ProfessorCirno

It's less that multiclassing martials is too strong, more that high level abilities are extremely lackluster. The idea was that high level abilities (and higher power level) would make up for the lack of multiclass synergy and combos. In practice, most of the time your best abilities are your first level ones, and outside of Barbarian, those get upgraded soon enough to become your pure bread and butter, while the higher level powers are...well, let's be frank, typically absolute garbage, at least compared to lower level ones. I think either higher level abilities need substantially more love, or lower level abilities need higher level upgrades to make getting those higher levels more tempting, or potentially to downgrade some of those lower level abilities because it's possible they're legitimately too strong to balance stuff around. Or hey, several of the above, but my point is, if you want multiclassing to be less tempting, you have to make those higher level abilities stand out far more.

Most of the PL8&9 abilities need more, to be honest. It's real easy to multiclass fighter when all you have to look forward to is inspired strike. It's real easy to multiclass paladin when the main thing you'd otherwise have to look forward too is to literally kill yourself.

It's not the end of days, but it's a bummer of a patch. We're still in the real early release of the game, which means there's probably going to be several balance patches that upend stuff, so yeah, it's kinda got to be expected. And yeah, a ton of stuff was overpowered, and you need to establish a good baseline to build classes off of. And yeah, there's going to be a future patch that probably buffs stuff back up. But this in-between period just kinda sucks. If you were playing a fighter or, god help you, a cipher, you probably just watched all your interesting stuff get cut down, without anything to really replace it (as I was playing both, I just watched my entire character collapse, so it's restart time). Ciphers especially are in a real bad place balance wise. My hope is that there's at least some work done to the nerfed classes to make the patch not just feel like a complete loss, as patches in general probably shouldn't make you feel targeted, and my desperate hope is that ciphers get looked at real goddamn hard before the patch is released, because that class may as well not exist right now. I should note: this isn't a case of "oh just play on an easier difficulty if you want to breeze through." I doubt anyone on these forums in particular actively want to just breeze through anything. The problem isn't "I'm not strong," the problem is "I'm not interesting." Cleave stance and charge needed to be nerfed, but people weren't drawn to it because they wanted the game to be easy, they were drawn to it because it was hype as hell to be able to just juggernaut your way through a group of enemies and leave nothing but entrails in your wake. It wasn't about making the game easy, it was about being kicking rad. When you see these huge nerfs without any abilities positively changed, it mostly just means your good stuff isn't anymore, and your class is now way more boring. People aren't upset because fighters no longer render the game obsolete, they're upset because fighter offense got kicked in the ****, and they want to do more then just vaguely take up space.

Right now Ciphers benefit from level scaling and general difficulty being super screwy. Most of their spells are kinda garbage, but it's also kinda hard to notice because the game doesn't kinda have a difficulty. There's also stuff on top of that - Soul Blade hides the powers being bad because, well, you never use them, and Ascendant hides it because by the time you pop, the battle is already more or less over, so it just feels like you're dominating everything (when in truth just about any class would do just as well if not better). Once difficulty gets balanced out, I have a feeling Ciphers are going to go downhill, hard.

It makes sense. Paladins are powered by the core beliefs in their souls, and even if Pallegina was kicked out of the Five Suns military order, she is still, at heart, a patriot of the Republics far more then she's a Kind Wayfarer. The Republics abandoned her, not the other way around.