Abbzug

I'm playing a nalpazca monk/wizard, and sometimes I take Aloth along as a fighter/wizard. The summon weapons are really bad, and so are the offensive buffs so I skip them. But the defensive buffs are generally .4 seconds with no recovery. So I just AI script all the defensive buffs at the start of fights. I don't generally have the spell slots and time to also throw out offensive spells so when I do it's usually when I spend empower points.

Does Marked for Hunt work with a 999 reset timer? From my experience the reset timer persists outside of combat. I tried putting some buffs on always true with long reset timers (like 40-60 seconds), and what I found was that if I was fighting battles in quick succession they wouldn't cast after the first fight.

Feels like there's too little combat and too little talking as well. I liked the trash fights in PoE. Plenty of them were skippable if people were really bothered by them, and they didn't respawn so I never saw the issue. There's a whole subforum dedicated to making builds, and I don't think they're optimizing for RP decisions. What is the point of coming up with clever builds if there's nothing for you to test them on. But there also doesn't seem to be that much talking either. Most of the conversations are a lot shorter and a lot less interesting than they were in PoE. I guess that's what you get when you decide to fully voice everything (not a choice I would've made).

There's a fan fix for the arbalest on nexusmods here https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity/mods/171 I'm not positive but I don't think the deadfire soulbound weapons (club and arbalest) work like other soulbound weapons. I don't think they work with any weapon focus or priest talent, I think they need the weapon focus specific to that weapon type. Idk could just be a display error or me not remembering correctly.

Mostly because of the way damage reduction works. It's a flat reduction to damage taken per hit. There's plenty of reasons to go for dual wielding, but in general you want big hits. Also attacks are broken into attack, recovery and reload phases (reload only for guns and crossbows). 2h doesn't really attack that slowly, it just recovers slowly and with the right setup you can eliminate or greatly reduce the recovery period. Also bigger weapons have stronger interrupts anyway so you might be interrupting less often but you'll be interrupting for longer periods, I don't really know how it washes out though. It doesn't wash out. So here's some basic math for you: a generic fight between a 2h user and a dual wielder. We can safely ignore attack speed and recovery buffs, as they are equally available to all, other than dual wielding style (which we will use in this example). We will set DR at the most optimal for this fight, 12 when using base weapons with no modifiers (proportionally it's the same, the value changes but not the ratios), so the dual wielder does as little damage as possible (3 per hit compared to average 7 for the 2h weapons, meaning the 2h weapon does 2x as much damage). Not going into the interruption thing as again it's not something I know a lot about in detail. I've never really done an interrupt build since I'd rather just use abilites and spells to disable stuff and I don't really dump stat resolve. But you shouldn't ignore attack speed modifiers. Even if they're equally available (and they're not, dw has more of them), they're not equally valuable which is what I was getting at. If you can swing a generic great sword as fast as someone can swing two generic sabres, then the great sword would certainly have a leg up. But again I'm not saying DW doesn't have it's place because it certainly does. You get into uniques and the opportunity cost of reaching zero recovery and it muddies things a lot. Also your view of class balance is certainly novel, and I'd just go back to trying the game on higher difficulties.

Seconding what has been said about higher difficulties. Mostly because of the way damage reduction works. It's a flat reduction to damage taken per hit. There's plenty of reasons to go for dual wielding, but in general you want big hits. Also attacks are broken into attack, recovery and reload phases (reload only for guns and crossbows). 2h doesn't really attack that slowly, it just recovers slowly and with the right setup you can eliminate or greatly reduce the recovery period. Also bigger weapons have stronger interrupts anyway so you might be interrupting less often but you'll be interrupting for longer periods, I don't really know how it washes out though.

Would despondent blows (melee accuracy debuff) stack with accuracy debuffs?

Yep. In D&D step 1 to succeeding with a bard was to pick a kit that removed as many bard-like qualities as possible.

I don't really like fighters. Never really use them after I get Caed Nua and can dump Eder. But favorites is harder. I kind of approach every game as deciding who to take to best complement my barbarian, monk or chanter so I guess those would be my favorites.

It's also not bad on a wizard. They have defensive self buffs and can spell mastery DAoM. So if they're unarmored they can reach zero recovery without any talents or items I believe. There's better candidates but it's still kind of fun to do.

Well I guess if I ever decide to use a large shield I'll use it with fists.

