Boeroer

Ascendant/Trickster has no significant synergies. I mean concerning the special mechanics of Ascendant. Maybe that's why you feel multiclassing Ascendant isn't worth it. It is though if you find those speed synergies. Although I personally prefer SC Ascendant due to the great PL8 and 9 abilities.

If you do multiclass ascended you want bonuses to attack/casting speed and/or recovery and/or INT bonuses and/or MIG bonus and/or PEN bonuses. You can achieve that via Berserker (+2 PEN, +30% attack/casting speed and +5 MIG via Frenzy, Bloodlust, most notably Blood Thirst, even AoE Staggered via spells+Spirit Frenzy). Or Streetfighter (-50% recovery time, fast focus gain). Use mortars with powder burns. One of the most popular, especially with DoTs, is Helwalker (+10 MIG, +10 INT, a little speed via Swift Strikes, +2 PEN, +12 ACC via Enduring Dance...). Priest with high INT and Salvation of Time also works well with Ascendant. SoT prolongs ascended state as well. You want speed and shorter recovery so you can cast faster while ascended. You want more INT so ascended and DoTs lasts longer, you want higher MIG so the ticks of DoTs are higher. If you go single class Ascendant you want Time Siphon for the same reasons: cramp as many casts into the ascended phase as you can. In general you want high DEX and Fast Cast passive. Bet thing is the power level bonus, not the 0 focus. Ascendants generate more focus per point of damage while not ascended. With Draining Whip (never take Biting Whip) also a SC Ascended can generate plenty of focus quickly. I personally find that Beguiler has the superior mechanic, but you can cheese around with Ascendant quite a bit (see Helwalker/Ascendant or Priest/Ascendant).

FoD also works with the Ring of Focused Flames by the way. +10 ACC is nice. Another nice effect of Ranger/Priest is Takedown Combo. If you combine it with a good single target dmg spell like Pillars of Faith or Divine Mark it can be pretty devastating. +100% base dmg for a spell with high base dmg is usually a lot more effective than for a simple weapon attack. If you want to use it with a weapon attack though you should pick Arquebus (because its highest weapon base dmg is most effective for Takedown Combo).

Some concern about Essence Interrupter: it still seems to destroy loot drop every now and then. Had that problem some days ago with an Arcane Archer - again. I thought it was fixed but apparently it's still not (100%).

Last time I tried Clear Out with a ranged weapon (in main hand obviously) you just had to command the attack when at range. The char then would walk into melee range but still use the primary ranged weapon once he got there. Impressive with mortars. But I may very well be that this got patched out silently. It worked with bashing shields as well as other melee weapons in the offhand. You just had to command it from ranged so that the game didn't pick the melee weapon right away.

I think that rest bonuses (that you don't get from food) shouldn't determine if you can finish the Ultimate or not. And as far as I can tell they don't.

It's not a spell. It's the auto-attack of spiritshifted furies. It jumps 1 time but doesn't work with Driving Flight. To me this is a bug. Why does it not work - but stuff like Watershaper's Focus or Fire in the Hole does? Not related to spells at all by the way.

If there would be a way to mark the spiritual weapons as "unarmed" so that they work with the unarmed weapon proficiency (including Haymaker) without giving them bonuses from MonasticUT/TranscendentS I would support that. It's sad that Fighter (esp. Devoted) with stuff like Confident Aim etc. doesn't work with Spiritshift. Iirc the spiritual fists of Woedica now work with the proficiency but don't scale with MonasticUT/TranscendentS. So there seems to be a way to realize this. Same as allowing Form of the Fearsome Brute's fists, Kalakoth's Minor Blights and Rot Skulls etc. to use a fitting weapon proficiency (unarmed/wand for example).

Druids can be made good martial characters with the help of certain spells, not by concentrating on Wildstrike alone and omitting all spells. Wildstrike, Nature's Terror and Avenging Storm is a very powerful combo for every SC Druid who wants to go into melee. There is no need to boost the melee dmg to the same heights as those of other classes if you can have such nice and powerful support spells. I would buff Wildstrike Frenzy though since it's really not good and no motivation to go SC Druid. Avenging Storm is though.

4) was removed from PoE and Deadfire because the combo is too powerful. In Deadfire, Monastic UT and Transcendent Suffering both scale with Power Level - while Druid's spiritshift weapons scale with character level. What happens if you have both (=dual scaling) you could see when Priest of Woedica got introduced and the spiritual "fists" did scale with level AND with Monastic UT/Transcendent Suffering: too powerful for obvious reasons.

Yes, I would prefer Ancient Weapons as soon as I could. By the way: Animany Cat as pet gives all party summons +1 PEN (and +2 MIG) which can make a huge difference in certain fights where your summons are only 1 PEN short of penetrating enemies' AR properly.

Tactician/Bloodmage with Whispers of the Endless Paths (using Mule Kick in order to apply AoE Disorient/Flanking) and later Spirit Lance (same trick) with the support of Chillfog (AoE Blind/Flanking) is pretty nice. Also Clear Out with Whispers otEP and Spirit Lance is pretty good. Tactical Barrage and Disciplined Strikes are both pretty nice - but since you can get +5 INT/smart via Infuse wVE already I'd probably go for Disciplined Strikes. Unlessyou want to use Monastic Unarmed Training. In that case you want to stack every power level you can get for the fist scaling. Or if you want to use lots of spells that scale well with Power Level (like Missiles etc.). Generally speaking with Tactical Barrage vs. Disciplined Strikes on a Battlemage you trade +5 INT and +1 PL (+5% multiplicative dmg, +duration, + PEN, +ACC with all offensive abilities) for +25% crit conversion. Usually I'd say Tactical Barrage wins this comparison, but since you can already get smart with another ability... Also notable: Vigorous Defense stacks its buffs with Wizard spells like Mirrored Image, giving you +50 deflection and +20 to the other defenses. Vigorous Defense does NOT stack with Llengrath's Safeguard though. But with all other wizard buffs that raise deflection. With Spellblade the nice thing is that AoE weapons like Minor Blights and Spirit Lance can apply all your afflictions and DoTs in an AoE. Arterial Strike, applied right at the start of the encounter on a bunch of enemies, can have a devastating effect for example. Same a Toxic Strike - especially if you buff up your INT. Also Riposte can be pretty nice with Spirit Lance and all those self buffs. Llengrath's Safeguard stacks its defenses with Mirrored Image etc. Llengrath's Displaced Image works very well with a large shield and Adept Evasion in order to make reflex based spells no threat to your Spellblade. You can basically nuke yourself with reflex based spells like Fireballs but won't get harmed a lot.

