KDubya

With the current recovery penalty on heavy armor I'd only use heavy armor if I was dual wielding. Unless I cared nothing for damage output. Two handers or sword and shield is just too slow with heavy armor, better to go naked and have a decent action speed. Keep your survivability up by having a good deflection via weapon modals like dagger, hatchet or quarterstaff, paladin's deep faith or illusion spells from Trickster, Wael priest or wizard. A Rogue/Paladin - Trickster/Goldpact is surprisingly tanky due to the illusion spells, armor from gilded enmity, and escape. Also has some interesting Rogue powers for more burst damage. The most powerful melee I've run in beta (not including any broken cleave cheese) was the "Carbide Chainsaw" - a Gold Pact Paladin/Berserker dual wielding dagger and hatchet and wearing full plate. With the +4 armor from gilded, tough skin and plate armor he had a massive armor rating of like 15, multiple boosts on kill, carnage, frenzy and Flames of Devotion. Bleak Walker does well here as well. Kind Wayfarer not as well as the confusion causes your heal from white flames to heal enemies.

I'd wait until we see the full ability tree to see what we lose when we go multiclass. The high level abilities might be good enough that losing them is not worth it. Paladins and Priests penalize you when you act contrary to their beliefs, so your Bleak Walker needs to be Cruel and Aggressive or at a minimum avoid any Diplomatic or Benevolent actions (I think that's what they are) You're not a bad guy just a brutally honest, tough love sort who knows that violence solves all problems and that peace is achieved through strength. All the Paladin orders are pretty good, better to pick the one that best fits your roleplay and run with that.

I haven't tried it in the last beta. Things might have changed. My issue with the Corpse eater is: Berserker is just so much better. Extra penetration, and extra armor while raging is fracking great! The confusion is easy to get rid of and if not is just a minor inconvenience Eating a corpse takes a long time. It was in the neighborhood of like seven seconds between activation and recovery during which you can be interrupted. The heal wasn't that impressive. What are you going to use the fury resource on after you eat a corpse? The best active I've seen is rage which costs you more and does less than what a Berserker gets. Spamming Barbaric blow with frequent corpse eating just looks to be a bad return on the investment of time, fury and damage output. Maybe there are some higher level Barbarian abilities that are worth using frequently enough to justify the time investment needed for corpse eating, will have to see. If the time was cut to like 3 seconds or less for activation and recovery combined it'd be a lot better and perhaps become competitive with a Berserker.

Are you sure? I remember to have tested it and found out that you could get only +10 deflection, even with both modals activated What about dagger + hatchet? On the other hand, dagger + shield should work, any shield modal. Dagger + hatchet works really well. Dual wield attack speed buffs of -50% recovery with two weapon style. Means you can wear heavy plate and still have good attack speed or go naked for massive dps boost. You get the +5 accuracy when attacking with the dagger You get the +3 deflection from the hatchet When you activate the dagger modal you get the +10 deflection boost When you activate the hatchet modal you get the -10 accuracy debuff Better offense than using a shield and comparable defense when you activate one modal, better defense when you activate both. Works really good with an offensive tank like a Bleak Walker/Berserker Fanatic, Deep Faith gets you good defenses that get increased with the hatchet and then you can activate modals when you want more.

If you have two guys attack each other in town, one using fists and one using any fast attack weapon they'll attack at the same time so fists are the same as fast attack weapons that do more damage than slow one handers so they are the king of DPS.

