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Conversions can only change the attack result to next category once so you can't have Llengrath's Displaced Image convert a hit into a graze and then have that graze get turned into a miss by Adept Evasion, unfortunately. Since you mentioned you were worried about having too many spells needing to be cast, I just wanted to point out that Mirrored Image and Llengrath's Displaced Image are instant cast and have no recovery time so they at least won't be taking up too much of your casting time. I also wanted to point out that the +30 Deflection from Mirrored Image doesn't stack with the +10 Deflection from Llengrath's Displaced Image. If you have both running at the same time, you would only get +30 Deflection from Mirrored Image and and the reflex and hit-to-graze conversion from Llengrath's Displaced Image. Though if you keep getting hit and were down to just 1 Mirrored Image copy, then LDI's +10 Deflection would start kicking in. However, if you can get your Deflection to the point that you are untouchable (which really depends on game difficulty and how high you can stack Deflection with other bonuses), then Mirrored Image may be all you need and LDI would become redundant (other than the reflex bonus which is nice). So in that circumstance you could skip out on LDI if you wanted to save yourself some Guile. Sorry, I play mostly vanilla so I didn't realize that BPM changed Persistent Distraction. In that case, for your Deathblows activator, you might want to grab Secret Horrors. Frightened is a great status, and Secret Horrors also causes Sickened so you have two afflictions that activate Deathblows and target different attributes in case you come across enemies with Perception resistance and immunity. Secret Horrors is relatively cheap for its Focus cost considering it is an AoE with two afflictions, with Frightened having particularly nice synergy for a high Deflection build like discussed earlier. I realize that this might not be all that helpful to you since you're already trying to fit other abilities into your build, but it's something to consider.

Yeah I think you would still want to have some Dexterity as a Riposte Rogue, assuming you're going for a damage role and not one that is purely tanking. Even though Riposte is independent of your recovery bar, it doesn't quite supplant the need for Dexterity on a striker Rogue for me, at least for the purpose of making non-Riposte, normal attacks which I think would remain the main form of damage. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, Riposte is just too variable (chance-based, relies on the presence of melee enemies, their attack rate, etc.) to be a consistent form of damage across all the different combat encounters you come across in the game. Just as an extreme example, if you were to make a Riposte Rogue with multiple sources of Riposte-like gear such as Tuotilo's Palm and Champion's Helm who dumped Dexterity and ignored standard attacking but pumped Deflection high enough to make enemies reliably miss their attacks, I think you would be disappointed by their damage output once you find yourself in situations like encounters that are light on melee combatants. I think it's probably better to treat Riposte as incidental, bonus damage rather than as a principal means of damage if dealing damage is an important element of your build. But if you were to build a hypothetical Riposte Rogue, for subclass I think the Trickster makes sense as a baseline for the +30 Deflection from Mirrored Image. Then you multiclass that with a class that boosts Defense (even though you might think of Deflection as a subset of Defense, they are technically different stats and would stack if you have one active ability that states it boosts Defenses specifically and combine it with another active that says Deflection). So you could look at multiclassing Trickster with a Paladin for their Faith and Conviction/Deep Faith passive defense, Fighter for their Vigorous Defense, or Cipher for Borrowed Instinct (and Psychovampiric Shield as a further stackable bonus due to being classified as an Inspiration). Lowering enemy accuracy would help with making them more likely to miss and trigger Riposte, so abilities like Paladn's Glorious Beacon, Cipher's Eyestrike, and Trickster's own Persistent Distraction and Blinding Strike would have extra synergy. And of course, you need sufficient accuracy yourself to land the Riposte attack so abilities like Fighter's Disciplined Barrage and Cipher's Borrowed Instinct could be pertinent. Here I go breaking my promise not to bring up WotEP any more, but the calculus for all of the above changes for me if wielding Whispers of the Endless Paths. By simply having a 100% chance to proc an attack roll from misses, I'd feel more comfortable maybe sacrificing some Dexterity and relying on Offensive Parry more as a legitimate damage source. While it would have the same issues as Riposte in those non-deal situations, it would at least have better consistency in the situations where counterattacking is applicable. The Trickster/Soul Blade combo from the OP in particular is nice because Offensive Parry would be passively generating Focus which could then be used for delivering Soul Annihilation in an AoE for burst damage to make up for the lowered attack rate if you took less Dexterity (though it's been a while since I used Soul Annihilation with Whispers of the Endless Paths and I vaguely recall the Soul Annihilation damage not quite being distributed equally to all enemies in WotEP's attack cone or some other quirky irregularity). And if I have a more consistent form of counterattack with WotEP, I might not need Riposte at all any more which frees me up to choose another class instead of Trickster for my source of high Deflection, such as Priest of Wael or Wizard who both also get access to Mirrored Image. That opens up some more cool multiclass possibilities, but it's getting way off topic so I apologize for the digression.

Fair correction, I've been trying to give an even-keeled impression of Whispers of the Endless, and a 100 percent chance to hit would make it seem better than it actually is. But since it's outside of SenSx's build concept and RP, which I totally respect, I promise to stop bringing it up!

