Boeroer

Edit: oh wow I totally had a brain fart and got carried away - messing up Helwalker/Ascendant with Streetfighter. Forget what I was rambling about down there. I'll let it sit here because there might be some tips that still are worth reading (like Thunderous Report, switching times, destroying loot with Essence Interrupter and cramping up enemies etc.). Just remove all the Monk talk! Easy! Sorry, it was early and I only had 4 hours of sleep. Jeeeez! ----------weird shyte starts now--------- The best dps will still be with dual mortars. At least if you can hit several enemies at once. INT (and other influences on AoE size) are important here. Duality of Mortal Presence (INT) boosts this a lot. So I'd always take it even if the burning lash of Turning Wheel doesn't apply to ranged weapons in the vanilla game (Community Patch mod corrects this so you can profit from the burning lash). Once you get Thunderous Blows + Hammering Thoughts PEN shouldn't be an issue. Also because mortars have pierce/slash damage. Fire in the Hole jumps with the AoE (!). And of course you don't lose dps by switching. That's 2.5 seconds of doing 0 damage and 2.5 seconds that get shaved off your "Heating Up" status. Enduring Dance will make sure you don't feel the ACC malus of mortars too much. Then Stunning Surge has a high chance of critting (again if you can hit several enemies at once). This means you can use it indefinitely with mortars if you can target several weak mobs at once. So: Pull of Eora and a tank (immune to push/pull effects) are the best friends of a mortar Monk(/something). You can start the encounter with Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights from stealth in order to lure enemies to one spot, then drop Pull of Eora while closing in with the tank (if it's an something/Trickster he can also be the one who uses Dazzling Lights). And then just use Stunning Surge on that crowd. Usually you get full focus right after one or two Surges. Also great that firih the opening shot from stealth will give you -85% reload time which means you can fire two Stunning Surges right away in a row and get ascended asap. Also try Flagellant's Path with dual mortars. It skips the reload and only has recovery... Another Blunderbuss that is worth considering - especially for the opening shot - is Kitchen Stove. It has the enchantment "Thunderous Report" which is a very high dmg cone attack (1/encounter). This alone (when placed smartly) can be enough to fill your whole focus and ascend you. Of course against single targets the mortars stink a bit. Against single targets Essence Interrupter is decent. One of the best options. BUT: it still destroys the loot if the enemies get turned into a summon on death. That's why I don't use it most of times. A neat alternative are St. Omaku's Mercy and Veilpiercer - if you tend to crit a lot (Enduring Dance!). You need to pick the enchantment that omits recovery 60% of times on crit. This can lead to great single target dps. Red Hand is also good. BUT: my go-to weapon against single enemies as a ranged Monk is the Long Pain. They work with two weapon style as well, have very high ACC and dps and do crush dmg (complements piece/slash just lovely). With decent action speed they even take less time to summon than switching does. So I would start with mortars and fire at cramped up enemies. Once only singular enemies are left I'd summon the Long Pain and finish them off. ---------------- Manmanman... but still: keep the mortars. With Crippling Strike and especially Arterial Strike (+2 PEN) and Toxic Strike they are great! But only if you have good INT. You can make them work better with Aloth's Armor and a ring of overseeing and the ring of the marksman. Valid alternatives to Essence Interrupter are still St. Omaku's Mercy/Veilpiercer. Rogue/Cipher has good ACC (especially once Borrowed Instinct is accessible) and ok crit conversion. If you are a Dwarf I also think Amiina's Legacy is very good. Even if you are not one - but then it's even better.

Speaking of Firebrand: quick reminder that Scion of Flame + Spirit of Decay + Bleak Walker's FoD will lead to +3 PEN with Firebrand. And plenty of lashes of course. Eternal Devotion adds its lash to direct damage spells as well (not DoTs). Unfortunately Fury's passive doesn't work with Firebrand (the weapon). Some smaller tricks for spell casters (including Druids): using Griffin's Blade for enhanced spell damage (10%). Chanter/Druid can use Shasha's Singing Scimitar to boost spell damage. It gives you +2% shocking lash per accumulated phrase (universally - also works for spells). The action speed bonus which stacks with phrases as well is also universal and works for spells. You can combine both in a dual wielding setup for more spell dmg and casting speed (Hound's Speed from Griffin's Blade only works for the weapon though ). I like Bellower/Druid for this. You tend to accumulate phrases with Bellower anyway and the PL bonus works well with the additive dmg bonus of Griffin's and then the added lash (up to 12% at 6 phrases). Troubadours and Beckoners can get to 14% (muticlasses) because they can collect 7 phrases due to their increased invocation costs. Troubadour's also nice because he can accumulate the phrases a lot faster. Wizard/Druid can bind Blightheart and add 10% corrosive lash to ALL spells (not only Wizard's). Paladin/Wizard can bind Blightheart and combine 10% corrosive lash + 10% burning lash from Eternal Devotion for their direct damage spells. Oops - no Druid involved. Not really Druid-exclusive but also works with Druids.