Blood Frenzy does not apply its DoT via Carnage. That is because Carnage can't crit (only miss/graze/hit). Spirit Frenzy (staggered on hit) does work with Carnage. The only weapon/ability effect I know of that works with Carnage in Deadfire is Lord Darryn's Voulge with Static Charge. Bleeding Cuts: no. Rogue's DoTs also don't work with Carnage. But Blood Storm and other DoT ability effects might work with an AoE weapon like Whispers of the Endless Paths. A good way to apply stuff like Blood Frenzy and Bleeding Cuts would be Heart of Fury. But also Clear Out (Fighter).

Ouff - good question, I never tested that. I guess it doesn't matter.

Skeletons for CC - especially with a Beckoner. Since they have engagement they tend to stop enemies on the spot. Too bad they take too long to cast to use them right from the start of the encounter. I never use the Ogres but the Wurms I find pretty handy. If you focus their fire on one single enemy they are quite effective. What I also like is Mushroom, Drake and Dragon summons with Wild Growth (from Ancient). It has no duration but stays as long as the summon lasts (giving it the Robust inspiration). Makes the summon pretty sturdy and also bigger. Which is pretty cool. Also works with wurms but doesn't make too much sense there.

I would say that due to the most powerful focus generation mechanic of all Ciphers the Beguiler is at least on par with the Ascendant. As Elric said the condition "needs to be afflicted" is already fulfilled by the Deception spell itself. You can start an encounter with let's say Phantom Foes and be at nearly full focus. The only Cipher subclasses that seem to be unpopular are vanilla and Psion. Biting Whip is actually the worst pick for any cipher unless you use the community patch. Draining Whip (double focus gain) is always better. Keep in mind that Biting Whip is only +10% additive weapon base damage. That's not even 2 or 3 dmg per attack in most cases. Sneak Attack and Deathblows shouldn't work with spell damage. Deathblows worked in PoE1, but shouldn't do that in Deadfire anymore.

Since @thelee's research usually is very thorough I guess this simply got patched silently. A lot of things actually do get fixed or changed without any patch notes mentioning it. Thanks for testing @srulz.

Not intended I guess. I never heard it used that way. Only as a saying when luck shines on the greatest dumbo... again. "Himbo and dumbo... dancing mumbo jumbo..." I say summer hit!

Good point.

Depends. They are not lowering your dps if you use a one handed ranged weapon. You will still get higher deflection and reflex and the dual wieldung speed advantage but only attack with the ranged weapon. And Tuotilos's Palm ist strictly better than any "normal" shield if you are a monk. The rest: mostly it's the enchantmens that make the bash attack worthwhile. For example Magran's Blessing you may interruot with it. And The Best Defense can "scale" its bash's PEN and dmg with enchantents. But I agree that they should scale their offensive stats with quality as well. I think that was simply forgotten during development. Or it was too difficult to do.

On the other hand we have the saying "Der dümmste Bauer hat die dicksten Kartoffeln" which would translate to "The most stupid farmer grows the biggest potatoes". With a little bit of fantasy you could also translate that to "The most stupid farmer has the biggest balls" - which would make even more sense somehow I guess. And suddenly the himbo circle is complete.

I wouldn't change the actual values of the Draining Touch Weapon. I think if you'd just change the spell's "duration" from 1hit/crit-->dispelled to 3hits/crits-->dispelled that would be a "fix" that: a) doesn't touch the phantom cheese at all (doesn't make it any cheesier - while raising the draining to 100% would make the phantom nearly unkillable). b) would make me at least consider to take this spell - even though it would still be worse than Corrosive Siphon (PL2) or Parasitic Staff (PL1). Because a graze doesn't remove it you could get lucky and land a few more grazes in between the hits until it gets dispelled. That would be nice and cool for a melee oriented wizard or wizard/something. For everybody else it would still be meh. Which would be ok for me.

Yeah that's nonsense. Shields don't make you slower. They don't give you any speed or recovery malus. They can give you an accuracy malus (medium and large ones). And that's it. Some shields even count as offhand weapons. If you equip one of those you will be dual wielding and using a shield at the same time. And that makes you faster. You can even pick Two Weapon Style then and Weapon and Shield Style - they will both apply. Those shields are rel. rare though. I think we have three in the game: Tuotilo's Palm, Magran's Blessing and the one from the SSS DLC. The spikey one I forgot the name of...

I mean it's in the same PL as Fireball, Noxious Burst, Kalakoth's Minor Blights (!), Alacrity and so on. I like that it was changed from a touch spell in PoE to a summoned weapon in Deadfire. But disappearance after one successful hit...? The pro is - of course - that you can't "waste" it's use. It won't go away unless you hit. No "oh shucks" when missing a spell. But that's really it... I don't know. All in all very lame still.

I also can't remember her. If she's a newly introduced NPC then maybe there is indeed more than meets the eye...