The problem with factoring Riposte into your DPS and maybe substituting it for Dexterity is that it is highly variable. Because it is a chance-based trigger off specifically melee attacks, it's effectiveness is going to depend on things like the composition of enemy types in an encounter, enemy attack rate, positioning, getting the enemy AI to focus you, the prevalence of disabling and crowd controlling abilities in your party that might interfere with enemy melee attacks, etc. You can control some of those factors but it's not going to be 100 percent efficient in every encounter. The reason why I like Whispers of the Endless Paths when going the tanky, counter attacking route is because at least Offensive Parry has a 100% chance to hit on enemy misses, making it a bit more dependable, and its AoE standard attack can be thought of as a way of maintaining DPS through multihit rather than attack rate if you decide to sacrifice some Dexterity. But SenSx isn't using WotEP due to RP, which is fair and understandable, so I'll stop bringing it up since it's irrelevant I think the default Might is okay since the build isn't using any damage spells and it has some nice weapon damage modifiers like Sneak Attack, Deathblows, Soul Whip, and Soul Annihilation, and good critical hit potential from max Perception and Borrowed Instinct to make up for it. But a related concern may be low Fortitude from going with default Might and Constitution which can leave you vulnerable to stuff like Knock Down. If you find yourself getting bullied too often on the front lines, you could take Bear's Fortitude instead of Bull's Will that's already in the build. Luckily, the +20 to all defenses from Borrowed Instinct will help even out some of your weaknesses later on.

Between the two, I would actually take Psychovampiric Shield over Adept Evasion. They're not directly comparable but if they're competing for the same space, I think Psychovampiric Shield would suit your build better now that you have settled on the more tanky approach. Adept Evasion is actually pretty nice and helpful on a tank, especially if you combine it with Weapon and Shield Style and use the large shield modal to make enemy Reflex attacks virtually inconsequential against you. However, I believe you are looking at dual wielding rather than using a shield. Since you are planning to max out your Perception and Dexterity anyway, your Reflex defense will already be fairly strong without the graze to miss conversion from Adept Evasion (though it is nice to have). It boils down to: Adept Evasion would diversify your defense by protecting you against Reflex-targeting effects like AoE spells, while Psychovampiric Shield would heighten your Deflection and help you get to the point of being untouchable against weapon attacks. Of the listed passive abilities that you're thinking of getting rid of, I would definitely drop Echoing Horror for some space for Psychovampiric Shield and/or Adept Evasion. I agree with you that the Frightened status effect is nice, especially on a tanky build like yours. By preventing enemies from using their hostile abilities with Frightened, you force them into making standard attacks with their weapons instead which you can avoid with your high Deflection or punish with Riposte (though be aware that enemies can still do non-hostile actions like heal and buff while Frightened). However, I find that the kill requirement on Echoing Horror makes it less responsive and reliable. I would actually replace it with Secret Horrors so I have a form of Frightened that I can cast at will. Of course, they aren't directly comparable since Secret Horrors is a spell that has to be cast while Echoing Horror is a passive, and you might not want to have this character have yet another spell they need to be casting all the time. You can always have another party member casting it for you, though. I do want to bring up the point that you should consider your choices for your build in the context of your party. Just like how you earlier decided to invest in Resolve over Intellect to move closer back to your original concept, you should consider letting your other party members handle some of the duties so you can focus on what specifically helps your character become the untouchable rogue like you intend. Borrowed Instinct and Psychovampiric Shield are good examples of the spells you want to be casting because they are "transfer" type spells that debuff an enemy while buffing you as the caster with defensive buffs that specifically match your intended goal. Persistent Distraction is a good example of a passive that you want to be taking because it lowers enemy accuracy which helps you trigger Riposte, gives you +1 Engagement, and passively enables Sneak Attack and Deathblows on the enemies you engage. However, casting things like Secret Horrors or Eyestrike might not be as good of a use of your time. While they would certainly benefit you as a Rogue who profits off Afflictions, they compete for action time you could instead spend on attacking and use up Focus that you could instead be using for Soul Annihilation. It might just be better to let a party member Druid cast Venombloom or a Wizard cast Chillfog to get the same effects on enemies while your main character focuses on what they do best. Similarly, you could cast Gaze of the Adragan yourself as a Trickster, or you could save the Guile on your actual attack abilities and let your Wizard cast it, who may have better Intellect and can do a better job at casting it. While it's nice to be self-sufficient, you can let your party handle some redundant duties and specialize more into what your build is trying to do. Just something to consider.

