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Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

I’m ridiculously excited for this. I haven’t really had time to play games in a few months and I’ll probably only be able to scrape together a few hours a week to play this one hundred hour game. :negative: But I’m still super pumped.

I’m totally the multiclass type of player. I like to play characters that deal with things with a huge bag of tricks and have just the right move for every situation, even if they aren’t overtly the most powerful. My favorite classes in the bg games are fighter/mage and fighter/mage/thief. But I’m not sure I’m that into multiclassing in this, at least at first. It seems like single class is actually going to end up more versatile than multi in a number of cases, while multiclasses are going to double down on a synergy. Since I’m probably going to play this game 8,000 times, I’ll likely end up going for a bunch of different things, but what I’m most interested in is:

Pure monk (crit build with a spear)
pure wizard (melee)
chanter/paladin
chanter/rogue (riposte skald)
cipher/monk
rogue/priest (I.33 sword and buckler Walpurga cosplay)

etc. holy poo poo I’m going to have the worst restartitis ever with this aren’t I

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Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Black jacket itself didn’t get a very high evaluation on the official boards, at least last time I checked, though dumping a bunch of pistol shots into enemies to max focus might go well with an ascendant.

Devoted seems like it would go great with just about anything, as long as you choose one of the dual damage type weapons. Some kind of cipher/devoted should work out really well, especially if you take the melee cipher subclass and cherry pick a few powers while primarily focusing on dealing as much melee damage as possible.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Dairy Power posted:

For a multiclass Paladin+Priest, are there restrictions on order/deity combos?

Yes, if they have conflicting favored and disfavored dispositions, they can’t be a multiclass combo. This means, for example, that priests of magran can only be bleakwalker paladins.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

I don’t know if this has been posted yet, but here’s a list on reddit of screenshots of all the abilities and trees for all the classes: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/8h88pe/complete_albums_of_abilities_summaries_and_talent/.

I wish we could see more about what the level 9 Citzal’s spell actually does, but that melee defensive spell at level 9 for wizards looks bonkers.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a build for single weapon use? Skald, monk and devoted are all the most obvious crit seekers, but skalds are almost certainly going to want to go for the paralysis shout, which means they’re getting 50% hit to crit a lot of the time and are potentially better off with two fast weapons. Skald/monk looks to have ridiculously good synergy at high levels, though, particularly depending on how implements of pain works.

If I do end up going multiclass, I’m thinking of either devoted/monk or monk/soul blade, since it seems soul annihilation would go well with a single weapon and a focus on accuracy. Devoted/monk is almost certainly going to wield the tsundere sword, but I really hope there’s a good spear for a crit build.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

isk posted:

Took a week off from work for Deadfire, among other things. Unfortunately, today I did all my errands and then ran out of things to do in God of War (which is amazing BTW). I've detailed my car, bleached my bathroom (twice), and done meal prep for the foreseeable future. I've become so impatient for the release that, to borrow from a recent story about ketamine, I've become time itself.

I hate you. If it actually released on Tuesday afternoon where I live, I would just say gently caress it, take the afternoon off and play it all day. But no, it releases at 1 AM on Wednesday morning, and it’s really unrealistic to suppose I could scrape together any time to play it until next week.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

ChrisBTY posted:

I did it. With 7 hours to go before unlock I finally beat Pillars of Eternity (and the WM).
Now to retrofit my Paladin into a Paladin/Barbarian and...

Thread: Barbarian got a huge nerf.

Well poo poo, how am I going to be a corpse-eating kind wayfarer now? I mean sure I could just 'do it' but I got me one of them pragmatic streaks.

Barbarian still gets a lot of really good stuff; carnage just isn’t broken the way it was before. Single class barbarians might be better than PoE barbarians ever were, depending on how blood thirst actually works out. It seems much harder to increase attack speed in this one, and barbarians look like they are really good at that.

However, pretty much everyone says that berserker is really good if you can deal with the confusion somehow, but mage slayer and corpse eater are really, really bad.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Cynic Jester posted:

What's a good multiclass for making a tanky fighter? Just Fighter/Paladin?

There are probably a ton of options. Fighter/Paladin looks like it would be pretty much unkillable and have excellent all around defenses, but fighter/rogue, fighter/wizard and fighter/priest of wael all have gigantic deflection buffs that should make themselves nearly impossible to hit.

