KDubya

Normal weapons have 7 penetration, some have 8 and armor piercing ones have 9 penetration. Naked or robes have 3 AR. All attacks do over penetration and you have 0% recovery penalty Light armor has 5 AR with a 4 versus one type. This means all attacks will do full damage everytime and that the mid penetration weapons will overpenetrate if they have the correct damage type and armor piercing will always overpenetrate. The take away here is never wear light armor. Medium armor has 7 AR with a 6 versus one type. This means all attacks will do full damage at all times (assuming equal levels of enchantment) but nothing will overpenetrate unless their is a critical hit. So -35% recovery time gets you protection from overpenetration only. Basically if you went naked and dropped 6 points of dexterity and added 6 to constitution you'd have -18% action speed and +30% health while a medium armor wearer has -35% recovery and avoids the over penetration damage boost of 30%. Better to go healthy + clumsy than wear medium armor. Heavy armor (Plate)has 9 AR with a 6 versus crush (Brigandine has a 6 versus pierce) This means normal weapons will do 50% damage unless they are the one type that works well, the mid penetration types will do -25% damage unless they are the correct type and armor piercing weapons will do full damage. This comes at the cost of -55% recovery. So light armor is worthless, medium armor only stops overpenetration and heavy armor has protection against some normal weapons and some mid penetration weapons and no protection from armor piercing weapons. To make even heavy armor a good trade you want to have some additional armor boosts like Gold Pact, Iron Skins, Barbarian's thick skin, Berserker Rage or something like that.

Confident Aim will only add effectively 25% graze to hit as you'll have Disciplined Strikes up for 50% already so its not as essential but remember that the ability choices at low level Fighter are really limited so Confident Aim might end up being the best of a bad choice. Dual wielding will do more damage and clear trash faster but the toughest fights will do better with the super accurate single weapon style. The Devoted getting better crit damage has a nice synergy with the extra accuracy and hit to crit that single weapon style gets. Maybe go with robes instead of armor to keep the attack rate up. Even heavy armor looks like its frequently breached so might as well go naked.

Oh thank you very much. I will sleep tonight in peace now. Seriously though. I might be convinced on the other subject - different playstyles and all - but I always thought that if you have to sacrifice features for some other features that is bad mechanic or design. Don't confuse this with choice, where I decide between use this or that ability when I play. In these cases you give up a mechanic designated for you to use to make to make another work. This is why I don't understand why are you conflicting so eagerly with me. Each of those recommendations would make gameplay more easier and linear. Especially with shattered pillar I am so much baffled why you object. All of you. Can you explain me why because I seriously don't understand. Your suggestions on Torments Reach to use the limited Mortification instead of the limitless Wounds is a big non-starter for me. If Swift Strikes costed Wounds I'd have no use for Mortifications at all. At that point you could probably just do away with Mortification completely. Every sub class gets a malus and Shattered Pillars get reduced Wound capacity, what would be a suitable replacement?

I find Stunning Blow to be terrible at a cost of two mortification. A multi has like 5 and a pure monk has like 7 at level nine (going by memory) I'd want at least three uses of Swift Strikes so that leaves one use of Stunning Blow per fight. Not worth the ability point spent, definitely not worth the two to upgrade it. Give me a spammable Force of Anguish and a spammable Torment's Reach, especially the stun upgrade. Wounds are limitless with a Shattered Pillar as I only have to cause damage to fuel it, not take a beating and need healing. Keeping Lightning Strikes up all the time is worth it to me. +35% action speed, +30% lash and it even activates Wellspring of Life for another +2 power levels which get you +1 penetration, +4 accuracy and +15% damage. What do you do with your stockpiled wounds #6-10? I could see benefit for a Helwalker to max out their Might bonus and auto attack or cast spells or whatever, but what does a Nalpazca need a stockpile of wounds? Unlike the others which take damage for wounds where their is no limit to how much damage you can sustain (except for total health pool), a Shattered Pillar is limited to their own damage output. A Force of Anguish can generate enough damage to spam forever, Torments usually gets two, three on a crit so you might have to add in a auto attack in between each one but since it stuns in a cone its pretty safe. For this five wounds is enough. When we finally see the highest level abilities and what they cost we can revisit the question on five being acceptable or not. It might be that a Shattered Pillar does better with a multi class where they miss the highest abilities in the event that the five wound max severely hampers the Shattered Pillar. Pale Elfs are cool in that they can have beards but mechanically Nature Godlikes are pretty damn good for fist monks. An inherent +4 accuracy and +15% damage is like getting a hat that gives you +4 Perception and +5 Might. On Devoted/Monks - they are very good but a single class Monk is in the same ballpark. Its close enough that individual taste will sway it one way or the other. At least in the Beta where max level is nine and we don't know what happens at level 10-20. After the first few iterations where multiclass was always better it was refreshing to have a tough choice between going multi or single.