I kind of feel like the companion stories and personalities are a huge part of the game. Can't really imagine going with a mercenary party unless I felt like I'd exhausted all the companion content in previous playthroughs already. I did end modifying companion attributes a little for my PoE1 playthrough (using the Unity Assets Extractor). I didn't actually minmax, just shuffled the attributes around slightly - I think that was a nice compromise between RP and gameplay. Plus I actually globally raised the XP requirements by 25% in that playthrough, so I didn't feel like I was cheating to make it easy on myself. But that's a whole tangent on difficulty that doesn't really belong in this thread... Two handed weapons do less than dual wielding but are still plenty viable for use on PotD, so don't discount Wizards and their summoned weapons for that reason. The Wizard has lots of instant cast buffs that can be set up in the AI to automatically cast at the start of combat or when they run out. Makes buffing really easy. A Wizard (generalist)/Soul Blade will get decent deflection and protection from the illusion buffs like mirror image and will end up more tanky than many fighters and paladins. Fire off a Swift Feet, a Vitality of mortal essence and a mirror image and you'll spend like 1.2 seconds and get +5 dex, +5 con, and +30 (I think) deflection. I think summoned weapons take 3 seconds so if you start from stealth with a spell like fireball, combat starts and activates your buffs, summon your staff while your other party members move to engage and then you can attack from the second row with the two handed reach and add in soul annihilation as desired to splat enemies. It should be a pretty cool and viable character on any difficulty. A Monk (I prefer Shattered Pillar)/Soul Blade will do an outstanding job. If you will use fists go with Nature Godlike for the power level buff. A Shattered Pillar/Wizard using summoned weapons is also viable. I'd go with the summoned weapons so that'd be two handed style instead of dual wielding but either or both could work as well. Using the reach of two handed you could stay behind the line and get good use of dance of death for a +12 accuracy buff while generating wounds by causing damage.

Now that Sabres are only +10% damage they are basically the same as using an accurate weapon which adds +5 accuracy which is roughly equivalent to +2% damage per accuracy or +10% when not considering the penetration caused by crits leading to overpenetration or reducing underpenetration. So for damage per hit you have Sabres, and Spears with a dps of 3.74, or fast accurate clubs, daggers, rapiers at 3.77 dps. Basically they are pretty much the same, go with what's cool or has the best modal. Two handed does 21 average damage, with two handed style it is 24.15 damage per hit. Pikes and great swords have attack speed of 0.7 while quarterstaffs have 0.5 (not sure if bug or feature) so dps is 5.14 for pikes and 5.37 for quarterstaffs. Accuracy roughly converts to +2% damage per accuracy so single wielding gets you +24% damage so a spear or sabre does 21.44 damage per hit and a dps of 4.56. Single wielding a fast accurate rapier, club or dagger gets you 16.08 damage and a dps of 4.59. The above calculations do not factor in the effects of criticals increasing penetration or the effects of possible overpenetration or reduced underpenetration. I also did not add in single weapon style as it only converts 20% hit to crit which is an additional +2.99% damage which is not very good. 0-25 miss 25-50 graze 50% damage 51-100 hit 100% damage 100+ 125% damage So basic weapon unit damage is 0.625 (25 grazes do 50% damage + 50 hits do 100% damage) An accurate single wield has +17 accuracy so 0-8 miss 9-33 graze 34-83 hit 84-100 crit so the unit damage is 0.8375 (which is 34% higher than 0.625 hence where the 2% damage per accuracy rule of thumb comes from) The single weapon style changes it to 0-8 miss 9-33 graze 34-73 hit 74-100 crit so the unit damage is now 0.8625 (which is 2.99% higher than single wielding alone which is not worth the ability point unless critical hits have some extra benefit) So two handed weapons will kill trash faster but against tough enemies the +17 accuracy from single wielding an accurate weapon will help a lot. If accuracy is 17 less than deflection you get 0-42 miss 43-67 graze 68-100 hit so unit damage is .455 while the accurate single wield has 0.625 unit damage. This gets you a dps of (.455x24.15) = 10.988/4.7 sec = 2.34 for two hander and (0.625x16)=10/4.7 sec = 2.13.