Edit: I bet fighter/chanter could be tough as nails too, if properly built.

Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 13:03 on May 8, 2018

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

GrandpaPants posted:

Fighter Rogue probably doesn't have as many straight options, but what it does get is Riposte, so that you can go on the offensive by being unhittable. Plus all the standard Rogue DPS upgrades like Sneak Attack and various debuff attacks.

People on the official forums comment that riposte reverted to its release state from PoE 1, meaning it only works on 20% of misses, meaning even if you can get gigantic deflection, it will still go off quite rarely. Disappointing, since I want to build characters around riposte.

Apparently, you can manage to get the monk’s Blade Turning ability to be up permanently, though, which is riposte on steroids in that it makes you automatically avoid and counter all melee attacks for its duration.

Sometimes I think the designers of this game just do not love rogues.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Avalerion posted:

:argh:

Is there even any point to making Eder a fighter rogue then? Just straight up fighter might be better.

Though I keep forgetting mods are a thing, so all this stuff should be fairly easy to fix. :D

Rogue brings a lot to the table other than riposte! Fighter/rogue should still be really good.

I imagine riposte, if you can make it work well, would be better on something like a caster multiclass that makes itself untouchable with deflection then casts in the middle of a big group while passively dealing damage with riposte. Or a trickster skald with rapier and dagger that uses riposte full attacks to build phrases quickly.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Wizard Styles posted:

Tricksters didn't do well as tanks in the beta, not even as temporary tanks. Mirrored Image works well for the usual Rogue playstyle and is pretty competitively priced at 1 Guile but it's not a good spell for tanks. At least that's my experience playing on PotD; Mirrored Image may work a lot better at lower difficulties.

That's a shame. I was thinking of relying on shadowing beyond, but 3 guile for a 10 second buff is a pretty steep price, so it seems unsustainable.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Can anyone help a relative computer idiot figure out how to view the game's files?

I used UABE to mess around with items in the first game, but I can't figure out how to open and get inside a file like items.unity3d, if that's even what I'm supposed to be looking for.

I just want to check out what all the different weapons are and try to figure out stuff like how the soulbounds react to different classes.

Edit: using the beta version of UABE works, but drat is this completely unreadable. And I really wonder if I'm looking in the right place.

Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 07:17 on May 10, 2018

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

isk posted:

Use a text editor. The game files are admittedly not easy to read atm. Reasonably confident a modder will come up with a more intuitive editor.

I was looking at the wrong files. Now that I found the right place to look, I’m going to have to dig through them more when I have some more time. I did find a post on the forums from someone who’s working on some modding tools, so that looks hopeful.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

To people playing rangers, how much of a liability is the animal companion? I recall Itumaak dealing simply terrifying amounts of damage in pillars 1, but he also went down absolutely all the time. How hard is it now to keep your companion alive?

I'm trying to decide between ghost heart or stalker for a melee wanderer build. The personal defense boost for stalker is nice, but monk gives enough defensive powers that I'm not sure I need it, especially since I want to go nalpazca and take dance of death/blade turning so that I can just tag enemies occasionally with wounding shot and let my companion eat them while being mostly invincible myself.

Of course, just skipping wanderer and going devoted or just pure monk is a possibility, too. But I found an item in the console that makes me extremely happy and it synergizes with wanderer better.

Finally, has anyone found the spear stalker's patience? If that's 70 hours into the game I might just skip it and go for a sword devoted.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

ProfessorCirno posted:

Monk/Priest is a combo that has just no synergy whatsoever. You are very much two lesser classes, one at a time, rather then a real cool single alloy. You unfortunately really would be better off picking one or the other.