I find Swift Strikes and its upgrade to Lightning strikes to be class defining and one of the best in the game. Duration is like 15 seconds with a 15 Intellect and power levels which is plenty long enough. You get +5 Dexterity, +20% action speed (+35% including the dex) and a +30% lightning lash. plus it is the only mortification ability that I usually take so I can keep this active for the whole fight. What two abilities work better than Torment's Reach? The upgraded version with AoE stuns is really good. Not as good as in PoE but there it was stupidly powerful. I still like to set the AI to spam this as often as possible with good results on PotD beta. The fact that it costs wounds which are limitless is what makes Monks great. I love Shattered Pillars. Getting wounds to further fuel my offense by causing damage is fracking great. The upgraded Force of Anguish can be run perpetually as each one will generate at least a wound which will fuel the next one. A few Monks spamming FoA and ping ponging mobs all over the place is funny as hell. Plus if you go heavy defensive via Unbroken with shield, Paladin multi, Trickster, Wael Priest or Wizard you can get good mileage out of Dance of Death and still generate wounds from attacking. Not needing to be a punching bag is my favorite thing about DeadFire. Monks do best with fists as fists do more damage than a sword, 16.5 vs 16 average, with the attack speed and recovery of a dagger. They are the king of auto attacks for dps. Using anything besides fists is generally a bad choice unless the weapon had some game altering buffs and powers. Two weapon style is much better than anything else for damage output, near 20% better for dps (factoring in using the appropriate weapon styles). Two handed does less damage and really gets hammered by armor recovery. To be less painfully slow you'd want to be running in robes while dual wielding in plate does just fine. To fix they'd need to substantially increase the damage and/or increase penetration and maybe make enchantments stronger on two handed as well. I find Helwalkers to be too glassy for my tastes and Nalpazca are either going to be brokenly good (if there is enough drugs to be under the influence for every fight) or annoying (if the supply of drugs are limited such that you are always hoarding for the next fight). I'll take the Shattered Pillar every time, five wounds is plenty as there are not any per wound stockpiled type abilities like Iron Wheel or the fire lash one. I'd suggest going Nature Godlike for the extra power levels which add +1 penetration, +4 accuracy and +15% damage and going pure Monk instead of multiclassing as the additional power levels get you another +1 penetration +4 accuracy and +15% damage. The extra abilities gained at a faster rate really make a difference. Compare a Devoted/Monk with a pure Monk and the Monk is a lot better in my estimation with near equal damage and extra abilities.

Woops forgot about the regen I think Devoted do a lot better with a weapon using class than with a fist monk. Devoted + Soul Blade, Street Fighter, Berserker, Corpse Eater, Skald, Paladin (any), Wizard, and Priest are all great because they can specialize in a weapon and pick good abilities instead of being stuck with the Fighter's lackluster tree. Even then going super shield tank with Unbroken compares favorably with the Devoted. The extra penetration can be made up with weapon switching and the extra crit damage is nice but amounts to like 10% damage (50% are hits, 50% conversion makes 25 crits which do an extra 25% damage so .0625 extra unit damage) A pure monks early access to the better abilities and more actual abilities makes them a better choice in my opinion rather than a Devoted multiclass. I need to run a Shattered Pillar mixed with a Soul Blade, Paladin, Berserker, Corpse Eater, and Skald to see how they fare.