That's a tricky dilemma. For me at least, high Resolve and Deflection stacking wouldn't be as attractive on this build without Whispers of the Endless Paths turning it into weapon damage. If it were me, I would actually go back to your original plan of default Resolve and no Psychovampiric Shield. The way I personally look at Trickster is that it allows me to play "greedy" where I can play a frontline character who doesn't necessarily have to invest in defenses to the same degree as other builds because I have Mirrored Image. Mirrored Image isn't the perfect defense (only boosts Deflection, can be dispelled, max bonus is progressively lowered after being hit, and is only available roughly after the starting island for a multiclass), but I think it is still good enough until you get Borrowed Instinct. At the point you'll have fairly solid defense from those stacked abilities for minimal investment. My personal bias is I don't like pumping Resolve so high on a character that isn't going to a main tank. However, you did want to make an untouchable rogue in which case it might make more sense for you to invest even further in Resolve. As far as Intellect, it can be quite valuable for buffing and debuffing duration. For your purposes, you can think of it as both a resource economy attribute, stretching out the value of your Guile per ability usage, and also as an action economy resource since the longer your durations last, the less time you have to spend recasting or reapplying your buffs and debuffs and the more time you can spend on attacking. I think it's going to boil down to whether you want to emphasize tanking or debuffing and figuring out what your build is mainly about. Regarding riposte, different gear and abilities that have counterattack don't quite stack like you may be thinking, but instead are separate instances that may independently trigger their counterattack. So multiple sources of riposte can have a chance to each trigger off of the same miss. From the testing thread I linked earlier, it may interest you to know that Tuotilo's Palm has a counterattack that generates Focus. As a bashing shield, it also counts as an offhand weapon for Two Weapon Fighting purposes, and can simultaneously take the Weapon and Shield Style passive. It may be a nice early option to boost your Deflection if you find Mirrored Image not enough before you get Borrowed Instinct.

I remember now I recently tested some weapon and shields effects for Focus generation in this thread which might be helpful for alternative gear ideas if using Whispers of the Endless Paths doesn't appeal to you.

I think it is totally fine to have a simplified build like this if it's doing everything you want it to do. In fact, the reason why I made my suggestions is because I think they would align with the stated goals in your original post and offer some refinements for that kind of build. I think Psychovampiric Shield is worth taking if you can fit it into your build because it is a Resolve inspiration that's stackable with your other sources of Deflection bonus, and every point of Deflection that you can stack really matters if you want to become truly untouchable. Whispers of the Endless Path's Offensive Parry would then give you the easy counterattacks you were looking for, and more consistently compared to just Riposte's 30% chance (I believe the Community patch buffs Riposte up a little, though). I know you were concerned about not having the Guile to be able to use some of the other cool Trickster abilities, which I completely understand. However, with a Whispers of the Endless Path build, paralyzing or terrifying enemies would be counterproductive because you want enemies to be attacking you to trigger Offensive Parry so you wouldn't really be missing out by not using those Trickster abilities. Using your Guile to only keep up Mirrored Image might feel less bad now that you can think of it as doing double duty because your defense will become offense WotEP. The damage you do with Offensive Parry also generates Focus so you can keep up Borrowed Instinct, Psychovampiric Shield, and use Soul Annihilation more frequently. The points you are already putting into Intellect for spell duration can also be thought of as a damage contributor with a WotEP build as it will increase the AoE size of its attack cone and hopefully hit more enemies with every swing. I don't want to push the idea of a WotEP build too hard on you or oversell it because it does have its issues for this particular multiclass. I think you would need to reassign some attribute points into Resolve and then dedicate some equipment slots for gear with Deflection bonus, which you might not want to do. The fact that Borrowed Instinct becomes available kind of late is also a valid concern, especially when you compare it to other multiclass setups like a Paladin/Trickster for instance, who can max out their Faith and Conviction/Deep Faith defensive bonus relatively early depending on their disposition. A multiclassed cipher WotEP build can eventually get their Deflection up to decent numbers thanks to their spells but it's not going to be as soon as some others.

One thing to keep in mind about the Watcher ability is that it is per-rest so you'll need to do a lot of resting if you want to incorporate it as a mainstay of your build. Brilliance is nice and all, but I don't think it's necessary to rest after each combat to have it ready for the next encounter or that you should be so worried about running out of resources. The nice thing about your multiclass choice is that even though you may run out of Guile, your Rogue class is still providing nice passive benefit from Persistent Distraction enabling Sneak Attack and Deathblows, and you have a fairly spammable attack ability in the form of Soul Annihilation. A Cipher active ability you might find useful is Psychovampiric Shield. It gives you a Resolve inspiration which will stack with Mirrored Image and Borrowed Instinct. Since you're also intending to go for high defenses and counterattacks, you may want to consider Whispers of the Endless Paths. You already have good Deflection potential with the aforementioned three spells and Offensive Parry would give you more counterattack chances to go along with Riposte. It may require you to move some attribute points into Resolve and equip supplementing +Deflection gear to make it more consistent, depending on your game difficulty level. Borrowed Instinct is also only available at level 13 as a multiclass, so it comes together slower compared to some other tanky builds that use Whispers of the Endless Path. On the other hand, your build also debuffs enemy accuracy with Eyestrike/Persistent Distraction to partly make up for that until you get the big defense boost from Borrowed Instinct.

This doesn't line up at all with in-game numbers or actual use case. If we look at single class priest vs. paladins with base duration to keep things simple: At PL 5 when Priests first get access to BDD, they have one cast that gives death warding for 8.0 seconds total. At the same PL, Paladins have 7 Zeal which gives them a total of 28.0 seconds of death warding. Priest later reach equilibrium with paladins as they gain two casts of BDD and later Salvation of Time, but at max level a single-class Paladin get 11 Zeal for a total of 44 seconds of death warding while Priests get a total of 36 seconds of death warding with their two casts of BDD and SoT. So why is paladin considered niche and no way replaces a priest for your BDD consideration, when they get access to death warding from the get-go and eclipse priest at max level? The above isn't even accounting for the extra duration power scaling that Lay on Hands get as a PL1 ability.

