cactot

Tekehu is amazing IMHO. Foe only chill fog is worth the price of admission alone, and he has solid foe only nukes and debuffs too. Combine that with the fact that Druids are arguably the best healers in the game with long lasting large area heal over time spells, and you have an extremely useful companion. Sure there are some ridiculous combos that make the healing unnecessary (like the +healing chant with fighter heal on damage taken ability), but if you don't feel like abusing those (or the combo hadn't come on line yet) Tekehu is a MVP caliber companion. At the VERY end of the game multiclass Tekehu might come out ahead because of the huge power spike chanters get at power level 6 and 7, but for 75% of the game pure druid Tekehu is as good or better than MC Tekehu.

Don't have the answers to all the questions, but yes passives should apply in animal form. You should be able to verify with DW by shifting and right clicking on the "weapons" and looking at the details re: attack speed.

Why not try them out? Save the game and start a fight with whomever is nearby and see witch works better. It is impossible for us to tell you more than that without knowing the weapons in question.

So I noticed there are some items people have mentioned exist in their games that others don't see. Devil of Caroc Breastplate - Requires that she spare Harmke (I have updated the Devil of Caroc Breastplate wiki entry with the above https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Devil_of_Caroc_Breastplate) Aloth's unique hat (name?) - Requires that he join the leaden key? Pallegina's armor - Armor might change depending on her status at the end of PoE1 Does anyone have any more detail on any of the above, or any others not yet mentioned?

Given your preferences, I would strongly recommend a rogue of some sort. They get awesome mobility at power level 1, invisibility on demand at power level 2, and lots of quality debuffs. They mix very well with any number of classes. If you choose street fighter it also gives them a very good damage boost while in a crowd, which is often when you need it the most. If you want something tanky, paladin is the tankiest class in the game (particularly kind wayfarer for the instant cast self-heals). Wizard, fighter and barbarian can all be decently tanky as well. Wizards with lots of buffs, barbarians with a large health pool (and armor buff if you use berserker), and fighters get defensive buffs and regeneration.

This would make it completely worthless for anyone who plays naturally and doesn't try to abuse the game mechanics. 33% chance on a crit is WAY worse than 30% all the time. You can (and do, particularly on POTD) still miss the second attack. Plus unless you optimize for accuracy *and* dual class berserker or fighter your crit chance isn't going to be that high. Let's pretend you can manage to maintain a 33% crit chance (fighter with disciplined strikes and an accuracy 20 points higher than their deflection), that would give you an average damage bonus of ~11%... If you want to fix it remove the interaction with rods, fixing it like you suggest might as well just be removing it. There would never be any occasion to take it over lightning strikes.

What about the unique blunderbuss one of your companions has early on? That seems like an ideal candidate, as it is a single projectile and has the rod blast radius built in.

If you focus on self buffing melee, Street fighter should work fine. Heavyish armor, pet that reduces armor penalty, open with nuke or debuff from stealth then self buff deflection and armor then go to town.

The con debuff healing penalties have been reduced as well. Sickened is 25% now iirc, not sure of the higher level ones.

FYI there are shields that can be used as offhand weapons, so there isn't much disadvantage in doing so. One is available fairly early for ~$13k.

Melee + wizard is going to be the toughest option, as quick casting armor + deflection buffs make you very hard to kill. Particularly if you go kind Wayfarer, your defenses will be sky high and you will have self heals. Barbarian + skald is a lot of fun too, just don't take berzerker or the chants and invocations will hurt your allies. You will want to optimize for attack speed and accuracy to stack up as many crits as possible for those sweet sweet phrases (and, importantly, to reduce the 4.5 second recovery time on invocations). For skald it *might* be worth using two rapiers with the modal active. 25 total bonus accuracy might give you more crits/minute since the action speed debuff will be somewhat offset by rage and dual wield. It would certainly be worth trying out. Soulblade will do the most melee burst damage, but will be the squishiest by far.

On Classic. I suppose you'll have to micro him even more to keep him alive on POTD, but that won't affect the damage output. Yes it will, +15 to all enemy defenses will reduce the number of hits and crits significantly.

It's too bad, it is much better organized and easier to navigate than the official one.

Yep, I am quite a few deep at this point. Some failed because unexpected mechanics (ranged crits don't generate skald phases? There goes a blunderbuss build...), others because they have no way to survive the opening salvo from a boarding party on POTD (that all seem to target the main character regardless of what you do), others because they are powerful but boring (heya there monk =\). Now I am in between a self buffing wizard + melee multi (pally, barb, fighter) that opens with a nuke then melees and a paladin + whatever multi (paladin for durability, other class for fun). The strongest contender right now is the MC as a KW + barb and one custom as KW + troubadour. Durable tanks with heals and decent DPS should allow me to carry any set of companions through POTD.

Where'd you get Abraham? I haven't seen him yet.