Luagha

Tekehu as a Chanter is a StreetShark with Chain Lightning. I have no regrets.

There is a very dramatic and obvious cutscene in the Queen's Palace that makes it absolutely clear that you are about to hit a point of no return. The Queen even says explicitly that it is time to stop playing privateer, that any of the factions can help you with the final goal, and that you must choose one of them.- your quest log also says this, and mentions a fifth option. This is where i'd suggest the hard save if you want to do all four, because each faction will open up their last quests at this point and it finally becomes possible to lock the others out if you're not reading carefully.

You are focus starved until you hit max focus, at which point you gain +20% damage and unlimited power usage for <I don't know how many> seconds then your focus drains to 0.

Even after 3.0, the original game is trivially easy by act 3. Even without min-maxxing. Just like this game now. At this point it's just a hallmark of the series (and even the genre, considering I remember the same being true in Baldur's Gate 2/Arcanum/Icewind Dale) that we're much more powerful than the enemies and if we want it to be difficult we need to set self-restrictions. Irritating, but easy enough to do. My favourite self-restriction is only using a rotating subset of my party for each encounter - allows all the high-level toys and can still throw the whole party at difficulty spikes. I'm much more bothered by bugs like the companion-related ones, because you can't work around those without cheating.

And i don't even like how Cipher plays (having to wait to cast spells and those spells having awful visual feedback), but I like the arpee. Want a priest, but Xoti is creepy. So there's me trying to make what feels like an agressively sub-par combination work, and wondering what powers you min-max types would select if forced to use it~ My first thought was "Wael Priest for lovely defense buffs on top of Devotions/Beacon/Pillar, Soulblade for a focus dump", but so far the real result seems to be ineffective nukes/buffs with lots of dull autoattacking. (Won't be the end of the world if he just ends up being the 'face' for cipher/priest arpees and the other four are the interesting combatants, especially with difficulty as low as it is. Just seems a pity.)

This list of console commands which was posted on Reddit: https://gist.github.com/SonicZentropy/f3711d2fa9b547a05cd2496077fda42d LIsts "ShowScalers" and "ToggleScaler(DifficultyScaler scaler)" - those look promising.

Mage/Fighter is plenty strong - it's the summoned weapons that seem a bit meh. There's plenty of nice self-buffs in there for wizards that cast quickly - and now that we can tell our guys to auto-cast, buffing for every fight won't be a chore like in POE1.

Great resource Aravane, thank you. ... frustrating to need so many external reference sheets to have a smooth playing experience, though.

I hate the way cipher plays but like the 'psychic' aspect RP-wise, so getting to basically ignore the class powers while putting all those active skill points into the other class works out perfectly :D

Bwahahah. At least we can't be tempted to use this with Tekehu since his chanter subclass gets no summons <_<

The bug makes him flip-flop more than he's supposed to, but as far as I can tell there's no combination of backgrounds that changes his 'pro-eothas' stance. There's some denial and hypocrisy going on, but it seems to be intentional and he's even aware of it... sometimes.

Soulblade of Wael turns out to be surprisngly effective, but monstrously boring. I take back the suggestion entirely~

You jumped into a topic to belittle people who cared about the topic, in what world would that ever not result in defensiveness? Acting righteous about responses you seem to have fished for is an interesting approach.

For every other priest spell I have looked at, it is treated as the power level your subclass gives it to you and not the native level. Gaze of the Adragan is level 6 wizard spell, PL7 Wael. Ingame it uses a level 6 spell slot alongside Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment. Easily reproducable: Take a priest to Power Level 7, look at level 6 and 7 spell lists.and see behavour inconsistent with other Priest subclass spells.

If you primarily want the mage half to buff, why not look at cleric of wael? Wael gets some of the wizard self buffs you highlighted and Devotions is the single best example of "does this increase my chances of hitting them and reduce their chance to hit me?" around. And it frees you from the creepy Gaunite.