u/pr01e

Enemies are deadly til you gear up, then you go to a new biome and they are deadly again. Just gather what you can and try to upgrade. 

The enemies also have twice as much health in 2p so practice and learn their move sets and how to manage stamina.

Why would a shortsword be able to reach 10' anyway? (the distance the enemy is at when the reactive strike triggers). It doesn't trigger anytime after that (like when they come within 5'), only when they enter the 10' reach.

Part of the fun is trying different things

Fun fact the Carson Mansion was what the Tales from the Crypt opening sequence haunted house was modeled after

https://preview.redd.it/xv0x9xefsh9h1.jpeg?width=447&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7c43047862c8d939597a29fc24af6f1c3213692

The building is the Carson Mansion, the social club is the Ingomar club. The building is not the Ingomar Club

my SD crashes within a minute of starting the game, every time

I have noticed when I crash, the game sets me back a bit. I guess it's autosaving every so often and your friend didn't get a save between picking up the coins and crashing, but your world DID save after he took the coins from the box.

One way to avoid that, if you have occasional crashes, would be when you pick up a valuable stack of something and need to travel with it, pick it up, log out, and log back in. then the stack is at least saved in that persons inventory. it is a pain but at least it takes less time than earning 2k coins

That's my goal as well 😃 Since my earlier comment I also tried moving the game from my SD card to the internal drive, and changing my characters hair from the long braids since I saw a comment about those causing issues with memory, still doing the same 1 minute crash. it does seem unusual that others are playing on the deck but I also wonder if those are all OLEDs

My original steam deck can launch the game and runs well outside of the city for about a minute, then crashes every time. if I run into my town before that minute, it will lock up immediately. the deck usually needs to be restarted at that point.

I've tried a lot of different proton versions, all either crash or cause "Fatal Error" at launch. I've tried with steam saves off, I've tried leaving it at the title screen to cache textures, I've tried the command line options, verified install multiple times. so far everything leads to crashing or fatal error.

https://www.sageadvice.eu/only-20-hit/

That's fair, this was your comment though.

"Pam doesn't stack with sentinel in 2024. Pam is basically useless for tanking."

I'd suggest when making comments like that, you should specify if you're only referring to echo knight because it sounded like you were saying that, because it no longer stacks with sentinel, it's now useless. Even though you responded to a comment about an echo knight

You have more than one weapon mastery. You can have topple AND push. you can use topple with your lance and switch to your pike to push for the next attack if it lands, so they will be 10' further away AND need to use half movement to stand. Then you can push them 10' further back with the PAM bonus attack because once their toppled there's no point in toppling them again, but push still benefits you.

although it also depends on party comp, if you have more ranged attackers topple may actually hurt your team. Another note is to get advantage on a prone enemy you need to be within 5 ft even with a reach weapon which a PAM user doesn't always want to do.

If your first two attacks fail to topple and you really want to topple the enemy, you can always use PAM bonus attack to try again instead of echo knight's bonus action swap. It's nice to have the flexibility.

I use push every week to keep melee threats away from my allies, occasionally it even provides a free kill when there's a ledge or hazard nearby, and since there's nothing stopping you from having a push AND a topple to leverage when needed (other than the optics of carrying two reach weapons), to say it's useless to have 50%-100% more opportunities to use of either of those effects (depending on if you get your Reactive Strike) is a far stretch, even if you use the word "basically". it's also nice to have another option for non large targets that will never fail.

The good thing is there's different ways to play it and you can pick the one you like the most, sentinel is definitely really good for echo knight. (but does require the enemy to move within 5' of your echo, or your allies to be within 5' of yourself or your echo, which depending on party comp may not always work out)

With dragonborn I like to think of the rage as cold predatory instincts. It's not usually flashy big loud anger like godzilla or red dragons (though there is a time for that), but rather calculating determination to make a target cease to exist in this world. like a snake stalking it's prey and going in for the perfect strike.

This works particularly well with 2024's Primal Knowledge feature too, as rage makes you better at sneaking up on something (stealth with str @ advantage), better at surviving harsh conditions (survival), better at noticing important details (perception), which may otherwise seem like details a big angry yelling guy may overlook or be unconcerned with.

