Myrtillo

Fleshmender and Acina's are indeed excellent options. About having a set of dual sabers>a set of dual pistols, it is not optimal, and I advise against it. The build was created specifically to make the most of Dual melee/pistol: It does not benefit from dual melle and duel range as it doesn't use full attacks, and the switching time would be wasted. And we want to cause those afflictions/stack action speed, so better attack with Mihn's/Scordeo on every attack, not every other attack. You would have a lot of cons with virtually zero pros (the only I can think of is one extra pistol shot before reloading, which is negligeable) Also, I find that dual wielding sabers looks silly and unrealistic, but that's just me.

Taverns, and booze merchants (The one in Dunnage, radiant court, comes too mind)

To be fair, every class with limited ressources is kind of an auto-attacker until mid game (and even late sometimes) :D I actually did not find it to be boring, because of the capacity of constantly alterning pistol>sabre, with pistol building stacking speed bonus, and melee attacks giving afflictions. It is more than plain damaging auto-attacks. And I was constantly alterning between a skirmish style and face-tanking engaging ennemies in general, with the help of stances. I found timing my Lower their Guard uses well really satisfying. I especially enjoy the instant combo shoot>pull>slash for a lot of early game burst (no recovery between those actions feels great). And grenades/Scrolls/per rest abilities (items or watcher)/Summon figurines can offer a lot of variety right from the start of the game. Only rarely I found myself thinking "damn, I have nothing better than an auto attack". Auto-attacks were made a lot but almost always as a decision, not as a default choice.

Honestly, not much. You can pretty much experiment with what you like. If you don't go for the looks, Devil of Caroc armor is a better pick than Miscreant, because the +2 ressources are turned into +20% crit on gambit making it virtually a 100% conversion. I would recommend a mobility skill on boots (charge or leap). Some survivavility on the belt (or the one that gives free potions). Second ring can be defensive, or boundless stars for some cool per rest abilities. Really pick the items you find/like and use them.

Reward from saving Oswald (Oathbinder Sanctum). You need to pass a dialogue check with him to actually get the ring. (I obtained it through diplomacy but there might be other options)

I remember getting it after I did his quest (with "best" ending aka we learn that the Gentleman was slaving and let Remaro go) + freeing the Huana slaves at Crookspur. I also often go for smart and passionate dialogues, which Serafan likes, I don`t know if it had a major impact.

