guildwriter

The general rules of spell shaping that I've noticed are as follows: Targeted AoE or Cones generally will be affected by spell shaping. PBAoE spells do not get affected. Wall type spells don't get affected. Don't know how definitive that is, but that's the general pattern I've noticed across Priest/Wizard/Druid.

Depends on what you're looking to optimize. If you want to create a self sufficient perpetual spell casting machine I think that Arcane Knight (Paladin/Wizard) is a better option for the following reasons: Constant Recovery is 1/encounter with a set duration. Exalted Endurance lasts as long as the aura is active. LoH is a 1 Zeal heal and you're already maxing Int. Woedican Paladin can heal off of inflicted targets. Wizard can set those up easily. Goldpact gives more armor if you want something more frontline. But again, it depends on what you want to optimize and what kind of RP feel you want (if any).

I just tried it out with my level 19 Pathfinder (Trickster/Ancient). 195 hp. Remember they scale by player level.

Need to give more context as to when/how this happened.

The main quest line is short. It comes more down to how much of the map and of Nekataka you've explored. DLC are about 3-5 hours each depending on difficulty (with SSS taking much longer potentially at the highest).

Summons need to scale their stats with PL. Period. End stop. Unless you're specifically using them for some sort of twisted Frostfall dispersed suffering sacrifice scheme.

Personally I think Helwalker/Lifegiver would be much stronger. You give up a throwaway summon, a mediocre summon boost, and a single PL for the ability to supercharge not only your dots, but all your heals as well. Not hard to work around the Lifegiver downside either. Shapeshift to go into heal mode, wait out the penalty and spread AIDS to everyone else.

Sporelings are awful past midgame. They absolutely explode against end game or max level enemies. They may have 195 hp but their deflection is like 19 or so iirc and pretty flat defenses. Wild Growth just scales with duration it seems (or I couldn't tell because the sporeling just died more or less instantly). I like the concept of a more summon based druid but they're pretty underwhelming.

I'd say a majority of the vanilla PoE2 subclasses work as intended and are quite viable. There are picks like Wizard Slayer and Corpse Eater that are DOA. But by in large the benefits and maluses on the subclasses are pretty fair. These latest ones are where things have gotten out of hand. Especially the scaling. The damage bonus makes sense if you need to keep the game in line for normal and so on. But on PoTD upscaled they are a bad joke. I've seen SSS enemies with 1k~ hp that weren't even bosses. 50-80 damage a swing for four wounds to kill yourself in 15 seconds? You can keep it. The stacking cost alone is bad enough and throws the tempo of the class. Make Enfeebled hit on crit if need be but these numbers need some heavy changes. This is a whinging for a different topic but to be brief: PoE2 suffers from a lack of normalization, or whatever they're using as their rubric no longer works as they intend.

That's about the only benefit I can see from it. The damage ticks get nasty really fast. Think at around four stacks or so it was doing 70 raw damage a pop. The damage doesn't scale fast enough with the stacks to make it even remotely worth it. To give some numbers. Each stack of Forbidden Fist Curse is +25% damage to self and +6 raw (increases with level scaling). Voidward does reduce the damage. At two stacks on my MC Goldpact/Forbidden it's doing 17.7 raw per 3 seconds with Voidward on. The thing is, it seems like each stack is getting the total amount of raw damage bonus. So at one stack its a +25% damage to self. At two stacks it's two +50% damage to self bonuses. And so on. At four stacks it does 70 raw damage per 3 seconds for 28 seconds. That's WITH Voidward and Ring of the Solitary Wanderer and Clarity of Agony active. To add insult to injury, the duration of the curse increases with monk PL. But you get a +100% damage bonus with Forbidden fist attacks so it's all good! And +14 Health each time a hostile effect expires! I really hope these numbers are a bug with how the curse damage is stacking because this is a really bad joke. So yeah, the only reason I can see to go forbidden fist over another monk is for the ready access to enfeeble. Good luck getting it on more than two targets at a time without murdering yourself. The more I playtest these subclasses the less inspired I find them.

Summons or charmed enemies will work as it counts anything friendly with a collision circle. The discipline regen is pretty marginal with the fix to Tactician where it only gives back discipline on a successful interrupt of an ability being cast. Pretty much just a refund of the knockdown cost if you manage to get it off correctly. Dunno, you can make a case that it's a better team subclass for sure. But from playtesting I think it's oftentimes situational at best and a "win more" type thing.

2 is the highest of any spellcaster barring buffs and other items that give additional casts.

I swear Xoti is most of the reason people think Priests suck.