Despite Sentinel no longer working, PAM with a Pike (push mastery) is still good for tanking. Pushing medium sized enemies back 10' without providing a saving throw three times a round with PAMs bonus attack is a great way to create distance. It can also be used on PAMs Reactive strike to essentially waste 10' of their movement as they approach.

2024 barbs are better at both out of combat utility and ranged due to three things -

Primal knowledge (lvl 3) - when raging, allows you to use strength for acrobatics, perception, stealth, intimidation, and survival. Since you roll str checks at advantage while raging, these become very reliable checks. I once raged to near guarantee an important perception check and RPed it as focusing my predatory instincts. It's also great for stealth, intimidation , and survival which all seem like things a barbarian should be good at but weren't in 2014. You also now get a rage charge back on short rests, so you can be more liberal in applying it out of combat without limiting your combat rage too much. Rage also lasts 10 minutes and is extended out of combat with a bonus action so you can pre-rage, make an intimidation check in conversation, then still have it active when combat breaks out.

Reckless attack now works on ranged attacks, providing advantage. Trident is one of my favorite options here due to the next reason.

Weapon masteries work on ranged weapons, so you can have a weapon mastery for your melee weapon and something like topple on your ranged Trident attacks, or slow with a thrown spear. Knocking a target prone at range is pretty nice, especially if they are flying at the time and slow can cost them an extra turn getting to your back line.

Correct, YMMV especially based on your teammates using synergistic abilities to pull into or your DM offering flying enemies or environmental hazards in combat (which is risky because to use BotT you need to end your turn within 5' of the hazard, meaning you can also be pushed in), but reactive strike can be used almost every turn as well on flat ground without risk, with no other requirements besides an advancing enemy (especially easy to do with push) regardless of your teammates setups.

You don't use it when you want to use reactive strike, because you only have one reaction. My response was about BotT competing with PAMs reaction. If you don't have PAM, sure use it every round.

Also Battering Roots provides either Topple or Push in addition to your weapons mastery so you can topple AND push with pike. Which sends them back 10' while prone meaning they are 10' further away from the backline and they have to use half movement to stand on their turn, while providing advantage to melee teammates until then, such as the rogue in this party. This can also be done on a Reactive Strike, which means the enemy only moves 5' forward during their turn (assuming 30' movement enemy, -10' away from push and -15' for standing).

Now they've only moved 5', AND you got to attack them (probably with reckless' advantage), and you can move back 10' if you want to reactive strike them again next turn and repeat the combo (which would otherwise provoke an AOO using BotT because it places them 5' away from you). Or even better they didn't have the movement left to stand and have to get up next turn, providing melee adv in the meantime, or they spend their action on this turn to dash to get up. That to me usually beats putting them next to you with 0 movement and their action ready to go, standing upright.

Branches of the tree is fun but situational, Reactive strike is a lot more frequent. They don't compete as much as it seems because as someone once explained it to me, Branches of the tree is for when you think a threat is going after your allies or is already close to them (they have low HP or are using effective spells), Reactive strike is for when you see a threat is going after you (which happens more often early on in combat) or when your allies are positioned behind you.

The hard part is guessing because you have to use BotT at the start of their turn before you observe their intent. You also probably use BotT less against strong enemies as it does nothing on a strength save and still costs your reaction.

PAM is a lot of fun on world tree barb - I use it with pike to get more reactive strikes and back row protection out of push as it doesnt provide a save. It also stretches reckless attack further by giving you a reliable bonus attack.. but if OP prefers to keep using Maul go GWM

Kick him out of the group and find a new DM, or have a current player try it. You will have much more fun that way even if they are not as "experienced" as this guy thinks he is

Id love to see apocalypse 2 - 5. Making powerful builds is a lot of fun but once you hit a certain point there's not much value in pushing further as everything dies so fast

I've never understood dms reluctance to let players talk in character during a fight unless it's slowing things down too much. In a lot of media that inspires these types of stories, from comics to movies or anime, characters are talking during battle. I don't think it harms anything and it's also fun to strategize with teammates to pull off cool moments, which you can't plan for before combat because the situation changes round to round.

It also just feels weird when we go into combat and everyones characters go silent until combat concludes

I've had it lock up and occasionally crash when opening the map on steamdeck as well, not on PC yet though

Raise the difficulty, Oracle can go apoc halfway thru the game with a CL build. That said, even on the highest difficulty it's easy, especially with CL