mforww

I have a 2-handed pollaxe wielding Eder that was leading my party in damage for a good portion of the game. Now that I'm at level 9, I'm sure he's probably not due to the absurd AoE from Aloth's fireballs, but he's still probably #2. If you go 2-handed with just chainmail armor (-35%), along with the right specs, they can deal a lot of damage. I'm not sure where people are getting this "nah, they don't do all that much" stuff from.

In terms of positioning, you're better off not putting your rogue or even your whole party in the middle of a bunch of bad guys. So again, I'm not really sure what the point of "scouting" is. Staying back and making the enemy come to you means they'll be coming from one direction - all the better to nuke them. Stealing is rather pointless, since there isn't much to steal and nothing that's very valuable is hanging around. This isn't like Baldur's Gate, where you can get the most OP cloak in the game through some stealthy pickpocketing... at best, you get a generic weapon or piece of armor that's just like something you can find on the bodies of your enemies. Speaking of the bodies of your enemies, the loot that's in containers is often inferior in number and overall value to that which can be obtained through murdering everyone. So rather than "saving yourself from a pointless fight" you're actually just depriving yourself of valuable resources. Stealth actually HURTS you in a lot of ways if you actually DO max it out and use it to avoid conflict.

I'm ok with not all of the skills being super high-impact. It's sort of like pen and paper DnD... you've got skills that are awesome when you need to use them, but sit around doing nothing 99% of the time. That's fine. It's just that I really don't see much use to improving stealth whatsoever. With everything else, there are skills challenges in dialogue, and some tangential effects like consumable duration. With stealth, I haven't use outside of combat, and therefore no reason to ever increase it beyond 1. If a skill isn't worth putting any points into, that's an issue for me.

Obviously I use "stealth" for the purpose of detecting traps, but beyond that I don't really see the point. Sneak attack is linked to flanking and status effects, so it doesn't even matter for rogues. Also, if you sneak past everyone in a dungeon you'll miss a ton of loot, so you're really just shooting yourself in the foot. Lastly, it takes like 1 measly rank in stealth to be able to see an enemy at the edge of the fog of war (in fact, you can sometimes see them first without stealthing at all) so if you want to set up traps or glyphs you can do that without any additional points in stealth. So why would anybody actually put points into this?

So far in my experience (normal difficulty, full party): 1. Might - it's more damage 2. Intellect - AoE spells are devastatingly powerful, and this makes sure you can nail all of your enemies with them 3. Perception - Useful for both stopping enemy mages proactively, and the deflection bonus to stop melee attackers, therefore making this the best defensive oriented stat. 4. Dexterity - Honestly, I feel like the boost to action speed really isn't really worth it. Since action speed affects EVERYONE'S effectiveness, this is the sort of stat that, if it were good, you would want to pump on literally every character. Obsidian obviously balanced this by making it weak, that being the case. 5. Resolve - Concentration is rather meh, from what I've see so far. If you tank properly and position well you almost never have a use for it, since the only 1-2 people on your front line getting hit don't do as much damage as everyone else, anyway. 6. Constitution - Ok, so basically Con wastes half of its utility by granting health, which 1) doesn't matter if you're rolling over enemies 2) doesn't matter if you're NOT rolling over enemies, since then it must be a tough fight where you need utility NOW and not later. This is probably more useful on hard difficulty where camping is more restricted. That being said, might beats con by giving you 3% more healing, which increases your effective health even more significantly! Con seems blah.

Just wondering what everyone's personal favorite chants are. My main character is a level 7 chanter, and he's been using Sure Handed Ila (faster reload time) and Lo, Their Endless Host (frights enemies). Faster reload time is really good for obvious reasons, and I'm finding the accuracy penalty to enemies from being frightened to be useful in keeping my guys alive.