MadDemiurg

Single classes that work well enough are either the ones that have no good multiclass build options or the ones that gain more and more powerful abilities with each level. Tbh almost all weapon classes benefit from multiclassing now, but rogue is likely the most front loaded class of all. Rogues get like 80% of their power from the first level. There's no real way of making multis less OP than nerfing starting class abilities and giving all classes good abilities on each new power level. Currently 90% of the rogue ability tree is trash but sneak attack + let's say street fighter passives are so massive it doesn't really matter. Sneak attack needs to be nerfed at level 1 and scaled with either power level or new talents at certain power levels. The whole actives tree is in severe need of rebalancing, most of them are complete trash both in guile costs and in general. You should be excited to unlock stuff like strike the bell earier, not look at it and say: "well, its another ****ty ability I won't use". And honestly, single class rogues aren't that bad compared to other single classes, they're just harder to use. Pure street fighter still deals pretty absurd dps but you need to jump through additional hops to keep it alive.

Honestly solo is bit dull cause you only have 1 char and all party synergies and multiple char build complexity goes out of the window. But it's the only way to challenge yourself atm. I too would prefer the game that is not soloable so you would actually get interesting and challenging party based combat. Pillars 2 seems to be closer to DA2+ and Divinity OS 2 where all the "tactics" end up being about doing some number crunching and then exploding the final boss with 1 hit though. The thing I liked about pillars 1 is that it had much more controllable environment in terms of possible stats, it still wasn't tuned enough for the party play but oh well. Pillars 2 seems to be way worse in this regard, at least currently. Actually most of the core mechanics changes seem detrimental to the gameplay, although conceptually stuff like multiclasses is cool. Maybe they'll manage to balance it, but I'm not too hopeful. There's plenty of unbalanced stuff from pillars 1 on top of new unbalanced stuff in pillars 2 as well as a bunch of old stuff broken by PoE2 rebalancing. Tbh it's pretty disappointing, I mean Josh is a really smart guy that knows his stuff and they had a ton of exp with pillars 1 to learn from, but it feels like a good chunk of design work is done by interns. It also seems like the beta keeps pivoting on some core design decisions all the time while the release is getting closer and closer. My current estimate that the game would need at least several patches and maybe a dlc or two to be actually enjoyable (if they keep supporting it).

Got removed with beta 4, now only works on weapon attacks. Welp, let's nerf spells some more, why the hell not. Terrible decision. Honestly, the ability to pile on ALL the bonuses on weapon attacks and almost none on spells is why we have the current imbalance. Also damage dealing passives like sneak attack and biting whip having full synergy with each other while spell passives explicitly designed not to work in multiclass e.g. fury working only on druid spells.

Well, this is logical, Fod gives your character +20% fire dmg, while spiritual weapon has lash on the weapon itself. Chanter's +25% fire dmg chant is also one of the rare things that works on spells. Skald is another pretty competitive caster build without the 2/encounter spell syndrome. Skald/fighter should be nice for fishing for crits and disciplined barrage should work on spells.

Yeah, I actually said that Ascended are an exception and suggested an Ascended/Wizard nature godlike build in the other thread . +3 PL working on wizard spells is a bug tho, so enjoy it while it lasts. @MaxQuest Yeah, I had a priest main doing like 360+ dmg with the shining beacon PoE1. Good to know you can still manage it PoE2. I think if we don't start nerfing OP weapon combos and abilities most damage spells could use just a straight up buff, especially direct damage ones. DoTs seem to be in a bit better shape. It doesn't even have to be a direct buff, you could add passives like +20% spell damage or +20% spell duration (working on DoTs). There's also a ton of trash spells left from PoE1 they never bothered to rebalance so they're still trash. Although many of the new "rebalance" attempts like the new armor system have made the game worse imo. Another thing would be making pure caster multiclasses bit more attractive e.g. legitimizing ascended +3 PL to be for all classes or making fury passives work for all elemental spells.

Minmaxers. DPS is all that matters on high difficulty levels/solo play. Kill everything before anything can touch you. Not really. Extreme tanking is actually the easiest and the most consistent way to solo PoTD in these games. You want dps too but if you can't tank no amount of dps will usually save you. Excluding the shadowing beyond rogue that skips like half the content.