I rolled two monks (Shattered Pillar) to compare. Both Nature Godlike for the power level boost for using fists. First was a Devoted/ Shattered Pillar, second was pure Shattered Pillar. I actually found the pure Shattered Pillar to be better. At level nine the Shattered Pillar has 13 abilities of which only the first one is poor with taking the reduced wound threshold, the Devoted/Shattered Pillar has to take two picks at this power level and all are pretty bad picks., and then only has 12 abilities at level nine. So the pure monk has effectively 12 good abilities compared to 10 for the Devoted/Shattered Pillar. This gets you the upgraded Force of Anguish for an on-demand prone and interrupt that costs just one wound, way better than the suck of knockdown. The pure Monk gets much earlier access to powerful abilities like Thunderous Blows and the upgraded Torment's Reach. A spammable AoE stun is much better than a spammable staggered. The extra power levels from pure class gets you +15% damage, +1 penetration and +4 accuracy when using fists. This is active at all times. The pure monk can freely pick a ranged weapon or alternate damage types or shield modals. If the bug of Devoted getting fists for free goes away then you'll be limited to only fists. The Devoted class adds +1 penetration with fists (the inherent power level difference gets back one), +25% crit damage and limits your weapon choices Disciplined Strikes - the +5 perception is only one accuracy better than what a pure monk gets due to power level Confident Aim - this plus Disciplined strikes has two 50% chances to convert graze to hit so 25% graze chance goes to 12.5% and then to 6.25% chance so 18.75% total so unit damage goes from 0.625 to 0.71875 or an extra 15% damage for two ability points which is the same as the 15% gained freely from power level for the pure monk Cleave Armored Grace (at higher levels than nine) Charge - I think its bugged as it'd never do anything when I tried it. Plus at a cost of two Discipline its not cheap, maybe you get one use and then need to save the rest to keep Disciplined Strikes up. All in all the pure monk is about equal in damage output and a lot better as a Monk than the Devoted multiclass. Better to make a weapon user for a Devoted which is not where Monks are powerful.

I wouldn't put too much stock in this thread. Most of the builds are from beta 1 which was way unbalanced, with hardly any from the current beta 3 or 4 whatever its up to now. Before the current Beta penetration was king and only Fighters had access to weapon styles. This meant that for melee dps you wanted a Devoted for extra penetration as well as the +20% attack speed from dual weapon style. It didn't hurt Devoted's popularity that the weapon specialization was bugged and let you take more than one weapon. Plus there was a bug where multiclasses got lots of extra abilities on level up which further powered them up. Also weapon speeds were bugged and heavy one handers attacked at fast attack speeds which also only had like one second recoveries instead of the current 3 second. Now everyone gets weapon styles so Fighters are not so special anymore. Single classes get bonus ability picks on power level ups, penetration on weapons has been drastically changed such that I'm not sure its worth wearing armor ever. Fighters are pretty much limited to Disciplined strikes, chaining cleaves to kill trash and regen. Not bad but not the easy auto pick for a Harbinger of Death melee god. Priests are still a very strong class and Paladins are still in my opinion the strongest melee class either pure or multi.

The resistances are the same as the racials so everyone can get them. Before in Beta the fighter and paladin resistances did not stack with the racial ones, is that different now? My thought was that since the weapon styles are available to everyone now, Fighters were not that great as a multi compared to Barbs and Paladins. Fighters get: stances where the bonuses get overwritten by auras (warrior stance) making cleave the best choice Disciplined Strikes which is great, the main reason to multi in a Fighter now Constant Recovery is good Knockdown sucks and Mule kick sucks donkey balls Two crap passives at tier one with arms bearer and fast runner. Hope you want an extra weapon slot The defensive passives are available to most other classes Weapon spec gets you +10% damage which is ok but nothing to gloat about Vigorous Defense at 2 Discipline for 15 seconds of +20 is good Into the Fray is bad at a cost of two discipline Unbending at a cost of three discipline will be real expensive for a multi Confident Aim is a good passive at 50% graze to hit. Charge seems bugged right now, doesn't look like it does anything Meanwhile Paladins get a +20 defense to everything including deflection for one point in Deep Faith, plus an easily spammed Flames of Devotion that can get a lasting duration, a marking ability that can refund its zeal cost, some cool on kill defensive boosts and on damage armor boosts. Plus they can get the same defensive passives as a Fighter. If I want a tanky guy I'm thinking Paladin not Fighter. Barbarians get a lot of offensive passives like extra damage when outnumbered, faster action speed on kill, rage/berserk, carnage.. If I want a tanky damage dealer I'm thinking paladin/barbarian not fighter/barbarian. Cleave chain reaction regen and Disciplined Strikes are pretty much the sum total of what a Fighter gets you. They definitely are not overpowered. PS I think single class Rogues are pretty bad but as a multi they add some value. The Trickster getting illusion spells when combined with a Paladin makes for a really tanky single target damage dealer.

