mrscojangles

Two Weapon Style decreases recovery time, Two Handed Style increases damage.

Someone on beta can probably provide a more clear cut answer, but my understanding was recovery time applies to gun reloads now like any other weapon. And eventually you'll have to reload.

Anyone can dual wield the 1 handed ranged weapons (pistol, blunderbuss, scepter, wand). Proficiency will give you access to their modals. You can talent for Two-Weapon Style to be faster, but it will get the baseline dual wield recovery bonus on its own without the talent. The talent stacks with that. Yep, if you take arms bearer talent you can. Or 6 blunderbusses.

With the wording on Dance of Death being, "Weave a pattern of pain with your movements, gaining a stacking bonus to Accuracy and Wounds. Suffering any damage ends this effect," does this mean that the scepter modal would cancel Dance of Death, or does it differentiate between self inflicted damage and actually having an enemy hit you? I would assume its any damage but, wouldn't be the first time a skill isn't clearly worded.

i havent made my mind up im trying very hard to make a single class rogue work but they just arent stacking up to other classes Even if you don't love the rogue high level abilities, a single class is still going to have access to level 4-7 abilities a lot faster and more of them as well. May not be enough to sway you, but its definitely worth keeping in mind that you'll have those abilities for a much larger portion of the game, when comparing single vs multi class.

Well damn, I thought i was set to go with ghost heart/ascendant but helwalker/ascendant seems like it might be a lot more fun. I'm guessing you build your helwalker specs with higher constitution to avoid potential oneshots/to soak the damage from the scepter modals, and since can spare the attribute points a bit more since get the +10 might/int from helwalker/duality and get 5 extra dex from lightning strikes?

I've been thinking of doing ghost heart/ascendant and hadn't even thought about helwalker/ascendant. For talents I assume Enduring Dance, Lightning strikes, Duality? The wording on Turning Wheel is saying melee, but i wonder if that tooltip is accurate on the wiki. "(Turning Wheel) - The monk is able to channel their pain into pure energy adding a proportional fire bonus to Melee Damage."

I don't know if I'd agree with that. Chanter/caster combos should be solid. I'm imagining chanter/druid and chanter/priest will make for really strong support characters, with a huge range of buffs/debuffs/heals they can utilize depending on the fight, as well as being able to pump out some good damaging spells and summons. stuff like ranger/rogue/pally/monk should pair nicely with caster ciphers. Wizard should pair nicely with some ranged builds as well, with blights or some other ranged summoned weapons and buff spells. Its a balancing act and a lot of it boils down to preference, your party layout, what you want to accomplish with the char, how quickly you want to unlock abilities and if you care about the 8th and 9th level stuff.

Two-handed. Well damn, I knew dual wielding two rods with the blast modal seemed too good to be true.

Semi-related question: are rods 2h or 1h like scepters/wands?

Not a direct answer to your question, as I haven't played beta or seen anything said by Obsidian, but there is also a console command you can use to change to/from POTD. No mods necessary. Deadfire has more scaling options though, so that may solve your problem as well.

Ghost Heart should make a nice multiclass with Cipher at least. Ghost Heart/Ascendant is probably going to be my first MC. Can spend most of your talent picks on cipher and use your ranger picks on the damage/accuracy/speed talents like Marked for the Hunt, Gunner, Two Weapon Style, Driving Flight, etc. Don't need to worry about spending points on trying to toughen up your pet, cuz its no big deal if it dies since no bonded grief. Spare points can be spent on some of the pet damage talents since it should be decent as a back line/caster harasser with its immunity to engagement and once again with it not being a big deal if it dies. You are correct though that single class Ranger isn't looking like the greatest option, but should work well for some ranged multiclass setups.

I also don't understand the aversion to just avoiding features you don't like in a single player game. I don't particularly like consumables (besides healing potions), so I simply don't use food/drugs/other potions most of the time when I play PoE or BG2 (invisibility potions are usually the exception to my "rule") or other similar games. Obviously there are features like health/endurance that you can't avoid but its always odd to me when people get upset over single player features that are entirely avoidable if you just put some self restrictions on your play through and hold yourself to those guidelines. Don't like how many spells you can cast before you rest? Then self restrict and just pretend you can only cast 5 spells per level before needing to rest. Its a single player RPG, its not like there is some scoreboard/ladder/ranking system and you're not going to place if you play the game a bit different than other people.

I can't speak with certainty for Deadfire, as I haven't played the beta, but my late 2013 MBP with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M had no issues with the first game, so I don't see any reason your 2016 MBP with a nicer graphics card should have any problems.

Really? I found most of them weren’t worth action time. If for nothing else, they work very well as some extra meat shields to buy a little bit of time at the start of fight for your casters to get out buffs/debuffs/cc/etc. Most useful on fights with a lot of enemies where you're more likely to get swarmed or cc'd right off the bat before you have time for your casters to get out multiple spells.

