enemy hate in the world because while your deflection is high to mitigate a significant portion of damage, it's not going to be high enough. Even with access to Barring Death's Door, encounters would probably just take too long and you'll be left out of steam with enemies still standing. Umezawa can work great in smaller-than-5 parties, but a completely soloable build would likely be unrecognizable to the one being presented here today. NOTES FOR MAGRAN'S FIRES Abydon: not recommended. This build leans hard on certain unique weapons and armor and you can really run up an expensive repair bill versus other characters that can use generics instead. Berath: nothing relevant to worry about. Eothas: nothing relevant to worry about. Galawain: be on the look out for Unstoppable and Bullish enemies. Unstoppable can't be afflicted, but they can be flanked; important to keep in mind for keeping your DPS up. Bullish enemies interrupt and knock back at will, so make sure you don't drop your best deflection bonuses (Arcane Veil or Escape) before trying to cast something at point-blank range. Magran: if you can pull off this build along with a party on this challenge you should probably quit your job and become a professional DOTA or Starcraft 2 player. Skaen: if you want to use this character to help illuminate things, the sabre proficiency is more important early on, and then you can use the sabre-torch. If you don't have access to the sabre-torch, well... *shrug*. Normal torches are still usable but represent a huge DPS loss. APPENDIX: LINEAR RETURNS I made the assertion earlier that speed adjustments offers linear returns. I've fought similar debates re: World of Warcraft and Diablo 3, and I'll fight it again now. But before we go onto my analysis and conclusion, we need to be clear what we mean by "linear returns." If you've taken calculus, then the easiest way to express what "linear returns" means is that for a given differentiable function f where f'' is the second-derivative and f consumes a stat x to yield a metric y, then if f(x) = y, ∃x₀: ∀x > x₀ f''(x) = 0. Putting it into words, we mean that after a certain point for x the second-derivative of f(x) is 0. Analogously, "increasing returns" is when f''(x) > 0, and "diminishing returns" is when f''(x) < 0. Put in less math-y speak, a stat has "linear returns" when for a given absolute change in that stat, the resultant metric always yields the same absolute change as well, regardless of what our starting point was. By contrast a stat has "increasing returns" when for a given absolute change in the stat, the resultant metric yields continually larger absolute changes the higher our initial stat was. Similarly a stat has "diminishing returns" when for a given absolute change in the state, the resultant metric yields continually smaller absolute changes the higher our initial stat was. A key point to this is properly identifying what the "metric" is. The poster child for this is resolve(deflection) and perception(accuracy). I've talked to and read posts by people who assume that because +1 deflection gives the enemy a -1 penalty on the attack roll and a +1 accuracy gives you a +1 on the attack roll that deflection and accuracy have linear returns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because the actual metric is "effective health." That is, how much effective health do you have? And as this is the true metric it becomes very clear that deflection/resolve has increasing returns, because at very low deflection another point hardly matters, but at the top-end each point of deflection is so important that eventually it gives you infinite survivability. Accuracy, by contrast, has diminishing returns, because it's the flip side to that deflection equation. When you go from missing all the time to grazing some of the time, you just got an infinite increase in your damage potential (which was previously zero). However, when you already have accuracy so high that you are critting all the time, another point of accuracy will do literally nothing. With regards to action speed and recovery times, a lot of people get hung up on the fact that when it comes to speed adjustments, the more bonuses you have the smaller your reduction in your action time and recovery time, and they therefore conclude that therefore the returns are diminishing. This is wrong for two interrelated reasons. One, the action time/recovery time is not actually the metric. It is in fact just a mere component of our true metric, and is in fact the denominator. Two, because it is the denominator for our true metric, the smaller our starting value, the smaller the change needs to be to accomplish the same net effect. For example, reducing your recovery time by .1s when you're starting at 1.5s is way better than reducing your recovery time by .1s when you're starting at 5s. So just the mere fact that you get less recovery time reduction the more action speed you already have does not, by itself, mean you have diminishing returns. Instead, you have to look at the true metric. So what is the true metric? Basically, damage per second, or damage over time. More generally, it is "how many things can we accomplish in a given amount of time?" Now, does this metric get linear returns from speed bonuses? Or is it diminishing? Or is it increasing? Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where you attack and on average do 15 damage to the target, and you do so every 5 seconds. Using the action speed equation, we can draw a graph of how much damage you are capable of doing for different levels of +action speed. See that smooth diagonal line going up(*) in the graph below (click to enlargen)? That's literally the definition of linear returns. (*) Note that for a game like Diablo 2 or Diablo 3, it's not quite this simple. At a certain point, because attack animations are connected to whole numbers of frames (frames as in "frames per second"; whole numbers as in no fractional frames) you start running into a "breakpoints" where you actually get 0 returns for a while until you get enough accumulated attack speed improvements to "round" down to the next lower number of frames per attack. So at a certain point it stops being a smooth diagonal line and starts becoming a steadily embiggening staircase. It averages out to be linear returns, but in truth it no longer really is any sort of well-defined returns because the function is no longer differentiable at that point, which was an important part of defining any kind of returns above. It is possible that at the extreme, Deadfire hits similar issues, but in truth it is clear that Deadfire retains recovery time to two decimal places (even if it rounds to one-decimal place in tooltips), and it is likely that it is impossible to accumulate so much action speed so as to hit "breakpoint" issues. Plus, if Deadfire allows for fractional attack frames, then breakpoints are a non-issue altogether. Now one hiccup here is the fact that the way Deadfire treats adjustments to your action time and recovery time is that it has different native units of measurement depending on whether it's a bonus or a penalty (malus). In effect, the native stat for bonuses is action speed. The native stat for maluses is action time. So when you have a -50% recovery time bonus, it is actually truly a +100% action speed adjustment. However, if you have a -20% action speed penalty, it is actually truly a +25% action time adjustment. Why is this relevant? Because it affects how Deadfire combines the numbers behind the scenes. When you're combining bonuses, you translate anything that's not an action speed into an action speed adjustment and then just add them up; you then optionally reconvert it into whatever unit (recovery time adjustment or action speed adjustment) the tool-tip requires; e.g. a -50% recovery time penalty and a +15% action speed bonus becomes a +100% action speed adjustment and a +15% action speed adjustment which becomes a +115% action speed adjustment for the recovery, which turns into a -53.5% recovery time bonus (and just a -13% action time bonus). When you're combining maluses, you translate anything that's not a recovery time penalty into a recovery time adjustment and then just add them up e.g. two -20% action speed adjustments become two +25% recovery time penalties that add to become a +50% recovery time penalty, which you can then reconvert back for display purposes into a -33% action speed adjustment if needed. When you're combining bonuses and maluses, you convert all bonuses into positive action speed adjustments and sum them, and then convert all maluses into negative recovery time adjustments and sum them, and then you subtract the latter from the former even though they are two completely different units of measure; so a -50% recovery time bonus and a -20% action speed adjustment becomes a +100% action speed adjustment minus a +25% recovery time penalty. The resulting number's unit depends on its sign. If it's positive, the resulting answer is determined to be an action speed adjustment. If it's negative, the resulting answer is determined to be a sign-flipped recovery time penalty. This is needless to say weird. Anyway, this is to say that yes, penalties can drag your numbers down because a -20% action speed is actually much more powerful than a +20% action speed. But unlike what MaxQuest says in his otherwise really useful action speed post, it's not just maluses that do this because of double-inversion (unlike damage penalties). For similar reasons, a -50% recovery time bonus is much more powerful than a +50% recovery time penalty. It's because you have to first convert to the "native units" at which point you see that a -20% action speed is actually a +25% recovery time penalty, which is more powerful than the +20% action speed; and the -50% recovery time bonus is actually a +100% action speed bonus which has a larger magnitude than the +50% recovery time penalty. Yes, again, this is weird and confusing. This odd use of native units of measurement also has an effect on the full understanding of our linear returns. When all you have are action speed bonuses, the linear returns are easy to see as a diagonal graph going up and to the right. When all you have are recovery time penalties, it is trivial to see that e.g. each +10% recovery penalty you add to your 5s recovery is a flat .5 second, which is also linear. But when you are combining bonuses and penalties, things get a little harder to compute and things don't add up as trivially. But if you remember about "native units" then it looks a little less weird that a -75% recovery time bonus can cancel out as much as a +300% recovery time penalty (which can make it intuitively feel like there's increasing returns to time/speed modifiers) or that a -20% action speed penalty outweighs a +20% action speed bonus (which can make it intuitively feel like there's diminishing returns to time/speed modifiers). And this is why it's so important that you get x and y right when analyzing whether for an f(x) = y, that f''(x) = 0 . Now, astute observers will note that with linear returns, the more you have of something, the less any further gain is worth relative to what you already have. MaxQuest has called this "intrinsic diminishing returns" for lack of a better term. I don't quite like the terminology because "diminishing returns" has a specific meaning, but I also don't have a better suggestion. Anyway, it is certainly true that if you have +500% action speed, another net +25% action speed is going to be a relatively less impact than when you had +0% action speed. This point is relevant if you're trying to decide between investing in damage or investing in speed, because to maximize total damage over time you want to balance out your bonuses as much as possible (for the same reason that given a rectangle with sides a and b with a fixed combined length of a + b = c, to maximize the area, a = b. In other words you get more area from being a square than from being an extremely skinny rectangle). But if you're not actively concerned about a tradeoff between damage or speed (such as when choosing how to allocate points between might or dexterity) the fact that the relative gain is less and less is completely irrelevant to whether or not you get linear returns, and sort of an orthogonal point altogether. Why? In general, a good way to think about increasing, linear, and diminishing returns is this: if something has increasing returns you generally want to invest a lot in it; if something has diminishing returns a little bit of investment might be worth it but it's definitely not worth it after a certain point(*); if something has linear returns, you're always going to get value out of it. If instead of this being Deadfire and us talking about speed bonuses, we were instead talking about Baldur's Gate and equipment that gives you bonus damage to weapons (like a pair of gloves that might give you +1 to weapon damage rolls), literally no one would be saying "oh I guess you have +5 total damage bonus now. Not worth getting more" unless it was some sort of tradeoff between equipment that gave you +1 damage or one that gave you +1 extra attack. In fact, everyone would probably be trying to stack on as much weapon damage bonus as possible after maximizing their attacks per round. It's the same thing here. When you're not trading off for damage, there's basically no reason to not get more speed if you can. (*) This is very simplified and glosses over a lot of nuance. Something can have such extremely slow increasing returns that it may never be worth investing in, and something can have such extremely slow diminishing returns that over a reasonable range of stats it may never not be worth investing in. Similarly, if every action speed and recovery time adjustment in Deadfire were suddenly decimated to literally one tenth of their current value, even though speed adjustment would still be linear returns, the gains would be so small that even though they would still be linear returns, you would be getting linear crap returns. The linear returns for investment in speed works out for us players in Deadfire because in large part Obsidian purposefully balanced speed with damage (see the Might/Dexterity correspondence). So that's it. What are you still doing here? Show's over! Hope you found this useful, entertaining, or at least educational!