The Intelligent Captain A smart tactician and leader that has a lot of options and uses underrated abilities with great efficiency. Fighter (no Subclass) Difficulty: 1.1 PotD (level scaling up) Solo: not tested, most likely not possible Introduction: This build tries to find the balance between roleplay, gameplay experience and efficiency. It aims at optimization, but maybe not in the usual understood way. In most of builds I see, optimization revolves around finding the best ability or series of abilities, and build around them to maximum efficiency. Although it is a very acceptable mindset, and in the end create the most broken characters, I always found it a bit boring. It means that every fight is the same, you just repeat your strong combo ad nauseam. Sure, thinking about the build and broken combos is enjoyable, but sinking 60+ hours of game time in it is another story. With this build, my goal was to make the most of whatever mechanics the game has to offer, and rather than building around one brokenly op combination, find small synergies in every little thing (with an emphasis on options that I beleived to be underrated). I found this extremely gratifying, because The thought process behind the build is original and has to evaluate all the little detail to make a great whole of a very efficient character.Every fight feels different. Your decisions as a player clearly make an impact, and you have access to a variety of meaningful options. There is always something interesting your character can do. This overall versatility and pursuit of the optimization through small details also makes for great roleplaying, and, even though I indicate my personal preferences, that I actually used for the playthrough, I strongly encourage you to make your own choices, especially when it comes to roleplay impacting decisions (race, origin, job, skills). The character was designed to fit as much as possible in the game’s setup, and to embrace his position as a ship captain in the Deadfire. A lot of gear choices were impacted by that roleplay perspective, but always with the idea of finding all those small synergies that will make the difference in the long run. This is especially true now that a lot of items have been nerfed hard and are not OP by themselves anymore. As a final note, the character is a single class fighter with no subclass. In other cRPGs, this would be the most plain and boring class, and I would never go for this option, but in PoE2, it can in my opinion be one of the classes with the biggest tactical depth, and none of the subclasses would really bring anything to the playstyle. I also saw it as a challenge as the general trend of comments seemed to be that fighters were rendered useless by patch 1.1 I now strongly disagree to this statement, it was just that fighters were used as a multiclass tool to be invincible and have ridiculous synergy with aoe melee procs that were broken to begin with, and they (thankfully) cannot be used to that end anymore, but they retain a lot of their potential. Race: Human was picked for RP preferences. Absolutely any race will do and can find its use so pick the one you enjoy the most. Godlikes loose swag points for not wearing a plumed hat or tricorn. Origin: None of the stats are min-max. Pick what you like and adjust. Stats : 10 Might 10 Con 10 Dex 16 Per 18 Intelligence 14 Resolve (I got Blessing of Berath for M12 CON12 DEX12 PER18 INT20 RES16). I like having high mental stats for roleplay purposes. He is a captain after all, so it is normal that his intelligence and resolve are high. Per is incredibly valuable, and intelligence is at the core of a lot of the synergies. You don’t need more than 10 con for survivability thanks to decent resolve, party buffs, defensive passives, and the very long duration on your constant recovery. Might is additive so left at 10(12 with BoB), dex could benefit from being higher, but this character will have a lot of options to raise action speed. Skills: I chose my passive skills for roleplay purposes: diplomacy/bluff/metaphysics, but get the ones you want, it has no impact on the build. Intimidation and Insight are good candidates. In terms of passives, I went for high arcana, moderate explosives and athletics. The high arcana and decent explosives give you an amazing amount of options that are both fun and really potent, especially considering the fact that you will have crazy amounts of accuracy (easily overcoming the increased defenses of 1.1 PotD), and improved AOE and duration through high intelligence. This adds to the variety of the build and was very satisfying from a RP perspective. (An intelligent character that uses all the tools at his disposal) Proficiency/Fighting style: This is the first meaningful choice: Sabre and pistol dual wielding. DW is without doubt the strongest option in terms of fighting styles right now. Plus, our character is a tactician and we want reactivity, so we cannot afford to be in recovery for too long. DW melee+ranged is a semi unusual choice. You get the benefits of the increased recovery, you get melee/range versatility without having to swap weapons sets. On the other hand you loose a lot of potency on full attacks, but that proved to be an acceptable tradeoff for a fighter. And consequently, the relative value of primary attack abilities is increased for that character. Ultimatey, you can go any one-handed melee/any one-handed ranged that appeals to you and has decent synergy. But sabre/pistol is both the most fitting in terms of roleplay/game, and one of the most efficient combos (plethora of good unique sabres, a few very good guns, and rapid reload is very good, as you have a lot of means to compensate for the accuracy malus). Blessing of Berath: Recommended: bonus attributes Great if you have it: Double Skill bonus, 50k gold Gear: We are going for that corsair captain look, while grabbing useful stats for the build. Always maintaining the balance between roleplay and efficiency. Fair Favor: Looks awesome, is very potent with our weapon choice. Miscreant Leathers: I can’t help but put this on all my watchers. Completely fits the theme, is still very good even after the nerf. With armored grace, this armor effectively reduces recovery. Drunkard Regret: Drink booze at every rest, for flavor mostly, but it is a nice boost, and the original idea of the build is to explore game mechanics, looking at you rum runners DLC Strand of favor: Gives an effective +15% on positive effect durations. This is huge for this build. The duration of some buffs/debuffs are what turn meh skills into yay skills. The rest of the apparel is up to you, go with what you find/think you need. Weapons: My personal picks: Mihn’s Fortune and Scordeo’s trophy. You alternate a lot between melee and ranged, and you shoot very fast with pistols so Scordeo is good. You crit a lot, so Mihn’s Fortune and Scordeo to a lesser extent are good You have very high intelligence, which benefit both the afflictions of Mihn’s and the stacking buffs of Scordeo’s. Also, both appealed to me visually (not a big fan of “magic” looking blades like grave’s calling). Scordeo’s blade is probably a very good option, although more randomized relying on fixed %procs rather than crits). I couldn’t test it in that playthrough due to my choices. As I stated earlier, you can go with a very wide variety of combinations. Anything that takes advantage of our high int with buffs, debuffs and aoe’s can find a use here. Ability Choices: As explained above, we pick a lot of underrated abilities. I will explain what makes them good in my eyes, at least comparatively to other options. Disciplined Barrage>Tactical Barrage.This one is pretty standard. Later on, we can respec to Disciplined strikes as we get another source of int inspiration. (Take disciplined