Lasci

If you absolutely, 100%, outright refuse to do both, go with the two-hander. The style feat lets you do 15% more damage and two-handers are better for piercing DR in general. I would still recommend having your second weapon set be a dual-wielding one for when you want to cleave through groups of enemies with low DR.

Aloth is probably one of the worst NPC's in the game. He's built very poorly. That's not to say that he's completely useless, but wizards also aren't exactly top-notch in this game. Two of their best spells are at level one, and the ones that come after that aren't particularly exciting. If you do go wizard, make sure to take Slicken and Fan of Flames at level 1. I'm going to add a vote to playing a Cipher and picking up Grieving Mother. I'm honestly inclined to say that Ciphers are one of the strongest, if not the strongest, class in the game. Frankly, though, you can get away with having one or the other in your group. Aloth is more comical and goofy, while Grieving Mother is very serious, morose, and 'heavy' in terms of her interactions.

Druids are a spellcasting class. but that doesn't mean they don't have their moments in melee combat. Max might and intelligence for damage, duration, and area of effect range. In the beginning, their shapeshift is incredibly powerful and will let you wade into melee for the first 60% of the game. Give your druid a sword and board and let her off tank in the beginning to help out Eder. Most fights, even on hard, won't last long enough for the duration of shapeshift to matter. Besides, early on you don't have enough spells to sit back and cast all day. However, as gear starts to distinguish other, tankier classes -- Chanter, Fighter, Paladin, Monk -- change roles and start focusing on staying in the back and casting spells. At this point, you should have a large enough pool of spells to be able to cast two or three every battle without having to worry about running out and needing to rest. The wildstrike talents are indeed a waste of time, as are any weapon style or weapon focus talents. Buy more spells per rest or focus on other talents that interest you.

If you're doing a ranged Cypher (which you should), then you want a bow for the fast attacks so that you can build Focus. Using a gun on a Cypher is generally a bad idea, because you want to be attacking quickly and often.

Sorry! Yes, two-handed style does NOT affect ranged weapons. I copied that description from an old document that I hadn't edited. Sorry about the confusion. I wouldn't put a single point in Resolve over 10 for a Rogue. If you want a deflection bonus, put it in Perception for increased interrupts. It's not a terrible idea -- a mix of constitution and perception will keep you safe from AoE as much as an errant enemy that gets past your tanks. Really, the important stats for a ranged rogue are Might and Dexterity for harder hitting and faster attacks. You can spread around that high constitution wherever and however you like. It really doesn't matter that much. You shouldn't be getting hit anyways. I don't see why you would ever consider dropping constitution below 10. Intelligence doesn't really influence your efficacy in combat at all. The rogue has barely any duration abilities and no AoE abilities. Resolve and Perception come up fairly frequently in conversations. My experience is that intelligence needs to be relatively high, like 16-18+, in order to be usable. What effects do you want to last longer? Crippling Strike? Is 3.5 seconds really worth losing hundreds of hit points?

If you're playing on hard, you can probably get to about the eighth level at your stage of the game -- with a bit of a challenge, mind you. Less so on lower difficulties. After that, things will be a bit overbearing. Once you hit level seven or eight, the rest of the dungeon should be fairly manageable.

If you're going to hire an adventurer, you should make him or her a monk, barbarian, or rogue -- these are the three classes that don't have Obsidian-made NPC's. Eder works fine as a tank. He starts off with Weapon Focus: Ruffian, which gives him a bonus to certain weapons, including stilettos. You can find arguably the best stiletto in the game in Caed Nua on the first floor of Oda Nua's Endless Path. Doing the blacksmith's quest also nets you a very nice shield that you can slap on him. With those two items and the best suit of armor you can put on him, Eder should serve you just fine as a tank -- you don't have to make another fighter to replace him. I would probably make a monk, in this case. I did it on a whim as my first adventurer and it ended up being a good idea. It works as an "off-tank" to help take some of the heat of Eder.

