Arranvin

Thanks for all the replies guys, you've given me lots to think about! I hadn't considered Beguiler before, but it looks good, as does the regular cipher. I don't think that I'd enjoy the nature of Psion. What do you guys think about Soul Blade? I know that it's not a natural fit for a ranged char but I'm wondering if the discount on shred powers and having Soul Annihilation as a last resort should he get cornered seems like it might be worth considering.

I agree about the Hunting Rifle. I haven't had any issues with other weapons but I snipe a fair bit and it feels like I'm repairing the HR all the time.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm planning on playing on console once it's eventually released so I won't have access to the community patch. Is Arcane archer still competitive against a crit focused ranger/ascendant using St Omaku's Mercy without the community patch?

Hello all. I backed the game but have only dabbled in it, I'm yet to complete a playthrough. I'm waiting on the Ultimate edition being available on consoles, quite fancy it on the Switch if they manage to do a decent port. Anyway, in the meantime I'd like to do some theorycrafting. Ranger is my favourite class, I really like having the animal companion. I loved playing a ranger in Pillars 1. However, from what I've seen of high level ranger abilities, it looks like more fun and more effective to multiclass rather than go single class. The fact that high level abilities eat up the same resource as the lower level ones turns me off since I found that the opportunity cost meant that I didn't use the high level abilities often. So, instead I fancy a multiclass. My aim for the character is high ranged dps with a bow (either hunting or war, don't want firearms, I'll leave them for Maia) with good survivability (mainly through evading attacks but if I'm cornered I'd like to be able to at least hold my own in melee) and a little crowd control. I quite fancy a seer, but I've played a bit as a scout and also really enjoyed that, the damage output was very satisfying. As a side note, I'm only going to play on Veteran or normal so I'm looking for effective but not overpowered builds, I don't want to optimise to the point where the game loses any challenge. I quite like both the base ranger and the arcane archer. I've been contemplating an arcane archer/rogue scout with Frostseeker or Essence Interrupter, and a ranger/ascendant seer with St Omaku's mercy. What do you guys think? Any tips? And does anyone know if the Arcane Archer accuracy bug was ever fixed? Thanks

Thanks Boeroer. The thread about multi-classing with paladin is indeed interesting, bleak walker wouldn't suit the particular character that I have in mind, but another order could work. Do you know if there are many cipher-only dialogue interactions in Deadfire? From what little I played as a mindstalker there didn't seem to be that much, certainly not to the extent that I'd feel like I was missing out on something significant, unlike Nano in Numenera! Also, out of interest, how do you think that a properly scaling imbue missiles would compare to twinned shots for a single class arcane archer? I don't think that I'll find SC AA too limiting with the imbue options. Waski, that's a really cool idea. If I go with a cipher multiclass I'll see how it works (back on you or random).

Hello guys. I backed Deadfire and so got a PC copy at release, and I played a bit with a few different characters before deciding to wait for the console release to properly play through the game (I love the idea of having portable Deadfire on the Switch). However, as the console release appears to be taking forever and the Switch version may not even be this year (Versus Evil's 2019 line-up specifically mentions Deadfire on PlayStation and Xbox and Pillars 1 on Switch, but no mention of Deadfire on Switch), I've had enough of waiting and really want to get back into Deadfire! My favourite class to play is a ranger, both in Pillars 1 and other games. I like doing solid ranged damage, having an animal companion and the overall feel of the class. I also like the look of the arcane archer as having more aoe damage and cc options looks more fun to me than sharpshooter's somewhat underwhelming bonuses. I'm aware however that arcane archer is awaiting a bugfix for Imbue's scaling. Anyway, I'm trying to decide between a single class arcane archer and a multiclass arcane archer / soulblade. The idea behind multi-classing cipher is extra damage through biting whip, occasional power use (whisper of treason, secret horrors, pain block for animal companion, borrowed instinct, disintegrate) and to unlock any cipher specific dialogue options, and soulblade gives a hard hitting melee backup should I get cornered. On the other hand, if I take Serafen/Ydwin instead of Aloth (I'm a sucker for returning companions in games but Aloth is a bit of a dweeb) then I can get them to use Ancestor's Memory on me and Xoti so that between that and salvation of time we can maintain brilliant, allowing me to spam twinned shots (for single targets) or death ring (for groups). So what are your guy's thoughts? Late game single class ranger power or more utility and more consistent damage through a cipher multiclass?

Is nerfing the Ranger's Evasive Fire really warranted? The ability was good, it could hit hard and it let you kite, but it was only really powerful against one enemy or a small number, given that you can't aim the attack. Seeing as rangers are still consistently seen as one of the weakest classes (if not the weakest) I don't understand the reasoning behind nerfing one of their stronger abilities...