strikes from the start if you have a support that give you smart/acute). They benefit a lot from all our +duration. On autocast in my tactics (If self Per Inspiration:none cast on self, no CD). Into the Fray>Lower their guard.One of the severely underrated skills. I read people considering that into the fray was bad, and penetrating strike was good, and I do not understand how you can get to this conclusion. The cost effectiveness of an action must be measured in resources and action time/recovery. Lower their guard is an instant cast with zero recovery, so to give a fair comparison, we can add a single normal attack to it. For the same price of two discipline and the same action and recovery time, penetrating strike give you a full attack, +25% damage, +4 pen. Lower their guard give you a primary attack, crush damage, dazed affliction, and an effective +10 pen (as you lower armor by 10). Full attack and primary attack are the same for us. The +25% is much less than the bonus crush damage (that scales with PL and benefits from the -10 armor). +10 pen instead of +4 speaks for itself, and dazed is added on top of all. And this is not taking into account the gap closing that saves you some walking time. In conclusion, Lower their guard is much, much better than penetrating strike. Power strike>Inspired strikeThat’s the second skill that I found very underrated. I imagine that players see the 4 discipline cost for a primary attack and freak out. But when you look at it, this is a really cost effective ability in the right setup, once you accept the idea that it is not meant to be spammed. It is a one hit wonder to be used as an opening move. Lets break it down: Primary attack. Once again, good relative value with our fighting style. +100% damage, +4 pen. This is excellent compared to other melee abilities across all classes. Stuns the target. Aoe raw damage. This appears deceptively weak in the tooltip that shows only the base damage. But this damage scales with PL (hidden scaling), benefits from the +100% damage mentionned above, and can crit (very often thanks to our skyrocketing acc and Intuitive). It deals around 40-60 raw damage per enemy. If you take in consideration the instant cast time of melee attacks, this is great damage. Aoe stagger. This is a great defensive tool (lower ennemy daage output by a ton and engagement potential to zero) especially at the beginning of the fight where mobs are the most dangerous Self buffs: Tier 3 Dex Inspiration and Tier 2 Int Inspiration. When we add up all these effects, and considering the fact that all this is achieved an almost instant cast/low recovery (due to it being a melee attack, and our attacks are very fast. The attack+recovery cycle is around 1.9/2sec), the cost of 4 discipline appears really, really low. Obviously, all the afflictions and inspirations benefit a lot from our high int build, the durations are natively very long. On top of that, we have a one-hit wonder that gather a lot of effects in one single cast. It makes an excellent candidate for an Empower point. And justifies taking lasting empower as well, and possibly potent empower if you have points to spare (it is the only ability in the game that made me take one of the empower improvement passives). On paper, chopping wood looks also awesome for this ability, but unfortunately, the only thing that auto crits is the initial primary attack, not the raw damage or stagger/stun. And it competes with the other PL9 abilities, and you will crit most of the times without it anyways. Fighter Stances>Conqueror Stance.I tend to stay most of the time in Conqueror stance, because +10 acc is great with our already really good acc. It negates the malus of Rapid Reload, and confirms a lot of crits with Mihn’s for more afflictions. If you start getting engaged by multiple enemies, switch to defensive stance for reduced damage and keeping them locked. These 4 skills are the core I use. A word on the others: Sundering blow: Decently interesting for tough enemies, can also interrupt in crit. I would say: take it alongside Inspired Strike at level 19. It has a situational use, but the debuff will last for a long time. Mule Kick / Clear Out: Good interrupts, but I already have interrupters in my party. If you play without a ranger or a rogue, or if you want to add even more variety pick one or the other early. As you crit a lot sundering blow often interrupts late game anyways. Unbending: Got nerfed hard (and it was deserved). In a party with decent support I never really felt the need to have it. Vigorous defense: Same, in a party I never felt the need to have more defense than what was provided by my support chars and constant recovery. Inspired discipline: Very expensive and you already get better effects from other sources in at least three stats. Take the hit was not tested, that is not really in the spirit of the build, and it competes with too many things on PL9 Charge: After the nerf, I’d rather use boots of leap for gap closing. And you will have swift for most of the fight so you don’t really need mobility skills. Passives: There is a lot of good stuff. - Two weapons fighting: Quite obvious - Confident aim: Nice early boost - Rapid Recovery : With our super long lasting Constant recovery, this is even more worth it - Weapon Specialization: Moar damage is always nice - Any of the defensive and affliction resistance passives depending on what you feel you need the most, and points you have left. - Armored grace: acting faster is a must for all characters - Reaping the whirlwind: +1 resource is always nice - Unbreakable: You get one joker per fight - Lasting Empower: Great synergy with Empower Inspired Strike - Potent Empower: Same thing, but take this only if you have spare points - Prestige: 1 PL is always nice Strategy and gameplay : Get in Conq Stance, cast Disciplined Strikes followed by empowered Inspired Strike. This will give you Intuitive, Swift and Acute for a long duration, stun and deal high damage to an enemy, stagger the others, and soften them up with raw damage. That is your standard opening. From there, you have a lot of options and you tactical decisions will be critical. Try to tank a decent portion of enemy mobs to benefit from constant recovery and naturally high defenses. You can shoot at a weak target with Scordeo’s really fast, which will build up a nice action speed bonus. You can melee attack with Mihn’s to cause random afflictions and good damage. Use Swift Inspiration to get to weak target unchallenged. When you need to deal decent burst fast and gap closing, try to use lower their guard immediately followed by an attack. Swap from Conq stance do defensive if you feel the need to. Use interrupt/prone abilities at the appropriate moment if you picked them. Make use of per rest/per encounter items. My char always uses a summon figurine (he collects them as a hobby). Use grenades. Use scrolls. Have fun making a lot of different choices every time, depending on what your current party needs and what enemies you are fighting. Your very high accuracy and boosted stats will ensure maximum effect for the choices you make. Conclusion: From my initial intention to see if fighters were indeed dead in 1.1, I ended up having a blast of a playthrough, making the most of abilities that are typically underused and that proved to be dramatically underrated. I would highly recommend this build if you want to experience a decent challenge in PotD 1.1, without using broken combos or cheese nor actually gimping yourself, and to feel that what you actually do in combat matters, that you get rewarded for your good decisions and punished for your bad. And most of all, if you want to roleplay as an intelligent ship Captain, that is a great fighter, has a lot of tricks up his sleeve and is a fine tactician.