Does priest, other than priest of wael or maybe priest of skaen, have synergy with anything? All your spells are medium to long casts and most are support oriented. And few of them give you inspirations you couldn't get from another class anyway. The ones that would have synergy, like minor avatar and cleansing flame, come extremely late. The spiritual weapons are really good, but not good enough to justify priest by itself.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Smith Comma John posted:

after getting my squishy rogue and maia (ranger) pasted way too many times, my second (potd) playthrough is definitely gonna be all tanky frontliners and casters. that'll also give me an excuse to use birbmom and furry barbarian

I think enemies are much more likely to swap to your soft targets than in the first game and Eder's knockdown on disengage doesn't seem to be proccing too often


If that's the one with the ambush bonuses I think I just saw it on the weapon vendor in Sayuka (where you can also find shark meat to feed a very good bird)

That's the one. It gets a ridiculous upgrade for single weapon critical hit builds.. I haven't really had much chance to play. I'm guessing Sayuka isn't too far in?

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Vermain posted:

You can make a decent argument for Priest/Chanter or Priest/Paladin to provide all-in-one party buffing, but the other Priest/X combos mostly feel like flavor things to me. That's fine, though; I recall one of the explicit reasons for multiclassing being included is to provide flavor options for people who're interested in something like that.

I want the flavor and to feel like I didn't gimp myself. Partly I'm just bitter that I want to play a priest of eothas, but they look super boring to me since there's next to no reason to multiclass and their added abilities are more of the pure support stuff that priests already have. I know it's not realistic to expect every multiclass combo to be good, though.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Smith Comma John posted:

it's a port so you can go whenever

Great, thank you!

Gyoru posted:

Priests just seem inferior to every other available support/healing option (druid/chanter/paladin), which is a nice change of pace from them being top tier in the first game.

Tekuha's single class druid Watershaper trait shits all over Xoti's Harvester of Gaun priest while also having a better natural spell selection. I benched Xoti ages ago for a custom single class Chanter (Skald) and never looked back.

I typically like playing priests in these games, so that makes me a little sad, but their spell set does look a little weak. Of course, lots of people thought wizard was weak at the start in Pillars 1, and that was with unnerfed slicken.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Managed to play for a few hours today. The difference in the quality of the combat between this and the first game is staggering! It feels like every aspect of the gameplay has seen a major improvement.

I'm playing a transcendent as a sort of practice run to get achievements for Berath's blessing and I'm shocked there are people who aren't impressed with soul blade. Soul annihilation means you deal more than double damage every other hit! Maybe it gets less bonkers later because of scaling, but since it scales with your focus, which scales with your melee damage, it will always represent a massive damage boost on any melee character, particularly those that use single weapons or two handers. And you get soul whip and some cipher powers as a bonus.

It's making me really question playing a wanderer, even though if I'm doing my math right, each point of accuracy gives a massive damage boost to a high level monk, and ranger has by far the most accuracy of any class, not to mention the animal companion.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

ProfessorCirno posted:

Also the thing with Soul Annihilation is that your weapon attack doesn't...actually matter that much. Like, it's literally just a standard attack with your primary weapon that, if it hits, has a ton of raw damage based on your focus dumped on top at the end. That means Soul Annihilation is more or less just as good with any weapon, since it's basically just an auto-attack hit. This is different from most other abilities that apply lashes or percentage changes to your actual weapon attack, meaning the stronger your weapon, the bigger the boost to them (which is why sabers reign supreme as far as base weapons go for dual wielding). Soul Annihilation doesn't actually use your weapon stats in the slightest, outside of "make an attack."

First, your focus is based on your weapon damage, so soul annihilation is based on how much damage you did on the prior attack. So it's strictly based on your weapon stats. Second, some of the mechanics gurus on the official forum said they tested it and soul annihilation also expends the focus generated by the attack that procs soul annihilation. I'm almost sure this means it more than doubles your damage every other hit, and that bonus stacks multiplicatively with every other damage bonus in the game, as long as they generate focus.

If you find soul annihilation underwhelming, it's probably because you didn't take draining whip. Biting whip looks like it might be better, but double focus gain actually translates into far, far more damage.

It does look like the top level abilities on monks are completely busted and shattered pillars look pretty broken too, but I don't know if anyone's done the math to determine whether they can compete with some of the stuff you get from multiclassing. Monk really benefits a lot and synergizes well with huge accuracy boosts for more crits (do the math on how much total damage one point of accuracy gets you if you take swift flurry, heartbeat drumming and wield a certain weapon) and passive damage from the animal companion on ranger; carnage and crit conversion on barbarian; soul annihilation, soul whip and some select cipher powers on soul blade; endlessly spammable paralysis cones, leading to more crits, leading to more paralysis and giant damage frost explosions with skald -- all those multiply your total damage by a lot and most of them give access to utility the monk doesn't have by itself.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Filthy Monkey posted:

Does all the hit to crit stuff stack? I was thinking about a hearth orlan devoted/sharpshooter specializing in warbows. Devoted gets the extra critical damage too.

