Ensign

At least compared to PoE1 resolve is a much stronger attribute, combat-wise. It's better for similar reasons perception is stronger - pen on crit is a big deal, and resolve will turn penetrating crits into mitigated hits even without huge amounts stacked. Perhaps more importantly other attributes were nerfed. Might doesn't have the same interaction with armor that made it much stronger than the 3% linear gain on paper; dex is now a linear boost along with every other speed buff, and int doesn't blow out from increasing returns on AoE either. There are still plenty of low resolve builds, and in a party you can still micro-optimize resolve onto tanks and off of backline while making up the difference in tactics. But it's a much better situation than PoE1 where it was proper to dump resolve on most everyone.

The +2 all stats blessing is worth somewhere between 1 and 2 character levels worth of effectiveness - worth almost exactly 2 if you count the extra skills, talents, power levels and proficiencies at zero. Its main benefit is that it holds its value throughout the game, even after you've hit max level, have more than enough gold for all gear upgrades - and doesn't get washed out by level scaling. In terms of very early game difficulty, the start at level 4 blessing (without being blunted by scaling) and even the 'start with fine equipment' blessings are higher impact.

As for the first bit, you can of course keep tossing more and more factors into the mix - lots of things that you can do to buff duration, and lots of things that could inhibit duration. Point being that the base duration in the skill description on level up isn't terribly indicative of how long CC from that skill will actually last. The opacity of the descriptions is not helpful here. I clearly feel that hard CC is much more powerful than you do, and that a 1.5x base duration:cast time single target hard CC is a perfectly good spell in this system (or will be once the busted stuff is pulled out) - but even that is a much higher power level than the spells that currently exist, with a few exceptions.

It really should be a universal rule that CC and debuff abilities last at least as long as they take to cast. There's a symmetry there I appreciate, but I don't think it's true as a universal rule. It also doesn't hold here, because even though Gaze of the Adragon says it's a 6 second paralyze, it's realistically a 9 second paralyze (adding in some power levels and intelligence) and the cast time should be well under 6 seconds with dexterity and rapid casting. It's also a pretty big AoE. In a vacuum I have no problem at all with it as a starting point. Plenty of games where I would be thrilled to make that trade. But in practice you're comparing it to dropping a Freezing Pillar on those targets, which is just a whole lot better. With the way this game actually works, CC needs to be pretty powerful to compete with big nukes or physical damage dealers, especially with the resistance and inspiration systems that hard counter a lot of these spells.

Illusion suffers from Cipher-itis, a collection of low power effects and short durations on long cast times - but there are a few hilariously broken spells in there too. Wizard's Double, Mirrored Image, and Llengrath's Displaced image are all stupid good defensive skills, while Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage and Ryngrim's Enervating Terror are wildly overpowered CC effects. But it's hard to build any specialist wizard when a supermajority the spells in the game are trash tier; generalists can at least grab all the good (and busted) ones, but the specialists are stuck picking through garbage at a lot of spell levels. Anyway quick and dirty starting point: Arkemyr's Dazzling Lights: 9s -> 15s Bewlidering Spectacle: 15s Confused -> 15s Dazed, Confused Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage: 15s -> 9s Confusion: 30s Confused -> 20s Dazed, Confused Ryngrim's Enervating Terror: 20s -> 10s, 20m -> 10m Gaze of the Adragon: 6s -> 8s Arkemyr's Capricious Hex: 10s Daze / 12s Sickened / 6s Paralyzed -> 15s Daze / 18s Sickened / 8s Paralyzed Temporal Cocoon: 3s/4s c/r -> .5s/4.5s c/r Kalakoth's Freezing Rake: 8s Hobble/Weaken -> 12s Hobble/Weaken Concelhaut's Corrosive Skin: Weakened -> Enfeebled Petrification: 12s -> 15s

We're pretty deep into fantasy tropes here. Dual wield...wasn't ever really a thing is battlefield combat. You never marched off for war with two axes in hand. A second weapon wasn't uncommon in situations where combatants were lightly or unarmored and carrying a shield was impractical - but even then the 2nd weapon was primarily a defensive weapon for blocks and parries with possible opportunistic use offensively. But it's so rich in the fantasy literature at this point that it is expected and for some reason we can't escape the 'it makes you attack faster!' mechanical trap.

1.1 patch is mostly about nerfing all the really high points, which it has done well (with a bit of head-scratching collateral damage). Two-handed weapons, as mentioned above, mostly suffer due to the power of dual attacks in high recovery world. They basically need a damage buff across the board, as they should out-perform dual wield consistently when you aren't mashing on dual attacks. I would bet on it taking another patch cycle or two for that to happen. For now two handers just aren't very good; they relied on a couple broken ones pre-1.1 and without them there just isn't an upside.