My first watcher was sailing the Lady Framboise. My current one captains the Orangotango.

And this is why there are a lot of items/abilities with +def against disengegement, a lot of effect that give you engagement immunity, and the Dazed status effect.

The same thing happened to me, and I assumed that in 1.1 you have to unlock the soulbound ranks for the owner to appear. I didn't test it though, so I can't say for sure.

Exactly. Also, the initial rant was that Obisidan did the balance changes to please PotD and Veteran players, which is obviously wrong. PotD and Veteran have been also adjusted. Tuning on the abilities and items is intended for all difficulty levels, to make it closer to the vision they have for their game, regardless of the difficulty. They just acknowledged that they were too potent in any difficulty setting. Also, unless I miss something, the changes are numbers nerfs rather than reworks: The ability/item does the same thing, but wth a potency more in line with the challenge offered by the game. The only exceptions that come to my mind would be charge and brilliant inspiration. I recognize that if your build relied solely on charges for damage or procs you have to adapt your playstyle. Same if your build relied on spamming the same tier9 spell over and over thanks to brilliant. But who would deny that these were dramatically overpowered, in any difficulty setting ?

I found Priest lvl 9 Incarnate to be one of the most potent and coolest summons in the game if you are a Berath or Eothas priest.

I would advise against multiclassing a priest of berath. Summon Incarnate for Breath is the Pallid Knight+the Usher, aka a good fighter and a good breath priest that look awesome This alone is enough to justify single class Breath priest

I started a 1.1 fighter on PoTD and I am having a lot of fun so far. The nerfs removed all the broken aoe damage stuff, and lets me emphasise a more tactical approach. (Buffs, positioning, cc, etc.) He has high intelligence to reinforce this aspect, which synergizes well with watcher abilities, as well as a high arcana score. He dual wields sabre and pistol because it gives him versatility (even if it makes full attacks way less efficient) So far I find it really fun because he always has something meaningful to do (either one of his abilities, or a melee attack or a range attack, or a scroll), but I actually have to think about the situation rather than spamming the same move because it is just always the best option. It is what makes combat fun for me: Identifying the best option amongst a lot of possibilities and choosing it at the right time. And from a rp perspective, this approach makes a fantastic corsair captain.