Alright, if we're going to talk pure min/max, let's get real: Aumaua / Dwarf MIG: 20 CON: 18 (19) DEX: 18 (17) PER: 10 INT: 3 RES: 9 Culture: Deadfire Archipelago or The Living Lands Background: Any There's absolutely no reason to take three constitution ever when playing a rogue. Intelligence is practically useless on them. Your debuff abilities decrease from 10 seconds to 6.5, which is a bit of a sore spot but not altogether a bad thing if you take the Grieving Mother with you and use the rest of your party to supply sneak attack opportunities. What's particularly great about a lack of intelligence on a rogue is that the negative duration theoretically effects Deep Wounds in a strange way -- it makes the raw damage affect the target faster. Meaning that you do x damage over 6.5 seconds rather than 20. So, ideally, you're going to be cycling pin point accurate shots to each enemy and whittling them down with the raw damage DoT effect. Two-handed Style gives you a 15% increase in damage. Penetrating Shot helps with sturdy, DR-heavy enemies. You can take Marksman if you want the extra accuracy, and Gunslinger if you're dead set on using one of the slow reloading weapons all the time. Dirty Fighting & Vicious Fighting are also quite nice. Interrupting Blows is great for sniping out mages from afar. Bloody Slaughter will help you pick off low health enemies as well. Graceful Retreat isn't a poor investment, either. I think that's about it. Sneak into fights and start them off with a deadly blunderbuss volley. Make sure your allies help set up sneaks. And go kill things mercilessly~

For future reference, I'm fairly sure mechanics has literally no use on your PC. You can have an NPC do it because there aren't any mechanics-driven dialogue options. Also, yes -- Ciphers are not meant to be in melee, but these kinds of builds can always be fun to try out and be silly with!

Additionally, Holy Power doesn't have a range indicator and any references of 'Will-o-Wisp' in spell descriptions give a tooltip for the 'Will' save.

Looking at Pallegina's tooltip for Zealous Focus, it states that it has a base of 2.5m, but I've tested it thoroughly and it appears as if it's just a straight up buff to the entirety of the party with no range restriction. It's showing up on the buff bar next to character portraits and I've checked the accuracy bonuses in the combat log. All signs point towards this being an ability that buffs the party without a range restriction. Is this a tooltip error?

It might be best to try this on hard before you leap right into PotD! As far as I'm aware, hard just adds extra or higher tier mobs, whereas PotD actually changes their statistics.

If you want to optimize your Ciphering, start off every battle with a blunderbuss shot for the focus boost. In an ideal world, you're dual-wielding with enchanted clothes because you want to build focus while dealing damage, but sometimes that's not a realistic option. Don't be afraid to push weapon focus and style feats off until later levels. Remember -- you're a spellcaster at heart. Your weapons supplement your damage; they don't deal the heavy hitting blows. That high Might score is there because you want to fire off Mind Blades into a crowd of enemies, not whack at them. Early on, use spears -- accuracy is incredibly important in the first few levels. Swap weapons as needed; stilettos for DR, hatchets for deflection, spears for accuracy, and so forth. When you're up against a particularly sturdy enemy, just take out a two-hander and go to town.

If you're playing on the highest difficulty, it's worth noting that you can create your own custom party fairly early in the game. You won't get to have conversations with them, but you can choose how they're built and how they level from start to finish -- not too dissimilar to making a multiplayer party in Baldur's Gate. I'm just going to assume that you want to avoid doing this and would rather use the Obsidian NPC's. In terms of outright min/maxing, you want to pool all your points into Might -- it's the only ability that directly affects the amount of damage that you do. Outside of that, there are three primarily offensive attributes and three primarily defensive attributes. The offensive ones are Might (damage), Dexterity (attack speed), and Intelligence (AoE size and duration). Whatever character you play, if you want to be the damage dealer, you'll want some combination of those three statistics. Technically there are no item or armor restrictions on the classes. Armor affects how fast you act -- the heavier your armor, the higher your damage reduction is and the slower your action speed is. So you could theoretically play a wizard. The differences between the classes are significant, to say the least. First off, they all get different values for Endurance (which is health in this game), Accuracy ("THAC0" or your chance to hit), and Deflection (AC, or your defense against auto attacks). You can find those values here. Additionally, they all each get their own unique abilities -- the spellcasting classes have particularly stark differences in their spell selection. Race is important, but there's a lot of choices. Choose something with a bonus in one of the offensive attributes. Don't worry about your PC having any ranks in the Mechanics skill -- one of the NPC's can take care of this. Survival and Athletics are probably the most important combat skills, and Lore lets you use scrolls. In terms of specific class recommendations: Cipher is the closest thing to a fighter/mage in this game and is arguably one of the most versatile and powerful classes in the game. But the NPC Cipher is actually one of the better built NPC's available, assuming you're against making your own generic hirelings at the tavern. Of all the spellcasters, they're the class that's the most consistently useful in every encounter because they don't have "per rest" abilities. They can consistently charm enemies and have a way to attack every defense. They're squishy, but should do just fine in the back with a bow. Barbarians are versatile, do area of affect damage with their auto attacks, and generally steamroll through your enemies as long as they have a tank taking the brunt of the enemy attention. There's no inherent disadvantage to dual-wielding, so you can swap between using a two-hander for fighting enemies with high damage reduction and dual-wield for less sturdy groups. There is no Barbarian NPC. Monks have inherent damage reduction with the way the wound system works and have inherent dual-wielding with their fists. They are similar to the Cipher in that they don't have to worry as much about saving their per rest abilities because they don't really have any. They have a way to attack all defenses and can suffice as a tank in fullplate in a pinch. It's hard to describe how effective they are without seeing how a level ~5 monk works in person, but they do work very well. There is no monk NPC. Druids are, in my opinion, the best offensive spellcasters. They get a 1/encounter shapeshifting ability that absolutely destroys the first 60% of the game because of how good the shapeshifted form's innate attack is compared to generic weapons. Their spells have a diverse mix and they can rejuvenate health. A high intelligence, high might druid does insane amounts of damage if you position her AoE's correctly. I can't speak much for the NPC druid -- I haven't used him at all. I don't have enough experience with a damage dealing fighter or rogue to recommend them wholeheartedly, but I know that rogue can do some neat stuff and works will as a supportive damage dealer, but they're not at all necessary to the cohesion of your team. I feel like the fighter is more of a tank in this game than he is a damage dealer, but it's worth noting that the fighter gets exclusive access to weapon mastery, which gives a net bonus of 127% damage with a certain group of weapons. Frankly, though, the NPC fighter is perfectly fine and serves well as a tank. There's also no rogue NPC, so that's something to consider. Still, I'd stray more towards the classes I listed above. I would not recommend a Chanter or Paladin. Both are better served tanking -- they both have mostly passive benefits and therefore are best suited to heavy armor. Ranger is just altogether a lackluster class and if you want to give it a try, I recommend experimenting with the NPC rather than putting your eggs in one basket with your own PC. I'm not particularly impressed with Wizards, either. It feels like they only have two, maybe three spells that are worthwhile at each level. But the NPC one is pretty bad mechanically, so experiment at your own risk.