Hi folks I am trying to make sense of the party I am creating in relation to the game mechanics. I don't think I am trying to do anything fancy, so hopefully this ends up straight forward. My party would be: Barbarian - Cauterizer, per Boeroer Eder - Dual Wielding Fighter Aloth - CC Wizard Pallegina - Roughly based off the "Fire General" build, Sword and Board Durance - Buff bot Sagani or Hiravias - Stormcaller / Not sure My main gripe is Durance and his low DEX, and this is where my head gets turned inside out mechanics wise. Of note - all of the above characters have fairly low dex scores, except Aloth. 9 (Barb), 11 (Eder), 15 (Aloth), 11 (Pallegina), 9 (Durance), 11 (Sagani) respectively. My immediate thought was to almost exclusively use the +3 DEX resting bonus via Caed Nua, but I am wondering if this is the correct option or not. In terms of roles, Durance wants every boost he can get (I can get him to 16-18 with gear + talents + rest, not including minor avatar), and it brings my Aloth (with gear) to a easy 20 dex as well. The benefit of DEX on casting speed is immediately clear to me. What isn't as obvious is the impact of DEX on my martial classes. E.g. I am planning for Eder to dual wield two Rimecutters + Vulnerable Attack asap. Early game, so long as he is wearing Padded Armor and has Outlander's Frenzy or Hastening Exhortation, it seems he can reach 0 recovery with ease. I can also wear Blaidh Golan for a minor recovery hit, but more survivability. Then, as I am able to Durganize his Armor + Weapons, it seems the sweet spot I can reach is Scale (Golden Scales or Pike's Pride), and drop the Armored Grace talent. Or keep the talent and I can wear any armor I want, including Plate. All of the above without the Gauntlets of Swift Action, who I can then use for Sagani. This is the sticking point I have with DEX now though. Is the added 3 DEX from rest valuable at all to Eder? I can see the effect of increasing DEX on the calculator, but I can't grok if the change/impact is worth it. My Barb would rest at 15 DEX buffed, which is 15% more action speed, but does the Cauterizer build benefit from this? Second question, what is the benefit of 0 recovery on caster classes? E.g. Aloth with the durganized Engwithan Scepter wearing Leather + Pilferer's Grip (trying to save on Durgan) and DoAM can reach 0 recovery fairly easy. The immediate and obvious benefits seems mostly in relation to the character completing attacks quickly, and therefore will feel more responsive when you want them to cast spells. Does recovery affect spells however? This is where it gets blurry for me. Ideally I'd like Aloth using something like Golden Gaze or Gyrd Haewanes Stenes when not casting, but the drop in recovery is immediately noticeable when switching from the Engwithan Scepter. I have the same question about Durance. Is it better to be casting with Unforgiven/Last Blade of the White Forge + Shield and 0 recovery, or does it matter? My last question is the most complicated question by far... Is there a way to make Angio's Gambeson less ugly/weird looking on Durance? I hate using this item on looks alone, but the power gamer in me can't resist it on Durance either..... I could chug DoAM potions instead, but those eat into early buffing time. Thanks for any help!

