Voss

Nope. You're throwing points away for no reason. I don't believe backstab works on guns. Melee only, last I checked. But popping out of stealth with blinding strike and penetrating shots with a blunderbuss is hilariously effective on a lot of targets.

They're actually 'un-flavor' NPCs. Visually, they undermine the setting, with hordes of godlike standing around with no one caring (especially in gilded vale, where the f'ed up inhabitants should be freaking out and forming lynch mobs). They're further confusing for players at the start of the game. Are they relevant story pieces connected to your character suddenly seeing spirits and weirdness? Oh. No, no they aren't. They're cardboard cutouts for bad prose, unrelated to the universe at all, often containing bad jokes. (Yay, for the elf beat up for accusing someone of bestiality!) Farming the immersion breaking crap for loot is the best use I've come across for them. But there should really be an option to disable them, as they're horrid and bad for the game experience.

The second set of stats is better, but not fantastic. For a tanky paladin deflection matters more than anything, and might hardly matters at all. Be warned, however that Paladins are pretty passive characters. You won't be doing much besides standing there. Druids - shape shifting is useful early on, and then never is again. The DR is unremarkable, their deflection is pants, and their accuracy is rather rubbish. So, yeah. Effective Druids are spell casters. For any character, going by d&d attributes is... Unhelpful. Think of them as increment counters for damage, attack rate, duration/ AoE size, and two for deflection (so tanks have two required stats, and others you might want, but can't afford to put points in), and nothing else. Trying to rationalize them or relate them to the game world is an exercise in frustration and pain. Yep, I left con out entirely. The opportunity cost for con is just too high as it does so little.

Don't say that. It's the only use I've gotten out of the entire class. Without it they'd be paladin level rubbish.

This, so much. Are there a lot of design decision I don't care for? Yep. But unfinished? Not at all. Buggy? Hardly. Certainly not by the standards set by the industry, or even obsidian itself. It does need some fixing, but compared to their other attempts, this is 1) an actual gem, rather than a turd, and 2) even has some polish to it.

Companions are built poorly. And the cipher npc is... fairly on in the game, which means you're going to be higher level and she's going to have more bad talents.

Druids should never tank. They're missing 20 points of deflection before class abilities and talents, and that difference is huge, and will let even crappy enemies tear through that paltry endurance number like it was paper. In most fights after Chapter 1, if my tanks take more than a couple points of damage from MIN grazes from anything that isn't a spell, I'm profoundly disappointed in them. They are offtanks so tanking a bit are part of their role. You are doing smt wrong with them then, maybe you chose the wrong spiritshift. With his HoTs and bear form I cant think on anything more tanky than a Druid. Ofc it really needs micromanagement, and the larger the party the less time you can afford on each character separately. What? Tanking in this game does not involve having mediocre DR and attacks (which all that spiritshift provides). Frankly any culture/class combination that gives you a brigadine is giving you the same or better DR. Tanking in this game involves high deflection (90+), which druids absolutely mathematically cannot get. Well, i guess you could set resources on fire creating scrolls of defense, but that is a really inefficient way to try to do someone else's job. The druid's role in no way involves tanking, or even offtanking. You should not be setting up opportunities for enemies to attack your druid. The druids role is pure dps, with maybe a little support if you want to waste spell slots on garbage. If you aren't turning enemies into frozen, electrified chunks, there is zero reason to play a druid.

Because, honestly, talent picks stop being valuable, because there are so few worthwhile talents. I've hit level 8, and I have nothing worthwhile to pick up for several of my character builds anymore. Its going to have to be something indifferent or something quirky but amusing, because 90% of talents are utter trash, and the remainder only work on specific builds. field triage is actually occasionally useful if something gets lucky. Crystal eater spiders are a good example. That bloody crystal meteor strike and the chance at petrify even on a graze can really rip out a chunk of health, (petrify gets a x4 damage multiplier, and I've seen those bloody spiders do 120 damage in a single hit after a lucky graze). Something like that can be a really brutal interrupt to the normal combat progression of no damage at all, with no reason to rest aside from brutal damage on one character. Field triage helps that a great deal.

Fight some and check the hit calculations. +6-8 points of deflection won't help you. I have found that deflection scales well. 5 points of deflection is valuable - and as it continues to reduce the damage you take by reducing (or eliminating) the hits you take, you never stop wanting more. I've found the exact opposite. Characters built to be deflection tanks take almost zero damage during fights. Characters with a couple extra points from stats? Waste of time/resources. Pallegina with a high base deflection from class, a large shield, a deflection ring, and a couple extra points from per/res items on top of her stat bonuses from resolve/perception is a fairly poor tank, because I didn't get her until level 8. She takes a fair amount of damage from casual fights even with a deflection of 81. My real tanks, built to purpose? If they take more than 4-6 points of damage from lucky grazes over a casual fight, I either got bad results from the RNG, or screwed up in some fashion. My damage dealers range at about 40-50 deflection. My main (ranger) and my custom druid, , both with 10s in all defensive stats, both have 41 deflection. Aloth, with his 17 Per and 14 Res? A grand 42. Sagani, with 18 per? 49. Woo. Those attribute points on the companions are absolutely wasted.

Fight some and check the hit calculations. +6-8 points of deflection won't help you.