1.) Torment's reach (or any monk attack like Force of Anguish etc) benefits from the soul whip. The upgraded version has a nice AoE stun that does a great job. Its toned down from PoE but I find it still worth spamming nonstop which is what a Shattered Pillar was built for as you can almost generate enough wounds from one activation to pay for the next. 2.) You have to take a Cipher power with the extra ability you gain per power level. So that's like seven and you'll have nineteen in Monk. Easy enough to find 7 good Cipher powers and/or passives to select. A pure Monk will have 28 monk powers. 3.) Both can get Thunderous Blows for +5 Might and +2 Penetration. The pure monk will be ahead by one penetration due to having two higher power levels but the Cipher gets that back with that cipher passive so its even in the end. At least in Beta the moon godlike heals are not very good as they don't scale, the same for fire godlike retaliation. Not sure if bug or feature. This makes Nature Godlike the best of the bunch, especially for a fist monk as +15% damage, +4 accuracy and +1 penetration are pretty fracking great. If you are sticking to the low level Monk attacks like FoA and Torment's, then going with a multi class, especially a Soul Blade works really well. It blends especially well with a Shattered Pillar due to their max wound limit of five instead of ten.

I've used a Shattered Pillar/ Soul Blade and a few other Shattered Pillars like pure class, mixed with Devoted, mixed with Paladin (both Gold Pact and Bleak Walker) and mixed with Berserker. Now that fist damage is fixed (it used to lose out Transcendent after a save load) Fists are the king of auto attack DPS. They have more base damage than slow one handers like swords and battle axes and the attack speed of fast weapons like rapiers and daggers. Power level also directly increases your penetration, accuracy and damage. Bottom line fists are great and you want as high a power level as you can get. So based on the above you'd want to use a Nature Godlike for the wellspring which gets you +2 power level and can be activated by Swift Strikes and Thunderous Blows so it'll be active pretty much all the time. This gets you +15% damage, +1 penetration and +4 accuracy, all of which is way better than any hat + racial. A pure class will have more abilities, more power levels, access to high level abilities and faster access to abilities. Getting an extra ability pick every time you gain a power level is really really nice. Just due to power levels a pure monk will gain +1 penetration, +4 accuracy and +15% damage for free. I would not make a pure Cipher, especially a Soul Blade, the synergy that they gain from multiclassing with a melee type is just too great. Even blending a wizard for the instant buffs, illusion spells and summoned weapons or a priest with summoned weapons would work really good and be better than a pure Cipher. Your shattered Pillar/Soul Blade gets +40% damage from whip at the cost of one ability, and can get +1 penetration from the Cipher passive for one ability. So two ability picks puts you at +25% damage, equal penetration and -4 accuracy compared to a pure monk who will be two power levels ahead. So auto attacking wise its better for the Soul Blade mix depending on the value of two abilities. If you keep the cipher abilities low, only taking the really good ones and only when the game forces you to pick one (when you gain a power level) you can get some of the monk abilities but you will not have enough to take all that you'd like. Just dumping all your accrued focus into soul annihilation rather than using cipher powers will put out a lot of damage A pure monk will be the better monk by far. If you want to use lots of monk abilities and passives going pure is a good choice. If you want instead a few Cipher abilities to add some unique stuff to a monk a soul blade is a good choice. It comes down to playstyle, from a mechanical standpoint both are good. I much prefer Shattered Pillar to any of the other Monks. Needing to take damage for wounds is not as good as needing to inflict damage for wounds. It's better to give than receive To me a melee Helwalker who gets to taking an extra 50% damage just seems too glassy. Lots of ranged versions that use the Helwalker to fuel a massive spell assault from their other class but that doesn't fit my image of a monk. I don't have experience with druids and shifters, just don't like the playstyle. For races a Nature Godlike adds a lot to a fist user. Other than the gimped island Aumaua (faster movement through surf and mud??? really ???) every race is pretty good so pick what you like. PotD with party companions will be easy enough that you can make any class you like without min maxing and be successful. So make what you find fun and interesting. Triple Crown Solo is a whole different game.