My ongoing peeve with Reputation gain (i.e. the pre-defined meaning and intention of conversation options) vs what I actually intended the option to mean. Currently, in PoE(2), the reputation system is, as in most (all?) other games, static. You choose Conversation Option A, and it has already been given a meaning by the writers/devs, no matter what meaning you and your PC may put in it. Example: In BoW, I convinced Neriscyrlas to find respite and release herself to the Void. My PC (paladin, dimplomatic, good) took this direction with the best intentions, since there's no option to release Neris to the Wheel (that I could find). But after playing the same dialogue sequence with Reptutations in conversations turned on, I found that this was in fact the "Cruel" option! Why? Why would this me more cruel than killing her? Well, sure, you're telling her that she's already dead and have been living an utter pointless existence for centuries, but is that really cruel? It wasn't for me, until I played it with the pre-set meaning of conversation options releaved. What I think would solve this problem, is a way to change the Reputation, i.e. the intention of conversation opotions. The example I just gave could just as well have been Honest, or even Benevolent (a peaceful solution), which was the way "I" meant it. These static "choices" breaks the immersion, restricts your ability to RP the character the way you envisioned it. You want to RP? Well, I as my character would have said this, but according to the rep-gain my character must say that in order to be aligned with the reputation-mechanic-RP aspect, if you catch my drift. You'll end up with having to pick choices just to align with the "correct" rep gains, or choose the "wrong" convo/rep options to align with what you would say, thus ending up with an ingame-personality that does not reflect your RP. Am I making sense? So, please, in PoE3, look into the possibility of being able to change the Reputation, i.e. intention/meaning of certain conversation options. E.g. dropdown for [chose your intention], where it makes sense, where you can select between a few options. I think that this would make the RP aspects of the game a whole lot more rewarding, since you can be much more dynamic in the way you approach conversations. Again, this is not something particular to PoE2, but PoE 1 and 2 are the RPGs I've spent the most time playing and enjoyed. Also, I do think that the PoE devs are more receptible to suggestions than, say, Dragon Age devs would be (simply due to the more corporate, top-down nature of how Bioware/DA is managed).

Hello, There have been a couple of threads regarding pickpocketing and asking how it works with the "Loaded Pockets" Berath's Blessing. If you want information on Loaded Pockets, you can go here. In anticipation of the new patch, I decided to do a deep dive and try to figure it out. To pickpocket an item, you need to be actively in stealth. When you activate a pick pocketable creature, you will see it's pick pocketable inventory. Items that cannot be pick pocketed are greyed out but show it's "Sleight of Hand Difficulty Level". Items that are not greyed out are items that you can pick pocket- you already have the necessary Sleight of Hand to pick pocket those items. To pickpocket, you actually do not need any points in Sleight of Hand- but you do need to actively be hidden. In terms of determining the Sleight of Hand Difficulty Level, there are a few modifiers. These are actually in global.gamedatabundle lines 10393-10545 and are in the spoiler below. I'll break it down below. The first factor is if you are currently in a creatures field of vision. This is indicated with the '"eye" appearing in your selection circle while stealthed. This increases the Sleight of Hand Difficulty Level by 2. The second factor is if you are currently detected. You are considered "detected" when the stealth meter in your selection circle is red. This increases the Sleight of Hand Difficulty Level by 2. The third factor is the level of the creature you are pickpocketing. It is as follows: At level 1, the difficulty increases by 1. At level 2, the difficulty increases by 2. At level 3, the difficulty increases by 3. At level 5, the difficulty increases by 4. At level 7, the difficulty increases by 5. At level 10, the difficulty increases by 6. At level 13, the difficulty increases by 7. At level 16, the difficulty increases by 8. At level 19, the difficulty increases by 9. The fourth and last factor is the type of item you are attempting to pickpocket. They are as follows: Weapons increase the difficulty by 2. Armor increases the difficulty by 3. Clothing increases the difficulty by 1. Consumables do not affect the difficulty. Ingredients decrease the difficulty by 1. Quest items decrease the difficulty by 3. "Misc" items decrease the difficulty by 3. Any ship upgrades/crew, food or drink, and artifacts do not affect the difficulty. Theoretically*, the highest Sleight of Hand Difficulty that a creature can have is 16. Therefore, this means that to pickpocket every creature in the game, you need 16 Sleight of Hand. *In practicality, not very many creatures are level 19+, and fewer still are non-hostile NPCs, so that number could realistically be lower. There appears to be two "inventories" for creatures. One that can be pickpocketed, and one that can't. When you kill an NPC, the loot they drop is from both "inventories". It's important to note that if you get caught pickpocketing a faction NPC (and this applies to stealing from "owned" containers or opening "owned" doors, as well), you will gain minor negative reputation with that faction. While hidden, you can also reverse-pickpocket explosives. You do not require any points in Sleight of Hand to do so. Explosives, in general, scale with your Explosives skill. When you reverse-pickpocket a bomb into the character's inventory it gains +100 Accuracy to hit and you have 10 seconds to get out of the radius before it explodes. (If you want to know how explosives work, go here) The Sleight of Hand skill is also used in scripted interactions and conversations. Typically, the Sleight of Hand options involve misdirection and skullduggery. There is also a game engine quirk that allows you to become completely hidden (regardless if you are being looked at/etc) while in conversation with an NPC and the game is unpaused. This means you can initiate pickpocketing to at least see the inventory of just about every major non-hostile NPC in the game.

I have been searching and reading posts/threads/videos and I feel that there is potentially quite significant misinformation on Chant and Linger mechanics as what I have understood seemingly doesn't occur in-game. Some frustrating observations (if true/confirmed): 1) Many chants seem to have a fixed duration of 10 seconds (typically buffs like Ancient Memory, or +defence chants) which completely ignores the phrase and linger mechanics as well as intellect. Debuff chants seem to actually factor intellect in the duration of the effect but still ignore phrase and linger (e.g Long Night Drink and its weakness debuff). Other debuff or damage chants (e.g Come Come Winds of Death) seem to factor phrase duration and linger because unlike point 2) the chant effect applies periodically (every 3 seconds) during the phrase and linger durations. 2) The vast majority of chants apply the actual chant buff/debuff only once at the start of the chant which causes phrase duration and linger to seemingly be completely useless. Select few chants like Come Come or Dragon Thrashed apply effects periodically and therefore make actual use of phrase and linger duration. Conclusion (assuming the above is true/confirmed): 1) The value of INT is far more limited than some people seem to think as many chants ignore INT for the purposes of duration. Outside of the select few chants that can scale INT and/or make use of phrase and linger duration, INT only increases AoE size. 2) As many chants only apply the effect once at the start of a chant, moving other members or enemies into the AoE thereafter will not cause a buff/debuff as they missed the initial application. They must wait until the next phrase begins. 3) Reducing phrase duration (e.g Troubadour skill) is the only way to increase the duration of most buff chants to simultaneously maintain greater numbers of different chants. E.g with no phrase duration reduction Ancient Memory and Silver Knights Shield can't both be kept up at all times (both chants have a fixed and flat duration of 10 seconds but it takes 12 seconds to cast these two chants leaving a downtime of 2 seconds), however Troubadour could maintain more than three chants, Ancient Memory, Silver Knights Shield and Her Courage Thick as Steel as casting all three only takes 9 seconds leaving no downtime. I look forward to hearing what others have to say, but overall it is disappointing how inflexible chants seem to be and how effective/reliant on troubadour I am to reduce phrase duration (and how companions like Tekehu can't be Troubadour).