Druids should never tank. They're missing 20 points of deflection before class abilities and talents, and that difference is huge, and will let even crappy enemies tear through that paltry endurance number like it was paper. In most fights after Chapter 1, if my tanks take more than a couple points of damage from MIN grazes from anything that isn't a spell, I'm profoundly disappointed in them.

I find a few ranks of stealth on everyone is useful for positioning, (just like a few ranks in athletics is mandatory for everyone to ignore fatigue. After that, you need mech specialist and a couple lore junkies (but that is easy thanks to the massive lore bonuses in character creation). But overall the skills seem tacked on and underutilized. As for finding things, it is mechanics. But it doesn't matter which character has it- the message that pops up in the box will always tell you the pc found it.

Ideal? Clothes (or naked) and some sort of ranged weapon (arbalest or arquebus by the numbers). Talents.... secrets of rime, the corresponding one for electricity, then weapon focus: soldier, marksman and gunner (in whichever order seems more important). Wildstrike talents are traps- spiritshift is only useful for the first couple levels when you're still putting your band together. As an aside, don't even try to build a druid as a tank or offtank. You aren't going to overcome that miserable deflection and things will simple eat your face. Let some other class tank well, and burn down the enemies piled up behind them.

I got bored with hard and switched to normal. I got tired of the tedium of tank and spank for no reward, and just wanted to get on with the story. Ironically I found the story important key fight in Cad Nua to be easier on hard, since there was only one, stronger additional monster in place of the two there in normal. So it was easier just to run up to <redacted> and knock <redacted> to the floor. In normal, the path was blocked and I couldn't get into melee.

Mechanics. Perception is irrelevant to finding things, and I've no idea why you'd think otherwise Anyway, I think the mechanics problem is a symptom of the skill system as a whole. Lore is its own thing, and matters if you want to abuse scrolls*, but all other skills realistically top out with 3 or 4 ranks. Taking athletics and survival up to higher ranks eats diminishing returns to the point of being utterly silly. Stealth could matter, but realistically the need to have a couple ranks and athletics and a couple people with mechanics or lore makes party stealth a no-go. You can have a character or two with really high stealth, but thanks to combat positioning issues, this really should be the tanks. *but lore has a crapton of inherent bonuses from class and background, so if you want lore, you can have all the lore with fairly minimal investment.

Good list and exposes one of the problems with the wizard- these are largely the only spells worth taking at all. All the grimoire switching and hijinks are pretty unnecessary and useless. Even copying feature is useless except to get aloth his first two level 2 spells while he goes back and picks up slicken on his level up. Shame the class abilities are so poor as well.

Yeah no health issue for pet. However there is a hidden issue for pets: no athletics skill. This means they get highly fatigued pretty quickly, which drops their accuracy and endurance. I discovered this while wandering around during the gilded vale quests quite by accident, as I happened to mouse over my pet, and found a huge debuff and a tiny endurance number. The pet is the worst aspect of the ranger class. I actually like the class, but babying this waste of meat is tiresome.

Hahahaha! Exactly wrong. Burning Hands Fan of Flames has some use, but otherwise Aloth and the wizard class is mostly baggage. This particularly true of their defensive and debuff spells. Superfluous at best. Their limitations on their per day casts wouldn't be a problem if any of the Wizard spells were worth a damn. Mr. Sawyer was clutched with terror that Wizards would break his game though, so he decided that Wizards would have nearly all of the limitations of Vancian casting, without any of the positive tradeoffs. Well, yeah, if you disingenuously stick to the crap spells. Try slicken, fetid caress, expose vulnerabilities and confusion instead. They're rather disgusting as is, let alone as encounter based. And arcane assault? Pbbt.

Pretty rough I was just in the process of trying them out, and unfortunately borked my party composition in the process as I was heading for companion quest things. The bandit had a big band of a large variety of classes with him, and 'the Dweller' is accompanied by 2 trolls and 3 greater earth blights. So... pro-tip. Don't drop your custom druid and wizard for sagani and a pike rogue built for the tight corridors of the endless and try to pick up some bounties 'on the way.'

It doesn't seem to fit. The monk as written here fits pretty well with the world, the body/soul duality and flagellation. Ki is a poor fit, and basing it off grazing is way too random to be reliable.

Your base DR (the top line on the character tab or the first value on the item itself) protects against everything, yes including elemental damage. The exceptions are specific DR against specific damage types based on the armor. So leather is DR 6 against everything but slash (better) and corrode (worse). Basically the primary value is everything but those called out specifically. And this can stack up, like pale elf and secrets of rime, who would while wearing padded, have a DR 19 vs cold.

Sell it, it really is just junk (the hunting bows on the hut dwellers are better weapons). There are a couple pistols lying around down the road a piece past gilded vale, though pistols are a bit...eh.

How so? I have zero uses for literally half the stats on most classes. Tanks could use the dps stats, but ultimately per/res matter so much more that they aren't viable. For non-tanks, per, res and con matter not at all, and int can sometimes be ignored as well (by a couple classes).

Except in D&D, terrible pathfinding AI doesn't make you eat a bunch of attacks when seeking new targets or getting around bits of floor that are essentially randomly not walkable. Also, what Epislon Rose said. D&D is, much like PoE, full of trap choices and exploitation.

It depends on the situation. In the open, one tank can be problematic. If there are any chokepoints, on the other hand, the problem can be on the other foot. Stupid pathfinding and disengagement attacks.