I've gone to Dunnage really early (just after getting Serafen) on 2 in progress playthroughs and in both Ragged Cerrow is available right away through the supply tab.

It's not a working game as there are many, many people who cant play it. That doesn't mean that it's broken for you personally, but as a whole, the game is broken. Do you realise that some people experiencing bugs that prevent them from playing doesn't make it broken for everyone? It's not a single exclusive state. Plenty of people have finished the game and the sidequest. They couldn't have done that if it was inherently broken. The game is buggy and needs work, aye. But that doesn't make it broken. And labelling people who disagree with you 'fanboys' comes across as very childish and trying to deflect attention from the weakness of your argument. If you can't debate without resorting to insults then you've already lost.

Learn some context. #35 out of thousands of games (over 15k as of January last year) is a pretty good point two-three weeks after release, as is the fact that it has yet to drop out of the top 100 games played on Steam. We're talking about an isometric cRPG with RTWP combat, a niche game ever since its inception. We're also discussing whether the game is a success not even a month after release. To quote a certain captain, context is for kings. And getting your **** together before you start proclaiming something a failure is too. learn some business sense 35 aint good mate Still trying to pretend that you're not trolling? Really?

Obvious troll post is obvious. Away get back under your bridge.

One thing to take into calculation is that multi-class gets a PL every 3 levels, not 2. If we don't just skip right to max level, we can probably see why solo-ranger actually has a way better time than Scout throughout the game. Here's the skill order for single class and compared to multi class on the ranger side Lv 1 - Mark + Wounding shot / Wounding shot + The other class Lv 2 - Vicious Companion / Mark Lv 3 - Gunner, marksman / Any lv 4 - 2-handed weapon / Marksman + The other class Lv 5 - Marked for hunt + AWS / Gunner Lv 6 - Roll / 2-handed weapon or the other class Lv 7 - Concussive shot + Shot on the run (T2) / AWS + The other class Lv 8 - Bull will or Protective Companion / Marked for hunt Lv 9 - Evasive fire + Driving flight / Roll Lv 10 - Stalker link or whatever. / Concussive shot +The other class Lv 11 - Con Tran + Improved crit / Shot on the run Lv 12 - Survival of Fittest / Whatever Lv 13 - Acc Emp, Dmg Emp / Driving flight + The other class Lv 14 - Pen emp / Evasive fire Lv 15 - whatever / The other class Lv 16 - Twinshot + Whatever / Con tran + The other class On paper, scout will be better at level 13 to 15 as that is when the ranger has to invest in empowered attack and on ranger, it's better to just use empowered for resource instead (unless you want to 1-shot the named-mage bosses). Which means level 13 to 15 is a blank spot with almost no growth in power outside evasive fire scaling with level. But before that, they get all the pieces of the build way faster than rogue with only level 8 and 10 being a freebie choice that can lead to even more acc bonus if you use stalker link. While you can slightly deal more damage with sneak attack, ranger is getting more accuracy and other talents to make them crit way more often too so it cancels out. And after 16, Twin Shot already happens so rogue will never catch up. 3 resources cost isn't a problem as I mentioned in another post where there are less than 10 fights in the entire game where you actually need to use more than 5 twinshots to end it. Majority of them being Tanky boss fights and 100+ deflection enemies (Fampyr). Hmmm, fair play. I'll probably give single class ranger a go for my next playthrough and see how I get on. Here's hoping that they haven't nerfed Frostseeker by then!

The Sharpshooter also suffers -10 deflection as well, which is fairly steep considering that the bonuses he gains are somewhat diminished in terms of overall dps by the recovery penalty (unless like you say you're using a gun).

