Boeroer

Yes. Nalpascas get +1 wound every 6 seconds while drugged. This cumulates with Dance of Death. Lash damage is multiplicative and thus considered more powerful usually.

All three would work well. Druid is the most powerful of the three - but only after some levels where he can accumulate some more spell uses. But Spiritshift is always strong. If you take high CON, MIG and INT, Veteran's Recovery, survival healing bonus and Boar form you can totally offtank with such a druid and wreck stuff in melee as well. Fighter starts best - his great starting values and Constant Recovery make him really good at low levels. Later on he lacks a bit of impact though. THen later comes Charge and he's great again. Chanter is the most effective one when it comes to micromanagement. He can tank well while dealing tremendous passive AoE damage from level 9 on and also heal passively. Before lvl 9 he will feel a bit lame if you don't know the tricks. After lvl 9 he feels like "Oh my Goodness!" Since you have no dedicated single target killer yet I would probably take something like the Lady of Pain. I personally would use the variant with Tidefall. Or a boar druid with focus on Spiritshift and shock spells/Wildstrike Shock - since such a guy can also kock out single enemies pretty fast.

But your alter ego liked the nerf: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/103609-to-the-person-at-obsidian-who-made-the-decision-to-nerf-figurines/

Crit damage is additive. Unfortunately 15% speed and 15% speed is not necessarily 30% speed. I think with +5 DEX + Swift Strikes it fits. But generally attack speed mechanics are kind of complicated. There's a whole thread about it. But you can use this to check: https://naijaro.github.io/deadfire-speed-calculator/ But since it's not updated to 2.0 some values might be different. But you can get a feeling how speed bonuses stack.

Maybe like this? Not great - but a bit more lines I guess...

I will take the watercolor picture you posted and try to add a few more lines. Let's see how it goes.

I think I managed to emulate the color brushes okish. But the heavy rim lighting makes it hard to extract proper linework. I guess I'd have to draw the linework by hand. Tomorrow maybe. Edit: now that I look at your watercolor portrait again I have to say it's pretty good actually. To match the style of Obsidian's watercolor portraits 100% it would need heavier lines (and that's hard with this portrait if you don't want to draw manually), but the texture is nice.

I updated the picture with greener ears. Since the picture above is linked to the one I edited "in da cloud" the change should be visible now in the picture above (maybe hit Shift+F5 to reload the page without using cache). I will try to make a watercolor picture now...

Oh, I forgot to make your ears green. wait a minute...

Well then you have fiddle around of course. I managed to make some ok watercolor portraits that match Obsidian ones - but for every portrait there's a different approach since they all differ in contrast, style and so on. Sometimes it's really easier to just draw it and not try to use filters and stuff on the original one.

Funny - they work totally fine for me. Did you use the console command removeAllAbilities <player name> ? Because that also seems to remove abilities of item origin - unless you reequip.

haha - I wanted to write the same about the ring because I also tested it in the meantime.

Yeah it seems that the appliance of the DoT doesn't care for linger time. I actually never checked if the Ring of Focused Flame and Scion of Flame work with Dragon Thrashed. If yes that might solve some of the PEN-problems when playing PotD.

You need more levels for boarding fights - or you need to shoot them to clump before you board. You can also just shoot the ship to pieces. You will still get the loot and the bounty.

Well to be fair (towards me ): I said "mildly ranting". That's a nice thing. Err I mean both: having 2 weeks of holidays and reporting what you found out. To be fair (towards you): the game gives you rewards for freebooting and stuff, so one could feel he/she is supposed to be a pirate. Not forced though.

