MountainTiger

I get how Lesser Wounds works on paper, but in practice I think it's less impressive. The wound cap means that damage spikes frequently exceed a monk's storage capacity, and enemy DPS in hard fights is often high enough to add wounds faster than I can use them, again resulting in wasted damage at the cap. The main situation in which I find my monks struggling to generate wounds is when they don't get targeted at all, which Lesser Wounds doesn't address. IDK, it could be a playstyle difference, I just find it underwhelming in practice.

I just don't think Lesser Wounds does much-enemies worth worrying about will do plenty of damage to keep your wounds up at 10 damage/wound. It's basically an empty pick IMO.

I'd think Scion of Flame before Wound Binding or Lesser Wounds. Depending on how effectively you're unloading wounds maybe eve before Heart of the Storm. I don't think you need a ton of Dex, since your main plan is to spam Torment's Reach. I'd do something like the Monksterlasher's spread, maybe less Resolve (the shield should be plenty of deflection) and a bit more Dex.

I don't know about the lashes. I would expect them to be applied but it's worth testing.

None of the shields look right, but Badgradr's Barricade seems to have a thematically appropriate set of abilities. Monks can spam full attacks as long as they have wounds, so you should get a lot of use out of the bashing if you go in that direction.

If you hover on the text in the combat log, you should be able to see a more detailed explanation of the attack's resolution, including the pre-DR damage. In this case, the 5 damage is not coming from Gaun's Share but from a shield bash. You can see a Gaun's Share crit further up for 13 damage. For the Gaun's Share damage: 12-18 represents the damage range on a hit. This is calculated as follows: Flails have a base damage range of 9-13. Gaun's Share has a 15% damage bonus due to weapon quality; this pushes the range to 10.35-14.95. Eder has 16 base Might; this provides an 18% damage bonus, additive with the weapon quality bonus (so a total of 33%). This pushes the range to 11.97-17.29. I don't recall how PoE rounds in the UI, so not sure if you have to have something else pushing the top of the range so it rounds to 18 or if it always rounds up. Either way, this is about right. For actually resolving the 13 damage crit, we have two more damage bonuses to consider: The Kith slaying enchantment adds another 25% additive bonus, and the crit applies a 50% bonus, so the is now 18.72-27.04. Once we have a number in this range, we subtract the 10 crush DR of the enemy, resulting in 8.72-17.04 as the final range of damage from the flail.

There are some pretty dark brigandines, if you're willing to drop a bit of DR

The Dragon Thrashed, The Dragon Wailed is one of the best AOE damage sources in the game, taking that with good Might will more or less guarantee a solid character. For Invocations, I usually prefer to focus on CC and damage anyway (I do usually take Reny Daret's Ghost because of the stuns, but otherwise I find managing summons more trouble than it's worth).

On PoE, I played on Normal the first time and cranked it up each subsequent playthrough. For Deadfire I'll probably start on PotD and drop to Veteran if that seems too hard for a first time around.

Well now I need to play a toilet obsessed Zizek through the first game, thanks a lot.

Yeah, Kind Wayfarers, not Goldpact Knights

I think the main reason those are the scroll builds here is that Boeroer liked the concepts. Assuming the Goldpact Knight and Bleak Walker on-kill procs work with scrolls, you could get a lot more out of them than a conventional build.

I'll be interested to see where they take it, but Eder's racism always seemed peripheral and not very deeply felt. His big flaw in PoE is his tendency towards apathy: there are a lot of things he'd like to change, but until the Watcher shows up he's just sitting around, drinking, and waiting for Raedric or the townspeople to string him up for being an Eothasian. Meeting the Watcher jolts him out of this and at least convinces him to take care of himself, and completing his quest convinces him to take on responsibility for others as well.

I'd probably go with the Bleak Walker. A Priest of Berath is also a strong choice.

I believe that the current state is very buggy, and that the release build will still be pretty buggy, I just don't get what the doomsayers were expecting from an Obsidian release. There is a brand image to uphold here.

Durance is a religious fanatic like Raedric. Durance's saving grace is this fanaticism only led to him killing another god rather than slaughtering innocents. In the game the gods really talk to their worshipers so for Magran to stop talking to Durance is a major blow to his faith. The only way he can ever have any happy ending is if Magran talks to him again. Durance was an enthusiastic participant in the Purges, he slaughtered a lot of innocents

They're trying a new mix between Might and Resolve, called Right

Good, deconflicts April gaming time with the Battletech release and should improve the day 1 experience.

I guess I'm odd for liking the crafting in PoE. It expanded the possibilities for endgame gear without requiring a lot of investment in understanding a complex system or in gathering ingredients.

I've said before that I support the Dragon Age: Origins compromise on ammo: basic ammo is unlimited, special ammo is limited. Carrying around stacks of mundane arrows is a pain, but having the opportunity to load something special for a big fight is fun.

Charm and dominate will do this if there are no other enemies in combat; here it looks like you have two ogres under your control so one gets the effect removed.

I like dwarves, and I like casters, so usually some combination of those two. Most games seem to expect and make more sense for a conventionally heroic character, so that pushes the personality.

I don't agree with your assessment of the Monksterlasher in two ways: it's not really that dependent on Bittercut, and you can get Bittercut pretty early (need to complete one quest in Act 2 to unlock the White March, then it's dropped by an enemy in an area immediately accessible once you go there). A Firebrand Barbarian might also be worth looking at, would really emphasize the fire part. I'd want something with a higher health pool than a Priest to take advantage of Battle Forged, but you could probably make it work. Paladins are the other melee class with inherent fire abilities (Flames of Devotion and Sacred Immolation). The Darcozzi Paladini and Goldpact Knights have order-specific talents than go further in the directions you're looking (burn DoT or Flame Shield attached to Flames of Devotion).

As Obsidian games go, I've generally found PoE remarkably stable. But it's definitely frustrating that a lot of long known issues were never fixed and that the latest updates introduced some new instability.

A few points in Athletics are nice early, but it doesn't scale very well late game. You still want one Mechanics specialist. Survival is the most generally useful skill, you'll want to pick a resting bonus for every character and put in enough points to unlock it, at the second tier if you can spare the points.