Crucis

It depends on how you're using it. In my parties, I have EVERYONE carry a ranged weapon. Thus, in this "stealth combat round", I can often fire all 6 party members at 1 or 2 enemies and get excellent results. One thing that's worth considering is that the first enemy you see may not be the one that's best worth expending this full team volley on. It's often worth sending in a highly stealthed scout in a little closer to try to see if there's a spellcaster just beyond that first enemy you spotted. And then see if you can get your party to creep up close enough to be able to target the spellcaster, rather than the less valuable enemy target you first spotted. If you don't think you can do this, sometimes it's worth firing only one guy at the closer enemy to trigger the combat and get the other enemies to come into range. And when they do, then let loose with the rest of the volley at one of the more valuable enemies. Of course, there will be some battles where this tactic may not be optimal, not because there's something wrong with nailing one enemy early on, but because getting close enough for everyone to get into range for that first ranged strike may force you to give up a defensible position, like a door way chokepoint. Still, that doesn't mean that you can't fire a single shot at the first guy you see and hold the remainder of the shots for other targets as they show up.

If the AC was an option to be taken at creation, it'd be much better. Not everyone wants to drag along a useless pile of fur.

I found both Inquisitors (?, whatever Keldorn was) and Undead Hunters to have been excellent pally kits. I didn't particularly like Cavaliers, but that was in large part due to them not being allowed to use ranged weapons, and my play style demands that all characters have a ranged weapon option.

Ruffian not useful? Are you nuts? It's a very good WF. Sabers are supposedly the best 1H weapon, and Clubs are a great blunt 1H weapon alternative. There's an excellent "Superb" unique club that I've given Eder every time to go with whatever Saber I have him using. Plus Ruffian gives him pistols and blunderbusses, one of which makes for a really good opening strike weapon for Eder.

Which really just brings me back to the pacing issue again. You get overleveled and then it's practically like having God Mode in 9 fights out of 10, even putting aside all other potential issues with combat that might warrant discussion. Welllllll, then don't be an obsessive completionist and leave some side quests undone, and try to time things so that you make the "leap" to the final few areas about the same time you reach level 12. Problem solved.

I kind of feel the same. For me playing an rpg has much to do with developing a character or group of characters. I think, the cap should have been set at 14 or 15. That would have been enough for the whole game. More than once I stopped playing when hitting the cap and starting over with a new character or rushing through without doing side quests anymore. Curious how the new nerfed experience system under patch 1.05 pans out. But I fear that the cap will still be reached well before finishing the Twyn Elms Arc. But there you have it. I love my completionist runs. And if you do that, the cap is really an issue. It should have been taken into account. As I said, 14 or 15 would have probably been enough. It was much better balanced in Neverwinter Nights II. In my numerous playthroughs of that game I always hit the cap at the very end of the game. But if you balance the game for the obsessive completionist, you end up hurting those who aren't. It's as simple as that. There was some guy in a similar thread who got to the final battle by level 8, who obviously hadn't done many of the side quests. (He was wondering how he was supposed to win the final battle.) If the level cap had been raised to level 14-15 and the difficulty level raised to match, this poor guy would have been in even deeper trouble than he already was when he reached Thaos at only level 8 with the level 12 cap.

What it really needs is a Tome of Amazing Agility, or a Codex of Stupendous Strength, etc. Or maybe an Idiot's Guide to Disarming Traps. Or Super Simple Stealthing in Six Simple Steps. (The book might be nearly invisible and require 10 points in Mechanics to detect.)

The old IE Hold Position command was MUCH simpler and effective.

I completely agree. Building up enough chants to use a 3rd level invocation takes so long that by the time you could use one, it's often too late to matter, since your party has probably nearly won the battle or is nearly dead. I think that the devs desperately need to rebalance Chanters. But in the meantime, I tend to think that the best way to use chanters is to mostly ignore their invocations and just focus on making best use of their chants, including the highest level ones. Chanter is the number one character to pull you out of nearly dead situations and into victory. Extremely useful if you're not save scumming and/or playing ironman. With the speed chant and maybe some speed items or talents, he can almost always save your game. Also, the Ila chant and the +30% lash damage chant are great for shooter-heavy parties. The rest of his abilities aren't that great, but that just means you can outfit him as a damage dealer and spend few points upgrading his chanting ability. I don't doubt that Chanters can have their uses, but so do other classes. However ... I don't know what "save scumming" is. Nor do I pay attention to those idiotic chant or invocation names, which is a BIG reason the Chanter class turns me off. It's like someone went miles out of their way to come up with the most idiotic, most difficult to remember, most annoying names for a class' abilities. To me, you've got the reloading chant, a burning damage chant.... you've got Ogre summoning invocations, and so forth. Hiding these simple to describe abilities behind ridiculously foolish, ridiculously long names is a complete turn off, at least for me. Hell, there are a number of wizard spells with names that I find silly and makes recognizing them quickly for what they do unnecessarily difficult. /rant

I like playing ranged elven characters, so it seems pretty fun to me. What's fun is entirely relative. How could you possibly find a constant +5 accuracy bonus fun? If that bonus was gone, but everything else in the game took a 5 defense hit, literally nothing would change. You don't define what's fun for me. OK well good for you, then. This thread is about the power of their racial ability, not your fun. You're the one who brought the issue of whether the ability was "fun" into the thread, not me.