If you shoot out their sails, then board you get decent xp and more loot. You definitely get more loot boarding though Also, a Dhow with full speed upgrades will be in boarding range after 2-4 full sails. That's my goto at this point, ship combat does nothing for more me after the first playthrough. If you want proof, my first playthrough I sank Bounty - Biakara and missed out on this item, which did not drop: https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Lance_of_the_Midwood_Stag In a subsequent playthrough I boarded that bounty and looted the unique pike. I have that Pike and have done ship-to-ship combat for all ships so far except one early game, so must have got that from loot while sinking the ship. Can see you would get more weapons and armour loot from boarding, but maybe less food and such items? At some point I'm sure people will do a side-by-side comparison. But you do get more XP and levels from sinking them, which is quite handy too. The loot is really a non-factor though, so people should do what they prefer. I happen to prefer the ship-to-ship combat, and I see others prefer boarding. It's great that both options are viable. I haven't boarded a merchant ship so not sure what loot you get then, but I've sunk quite a few, and you get heaps upon heaps of cannonballs, medical supplies and the like. 40-50 cannonballs is not rare. Doesn't cost a lot either ofc, but it's nice to get them for 'free'. Just wish they didn't overflow, causing me to lose so many. I can confirm that it's possible to get the pike through ship to ship combat as I did so last night! I haven't done any boarding fights yet as until last night my party was only level 5 and there were 3 of us (mindstalker, xoti, serafen) plus random Port Maje crew versus 13 enemies at a time! I guess they don't warn against the 'did everything wrong' background for nothing Now that we've hit level 6 and have Tekehu and Maia I may try testing boarding versus ship combat and comparing the loot.

No sub class spec (none of them are really that good as they control your playstyle and ranger are best when they are versatile.) I play with 4 con 4 resolve. Max Might, Dex and Per. The rest into int. Both Con and Resolve are kinda trash especially on ranged char. The only time you will ever receive burst damage on the range char are in ship battles and even if you have 10 cons, without armor rating, you will die anyway. If needed, just have Druid or Cipher give you Robust buff to deal with the initial burst. For skills, you don't need to spec into pets at all. They scale poorly so you just use them as meat shield. Get Mark + wounding shot and the talents to boost your range attack. Get 2-handed weapon talent because bow and arquebus are considered 2-handed in this game and get the bonus damage from it. Then get upgraded mark and accurate wounding shot and just abuse having like +35 base accuracy at low level with marksman with a good weapon. After that, Evasive fire and Tranquilizer are the next 2 active skills you will grab. Evasive fire can be used to deal damage to a single-target by just spamming it (It's a spell. It scales off PL with high crit rate and no recovery time) and tranquilizer is an instant buff cleanse for pesky arcane veil and unbending tanks. The final active you need is the Twin shot. You should have every possible damage boost and faster reload/recovery passive unlocked along with all bonus accuracy (marksman and +10 accuracy while health is above 50% against enemy below 50% health) Use Arquebus in the early game unless you're fighting pierce immune because it has good range and damage, or use single-hand pistol if you're going for DPS instead with its modal for fast reload and single-hand bonus to cancel out the penalty. Don't forget to use the pig from the scavenger hunt. He gives gun damage and also take off recovery time based on armor. Combined with armor that has -15% recovery passive, you actually reload faster while wearing that light armor. If you can grab the 47k arquebus, probably with 50k cp blessing early, grab it and just shoot for 120-200 each hit for no effort because your acc is way too high (legendary gear, modal, acw, mark, and marksman for like +70 accuracy) and no enemies can stand a guaranteed crit shot with +50% burn damage multiplier. When you get driving flight, this also get bounced for like 75% of the damage. And when you get twinshot at level 16, you unlock the potential of the 12 arrows ice bow that breaks the game it only loses to Monk overtuned DPS and T9 Druid/Wizard spells. Not a single stage where you will feel ranger is that weak. If skeleton enemy with pierce immune are bothering you, go Dual-Saber, mark them and use AWS with the dual-saber. IT's a full attack that can also be used on melee. Double Saber crit will melt skeleton enemy with no effort. Or use Bow but I prefer to just smack them with Saber. The moment you have that arquebus, you can have everyone in your team go on auto-pilot or even you as well. You just need to manually shoot the mages/rangers to remove any potential threat with AWS or Empowered AWS and the only reason you manually control the twin-ice bow is to maximize its AoE potential. That certainly sounds like an effective build. I can't help wondering however if a Scout would be more effective overall. Twinned Shots with Frostseeker are undeniably powerful, and perhaps when using that particular weapon from level 16 onwards the single class ranger can pull ahead, but prior to that a Scout (especially an assassin scout) can be hitting hard with sneak attack damage on top of accurate wounding shot, and can eventually add Deathblows and Deep Wounds to their damage. As I understand it at max level this'll add 60% sneak attack damage (more if Nature Godlike under an inspiration), a further 50% from Deathblows and 20% raw DoT on top of Wounding Shot's raw damage. And this can be triggered for 1 guile by using debilitating strike, which can then spread to other enemies through driving flight. The lower resource cost makes this more sustainable than using Twin Shot. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that single class ranger's are rubbish. I'm actually trying to decide between a ranger and a scout for my second playthrough. However, to me the only thing that seems to allow rangers to be truly powerful compared to other classes and multi-class combos is the interaction between twinned shots and Frostseeker. This seems like an issue as no class should be reliant on one item to be competitive. I know that, as you said, accurate wounding shot with the 47k arquebus is powerful, but it'll be even better with the rogue bonuses I mentioned above. Ranger isn't trash, but I do think that single class needs some sort of boost to be competitive with other classes and multi-class combos. What do you think?