Body Attunement was wildly out of line with other armor buffs and debuffs. It totally needed a hard nerf. Granted it was over-nerfed and looks poor in comparison to alternative debuffs, but its core effect is now in line and bringing it back up won't be difficult.

Yeah, that's how I remember it being. Yep, you're right, it stacked duration. I remembered it being a long duration modest buff and somehow thought it was a long single target debuff - lesson learned! ...and yes, duration stacking in deadfire would be fine.

I imagine we'll see a more complete list with the official patch. That would just be good practice. Some of the changes were clearly over-nerfs, but honestly that is ok. It was critical to get the grossly overpowered stuff out of the way to see what the game plays like without it. Basically all the 'top' builds before this were picking a handful of the really broken things and riding them to victory over and over; we won't see so much of that now. There are still a few clearly overpowered things (Whispers of Treason and the Rygrim's Terrifies) but those don't blow out the game the same way, so now they'll get to see what can and should be brought up.

Exactly. I might be remembering wrong, but I don't think it stacked with itself in that way in PoE. It wasn't AoE in PoE.

Good grief. Who wouldn't forge that estoc back in PoE1? That's just so stupid. It's a bug that was fixed in the beta patch.

Rogues had insight instead of sleight of hand as a class skill during the beta; it was only changed for release. This just looks like the blessings have a separate list that wasn't updated since it is applying to the old class skills instead.

More offense? Dual wield for the double white flames heal. Cast Devotions and Dire Blessing before engaging. But honestly you're not going to get a lot of offense out of the combo, not compared to the dual martials - you just don't have the modifiers available. Normally I would say Lay on Hands at level 1, but between White Flames and Restore you might want to get Sworn Enemy. It's a minor point, though, you'll want to get them both pretty quickly.

I think it comes down to how you want to play the character. In PoE1 a pure buffing priest wanted to stack Crowns -> Devotions -> Shields/Blessing/Protection from X and still get the Inspired Radiance in there somewhere...and that's just to open. If you're playing such a buffer then you'd want to max dex. But I don't think you'd want to do that as what's the point of the multi-paladin then? I would want to play this character as a tanky front-liner with a lot of situational support and utility, but I would generally be swinging weapons rather than buffing. In that case dex is not nearly so important (reactive spells are generally all 0.5s casts), but intellect and (somewhat less) might are. Resolve is very all or nothing. If you can push it to the extreme and become nearly immune to afflictions it is amazing, otherwise forget about it. As I am personally interested in seeing how well that works I'd run something like 13 might 15 int 20 resolve (10/10/10 con dex per) and main tank the character. Would be nice to have a main tank immune to CC with Liberating Exhortation and Suppress Affliction, right?

Perception is fine but easy to substitute. Borrowed Instinct for +20 accuracy, 50% graze to hit from Discipline Barrage plus the perception boost. On the other hand might and dex aren't substitutable; might stacks multiplicatively with everything and is even better than in PoE1, and dex improves base speed in a way that also stacks multiplicatively with every other speed increase. Those two (and int) are clearly the best attributes. On most classes I stop caring about perception as a combat stat once I get access to Devotions; on Fighter I never really care due to Disc Barrage.

Yep, you're going to be using Disciplined Barrage and likely some of the deeper Cipher buffs (Body Attunement, Borrowed Instinct), all of which are high impact buffs and debuffs where a bit more duration would be nice. You're also going to be getting a lot of graze to hit conversion from Disc Barrage devaluing perception. Resolve is still pretty low value unless you're stacking it really high, and perception easy to substitute.

Given constraints? 18 might 10 con 18 dex 10 per 12 int 10 res. Might and dex >> everything else, int is next most important (but you run out of points); everything else at your floor.

Er, right, Templar not Crusader. Got the multi-class names mixed up. Paladin + Priest. Should play super well as tanky support, especially with White Flames. Restore, Suppress, Withdraw, your summoned weapon all show up real early, and Dire Blessing and Devotions aren't delayed too much. That last bit is important - the main penalty of multi-classing in my mind isn't the loss of PL8-9 spells at max level, but pushing the PL5-6 spikes from 9-11 to 13-16. If you have core spells in those power levels, you're talking moving those spells from the esrly-middle part of the game to fairly late. But neither paladin nor priest has critical abilities at those power levels! So instead of hitting a down period for a single classed character of either, you get to keep filling in with more great low level abilities. Score! I wouldn't sweat the loss of a couple power levels. The damage and duration scaling from the beta was really modest. As you're not using abilities where penetration matters, +2 power level is something like 3 might and the duration half of two int. Whatever.

