Lasci

Wizard and cipher have it pretty easy in act 1, which is arguably the most difficult part of the game to worry about. And Cipher's charm/domination tree of spells helps nab Sanguine Plate with pretty significant ease. Barbarian gets good at level 4 when you get One Stands Alone which deals with... just about everything that isn't a phantom. Monk is also a pretty smooth ride, especially if you put a mace in your left hand and abuse the high-accuracy double Torment with DR you get from it. I haven't tried rogue, but people have obviously had success with sneaking through enemies. Honestly, though, most of the classes use the same strategies for most of the gam.e Early on, fan of flames and the figurine. Later, obsidian figurine. After that, paralyze. And for the final boss, a Gaze of Adragan trap and Paralyze scrolls while using summons to split the fight into three individual duels.

You can get Gaze of Adragan traps from the trapmaker dude. I've never had any interest in checking the scroll because they're easy to make, but there might actually be something there worth taking a look at. Also, story purposes. You get a better ending if your stronghold is complete and, frankly, it's not like you're ever hurting for money in this game. I do agree that it definitely feels like an awkwardly added on feature.

Noble Barbarian would be pretty good. Ravenwing and Mosquito are excellent Act 2 items. Honestly? This team isn't going to make the game feel any more interesting. I think you might want to try a trio, duo, or solo run through the game.

Scrolls are hilariously cheap and you have more money than hollowborn in this game.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/74340-named-weapon-locations/

Can I recommend to just skip right to PotD? I never played normal, so I don't know the specific differences between the difficulty levels in terms of what encounters have more / stronger enemies, but I feel like you're going to get bored of hard pretty fast. Skipping from normal to PotD -- especially with a custom party -- might actually prove to be a fun challenge, whereas hard might just be a breeze. Especially especially especially with a custom party. That party's A+ solid, though.

I mean, hard is pretty much a walk in the part after Caed Nua anyways -- and it's only hard before you finish Caed Nua because there's no way a party can be resilient enough to breeze through the mess of phantoms that are thrown at you that early. If you want to use Grieving Mother, use her! She's a great companion story-wise and Ciphers are, in general, fun to use.

You need one person (ideally an NPC) with high mechanics. Unless you're soloing, stealth is pretty negligible. Lore is easily the best skill, though -- and one that every single one of your party members should have at ~10 for scrolls.

The companions are fine. The attributes in Pillars of Eternity don't lend themselves towards needing to be min/maxed. In general, most classes are more gear-dependent than they are attribute dependent, and the small difference in each point of a stat make it so that the NPC's perform perfectly fine in practice despite looking abysmal at a glance. For instance, 3% of a damage value that's generally no larger than ~45 at the high end for weapons really isn't much of an increase.

Aha, thanks.

The mushroom's charm is against deflection. Accuracy isn't affected by any of the attributes. I think everyone gains +3 for every level? I'm sure the enemies in this game have custom tweaked values.

I can't seem to find it in the soundtrack.

Have to wear the robes before you encounter anyone and get violent as well.

Rose of Salthollow is obtained in Cliaban Rilag, on the stream out. You have to have 16 Constitution to take the sub tunnel and "follow the glint"

Don't get the cold damage. Take piercing shots instead if you're going gunner. I'd probably replace Heart of the Storm for Marksman, too.