Eos

Generally speaking you want Marksman, the appropriate Weapon Focus and Gunner/Penetrating Shot for your ranged DPS. Gunner for slow firing weapons, Penetrating Shot for fast firing weapons (and kinda the blunderbuss, though one might argue that the blunderbuss isn't exactly a DPS weapon but rather something for cyphers - but opinions on this are divided and I haven't seen anyone doing a proper testing on PotD against different types of DR enemies)

The One-Handed, Two-Handed and Dual Wield talents only work for melee weapons. The equivalent weapon talent for ranged weapons is Marksman

Where you got this from? In law they call it 'systematic interpretation', i.e. looking at something in relation to other examples from the same environment. In this case: every other talent in the game adds %-based damage. Stand Alone is the only one which adds a flat damage bonus. There isn't really a reason why this should be the only talent that works this way, at least no obvious one. So most people assume that it's a unintended leftover from the beta in which several skills/talents had flat damage bonuses and all of them except for Stand Alone were changed to being relative. So in no way absolute certainty, but rather likely that it's just an oversight and will be changed. Also because it's crazy op :D

Did you really have good experiences with confuse spells? From my playthroughs they are pretty much unusable unless you can be absolutely certain that the mobs are completely shut off from running into your party while confused. My fights usually evolve around having all the mobs on my tanks and as far away as possible from my squishies. One confuse spell though and they are all over the place, engaging whoever after the (pretty short) confuse wears off. I first saw the spell and thought: 'Neat, aoe disable', then used it and, once the confusion wore off, had 3-4 mobs standing right next to my casters without having a chance to stop them from walking there in the first place (because you can't engage friendly targets and disabling them any other way breaks confusion/makes confusion obsolete in the first place) Otherwise useful tips

This. Either go Arbaleste, Arquebus or Pistol for raw damage.

The experience malus shouldn't really be that much of a drawback. As said, your created hirelings are probably superior in terms of stats/talents anyway and eventually everyone gets to be level 12 anyway. But do I understand that correctly: you think magic and especially Cyphers are underwhelming? What kind of planet-melting, galaxy-destroying powers do you expect from your magic users?

Slightly over 40 hours on Hard, doing all the quests, exploring all the areas. Though I kinda fast-tracked the first couple of hours because I decided to remake my main character and then just skipped the first act of the game. Isn't the pool missing the 30-40 option?

Well, he certainly made his point very clear. But I'm surprised that the mobs seem to have infinite uses of their spells. Had always assumed they'd have just as much of a limited spell usage as the player's chars

I agree with you OP. Except that I have a different quarrel with some of the design decisions made. The game would be good and I would give it 10 out of 10 if it weren't for its complete lack of first person shooting sequences and car tuning. I mean, why would anyone make a RPG without some fast-paced World War II shooting and some nice, technical vehicle tuning? wtf?

Why not a monk or barbarian then? You didn't specify the difficulty, but from what I've heard they're pretty much what you're looking for. Somewhat tanky, up-in-their-face-ish melee damage gods who don't even need to switch between weapon sets or spread their talents thin to achieve their front line capabilities.

What weapon are you using,, Spear/Pike? Ranged, for most of the game the Arbaleste Hold-Wall, then the named Arquebues from the Pirate bounty. How do you have more crits than hits? Because the number of hits is the actual number of hits, not the overall number of attacks. So it's the overall number of attacks not including misses, grazes or crits.

Just out of curiosity: why do you want to run a (sub-par) hybrid?

Ah, sorry, somehow I managed to think that you wanted to be tanky. So ranged DD it is. But I don't think it's a good idea to stat/gear your Chanter to be able to engage in melee while also trying to maintain high ranged DPS. You can't excel at both and there are more efficient ways to confront melee heavy encounters than to have one of your chars be a jack-of-all-trades. Stats Maximum Strength, Maximum Dexterity, Maximum Intelligence: you want to hit hard, you want to hit often and you want to hit a lot of things in one go Minimum Perception, Resolve, Constitution: granted that you position your Chanter well and properly manage aggro, you don't need any sort of defensive stats Talents All the offensive ranged talents there are: Marksman, Gunner (if you go Arbaleste/Gun)/Penetrating Shot (if you go Bow), Weapon Focus and then maybe some of the +elemental damage talents if you have a specific invocation nuke that you like to use a lot, or else Envenomed Strike, or Savage Attacks.. after the initial three talents you are pretty much free to choose whatever you want as they rest is rather marginal in comparison to the first three talents Items Most damaging ranged weapon you can find, no armor (only slows your attacks down) and items with +Might/Dexterity/Accuracy/Crit Multiplier/Ranged Damage Combat Best chants for ranged offense are the attack speed chant and the fire damage chant. Not much else to chant. Stay in the back, focus down crucial/squishy targets first and throw out an invocation whenever you got the resources for it. I'm not sure why you would ever want to go melee with your ranged character or what situations 'call for it' and you would ultimately just weaken your char overall by also statting/gearing him for close combat

First playthrough, on hard, with all quests and stuff done

How can anyone in their right mind try to ship a multimillion dollar product without making absolutely sure that they don't upset all their players with a degree in Medieval English Linguistics?