I guess I would go Devoted/Fury with the Voulge (non-shifting) and use the Fighter part for more sturdyness and self-healing (since Fury can't). I think I would use Tactical Barrage instead of Disciplined Strikes. +1 PL is +5% multiplicative dmg in all cases (except auto-attacks) and in my books that's better than 25% crit cinversion (which - if we think about 100% hit chance at best, would only lead to 0.25*0,25 = roughly 6% additive dmg increase). In reality you don't have 100% hit chance, so... Besides stuff like PEN and ACC and also the higher INT. For me Disciplined Strikes is only the favored pick if you do somethung special that's dependend on crits. The Voulge is better on a Barb since Carnage applies Static Charge, but it's still good - especially once you get Clear Out (and can apply static charge to multiple enemies at once). Another nice synergy between Fighter and Druid is with Clear Out and a Morning Star: you can apply Body Blows in an AoE which makes it a lot easier to land the next fortitude-based spells (like most DoTs). Same would work with Reflex and Will based spells and a flail or club of course.

It's ok but nothing I'm too excited about. The +5 PER and either +5 INT, +1 PL (Tactical Barrage) or +25% crit conversion (Disciplined Strikes) are nice for casting. Unbending and Clear Out are always useful of course. It's too bad that there's no way to bring the Devoted and Spiritshift together. That would be interesting. Also Clear Out + Avenging Storm would be very nice if only Avenging Storm wouldn't be PL8. I personally think a lot of multiclasses awesomeness was prevented by that spell being in the SC-only tiers. They should have done a PL6 version and an upgrade at PL 8 maybe. Also Wildstrike Frenzy needs a boost. In it's current form it is not very tempting. SC shifters are not good. They would be better if their weapons scaled with PL rather than char level (see Transcendent Suffering) and if Wildstrike Frenzy either came with an additive or even base dmg boost and/or a bigger lash.

It depends a bit at which level you are looking. Generally: Berserker/Fury can be very strong - especially once you get Blood Thirst. Nature's Terror + Relentless Storm (supported by an initial cast Plague of Insects do all trigger Blood Thirst on kill. Also all your elemental spells will have +3 PEN (Berserker Frenzy + Fury passive). That makes the build very good on PotD right from the start (both obtainable at lvl 1). If you go melee with Lord Darryn's Voulge and Deltro's Cage your Storms will have +5 Power Level and Nature's Terror still +2. Supported by Blood Thirst your Carnage will apply a ton of Static Charges in an AoE. It's an offensive beast but you have to heal him with party member (Berserker Frenzy hurts and Fury can't have Rejuvenation spells). And/or use Savage Defiance (but comes a bit late). This build would not spiritshift. DoT + Blood Thirst is a very effective combo. You can also use Whispers of the Endless Paths + Taste of the Hunt. The healing is still only applied once but the DoT (which is quite potent) will get applied to all enemies in the cone. This can lead to even more kills which will trigger Blood Thirst. Just a variant to Lord Darryn's Voulge. Also works with Barb/any other Druid. Another nice alternative is Helwalker/Druid. Especially if you cast a lot of DoTs. Here I would pick a Nature Godlike Ancient on the Druid part and the Spine of Thicket Green as weapon with the +3 to Beast PL. The high MIG and INT from Helwalker boost your DoTs as does the +1+1+3 Power Levels. You will be casting DoTs mostly. But it's also a great healer. If you want a superb healer you can use the same combo but with a Livegiver instead of a Ancient. Enchant the Spine with +2 PL to Rejuvenation instead, spiritshift right at the start of combat (+7 Power Level to Rejuvenation) to cast healing over time in advance. After the shift your PL will drop to -1 PL which is not too bad. You can also cast some Dots at the start of combat and only shift if you feel the need for healing. Choose cat form since it can cast very fast (Cat Flurry). The high MIG and INT of Helwalkers combined with the Power Levels do immense healing. Another good healer+support is Livegiver/Priest of Eothas with the Spine again. You will have a ton on spells in general but the best part is: shift to Cat form and dish out +7 PL Rejuvenation. Once you shift back do +2 PL Restoration spells with the Priest side. The PL malus for Rejuvenation after switching doesn't apply to your Restoration spells. If you are looking for a very sturdy melee druid based on Spiritshift: Goldpact Knight + Bear form is very sturdy due to the immense AR (Gilded Enmity +4, Exalted Endurance +1, Bear Form +2 + several paladin passives) and the healing. The damage output is good due to Wildstrike + Flames of Devotion + Sworn Enemy. Eternal Devotion also applies to spells by the way. And lots of support capability of course With the Community Patch you can combine Barbarian/Stag Form for dual Carnage. It's not super OP but great fun. If you pick Spirit Frenzy you can stagger opponents twice (double chance) per hit. The cumulated AoE dmg is nice. If you combine it with Blood Thirst (cast some long lasting DoT spell and then go melee) you can destroy entire mobs quickly. In an unmodded game the Stag form is crap though. For a Shifter of course the Rogue is another obvious option. Wildstrike + Sneak Attack and Deathblows is a good melee combo. Especially as a Cat you can do enormous melee dps. Don't forget to cast some supporting spells before going into melee. Honorable mention goes to Arcane Archer + Fury. The jumps of the Fury attacks don't work with Driving Flight (you might want to skip that) but they are not affected by the accuracy malus. And every jump (so, basically two attack rolls) will trigger an Imbue spell. You can use that to apply damage + double Imbue:Web at the enemy (later also double Imbue:Pull of Eora) and then nuke the immobilized/cramped enemies with spells and attacks. The double appliance of web /pull makes sure that every enemy gets affected. Also nice: Bleak Walker/Fury. With Scion of Flame, Spirit of Decay and Heart of the Storm you get +3 PEN for your FoD attacks which will pack a punch even against high AR foes. At the same time you can cast spells as usual. Eternal Devotion works with spells as I said. There are a lot more variants. It really depends on the role your character is supposed to play. Even a summoner centered Chanter/Ancient is very good in some cases because he can have summons on the field all the time and can boost several summons (Wurm, Drake, spores) with Wild Growth which makes them very sturdy (indef. duration of Wild Growth). A Bellower isn't the type of chanter that comes to mind when thinking about summons, but his PL bonus makes them last a long time and Wild Growth on then makes then tanky. Since he can't put out chanter summons as quickly as as a Troubadour he can fill the gaps with spores. If you like summons it's quite nice. And of course there is single class: Fury with Dual Mortars and Avenging Storm is devastating. That's because Blinding Smoke on Hand Mortar triggers Avenging Storm, too and Fire in the Hole jumps (incl. AoE). Gun-Fury basically. Also a SC Nature Godlike Ancient with Spine of Thicket Green is very good with all Beast DoTs. So is SC Fury with Deltro's Cage, Darryn's Voulge and other elemental PL boosts with Maelstrom (and other elemental spells). Spiritshifting is not very great on its own as a SC druid though.