Twin Shots is only really good with items like the ice bow that scale really well with it and driving flight. Otherwise it's just two attacks. It's not terrible, but for a tier 8 ability with a bond cost of 3 It's pretty underwhelming. Compare that to what a Scout can have - 60% sneak attack, another 50% from Deathblows, 20% raw Dot (that constantly triggers Predator's sense for the animal companion) and another 10% hit to crit from dirty fighting. For a single class ranger to compete they need twin shots to go back to how it was in POE 1 and Stunning Shots too. Then they'll have a decent level of power compared to other classes.

The ranger is a pet class in the way that a wizard is a class that casts spells. It's integral to the class. Yes, there was no animal companion in BG/IWD but that was simply due to it being a feature that was left out. 2nd ed AD&D, which BG and IWD were based on had rangers gain animal companions. Nobody is forced to use an animal companion in Deadfire. If you really don't want one, play a Ghost Heart.

I went through and took screenshots of everything, here's the screenshot for the hunting bow: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2435760853731766319/9A6A0F42A20F8F851569B018A31A111B84B56588/ Here's the screenshot for war bow: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2435760853731767001/D98C513B71B708525BFE9057966FA3B14C7D3520/ same character, base 10 might? Maybe it's an error in the game files, or maybe there's something I missed. More likely though it's that War Bow has higher penetration, whereas hunting bow has low pen but higher damage -- like GS vs the Estoc. Fair play, I had missed something! I didn't realise that the damage balance between the bows had been altered, I was assuming that it was the same as Pillars 1. I wonder if the speed of the weapons has been adjusted along with their damage.

Thanks for posting this, it's very interesting. I've always tended to take Wounding Shot but I think I'll give Marked Prey a go.

Unless I'm missing something that spreadsheet has at least one error in it. It lists hunting bow as having higher damage than a war bow. Fair enough the hunting bow may have a higher dps, but I'm fairly sure they don't have higher base damage!

Cheers! If Twin Shot is single class only that'd probably persuade me to stick with single, at least for my first playthrough. I've never considered mixing monk or paladin with ranger, I'll mess around with that combo in the beta and see what I come up with

I've dabbled with the beta but I've barely touched it compared to a lot of you guys here. I was wondering, what are people's thoughts on the best way to build a ranger focused on dealing damage at range? Sharpshooter is an obvious choice, but I'm less sure about multi-classing. Scout for 50% sneak attack danage seems like a solid choice, although Seer may be better overall for a non-situational 40% damage bonus plus the option to pick a wide variety of cipher spells that can aid the party by hindering the enemy. I kinda like the idea of a Hunter in order to be more durable and wonder if bonuses like confident aim might offset the relative lack of damage bonuses compared to seer and scout. If the data-mining is correct, it looks like multi class rangers will lose out on stunning shots but will still get twin shots, which may be a worthwhile trade off, especially if so progession is more gradual and you'll only be using top power level abilities for a small fraction of the game. Anyway, what do you guys think? I'd welcome advice from more experienced players

Is the example given definitely a bug? Given that this is a multi-classed character might it not be the case that having a second class allows the character to bypass the limitation of only being proficient with one weapon? Note that I'm not arguing in favour of this being the case as it's probably too powerful, and essentially means that a Devoted multiclass has no downside, but I'm curious about how the subclass bonus and penalty is intended to interact with a second class and that classes' proficiencies.

Enemies should drop whatever they were equipped with when you kill them. You shouldn't need to have your suspension of disbelief tested by an enemy who was wearing plate mail and swinging a greatsword dropping just a hunk of cheese or a ruby or whatever a random loot system assigns to them. Random loot as well as what was equipped is fair enough, but items that you could see an enemy using seemingly disappearing is immersion breaking. If you find the stuff to be a hassle just leave it lying on the ground.

Sharpshooter/Devoted. Massive penetration, accuracy boosts through abilities on both sides, but to crit conversion of sharpshooter works nicely with devoted's crit bonus and fighter abilities can help make up for sharpshooter's deflection penalty. Not as much raw damage as Sharpshooter/SoulBlade (the melee focus of soul blade seems counterintuitive but it's still a nicer option to have than going with either of the other sub-classes) but the added penetration and survivability is nice, and confident aim allowing grades is a nice boost too.