Does anyone know if Predator's Sense is triggered by Stalker's Torc? I know that the latter was bugged and was supposedly fixed by a patch, but I am not sure how both of those items and Stalker's Link interplay. If this was a tabletop game, I would assume if you Stalker's Link you get "+10 accuracy when attacking the same target as animal companion". Stalker's Torc should says it modifies Stalker's Link to do "+20% Damage per 3.0 sec", which I assume also triggers when attacking the same target as animal companion. The question is whether "+20% Damage per 3.0 sec" counts as damage over time, which if so would give the Animal companions of Rangers with Predator's Sense "+50% damage against targets affected by damage over time". Can anyone confirm whether this is the case?

What I'm trying to figure out is this: I don't understand how the game gets to 52.1. The base damage could be anything between 38 and 55, and then there would also be the critical damage multiplier of 0.3 and the 45% more damage.: Is there someone who can explain these mechanics to me?

Hi everyone, not meant as a whining/rant post, just throwing around some questions/doubts. First of all, and maybe needless to say, I do love PoE 2. No matter how much I love it, I can't help thinking the Concentration system (for casters), despite being a really nice idea, is deeply flawed. Bear with me, and please do let me know if I'm wrong, somewhere: - No matter the level, no matter what kind of caster you are, no matter how high your stats are, you can get at best 1 level of concentration at the beginning of the combat (through the talent). You cannot actually stack concentration layers, you just need to get it up again through spells. And this is what I kind of find insane...you need to cast a spell (one that provides concentration) to cast another spell...you cast a spell to cast another spell...and if u get interrupted during that buff spell, well...you understand where this is going... - Most times (not always) casters are targeted by spells (since they tend to cast from behind the first line). Knowing this, I always try to keep Arcane Reflection up. How ON EARTH can mobs interrupt me if the spell 1) does not deal damage 2) does not even hit me. I have experienced this several times. Is it a bug? Is it working as intended? Is it me who's slowly slipping into madness? Who knows... - Spells/abilities can actually interrupt people while they WALK...I mean...seriously?!? Do I need to be focused to WALK?!? I could understand if the pg received a massive damage/crit, so that he needed some time to recover...that, I'd understand...but grazes/hits too seem to prevent characters from running...again, am I missing something? - This is the best...the one and only level of Concentration protection can be taken off by an attack EVEN WHEN YOU ARE NOT CASTING...so, example: mage running from one side to another of the map, just RUNNING...one arrow hits him with a graze...Concentration goes off...he was NOT EVEN casting...I mean...this cannot be the way developers wanted this mechanics to work, right? So...please, do correct me if you think I'm wrong or just share your view about this...I like the system, just think it could have been implemented in a much better way. Just a thought. Ah, by the way...I'm obviously talking about PotD difficulty. Thanks everyone.

Increasing a character's stats past the baseline value of 10 should have only positive effects on gameplay and combat. Following this is good game design and makes sense. In PoE, there are many abilities that have drawbacks such as afflicting the character for a duration or forcing them to take damage. In all of those scenarios I've found, the following things happen with regard to self-harming effects: Duration increases with the player's INT, beneficial effect increase (like from Strand of Favor, which contradicts its description), and Power Level (if class ability). Damage the player takes increases with player's MIG, Power Level (if class ability), and all percent damage increases such as the human race bonus when bloodied or near death. Why does INT increase the duration of these harmful effects while RES simultaneously reduces it? Now we have two stats that the player wants to increase, both contradicting each other. INT should have no influence on duration, which will allow RES to do its job properly. The reason it works like this currently is that the game treats self-harming effects as both helpful and harmful. This should not be the case. On the other hand, ability self-damage should scale as the character becomes stronger to keep things balanced. All the abilities I mention below are relatively balanced to Power Level. Because self-damage is almost exclusively raw and all +% bonus damage increases will scale this damage up, it's easy to see that things can very quickly get out of hand. Forcing this self-damage to scale from Power Level only will allow DPS characters to use abilities like Frenzy and Sacred Immolation without having to compensate with high CON. The following abilities should be changed: Monk Forbidden Curse duration. Should be RES only. Monk Forbidden Curse damage tick. Should be PL only. Blood Mage's self-damage should be PL only. It's almost certainly being affected, but there's no tooltip and since it's random damage there's no way to prove it via screenshot. Paladin's Sacred Immolation damage tick. Should be PL only. Barbarian's Frenzy damage tick. Should be PL only. Blunderbuss's Powder Burns duration. Should be RES only. Wizard Spell Deleterious Alacrity of Motion. Should be PL only. Strand of Favor's passive effects both apply to self-inflicted effect duration. Only the Ward of Favor ability should apply. Fixing the scaling issues of harmful self-inflicted effects would be a strong improvement to combat overall. This will make the commonly ignored aspects of some classes and builds competitive, which would enhance the game's variety.

Does the salvation of time increase the duration of (spoiler) merge trinket effect from slime megaboss? A little low level to find out myself, but very curious.

Hello guys! First of all, happy new year in case i won't get a chance to wish you that later I am a new deadfire player and right now i am considering if i wanna play a single class wizard and which subclass i wanna play. That being said there are few things that perplex me: 1) Might's global damage modifier, namely whether it stacks additively or multiplicatively with power level damage modifier. 2) Merge effect from some lategame bossfight trinket. Is its duration boosted by priest's salvation of time? 3) What are all the ways of boosting corrode (not poison), frost and transmutation power levels? Is corrode and acid the same keyword? I wonder if playing a transmuter would be fun. 4) Is skill damage bonus from weapon retained by substantial phantom? (Like bonus from Chromoprismatic Staff) I have admitedly completed first POE on POTD and fell in love with wizard kit: with its damage over time spells (DOTS), affliction spells, deflection buffs, accuracy buffs, action speed buffs. In fact slightly changed TodWilkinson's wizard build with padded armor, slightly higher resolve and invulneribility heuristics instead of save boosting talents was my favorite way to play. The class had specialized, balanced yet strong kit (unlike its D&D counterpart that could do everything often times better than anyone), a kit that was somewhat reminiscent of Warlock from old WOW in terms of mechanics. Which makes me a little sad to learn that pretty much everything that a wizard tried to accomplish faced a nerf hammer. Now i wonder if it is possible to make oldschool iteration of wizard with DOTS still work