I do agree with other posters that you need to consider subclasses as part of your analysis because they can make a meaningful distinction. As others have said, it's not just an extra ability here or there. Some subclasses like Trickster Rogue get a whole suite of extra abilities that allows them to flex into roles like tank or crowd controller. Some subclasses significantly change the way they operate; Psion was brought up already but Beguiler is another transformative subclass for Cipher because they can bypass the normal weapon damage-to-Focus paradigm and operate as pure caster (most of the time) due to their subclass ability to gain Focus from Deception spells. Your analysis of paladin is a telling example to me. What about classes like paladin or priest where there is no "baseline" class and you must choose a patron god or paladin order as your subclass? Do those subclass bonuses just go out the window? Here's a great example. You seem to esteem Barring Death's Door very highly yet dismiss paladin in the same breath. What about Shieldbearers of St. Elcga who get an identical death warding effect to their Lay on Hands ability? If we're just solely looking at death warding capability, I would consider the Shieldbearer superior because they have access to it as early as level 1, which means it gets power level scaling of its duration, and it only costs 1 Zeal, which means they can keep the death ward effect for an overall greater length of time than a priest, even when factoring in two casts of Barring Death's Door and Salvation of Time. I'm not even that high on BDD myself, but just going of the merits of your own criteria and what you think is important for your tier list, this should hopefully show you the gaps in your analysis by not taking subclasses into account.

This is off-topic, but I wanted to share a very interesting interaction I ran into during my tests with Grave Calling. While attacking a Many Lives skeleton summon to trigger Chillfogs from Grave Calling, I happened to have another Chanter nearby who was using the Mith Fyr chant. I noticed that a skeleton affected by the Mith Fyr chant was completely invulnerable to weapon damage from Grave Calling; the combat log would state that the attack was cancelled out even if the hit landed. This is due to the interaction between Mith Fyr's Fire keyword and Grave Calling's Frost keyword, and them being counters to each other. This got me wondering, though, if it would be somehow possible to cheese this and render the party invulnerable to weapon attacks by forcing a keyword onto enemy attacks and then applying a counter keyword to the party. My first thought was to cast Moonwell on the party, which is Water keyworded. I'm sure many people have noticed how it not only heals but also nullifies incoming damage from Fire spells. Now, the tricky part was finding a way of applying a Fire keyword onto enemies because it couldn't just be a direct Fire damage spell which would just harm the target, but rather some kind of buff or effect that would make the Fire keyword "stick" onto enemies. I first tried a Berserker/Chanter to see if I could deliberately Confuse myself with Berserker Frenzy and perhaps apply Mith Fyr to enemies that way. Unfortunately, the positive chant effect of Mith Fyr didn't get applied to enemies even while the caster was confused. I next tried it with a Paladin/Berserker, again using Berserker Frenzy to Confuse myself and using Paladin's Shared Flames attack. Sure enough, I was able to grant Shared Flames to enemies while confused and put them under the effect of the Fire keyword. However, when enemies with Shared Flames attacked my party who were under the effect of Moonwell, their damage still went through. I think I figured out why Mith Fyr/Grave Calling counters each other out while Shared Flames/Moonwell doesn't, and it has to do with Grave Calling and how its elemental damage and keyword is coded. Though it appears to be an elemental lash similar to Shared Flames, Grave Calling's freeze lash is inherent to the weapon which makes even its auto-attacks Frost keyworded. It's probably why it and other elemental weapons like Thundercrack Pistol, which has a similar Shock lash, are able to be used by Arcane Archers without suffering the subclass penalty when auto-attacking. So you'll see Moonwell countering Fire keyworded abilities, but it's not going to be able to counter auto-attacks like my cheese idea unless you were somehow able to grant enemies inherently Fire keyworded weapons. If only spells like Firebrand weren't self-targeted! Just thought I'd share this cheese idea for keyword counters in the hopes someone more clever than me can figure out a way to make it work.

I did some more testing with Grave Calling, and the behavior I mentioned above with Skald Phrase generation was consistent across repeated attempts. To be fair, it may have been too much to expect uncapped Skald Phrase generation, on top of Grave Calling's already powerful ability to create multiple Chillfogs that can also generate Focus on Ciphers. I also added St. Drogga's Skull and Keeper of the Flame to the list of tested gear in the OP. While I was at it, I also tested some of the armors that do retribution damage like Kahako Nihi and the High Harbiner's Robes. I wasn't really expecting them to generate Focus or Skald Phrases but wanted to see on the off chance if there was some weird implementation where the game considers it a weapon attack. Unfortunately, they don't generate either Focus or Phrases, as you would predict. I can confirm that Offensive Parry will generate both Focus and Skald Phrases. I think a Soul Blade/Skald like my test character, who wanted to gain "free" and passive class resources this way from counter attacks, would actually be a fairly decent fit for Whispers of the Endless Paths. You have the +20 Accuracy/Defenses from Borrowed Instincts, which you can stack with your multiple sources of Perception and Resolve Inspirations, plus engagement slots from Tactical Meld. While you wouldn't be able to stack your deflection as high as some of the other dedicated WotEP builds, you have various abilities to debuff enemy accuracy and deflection to partly make up for it. Additionally, you have some nice synergies like penetration boosts from Hammering Thoughts and Their Champion Braved, which you can combine with enemy armor debuffs like Body Attunement or Hel Hyraf, enemy under-penetration potential with the aforementioned Body Attunement granting you armor and WotEP inflicting Daze, and the ability to direct Soul Annihilation in an AoE cone with the weapon.