I like playing ranged elven characters, so it seems pretty fun to me. What's fun is entirely relative. How could you possibly find a constant +5 accuracy bonus fun? If that bonus was gone, but everything else in the game took a 5 defense hit, literally nothing would change. You don't define what's fun for me.

Actually, Boreal Dwarf ability isn't bad either. Those +25% damage to 2 different monster groups aren't bad at all.

I like playing ranged elven characters, so it seems pretty fun to me. What's fun is entirely relative.

Not everybody plays in such a way to find every last side quest to farm every last XP to be found. If the game was balanced for the "do 100% of the side quests" crowd, the people who didn't would have a much more difficult time as they approached the end of the game.

This. DEX is actually somewhat important if you're using a damage-based Chanter. I would only dump it if you were using a tank based Chanter. If anything INT should be the first stat to look into for dumping, since it doesn't affect Chants only Invocations, and the only ones that would be hurt by low INT are the status inflicting ones. The problem with dumping INT is that it'd reduce the size of Chant's AoE, which doesn't seem like a good thing to me. That said, if one only used Summoning invocations, INT wouldn't be as much of an issue for them, since IIRC they hang around as long they're not killed or the battle ends.

I think the ability description mentioned that shielding flames is for allies only. So the paladin is excluded? Shieldbearer abilities seem to be more focused on helping allies than on themselves.

Well, the defination of ranger is a tough one. BG games were using the D&D rules and the D&D ranger paradigm. But ranger means everything from LOTR where it is a race/lineage, to D&D where it is a fighter-druid hybrid, to other games that took the root word "range" to mean "ranged weaponry user" which is what POE has done, along with some other more exotic concepts of the class/term. This game isnt BG based and it isnt D&D based. The ranger here is just a ranged weapon specialist with a pet. That is OK. I agree they should have their own unique style, and they sort of do: ranged attacks. But its a little bland, for all that. as for WS -- noble offers 2 ranged weapons, secpter and rod, which might make an OK build. Most folks seem to be loading up on the slowest, hardest hitting stuff, and those are middle of the road but they do offer ALL THREE damage types (pierce, slash, crush) so one could make a solid build from it. I'm not at all sure that I'd say that PoE isn't BG/IWD or D&D based. Oh sure there are differences. But the similarities are rampant and often blatantly obvious. Often painfully so. You have weapon focus, weapon specialization, and weapon mastery for fighters (though they are for groups rather than specific weapons). Even the terminology is the same. Weapon SPECIALIZATION. Weapon MASTERY. Looks like a direct copy to me (from IWD2), IIRC. There are a considerable number of wizard spells that seem like near direct copies from their BG or IWD counterparts. And the list goes on and on. Heck, I'm not even sure that the number of differences is greater than the number of similarities when it comes to the overall rules set, etc. As for the definition of "ranger", I agree. I personally don't mind the PoE version of ranger as ranged combatant, though I could do without the animal companion. But I could also see a version of Ranger as "Light Fighter" (not "Fighter Lite"), as I described previously, which could cover both melee and ranged combat. The old BG2 Stalker kit is probably the closest match, but not perfect, with the idea being that this style of ranger is about stealth, speed, hit and run, and so forth, rather than wearing the heaviest armor and slugging it out, toe to toe with the enemy. The problem I see here is that such a character/class could very easily be seen to overlap with the Rogue class and possible make Rogues irrelevant. Also, I suppose that one could also argue that there's no hard and fast reason why you couldn't make a "stalker" style "light fighter" character using the Fighter class. Of course, such a character wouldn't have any rogue like abilities, but given that skills aren't limited by class, there's no real reason you couldn't build a decent stealthy light fighter from a Fighter class, if one chose abilities and talents that fit the theme as best as possible.

It's irrelevant to their chanting, but not to their physical combat abilities. You could in theory have a ranged chanter who just hung back, firing whatever ranged weapon fit their (your) fancy, and DEX might matter plenty. Or you can be a Kana-like chanter, strap on that plate armor, grab a big ol' greatsword and chant away on the front lines, and DEX might not matter so much, if you're a tanking chanter.