Hearth Orlan - 10% hits to crits when attacking an enemy threatened by another party member
Sharpshooter - 15% hits to crits
Disciplined Strikes - 25% hits to crits

That is 50% hit to crit right there if they are additive.

If you used a pistol I think you could pick up one-handed style for another 20% hits to crits? Not sure I want to use pistols over frostseeker though.

They stack, but not additively. Each chance is rolled separately, so there are diminishing returns. Also, remember that the hit range is only fifty points of the attack role, so your first 20% hit to crit is actually "only" a 10% increased effective crit rate overall, assuming you have over a 50% and under a 75% chance to hit. In your example, you would actually convert 42.625% of hits to crits, assuming you're in the accuracy range mentioned, meaning hit to crit would increase your crit rate by 21%.

This means stacking accuracy is probably better than stacking hit to crit, but accuracy is hard to stack.

Urthor posted:

Well my other weapon does https://i.imgur.com/4VpghEp.jpg and an AOE attack on every crit is a whole lot of AOE. Modwyr really only gives a nice ability once per combat and an immunity to intelligence afflictions.

If there's other on crit weapons though that'd be neat to know about them

There's a spear that can be upgraded to give a 33% chance to eliminate recovery on scoring a crit. Probably not much on its own, but it should stack in really funny ways with the monk critical flurry abilities.

By the way, has anyone who's played a monk to a high level noticed how swift flurry and heartbeat drumming stack? I assume they roll separately and aren't additive, but what I don't know is whether both can proc at the same time for a chance to swing again twice after scoring a crit.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Inverness posted:

Less a mod and more a cheat console program actually:

https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/2/

Then run this:
code:
import Game
Game.GameState.Instance.LevelScaleUpOnly = True
Game.GameState.Instance.LevelScaling = Game.GameData.LevelScalingOption.All
Do not have the settings menu open while you do it, but once you do it you can verify that it took effect by opening the menu. Then you can save your game and disable the mod if you want.

But does this make level scaling actually work? Lots of reports that it doesn't work at all, even if you turn it on, which is really depressing, since I'm only really interested in a game if it's providing some constant challenge and tension.

Are there at least some really high level, tough encounters that will still provide a challenge without scaling on PotD?

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Has a list of major points from the recent stream been posted anywhere? I don't want to watch a one hour video when I could read something for less than five minutes and retain the information better.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Fresh Shesh Besh posted:

Is there any point in getting Spiritual Weapon for Xoti? It's literally what she's already using.

I haven't played far into the game because I keep restarting, but just from a little time using the spell and reading the descriptions, yes, there's a point. The items granted by the spell are different in three ways:

First, they scale with character level, but xotis weapons can only be upgraded to fine (I think).

Second, they don't get the enchantment upgrades her actual stuff can get (I think).

Third, the summoned sickle gets 50% multiplicative bonus slash damage, which combined with its base enchants and the scaling property makes it a very good weapon.

On a somewhat related note, people are knocking on her contemplative choice a lot, and I thought it was really bad at first too, but thinking about it, it's better than it seems. There's still a lot of really good stuff at low levels in monk, and at level 10, so still not too late, you'll get devotions for the faithful, which is one of the best abilities of any power level in the game and maybe of the only major reasons to bring a priest in the first place.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Harrow posted:

People with endgame Monks: are you staying mostly unarmed, or do endgame unique weapons start to outstrip fists? Dual sabres is looking especially great.

Probably it really depends on a whole lot of things, mostly the AR of the things you're fighting. I did a bunch of number crunching (that might well have mistakes) and came out that using just the spear stalker's patience in one hand with swift flurry probably works out to about the same damage as fists with lightning strikes, maybe a little less. Once you get heartbeat drumming, it should outpace your fists. Note, that item has a wounding property that I didn't take into account, since I assume you'll kill everything before it matters, but that's a significant dps increase if fights drag on.