Some thoughts on Tactician from a solo perspective: On PotD upscaled the penalty for not having an ally assist you is fairly irritating. The -5 Accuracy isn't as much of an issue as the -1 Pen. While Raw damage does circumvent this entirely (Animancer's Energy Blade for Melee and other Spell options), it makes your choices for melee and spells more limited as it is a global Acc/Pen debuff. Flanked can be achieved through any Perception affliction or Persistent Distraction. While there are consumables such as Cinder Bomb or Shock Chain Trap that will also inflict the debuffs, the accuracy may not be high enough to overcome high end defenses. Especially against bosses. Therefore class choice matters quite a bit. As a result, enemies that are immune or resistant to perception afflictions are going to be an issue. This can come in many forms like outright resistances/immunities or situational benefits like Slippery Mind. This means you can't build the Tactician and assume you'll have infinite resources all the time in every fight. There needs to be enough offensive power to push through certain areas. I'd argue that some kind of approach involving some mix of armor/deflection stacking and healing is necessary for most classes. Inflicting mass AoE distracted from stealth is possible though and based on my testing of other classes so far, I think Assassin/Tactician could be an effective approach. To me the most effective pairings to Tactician solo would be Trickster, Assassin, and Wizard (no dual). Each of these classes has one or more methods available to not only inflict mass perception afflictions, but also methods to apply other salient debuffs or survival tricks. Trickster paired with Tactician can either tickle or overcome the deflection cap to make themselves unhittable for periods of time. Biggest concern is an effective way to deal damage as riposte tanking doesn't work against ranged or casters and the -Pen really hurts in this instance. Active weapon swapping is a possibility and is enabled by fighter's time reduction of weapon swaps skill. Wizard can easily hit the unhittable cap and has a wide variety of damage spells that can be used to overcome the Pen issues. However the class is far more resource reliant than the previous example as most of the damage will be caused by spells. As a result you could theoretically run out of resources if you aren't careful about playing right. Though between empower and using grimoire of vaperous wizardry you have a lot of resources at hand even without brilliant. Assassin is interesting as between the +25 ACC bonus from stealth and +10 from Helm of the White Void, that nets a +35 Accuracy bonus against Fortitude. Good chance against many targets that's enough to apply distracted against the entire group using Pernicious Cloud as its radius can grow to the entire screen with enough Int. Which means you could easily restealth, stay in combat, regenerate resources used, and go back at it again. Downside is that distracted is the weakest of all afflictions and thus is canceled by a resist. Other issues are weapon pen and defenses are not nearly as strong as the previous examples. This all being said I still find the Tactician experience to be fairly wonky even with the bugfixes. Getting this to work as often as possible will require a lot of effort.

Priest spells have penetration. I've looked at every priest spell in the current Beta branch and everything has a Pen between 7-9. And all summons except chanter's summoned weapons are made of tissue paper and die. Part of the reason being chanter's summoned weapons have special properties and summons don't scale with PL except duration (making them practically useless at max difficulty except as meatshields). Really not sure where this Pen concern comes from. Pillar of Holy Fire hits at Delayed Fireball levels of base damage while coming at an earlier PL allowing for more casts. Honestly most of your concerns and criticisms seem to come from a lack of experience and understanding of the overall system. Woedican priests I'd argue are one of the best options for a SC priest. Those debuffs are seriously good and one of them landing can swing the entire fight. Priests have the best buffs in the entire game bar none and can extend the durability of characters in ways that Druid and Wizard don't even come close to. You have not experienced the sheer amounts of frustration high level enemy priests can cause. I mean, Spiritual Ally has a spammable Heal that casts Robust on the target. CoP is +15 to all Defenses in an AoE, literally best in it's class. And so on and so on. Furthermore, and this comes from someone who has played or tested most class combinations with Rogue, Skaen is one of the best options for Assassins. They can play well solo or with a team due to how flexible they are as priest gives them nuking, buffing, heals, summons etc. I don't know how free Escape, Finishing Blow, and Shadowing Beyond gets overlooked. Not only is that a free 12 guile overall, you don't even have to make those picks anymore freeing up 3 skill picks for other areas. Are Wizard and Druid still good picks? Yes I'd say so. But it comes down to the greater context of questions like difficulty, overall team composition, fight composition and so on. This is one of the reasons why I had to force myself to beat PoE1 but I consider PoE2 to be a superior game warts and all. The sheer amount of playstyle diversity completely blows away PoE1. If there are clear "best class" picks then that is a design smell imo.

IIRC I saw a dev say that beta saves will transition without any issues but I can't find where it was said. Personally as long as they patch correctly I can't see why it would be an issue.

As someone's whose favorite character right now is Assassin/Skaen, I don't think it's fair to say that priest is a boring class at all. If you think of them only as buff bots and healers then they will feel disappointing. Personally I think they have a lot to offer but it requires a bit more thought and understanding of the system to understand where and how they offer unique benefits.

There is no build listed that will fall apart because of having BB or not. Any gains such as stats are marginal benefits.

It's a shame that there is no way to do content mods as of now. I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential gameplay wise.

Sinking does not give the same loot. Have tested several times on the same ship and definitely got better rewards for boarding. Have no idea if it's linked to how many crew members you've killed in ship combat. All I know is I've consistently gotten more trash superb/exceptional/fine gear each time I've boarded while sinking has generally netted me lower amounts. There is some variance but I'm not sure what it's linked to. Early game it's generally not worth it, just sink them. Not until you at least get fine or exceptional gear should you consider boarding targets.

Was mostly referring to how you want to use ranged weapons and that you want to use warbows. The starting approach really depends on the group makeup and what you want to do, but yes, oftentimes opening up with nina's shadowflame is a great thing for assassin/wizard. Never tested Blood Sacrifice from stealth but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Things like Darkest Before Dawn from the Protective Eothesian Charm break stealth so it's entirely possible.

Yeah I play PotD upscaled only so there is that.

Does immunity to flanked prevent the character from having their flanked status as counting against Brilliant Tactician? I've run some tests where the character is flanked by another enemy but has immunity to flanked and brilliant tactician doesn't seem to work (everyone else is distracted and the character is solo).

I think it's worth stating that I approach the game mostly from a solo perspective so that colors some of my advice. So I don't really feel like anything I've said discounts what you're saying. I've never needed to harvest ships for XP because frankly, I can hit level 11 without leaving Nekataka running solo and that covers the point where most builds I run start functioning properly. Once XP gets split, sinking ships is definitely an easy way to gain levels and gear. Especially now that trash ships respawn it's probably the best approach period for people running full teams. I will say I force vengeance ships early and sink them though as I don't like waiting for those drops and those fights are intensely irritating.

I'd say so. Everything in the game can be solved by with character combat, including ship combat. So enchanting is always a safe place to invest. As far as xp harvesting risk free for solo runs I've found that mechanics and harvesting high level locations of their traps is nice and safe.