Of the four tanky types you mentioned (fighter, paladin, monk and barbarian) I wouldn't say the monk is the strongest, but they definitely have the easiest time in act 1 and the early game because good equipment is kind of scarce and monk fists are awesome. And those parts of the game are probably the most challenging for a new player. It's really a class that hits the ground running and just gets better and better. I never liked the theme of them so I avoided them a long time, but when I finally tried them it really opened my eyes. They're not my favorite class, but they're still a hell of a lot more interesting and engaging than fighters imo. And the game is kind of inspired by Infinity Engine games and 2nd edition D&D, but the balance is very different. In 2nd edition wizards started very weak but ended up making other classes obsolete at a certain point. That just doesn't really happen in this game. Low level wizards in Pillars are really strong and you can start a nuker build, a control build or a gish build very early. If you're looking for a late bloomer that has a rough start and then just has jaw dropping performance later in the game I'd look elsewhere. Like a barbarian or chanter. But even that is a stretch. No class really peaks so soon they stop being fun and no class peaks so late and so great that they make everyone else superfluous.

Honestly I think it's best not to ask, or even engage directly. Exactly. Don't negotiate with terrorists.

Yah I like the use of spelltongue to buff an offset. Soulbounds are a good choice. Daggers maybe even since march steel and the superb one isn't bad, plus you get the flick of the wrist bonus if you need a little more accuracy.

Idk, I've had good luck with my melee rogue by tanking might and intellect and maxing con. Sneak attack + reckless + superb + whatever else seems to offset the might penalty just fine. Doesn't make the meanest rogue, but I only really use him as a mechanics bot and to take out high priority targets (don't really micro him otherwise). I feel like any other class that took two attributes as dump stats would either have the defenses of a wet paper bag, or the offenses of one but maybe I'm wrong.

That's really clever.

Another constructive brindle post.

Ben Carson taught me that intellect is a dump stat for brain surgeons. I would rationalize it the same way.

Godspeed to anyone that bites on this.

I would say that targeting fortitude over deflection is a downside. Just about every mob will have higher fortitude than deflection, and abilities which lower fortitude are a lot rarer than ones that lower deflection. But it's still an overpowered spell I suppose. I'm just not a huge fan of ciphers. Seems like their spellbook is very feast or famine, so yah it does get very repetitive.

Because carnage doesn't work while unarmed? Thought more people were aware of this. I mean maybe if you played a 3 int barbarian that totally ignores carnage, but why would you do that. @Elric Galad it strikes me that the devs probably made that connection as well that it'd be good with carnage which is why they didn't allow that combo.

Gallant's focus is a pretty good early game pick when you can't really stick to a weapon focus and just have to use what's available. But later on when you've got your main weapons and you've got a priest with per encounter spells I'd normally respec out of it if that build needed the space. I don't think paladins are a factor since zealous endurance + gallant's focus is better than zealous focus alone imo. I'd be interested in seeing some builds that use novice's suffering, maybe I'll search the forums. +16 accuracy and higher base damage than the other fast weapons is appealing, but obviously it can't be crafted and it doesn't have any neat effects. Plus it costs a talent. Seems like not a great trade off. Maybe I'd take it on a chanter since their melee presence is mostly ceremonial so aren't worth the crafting mats and they have plenty of free talents. Kind of dumb it doesn't work on barbarians.

On my barb I did max might and max int (with a godlike and old valia, so 20 int). Everything else at base so nothing complicated. Barbies work well with any on-hit effects as mentioned so really there's so many options. But I just went with tidefall and spelltongue in my second set (single wielded). On the big fights I'd use spelltongue against a swarm to get like a full minute of haste buff, and then swap to the tidefall. But it's kind of unnecessary. Barbies require very little bandwidth. Just give him some good weapons and he'll be a meat seeking missile which will free you up to play the lesser classes. Imo that's a plus but some people like lots of micro.

I tried hard but restarted on PotD because it felt like it was just normal mode. PotD feels pretty good. Some of the encounters are challenging and take a few tries to get the hang of, but it's not so difficult that I feel like I'm save scumming. But yeah Act 1 is definitely the hardest. Difficulty kind of breaks down somewhere in Act 2. Starting on hard is probably fine for most people so long as you don't get intimidated by the early game.

Don't really know what story mode is supposed to be, so hard to judge it. I really hope they find a way to not make the barbie companion show up super late. Kind of hoping they just backport him into Act 1 or right after Caed Nua.