Another point in favor of that weapon is that it resets your recovery instantly on 1/3 of criticals. With swift flurry and heartbeat drumming significantly increasing your total number of hits, when you use whispers of the wind, because you hit a whole bunch of times at once, as long as your accuracy is significantly above your enemies' deflection, you should have a high chance to just be able to instantly use whispers of the wind again.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Insurrectionist posted:

Will level scaling be fixed for current saves? That'll probably decide whether I restart or not.

Per a dev on reddit:

quote:

Currently, if you've visited an area before, then that area will continue to have those enemies at that level. New areas you haven't visited should be scaling correctly, though.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Tenzarin posted:

With the changes to wizards and general abilities, the melee weapon summoning is more in line and less insane. Since veil has a pretty short duration and there is no upgrade making it +75 deflection you gotta rely on other defensive spells now.

Its kinda annoying that martial power lasts for 30s while every summoned weapon but the bow and warding staff lasts for 25s, so your wizard is just gonna attack with his regular weapons before getting to rebuff.

The wizard’s summoned weapons in general seem pretty bad, though. People say minor blights are still good, but the only one that looks decent compared to strong uniques is Citzal’s spirit lance, which is fairly in line with most unique weapons on a pure class wizard, considering you don’t have to buy it or pay anything to upgrade it. It’s likely completely busted when combined with some of the abilities that really weren’t designed with the ability hit multiple enemies or multiple times per swing in mind, like fighter’s cleaving stance or monk’s swift flurry, but that’s a general major balance issue right now. Unless you’re going for cheese, you’re probably just better off using your regular weapons than wasting time, spell uses and ability choices on the summoned weapons.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

ProfessorCirno posted:

It's...functional. There's honestly almost no actual synergy between them, you're mostly just mashing the strongest class in the game (monk) with a near empty class that has like three good tricks (cipher). I mean, you'll do fine - the game doesn't really have a difficulty - but fighter's a better multiclass for cipher, and either no multiclass at all or fighter/barbarian/paladin is better for monk.

In most circumstances soul blade strictly increases melee dps by more than 50% and it works from level 1, though doesn’t really come into its own until you get draining whip. A nature godlike transcendent with maxed out might can be punching for over 100 damage by level 4. You rip through fights on PotD before your companions really get to do anything. It synergizes well with lightning strikes and turning wheel since soul annihilation is multiplicative with those, which are in turn multiplicative with the additive bonuses from soul whip and might. Transcendent may not have game breaking skills like charge and cleaving stance that are certain to be nerfed, but it’s a really straightforward melee powerhouse that’s strong out the gate and can cherry pick the few good cipher powers for some versatility later on.

For the guy thinking about this combo, don’t listen to ProfessorCirno’s advice, soulblade is one-dimensional, but it synergizes perfectly well with monk.

Just make sure you take the increased focus gain passive, not the one that increases soul whip to 30%. Soul annihilation deals damage based on your focus pool when you use it plus the focus generated on the attack that procs it. If you take draining whip, you double soul annihilation’s damage. Biting whip will only add 1-2 points of damage per attack. Draining whip is probably at least a 25% increase to your total DPS. Also, shattered pillar isn’t the clear best choice. If you don’t mind dealing with drugs, nalpazca will probably be better.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

ProfessorCirno posted:

Nothing here contradicts what I said in the slightest :confused:

It's entirely functional. Soul Blade does it's thing, monk does it's thing, but neither really interacts with each other on a great degree. Soul Annihilation works well with Fighter because Cleaving Stance activates when you kill, meaning Soul Annihilation is more or less guaranteed to activate it; monks don't have anything that specifically fires when you kill a dude, and while I'm certainly not going to look down on their buffs because they, like everything else monks have, are extremely good, they don't work as well with Soul Annihilation as the fighter buffs do; Lightning Strikes is insane, yes, but Soul Annihilation already does hilarious damage, and appreciates Tactical Barrage way more. Transcendent, in other words is losing probably the best high level powers in the game for a really good single target nuke with a required build up and cipher dialogue options. And hey, I'm playing one, so obviously that's a fair trade to plenty of people.