Depends on the role you want your chanter to fulfill; the three most obvious ones being tank, ranged DD or support. As you are playing on PotD, you should prefer specialization over hybridization as it's just simply more effective and you got enough party members to cover all your bases with highly effective specialists instead of semi-effective-but-highly-efficient hybrids. Tank If you go tank, you can just stack defensive stats/talents and not care about any sort of offensive stats/talents. This works so well because the Chanter starts with high deflection and all his defensive core abilities (chants + defensive invocations) don't care about your stats. Stats minimum Strength, Minimum Dexterity - you don't need your tank to deal any damage and your chants/defensive invocations/summons don't care about your Strength/Dexterity maximum Perception, maximum Resolve - you want to be tanky, so you take the stats that increase your deflection (don't mind saving throws, because every stat contributes to those equally) as you see fit Constitution, as you see fit Intelligence - because as a Chanter you don't have built in Endurance regeneration, you do need a healthy amount of Constitution because no matter what, you will get hit during a fight and no matter how high your damage reduction is, some damage will tickle through. I am comfortably with 14 Constitution, but your playstyle might warrant more or less. The rest can be put into Intelligence to increase the radius of some of the invocations Talents Everything that increases your damage avoidance stats. Cautious Attack for deflection, Weapon and Shield Spec. for deflection and Reflex, the three saving throw talents, Superior Deflection.. you can probably figure this one out on your own. Items The heaviest armor you can find (you don't care about your recovery time because you don't care about attacking anyway and you get your chants/invocations off just fine), the biggest shield (you don't care about your accuracy because your chants don't need to hit anything and your defensive invocations are mostly summons who have their own stats), a hatchet (don't even need to enchant it, because there's no difference between 0.6 damage and 0.7 damage per hit) and whatever boosts your Perception/Resolve/Constitution/Deflection/Saving Throws/Intelligence. Combat I usually have two types of chants: a defensive one for when the Chanter is in the front (wielding his trusty hatchet and a shield), supporting my main tank and being an off-tank, and a offensive one for when there is no need for tank-support/an off-tank and he can just increase my party's DPS by chanting the ranged attack speed chant and the fire damage chant (standing in the back wielding a ranged weapon which optionally even has a property like '+10 accuracy for an ally who attacks the same target' or '-5 defensive for the target') Whenever the points for an invocation are there, I usually summon either some defensive mobs (skeletons, ogres, ..) to support my tank/create flanking for my Rogues, or an offensive one (phantom, drake, ..) to increase party DPS. That's pretty much how I use my Chanter as a off-tank. If you want to go ranged DPS, just do the opposite. Stack Might, Dexterity, Intelligence, ignore Constitution, Perception, Resolve, wear no armor, wield some heavy hitting ranged weapon, chant the offensive phrases and pick the offensive talents (depending on your weapon of choice: Gunner, Penetrating Shot, Marksman, Weapon Focus, etc.) and stand around in the back with your squishies

Was wondering the same. And seeing how quickly they can generate Focus with a Blunderbuss, this wouldn't even be a huge nerf. At least not on PotD, where the fights tend to last longer and you'll go through a couple hundred focus anyway. Would at least get them a bit more in sync with the other classes who need to build up their resources (chanter, monk).

Ranged class with very high starting accuracy (i.e. rogue or ranger), Wood Elf race, Marksman and Weapon Focus talent: nets you +16 on ranged enemies.. not sure what the point of the question is though as the specifics (i.e. per encounter abilities, but no buffs) are concerned. You could also take weapons/items with accuracy mods into consideration, etc.

I used him as a ranged support, so the obvious talent choices were Gunner, Marksman and the appropriate Weapon Focus. As well as later on some luxury talents like Envenomed Strike or Savage Attacks. In my current PotD run I'm having him as off-tank as well. So far he got Weapon+Shield Specialization and Cautious Attack. Later on he will get the +Deflection/Saving Throw talents. Basically everything that increases his survivability. Couldn't care less about his damage

Pretty sure a ranged rogue does work well with a bow. Just take the appropriate talents and you should be doing fine. Using an arbaleste/a pistol would yield more damage, but seeing how you aim your rogue at being a dps/support hyprid, a bow should do it's work. Especially if it stuns on crit, which you Rogue will do more often than not during the later stages of the game.

On hard, I'd recommend level 12 for the final fight. Up to that point though it's mainly based on your own skill level/party composition/optimization level. At level 5 you can easily do the first levels, so just walk in there and see how far you can get. Was a pretty fun experience for me to go there underleveled to see how far down I could get before the mobs started to whoop my ass (spoiler: at level 10 it wasn't too hard to reach the bottom, so I guess 7 or 8 might be doable?)

Whenever people complain about a difficulty being too hard when there's still a harder difficulty around, you know you've done something right

The pistole Ducanale from the act 3 shop should be the highest dps ranged weapon due to its two offensive mods.

Fighter + Chanter works like a charm

And strangely enough chanters seem to be the only class that doesn't have build in synergies with itself. The higher level the phrase is the longer it takes to chant resulting in slower generation of points for invocations. The higher level invocations on the other hand also require more points to be cast meaning that you effectively have to decide between high level phrases or high level invocations. Feely really counterintuitive in terms of character progression :/