So the Chillfogs from Grave Calling are very unusual for Skald phrase generation. I believe it is actually only 1 phrase possible per instance of Chillfog. What I observed at least was that you can potentially gain a Skald phrase from only the initial pulse. Subsequent pulses from the same Chillfog don't appear to be able to generate further phrases. This does make it less exciting as a resource generator for Skalds compared to a Cipher who can get a lot of Focus this way. I'll test this more thoroughly later, or maybe someone else can corroborate these findings with their own testing in the meantime.

I've been refining a Soul Blade/Skald build and decided to test an assortment of weapon and shields that have retaliation, counter-attacks, or AoE damage procs to see which of these can generate Focus for Ciphers or Phrases for Skalds (50% chance to generate a Phrase with melee critical hits). Here are some of the results: Grave Calling – Chilling Grave generates Focus and Phrases Akola's Apex Ward – Shark Teeth Counter does not generate Focus or Phrases Tuotilo's Palm – Outward Spikes generates Focus and Phrases Wintertide Bulkwark – Frostbitten Palisades does not generate Focus or Phrases Magran's Blessing – Fire Shield generates Focus and Phrases (only when the Fire Shield is active, of course) Eager Blade – Bounding Strikes + Kaul's Retort generate Focus but do not appear to generate Phrases. I only saw a Phrase generated if the initial weapon hit that procced Bounding Strikes also crit, and I never saw Kaul's Retort generate a Phrase after proccing a couple dozen crits with it. May require more testing or code delving. Engoliero do Espirs – Cruel Blade generates Focus but does not appear to generate Phrases. Again, I only saw it generate a Phrase if the weapon hit that procced Ghost Blades also crit. Whispers of the Endless Path – Offensive Parry generates Focus and Phrases Voidwheel – Necrotic Heart generates Focus. It may or may not generate Phrases since the Necrotic Lance is conditional on a weapon crit anyway. Karaboru – Bloody Momentum generates Focus. It may or may not generate Phrases since Bloody Momentum is conditional on a weapon crit anyway. Chromoprismatic Quarterstaff – Soul Storm generates Focus and Phrases St. Drogga's Skull – Flames of Retribution generates Focus. It does not appear to generate Phrases – the only time I saw a Phrase generated was if the initial weapon hit also crit. Keeper of the Flame – Magran's Wrath does not generate Focus. It does not appear to generate Phrases – the only time I saw a Phrase generated was if the initial weapon hit also crit. Some more observations: It appears there is a hardcoded limit of only 1 Phrase that can be gained per attack with the Skald subclass bonus. Even when critting multiple targets with an AoE auto-attacking weapon like Whispers of the Endless Path or layering multiple Chillfogs with Grave Calling, I never saw the Phrase count jump up by more than 1 Phrase at a time. For testing methodology, I turned off chanting entirely on my Skald/Soul Blade test character so the only way to generate Phrases was through weapon critical hits during testing. It was really hard to determine whether weapons that procced AoE damage from crits provided any Skald Phrase generation because I wasn't sure if the initial weapon crit was what created the Phrase and not crits with the AoE. If they do count, they may assist with providing more hit rolls for Skald's 50% chance to trigger. With the 1 Phrase hard limit and the conditional based on weapon crits, I can't say definitively, just based on observation, whether the weapon AoEs trigger Skald phrases.

Very cool and funny implementation! I love the image of repeatedly pointing your Thundercrack Pistol at enemies who are too scared to do anything except freeze and raise their hands in the air every time you swap to it. I know you say you can turn off the AI script at a certain point once you've locked down enemies long enough with the Thundercrack Pistol's debuff, but I was wondering what would be the best build for this strategy if you wanted to keep the AI script on and just have a character who only stands around and continuously swap weapons like we joked about in the other thread? Obviously it would need to be at least a Chanter to get the benefit of SSS's recovery reduction. One idea is to go with the Skald subclass, only because selecting the highest costing non-offensive invocation available will increase your maximum Phrase capacity +1, which does help the scaling of SSS's recovery reduction. It's a small bonus and maybe not necessary, I admit. I think the better idea is is to go with the Troubadour subclass and stack Intellect as high as possible so you can have the effects of multiple chants going at once or you can turn on Brisk Recitation and get faster hits with the offensive chants or more skeletons with Many Lives. I think a tank role makes the most sense in that case to get more value out of a character that can't actively attack. A couple of quirks does make tanking complicated in this scenario if you're constantly swapping weapons, unfortunately. First, when you switch weapon sets, engagement briefly deactivates and it takes a second after switching before engagement reacquires targets. If you're switching weapon sets constantly, it might not give your engagement slots enough time to latch onto enemies. Secondly, you can only activate self-buffs when you're not in recovery, so you'll have to depend on passive bonuses since you'll be stuck in recovery from constant weapon swapping. So I guess you can have Whispers of the Endless Paths in the other weapon slot to swap over and hopefully trigger counterattacks and combine that with Rogue and Riposte for more passive attack opportunities, or maybe Paladin for the passive deflection bonus. I think multiclassing with a Black Jacket might still be a good idea here because they can still activate their self-buffs like Refreshing Defense and Unbending Trunk thanks to their subclass bonus and Quick Switch allowing them to bypass swap recovery. Of course, if you didn't care about the spirit of a purely passive build and allowed buffing in between or before turning the AI script for weapon swapping, you have a lot more possibilities such as Trickster Rogue abilities like Mirrored Image to buff WotEP and Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage for a fear aura when standing around enemies.