I could be wrong, but TC doesn't sound like he has any intention of playing PotD in the near future.

Resolve is useless offensively. Perception gives a +3% chance to Interrupt per point over 10 vs. the target's -3% chance to be interrupted per point of Resolve over 10. Each hit has a base chance of 50% to interrupt, before Interrupt and Concentration are factored in. It's mostly negligible, but worth noting that if you want to put a point in one, Perception is the better offensive option. In almost all cases, Might, Dexterity, and Intelligence are the offensive attributes. Constitution, Resolve, and Perception are the defensive ones. The reason barbarians are better with higher attack speed is because of their 'splash' damage and the fact that one point of Might generally isn't significantly enough increase in damage compared to hitting multiple enemies faster considering the game's mostly low damage values.

Stats do not a PC make. Talents and abilities are far more important. Take high Might and Dexterity if you want to focus solely on sticking to the back and shootin' at things. The idea of having four weapon slots is definitely an intriguing one, though I'm not entirely sure it's worth the investment. Also, I'm almost positive that despite what the tooltip says, the paladin auras don't have a range on them. Maybe when they're activated the range counts? I've double and then triple checked this by sending Pallegina to the other side of the map while my party fought, and the buff was still active.

First off: attributes in this game are like icing on the cake -- they are not the end all be all to a character build, nor will they somehow cripple your character. If you want to roleplay a willful, long-range, gun-totting, hyper-perceptive roguely assassin, then go for it. Losing a 9% damage bonus is not going to cripple your character. Seriously. Think about this for a second. Let's say, hypothetically, you've got an arquebus that does 40 damage, consistently, every shot.. That's pretty generous. The difference between having Might 14 and Might 17 is less than 4 damage. Four damage. Four! If four damage is the difference between life and death, victory or defeat, you've done something very, very, wrong. Listen, this game wasn't built so that it had the rigidity of builds that the Infinity Engine has. The developers have very clearly stated that they wanted it to be hard to make a 'useless' character -- you'll just be different, if anything. And they've done a very good job of making good on that goal. To answer your question in a tl;dr fashion: Yes, a long-range rogue is viable. Yes, you can take points in Resolve and Perception for the sake of roleplaying. No, you do not have to drop Constitution to 3 to have a working long range assassin. What talents and abilities do you pick? Whichever you want. Unless you're clicking random things and choosing exclusively defensive talents, you're not going to go wrong as long as your rogue is continuously attacking someone with his gun. A few pieces of extended advice, though: 1. Guns are great for that first volley, but they take a day and a half to reload. Try sneaking forward with your rogue (and any other stealth-heavy allies who are equipped with range weapons) and fire off a sneak attack onto one of your enemies before falling back to your allies. Swap out to another ranged weapon -- either another gun, or a bow/crossbow for quicker, more sustained reloading. If you stick exclusively with guns, try to save your auto attacks for when you can get off a sneak attack. 2. Take Grieving Mother with you. She's a cipher and has a lot of abilities that trigger your sneak attacks. 3. If you're going with a slow weapon, try to go for active abilities that you can use to enhance your limited gunshots. If you're going with a fast weapon, try to go for passive abilities that increase the effectiveness of each shot you fire. Reckless Assault is really good as long as you can use your tanks to keep enemies off you. Dirty Fighting is pretty good, too. So is Bloody Slaughter.

