Schyzm

several people seem to be overvaluing cipher/rogue because they perform so well in moderate fights. though I suppose you can have all sorts of ideas about balance. wizards/druids are still the workhorses of big important fights. I agree though that cipher feels like the best made class in this game. powerful, cool abilities, somewhat balanced feel-wise. too much of the game is too loyal to 20-30 year old rpg ideas like per-rest, accuracy, etc. and cipher is like their best attempt at a more modern rpg class.

Fighters are freaking amazing, ijs. Yeah they kill much slower than other classes, but at later stages they do not go down. It's painful to watch and not exactly exciting since all they do is swing their sword at the enemy until it finally works, but holy crap they WILL get the kill eventually. Not to mention they single-handedly hold half of the defensive line for the team. yah fighters are good tanks. I don't like any non-caster dps if we're talking "balance" though.

best: casters worst: people without spells going to have neway probably: tanks, priest

I think the most straightforward potd party is 2 tanks+4 casters. non-casters are inferior and 1 tank is really hard to make work in a conventional sorta way. so just pick whichever 4 casters u like, tho, more conventionally probably make at least 1 a priest.

should get u through potd, but I would like to point out that non-tank, non-casters are probably inferior overall. u need tanks and spells are too good.

wizards get very powerful late game because of their per rest mechanic allowing them to vomit out an enormous # of powerful late game spells in important fights. but to be honest, I don't like the class having used it to bomb a bunch of fights. cipher is a much more fun and balanced class that is more enjoyable and still pretty good with some pretty strong stuff.

I told someone else this and he said it worked, make a chanter, cast the phantom spell. it stomps everything in the beginning part of the game. otherwise just play better:)

if ur doing things that u might consider difficult u prob need a priest, there just isn't another class that covers the same design bases as priest, its just the unique flower class of pillars.

wizards are still possibly better than ciphers, just because the per rest resource mechanic is superior for beating hard fights, and those are the relevant ones. but I imagine cipher is going to feel a lot better designed and more fun and consistent.

I think it's a little of column A, a little of column B. The devs didn't like how arcane spellcasters dominated BG2, so they set out right from the beginning to stop that train before it could get going. Then they saw widespread reports that Slicken was OP (and it was, indeed) so they decided that needed nerfing as well. To be honest, I can't argue with them that much--a 1st level spell shouldn't be dominating the entire game to that degree, especially after the 1st level spells become per-encounter at level 9. The problem is that right now the Druid will soon be doing literally everything better than the Wizard. Sure, the Wizard still has Confusion and the like, but it's not nearly as spammable as the Druid's very nice level 1 spells (which lost no utility in this upcoming patch). Sure, you can say that it doesn't matter as this is a party game, but my contention is there will soon be precious little reason to choose the Wizard either as your PC or as a party member (Aloth or hirelings) when the Cipher and Druid can do just about everything better. the cipher might still be inferior just because his resource mechanic is not as suited for spamming down people in really important fights. the one thing that irks me about poe is that there is no replacement for the priest, druids are 80% wizard and paladins are 80% fighter. priest is basically its own singular class/role and that kinda gives me a sad.

It's like everyone collectively took a look at wizards in early DND and then said. "Yea, I'm gonna nerf the **** out of you until the only advantage you have lies in specialized lore, a few places to hang out with other wizards, and nostalgia." By this point the Cipher is better at CC (not reliant on rest), paralyze can be used with emergency scrolls, and the druid has better aoe. not being reliant on rest is pretty meaningless in a min/max consideration, the game is based around the hard fights. but yah slicken was holding up the wizard quite a bit, it'll probably no longer be as good as druid.

melee dps are mostly kinda pointless, I mean they do high damage, but ranged do as well. having a bow doesn't hurt u in terms of taking damage vs having a poleaxe or two daggers and the pathing problems and lack of focus fire is at least a moderate disadvantage.

I also lost my potd/toi to this bug, it is not cool, plz fix:)

wizard is probably the strongest late game char just because the game is about hard fights and a wizard w/ 10+ spells is one of the best chars at winning hard fights.

I don't like the per rest spell system either. I thought it was really strange when I made a druid and was like, "oh damn like 8 spells! imma spell fiend!" skip forward to playing druid, its basically entirely auto attacks. you get some relief later because you kind of collect a large number of overall spell uses, but there should probably be a better way at this point.

Thanks, thats a bummer, it seems like lots of attributes aren't terribly desirable, I wonder if might increases the damage of summons.

chanter is my favorite char, seems really good, but I was wondering, does dexterity make your phrases go faster? like will you get more overlap if you have a high dex chanter?