Now I'm picturing something like a Bard from Icewind Dale standing around only playing bardsong, except it's a POE Chanter who buffs his party by constantly juggling his weapon sets like a jester

I ran a quick test of both of your ideas. It looks like Modwyr's Eager Lover enchantment doesn't work, unfortunately. I suspect it is because the Eager Lover action speed buff is a persistent effect that is applied directly to the character (you see the Eager Lover stacks showing up next to the character portrait which stay on the user even after switching off Modwyr). If instead Modwyr's action speed bonus was tied to the weapon itself, I think it would let you infinitely reapply it with Black Jacket weapon swapping like the case with Squid's Grasp. However, Sasha's Singing Scimitar does work like this. Not only that, but the Companion's Prelude upgrade works on the whole party like you speculated! So a Black Jacket / Chanter with this weapon can infinitely reduce recovery for your entire team by pausing and repeatedly weapon swapping. That's a pretty insane feature for that particular multiclass!

I don't know why this didn't occur to me originally but I just re-tested it and it works exactly the way @Constentin Lévine speculated. You can pause after an action and then keep switching back and forth to Squid's Grasp and it will progressively decrease your recovery bar every time you swap back. You can keep doing it until recovery becomes close to 0s (the bar moves less and less each time but it is technically possible to reduce it down to like 0.0001 millisecond). Honestly, I only figured to swap to Squid's Grasp once when I first tested this and was pretty happy when it worked the one time. The fact that it can recursively reduce recovery is pretty crazy! Sorry, maybe "refreshes" is the wrong word when talking about Magistrate's Cudgel and Black Jacket quick swapping. To be more precise, when the Deliberations buff wears off, you can just swap back to Magistrate's Cudgel and endlessly reactivate the buff by re-engaging an enemy. Like I said previously, the Deliberations buff will persist even after you switch to a different weapon set. One noteworthy thing is that the +1 Penetration from the Deliberations buff is a universal bonus, meaning it can also apply to spells! This and a couple of other spellcasting supplementing weapons like @thelee's choice of Lance of the Midwood Stag in the OP makes Black Jacket a pretty interesting subclass choice for spellcasting multiclasses aside from the more obvious choice of Tactician.

Black Jackets are really fun to play around with and have a lot of interesting combos. I sometimes think even 4 slots isn't enough to do everything I want with them. A few suggestions and ideas: Bronlar's Phalanx - I know you've already got Tactical Barrage, but I like the fact that this shield gives you a free Intellect inspiration and can at least save you 1 point of Discipline. As a Black Jacket, you can also take its stronger Stand Firm upgrade for the added deflection, armor, and health regen and not have to worry about the immobilization downside since you can freely switch out of it at will. The scaling deflection bonus and regen helps make up for low resolve and the subclass's weaker Fighter recovery. Granted, the health regen is conditional and not party wide like Lethandria's Devotion, but it could still be a nice alternative shield choice if you don't want to indulge in the Lethandria's Devotion swap cheese. Magistrate's Cudgel - soulbinding it to a Fighter makes this a nice buffing tool when paired with a shield or an offhand weapon with engagement, giving you either +1 AR, +1 pen, or minus 20% recovery. The nice thing is that these buff persists even when you swap to a different weapon set, and you can swap back whenever you want to refresh it. Squid's Grasp - I tested this a while back and found that the plus 20% action speed from the Attempted Parley will also reduce in progress recovery. In other words, you can swap over to this weapon whenever you've just performed an action and it will cut down on its recovery time (provided you are surrounded by 3 enemies - the Flanking immunity you get with this weapon helps mitigate some of the danger). It depends on your tolerance with micromanagement, but it could be a worthwhile addition to your arsenal especially on a spellcasting multiclass like this to speed up some of the slower spells.

