Effusion

Try it naked?

The patch changed it to +2 pl (up from +1) for your school and -10% (down from -20%) recovery for other schools, as well as changes to a number of specific spells (mostly related to cast times) and the transmutation specialist ability (still benefit from gear aside from armor/weapons while transformed). The fundamental problem that different specializations have different benefits (how much they get out of increased power level and the special ability) and costs (which schools are lost) that aren't balanced remains unchanged.

Nothing really changed. Evokers are good for blasting, illusionists are okay-ish if they don't plan to rely on weapons, and the other three shoot themselves in the foot with their lost schools.

Cool.

Most notably their only regular attack ability, barbaric blow.

It was always like that. It has a shorter recovery time than other spells though so it's only 0.5s slower.

Probably because the barbarian is generally better at getting last hits with their splash damage.

A lot of the stuff that was over performing has been balanced down, difficulty has been tuned up, and now people are waiting for the patch that fixes things which are under performing. This means that some classes are in a weird place where they've gotten their nerfs but are still waiting for their buffs.

It really should be a universal rule that CC and debuff abilities last at least as long as they take to cast.

Devoted is definitely a meta knowledge based subclass. At least you didn't pick one of the weapon types that only has one unique.

Parrying daggers (also capes and offhand gauntlets) weren't exactly rare afaik, but they were for dueling rather than warfare. They were (arguably) more effective than a buckler for that purpose because one can catch and control an enemy's blade rather than just deflect it.

Would that not just shift the problem from favoring dual wielding to favoring 2h weapons, or reduce the number of 'optimal' attacks for damage builds? I think it would make more sense to have full attacks do reduced damage while dual wielding but still hit twice, or have 2h/single weapons do extra damage on full attacks.

Might is deliberately not strength though, which is why it can apply to spells. If you want to have a faster swinging 2h character then increase your dex. The stated idea behind the stat system is to make stats a choice of how players want their character to handle rather than something that just has to match up to their class/weapon. The thing is to me, I don't care how dexterous you are, all the DEX in the work is going to make a weakling able to handle a heavy weapon more quickly. That's what strength is for. I don't care how dexterous you are, if you're a weakling, it's going to be more difficult to pull a bowstring or reset a crossbow's string than if you're strong. Agility will only take you so far. And sometimes what you need to do things more quickly is NOT dexterity, but actual strength. You're thinking in terms of dnd stats, not poe stats. Might is not the same thing as strength. Muscles don't make a lightning bolt spell hit harder.

Might is deliberately not strength though, which is why it can apply to spells. If you want to have a faster swinging 2h character then increase your dex. The stated idea behind the stat system is to make stats a choice of how players want their character to handle rather than something that just has to match up to their class/weapon.

It's more relevant to compare the weapons people actually use. Nah, if base on your logic, it will just result in most of 2h weapon underwhelming while only one or two is ok. Yes, that seems to be the consensus on the current state of affairs.

It's more relevant to compare the weapons people actually use.

I don't think it's a great combination. It's doable, but the classes don't play off of each other especially well and I think you'll find yourself more pigeonholed than if you paired either with a martial class. Ciphers tend to pair best with martial classes because they need weapon attacks to generate resources, and their soul whip passive increases weapon damage. The only weapon damage druids really get is from spiritshift (they lack the self buffs of other casters), so that's where the main synergy is. The animist subclass can only shift once for a normal duration, the lifegiver gets some stiff penalties when it ends so they want to be careful about using it, the shifter subclass doesn't allow spellcasting while shifted (all cipher abilites count as spells, but maybe your build doesn't care about casting them and just wants the damage boost from soul whip), and the fury subclass can extend its spiritshift duration when it kills things (it's ranged though so i don't think it works with the soul blade, and be careful of running out of spiritshift from slow casting spells as well).

I put down no preference because, to me, it all comes down to implementation. In a turn based game large parties are great because you can micro the entire team easily. In a real time game though, especially one with friendly fire and per rest/encounter abilities, the optimal party size to me really comes down to how much I can trust the ai to handle basic combat on their own. In pillars 1 I'm finding that I'm trying to minimize the number of per-rest based characters (wizard, priest, druid) in my party because I just can't trust them to manage their own resources intelligently. For story and role playing purposes it comes down to the writing and balancing their chattiness against party size.

But if you want to actually use them to hit things, you can only do so at the +4 difficulty penalty they incur for requiring weapon proficiency, which Ezren has no way of getting. Something similar bothers me (even more so) about Ordikon's Staff, which seems like it's made for someone like Ezren (for having a way to pass a combat check in a chinch without having to worry about having an attack spell in hand, for example, or for dealing with banes immune to such spells), but then it requires Weapon Proficiency, which is kind of silly. Yes, I think Seelah and Lini are the characters who can use these weapons to their fullest. Still, even with the non-proficiency penalty Ezren can still get a net 3d6+1 (sword) and d10+2d6+6 (glaive) when discarding them. That's enough for ezren to take down a minor bane in an emergency with the glaive. My only guess with Ordikon's staff is that it's for a character from the physical game that we don't have.

There does seem to be a few issues like this floating around. I have a Merisel whose hand got duplicated somehow so now she has has two venomous heavy crossbows and revelation quills (which should be impossible because it's a loot item) in her deck.

On the subject of Ezren dropping a weapon slot for an item, act 6 added a couple of weapons which might actually be useful to him, Chellan sword of greed and Karzoug's burning glaive. These are both strength based weapons that can heal on an int check. Ezren doesn't need much healing but it's still nice to be able to get allies, spyglasses, and spells discarded with staff of heaven and earth/hungry shadows back. I hope we get more weapons that act like magic items in the future to give that slot more value to casters.

This topic comes up regularly in any RNG based game. Unfortunately, humans have evolved to be bad at estimating statistics thanks to a negative bias which causes negative outcomes stand out more to us than positive ones. This means that most of the time when a system is fair it will feel unfair. I think games tend to amplify this when the player has the agency to avoid situations where they're unlikely to succeed (eg, using blessings instead of hoping for a 15 on 3d6) because this causes them to experience more unlikely failures than unlikely successes. It's quite difficult to create a system which feels fair without actually tipping the scales heavily in the player's favor. In this game I deal with it by ignoring average rolls and just focusing on minimum rolls for anything important. Aside from rolling the occasional 0 on a d10+2, this works pretty well for me.

Her melee bonus went down from +2 to +1 though so you're getting the same d8+5 melee as the 3/3 base build.

I think giving armor a chance to prevent a failure instead of mitigate one would make it a lot more desirable. Something like "bury this card to reroll a failure" or "discard this card to change any rolled 1s to 3s" would be a more valuable kind of safety net.