Hello, The other day I had a shower-thought: Explosives is one of those skills that people seem to not really use. So, In my undying effort to cover information no one really asked for, here's how explosives and the Explosives skill work. Before we get to what each point of Explosives actually does- there are a few of things to note: First, explosives typically have a base penetration of 7. Second, is that the accuracy is affected by your base accuracy rating (+20). Third, range and the area-of-effect radius is not affected by anything. (I believe it used to, but isn't any more) Fourth, anything that affects recovery (dexterity, armor, items, etc) will effect the recovery when using an explosive. Fifth, anything that affects accuracy like buffs, items, etc, also effects explosives. (Marked for the Hunt, Ring of Focused Flame, Devotions of the Faithful, etc) Each point of the Explosives Skill will give explosives: +1 Accuracy +5% Damage +5% Affliction/Status Effect Duration +0.25 Penetration On top of that, explosives get a +3 Accuracy bonus for every character level above level 1. This means that with a level 16 barbarian that has an Explosives skill of 13 the attack would have: 78 Accuracy, +65% Damage, +65% Duration, and 10.25 Penetration. Just like anything, explosives can get critical hits, and can overpenetrate. The last thing that affects explosives mechanically is reverse pickpocketing. When you reverse-pickpocket an explosive into an enemies inventory, it works the same way as if you were throwing it, but it gets +100 Accuracy, +100% Base Damage, and +100% Base Penetration and gives you about 10 seconds before it detonates. Ironically you actually do not need any points of Sleight of Hand to reverse-pickpocket an explosive, but you do need to be hidden. (If you want to know how pickpocketing works, check this out). The Explosives skill is also used (admittedly, rarely) in scripted interactions and conversations. Typically, the Explosives options involve using, manipulating, or disabling explosive materials and ordinance.

Ok, after having done POE1 I'm starting on Deadfire. I have a few questions regarding mechanics. 1) I love the ability to do behavior rulesets, but I'm currently trying to figure out ranges. Example: I want Xoti to use "Blessed Harvest" (range 4 meters) on targets below 50% health, but I dont want her to move (maybe 1 or 2 meters max) too far from her current position. I can do an AND rule with "enemy below 50%" and "enemy in melee range" (2 meters?), but I wonder if there are other ways to do it. 2) Poisons. How should the "this effect clear on weapon switch for X seconds" be interpreted? Are poison coatings permanent on a weapon until that weapon are swtiched or what? Can someone explain to me what the sentence means? Preferably like i'm 5 years old. Thanks in advance.

Why Test (Version 1.2.0.0028) Mmmm, Carnage. I've been a long time fan of Barbarian and have been seeking information on how the Carnage mechanic works in Deadfire since release. Unfortunately, things were slow both here and on Reddit with limited interest (people consider Carnage a worthless ability, especially in light of Mob Stance prior to its nerf) and poor accessibility (limited HUD tooltip info). The only question that really got answered was whether the secondary Carnage attacks applied on-hit effects, and the answer was a resounding, "No, but Spirit and Blood Frenzy on-hit effect buff does." That, and the fact that the resulting Raw damage does not care for Penetration, Graze, or Crit modifiers. Fast forward to present day. With the help of the mod guide video kind of showing where to look, I've been able to look at the various status effect and attack object structures. So here's some general observations from what's been tucked away in the GameDataBundle files: Carnage damage does scale with Power Level. It's a meager +5% per PL, but it's better than nothing. Amusingly, since Carnage is itself PL 0, and you start at PL 1, you actually start with the bonus +5% to Carnage damage. Don't get excited, though, because this scaling value is applied after the 0.33 modifier.The 33% damage effect will check the weapon in your primary or off-hand as appropriate. It does not care about anything other than the weapon's Base Damage range. You don't get the accuracy bonus from weapon quality. There is a hidden PL accuracy bonus that can't be observed in the game's tooltips, as noted in the Power Level Compilation Thread. The AoE Carnage attacks (main and off-hand) that apply the 33% damage effect seem to use a static 0.33 value for damage that overrides the default ability damage scaling for effects (+10% per PL). This just means you can only rely on the +5% damage per PL after the 0.33 reduction. Damage So the question I had at this point was what influenced Base Weapon Damage? Does weapon quality factor at all? What about active abilities proc from passives, like One Stands Alone, or conditional passive bonuses like Wilder Hunter? Thanks to a wonderful group of Assassin Vines, I've been able to get started on testing. Here are my observations thus far. Damage range for Carnage appears to use the following formula: (([base Weapon Damage] * [Might Damage Bonus]) * 0.33)(1 + (.05 * PL)). This was tested with a mod I made which increased the scaling damage bonus from PL so I could observe any small change to other values. Weapons used were of the same type, but different quality between them. Of course, quality had no effect on the damage result, and neither did One Stands Alone. I still have not tested sabre's Sharp weapon property or Wilder Hunter talent, though I suspect that Carnage damage will not check for creature type before applying itself. If anyone tests these before I do, that would be nice. Surprise! Might influences your Base Weapon Damage before it is shoved into Carnage's % damage calculation! This was tested by observing the damage range with and without Frenzy. Whether it's worth having high Might to maximize Carnage damage is another thing. Assuming you max it out, you're still looking at 10-15 Raw damage from 30 Might and 10 PL delivered via a Sword swing (Base 13-19). Finding the minimum and maximum damage possible is just a matter of using the minimum and maximum values under Base Weapon Damage range for the relevant weapon. For the most part, numbers stayed within the correct range, but was a little tricky to parse because damage values are not integers. Your damage range will include decimal values, but the hit point damage flying out of enemies on screen will round the value up. Testing Error In the GameDataBundle files, it appears that your off-hand weapon is ignored for base weapon damage and your main weapon is used instead. This isn't because they didn't put in an entry for your off-hand weapon. They did. It just doesn't get referenced at all, and thus the AoE attack and subsequent 33% damage status effect it would reference are also unused. It may be a mistake that the main weapon got referenced for both the main weapon on-hit event and the off-hand weapon on-hit event, or it could be a measure to prevent the game from breaking on something. Area of Effect As for Carnage AoE size, even with 21 Int, I struggled to hit more than 3 additional Assassin Vines at a time. Barbaric Blow's 50% increased Carnage AoE did not make a noticeable difference, though I guess that's fitting given the size of the base AoE (360 degrees; "Small"; 1.5 blast radius override). At the very least, if you get 3+ enemies clustered, Heart of Fury can apply a lot of extra damage via main and off-hand Carnage AoE. Closing There's nothing to really close this OP on. The goal wasn't to show whether Carnage was a viable mechanic or not but to clear up some of the mystery behind how it works. I'll leave some closing thoughts: Abilities like Barbaric Blow and Heart of Fury do not influence Carnage damage whatsoever. This, despite Barbaric Blow claiming it also increases the crit rate of Carnage. There's no benefit to doing so even if it worked that way. You ultimately use the abilities for the Full Attack abuse and maybe the increased Carnage AoE. For consistent, powerful basic attack applications, dual wielding wielding a spear, sword, or battle axe in your main hand will offer the best results (Base 13-19 damage). Might becomes slightly more relevant with big 2h weapons since it will modify a bigger value. Great sword, pike, and quarterstaff (Base 18-24 damage) will lead to a maximum Carnage damage range of 14-19 at 30 Might and 10 PL. From my testing, 2h Weapon talent doesn't modify Carnage damage and neither does the great sword modal. Two-weapon Full Attacks will apply a big sum-total Carnage damage with endgame abilities, such as Heart of Fury, but a max level Barbarian can swing Sanguine/Voidwheel with amazing impunity once the first enemy falls. This can result in a solid Carnage damage spike over the course of a combat encounter. The benefit of instant primary weapon recovery via Blood Thirst should not be underestimated. As of the recent testing in patch (1.2.0.0028) even the attack animation is canceled. It's seriously FAST. Completely unrelated to Carnage. You could forgo melee entirely if your goal is to dual Pistol/Blunderbuss Heart of Fury. Heart of Fury will fire at all enemies within range AND has the bonus of bypassing primary weapon reload (unlike Barbaric Blow). The downside is the ability cooldown, but you will still ultimately pump damage faster by just rushing the second Heart of Fury. Whether it's worth the 8 Rage is another matter. EDIT: I saw an enemy get hit by the Carnage AoE triggered on them. They were moving fairly quickly (Terrified) and just ran into their own AoE. It was HILARIOUS.