200 damage + ~50 vs 2 adjacent targets, make a 75 dmg fireball worth it if it hits 4+ targets.At the same time, fireball was listed as average cast in the last patch notes; and opening from stealth reduces recovery by 85% now. Dunno, which is better atm as I haven't played an alpha-strike party since beta2; so would have to actually play-test and see how it feels first. Atm am playing via dot-charm-lots-of-heals style. But generally I do see atm how to achieve ~50-60 single-target steady phys dps (with alchemy, but without cleave/flurry). And ~10-15 dps per spell vs all enemies in 4-5m radius, after the dots have landed. Well, we're sorta comparing apples to oranges here since single target damage is more valuable than aoe as it allows to drop enemy count faster. I would say that if single target is approaching aoe levels in total damage the situation for aoe is really bad. E.g taking your numbers 50-60 single target vs 10-15 aoe is heavily unbalanced in single target favor. Plus let's say 100+ fireball is 1/enc using empower, you can full attack like 4-5 times with multi pala and then go on cleaving with still really high dps. Fireball is still 3s cast + 4s recovery base whereas a weapon attack would be like 0.5s attack + 4s recovery and -44% recovery from dw + dw style. P.S. you could actually do a lot more than 240 with shining beacon in PoE1 too if you buff int and might through the roof (easy with priest spells).

Did you max perception? Anyways, **** happens and everyone can miss. It's not like Soul Anihilation has lower accuracy than normal attacks. But you hit "most" of the time atm. I mostly mess around solo PotD atm, party is easy mode . Yep, I tried a pale elf paladin/soul blade with 20 Perception, dw doesn't really work well on PoTD because I just miss so much with my attacks, and my soul annihilation miss a lot. I might try a ranger/soulblade instead, or use single weapon style instead of dw. Idk, my pala/souldblade is hitting just fine most of the time. How is dw bad accuracy wise if it doesn't give you any penalties? The only style that would beat it is 1h + empty hand as it gets 12 extra acc but it's both squishy and pathetic dps for the most part. Try dw spears for +5 acc although dw sabres and zealous focus are working just fine for me. Ranger/souldblade dw should be still decent with wounding shot but not really as good as pala. FoD also has innate +20 acc while wounding shot needs an upgrade to get it.

If you're comparing to beta mercs, they're all terrible. I stated multiple times that in suboptimal build world damage spells are ok. They are not ok when you start optimizing. I've played the very same nature godlike evoker, it's decent for a caster but nowhere near top tier. Monk multi might hit bit harder than that, but you're missing PL and spell levels from multiclassing. Scepters also suck in beta 4 after pen rebalance with comically low base dmg at the cost of marginally higer pen. So this is an outdated build. I'll let you do the math. Priest of wael with rod is decent but not really amazing due to terrible 6+s recovery with the rod modal. And this is a weapon summon, this whole thread is about damage spells being bad. Most of the builds you're suggesting are actually centered around weapons which I never argued about being not viable. The point is, spell based damage dealing is bad in current meta. But let's agree to disagree, I don't really see a point arguing with you anyway.

Good to know, still 75% is a ton.

Did you max perception? Anyways, **** happens and everyone can miss. It's not like Soul Anihilation has lower accuracy than normal attacks. But you hit "most" of the time atm. I mostly mess around solo PotD atm, party is easy mode .

Arguments aside, tell me about this devoted hunting bow guy! So you just pick hunting bow as the devoted weapon and use modal and he owns? How do you build him? Quite simple. Max Dex/Might/Per. Dump Int. Take hunting bow and use its -50% recovery modal. it puts you at -15 acc but hunting bow is +5 acc base so really it's -10. The other 10 you compensate with conqueror stance. Spend all your discipline on disciplined barrage, don't bother with any other actives. Take the +50% hit to crit upgrade. Also take confident aim. Take 2h style and other passives that look decent enough. Congrats, you have ~3s attack interval in plate armor with smth like 40-50 damage per hit at range and super consistent hits with frequent crits. Melee dw version is overall a lot stronger tho because it can cleave for like 60+ damage with a full attack. Both would benefit from dual classing paladin a lot for +resists and FoD tho. Especially melee dw because FoD is full attack. Melee dw Crusader can crit for like 160 with FoD and you see it quite often. You can use 2 in the time it takes to cast a spell, lol. It's still not as good single target damage wise as dw Inquisitor, but it has cleave.

It wouldn't be much different at 10 focus really. It is (occasionally) useful, but not something you really build around for this type of character.