I like Wizard summoned weapons, but I don't think Conjurer does anything particularly noteworthy with them to justify going as that subclass for that kind of build. Like I said in the post up the thread, the Conjuration PL bonus only translates into more duration for summoned weapons, which gives you some more seconds of uptime with your weapon and may save you from having to recast it again during longer fights. In practice, this bonus duration might not even be relevant for encounters beaten before your original summoned weapon wears off. If Wizard summoned weapons scaled with PL like Monk fists, I would think it more worthwhile to try to stack PL for them as a Conjurer, but as it is in the game currently, I am simply unexcited by additional duration being my only benefit in this application. The bigger issue for me is losing Illusion spells as a Conjurer, especially if I'm going as a more melee-focused build with summoned weapons because the Illusion school offers some very welcome defensive buffs. Again, it's not the end of the world for a frontline Conjurer without Illusions spells since you can get defensive buffs from the non-restricted Enchantment spells such as Llengrath's Safeguard or Citzal's Martial Power, plus they won't actually suffer the increased recovery penalty as non-Conjuration spells due to being instant cast anyways. However, these spells have awkward conditionals such as requiring you to drop to half health before triggering or preventing subsequent spellcasting. Meanwhile, Illusion spells like Wizard's Double, Mirrored Image, and Llengrath's Displaced Image provide straightforward and effective defensive buffs while also being available much sooner than the aforementioned Enchantment alternatives. You might not need these defensive bonuses if you instead go for ranged summoned weapons like Minor Blights or Blackbow, but even then you're still only getting bonus duration with these weapons as a Conjurer. The PL bonus is just not that impressive for Conjuration spells, and I feel like it doesn't nearly make up for the tradeoff of losing Illusion and Evocation spells when you go Conjurer subclass. I feel like you don't even look at the subclass PL bonus when going Conjurer, and just get creative like @Constentin Lévine's suggestion of cycling Conjure Familiar to get as many stat bonuses as possible. There's an opportunity cost of having to cast Conjure Familiar over and over again and needing to apply the Brilliant inspiration on the Conjurer to allow this, but at least it would be a stronger bonus compared to the subclass' innate Conjuration PL bonus.

I notice on occasion when under pull or push effects, the target will sometimes get "stuck" on an object where they will be in the push/pull animation and sort of continually hover in place. When it happens to a party member, they end up being unresponsive and effectively stuck in place for the rest of the combat. It's obviously a bug, but I tried to see if I could exploit this by summoning a Furyshaper ward and knocking enemies into it but it doesn't work unfortunately. It only seems to work on map objects with collision, like a table for instance. I also tried using Withdraw on the Furyshaper ward to see if it would somehow turn it into a hard object but it still didn't work. I suspect it is because it's treated like a unit, albeit a stationary one, so it has that coding/behavior where units kind of clip through each other sometimes if trying to fill the same space. If there's a way to summon something that makes a space non-traversable it may work, but as far as I know there isn't. As far as ways to make use of the push effect, there's always traps and seal spells that you can place ahead of time and knock enemies into. But it's not like push is really helpful for those since just placing them between yourself and the enemy is generally enough to have them trigger with proper placement. Another idea is the Hobble traps dropped from the Footsteps of the Beast that would allow you to push enemies away and use the created distance to drop the Hobble traps and kite enemies into. It is admittedly not too useful of a strategy and it would conflict with gun usage since you wouldn't be able to reload while moving, though.

Here are the numbers from the testing: No-subclass Wizard Necrotic Lance = 11.5 pen, 9.4 sec Necrotic Lance (Voidwheel) = 13 pen, 6.8 sec Necrotic Lance (Substantial Phantom) = 11.3 pen, 8.1 sec Ghost Blades = 11.3 pen Ghost Blades (Engoliero do Espirs) = 13 pen Conjurer Necrotic Lance = 12 pen, 10.1 sec Necrotic Lance (Voidwheel) = 13 pen, 6.8 sec Necrotic Lance (Substantial Phantom) = 11.3 pen, 8.1 sec Ghost Blades = 11.8 pen Ghost Blades (Engoliero do Espirs) = 13 pen I only kept track of the penetration and duration differences since those were straightforward factors to see if the PL bonus was applying in the combat log. Both characters had identical attribute spreads of 18, 18, 4, 18, 17, 3 and were both moon godlikes. I'm really trying to give Conjurer a fair shake as a subclass by finding a decent use case for their PL bonus, but it's hard to see the benefit. Like I said earlier, the Conjuration PL bonus kind of goes to waste on summoned weapons since all it's giving you is more duration and has no bearing on adjusting quality levels or imparting any other kind of benefit. In practical terms, the added duration might save you from having to recast your summoned weapon again in really long fights. But that's the best case scenario for a fairly marginal benefit, when you consider that that spell slot you save for other usage is going to be limited by the fact that you're cut off from two other spell schools. It seems even less meaningful when you factor in the ability to extend duration with Wall of Draining or compare it to a Blood Mage's ability to regain spells. I've been looking at Minoletta's Piercing Sigil and Cloak of Death as the explicitly Conjuration-keyworded, non-summon high level spells that would profit more from PL, going single-classed and stacking PL via Prestige and Conjure Familiar. My idea so far is a low deflection, high health retaliation tank, with the moon godlike racial for healing. MSP and CoD can both proc off the same retaliation and it would be worthwhile having both spells up since they target different stats of your attackers. However, I foresee MSP's push effect and CoD's effect that turns enemies invisible being a major pain in the ass that can throw off the targeting for the rest of your party. I'm also unsure how viable a single-classed Conjurer without access to defensive Illusions spells will be on the frontlines. As a Conjurer, you still have access to Enchantment school defensive buffs like Citzal's Martial Power and Llengrath's Safeguard which will both stack and won't suffer the Conjurer recovery penalty with non-Conjuration spells since they're zero recovery. The problem is that Citzal's Martial Power cuts off spellcasting while it's up and Llengrath's Safeguard doesn't trigger until you're at half health. Having high deflection from those spells would also be at cross purposes of MSP and CoD which requires enemies to hit you in order to proc. I think it might be better just to cast buffs like Ironskin and Infuse With Vital Essence and gearing with heavy armor and Cadhu Scalth to help mitigate the incoming damage. I've done some preliminary testing with this build and I can't say I love it. The moon godlike healing isn't substantive enough to rely solely upon, so I'm having to consider some of the life-drain spells from the Transmutation school (with the slower recovery penalty) or maybe summoning Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff just to poke enemies to get some health back. While I do love the idea of being a prickly porcupine that enemies don't want to touch, the fact is your effectiveness with this strategy is going to be limited by how long you can stand up to the damage and how often enemies are going to attack you in melee (summoning an Essential/Substantial Phantom after casting these retaliation spells unfortunately doesn't impart those buffs to your copies so you can't double the odds this way). It's a convoluted way to do damage and crowd control, but I think it's way less effective than many of the other competing power level 8 and 9 spells from other schools.

