MadDemiurg

Chanter with the fire rain chant is a dps powerhouse :D That been said, Dracozzi PC pala is quite good. +6 acc aura and 2x +10 acc buffs per battle on top of it is no joke. Defenses are good too. Basically I see 2 main problems with paladins atm: Non PC paladins are much weaker. If you want to use a paladin it MUST be a PC. Maybe non PC paladins should either get bonuses from PC's alignment or just get increases with level. They don't have as many engage slots as fighters for tanking. Adding +engage to some paladin ability or buffing hold the line to +2 would be welcome Also, maybe aura range can be buffed (bit too small atm). This is more or less in line with OP's suggestions, but not so dramatic. Otherwise, I think they are fine.

It was soloed by a cipher (there's a post on this forum about it, although with S/L). Tactics did involve a petrify trap. I think same tactic can be used with any class, but cipher powers were useful in dealing with the ads.

Wow, thats quite impressive. If it's doable with a paladin, I'd say it's probably doable with all classes.

Well, D&D had save-or-die spells. This one is pretty much the same (it has a save after all). I'd say remove the traps and leave it to wizards .

Any sort of stacking for hit conversion does not make it progressively better (like in case of deflection for instance). Putting +20% graze to hit on a character that already has 30% would result in same dps increase as putting it on a char that has 0. So "you can stack it" is not a good argument for whether the talent is good or not. That been said, the talent is not bad, it works great if you have low/mediocre accuracy. Thing is, with 1h you will likely be aiming for high accuracy and crits to maximize that +12 acc advantage, so the bonuses of 1h style do not work well together.

They weren't nerfed that much but they never were the best damage spell, just the least restrictive one in terms of targeting. I used other spells more pre nerf too.

I've been running a monk myself out of curiosity and he deals twice the damage than the rest of my party combined I'm inclined to believe he's quite balanced. Surprisingly following in game tips on stats resulted in the most workable build for me. I went 18 17 17 8 10 8 moony. You deal very good damage with DW fists, which you can swap for dw weapons when they get better, and can tank some damage due to big hp pool which is also effectively your ability pool (that's why I think CON works much better for a monk than deflection). Just don't expect him to be the main tank. He's a solid dps with some CC options that can take some beating. Flanking mobs and taking them 1 by 1 works well, since 1 on 1 he can handle mobs just fine.

Mind wave damages 1 target, it's primarily a cc spell. Mind blades is an aoe for very dispersed groups of enemies, but it has terrible accuracy since it's +5 vs deflection and needs a roll for each jump. Soul shock is the easiest to use AoE. It has better damage than blades, lower cost and no drawback of stopping the chain on a failed roll. Most mobs should be clustered on your tank anyway so it can often hit more targets as well. Antipathetic field has one of the highest damage potentials of all cipher spells, but it is tricky to use.

They wouldn't be anywhere near garbage tier. It would just require a little ramp up which sounds much healthier, instead of having the ability to unleash several potent spells at the start of combat, every combat. They would be squishy chanters. Maybe not garbage tier, but pretty bad. The benefits of being able to do this every combat are pretty moot since you don't get into combat requiring serious spellcasting support that often. And when you do, wizards/druids/priest can unleash much more powerful stuff. By the time they would get to cast smth most trash combats would be over by mere auto attacks and most big fights too because wizard and druid bursted everything already.

That would be a shield. Ugly, overlapping design. They want fighting styles to offer unique advantages. Aside from the fact parrying would be hard to distinguish from a shield, it would scale much worse. And you can choose your shield. No, that would not be shield. Deflection bonuses grow progressively better when you stack them, so shield would do little for a char with low deflection, while parry would be much better if he has high acc at the same time. Shield would be better on high deflection char. You can further distinguish by adding duelist-like mechanics I've described in the 2nd post. As of now, 1h as a style offers greater accuracy, but graze-to-hit 1h talent doesn't offer anything really distinguishable and is opposed to the mechanics of the style (since you want to stack acc your graze chance should be lower than for other styles for the most part).