Anyways, you aren't disagreeing with me, you just think what I'm saying sounds overly harsh. :colbert:

To be fair, your last sentence is true. We’re basically saying the same things and I’m disagreeing with the way you’re saying it. And also to be fair, soul blade mostly brings single target damage and some utility, and single target damage wasn’t a priority in PoE and still isn’t a priority in Deadfire, to the extent that anything is a priority when there are not a few builds that can instantly kill whole groups of enemies at a time from quite early on.

But to be fair to my point, in terms of single target damage, monk synergizes with soul blade much better. Tactical barrage doesn’t offer nearly as much damage as lightning strikes and turning wheel, both of which multiply the damage you gain from might, which is then multiplied again by soul annihilation, which is multiplied by might and power level separately again all by itself. Yes, monk would probably benefit more from fighter with cleaving, but cleaving is obviously completely broken, giving the equivalent of heart of fury from PoE every time you kill an enemy. Personally, I’m trying to avoid abilities or combinations that are clearly unbalanced and break the game.

Speaking of which, the real strength of single class monk isn’t the high level abilities, by which point every fight is almost certainly a stomp anyway, but faster access to raised torment. But a spammable attack that stuns enemies in a cone and also does good damage seems like another thing that just didn’t get time for a balance pass and is clearly going to break the game in half. If it weren’t for that, a massive single target dps boost right from the start of the game and access to some good utility might seem like a decent trade for super strong skills you can only use once every fight is trivially easy anyway.

To compare, cipher’s time parasite is apparently hilariously broken, since it stacks with itself to give you 250% action speed, but no one cares because you have to deal with a mediocre skill set until you finally get it, then once you do, only a tiny, very easy fraction of the game is left anyway.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Axetrain posted:

For a single class shattered pillar monk what do people like more, lightning strikes or swift flurry?

The math suggests lightning strikes is better in the vast majority of situations. Swift flurry is involved in a lot of cheese, though, at the moment, since there are weapons that hit multiple enemies at once or hit multiple times, meaning you crit a lot, which procs more hits, which procs more crits and so on until everything is dead. It’s not the only problematic ability with those weapons, but it might be one of the worst. Really, they should all work like carnage does now and not proc weapon abilities.

For a normal build, by the time you get heartbeat drumming (power level 7 skill) swift strikes might be roughly comparable with lightning strikes if you have a whole lot of accuracy, and it will be better if you are using a weapon that has a powerful on crit effect. But it will be much weaker at the point you first get to choose it and respecs are broken, so unless you’re out to break the game, lightning strikes is almost certainly better.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Subjunctive posted:

What are the non-trap weapons for Devoted? Sword? Mace?

Spears are rarer than swords, but probably stronger. Looking through the game’s files, Modwyr is okay, but more for defense than damage. Otherwise there’s a sword that’s actually a club (macahuatl) that’s really good and unique. But there’s also a spear that has the stats of a sword (pierce/slash damage types, the same penetration as swords and no accuracy bonus), but has damage numbers far superior to any unique sword. I don’t know when or where you get it, though. The other two unique spears are also really good.

Of course, sabers are plentiful, full of fun, unique effects and very strong, but then you’re stuck with one damage type.

You can’t go wrong with great swords for sure, though.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Khanstant posted:

I wish I had some of those cool spears. Spears are just a cool weapon. I also like how you don't need to have weapon proficiencies necessarily, at least until you start getting perks for weapons if you do have them.

I'm really glad there are some good spears, but I do want to make a complaint about them. Of the three unique spears, two of them are hunting tools, one of which is a hunting tool for a hunter gatherer society. The third unique is a stone weapon from a time pre-dating metallurgy. I know fantasy rpgs have to cleave to western fantasy archetypes, but the "primitive spear" is one of the most annoying. Why can't you just let us have Gungnir?

Heithinn Grasida fucked around with this message at 02:27 on May 21, 2018

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Khanstant posted:

It's really weird. Wouldn't a spear beat a sword in a fight? Especially once you start getting into fantasy materials so the shaft of a spear is super strong. A spear is the best part of a sword, the pointy stabby bit but now it's at the end of a pole -- so you get to do the danger stuff at distance because the worst part of a sword is getting stabbed by one. Nothing about the spear seems inherently primitive to me, and they seemed quite common in the eras of no-guns combat.