I was starting to get a little bit mystifed just how disposition influenced priest/paladin, and couldn't find any good answer for Deadfire. Instead, I found unanswered questions being asked on reddit or here that posted numbers that made no sense compared to past patch notes. So I decided to do a lot of tests and deconstruct what's happening and oy is it weird. (Someone will probably chime in and say that you could open up some game file and find this all out, but I did it the hard way.) Putting it here so that hopefully people curious about why one bad disposition is so negatively affecting their pally defenses. BACKGROUND priests/paladins have favored/disfavored dispositions. They influence the following things: For priest: Holy Radiance healing, Holy Radiance burn damage, Spiritual Weapon lash For paladin: Faith and Conviction defense bonus, Deep Faith defense bonus In all cases, only a disposition score up to 3 is counted. 4 is counted the same as 3. It's been mentioned in this forum before, but I still see people getting confused about it, but for hired adventurers, they use YOUR current dispositions. This is different from POE1 (where companion paladins scaled by level instead and companion priests not at all). This means that e.g. a priest of skaen recruit is not going to play well with you if you rolled a kind wayfarer main character (which is a perfect overlap between favored dispositions for the paladin and disfavored reputations for the priest). Dispositions are the same as in PoE1 (you can look up on wiki). I don't know what Pallegina's special subclass paladin's dispositions are, the fact that I was testing on a character with crazy reputations and Pallegina still had +8.9 neutral faith and conviction almost makes me think she has none. PRIEST HOLY RADIANCE Holy Radiance heals a base of 15 health. It starts with a base +5 disposition bonus. (So with neutral disposition you will heal 20 health). Each positive disposition gives you a +20%/rank modifier to the disposition bonus. Each negative disposition gives you a -20%/rank modifier to the disposition bonus. So if you are a priest of Wael and have 3 Clever and 3 Shady, you'll get +120% bonus, for a total of +11 disposition bonus. Importantly, like every other penalty in Deadfire, penalties go through an inversion and are treated as a "rate" multiplier, so each individual disfavored disposition will actually outweigh an equivalent-strength favored disposition. Put another way, when you only have one type of negative disposition, it's as it seems (so 3 Honest for Wael would be -60% or a net +2 disposition bonus). But in any other situation, you invert and combine them. So if you have 1 Honest and 1 Clever, your net disposition bonus is actually: +5 * reinvert(.2 clever + 1-1/(1-.2 honest)) => +5 * reinvert(.2 + -.25) => +4.75 (rounds to +4.8 displayed) where "reinvert" is a function that does: reinvert(x) { return x > 0 ? 1 + x : 1/(1/(1-x)) } Note that although a disfavored disposition will outweigh an equivalent-strength favored disposition, this equation does mean that if you only have disfavored dispositions or have more disfavored than favored, the penalty is not as severe as you would otherwise get from a purely additive or multiplicative combination. In fact, even though "15" is the base, you can't actually get this low, the lowest you can get is 15+5 * reinvert(1-1/(1-.6 bad disp) + 1-1/(1-.6 bad disp)= 15.83 (rounding to 15.8 displayed, plus a guaranteed minimum +1.5 from power scaling for 17.3) Holy Radiance is also at PL0 so it has an inherent +10% priest PL scaling to heal effect. Importantly, this and any power level scaling only applies to the base healing of 15 health; the disposition bonus is excluded. But after you apply disposition bonus and power level scaling, you get a subtotal any other modifiers (might, bonus to healing, etc.) are applied this larger subtotal. The same thing applies Holy Radiance's burn damage, except it has a base 12 burn damage, and a +5 base disposition bonus. Again, power level scaling only applies to the base burn damage, but all other modifiers apply to the subtotal you get after applying the disposition bonus and power level scaling. Again, ranks in disfavored dispositions outweigh equivalent-magnitude. The upshot is that the healing scaling is kind of meh; the difference between a blasphemous priest and a devout priest is about 10 points of healing before might and other modifiers. This is not nothing, but is a huge step down from the massive scaling you could get in poe1. On the other hand, scaling for burn damage is still significant, because even though it's still the same +5 base disposition bonus, the damage repeats every few seconds, so the difference between a neutral priest and a devout priest can be a decent chunk of change. If it were up to me, I'd fix it so that the disposition bonus also scales with power level. PALADIN FAITH & CONVICTION PLUS DEEP FAITH This is where I really tore my hair out. Because the 1.1 patch notes have this: Keep the above in mind, because these numbers have almost nothing to do with how faith & conviction and deep faith actually work and makes me suspect that either whomever wrote these lines had massive typos (likely for the faith & conviction stuff) or even Obsidian doesn't completely understand the ramifications of their double-inversion system (very likely). Basically Paladin defense bonuses work a lot like the priest Holy Radiance stuff, except for Faith & Conviction you have a "base" +8 to all defenses, and then a +.9 neutral defense bonus (you still get 20% modifiers based on your favored/disfavored reputations). Once again, disfavored dispositions outweigh equivalent-magnitude favored dispositions. Note that a ramification of this is that the range for Faith & Conviction is actually 8.2 to 10 (with in-game rounding). I have no idea how any designer at Obsidian who understood their own system thought that you could actually get down to a +6 defense, the penalties just don't work this way. (Confirmed studiously in-game). For Deep Faith, it's similar, except a +10 base to all defenses and a +2.25 neutral defense bonus (with 20% pos/negative modifiers). Once again, I have no idea how Obsidian thinks the range for this is 5-15, because the actual range is 10.6 to 15. (Confirmed studiously in-game). Note that due to the way Faith & Conviction works, disposition barely matters for a normal paladin. The difference between a blasphemous paladin and a devout paladin is 2 defense essentially, and the difference between a blasphemous paladin and a neutral paladin is virtually nothing (it is theoretically .7 defense, but very few effects in the game especially post 1.2 have fractional defense or accuracy so in practice there's hardly ever a difference between 8.2 and 8.9). For Deep Faith it'll matter a bit more, as +5 all defenses can be a significant difference. This is again unfortunately a far cry from poe1. PRIEST SPIRITUAL WEAPON Spiritual weapons use the same equation as other scaling, except it's a base +20% lash, with a +5% neutral disposition bonus, and then the 20% modifier (positive or negative) based on disposition rank. The effect of this is that the range of the spiritual weapon lash is not [20%, 30%] as the patch notes say, instead the range is actually [21.25%, 31%] (it's hard to completely verify this in game because it depends on relying on the combat log which does rounding, but for all intents and purposes I have verified this range in-game via repeated attacks on Aloth). Like the other disposition scaling stuff, negative dispositions outweigh positive dispositions. On the plus side, this range is actually slightly better than promised, a 31% versus a 30% lash is not huge, but it's also not nothing. POSTSCRIPT It's possible that the relatively weaker disposition scaling on these various effects compared to poe1 is intentional, because there's no "Untroubled Faith" equivalent. (In PoE1 there was a talent named Untroubled Faith that would erase the effect of any negative disposition.) Instead, in Deadfire, once you accumulate a disfavored disposition it will permanently negatively affect you. Even if you get a 4 in a favored disposition, the way disposition works is that it counts as a 3; the extra point does not help you offset a disfavored disposition. In a system without Untroubled Faith (which IMO was a really lame talent but apparently people around the internet used in their own games) it becomes less of a big deal if you accumulate some disfavored reputations because the stakes are much lower. Though I suspect some of the scaling with the paladin has to be buggy/unintentional... POSTSCRIPT 2 Now that I've confirmed how Spiritual Weapon's faith attuned lash works, I strongly suspect what's happening here is that there's some scripting function that gets called with two arguments, a base and the neutral modifier. Someone on staff explained it one way while (possibly mistakenly) implementing it another, and now everyone who uses this script call is copy-pasting the same mistaken understanding of the range the script function produces, because I suspect in every place it is used, designers thought it was going to give them a linear range of [15, 25] (healing for Holy Radiance), [12, 22] (damage for Holy Radiance), [6, 10] (faith and conviction), [5, 15] (deep faith), and [20, 30] (spiritual attunement) instead of the non-linear range of [15.8, 21]; [12.8, 23]; [8.2, 10]; [10.6, 15]; and [21.25, 31] respectively. On the plus side, if Obsidian feels like fixing this, it should just involve changing one script function and everything else will get updated.