When you only have five points of Discipline to spend per encounter, saving two of them is huge. Constant Recovery gets you like 3.1 health per second with a 21 Might. In that tough fight that's another 84 health regened. It looks pretty useful to me especially if you are trying to have good defenses in conjunction with the regen. If you dump Intellect without matching with Resolve you have a crap Will defense which will cause issues. If you do keep your Will neutral you're just trading duration of abilities for some affliction reduction and some deflection. I wouldn't do it with a Fighter but a Rogue might be a contender for a Moron since I don't think they have many long duration abilities. Perhaps a Blackjacket would benefit with that approach as they lose out on the Regen anyway which is the biggest concern with a low duration. The good thing is that the question isn't black and white, it really does depend on your specific build and playstyle which speaks well of the character design in the game.

In PoE my team with a Juggernaut Monk, Pelegrina, Kana and Devil would have good enough saves to just face tank charmers on PotD. never had a priest so never used the immunities. I'd expect in DeadFire that good saves will work just fine. Plus with the new spell system there is no guarantee that your priest will have the correct immunity spell, maybe you took a different spell or maybe you don't even have a priest. Fighters don't inherently have worse will saves than anyone else except for paladins who have +20 to all due to Deep Faith. In my experience on beta PotD enemies target the guy with the worst defense. If that is your super min maxed Harbinger of Death melee god then the rest of your team is in peril of getting splatted. Not dumping a defense and grabbing additional protection like Vigorous Defense or Iron Will or the +20 affliction defense can make a big difference between getting crit or getting missed/grazed. Duration wise a standout ability like Disciplined Strikes is 15 seconds. With my typical 15 Intellect I get 18.75 seconds and three uses will last 56 seconds. To match that with a 3 Intellect Moron you'd get 9.75 seconds per cast and need 5 casts to get to 49 seconds. That saves two discipline points that can be used for something like Vigorous Defense to further harden your defenses. In the case of Constant Recovery base duration is 45 seconds. My approach gets you 56 seconds and the Moron gets you 29 seconds. A tough fight, the ones where you want your regen, is going to last more than 30 seconds. If you keep your Will save neutral by adding to Resolve you'd get -35% duration to afflictions and +7 deflection which might be a viable plan but you'll still suffer from short durations. Personally I'd rather get missed or grazed by an affliction instead of getting hit or crit with a -35% duration.

Actually a Devoted/Shattered Pillar at level nine gets 11 penetration with fists and a pure Shattered Pillar gets 10 penetration so the difference is not that much. Single class getting two abilities when new power level combined with a higher power level makes fist using monks a very strong contender for staying single class. I agree that having an unarmed proficiency that Devoted needs to take instead of getting it for free would be best. have it apply to claws for shape shifters and everyone wins.

My concern would be in tanking my will save and becoming target number one for charm and dominate where my massive offensive output would be turned on my team. Its not as if I'd be dumping Intellect and adding those points to Resolve (actually now that I think of it trading duration for affliction reduction might be a good trade for Fighters and maybe Rogues.) I tend to either keep Intellect at ten or add a few to get it to 15 or so. The longer duration lets me use some resources for other abilities rather than needing to save it for a low duration Disciplined Strikes. Plus it'd greatly diminish your Constant Regen. I pretty much have been sticking with my standard ' leave everything at 10 and then pick three to raise to 15 with another three available to add wherever'

We need to see the full skill trees to see what a multiclass loses out on with power level 8 and 9 and compare that to what is gained via the flexibility and synergy of the multiclass to see if they are good or not. I'm betting that the answer is "It depends" which seems as close to balanced as we will ever get. I definitely don't think as I did earlier in the Beta that multi was always better and that's a good thing.

If sneak attack had +5% per power level that'd work fine if you did not also have deathblows. Start at +50% and scale to +85% for multi and +95% for single. Sounds fine to me. The issue would be if Deathblows was still available and it added an additional +50%.

Everyone getting weapon styles cheapens Fighters and force specialization on everyone. If you use weapons you will pick one of the styles, absolutely no reason not to. Now you'll effectively be shoehorned into a single fighting style. Before you could dual wield for greater dps and then grab a shield when you want more deflection or single wield when you want accuracy. Pure flexibility and freedom. No one was complaining that their Berserker/BleakWalker was doing bad damage dual wielding sabres. Now you will spend the point on a fighting style and stick with that to the exclusion of others because you spent a point on getting it. Now your dual wielding will be 20% faster than before which was not needed. Adding a Fighter only gets you a stance, disciplined strikes and regen. All are good things but anyone can get the fighting styles now which cheapens the fighter. They do need to give everyone Gunner and Marksmen so that Rangers aren't exclusive to them I am pleased that they finally fixed the Monk unarmed damage bug where a save/load wiped it out.