You don't need luck to CC the dragon even on PotD. You just have to know which accuracy buffs you can stack

Depends on how it's implemented. D&D also had this sort of thing with 1 attribute giving many stats, and while often being cheesy it was fine in specific occasions. It does not stack directly with deflection so their chances are multiplied for starters. If your parry chance would be 20% it would reduce incoming dps exactly by said 20%. If you balance it around 10% parry chance vs equal acc it would be fine. You would get double value from acc debuffs though. Maybe some cap is in order. Alternatively it can be made a bit stronger, but balanced by being disabled when flanked and/or limited to x parries per y seconds. That would mechanically go nicely with "duelist" style.

I think 1h unique talent should be "parry" instead of graze-to-hit bullcrap. You make a roll using your accuracy vs opponents accuracy using some negative modifier so it would be balanced and if you win your opponent misses.

The rules are too D&D like to accommodate 50 levels nicely. Epic D&D levels are too much for a video game to handle properly. We're already talking about resurrections, mass mind control etc. What level 50 could offer? Creating your own planes of existence to gather armies for invasion in other realms?

Cipher would be garbage tier if starting at 0 focus. He's mostly just good at demonstrating how much better spellcasters are to those who aren't good at managing their spells per rest usage. Most of his spells are weaker than druid/priest/wizard. He has a few OP spells though.

1h was widely used historically though, but mostly in duels and not in mass combat. DW is the silly fantasy style that offers no benefit IRL (aside from some quite specific styles that used a small defensive weapon in the 2nd hand). W+S and 2H are technically the most efficient styles in line combat.

You need to stack DR on your 1h/dw melee if you want them usable outside of flanking. That is a direct tradeoff with dps though.

Actually blunderbuss/arbalest have really long reload phase, attack/recovery pretty long too, but not so much. Thing is that you can cast during reload phase, so here is difference between bows and blunderbuss. Bow - lot of short recovery phases between attacks during which you cant cast. Blunderbuss - average phase during which you cant cast + long phase during which you can cast. I know that, longer recovery can still be annoying at times though when you need to cast a spell ASAP.

Generally no since there are a lot of crappy spells, and 4 per level are enough mostly. But it would make wizard worse if spells were better balanced. That's a bit weird for a supposedly most flexible spellcaster class.

Again, from pure dps perspective, 1h is probably better than 2h atm (not sure about estoc though). But if you compare sabre vs most 2h it is 13-19 vs 14-20, with better attack speed and accuracy. +12 accuracy is a big deal. People that say they have no problem with deflection are not playing PotD. Let's say you have 35 graze chance, 50 hit chance and 15 miss chance. vs 0 dr that means your average damage is 0.15 * 0 * damage + 0.35 * 0.5 * damage + 0.5 * 1 * damage = 0.675 weapon damage on average. 11.475 average damage for 14-20 weapon. With +12 accuracy: 23 graze, 62 hit, 3 miss, 12 crit: 0.03 * 0 * damage + 0.23 * 0.5 * damage + 0.62 * 1 * damage + 0.12 * 1.5 * damage = 0.915 weapon damage. With 13-19 weapon : 14.64 average damage. Also 0.915/0.675 ~= 1.35. So 12 more accuracy means 35% increase in dps in this case. It might seem that higher DR would favor 2h, but higher hit and crit rate don't make it so one sided. Don't have time for a chart atm, but 1h would look very solid. Thing is, you want your frontliners with shields and your glasscanons with pikes/quarterstaffs for reach. If you're brave enough to go into full contact without a shield though, 1h is a solid choice.

The minor problem with slow weapon and casting is that if you shot one you get a longer recovery period in which you can not cast anything. The actual casting speed and recovery are not affected of course. This can be remedied by turning auto attack off, but increases the amount of required micro,

1h crit build is good enough. In fact, sabre offers almost as much damage as 2h atm, with higher accuracy and speed. Quite good option if you're not going for the reach. Problem is, your tanks will likely use a shield and your melee dps will use reach to stay out of trouble. So it's not a build for a full tank + full dps party which most are using.

Perfectly doable. You can even make them fight each other.

It is +20 but should be +20%. Does Obsidian accept pull requests :D?

Yeah, this is one of the most OP combos likely. Can do some church choir RP as well :D.