Lasci

You should be just fine to handle Caed Nua on hard with a dual wielding rogue and the party of NPC's you can get before then. You might want to pick up an adventurer, but otherwise you'll be fine. Go play the game and stop asking questions!

I think you would benefit a lot from having a druid in place of one of the ciphers. What difficulty are you playing on? If it isn't PotD, this changes the conversation drastically.

Rogues perform well with any of the offensive melee weapon styles. Barbarians tend to be strictly better at getting into melee, if only because they have the raw endurance and abilities to make something like that safer and their kit is built around it. But that doesn't mean that melee rogues are bad. When you're dual wielding you want to get vulnerable attack. It's basically a straight up +5 damage boost to your attacks, especially later in the game when everyone and their cousin has DR. If you haven't taken a weapon focus talent, make sure to be flexible with what weapons you're dual wielding. Pay attention to the enemy's DR and act accordingly. Additionally, each weapon excels at something different -- hatchets add deflection for defense, spears add accuracy for more hits and less grazes, axes help with crits, stilettos give DR piercing, and so forth. Again, stilettos are typically best in this situation because you don't have enough damage to pierce through DR, so that combined with vulnerable attack gives you a huge boost in damage. I honestly think dual wielding rogues are probably the worst type of rogue, though, because it requires so much micro management of your modal and the weapons you're using.

Wizards have a lot of damage at higher levels. Druids tend to have a larger area of effect but sacrifice damage for some sort of debuff. Ciphers have a shorter AoE and typically have special debuffs attached to their spells. The wizard just straight up barrels through with high damage values most times.

From what I can tell, it's just a number modified by level and the spell in question. Does anyone have anything more specific than that?

Nope. Give them a fast ranged or melee weapon, single-handed so that their accuracy doesn't suffer, and interrupt their auto attacks when you want to cast spells.

Barbarians are in your face melee DPS. They have a lot of steamrolling mechanics that let them charge into battle, get injured, and then charge some more. Ciphers are long-range spellcasters that do very well in small, quick encounters because their Focus mechanic doesn't restrict them to spells per rest. They're honestly exact opposites of one another. However, I would recommend going with the Barbarian if you're not going to be hiring adventurers. There's no Barbarian NPC and the Cipher NPC that you get is actually really good at what she does.

Optimized wild orlan tanks basically don't need a shield for the first several hours of the game. <.<

... I don't understand the confusion. If you have 20 in both deflection stats and a handful of constitution, you shouldn't have any troubles doing your tanking. What you take after that is negligible; you're not going to be a damage dealer with so much invested in deflection, which is fine. It's not that difficult. The difference between a couple points in one stat or another is barely noticeable. Making optimized characters in this game isn't hard when they have a single purpose.

120 deflection on a level 5 fighter? How? <.<;

Cipher is great on PotD because it greatly reduces resting downtime. If you're willing to constantly lug yourself back and forth to an inn, they're not necessary.

Tanking as a wizard works, but it's gimmicky at best and will be incredibly frustrating on higher difficulty levels because you're going to be going back to get campfires extremely often. You're much better off taking twelve out of perception and resolve and putting it into dexterity. By going full wizard tank, you're relying on a lot of per rest abilities, and while you might think Dongom has a poor argument, I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to have to go back and rest more often than I already do on PotD or did on hard. Hardened Veil is great, yes, but you should be relying on it for emergency "oh crap I got targeted I might die" moments, not using it in every fight in order to have some semblance of tankiness for 26 seconds and then being squishy again. Ideally, you should be using a quarterstaff or pike early on and sticking behind your tankline to avoid having something go wrong. Two-handed style is great, but I've never liked taking both a style and a weapon focus because it forces you into using a certain weapon. If you take weapon focus peasant, your strength diminishes in the late game because the exceptional quarterstaff is really bad. Alternatively, using a spear and one-handed style helps make you and your spells more accurate, which helps a lot with the wizard's naturally low melee accuracy. And with one-handed style, wepaon focus peasant is a lot better -- being able to choose between spear and hatchet is much more ideal. If you only take buff spells, you're really crippling yourself but not utilizing what makes a wizard a wizard. How can you have a wizard in melee range and not want to spam fan of flames instead of something like eldricht accuracy?

Melee wizard is much better than melee Cipher. I just can't stomach the idea of a Cipher getting caught up in melee. To elaborate- Fan of Flames is going to be your bread and butter in encounters for a while. Meanwhile, you can grab any two-hander you like (preferably one with reach) and use it to get into melee while hiding behind your front line. When you have enough spells per rest to use it, you're going to want to start to utilize the level one spell that gives you a magical quarterstaff. This thing is the best weapon in the game for a good while and will sustain you in longer fights. You also want the level one spell that gives you +15 accuracy, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, you basically want to utilize all the relevant self buffs you can get while picking up the best damage dealing spell of each spell level.

Cat's Claw 1H sword, gained from taking the King's side in the Old Queen and the New Queen.

Just like DPS Monks, Barbarians want to get into the action and take a bit of damage before they cut through the entirety of the opposition.

... no? Ahh, then to answer the OP both shift and its talents are complete junk. No, spiritshift isn't junk. It's talents aren't bad, either. They're not stellar, but what else are you going to get with a druid? Spiritshift is great for the first half of the game, and by the time it falls off, you have a repertoire of spells to handle any situation.

Basically, yeah. Most of the godlike's abilities and anything else that helps you out when you're under 50% are great for barbarians.

... no?

Returning Storm is the level three druid spell. Relentless Storm is level five. They're identical except for the fact that Returning Storm does more damage, stuns longer, but has half the duration. However, it's by far the superior spell despite that. It feels like this was a mistake.

The freeze one only works for Blizzard -- that's the only spell that frost gets an advantage on. I don't think it's worth it. Hail Storm is crush damage, not frost. Taking a look at the damage from the storms, I suppose the shock damage is alright. You get about an extra 6 damage per hit, an extra 2 on the later one. I think the Burn one is still a bit better, though. Firebrand is very strong early, especially if you put Taste of the Hunt on it. No worries. Like I said, druids don't really 'need' any talents when they're in a party.

Yeah. And? You have twelve seconds to use wildstrike if you're taking the talent. Make them count.

Sorry, I'm dumb -- what's the fire godlike bug?

Corrosive is probably the most viable of the talents. Frankly? I don't think it matters much. There aren't many talents that the druid need -- you get a lot of your damage, utility, and overall strength from spells in the mid to late game. If you like playing in your wildshape form, embrace it and take a couple of the talents. If you find yourself keeping your druid to the back and not using it often, then don't bother. It does work even in the late game, just not as well as, say, a druid who decides to wield one of the powerful two-handed unique weapons that could be available to her if you replace the wildstrike talents with two-handed style or what have you. But your druid is always going to get the most work done as a spellcaster in the late game, not shapeshifted. EDIT: Also, none of the elemental enhancing talents are worth taking except for burn and maybe shock, though I wouldn't recommend the shock one. Corrosive is probably the least effective at synergizing with the druid's spell. I think there's only one level 1 or 2 spell that does corrosive damage?

LastSoloer, depending on what you need to do with your talents, I might recommend trying out the +20% burn damage utility spell, especially considering you're going with two-handers. Cast Firebrand and win against things that don't have burn DR?

Druid has a lot of wonky spells that kinda seem counter productive, but they're not necessarily bad. All the spellcasters other than the druid start off pretty lackluster, however. I'd give it some time. To be honest, it doesn't help that Aloth is very poorly built.