Ensign

Oh they do some of that as well - enemy spell casters hammer you with Arcane Dampener on PotD as the most salient example. Players complain about that too. ...and honestly they should. The 'smarter enemies' trope shows up in every game because it sounds like a smart criticism, but it isn't. The absolute, core gameplay of every single player combat game I know of is the player overcoming more powerful or numerous enemies by outsmarting them. Giving enemies more and more abilities makes it harder to outsmart them, but it does so by making the possible solutions narrower and narrower. How do you maintain a class based role playing game when the right answers to all the tricks rely increasingly on mastery of system corner cases? The extreme of that is even worse - it is not hard to make an AI with builds that will outplay the player. Perfectly timed debuffs and interrupts and stun locks are things AI is great at. Having the game outplay *you* consistently, to an extent that you are fighting weaker but much smarter foes, isn't smart design - it is an infuriating game that no one wants to play. When you stick to the core principles of the game - players outsmarting superior foes, primacy of class balance, enabling multiple strategies - buffing the attack/ defense numbers with minor mechanical changes and nothing more is a mediocre solution. Unfortunately every other solution we know of is so, so much worse.

It doesn't matter how high level the captain is if their ship sinks to cannon fire.

Ranged single class Monk is kind of a niche build but works fine. The usual build is to dual wield scepters and keep the scepter modal on all the time - that increases damage and crucially self-inflicts damage, which generates wounds and powers your abilities. A lot of Monk's abilities are melee only. Dance with Death works better at range though and helps your damage and wound generation. Lightning Strikes and Turning Wheel will passively increase damage via lashes, and Thunderous Blows gives might and penetration. Your big mid-game power spike comes from Stunning Surge. It works with ranged weapons, and restores its cost on crits, allowing you to spam stunning dual attacks as long as you keep critting. Then late game you get some immensely powerful abilites; Monk has the strongest PL9 abilities in the game (only competing with Wizard) and those work well from range as well. A lot of this works really well with the mortars (unique Blunderbusses) as well, turning most of the above into ranged AoE attacks.

Before Set to their Purpose got torpedoed Fighter/Chanter was a pretty popular build. There are still a bunch of obsolete ones in the build list. I doubt you'd want to touch one now - between the big fighter damage nerfs and the loss of Brilliant that class combo really did get nuked from orbit. The philosophy of over-nerfing then bringing it back up is sound from the perspective of getting it right quickly. It does depend on the speed of the patch cycle though. We've only had one major balance patch since the game went live; everything over-nerfed in the 1.1 patch is still over nerfed in 4.0. It's harder to defend the over-nerf then bring back up philosophy when you don't do the second part.

You need -4 or -5 rep with the Principi, which means having the full 3 negative bars but only 0 or 1 positive bars. Hitting 3 negative when you already have 2 or more positive reputation will not cause it to spawn.

Following up for anyone else interested - the point about stealing in Dunnage made all the difference. There are 5 spots you can steal in Dunnage to lose Principi reputation - 3 in the King's Coffin near the prostitutes, 1 on top of the Balefire Beacon, and one at the Radiant Court. You can also lose reputation twice from threatening Cotta, and lose reputation for every one of Talfor's thugs you kill. Between all of those you can pick up 14 -reputations with the Principi on PotD (more thugs spawn); -13 are needed to drive your negative reputation to the minimum and spawn the Terror of the Deadfire. No need to wipe out the Undercroft, and you can complete the rest of the Principi quests any way you like (and repair your reputation to mixed).

Still, nerfing abilities to the point where they no longer function is not a great design. Taking Brilliant off of Set to their Purpose, for instance, didn't just tone down that character and skill, it nuked it from orbit (and that variant isn't even playable or re-specable anymore). It took them several iterations to figure out brilliant, but that speaks to the import of getting the fundamentals right up front - moving numbers around a bit is annoying for players built around those, but completely removing functions causes real problems for games in progress.