Aside from reach, using a weapon with a long shaft affords more speed and power compared to a sword, and the spear allows attacks at the legs or feet that are hard to defend against with a sword, while at typical fighting distance, a sword is mostly limited to strikes against the upper body. Of course, swords have their advantages too, but those are very hard to replicate in a computer game.

I think the "primitive spear" thing comes from the perception that they were migration age weapons that were outmoded by the high middle ages. But that's misleading, because even if medieval spear designs weren't in common use compared to weapons like pikes, pollaxes, bills and halberds, there were still relatively short polearms focused on the thrust that saw use well into the 19th century. They were just called half-pikes or spontoons instead of spears.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Ravenfood posted:

e: Also, from way back, but swords were really often just status symbols of the wealthy and heroes. They're not great weapons. If you wanted to kill someone, throughout most of recorded history, you took a sharp pointed object on a stick. Sometimes that sharp object had other things attached to it, like an axe, hammer, or gun, but it was a sharp pointed object on a stick.

This is an overstatement. Swords were incredibly commonly used for most of recorded history in most societies on the planet. There is no reason to believe swords weren't great weapons unless you believe our ancestors were stupid. Personally, I think the designers of the macahuatl or the khopesh were no less intelligent and no less bloodthirsty than engineers who design anti-tank cannons. Swords were incredibly effective weapons for the role in which people used them.

That role in most societies was as an all-around side arm for personal defense. You can carry a sword easily at your side, where it interferes very little with your movements, then draw it quickly to defend yourself if you're not carrying a pole arm or if yours was broken or lost. It's a much more versatile weapon compared to an axe or hammer and is capable of dealing far more devastating damage to an unarmored body. It falls short against armor or against pole arms, but those are unlikely to be a factor except in a pitched battle.

Soldiers don't all carry hand guns to the battlefield, but hand guns still play a very important role in how human beings kill each other. Swords occupied a similar role, but were relatively more significant than handguns are today.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

derra posted:

The stealth spear is really good guys.

That thing looks so cool. What are you using it with?

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Sorry, I meant what class.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Multiclass priest might be decent if you go for the 2nd level summoned weapons. Those get some of the highest damage per hit of anything in the game, and apparently benefit from all gear that boosts a specific weapon type. So you can get -25% attack speed, hit to crit, accuracy, and all kinds of other goodies from various pieces of equipment.

Considering the only priest spell you really need is devotions for the faithful, and that's what one of the best spells in the game, and you can use some of the best weapons in the game from very early, multiclass priest really doesn't look that bad, just not in line with how overpowered a lot of the other choices in the game are.

Priests do need help, though. I think they need a lot more fast casting spells, and the slower casts need a much bigger impact. And the bonus spells really need a rework. Priests of Wael are the clear winners, with loads of great defensive tools. Berath gives the spiritual greatsword, which is something that could justify the pick. Skaen looks acceptable with the off-class rogue skills. I'm not sure whether Magran's fire spells add that much, but maybe they're okay, and priests of Eothas just get screwed with a bonus list that adds nothing to the class at all. Originally they got druid elemental spells, and that was much more interesting and much cooler.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

AngryBooch posted:

I think Trickster is the weakest subclass in the game right now and needs a definite buff. Maybe along with the wizard specializations, but the solution there is to just have more spells of each school at each level where needed.

What do you think it should get? I played a shadowdancer with trickster for awhile and it seemed okay. It led my party in damage, but still felt fairly anemic compared to other class combos I've tried. I did like being really drat durable on PotD even with a constitution of 8. By the time you get deathblows, the penalty probably isn't even very significant, but that's very late in the game. In the end, streetfighter would have been a far better choice for a tanky rogue and probably have taken less damage by virtue of killing things faster.

I think the main issue is that the spells you get aren't good enough, except maybe for at the very top tier, but those cost too much. I didn't mind spending guile on the spells at all -- in fact getting a use for my guile that left me free to focus on rogue passives and monk skills was really good. But the spells also didn't add enough.

Arkemyr's dazzling lights rarely felt worth the casting time compared to just killing things. If it had a longer duration or an instant cast, I think it would be worth it.