Nature Godlike Monks gain +15% damage from Wellspring of Life with their unarmed damage. It went from +20% to +35% damage. I didn't notice if accuracy went up as well or any durations on abilities like Swift Strikes, will have to pay more attention next time. Not bad but not sure that its worth a hat slot when I could have gone Aumaua for the Might affliction, Elf for Dex affliction, Orlan for Resolve affliction or Dwarf for Con affliction. PS Cleaving Stance + Disciplined Strikes (50% crit to hit) + Swift Flurry (crits cause another attack) does pretty sick damage.

I thought Death Godlike were bad in PoE and still bad in DeadFire unless you really double down on the extra damage while wounded with a Berserker/Streetfighter or something like that. Even then I think a human + a hat would be better. Now Nature Godlike are interesting due to the extra power levels. Trying a Nature Godlike Devoted/Shattered Pillar to see how the extra power levels translate into better fist damage from Transcendent Suffering. The wellspring will be easy to proc due to Swift Strikes and later Thunderous Blows.

So now every devoted get not one but two devoted weapon set? One is the weapon set you pick from level 1, another is fist?? Yep. My Devoted picked warhammers and got the Devoted bonus to pen for both the warhammers and for fists. Thing is that even though warhammers are a good penetration weapon fists match them due to the monk transcendent suffering so no need to take something to help with penetration. Need to see if I can pick pistols or blunderbuss as my weapon while primarily using fists. Both could be dual wielded and benefit from the new dualwield talent.

Devoted/Monk is quite good now. Went with Shattered Pillar like I always do. 11 Penetration fists and haven't gotten Thunderous Blows yet. The Transcendent bug is fixed so a save load doesn't wipe out your unarmed ability. Fists hit hard and fast. Basically you get two weapons that will benefit from Devoted with fists being one of them. I really see no point for light armor anymore as even unskilled fists have enough pen to overcome it. Medium looks pretty worthless as well. Even heavy armor loses against the high penetration weapons. Thinking that unless you have an armor bonus like Berserker or Gold Pact you may as well go naked, will have to see how it goes.

I think it'd be cool if in game you were the reincarnation of Thanos after the Watcher killed him in PoE. You awaken and have free will to either try again with Woedica or choose a new path. That sounds better than you are the same person as from PoE but lost all your powers for reasons ...

My first run on PoE was on hard. After that it was all PotD and sometimes Expert. On the Beta after the first run I went with PotD. I'm planning on going PotD to start DeadFire but not Expert. With Tyranny I did Act One at hard then restarted on PotD or whatever it was called. Only did the one play through and that was in the first month or two of release. Not sure how expansions and patches have changed things as the original combat equation was easily solved with Magic imbued weapons + illusion buffs + a single defense stat + light armor = win.

Dwarves are my go to race in most any game. That said, i believe that Pillars of Eternity and their whole world would have been better off if they had kept both Dwarves and Elves out of the game and just stuck with Human, Aumaua, Godlike and Orlan. Would have been original and the lore would have fit just fine. Pandering to nostalgic backers made for some bland races.

Put me down in the "this is a good thing" side. I thought they were crazy when they gave the release date. Then hearing that maybe (Maybe??) they'll be going back to Might a mere four weeks before release had me nervous. Now pushing it back makes me feel better. The problem is that they gave an exact release date too early, should have stuck with spring 2018 until they knew they had it nailed.

You don't need to take it to any extremes like 5 empowered assassin fireballs, just each guy having an Arquebus in one slot is enough. Even without stealth you see enemies before they see you. Then just activate the Arquebus modal for +20 accuracy and pick who gets shot first. Its not as if enemies are capable of switching weapons during combat. If enemy encounters started off with a firing line of aimed Arquebus shots before they switched to melee weapons there'd be a fair bit of crying on the forums. Sure it gets monotonous but it is damn effective and virtually foolproof. Even if the enemy spell casters are back far enough to not be targeted, deleting a few of the riff raff in the first seconds is still pretty good. I'm with Gromnir in that only semi-scripted encounters will mitigate this. I wouldn't want this in every encounter but in the big ones it'd be nice to start at a more even footing or even at a disadvantage. It will come down to how the encounters are designed.