Druid spells are incredible and shapeshift utterly destroys the early game. My PC is a forest godlike druid using the stag form with a hodgepodge of suboptimal attributes and it's only just recently -- towards the end of Act 2 -- that shapeshift has fallen behind named and heavily enchanted weapons. Your barbarian shouldn't need to be tanky, and shouldn't die easily if you're using your tanks correctly. Ranger feels a bit lackluster, I will admit. Cipher is definitely incredibly powerful. The synergy with all the classes is pretty stellar -- Grieving Mother does impressively well as long as people stay off her, and god forbid if you have a rogue supplementing her debuffs. Chanter is a very good support/off-tank. The summons provide a shieldwall and can distract the enemy. Any time you invoke, you're getting your money's worth despite having to wait all that time. Paralyze the entire enemy? Awesome. Reduce everyone's DR? Sweet. And all the while you're healing your allies' Endurance? What's not to love?

Engagement isn't a big issue if you play your bottlenecks and make sure that the tanky folks get in front of the enemies before your back line does. Yes, having all that engagement can sometimes help immensely, but it's not the crux of a good party.

It totally, 100% absolutely, positively, does not matter what you play. All of the attributes have their individual opportunities to shine, so you're always going to get a time in the spotlight as long as you have at least one of them at 16+. Might is probably the least interesting attribute for this -- it often gives you very forceful, intimidation-driven responses. Otherwise, the rest of the attributes all have a fair amount of useful dialogue options. Your PC doesn't need to have mechanics; an NPC will take care of that for you. I've noticed that Survival gets a lot of dialogue options for being 4-6+ and they typically share a purpose with Intelligence dialogue options. A high lore often allows your character to interject and sound intelligent, too. I would prioritize those for your PC. Monk, barbarian, and rogue are the three classes that don't have NPC's -- you have to hire generic adventurers at an inn if your PC isn't one of them. I'd recommend playing one of these if you're nervous about overlapping classes. You don't need a fighter to play the game -- especially if you're not on hard. Pallegina and Kana can both be your tank if you decide not to play a tanky class. Seriously, just play through the game and enjoy it. Don't stress too much about what your character is; your allies can easily make up for it in the long run.

Try to max out your might and then look for an even distribution between dexterity and intelligence, favoring dexterity moreso. You can skimp on all the defensive stats (con, res, per), especially constitution -- barbarians have so much hit points that you won't really need any more from the stat. You don't have to always be beholden to using a two-hander -- there are no downsides to dual-wielding for your second weapons set, for when you're up against enemies that don't have particularly high DR to soak your blows. Don't try to tank as a barbarian. They don't do it nearly as well as other classes and you'll lose a lot of that offensive oomph if you don't lean towards utilizing the abilities that make barbarians into steamrolling, creature murdering powerhouses.

I've desperately wanted to try a single-handed rogue build that abuses Dirty/Vicious Fighting, Bloody Salughter, Pallegina's buffed Zealous Focus, and high accuracy to deliver continuous crits. If I'm not mistaken, a sufficiently high accuracy can make continuous, deadly crits possible. Add in Dire Blessing from Durance for extra affect. In fact, I think I'm going to hop in game and try it out now.

Defender is a modal fighter ability that allows you to engage two more enemies. Using knockdown on enemies that are on top of your back line also helps. Despite its deceptive name Into the Fray serves a similar purpose by pulling an enemy to the fighter. In general, send your fighter in first. Make sure he's the first person that runs into your enemies. If you're not playing on hard, this should take up a goof chunk of your opponents -- they won't be able to get through your fighter and the three enemies he's engaged with if you're fighting at a bottleneck.

Ironically, I had a full list of where I'd found each of the named items, but I bluescreened and lost the notepad file. The sabre Resolution is found in the fourth level of the Endless Paths. Oidhreacht is found early -- I want to say it's somewhere in Gilded Vale. I remember giving it to Eder as his first weapon and he's had it for ages. The one-handed sword, Whispers of Yenwood, is found in the Great Hall of Caed Nua. Elawen Ein is found somewhere in the Endless Paths. I want to say it's on the Blight level.