Mirror image is good, especially since you can just recast it over and over. But you can also just use escape or shadowing beyond over and over if your main use for guile is defense. The spell doesn't really add much that rogues don't have already. If this were a special version that gave less deflection, but that stacked with other bonuses, it would feel better as a constant use for guile to boost defense.

Confusion is highly situational, so it's hard to know when this would be worth it.

I didn't get gaze of the adragan, but it seems like a very high cost, both in class resources and cast time for a short duration debuff, even if it's powerful.

I think the designers didn't want the trickster's spells to outshine a wizard's, but by making the trickster a lovely rogue with lovely wizard spells, it just becomes a lovely class. The idea is to sacrifice damage for defense and utility, but characters that want to do that would pretty much always be better served by an option other than trickster. Actually it needs spells that are stronger than what a wizard gets and that complement its skillset better for anyone to justify the pick.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Yeah, that's fair. My . . . "concern" is far too strong a word . . . suspicion? Is that a few classes (ciphers, maybe rangers, maybe priests) are basically coasting right now on the general ease of the game, and if the overall difficulty is corrected, their problems will spring into a sharper relief. That's second-order concern though admittedly.

I guess there are a lot of powers that are actually really strong, even on supposedly weaker classes, that are getting overlooked because everything is too easy, the game is still very new, descriptions can be confusing or misleading and some combos are both obvious and completely broken.

Wasn't there someone here who had his priest melt the screen with giant damage shining beacon ticks? And that's a fire spell, so there are tons of items that could boost its power level through the roof. Storm of holy fire can also apparently deal busted amounts of damage, too. People are saying disintegrate's tool tip is not a display bug, it legitimately does deal thousands of raw damage over time with one cast. Evasive fire allows for a very cheap, fast, decent damage attack with no recovery which is also an amazing mobility tool (and I think the value of simple mobility skills like escape is being overlooked right now, too). I bet there are more really strong spells on "weak" classes that aren't obvious choices for a power build and so aren't being discussed.

That's not to say there are no problems with those classes -- ciphers probably have a dearth of good picks, but the good spells they do get are too good; most priest buffs look pretty bad, but maybe they're amazing if you build them as nukers. Except almost nobody knows that because all the nukes are mid to high level, so you legitimately suck until then. Rangers have to invest a ton of skill picks into what feels like the basic functionality of their class, then they don't feel like they get to do enough cool things themselves (ghost heart avoids that and feels really good, though). But I'm not sure people have a proper sense of class balance yet, not just because game balance doesn't exist, but actually almost nobody is really familiar with what the classes can do beyond a few highly discussed combos.

Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Blockhouse posted:

what's a good class option for the matched gun/saber unique pair? I feel like that's the only proper weapon for a principi run.

How cheesy do you feel like being? Fighter is super cheesy, since charge hits multiple enemies with the saber, so has a high chance to proc the zero recovery buff, then cleaving stance apparently shoots every enemy in range with the pistol every time you drop someone in melee, which means you should basically never stop swinging your weapons at all after the first few seconds of a fight. If the enemies even last that long. You’re exploiting some of the most broken skills in the game, though. Combine it with monk’s swift flurry for even more cheese.

Blockhouse posted:

at this point I'm too far into Cipher/Ranger to really back down

If you’re not exploiting broken mechanics, this should be a good combo, one of the best at disabling and destroying single targets, in fact. Use the ranger’s accuracy boosts to charm or straight up disintegrate nearly anything you want. I’m starting up a soul blade/ghost heart to do that, as well as using evasive fire to build focus for soul annihilation at the same time as repositioning. It should be a highly mobile, mixed range striker with decent utility. I don’t know how takedown combo interacts with soul annihilation, but that interaction could prove pretty good. If you don’t want cheese, this is also a good pick for the saber and pistol set.

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Heithinn Grasida
Mar 28, 2005

...must attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus steel...

Ravenfood posted:

Say what now? That's amazing. Broken and overpowered and kind of stupid, but also amazing.

I was mistaken, it’s not everyone in range, just everyone next to you. But apparently it also works with charge, so if you charge with a sword and pistol, you shoot everyone you hit with the charge. I’ll link to the thread on the official forum later.

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