DreamWayfarer

Have you ever tried a build that abused healing while having low deflection? Because even before Braven posted the "Glass Tsunami", I was playing with a very similar concept, and often my Fighter had to retread from difficulty battles because her Health, which started at 100%, was now at 10% while her Endurance was as full as possible and could heal further, should she gain more Health.

Eventualy, you will unlock a chant that does a lot of Fire/Slash damage in a large AoE, and be able to melt faces just by standing there. Before that, your tank chanter will mostly be a support character who does something cool once in a while. Paladins can be built as high-burst mage killers, but more often than not you will use them for tanking and support. They are somewhat more active than Chanters, and in some ways more flexible. As for damage dealers, Rogues are probably the strongest martial class at single-target melee DPS, but Rangers are able to compete with them if you are good enough at micro-managing the pet, since it is basically a mini-Rogue. Monks are extremely powerful, if you play them well, but are not a class I would recomend to a new player, or someone who dislikes micro-managing. Barbarians are also very interesting to use, after you get more experienced, and damage dealing Fighters are more reliable than Rogues, even though they have less raw firepower.

Fighters are much better at being durable damage dealers, and investing ability points into engagement, something of very dubious use, instead of something that helps dealing damage and not dying, is a bad idea. For a "pure" tank, I would only use either a chanter or paladin, since they also bring much-desired utility while alive.

In builds with low defenses that abuse self-healing, Wound Binding can be a lifesaver during hard fights where you will just run out of health, so it is not fully useless. Of course, there is only a very small subsect of builds this applies to.

In defence of Dark Souls II, which I believe had potential buried under its worse design, dual-wielding, hexes and weapons that can do double duty as catalysts/talismans should have been on Dark Souls since the beggining. But yeah, DSI>DSII, at least as far as the base games are concerned.

Hey, I like the pacing of combat in Dark Souls 1!

Aloth being a Wizard is actualy a reason to also make the Watcher one,since you can learn spells from one another.

It is not the impression your posts gave me, but OK then. Caster are OP, that just means we need to compare barbs with other martial classes or with "partial" casters instead.

Wizards are probably better at burst spell damage, for the simple fact they can self-buff. Druids, however are very fun and much more flexible when things don't go as planed, due to getting all their spells on level-up instead of being limited by grimmories. Just remember to attack the weakest enemy defenses first and not forget to debuff them. As for builds, you can make your druid a normal caster, picking the +1 spell and elemental damage talents, turn them into temporary melee monsters by picking talents that boost spiritshift and unarmed damage in general(except novice's suffering) or take a shield, hatchet abd talents that boost deflection, for a frontline battlemage that can unload all those cone spells right on the foe's face. In terms of attributes, INT rules. Druids need PER more than other casters, since wizards have more ways off buffing their accuracy and debuffing foes, and priests are masters of buffing in general. All else is quite flexible, depending on your build, but I wouldn't dump anything below 8 unless I was making a third liner caster.

@theBalthazar: Aparently, you rest after every battle. If you try to keep going for as long as it is possible, you will see that your usual tatics don't work so well and that martial classes are able to contribute on a level comparable to the casters, even if the later are still top-tier.

If your monk isn't taking damage at all, you are just face-rolling the game either way and the only thing that matters is how fast you clean up the trash. Which Barbs do very fast. EDIT: and monks do have nice, spammable AoE. Torment's Reach. And your ranking seems to be based purely on your own playstyle, and not take into account tatics that are not "unload all your spells in a single fight, CC first, damage later". At least, that is the only way I can explain how you rank Monks and Paladins so low, and think Ciphers are only medium-tier. Ps: your explanation of why Fighters are supposedly mediocre focuses purely on tanking, so I assume you haven't built a damage dealing Fighter. Take a look at the "Glass Tsunami", or the "Lady of Pain", or for a tankier build, the " Engineer". Fighters are awesome.

It was nerfed.

@theBalthazar: You ranked Monks and Paladins as bad. While all classes you ranked as bad are viable and effective, if not downright OP when built well, those two are so strong your ranking lost the little meaning it had.

Prone, stun, paralyze... anything tgat stops the enemy from whatever it is trying to do, no "ifs" or "buts".

Chill Fog, if you plan to master "hard" CC on other levels or use Combusting Wounds a lot. Otherwise, Slicken is better when you need to stop a mob as fast as possible.

My druid with 9 DEX and 18 PER won half of the times.

Yes, I don't know where you got that from, brimsurfer. What people are arguing is not that the weapon is a physical manifestation of your soul, but that you and the weapon "share" your souls while bonded. And I don't think it has anything to do with them being enchanted to do so, most of the time. On the soulbound items I read the description of, it seens the enchantment developed naturaly, maybe as the item gained splinters and imorints of its wielders souls through history. If you need a reason for why you simply don't get the bonus without any weapon foci, remember that many weapons share some principles behind their use. Having knowkedge on some of those orinciples may make it easier to unlock the knowledge absorbed by the weapon. And I don't see how the recovery penalty on a soulbound armor applies to this discussion, as it is a completely different thing. No soulbound weapon strikes as fast as fists or benefits from novice's suffering, so I don't see why soulbound armor should make you as fast as if you were naked.

Paladin and Monk are a good choice. Both are sturdy, specialy the Paladin, and the per-encounter healing will help you make the most out of your monk.

IT IS INEVITABLE, MORTAL. BOW BEFORE YOUR STONY OVERLORDS.

Cats can deal with rodents, and are smug enough to think they are the owners of the house. You heard it well. The watcher is the Stewards pet kitten.

Maybe the weapon takes "imprints" of the souls of its former owners, so you end up getting some of their knowledge of how to wield it as well? It fits with what we know.

It is simple: the steward does not like her pet to sleep under the same roof as she does. What? Did you think the watcher was the master of Caed Nua?

The best part is that they buffed spiritshift so that it remains useful for the whole game, and if you dislike it, druids have enough base deflection for you to give them a shield and defensive talents to have a decent off-tank. @spell mastery: honestly, I liked the change. Attrition became meaningless after level 9 even if you didn't abuse rest-spamming, and the massive power increase of casters rendered all other classes superfluous. Now, things are a little better, and with update 3.0 they removed some of the trash mobs from wilderness areas.

Knowledge of how to make black powder cane much earlier than its widesoread use in war, and even then it took centuries for it to prove superior to the alternatives.

Yeah, I suppose you did leave it implicit with the "people who care about such things". If I had to fit Gandalf into any PoE class, it would be Priest. Good enough at melee after a couple buffs, force multiplier in any team and more holy than scholarly, fitting the wizards' true nature. EDIT: and fire. Never forget the fireworks.