Best armors for a beguiler would probably be Miscreant Leathers and Devil of Caroc.

You don't really need big amounts of stealth, as you can just unlock the container in plain sight, then get out of the detection circle, stealth, maybe throw a sparkcracker, rush the chest. As long as the second (red) circle is not full when you are in the distance to open the chest, the game will pause and you can loot freely. Alternatively, leap does not break stealth so if you have the boots of leap or a barbarian, you can jump in in stealth from across the room, land next to the chest and loot it.

I definitely considered it initially, yes. I have never been a big fan of dual wielding in RPG's. My prefered setup has always been 1 handed no offhand. However, when I saw the dagger modal, it made a lot of sense to go for a historical rapier and dagger fighting style. That was a compromise I was able to live with. The reality is that dual wielding is just too good for rogue. All the offensive ablities are full attacks (except sap). And most important of all gambit dramatically needs dual wield, otherwise the maximum refund you can ever get is 2/4, as opposed to the 4/4 dual wield gets you. Plus, gambit virtually always crits, making the acc bonus from one handed kind of useless. And gambit is what makes the build shine, and be one of the highest single target melee dps (fast recovery and virtually unlimited full attacks that always crit for roughly 300% damage once you factor all the bonuses from sneak attack, deathblows and gambit). Going single rapier would give you style points, and maybe an incentive to use Perplexing Sap, but that's about it unfortunately.

The proposition to reduce the accuracy comes from actual observations I made over the full playthrough as a Cipher: I never missed, rarely grazed, mostly hit, and sometimes crit. With the strongest CC in the game and for a great duration. On PotD. This felt really OP. Ringleader in its current state is a "I win" button that can be cast in three seconds at the beginning of the fight.

A chanter skald can cast an AoE charm invocation repeatedly also ("the lover cried out to the beloved, I am yours!"), and also have party heals, summons, etc. Ciphers are not the only class who can cast repeatable intellect afflictions. Cipher charms are potent, sure, but it's ok to let classes be powerful. Let players have nice things! Cipher charm durations are a little long -- you could reduce their durations by a quarter or even a third without hurting much -- but we have a whole first game that let charm effects work and they worked fine, there's nothing inherently too powerful with charms as such, they just seem powerful compared to the rest of the crap that's filling the cipher toolbox currently. Past that, I don't think it's all that valid to cite the focus mechanic as an advantage because the per-encounter limits are very rarely all that meaningful after the first few levels. Fights rarely last long enough for a higher level caster to dump his spellbook, and if they *do* last that long you can burn an Empower. More importantly though, casters can open the fight with their strongest powers, while ciphers can't, which is a huge difference in tactical strength, because the opening moments of the fight are the most tactically valuable. I'll agree that "legacy class" is inexact. A better descriptor would be unfinished, which is odd considering this is a sequel. Playing a cipher right now feels like cooking in a new kitchen the day after moving houses: all your tools are in the wrong place or broken, and half of them are still missing. I mostly agree When I proposed to nerf acc of charm spells it was actually to indirectly nerf the duration (graze more often) and create a higher risk of failure/high reward. But I think it might actually need both. -10 acc and -25% duration. It is ok for players to have nice thing, but to have every fight terminated because every ennemy is charmed for 30 seconds and you have to force attack on green circles one by one is not fun. Chanters do not generate phrases as fast as ciphers generate focus. And their charm duration is much lower. And ringleader is a dominate on main target, which is a big deal on mages. I do agree that in the current state of the game battles are not long enough to give a real edge to renewable ressources. But this (hopefully) might change post-patch. Once again, cipher is for most of their abilities poorly designed, there is no denying that. What I try to correct is the conception that it is weak, when it is not. It is actually brokenly overpowered just because it has access to time parasite and ringleader.