If you want to use an old overtuned thing, or add new overtuned things there are plenty of mods for that. The unmodified game should be as close to balanced as possible. You want first time players who have read nothing about strategy or tactics ahead of time to have a consistent experience, and you can't deliver that if the various options (which they will be choosing from quasi-randomly) are wildly out of balance with each other.

PER matters if you're planning on using offensive invocations. Hel-Hyraf for armor reduction, Killers Froze Stiff for the paralyze, and Seven Nights / Winds for the big AoE nukes are all very good spells that you may or may not want to use; if you do, PER is something you'll want to invest in. DEX affects action speed. A Herald is generally not action speed constrained - it takes a while to rebuild phrases to cast an invocation and your paladin actives aren't things you generally want to spam. So if you really want to min-max a chanter tank, you can dump DEX and set them to passive, so they never auto-attack and you have reasonable responsiveness when you want to cast something important. If you plan on auto-attacking though, I suggest not dumping DEX - the recovery from each attack becomes prohibitive and it's not worth the long downtime when you might need a Lay on Hands or Exhortation.

To anyone unfamiliar, you are observing a particularly extreme and obvious example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Blood Mage outperforms a vanilla Wizard when you want to cast the same few spells over and over again, ideally 1 from each 'tier' of low/mid/high level spells. If you are using a bunch of spells from a variety of power levels Blood Sacrifice ends up being really random in what it returns. You would be better off just chain casting with a vanilla Wizard and using Empower to restore your spells, swapping to Vaporous Wizardry if necessary; that gives you 4 full barrages of spells in a fight, which is more than sufficient to let you blast without rationing in virtually every encounter in the game. Where I have found Blood Mage most useful, outside of extreme soloing shenanigans, is with more tactical play. If you just want to spam Missile Salvo and Capricious Hex over and over, for instance, you can play DAM / Missile Salvo / Hex, the hit restore and be guaranteed to get one of those 3 back. If it's DAoM put up Infuse or another self buff; if it's one of the others cast it again and chain together your best spells. If it's unclear I think it's best as a single class Blood Mage (again, outside of extreme endurance / soloing builds with Tactician); it works best when you take full advantage of its spell restore to cast your best spells over and over, and a secondary class only weakens that.

I would advise against dumping DEX even if you don't care about your damage output - 8 second recovery after every Lay on Hands is *painful*. PER can pretty safely go though if you're doing a summons and heals guy.

Plus on the handful of bosses where CC does work (Grub Queen, SSS Gator) you can just trivially stunlock them to death, trivializing the encounters. It's pretty obvious why it's the way it is. Also as you mention a lot of lesser CC still work - interrupts and knockdowns can shut down all the big hitting attacks. Downgraded stun and downgraded terrify still daze and frighten, mitigating a substantial amount of threat. Most might/dex/res resistant intellect immune mobs have no resistance to blind, and while it's not valued so highly since it's so common getting that blind on there makes a big difference.

Not the damage from overpenetration, but the threshold for overpenetration (2x armor) and bonus from critical hits (1.5x penetration). I like how those behave at the beginning of the game or when you're still in fine equipment, but late game with legendary gear and max level enemies neither of those functions all that well. I think it'd work better with, say, +2(3?) pen on crit and +3(4?) pen over armor for overpen, or similar - something that made it work consistently throughout the game.

Vanilla Wizard gets 17 spell casts at max level, plus 9 from empower. Even casting low level invocations it takes a good 7+ minutes for a Chanter to dump that many spells, and a Cipher needs to dish out in the ballpark of 1000 damage with weapon attacks to cast that much. Those are some crazy slow fights where that comes into play - Belranga, some of the endurance trials in SSS, or a purposefully noodly party composition.

16 AR, -1 flanked, -1 usher's visage, -2 the shield cracks puts it at 12, you should be able to get full pen on a 12 armor target without too much trouble, right?