cool, i was worried for greatswords and longswords since they have only 6 pen while estoc and mace have 9, do you think hammer is much worse than longsword? (13-19 6pen slash/pierce vs 11-15 8pen crush/pierce) I didn't pick up on the 6 pen for swords Swords are 16 avg and hammers are 13 so they're 23% behind. Each missing penetration is 25% malus. So at armor value 1,2,3,5, 6,11 and 12+ the sword is better. At armor = 4 the hammer is ahead by 7% due to overpenetration, at armor =7 the hammer is up by 2%, at armor = 8 the hammer is up by 27%, at armor = 9 the hammer is up by 27%, at armor = 10 the hammer is up by 2%. Sword vs hammer is a lot closer than like axe vs hammer, other than the dual damage type as the one pen difference is given up by the 23% damage malus. I like hammer over mace as the damage is the same and I like dual damage over one penetration. But remember that this is DeadFire so the answer is always SABRE

I think a Berserker/SoulBlade would work just fine. Until we see the full tree we don't know what we give up for being a multi so that might end up with everyone being a single class. Carnage might not generate focus but so what?, its still free AoE raw damage. A Berserker still has a might, penetration, con and attack speed boost from rage, an on kill attack speed boost, thick skin for better armor, and lots of damage boosts from being bloodied and flanked. If all you used SoulBlade for was the +40% damage boost, soul annihilation, the weapon penetration passive and the +15 will defense passive that'd all be a nice add to the Berserker. If you want primarily a Cipher then Berserker might not be the most optimal but if you want a Berserker with a little something extra then a SoulBlade is a fine mix.

I don't think that any of the wizard subtypes are worth it, I'd rather have a general wizard and have accesses to all the spells, especially as a subclass. If you are looking for an illusion using rogue, the Trickster rogue subclass is pretty good. The illusion spells add a lot of survivability and paired with a Paladin, Cipher, Fighter, Monk, or Barbarian makes a very capable melee with much better survivability than the other Rogue types.

I really like that Paladins have penalties for going against their Order's beliefs. Makes it much more engaging to roleplay, especially when you turn the cheats off that tell you which response is which.

You max out at five wounds. I'm not sure of the actual damage needed but FoA can generate the one wound it costs when upgraded so you can use it forever. Torments reach generates like 2 wounds and costs 3 to use. On a crit you get back 3 wounds.

I think the best chance for overpenetrating is to get a critical hit for the +50% penetration. In the case of two handed weapons a Morningstar is crush/pierce and 8 pen while an Estoc is pierce and 9 pen with both doing the same base damage. I think the Morningstar will do better in most circumstances due to the dual damage. Another thing to consider is that basic weapons are only two penetration less than the armor piercing weapons which do less damage. An Estoc does 18 avg damage and a pike does 21. The Estoc does 16.7% less damage and best case the +2 penetration does +50% damage which becomes 33.3% more when the armor = Estoc penetration and +8.3% more damage when armor = Estoc penetration minus one. So basically there are two values of armor where the Estoc does more damage than a Pike, for every other armor value the Pike does better. The variance for two handed are the closest at 16.7%, one handed slow (maces) are 23.1% less than battle axes, and stilettos are 20% less than hatchets. The take away here is that its pretty much always better to just go for the more damaging weapon with the lower penetration rather than going for a lower damage high penetration weapon. If that is available in a dual damage type or it has accuracy so much the better.

In an earlier beta I had a sharpshooter/beguiler who dual wielded scepters. Had great penetration from scepter plus the sharpshooter boost, wounding shot is a full attack so it benefitted from dual wielding, you could start combat with phantom foes so everyone was flanked which got you past the beguiler issue of needing enemies to be sneak attackable. You can target your pet for that line attack echo something, plus ciphers have a few ally buffs and heals which work on the pet. It worked pretty good. Nice. I was planning on sticking to warbow and dual-wielding rapier and stiletto for CQB, but what you just said here seems to indicate that should still work. My plan was really to use my animal companion to set up the cipher attacks, and to use cipher abilities to "buff" my animal companion. Don't know if I'm going to use sharpshooter, since it really sounds like that would gimp me in the event that I need to get close and fight in melee. The good thing about scepters are there is no penalty for using them in melee so you never need to switch to anything else. Plus they are dual damage type.