Body attunement also buffs you, it does not only debuff the ennemy. I think the nerf is too hard, but having played a full pre-patch PotD playthrough with it, it was honestly very strong as it was and deserved one. Maybe +3/-3 armor would have been better. I do agree that the per rest/per encounter is a problematic legacy from Poe1, however, druids and mages can only cast the same spell twice. Ciphers can cast them at will if they have the focus. This is to be taken in consideration. You can charm ennemies every 4-5 seconds. The real problem of the cipher is that a lot of powers are bad or even jokingly terrible (looking at you haunting chains), but the ones that are good are really good. It doesn't make the class weak. But it is dramatically unbalanced and poorly designed. I still maintain that ciphers are OP, and might be even more with ennemies getting tougher (charm/dominate potency scales with ennemy power). They do not need a buff but a complete rework of 70% of their powers, a nerf to charm/dominate accuracy, and probably an even bigger nerf to time parasite than what is coming in 1.1 if they keep it stacking the way it works.

I have completed a playthrough in PotD as a pure cipher (no subclass) and here are a few thoughts: Charm/Dominate effects are very strong from the start. Whispers of treason is a dirt cheap way to get you through early encounters (or even later encounters, really). Ringleader is a complete battle changer and can be cast as an opening move without generating any focus very early (I think character level 8 ). Time Parasite is broken af, and i think it will still be extremely potent after the nerf. usually, I open a fight like this: (Starting focus is 75 with the two passive that increase passive focus) My watcher is wielding the scoedeo set (sabre and gun). I shoot with the gun, even a graze gets me over 80 focus. I immediately cast time parasite (no recovery from guns). Ennemies are now 50% slower. My watcher is 200% faster. I run in melee, attack 5 times in 3 seconds, it usually kills an ennemy and gets me a lot of focus. From there I can cast body attunement, psychovampiric shield, gets me unkillable. I can cast ringleader for an instant "I win". I can use pain block if any ally is in trouble. I can cast mental wave for aoe damage and prone. Or death of a thousand cut if I am fighting a boss, then cheap shred spells. Or really, at this point, I just use spells for fun because I like the visual effects. The fight is won anyways. If focus gets low, I re-attack a few times in 2-3 seconds. When time parasite is about to run out, I re-cast it. With the passives, Will spells have great acc and hit>crit, and the will defense is really high (in addition to stunning anyone attempting a will attack on you). I do not understand how people could find that ciphers are underperforming. They probably just looked at it on paper, or the few first steps, or were trying to focus on damage spells which I agree are mostly meh.

I notice in your list that you consider the vast majority of skills to be "good" or "decent". Good and decent are where you want to be balance wise. Ok is acceptable if there is a situational niche. Bad is not acceptable. However, on the ones you listed as bad: - Take the hit: possible, I never really tested it, not my playstyle. But on paper it seems okay: If you stack (post-patch)unbending+constant recovery, and maybe a con ispiration, raw damage is probably not so much of an issue, and it will tremendously boost the survivability of the party as a whole. And if it gets too intense, you'll proc unbreakable. Still infinitely better than having your mages and other dps chars dead. - Unbending and upgrades: I still think it has uses as a panic button to help you survive long enough for other heals to kick in or ennemies to die (as opposed to the free invincibility tool it used to be), but I might be wrong. -------------- EDIT: I wrongly believed that the -10 armor was persisting for the duration, but only dazed does. -10 armor disappears after the first attack, making Lower their guard much less potent. I think Lower their Guard is very underrated. With slightly above average intellect (which fighter will want anyways) and tactical barrage on, duration goes easily above 10 sec (it is also boosted by PL). So for a skill that costs 2 discipline, has a 0.5s action time and 0s recovery, you give one ennemy a -10 armor for around 10 sec (not even factoring the 10 sec daze that is meh, and the low-ish crush damage). That's enough time for each party member (including the fighter since there is no recovery) to do 2-3 attacks on that ennemy that will most likely overpen even if they would normally be "no pen". I find it really potent. It might be even more potent with 1.1 armor increase. -------------- Inspired strike: It might seem expensive if you see it as a spammable ability, but if you use it once or twice per battle to think the ranks and give you the inspirations, I think all you gain from it justifies the cost. - On primary target: +100% damage, +4 pen, inflicts stun. This is worth 2 discipline As a comparison point penetrating strike that you judged good, for 1 discipline does only +25%dmg (instead of +100%), +4pen (same), no status effect (instead of stun). Sure, it is a full attack, but that is only relevant if your fighter is dual wielding.). Also, you seem to mention that it only does +50%-60%. In my game it seems to do the correct +100% damage. - On self: Tier 2 int and Tier 3 Dex inspirations for a good duration. Worth 1 discipline - In aoe: causes good raw damage and stagger. Worth 1 (maybe 2) discipline. The tooltip wrongly gives the impression that the raw damage is weak. It scales with power level, and this is not shown, and it is affected by the +100% damage of inspired strike. Before any crit or might multiplier you can easily reach around 40-50 raw damage in aoe. Now there are two advantages for all those effects to be combined in one ability: First one is obviously time optimisation, You basically do 3 actions in one. Second one is the potential to empower. Inspired strike is a great candidate for empower points. - More damage and accuracy (obviously) - Afflictions last longer - Inspirations last longer - Aoe raw damage becomes very significant (around 60-70 per ennemy before crit or might multiplier). ------------------- So I stand by my point. 1.1 has nerfed what needed to be nerfed for the fighter, without overshooting it (with maybe a question on Unbending). And single class fighter can be both fun to play and efficient.