I've been theorycrafting a Conjurer build that makes use of the +2 PL bonus with Conjuration spells in a way that's more substantive than the conventional wisdom of using summoned weapons with them, as I find that the mere +duration you get with Conjurer summoned weapons isn't a particularly advantageous usage of the power level bonus, especially for the tradeoff of losing two other spell schools for it. I was looking at the damage spells from the Conjuration school to better leverage the subclass bonus when it occurred to me that Voidwheel can cast Necrotic Lance and Engoliero do Espirs can cast Ghost Blades, both of which are Conjuration spells. I wanted to see if the spells cast from these weapons would get the Conjurer PL bonus on top of the weapon quality scaling. To that end, I tested this by creating two single-classed Wizards, one a Conjurer and the other no-subclass, with identical stats. For a control group, I had them cast Necrotic Lance and Ghost Blades as spells from their spellbooks. As expected, the Conjurer got +0.5 higher penetration and had longer duration in the case of Necrotic Lance's secondary DoT damage effect. However, proccing these spells from the weapons did not get the Conjurer's +2 Conjuration PL bonus. While you do get scaling from the weapon quality, these weapon-triggered spells performed the same in the hands of both the subclass-less Wizard and Conjurer. One interesting thing I noted was that the duration of the secondary DoT from Voidwheel's Necrotic Lance was lower than the duration of the casted spell version. I suspect the weapon just uses base duration (it, however, still gets Intellect scaling as normal since casting Infuse With Vital Essence increased the duration). While I was at it, I wanted to test if Substantial Phantom got the Conjurer's PL bonus since it does get Necrotic Lance as part of the selection of spells it's able to cast. Unfortunately, the Conjurer's PL bonus does not get carried over to the Substantial Phantom copy when it casts the relevant Conjuration spell. Again, the Substantial Phantom performed identically between the Conjurer and no-subclass Wizard. Interestingly, the version of Necrotic Lance casted by the Substantial Phantom was slightly inferior to the no-subclass Wizard, having less penetration and secondary DoT length. Weapons copied over to the Phantoms also didn't make any difference in terms of the spells procced from them. Just thought I should share these findings to the board for the sake of posterity and in case anyone else was curious about this interaction. This is on the vanilla version of the game without the community or balance patches, by the way. I'm posting this on my lunchbreak but I'll throw up the hard numbers from the test later when I get back home.

I did some testing on this and it does appear that an action speed bonus does dynamically adjust recovery time, even for an action that is currently in progress. I created a Black Jacket test character who had the Quick Switch talent along with a minimum Dexterity score, equipped with heavy armor, and attacking with a Rod with the Blast modal on (+50% recovery time). My thinking was that any increase to action speed would be more noticeable and easier to observe on a character with a low baseline speed. Anyway, I spawned 3 adjacent test dummies next to my character to ensure that I would get Attempted Parley's 20% action speed bonus when switching to Squid's Grasp (I also double checked that it was correctly applying the bonus in the weapon details). I ran a few tests attacking with just the rod to establish a control group and got an average of 24 real-life seconds of recovery time while running the game at the lowest combat speed (there was a variance of a few milliseconds in this string which you can chalk up to human error while starting and stopping the stopwatch based on visual observation of the recovery bar starting and ending). I then did the same attacks with the Rod, but this time I paused as soon as the attack completed and immediately swapped to Squid's Grasp with the Attempted Parley upgrade. Upon switching to Squid's Grasp, with the game still paused, I observed the recovery bar immediately dropping from full to roughly 90% full. The overall recovery time dropped down to 21 seconds when holding Squid's Grasp (again, some milliseconds of variance here). For the sake of thoroughness, I also used a separate Chanter to cast "Bride Caught their Ruse..." (Quick inspiration) on this Black Jacket character during his recovery phase after a Rod attack. This was a little bit harder to accurately observe and record since I couldn't precisely get the invocation to finish casting at the same exact time as the Black Jacket began recovery, but the same trend was observed: the recovery bar immediately dropped and the overall recovery time was reduced. Hopefully this is of some use for other people. I do love Black Jacket fighters and this small technique of being able to decrease recovery time for free with some micromanagement with Squid's Grasp is a fun way of illustrating this subclass's utility.