My impression is that Paladin is much better as a multi-class. Most of the class' power is in those first tier abilities and upgrades, plus auras and Liberating Exhortarion, which you'll get regardless. The other Exhortations are a lot different this time around, relatively low impact but fast to cast; they aren't game changers anymore. The high level abilities are more flavorful than powerful. Priest is going to play a lot differently from PoE1. There aren't Prayer Against X spells anymore and group buffs have, in general, been nerfed hard. Most of your critical reactive utility is in the very low level spells, and Devotions is inexplicably unchanged at level 4...after which it's a wasteland until the high level abilities. The upshot of that is that a multi-class Priest should play nicely as a Devotions to open combat, then as a mini-Paladin with Restore / Suppress Affliction / Withdraw to supplement Lay on Hands and Liberating Exhortation. If the alternative is not running a priest, Devotions alone is worth the loss of high level abilities on basically every other class, even if you use nothing else from priest. So a Crusader will naturally play as an extra supporty paladin. Main concern is being able to cast much of anything on the front line due to lack of concentration; fortunately the aforementioned important spells are all ultra fast casts. Pure priest is almost assuredly a fire priest nuker; that's where the residual power is. At high level you'll be able to (heavily nerfed) Crowns / Shields / Devotions, and then nuke with all your residual spell casts. If you're leaning Crusader I'd go that way. Restore / Suppress / Withdraw with Devotions opener is more than the high level paladin abilities offer and will spike much earlier in the game.

Yes, the Deadfire ranger has a lot of its power and gameplay tied to the pet. It's not just some ornamental thing for a ranged class - strong ranger play uses the pet as another party member, and you want to coordinate the ranger and pet to maximize your output. Scout will give you more stuff to do...but honestly the two classes have a lot of redundancy. Evasive Roll and Escape, Wounding Shot and Crippling Strike - you're delaying access to higher level abilities for the sneak attack bonus and not much else. If you're doing that to avoid making as much use of your pet, well, at some point you have to ask if you really just want to be a ranged rogue.

I think their armor/penetration plan makes sense from a high level view - you compress the variation in performance into a narrower range of stat values to make each point higher impact and more meaningful, and letting it scale naturally throughout the game. The main problem is...you want the range on the response to be slightly larger than the range on the inputs, so that each point is meaningful. If base armor values vary from 3 to 9 you would want the effects of armor vs pen to have at least as many values; otherwise your system is going to have many obviously 'wrong' values because you get no bang (reduced damage) for your buck (recovery)

The game provides many more tools than you need to complete it, even on PotD; even solo if you optimize enough. If you take advantage of everything available the game is going to be tedious, not challenging. The difficulty is in how complex the game is - as a new player you don't know how to build characters, what to target, how to position, let alone stuff that veterans take for granted like what order to do quests in and where the difficulty spikes are. The first time I fought the Adra Dragon when the game was new, it took me an hour to figure out how to work more and better tools into my approach and finally get a kill (and I was very happy once I did!). A couple nights ago I did the standard buff / debuff / paralyze / kill approach and wiped it in under a minute real time. The skill / experience curve is real. As for why rogues are rated so poorly - mostly because, if you're going to dump a ton of love into buffing and setting up a single hero to kill everything, it might as well be a barbarian - which is easier to micro, much more durable, and will actually one shot entire encounters when set up properly. Rogues are nice early in the game, when their free 50% modifier is a big boost over the competition, but as mentioned it isn't actually all that much better than a cipher early on (which does absurd things with all that focus if you set him up instead of a rogue), and as the game progresses the rogue offers more or less the same thing while other classes have defining abilities progressively come online. Which isn't to say it's *bad* - I'm sure you could run a bunch of fighters rogues and rangers through the game (on PotD, of course), with support coming entirely from spell use without too much trouble, but if someone is struggling to beat encounters it's not something I'd recommend.

My last Adra Dragon kill (PotD, level 13) had my Cipher's actions go DAoM pot -> auto a Xaurip for focus -> Psychovampiric Shield on Adra Dragon -> Mental Binding on Adra Dragon -> kill. That fight is straightforward for a Cipher since the dragon can be paralyzed. Buff party, debuff dragon, Psychovampiric Shield for the -20 will, then hold it down with Mental Binding and PS until dead.

In general they are worse than the obvious damage boosters (weapon focus, apprentice's sneak attack, one/two handed/weapon style) but on par with the situational toggles like penetrating and savage attack. See above for more details, and calculate it out yourself across cases if you like, but as a rule of thumb treat it as a lower variance toggle.