It'll be interesting to see what exactly the berath's blessing options are and if they're forced restrictions (can't wear armor, can't use specific quality of weapons/spells/etc), if they're increasing NPC stats, or what exactly they'll constitute. One thing I personally did in the first game to inflate difficulty on additional playthroughs was using console commands to repeatedly roll back XP to postpone level ups. Its not the best option because you're likely to drastically delay or entirely miss level cap and the max level abilities, but its an option I've used numerous times in both BG2 and PoE. If you're satisfied with the difficulty you're at, you can continue postponing the level up by rolling back XP until you hit a point where you feel like you need the next level to advance, and then you add back a little XP to hit that next level. In the first game, you had to also manually activate some of the high level scaling before going to zones too, as if you're not high enough level for the game to give you the high level scaling prompt, you'd still want to make sure you used console commands to activate it before going to those zones. While these options aren't the most convenient way to go about things, I found the difference to be very significant in mid to late game difficulty, and was able to have some highly enjoyable tough fights late in the game instead of having the entire game turn into a complete joke if you're the type of person to do every single side quest. The level scaling options should (hopefully) make a big difference in general in PoE2, but if that isn't adequate, the "only scale up" option + rolling back XP should be a decent way to artificially inflate the difficulty a bit, at the cost of getting a lot less time on the high level abilities, or potentially missing out on some of them altogether depending on how much XP you roll back.

Indeed, too early to say with any certainty. Good news is, lot of the racial bonuses seem very nice, so plenty of options to play around with.

Much appreciated. For some reason I thought I had seen a post a while ago saying it was 10 seconds, which with how long cast times are, was worrying to me. Glad to know its decent baseline + scaling with int. Definitely seems like for a ranger/ascendant multiclass that biting whip will be strong, since with the rangers ranged damage/accuracy talents +biting whip, it should be able to get ascended pretty quick still. And if its lasting 25+ seconds with high int, the slightly longer delay on getting back to ascended afterwards shouldn't be too bad. I'm guessing you're probably only talking one or maybe two extra attacks to get back into ascended with biting vs draining, and the damage increase on the ranger skills should be pretty significant. Great, thanks for the info. The nature godlike passive seems like it may be incredibly strong for pretty much every class, depending on how good the helm itemization is.

Made a post in another thread, but due to my posts needing mod approval before they show up, it ended up getting a bit buried before it was ever even visible, so I figure a fresh thread is probably the safest bet. Other people with additional questions for those with beta access (regardless of class/spec) are welcome to post them in this thread as well. Been trying to figure out how i'm going to be building my party and have a handful of questions for some of you folks with beta access, as accurate and up to date information can be a little tough to find without digging through thousands of posts. Big thanks in advance for any answers. -Ascendant cipher: 1. What is the power level increase and the soul whip damage increase during ascended? 2. What is the power level decrease, soul whip damage decrease and focus increase when not ascended? 3. How long does ascended last? Does this duration scale with anything (int, power level, character level, etc)? 4. For anyone who has had a chance to play around with it, how does it feel with biting whip vs draining whip? Thinking of a sharpshooter/ascendant multiclass, so I was definitely leaning towards biting whip unless draining whip is really going to be essential for quickly getting back into ascended. -Lifegiver druid: 1. What constitutes "creature summon spells"? Is this just actual minion summons like blights or does this also include spells like insect swarm and plague of insects? 2. What is the post spiritshift penalty on rejuvenation spells? Is this additive with the baseline +2 bonus? For example, if the decrease after spirit shift is -4 does that put the actual impact at -2 or is the +2 baseline ignored after coming out of shift? 3. For druid multiclass, is it possible to use other class spells during spiritshift, or locked out of casting non druid spells until the shift ends? Example: I'm debating doing druid/troubadour or something like druid/priest as a serious buff/heal char and i assume chanting still continues during shift, but are invocations or priest spells usable during this time? 4. On that note, has anyone played around with any druid/chanter, druid/priest or other druid/support combinations, regardless of subclasses (though i'd prefer information on more support, heal, or caster type builds. I'm not crazy about melee druid)? How are they? Favorites, least favorites, points of interest, etc. Any opinions/information on any of these questions is much appreciated. Again, many thanks in advance.

Been trying to figure out how i'm going to be building my party and have a handful of questions for some of you folks with beta access, as accurate and up to date information can be a little tough to find without digging through thousands of posts. -Ascendant cipher: 1. What is the power level increase and the soul whip damage increase during ascended? 2. What is the power level decrease, soul whip damage decrease and focus increase when not ascended? 3. How long does ascended last? Does this duration scale with anything (int, power level, character level, etc)? 4. For anyone who has had a chance to play around with it, how does it feel with biting whip vs draining whip? Thinking of a sharpshooter/ascendant multiclass, so I was definitely leaning towards biting whip unless draining whip is really going to be essential for quickly getting back into ascended. -Lifegiver druid: 1. What constitutes "creature summon spells"? Is this just actual minion summons like blights or does this also include spells like insect swarm and plague of insects? 2. What is the post spiritshift penalty on rejuvenation spells? Is this additive with the baseline +2 bonus? For example, if the decrease after spirit shift is -4 does that put the actual impact at -2 or is the +2 baseline ignored after coming out of shift? 3. For druid multiclass, is it possible to use other class spells during spiritshift, or locked out of casting non druid spells until the shift ends? Example: I'm debating doing druid/troubadour or something like druid/priest as a serious buff/heal char and i assume chanting still continues during shift, but are invocations or priest spells usable during this time? 4. On that note, has anyone played around with any druid/chanter, druid/priest or other druid/support combinations, regardless of subclasses (though i'd prefer information on more support, heal, or caster type builds. I'm not crazy about melee druid)? How are they? Favorites, least favorites, points of interest, etc. Any opinions/information on any of these questions is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.