Ensign

Given those options I would choose single class Priest of Eothas. I am not as high on single class Priest as Boeroer, but it is a reasonably powerful support class that you can build your party around. Single class Paladin on the other hand is rather weak; it is pretty tanky (but not exceptionally so); otherwise it doesn't offer anything all that exciting that you can't get from a multiclass. Multiclass Priest + Paladin doesn't have any important synergies that compensate the power loss from going multiclass. The weakness of Priest is its inflexibility. You take the good spells and need to build your party around those to be effective. Fortunately those spells are really good and worth building around! Priest of Eothas is the most linear of all the Priest subclasses, so there isn't a lot of nuance - there is, as far as I am concerned, exactly one right way to build a Priest of Eothas - but it's a worthy character to main.

Path makes its money off of a *very* good itemization system for its genre and a clever economic system to supplement it. It also has an excessively complicated character build system that, while not great design in a vacuum, does some smart things that crucially work well with their core itemization and reward loops. On the other hand, its gameplay is trash. The industry has gotten way better at this but Path's gameplay would have been amateurish even 20 years ago. The D3 vs Path is a really interesting case because D3 failed so hard on its itemization and economy that they had to totally reboot the game to try and save it. It was a shame, because so many other elements of D3 just dunk on Path so hard, but in that genre itemization and reward loops *are* the game, and where Path nailed it D3 sh*t the bed.

It's a really elegant solution though! Shame it is so hard to communicate a -300% damage mod or this would be a lot simpler.

I don't think there's any problem with the Ranger-As-Beastmaster class. It's perfectly reasonable to balance and it's an evocative fantasy and something a lot of players demand. I do think there is a problem in that 'Archer / long range DPS' is also a popular fantasy, and not one that has an obvious home in the PoE universe without being glued to the 'Beastmaster' that a lot of players don't want. If starting from scratch and without the design debt to PoE1, I think the right thing to do would have been to make the animal companion the benefit of a single Ranger subclass, as part of a Beastmaster / Stalker / Sharpshooter trio, and balance accordingly.

Touch Phantasm is indeed sexy. I'm guessing the extra armor and deflection from Stalker did a lot of work then in keeping your AC alive. But then again you do micro your characters pretty heavy and moving the AC around to not take heavy fire isn't much of a burden when solo, is it? ...trying to figure out what drives such different experiences with pets popping or not. Am guessing low micro is a major culprit, but unsure if there are other components as well.

I like blunderbuss plus shield. Makes you a lot more responsive since you can cancel the reload but not weapon recovery. You just lose out on some valuable stat sticks - especially as a source of flanked immunity if you aren't using Gipon. I wouldn't even take Flames of Devotion for a solo or duo run. Shared Flames is great in a party, but solo you're spending your precious Zeal for a very minor damage add. You're not bursting anything down, so save it for a Lay on Hands. I wouldn't take something other than Troubadour, it's clearly the best subclass for Herald and a substantial upgrade over base Chanter. You're not getting mileage out of Skald and Beckoner gives up a lot to clog the battlefield; stick with Troubadour, Brink Recitation is OP and the full overlap on two chants invaluable.

Did you make use of Defensive Bond on that Stalker/Geomancer? I feel like that one would make a big difference if it were active reliably, but that is only really true for a Stalker and I haven't been compelled to play one yet.

See I'd look at it the other way around - looking at the only slightly lower damage of short bows and big difference in penetration, why use hunting bows? Hunting bows are for clearing unarmored trash. War bows for hitting targets with armor. An archer character really wants to have one of each equipped to swap between depending on the target.

The animal companion micro aside, is it any more boring than fighter / rogue / barbarian? What is the difference?

Eh. That was an important fail safe. Reducing damage to zero as a core interaction is really dangerous balance wise. It's also utterly infuriating for a player to be whacking a target and have damage reduced to zero. You could make that failsafe a little shinier in principle but it needs to be there.

I don't disagree. Their new system is a lot more sensitive and difficult to balance than the core of the DR system. But I also don't think that the precise functional form is as important. What matters are the core interactions - dagger vs plate, sword vs leather, greatsword vs cloth, and permutations - and how those work in practice. You can build a variety of functional forms that preserve those core interactions, and to an extent those are all ok. The Deadfire armor system falls apart on two counts. First I don't think it preserves those interactions well (the worst weapon in the game against plate is...a greatsword?). Second, while it does ok at the core interactions their armor system badly falls apart at the edges, and significantly had a problem with over penetration. Having the marginal value of the -1 to 0 penetration point be huge, but the 0 to +1 be exactly zero is poor design. You could rebuild the core interactions and scale them appropriately in DR space and have an overall much better design. It does require more tuning to get the core right than their system, but it is much more robust and easier to balance once you have done that up front work.