The chart above is out of date. Single classes now get an extra ability whenever they gain a new power level, so that's level 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, and 19. Multis get an extra ability when they gain a power level but they need to spend them in each class, can't put them all in one. So singles get 27 abilities plus first level and multis get 25 abilities plus first level and 6 of them must be in each class. Its not a no brainer choice anymore to go multiclass, and that's a good thing.

In an earlier beta I had a sharpshooter/beguiler who dual wielded scepters. Had great penetration from scepter plus the sharpshooter boost, wounding shot is a full attack so it benefitted from dual wielding, you could start combat with phantom foes so everyone was flanked which got you past the beguiler issue of needing enemies to be sneak attackable. You can target your pet for that line attack echo something, plus ciphers have a few ally buffs and heals which work on the pet. It worked pretty good.

I just had a thought about a Devoted Wizard going with staffs until unlocking Citzal's Lance and then re-speccing; in PoE first level selections were locked, only second level and beyond were changeable. Devoted select their one and only weapon at level one so they'll never get an opportunity to select a different one. If that is still true would you want a staff user who can use their summoned weapon for the entirety or go with Pikes and just suffer until you finally unlock Citzal's? Or avoid Devoted and go with a plain fighter or some other melee class? ​​MY BAD - its companions who are locked, you are free to cheeses as much as you want.

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If you sit out the first few months you won't be able to participate in the balancing discussions. That was quite fun in PoE playing in each of the early versions and witnessing first hand what balance changes occurred. This last Beta with the changes to single class - more abilities and the fixed monk unarmed damage give me an optimistic belief that balance will be pretty good.

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Another thing to consider is with iron wheel reducing incoming damage and other monks needing to take damage to get wounds you might get to where you run out of wounds until they expire. At 10 wounds getting +10 armor it'd be hard to generate many wounds to make up for any you use. If you are just going to sit at 10 wounds and auto attack for the extra fire lash that sounds rather boring. A Shattered Pillar will always have wounds because they will always be doing damage. Set the AI to use Torments Reach when you have five wounds and you'll bounce between 2 and 5 wounds. If you were spamming upgraded Force of Anguish you'd bounce between 4 and 5 wounds. Plus it'd be a lot easier to make use of Dance of Death and ability spamming as you can stay unhittable for the +12 accuracy boost and use your damage output to fuel ability spam like FoA or Torments.

If you can stack enough AR boosts it becomes worthwhile. In the example you mention, a Berserker with fine light armor you have 5 +1 (fine) +1 (thick skin) + 2 (Berserk rage) for a total of 9 AR with 8 versus the weak type. For -20% recovery you have -50% damage from normal weapons, -25% from fine normal weapons, no protection from some of the mid pen weapons, -25% from the rest of the mid pen weapons, no protection from fine mid pen weapons and no protection from armor piercing weapons. Even crits won't be able to over penetrate you. If you went with fine robes you'd have a AR of 7 and no recovery penalty. This would stop anything from over penetrating you and even armor piercing weapons would need a crit to over penetrate. If you went all in with plate you'd be at 13 AR, now we have some armor worth wearing. Even Fine armor piercing weapons are getting socked with -75% damage. Definitely worth the -55% recovery speed. Just Dual wield with the style boost and your attacks will be plenty fast, add in the speed boost from rage and some boost from the on kill effect and you are a Harbinger of Death melee god. The extra two penetration that they gave to every weapon really cheapens the value of armor.

So One-Handed Style beats or is at least on par with Dual-Wield? What about 2H? Still awful? Without running the math I'd say that dual wielding is probably better in all cases but single weapon style, especially with a Devoted or anyone with something special for crits, is close enough to not be a gimped choice. As long as doing like 10-20% less damage is close enough anyway. It gets complicated when you try and factor in the penetration effects of crits and overpenetration, or even a situation where you need a crit to get past the armor. Not sure that the same can be said for two handed style, it does like the same damage as single weapon style but doesn't get the big boost to accuracy and crits. If I was balancing dual wielding I'd give it a -1 malus to penetration or something like that.