I also think that the opening and the early game of PoE is the best part.

I don't know. I wrote down some ideas about priest trinkets (based on the requirements I explained in length in this thread), Phenomenon didn't like the direction where my trinkets were going and I said he should maybe discuss with MaxQuest what they really want from trinkets/want to do with trinkets. That was the last thing I heard about that topic.

So basically something like Seeker, Slayer, Survivor as a standalone game with additional classes and monsters?

Of course. Some even completed the Ultimate Challenge. "Capable of soloing" doesn't mean nonchalantly facetanking everything though. You can't do that at lvl 8 with any solo build. At least not with very specific items and consumables (that are hard to get at lvl 8 solo PotD). Arcane Knight, Herald, Crusader, Shepherd(Stalker), Inquisitor and some others have nice tanking capababilities though. Certain combos like Tactician/Priest of Skaen can develop certain cheesy tactics (Brilliant + SoT + Barring Death's Door) which lead to kind-of god mode in some cases. Same with Fighter/Bloodmage (Unbending + Wall of Draining). The usual approach is to avoid fighting when possible until you reach the higher levels and your build unfolds. And only then doing all the fighting. But of course you can do it differently. It's just difficult to do every fight with a mid-level solo char even if the fight isn't overleveled.

That's some nice research.

I think it's pretty dead since neither @MaxQuest nor @Phenomenum seem to be posting frequently anymore. Happy to be proven wrong though.

Thank you @SChin! So... no new Community Manager yet, hm?

Hey! Welcome to the Quantum Tunnel Fanclub!

Yes, you can do all that. You can even take it further and export that second character who now has the "cloned" unique item and export him, thus tripling the unique item... and so on.