The problem with the class in a nutshell.

The power level of a pet can only be so high since there is a class power budget to work within here, but their durability is really a problem. When fighting enemy Rangers you just ignore the pet and assume it'll get knocked out by the Chill Fog / Combusting Wounds or some chip damage from summons or something. Your own pet frequently can't go into melee late in the game without just popping and putting bonded grief on the Ranger. That's a problem when a lot of the Ranger's power is loaded onto the pet - the pet damage passives are pretty good (though Predator's Sense is kind of dependent upon Wounding Shot not being, well, Wounding Sh*t), Takedown and the upgrades are pretty brutal, etc - and the pet just dies, making all those abilities dead weight. On top of that the pet support skills (Heal, Revive, Play Dead/Master's Call) are all priced like they are powerful, versatile skills, consuming full actions with substantial bond costs, when they are anything but. You're supposed to pay 2 bond - and a full cast time! - for a pet-only Lay on Hands? It's not like you're going to stack healing modifiers or spellcasting bonuses on a Ranger for faster pet heal, why is it so trash? Ghost Heart losing access to those skills is doing you a favor - they are all trap choices! The pet really needs a balance pass. I disagree with Boeroer on pets hitting like trucks - that gives them some power, but doesn't solve the core problem of them being micro intensive and dying to a stiff breeze. I suspect most players want a pet they don't have to micro-manage without it being a major liability; to that end, a more durable pet, or at the very least drastically improved support skills, are necessary.

The class needs a Wounding Shot fix pretty badly. Also, animal companions need to scale better at high level - they blow up fast enough that they become more liability than strength as the game progresses. Otherwise I think they are in a reasonable place. Plenty of places to tune, but those are the major pain points.

I must have missed the memo on single class Rangers being good now. If it is, it's because single class Arcane Archer is carrying a lot of water. Ranger combines really well with other classes, as you can use its accuracy boosts to help land abilities from the other class. Single class Ranger on the other hand has great accuracy boosts to land...not a whole lot. You do have some really nice high level abilities - Whirling Strikes is a better, cheaper version of Heart of Fury, for instance - but the problem is that you're a Ranger instead of a Barbarian. While the Ranger's passives boost their pet for the most part, Barbarian's buff the Barbarian, which all get multiplied through by Heart of Fury. Ranger doesn't get any of that sweet multiplicative goodness. I'm skeptical of Arcane Archer as it still doesn't get any multiplicative goodness and I imagine it to be really bond hungry, but that is worth experimenting with.

Yep, for a Beguiler, Soul Whip does +20% damage. Biting Whip also does +20% damage (trait does nothing) and Draining Whip reduces Soul Whip to 10% damage (but +100% focus gain). I think it got caught up in the great damage mod nerf right before launch and no one looked at it to make sure it still made sense.

Not even the damage inflation, but the imbalance between damage inflation and DR inflation. Damage was going to inflate from higher level, more damaging spells after all, and weapon attack damage needed modifiers to keep up. There just weren't any ways to keep up on the DR side, and the few options were all flat +1 DR bonuses, never percentage bonuses - unlike damage bonuses, which were always percentage based. Replace that with percentage armor bonuses, and a variety of outside armor sources that at least smelled like the variety of offensive boosts, and you'd have a perfectly functional straight DR system. It is more difficult to tune and balance than their PoE2 system though.

It's...not good as a single class. You can pump PER and INT to the max and still do plenty of damage to outpace Psion's focus generation. The exception is if you just want to spam low level powers. You can't cast 1st and 2nd tier power faster than you can spend the focus at high levels, and tier 3 powers won't leave you with a ton of time. So that is an option. Casting higher level powers frequently would leave you with enough time that you're better off with the empowered attacks and focus generation. Plus there are a bunch of tricks to generate focus faster on a non-Psion - Thunderous Report chief amongst them - that a Psion can't replicate. You really need to have a high burden on your time for Psion's passive generation to be valuable, and the only things that really qualify are conventional casters. The issue with Beguiler is that Ascendant pretty consistently out-Beguiler's Beguiler. I even like the additional range a lot! Beguiler gets its value out of throwing a lot of AoE deceptions to get additional focus gen, and that generally means spamming low tier powers (Mental Binding, Phantom Foes, Secret Horrors) which hit in an AoE and can generate focus. On the flip side, Ascendant gets it value out of ascending and spamming high tier powers. As it turns out, spamming Phantom Foes to generate focus stops being attractive pretty fast, while Ascendant is scaling into spamming Time Parasite and Mind Plague. Beguiler is pretty clearly unfinished. Just look at its Soul Whip - Biting Whip adds...nothing, and Draining Whip causes you to do less damage?