You don't get it at all, and you probably haven't read the complaints. People aren't complaing about the nerfs of these skills that deserved a nerf, they are complaining about 2 things : -The nerfs are too big, the stance becomes average at the very best and unbending become a high level skill that cost a lot of discipline and that heals less than a 1 zeal paladin heal. -The other warrior skills are bad, and his best skills left are just "good" (Discipline strikes and Penetratig strike). Nothing excting and all his high level skills are bad. Those OP tools were mainly a problem for multiclass with fighter in it, but as a singleclass it was lackluster as a dps, and now it will be worthless. Like Balthazar pointed out => nerfing something because of multiclass can tend to impact the single class even more. So if the single class only had these skills for it, well it becomes easily worthless. I read all the posts in this thread and others related to 1.1 as well. There were complaints about the fact that charge would not attack all ennemies anymore and calling the move now useless. Same with cleave stance. I think it was not an objective vision. Stances are a ressource-free passive bonus with no drawbacks, so it makes a lot of sense that they are average, on par with other passives. If you find you are point starved and can't take a stance, well maybe that's an issue that will not be affecting single class fighters. About unbdending I admit that I can't tell yet if it has been nerfed too far or not. But it is still a heal that scales with the ennemy power. 33% of damage converted to healing seems still like a massive survivability option. 75% was absurd, and 50% would still probably be absurd. Single class fighter has a lot of appeal, and is by no means "worthless". (and anyways none of the single class fighter only options have been nerfed so I don't see your point) Inspired strike is a great candidate for empower with chopping wood given the numbers of effects and damage that would autocrit. Sundering blow might be extremely potent with the increased PotD armor, and the nerf on body attunement. Take the hit would make a lot of sense on a pure tank, which is clearly one of the path an unbroken fighter can take. And fighter has a lot of great passives justifying sinking more points in the class. There is a lot of tactical potential that was unused because there was no need too. Lower their guard is a good example. The rest of fighter abilities are balanced, they were just eclipsed by the broken ones. I do agree that players looking for big DPS numbers should not take fighter, but it is not a problem. Fighter can still provide average dps, great survivability, and a tactical presence, and there are other melee classes that fill that DPS role.

I don't really understand how seasoned players complain so much about the fighter nerfs. I mean, the class with arguably the best survivability was able to do massive damage, in aoe, without friendly fire, procing weapon on hit effects, with a low level cheap ability. It didn't make any sense. I am fairly certain that the fighter can still do great damage. Not brokenly absurd amounts of damage, especially compared to its defensive potential. The patch just brings charge, unbending and cleaving stance on par with other abilities and adequate compared to the challenge offered by the game. Isn't that what balance is supposed to be ? There has to be some strong form of "It was better before" bias here. I am convinced that if fighter had been released in that state, no-one would have found it too weak.

No matter how well you re-tune encounters, if one effect type is plain better than the other options (which was imo the case with -recovery), it is always going to eclipse the others. Recovery and action speed are the two stats that are universally useful in every action every character takes, and the values were too high for how much potency these effects bring to the table. I'm all for better AI and ennemy variety. But I don't see how you put recovery in line with everything else in the game without nerfing it.