In general they are worse than in PoE. In PoE the animal companion's base damage scaled which worked very well with dmg bonuses like Predator's Sense - since a raise in base dmg is a multiplicative dmg boost (by the way I think the Wolf was the way to go for PoE1, not the Bear - since DR didn't have that much of an impact anyways but the higher starting base damage of the Wolf has). In PoE the AC was a slow hitter, but it could hit like a truck with the right talents/abilites. In Deadfire the base damage doesn't scale - but instead the Animal Companion gets additive dmg bonuses while he levels. This is a lot less impactful since the non-scaling base dmg is rather low and the additive bonuses don't provide the oomph then. With all the abilites the AC can hit okish - but not comparable to your Ranger and not comparable to an AC's dmg per hit in PoE. Still adds some damage though. The bear can be made quite tanky with the right abilites - Armor Rating in Deadfire is more impactful than Damage Reduction in PoE was - so every point of AR you can put on the Bear will help a lot to make him more tanky. In Deadfire the AC can have some more active abilites than in PoE and some of them are quite good. For example "Takedown Combo" will apply an effect on the enemy so that the next attack on him that hits gets +100% damage. This might also be a mighty spell. So you can do some nice stuff with the AC. But auto-attacks is not the strong suit unfortunately.

You can export a character. Then you can start a new playthrough with that exported character instead making one from scratch. You can keep the level, items etc. if you wish.

No, the imbue spells' scaling wasn't fixed in the unmodded game - despite multiple attempts to remind the devs that those abilites don't work well without any scaling. Especially PEN was an issue. Only thing that scales is the accuracy (with Arcana). Community Patch scales PEN with Arcana skill, too (which helps a lot). No change to ACC (since it already scaled with Arcana as I said) and dmg (doesn't scale - but with Driving Flight and other jumps this might have been too good). With Drivingt Flight you already get like dmg*2 with Fireball and Death Ring. Missiles still scale horribly though (no additional projectiles or dmg) and are bad even with Driving Flight.

It's pretty substantial though (-15).

They will start one level below your Watcher. They will not stay there though. If you get them early the XP difference is not much since low level thresholds (for level-ups) are much smaller than higher levels'. So after a few levels they will catch up on you and when you reach higher levels the difference in XP is barely noticable. Just clarifying so that "always one level beneath your watcher" isn't misunderstood. If we are talking about the moment you hire them it's correct of course.

Unbroken suffers a Reflex malus though.

Imbue spells will trigger with every jump (so Watershaper's Focus will trigger two instances of the spell, with Driving Flight it's even three instances). AoE hits however will trigger NO additional spell instance. It used to be like that (AoE hits each triggered an Imbue spell) in the beta version but that got removed quickly. You can imagine how OP Imbue:Fireball with Watershaper's Focus or Fire in the Hole were... But even now Watershaper's Focus + Driving Flight using Imbue: Death (for example) is devastating. Three Death Rings from one shot kill a lot of enemies right on the spot. By the way: multi projectile weapons like Blunderbuss or Frostseeker only trigger one Imbue spell. Arcane Archer/Priest doesn't sound like a particularly effective combo. Arcane Archer/Paladin is good (if you are looking for a mix of offense and support).

I have no idea why you can't see the AoE. That's kind of meh. I like to use Clear Out with WotEP: at least you can see the exact direction then. Clear Out's radius seems to be pretty big - more than 2.5. What you said (that you maybe can't see it because it can be executed with AoE weapons which have their own AoE indicator) might be the explanation. Makes sense. Although I would have preferred two overlapping AoE indicators instead. 135° for Clear Out could still be the case. Feels like it. I guess somebody could look it up in the code...? Clean Sweep's radius becomes huge with some good INT, so I suspect the base radius is also pretty big. Clear Out and Clean Sweep seem to scale with INT normally. Clear the Path is like Mind Lance, Driving Roar or Rolling Flame: a very long 'line'. But in this case it's also pretty broad. Like Driving Roar's I guess (which you can see). The size of the Clear-the-Path AoE doesn't seem to be influenced by INT at all. It's perfect for Edér and similar lowish INT Fighter's.

True, during early game a large shield really hurts. Using Rapier, Spear, Dagger and other stuff with +5 ACC does help a bit.

It seems to be kind of borked. Somebody reported that it works better with Turn Based mode then with RTwP.

It's only 8 accuracy. That's manageable with some levels. I mean Blunderbuss wielders suffer -10 ACC and I don't consider them to be poor offensive characters. On the other hand you get more deflection, more reflex and an awesome modal (in my opinion). With a large shield modal activated you can get bombarded with AoE spells and only get damaged slightly. One weapon that is very good in combination with large shields is Scordeo's Egde because Adaptive counters the ACC loss easily and also Blade Cascade can remove the disadvantage of not having dual wielding speed. What also works well is fists. Especially Forbidden Fist and most of the Monk's wound-fueled attacks (which are primary). And actually if you use a large shield (and raise your defenses high - you get more deflection AND Reflex after all) you don't need that much of AR which means less armor penalty which means faster attacks. I'm currently using Aloth as my only tank (as a single class wizard) with Cadhu Scalth and only padded armor and he's still hitting stuff while being sturdy. Also if he nukes himself in order to damage the enemies around him his large shield modal helps a lot.