For a two handed devoted I would pick morningstars from a powergaming perspective. Good uniques, high pen (important for devoted when you can't just swap to a high pen set), the best dual damage combo, crazy good modal that works well with Brute Force. I like the voulge as well, and being able to swap between it and Wahai for big cleave is appealing tactically. Not being able to upgrade the voulge past superb hurts though. I use it a lot on non-devoted where you can swap it out late, but being locked in? Eeeh. Devoted / Berserker is the one to do it though. Greatswords would be ideal thematically, and have a lot of cool uniques to play with. Willbreaker is really good though and I don't think any greatsword can outperform it consistently - the weak modal and greatsword tax is too great.

I think it is rather weak. The benefit of his chanter subclass is a bunch of free invocations - which is great as part of a multiclass! You can avoid investing in invocations at all and have a great variety of druid spells and passives. Also, the downside of losing access to summoning invocations is mitigated by the watershaper's summons. You can only have one active summon per character anyway, and while chanter summons are some of the best in the game Watery Double is no slouch. As a single class chanter Tekehu gets a bunch of free spells that aren't necessarily better than what would otherwise be available. For instance gaining Chain Lightning isn't very exciting since you can take and upgrade Winds of Eld Nary, which is a cold damage version of the same spell. It does save you a bunch of points on level up, though I'm not sure what you are going to spend them on; single class characters can take everything they want anyway, generally. Plus losing out on the summons here is a big penalty. Basically Stormspeaker is a clear downgrade to base chanter as a single class, but a strong sidegrade in a multiclass that works really well when multiclassed with a spellcaster - like druid!

A lot of people really, really did not like the widespread nerfs in 1.1. I bet it showed up in their metrics too.

I agree. Most of the things hit were clearly over-performing. I think it's important to draw a distinction between down-tuning something that is over-performing and making a major functional change to an ability to it, especially when the functional change makes it bad. There's a big difference between 'my character isn't as powerful' (which players may grumble about, but is valuable long term) and 'my character doesn't work at all anymore', which is what happened to War Caller. Set to their Purpose isn't wildly overpowered infinite resources anymore, but it's also a bad skill that you shouldn't take. Charge and Mob Stance were doing stupid things with constant zero recovery full attacks, though in retrospect those were really carrying a lot of water for the class and it's kind of underwhelming without them. Not saying that those changes were bad - they were important! - but they did invalidate a character, and the lack of any substantial follow-up has left that combo in a 'yeah don't play this it's kind of bad' state. I don't like to speculate about a company's internal processes, but yeah, the backlash (which, mind you, was also a predictable consequence of obviously poor balance at release) might have spooked them from making further balance changes, which has left the game worse off than it should be at this point. They should have plenty of data to bring up many of the known underperforming sore spots at this point.

Priest Xoti is probably best as a single class priest for her main purpose - getting you through Maje island. Blessed Harvest is pretty great and Holy Radiance + 2 Restores does work. After that though I prefer Monk Xoti. I also consider her unique subclass to be a pretty obvious downgrade to vanilla Monk (especially painful trying to maintain Thunderous Blows) but it still functions reasonably as a single class Monk, and recent nincompoopery aside single class Monk is quite strong. In fairness, I like playing with Eder as a striker in games using story companions, and Priest / Fighter synergy is...poor, to be generous. The game really needs a balance pass on the companions and their unique subclasses. It's pretty painful that several of them (Xoti, Serafen, Pallegina) are such obvious downgrades to even their vanilla classes.

Pallegina Troubadour is an easy obvious upgrade to Chanter. I don't like her Paladin subclass but I wouldn't want to swap it for thematic reasons. I would switch Serafen's Wild Mind to...any other Cipher subclass. Even base Cipher or Beguiler (barf). Wild Mind is just a straight downgrade to base Cipher and infuriating whenever it forces a reload. Xoti from Priest of Gaun to anything else. Real bad skill selection, locked out of PL9 skills, and zero synergy with Monk. But really run her as a single class Monk. Eder is fine without subclasses, I like all the versions of Aloth (though dirty Trickster would be fitting and strong) and I wouldn't touch Maia or Tekehu.

Early on you'll take Clarity of Agony and use that in case of emergency. Otherwise sit on the wounds and use them for Thunderous Blows or stack them up for Duality and its upgrades. Later you use them to summon duplicates and eventually whispers - yes, whispers works with ranged. With dual mortars and stunning surge you're looking for the usual - buff accuracy, debuff enemy defenses, and try to hit enough foes to get crits. You're a bit more wound starved than with scepters but AoE stunning surge and whispers can get really funny.