I don't really agree that only the dps abilities are good, but let's say fast runner is both weak and gimmicky as you most likely won't be needing it unless you have a kite solo build. Stuff like +deflection/resists, +armor etc is universally good, although the vanilla +10 to save X perks are meh, but let's say pala/fighter can get +20 vs all afflictions with 2 points, this is pretty good. Even pure utility talents like deep pockets can be pretty good depending on power of available consumables. Well, in PoE1 consumables were just too "tryhard" for a party, but for TCS solo this was a really good pick. Thing is, a lot of the abilities are just trash, many dps ones too (see dirty fighting).

Well: a) it's a bug and it will be fixed b) why bother with powers when you have soul anihilation **hits for 170 damage**.

irony. honest, do some homework and search board for contemplative, sage, ascetic, warlock and similar combos. am thinking you is gonna be surprised by how effective such is in deadfire. your personal experience may be insufficient at this point to be giving you a full picture if you genuine is seeing multiclass caster builds as "pretty weak." and yes, nature godlike specialist casters is one-hit wonders in the sense they is powerful damage dealers. is a pretty significant "hit." HA! Good Fun! I tried some of the builds I found here and in other sources when I started on deadfire, a lot of them are actualy unimpressive or just straight up bad. Others are horribly outdated for beta 4 and don't work anymore. It's kind of hard to find good builds in the pile of of suboprimal ones. I read through the whole "best beta" builds thread. If you have something to suggest in particular, feel free to, instead of cryptically suggesting some OP builds that exist somewhere, otherwise my experience is as good as yours, thanks. 100+ fireball 1/encounter is a gimmick when I can cleave with a pure fighter for 60+ and with a multiclass one for 100+. That's quite a hyperbole) I tend to separate damaging spells in 4 groups:1. alpha-strike damage (stuff that likes to get empowered and is used to eliminate enemies asap, like missiles and fireballs) 2. periodic damage (have decent total damage values but can't be used to "evaporate" enemies; also usually do not benefit from INT) 3. total damage-per-casttime kings (spells that can deal tremendous amounts of total damage, but do it slowly, over time, like Shining Beacon, Touch of Rot, Disintegration) 4. utility damage (usually has low values but gets something useful like interrupt attached in return) If I want to deal "spell damage" I use categories 2 and 3. If I want to quickly eliminate weaker enemies at the start of combat, and fight the remaining sturdy ones, I will use spells from 1st category. Wizards in my opinion were always great at 1,2, and 4. And unlike priests sucked at 3. Which in my opinion is ok, but maybe that's why you have a feeling that they deal "no damage"? Unless my party is built around alpha-strike, I spec my wizards for crowd-control, and leave "total spell damage" department for priests, druids and in case of poe1 also: ciphers and dragon-trashed chanters. In beta4 my favorite wizard spell so far is Repulsive Visage. Even through terrifying is only partially working at the moment (as it doesn't prevent enemies from using all hostile spells like some aoes), it still prevents enemies from auto-attacking you and afaik from using single-targeted offensive stuff. The next spell I like is Miasma of Dull-Mindedness due it's decent malus to will; which helps with landing charms, beacons and also helps that visage. Other than that there is Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights, which was UP in PoE1, but decent in Deadfire, since it guarantees that your armor won't be overpenetrated, if penetrated at all. And the rest is survivability ones like: Arcane Veil and Spirit Shield, because they have good effect/casttime ratio. Special note about Confusion and Bewildering Spectacle: in PoE1 I sometimes used those as oh-shi- emergency buttons, since it could quickly transform a 10x6 into 6x10 fight. And was really disappointed with them in deadfire. But I can see a situational incentive to pick them after beta4 came in. For example Confusion could be good vs Scirocco as in: let them kill and blind themselves. I agree that it's a hyberbole, it was intended as one. But the fact is, they are still very suboptimal. I'm not sure why you're arguing about CC spells being good in the 2nd part of your post, I never suggested they aren't. Most damage spells of all 4 categories you listed are nerfed pretty heavily tho e.g. shining beacon is only a fraction of what it was before. And weapons are capable of some serious alpha too, I can probably do 2 full attacks in the time it takes to cast a fireball for 200+ total damage + cleave.

Well, I don't want class abilities to be 100% equivalent in power because the design should be asymmetric and it's ok for fighter to have better hit/crit ratio while rogue has better raw damage (Even tho the primary fighter role is "defender" so he really shouldn't match rogue in dps) but something like 50% graze to hit or hit to crit is just too much for 1 ability imo. The fact that cleave and disciplined strike are the only 2 good things about fighter(which I mostly agree with) says a lot about internal class balance. Would you ever want to spend discipline on knockdown? Hell no. If it was on at least wounding shot level of power, then probably.