Not exactly. It doesn't need to get upgraded, it comes with the summoning tool. It works like this: if you crit with the bow, the target will get a status effect "Experimental Souls" (or one of the upgrades). If this effect is active (it doesn't go away but is endless) when the target dies (doesn't matter how it dies) it will summon a creature that can be hostile (I think towards everybody?) or friendly. The last part I'm not so sure about because I immediately enchanted it with Soul Diplomacy (see below). One of the upgrade (Tethered Souls) will make sure the creatures stay twice as long (the base duration seems to be 20 sec, so 40 now?) and the other one (Soul Diplomacy) will make sure that it's always friedly (ally). I couldn't see the use of hostile summons so I took Soul Diplomacy. Note that the variety of creatures includes pets that do absolutely nothing. But I also had oozes, sporelings, guls and other stuff, , even a Lagufaeth Mage, that helped with the fighting. There is no summoning limit by the way: every enemy who dies with the status effect will summon an additional creature that stays for 20/40 secs. So you can fire at different enemies to apply the effect on crit (Driving Flight works!) and then let your party members kill the enemies for lots and lots of creatures. edit: my INT was 20 - so maybe the base duration is only 12 secs.

It's surely a lot better to use Wouding Shot on a weapon with higher damage per attack. You are right that for example switching to Lead Spitter for Wounding Shot is a smart thing to do instead to use ith with Persistence. Persistence is great for rangers, especially because it not only is the best ranged dps weapon for auto-attacks but also because it constantly triggers Predator's Sense for the animal companion - but it's not the best option for a Wounding Shot (UNLESS you have Twinned Shot which will almost double your damage per attack with Persistence - then it's totally fine to use the bow with Wounding Shot). Yes, I meant that you can take better talents than Penetrating Shot with Persistence. Because Persistence's wounding damage is calculated PRE DR Penetrating SHot doesn't influence wounding at all. And with high MIG the wounding damage is not 25% but more - with 20 MIG for example you'll do ~33% raw, multiplicative damage. So Penetrating Shot has relatively low influence on your overall damage per hit compared to other bows (that don't feature wounding). In most cases it's better to attack more quickly than to do mere +5 dmg per shot (while you slow yourself down considerably). Also note that DR bypass does NOT work for an elemental lash that you put on Persistance. All this makes Pen Shot a weak pick for Persistence. Rather take something else in my opinion - for example Gallant's Focus (if you don't have a paladin with Zealous Focus or a Priest with Blessing).

Yes, for me Priest and Wizard (also Druid) are the most powerful classes in PoE (with the order Priest > Wizard > Druid).

I also don't like it too much, but once you get the hang of it it's not too bad - also because the loot can be very good.

Then I'm giving an opinion after all. I'm super constructive in showing you that your initial statement (on that all your reasoning is based) is wrong. As several others already mentioned: you are not forced to be a pirate nur do you start as one. I do not need to repeat their arguments. This completely eliminates the reason to discuss further why that is a bad thing - because there is no such thing. And in doing so I prevent others from reading your unwithspoken statement and think "Wow I'm forced to be a pirate - that's bad, I don't want to buy/play this game." And that's why I'm not superpolite about this. I don't like it if people post their feels as if it were facts and influence other people who don't know the game yet and maybe push them away. You could have written your OP in a more differentiated and informed way (e.g. that you have the feeling that the game kind of pushes you towards piracy or so - which would be totally fine with me), but you chose not to. Sorry if I came over as supergrumpy - I didn't mean to. But I wasn't happy about it either.

I also found it interesting - but the cape is a late item so I had to come up with some alternative (when lobbing fireballs onto your own head) as long as you don't have it.

We could also just use the original wc portrait and change the colors a bit. I guess that's easier than making a watercolor version from a "normal" portrait (which is tricky if you want to really match the original Deadfire watercolor style in my opinion). Or wait: was the above picture an official one? If not forget what I said.

Indeed. Else i won't be here talking about this. I played for many hours when the game was published. Then I would say it's even worse that you claim to be forced to be a pirate despite better knowledge. If you don't like the whole "Pirates of the Caribbean" vibe that's fine, but (mildly) ranting about problems which are only self-perceived is supposed to lead us where...?

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83435-class-build-riptide-the-pit-fright-dps-offtank-melee-ranger-double-team-supreme/ Check this out for some basic ideas how to build an effective melee ranger. Some minor things might have changed (now higher level cap), but the basic stuff (wounding weapon + auto-heal for the pet and some dmg boosts for the ranger) still apply 100%.

Nobody forces you to be a pirate. Did you actually play the game?