I think that they were priests of Berath. I didn't use them, in part because I found them ugly. But also because even enchanted to Fine, they wouldn't have enough DR for my taste at that point in the game. I stuck with scale armor, IIRC, for a while before switching to padded armor and eventually some excellent or superb robe. (It might have even been Eder's Scale armor that has the Second Chance enchantment going for it.) Yes, the choice of armor for a monk is going to be something to consider very hard. Early game, you can run nekkid and do just fine going all out damage. Mid game is where it gets tricky -- you don't yet have the best robes and belts and such, so your DR is too low, -- mid game to me was a good time to wear heavier armor and then you can remove it again late game when you find the robes and other items. My level 12 monk still only has an excellent robe (I actually have at least 3 with different DR enchants). If you spend the resources you can enchant the priest robes to have a pretty good DR combined with belt and such all on a very, very low loss to attack speed. Its just an interesting item that worked well for me, ugly as it is, and you can get a bunch of them early on. IIRC, my level 12 monk ended up wearing a green robe whose name was something like Gwaen Gwist or whatever. It was a damned fine robe late in the game.

That particular line of argument is flawed as it can be applied to all classes. I will agree that having resurrect as a class skill isn't anything special as the resurrect scroll requires a low amount of Lore and has a very large AoE. It's usually better for even the Paladin to use the scroll then THAN their own class ability in that regard. It depends on the situation. But unless it's the final battle of the game, I'd say that it's the reverse. I'd rather expend an ability that's replaced at no significant cost than expend a scroll, unless there was a reason that the scroll was the better option for the situation. That is, if the paladin ability can raise only a single character, and you have only a single character in need of being raised, then the ability is a better choice than the scroll which can raise up whomever is in its AoE. It may also depend on whatever other differences may exist between the ability and the scroll, mostly how much END does the character get after being raised.

Agree 100% on the aura. They're too small in general. And their small size means that any AoE increasing effect from high INT isn't going to be worth investing in that high INT. +24% of a small number is still going to be a small number. That said, if one is going to go for a high Lore score with a paladin with the intent of casting scroll spells, a high INT could come in useful there, so one should be careful not to totally dismiss INT here. -rezz "kill" instead of "skill" I don't have the slightest idea what you're saying here. Boring play? It's a matter of personal taste. What you find boring others may find enjoyable. Personally, I enjoy having Pallegina along in my parties to support Eder. I'm not interested in worrying about crap like "cc" and "dps". I bring alone characters that I like and find useful for my playstyle, and don't worry about the rest.

^ Exactly this. The perceived strength of the wood elven racial benefit points to how much weaker most other races' racial benefits are. IMO, there are very few other racial benefits that are even decent to pretty good. Obviously, the Moon GL. The Hearth Orlan's bonus to crits isn't so bad. The Boreal Dwarven bonus +25% damage vs 2 monster groups) is pretty decent. The Island Aumaua benefit (i.e. getting an extra weapons slot) is pretty decent, IMO. Beyond that, I'm not sure that I'd say that any of the other races' benefits are any good. Other than the Moon GL's ability, I honestly don't see any ability that requires the character to fall below 50% END as "good". The Moon GL's ability is good because it's meant to heal you after reaching those thresholds. I don't see making one's character stronger or more damaging when below 50% END as a good thing. I'd rather not be triggering it in the first place. I prefer abilities that aren't tied to reduced END. That's why I like the racial abilities I list above. On a side note, why do other races with sub-groups have different abilities for those sub-groups, while humans share a single racial ability regardless of whether they're Meadow, Savannah, or Ocean Folk? Or for that matter, why not have all of the different racial sub-groups get different attribute bonuses, rather than have those attribute bonuses tied to the overall race?

I completely agree. Building up enough chants to use a 3rd level invocation takes so long that by the time you could use one, it's often too late to matter, since your party has probably nearly won the battle or is nearly dead. I think that the devs desperately need to rebalance Chanters. But in the meantime, I tend to think that the best way to use chanters is to mostly ignore their invocations and just focus on making best use of their chants, including the highest level ones.

I think that his point is that you can "want" it all you want, but that isn't going to make it so. This is what I was referring to above when I said that Chanters face a painful dilemma when choosing between using fast, but weak chants in the hopes of getting to their invocations faster, or using slower, but more powerful chants and having almost no hope of ever building up a high Chant count. I haven't played a Chanter beyond having Kana around for a while, but I'm strongly tempted to say that one may just be better off forgetting about the Invocations and instead making better use of the Chanter's more powerful Chants, since those are far easier to make use of than the high level invocations.

It seems to me that Chanters are faced with a painful conundrum. Either you can use chant lines designed to build up your chant count ASAP so that you can cast powerful Invocation spells ASAP, but only at the cost of weak, low powered chants. Or, once available, you can use the more powerful and more effective chants, but only at the cost of a much slower chant count progression. It almost seems like a no win situation because even with fast chants, getting a high enough chant count to cast a high level Invocation spell will take a long time. And heaven forbid that you try to get a high chant count using a chant line composed of level 3 chants! In some ways, one almost wonders if worrying about the invocations is worth it, and if Chanters would be better off just going with the Chants that they feel would be best for their party, and casting spells from scrolls (with the obvious need to build up Lore along the way).