Concelhaut's is a good supplement to Ninagauth's, with lots of Evocation and the unique Crushing Doom. Arkemyr's (both versions) is good for illusion spells and CC. Llengrath's is great for a martial hybrid with many of the critical supportive spells (displaced image, vital essence, spirit shield) but does not have any unique spells. Then of course Vaporous Wizardry, which is definitely worth keeping as a backup for fights that go on far too long.

https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Gipon_Prudensco

Let's say I'm trying to play it straight and want to spawn the Principi vengeance ship early for that sweet sweet armor - what are some of the good ways to do it? Murder-hoboing my way through Fort Deadlight left me with...tier 1 positive reputation, so I'm a bit unsure who they even care about now.

I honestly think the armor vs pen system is fine. There are some really minor tweaks I would make to it (multiplicative overpen in an otherwise additive system is weird) but I think the core design is sound. I think the tuning of the pen system is poor. There are too few sources of additional pen; armor suffers a similar problem. Those sources of pen that do exist do so at essentially zero opportunity cost with respect to damage. It is important that, given their relative import, each source presents substantial opportunity costs to make investing in it a serious choice. Lots of potential directions here, but at least with respect to high level enemies penetration is king and you want to stack every bit possible because you can't get enough.

I feel like priest has enough oomph in it's best spells to be a strong party member, but its power is narrow enough that you have to build your party around the priest to make it shine. You can't just drop one into any party and have it contribute - you need the squishy melee dps to BDD, the external buffs to SoT; you want to avoid other accuracy buffs to maximize DotF. Most other classes have multiple builds and roles you can build to fit into a comp, but priest really has zero flexibility if you want it to pull its weight. Wael and Skaen are exceptions in that their cross class skills let them act like illusionists and rogues enough to fit into their respective multiclass roles. If you are mostly limited to core priest skills there is only so much you can do.

It's interesting how small changes in the zero point have such profound impacts on player perception. Might (and Con) are the only attributes unchanged from PoE1, and its viewed as much weaker this time around despite most of its competition being nerfed. Might played an outsided impact on damage in the early game of PoE1 due to its interaction with armor, and even though that diminished harder than it does in PoE2 the perception of it being the best stat in that game remains. Resolve is in a tricky spot. 1 deflection per point is a bit weak for an attribute on most characters, but 2 deflection per point would be one of the strongest attributes in the game and make uber-tanks trivial to build. The affliction duration is a good knob to turn, if a bit naturally insensitive - the strongest afflictions are dangerous enough that you want to resist them, and the tier below those tends to be spammed enough that resolve doesn't move the needle much. They could afford to turn that knob up a bit, to ~5% per point - though that might annoy players more from high resolve foes than they'd appreciate its benefits, and debuffing resolve to maximize affliction durations would be a more salient - and less visible - part of the stat. Unfortunately, unlike the health from constitution, deflection doesn't have naturally sharp diminishing returns, so I suspect people will be 'lol dump resolve' for any values of the defensive stats until it's wildly overpowered, at which point the calculus flips and everyone maxes it without thinking. Its current spot is fine, even if players tend to want to max or dump it, instead of naturally tending towards a moderate value like most other stats.

The double inversion craziness is at least a mathematically elegant system that behaves in good ways. Its main problem is how hard it is to communicate what is going on. With damage modifiers I don't think it is too bad, but when you start mixing speed and recovery modifiers it gets hard to keep straight. Mix in differences action vs recovery speeds and...yeah the messaging is a mess.

It'd be worth it to give druids and priests 2 free spells of each level, and put a lot of emphasis on cross class skills. Their limited spell selection and the relative narrowness of their spell lists is a pretty big limitation of those classes - I find myself usually preferring another wizard to a priest or druid.

I like dual pistol/blunderbuss kind wayfarer/ranger as a character. It has flexible positioning to maximize the auras and apply LoH / exhortations, and spams heals through FoD dual attacks. Plus driving flight with mortars is a lot of fun.