AgentNoun

Yeah, that's a good point about Berserker with Skald--probably a more flavorful combination, too. It's a tough choice for me between multiclassing Shattered Pillar with another melee class or just going pure. I want access to those very cool high-level abilities and earlier Torment's Reach, but at the same time it seems like I'm leaving some very good multiclass options just lying there.

Oh wow, okay, I had no idea Shattered Pillar could generate wounds that quickly. Side note: I'm kind of curious how a Shattered Pillar/Skald multiclass would work. It's obviously not going to be as offensively powerful as some of the other multiclasses in this thread, but it seems like gaining phrases on crits (plus cheaper offensive invocations) could let you spam offensive invocations to a comical degree. The paralysis cone one even gives you more chances to crit, which means more phrases, which means more invocations... Not sure if it's better than Shattered Pillar/Barbarian or even just pure Shattered Pillar's ability to spam Torment's Reach, but it seems like it could be really cool.

Out of curiosity, why Shattered Pillar for solo? If you're going to get hit anyway, wouldn't it be better to get Wounds passively from that and have a higher Wound max for the "stacks based on how many Wounds you have" buffs? Or is Shattered Pillar just faster at building up Wounds and/or better in some other way?

For a single-class Shattered Pillar Monk, is Swift Flurry still better than Lightning Strikes?

On a melee non-tank character, would 8 Resolve be okay, or should I have at least 10?

Anyone have anything good you're using for male Ocean Folk? I'm not a fan of any of the included portraits myself.

Do you think it's worth it to pick up Soul Blade as a multiclass over going pure Shattered Pillar Monk? Do Monk's own abilities and unarmed damage bonus progression make up for the lack of Soul Whip/Soul Annihilation damage?

Pure Cipher with guns to build Focus is a classic from PoE1 and by all indications it should work great here, too. All of the classes are good without multiclassing, it looks like, and especially casters like Cipher. You could possibly go Cipher/Devoted Fighter and focus on guns for your proficiency, but you'll slow down your Cipher spell progression in return for higher crit and accuracy with your guns. Up to you if it's worth it, but if you're mostly into Cipher for the spells, I'd go single-class.

Eder can be a Rogue, and you can recruit a Cipher. There's no reason your Watcher needs to have all of the useful skills unless you're soloing.

Well that's promising, then! Multiclassing is cool but Shattered Pillar addressed everything that prevented me from making my Watcher a Monk in PoE1 (specifically, I didn't want to need to tank to have resources to do my skills). So I guess I'll dive right in with pure Monk! Do you have to take an equal number of abilities from each class? One drawback I could see to Soul Blade is if I end up with a bunch of Cipher spells I never cast because I'm dumping all of my Focus into Soul Annihilation, in which case I'd probably rather be a pure Monk.

How is Shattered Pillar Monk as a single-class character? Obviously we're all excited to be able to multiclass, so I think a lot of us are thinking about multiclass combinations before we think about how single-class works, at least for melee characters. I'm having a really tough time deciding between going single-class Shattered Pillar Monk, or multiclassing it with Ascendant Cipher. The delayed ability progression for multiclassing worries me--it'll be a lot longer before I get AoE CC skills like Torment's Reach and Amplified Wave--but it's possible that it's worth that trade-off for the versatility.

Do you think the rank 8 and 9 Monk abilities are worth going single-class for? They seem pretty incredible, but so does the Devoted bonus, especially if it works with fists.