The topic was already tackled by many here and there, but I couldn't find a comprehensive treatise about that in these forums. My question is: which weapons that attack in a AoE or proc an AoE on crit translate the ability effects to all its AoE hits? I did some testing myself and recollected some infos scattered around. And also... what about weapons that do attacks that "bounce"? Does the second attack transfer ability effects? Is there a logic or a general rule behind the translation of ability effects? Edit: here's what the common knowledge is (patch 1.2): Normal weapons WotEP AoE: it does transfer ability effects (Crippling Strike, Blinding Strike, Stunning Blows, etc.); it does NOT work with Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming. Whahai Poraga AoE: it does transfer ability effects and it does proc Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming. Hand Mortar/Fire in the Hole AoE: it does transfer ability effects (Dorftek made a build around this feature). Frostseeker AoE on crit: it does NOT translate any ability effect. Watershaper's Focus* bounce attack: it does apply ability effects. Rods' modal AoE: it does apply ability effects. *Watershaper's Focus, being also a rod, can then achieve two AoE jumps (=three AoE attacks) with Driving Flight firing just once (as pointed out by Boeroer). Summoned weapons Kalakoth's Minor Blights: it transfers rogue ability effects (Crippling Strike, Blinding Strike, etc.) and Stunning Blow. Citzal's Spirit Lance: it transfers ability effects and it procs Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming (tested by Boeroer). P.S.: I'll keep updating the list if somebody has new infos or any suggestion.

Does an item with +1 int stack with an item that has +2 int for a total bonus of +3 int for example? What about inspirations? Do they stack? How about weapon proficiency modals? What among these things do and don't stack with each other type? Is suppression still around in PoE2 or will all items' effects stack with each other?

With the help of some fellow watchers, now I know how the game calculates lash damage. Suppose "PhyDMG_mid_stage" is the calculated physical damage only without penetration factor. For example, with +60% might, +60% legendary, +60% sneak attack, -50% Graze, the PhyDMG_mid_stage would be Roll*(1+0.6+0.6+0.6-1)=1.8*Roll. (-50%: 1-1/0.5 = -1, you can check this <a href="https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98679-mechanics-attack-speed-recovery-time-reload-time/">mechanics-attack-speed-recovery-time-reload-time</a> for explanation) The baseLashDMG = PhyDMG_mid_stage * coef The reason I am calling it "mid_stage" is that when calculating the final physical damage, we need the penetration factor. So far, we only have 5 values, -75%(-3) -50%(-1) -25%(-0.33) 0 +30%(0.3). The number in bracket is the covereted value for damage calculation. And the example continues, suppose we have an Overpen, our final physical damage for the above would be Roll*(1.8+0.3)=2.1*Roll. Whats next, suppose we have +50% fire damage (turning wheel). What would be our total combined damage? The baseLashDMG would be 1.8*0.5*Roll = 0.9*Roll. Now we need to consider the fire damage penetration. If we also have an Overpen, then the finalLashDMG = baseLashDMG * (1+0.3) = 1.3*0.9*Roll = 1.17*Roll. Well, the inconsistency comes. The intuitive value would be 2.1*0.5=1.05*Roll, but the actual value in the game is 1.17*Roll, which is higher. In the above example, the difference is not that obvious, but in the game, with the help of many skills and items, that difference could be much higher. The current game system would magnify the physical damage bonuses. I am not gonna call it a bug, but at least an inconsistency. The penetration factor for physical damage is an additive factor, however for lash damage, a multiplicative factor. Also, raw damage would be much worse than normal elemental lash when you have high enough pen. On the other hand, raw damage could be extremely good against enemies with very high AR. For example, the Aztec style obsidian blade(I forgot the name) has +10% raw lash. For example, +60% might, +60% legendary, +60% sneak attack, -75% noPen, the coef_sum = 0.6+0.6+0.6-3=-1.2, and the final physical dmg = Roll*(1/(1--1.2))=Roll/2.2=0.45*Roll. The raw_lash = 0.1*1.8=0.18*Roll, which would be 4X as a normal elemental lash.

In current state, that's additive +25% bonus from crit looks laughable so, how do u think, should critical changed to multiplicative modifier?