I've had some fun with shifter builds lately. I don't think they are the "strongest" beta build but they're quite nice. They will probably get screwed by availability of better gear at higher levels as usual, but currently: -Shifter hide is the same 10 armor as plate armor but 0% recovery penalty. This is huge. Bear has 12. -Claws are 13-19 base damage, same as sabers and spears and scale in quality, but have +1 pen -Cat claws have lower recovery than sabers or spears which results in ridiculously fast attacks combined with your 0% recovery penalty -You can heal like 1.5 your hp (in total) by switching between all forms. If running low on health, just jump to the next form and instantly heal a big chunk of HP. Even though you'll currently be 1 lvl short of wildstrike 2 it's beneficial to multiclass as other classes give you more than just +20% lash. The best ones are imo paladin (surprise!) and rogue. Both give you full attacks (which look ridiculously fast in cat form and burst down anything in seconds) and pala gives you better survivability as well as FoD being >>> crippling strike, but rogue has sneak attack and crippling strike is still a full attack. Overall it's definitely a pretty strong dps build with decent survivability and some backup casting if needed. The downside is that you can't really dump int, but even with 10 dex your attacks are faster than most other builds.

I've run a nature godlike evoker wizard, it's a one hit wonder and doesn't match an optimized melee build in terms of total damage done in my experience. People believe many things to be OP... even when they're not. I've tested quite a lot of builds. E.g. wIzard multiclasses that work usually center around conjured weapons and they still aren't top tier this beta because of really low pen of blights. Maybe with higher lvl cap and lance accessible to multiclass they will be stronger. These builds won't really benefit from offensive spell buffs much if at all. No multiclass actually helps wizard doing damage with spells. Anyways, as I've said I would prefer to nerf all OP stuff instead. But you're welcome to show your OP spell damage builds. Of course, this discussion is pretty subjective atm, I can say "X OP" and you would respond with "Y OP". I'm not really sure what the benchmark should be cause "X did the most damage in my party" is not it.

Tbh disciplined strike (both basic and upgrade) needs a huge nerfbat. Confident aim too. Dirty fighting on rogue is like what, 15% hit to crit? lol. That been said it would instantly move fighter from top to trash tier, as most of their other actives are terrible and they lack interesting passives. So overall rebalancing is needed, current situation just gives you an OP autoattack bot with 0 build diversity.

If you want an example of a single class dpser better than a spell damage oriented wizard or druid you should not look much further than a straightforward devoted fighter (I've actually read comments about fighters being UP here which is quite amusing). It can currently stack 100% graze to hit and 50% hit to crit conversion which is kinda crazy and with a proper dps setup such as dw spears/sabers or a hunting bow with its modal can put out pretty ridiculous damage numbers. Of course it can get even better with some multiclassing, but just a vanilla one is sufficient. If you're running some rp build with like 5 sec recovery and not min/maxed you won't see the good numbers tho. Most caster multiclasses are actually pretty weak and the ones that are not do not center around spell damage, so buffing spell damage builds won't have any noticeable impact there. Again, quoting my original post " I'm not sure they are actually UP since they can do well enough on PotD so maybe it's weapons and weapon damage passives that need nerfing". Tbh I do prefer the nerf route as the game is easy enough as is, but "surgical nerfing of a few multiclasses" is not gonna cut it, the list of OP damage builds is really really long, I'll get tired if I start listing all combos.

I mean, disciplined strike might become redundant at high level party play if let's say a priest would have an aoe buff like that, but by the current lvl 1-9 standard it classifies as "OP as hell".

I mean, berath is definitely decent but it still doesn't match the good dw build damage output. Yeah, +50% lash is like bleakwalker FoD except for the +20 accuracy and full attack part and while FoD is limited by zeal this is also limited by buff duration. God weapons would be really good if they weren't meme weapons or if the weapon balance was actually any good. I actually tried soloing Skulking horror (PotD) with a lvl 6 devoted/berath priest, it didn't go well, it generally is a relatively easy fight for high dps builds. 5+ sec recovery in heavy armor is too painful when you can have like 2.8 with dual sabres or spears. You can go light armor but then you're bit too squishy.

@Gromnir If you read the first post it's specifically comparing to multiclass builds, but that's the world we live in right now. Maybe certain multiclasses need to be nerfed instead. Although certain builds can put out very respectable dps even single class. @rest Yeah, beguiler is likely a great CC class too but I haven't used it much to compare.

Cleave is a full attack afaik?