Had a few questions about spiritshift in Deadfire, but couldn't find the answers. So made a few tests myself and here is the aggregated info (for beta3): (note: all screenshots are made at lvl 1 and 10 str/int/res) Spiritshift Bear (Shifter): - ability/armor/claws: - active ability: Terrifying Roar: Spiritshift Boar (Shifter): - ability/armor/claws: - note: although it shows 0 raw damage every 3s, it actually damages for [4 + 10% per power level] per tick; (e.g. each tick deals 4 dmg at power level 1; 6 dmg at power level 5) - note: this raw dot does not stack with itself - note: boar regeneration equals [4 + 10% per power level]. I.e. it heals for 4.4 / 40 = 11% of max hp at ch.lvl 1 / power.lvl 1. And 7.6 / 230 = 3.3% of max hp at ch.lvl 20 / power.lvl 9. (* these values are for 10 mig/res) Spiritshift Cat (Shifter): - ability/armor/claws: - active ability: Cat Flurry Attack: - note: cancelling or changing form does not clear Flurry Attack buff. Spiritshift Stag (Shifter): - ability/armor/claws: - active ability: Druid Stag Carnage (yes for some reason it is an active, not passive atm): - note: druid does not have passive carnage. He can make only 1 such attack and it deals really low damage at the moment. Spiritshift Wolf (Shifter): - ability/armor/claws: - active ability: Knock Down: Spiritshift Storm Blight (Fury): - ability/armor/claws: - active abilities: Shifting Storm (Teleport) and Storm's Rage (single target dmg+stun): Spiritshift duration: - base duration is 15s. It gets a bonus +5% per power level; and this bonus stacks multiplicatively with INT. - shifter has a longer base spiritshift duration. It is equal to 22s. - fury gets it's spiritshift duration increased by 4s when dealing a killing blow. While shifted you do not benefit of your items (they are unequipped). But you can still benefit from your racials. Shifter gets healed for 20 + 5 per power level health at the spiritshift end. He can end his form prematurely. Or switch to another one. While shifted, shifter cannot cast druid/priest/wizard spells, use powers or invocations. But he can use active martial abilities and scrolls. Lifegiver gets: +2 power level with rejuvenation spells +5 power level while spiritshifted (so the bonus is +7) -5 power level after spiritshift has ended (so the malus is -3) What's possibly wrong with spiritshift: - At the moment, Spiritshift Hide get's +1 AR bonus on character level 5 and 9. Personally I would expect it to be on the same level when you can enchant your armor by 1 tier up, i.e: 4,8,12,16 - Elemental Corpus doesn't get such an AR bonus, i.e. it doesn't scale at all. - Elemental Claws are currently marked as two-handed. Maybe that's an oversight? As the plural form and the model itself point for dual-wielding. - Claws' damage does not scale. Or at least it's not displayed in their tooltips. - Boar regeneration and shifter healing (on spiritshift end) scale a bit poorly. And will be of x3-x4 less usefulness for a druid at max level (unless there are some really strong +healing modifiers in the game). - If a druid while spiritshifted tries to cast Scroll of Kalakoth's Minor Blights he usually gets stuck with the cast animation, and the scroll casting never finishes. But in rare cases when he succeeds (example) he can't auto-attack at all. - Animalistic spiritshift forms are still to large in inventory screen - Storm Blight form could use a female model for female characters - Spiritshift Stag form can deal only 1 carnage attack, during which main target takes normal damage, while adjacent ones just 1-5 slash dmg. - Spiritshift Cat form description mentions: "the cat spiritshift has a naturally fast attack and can burst into even faster attacks". This was correct for beta1, but is not longer true in beta3, because cat claws are now as slow as others.

Attack Speed Calculator version 1.0.5, PoE v3.06 compliant PREFACE: - When I have just introduced myself to PoE, I quickly noticed that something feels strange. Weapon tooltips are vague. Attack speed bonuses are providing non-uniform gains. Also there have appeared many questions when it came to the build optimizations. If you are interested in attack speed mechanics behind the game facade, than here it is, the aggregated info on this topic. NOTE: - This is still a WiP. Additional sections/explanations will be added over time. BASICS: - One of staple notions in PoE is [action]. Action is character's activity, be it a swing, pistol fire or spell cast. - Every action consists of minimum two phases: [attack] which included the attack animation per se, and [recovery] which role-playing speaking is the duration for your character catching his breath and getting ready for the next attack. - A specific set of ranged weapons, namely: crossbow, arbalest, pistol, blunderbuss and arquebus have an additional phase called [reloading] during which the character reloads the weapon in question. The phases go one after another. And visually a full action cycle can be presented in the following manner: RANGED: MELEE: * As you have noticed there is also a small delay between two actions. Tbh I haven't found any trace of it in the source code, but it's always there when you doing frapsing tests. It has a value of 5-7 frames which corresponds to 0.166-0.233 seconds. Most likely it is related to UnityEngine itself and the way it periodically checks for the events; with 1-2 frame variance coming from stuttering in case Unity was busy with something. BASE VALUES: - When trying to decide which weapon to choose, an important factor is how fast each weapon is. UI Tooltips are not providing the exact values. And those categories are actually quite inaccurate. So: WEAPON BASE VALUES: DRUID FORMS BASE VALUES: ANIMAL COMPANIONS BASE VALUES: Speadsheets: link P.S. If you want to check these base values yourself, feel free to use a simple mod I've made for this purpose. It will print some extra data in the combat log, each time any party member is performing an attack: (it will also 'catch' existing recovery modifying talents/buffs/armor; but unfortunately not the weapon enchants; at least not yet) Installation is quite simple, as it was made to work with IEMod Framework. - download IEMod. 5.1.0-beta Launcher for 2.03.0788 ZIP content preview will suit. - copy the INFOMod.pw.dll in the same /Mods folder, where IEMod.pw.dll is - launch PatchworkLauncher - add the mod in active mods (you can leave IEMod unchecked) - select "Launch with Mods" The dll can be downloaded here: INFOMod.pw.dll Or you can download the project itself: link

Hi, First thing: did you ever ask yourself why Backstab is best done with an arquebus or a great sword? Because obviously those are the weapons with the highest base damage, and since Backstab's bonus is only applied to the first swing/shot it's best to use a weapon that hits as hard as possible. Now imagine your superstealthy rogue sneaking up on people with his great sword *sneaky sneak sneak* "nobody sees me while I take a biiig swing". Or even worse, how he holds his arquebus, point blank, to the head of an enemy... Erm, yeah. Then this: Flames of Devotion is a nice ability, right? It gives you a good damage bonus but is quite limited in use. So in this case you'd also want to bring the heavy hitting weapons with high damage per hit in order to get the most dmaage out of FoD. But it's a Full Attack, so you can use heavy one handers and get two swings with FoD - or you use a great sword or an arquebus or even dual pistols or whatever. Anything that does the most damage with one or dual swing/shot. This is the situation with every ability that has limited number of uses and derives its damage from your weapon (and which is primarily used to deal damage). You don't want to use light, fast weapons for those attacks. Because they suck with Backstab, FoD and other similar abilities like FInishing Blow and whatnot. Why on earth is a Full Attack not implented as a series of blows/shots that takes the speed of the weapon into account? This would make light weapons a competitor for Backstabs, FoD and so on. At the moment the quickness of a weapon doesn't matter for Full Attacks. If you're holding two war hammers or two daggers: you get two swings for your Full Attack ability. Imagine if a Full Attack was balanced in a way that it would end up with roughly the same amount of damage dealt (generally speaking, has to be balanced around base damage and PEN): - Full Attack with dual light, fast one handers: you get 4 strikes (mainhand-offhand-mainhand-offhand) - Full Attack with dual heavy one handers: you get 2 strikes (mainhand - offhand) - Full Attack with a light one hander and a heavy one hander: 3 strikes - Full Attack with a light two hander (think of estoc with low base damage): 2 strikes - Full Attack with a heavy two handed weapon (like great sword): 1 strike - Full Attack with a bow: maybe 2 shots or only one - depending on the damage and speed - Full Attack with guns: 1 shot That would make light weapons viable for all those abilites as well. And it also makes sense that you can place some more hits with a light weapon when executing a special ability. So, a Backstab coul be a series of quick stabs with a dagger or stiletto OR one mighty swing with a great sword. What Do you think?