Lonlon

Thanks a lot for these suggestions! They really help me think through the setup. Now a few more questions came to mind: If I go Ascendant as the second class, do you think I could afford to dump a bit of PER, considering how much accuracy both Ranger and Cipher can stack? Would having two Ciphers in the party (Serafen as Witch + my MC) feel a bit redundant? Should I run Aloth as pure Wizard or Battlemage to fit this composition better? Even though I understand why Ghost Heart is strong, I’m not a big fan of the ghost pet. I’d rather have a living animal companion, it fits my RP better. If I skip Ghost Heart, which Ranger subclass (and animal companion) would you recommend instead? And lastly, even though Ascendant seems really strong and fun, are there any other interesting multiclass options that could work well for this archetype? (Maybe Chanter, Priest or Paladin? mostly the “dark” or “questionably aligned” ones?) Thanks again!! Yarrr

Hey everyone! I'm once again planning yet another Deadfire run, and as usual, I'm coming here to gather your always insightful advice This time, I’d like to side with the Principi and include Serafen in the party. I also want to experiment with a class I’ve barely touched before - like Ranger, for example. Here’s the initial setup plan: As always - PotD upscaled, RTwP, Community Patch. Party composition Eder (Tank): Swashbuckler - probably modded Unbroken/Streetfighter, since I’ve always played him with no subclass. Not sure yet if that fits the team balance, but he’ll be the main tank. Xoti (Support/Caster): Either full Priest or Monk/Priest. I’m hesitating because if Eder goes Streetfighter, having too many melee characters might make it tricky to trigger Flanked consistently. Aloth (Caster/Support): Either pure Wizard or Battlemage - same concern as above regarding melee density. Serafen (Melee/Support): Definitely Witch this time - probably 2handed with Willbreaker. I really want to give that a proper try. For my Watcher I’d like something that: Fits well with this team composition (probably ranged or hybrid auto-attacker), and Makes sense RP-wise for siding with the Principi. I’ve been looking for a build that could mix melee and ranged versatility - maybe something like dual-wield pistol/melee, or even general weapon swapping flexibility (Blackjacket, maybe?). I’m not necessarily after a broken or solo-tier build - just something fun, effective, not boring, and that fits both the party and the RP. Initially, I thought about something like a Fighter/Ranger, but I’m afraid it might feel a bit too simple. I usually play multiclass caster/melee hybrids with lots of options, so I worry a non-caster build could feel a bit flat - although I’ll admit my Devoted/Berserker run with Lord Darryn’s Voulge was a blast ️ A few things I’m looking for: I don’t necessarily want something that requires heavy micromanagement, but I’d like some versatility depending on the encounter (pet management, melee/ranged flexibility, weapon swapping, maybe a bit of spellcasting ?…). I’d love a gameplay style (and gear progression ?) that evolves noticeably as I level up, not one that feels identical from early to late game. Mostly ranged (and ideally Ranger) because I’ve played melee builds so many times, and I’ve never done a proper Ranger run. Anything involving sword & gun or weapon switching has my heart So yeah, I’d love to hear your enlightened ideas to help me shape this run! Thanks in advance, and cheers as always!

Maybe there is a different damage scaling formula for summoned weapons and actual spells

tested "cone of cold", really strong indeed ! Freezing Pillar is so overtune I respeced into it as soon as I cast it for the first time Also I like the synergy between frost spells and Charge, I'm still trying to figure out what are the conditions for an enemy to shatter but.. yeah quite fun !

It seems you need to have looted one already in order to be able to craft it.

Here are a few tips that may help you : - One of the best ways to mitigate damage in this game is Heavy Armors. They will nerf your essence pool a bit but early game it doesn't matter that much compare to what they bring to the table. - Use Arcane Veil as soon as you can. It has been nerfed but is still a very good spell and rank 2 keeps you safe from projectiles. - Upgrade your armor (and weapons too), it's one off the most important thing to do in this game in order to stay effective/relevant against higher tier enemies. - Check your endurance bar (the white one). If you find yourself out of endurance quite often while dodging/blocking, consider putting some points into Resolve and/or maybe the heavy armor talent. - If you chose the wizard route, try to find a Grimoire of Greater Elements ASAP. All the spells it features are very good early on (and even late game actually). - Also I would suggest you use a gun early on. It's a very nice weapon type that deal tons of damage with headshots, like spells it doesn't scale with crit chance (because headshots), and while it's reloading you can cast spells from your grimoire.. (A very very strong talent to combo with guns is Steady Aim) - Remember that while under the effect of Arcane Veil, your spells cannot be interrupted. I'm pretty confident anyone can beat this game in normal/easy difficulty. Just keep trying and learning about the mechanics and eventually it'll work out

Yeay ! Good news. To get the enemies off of you you should try to invest in one/some of those : - Kai's gun/taunt ability, I think this is one of the best abilities in the game period. - Frost spells like Blizzard or Freezing Pillar (didn't try the spray thing yet, maybe it's good) to make the enemies CHILL a bit. In general, the freeze status effect is really really good for control (and shatters), and along with the shock effect is the only affliction that really matter in this game I think. - Charge is kinda cool to knock back a grp of enemies that are rushing you (also improve you mobility while exploring) - Pull of Eora. Requires investment to be efficient but is f***ing OP when you do. - and of course Tanglefoot is really good too. I didn't try gamepad but I guess it should be quite bad for ranged builds (I just cant play FPS with a gamepad :') ). Also remember you can change your action bar's keybinds for more convenient ones (like X,C,F,..., maybe mouse buttons ?) Regarding Shadowing Beyond I think the skill is strong because it enables sneak attacks which are deadly, but it also requires a lot of movement/good positionning to make good use of it.

Should make PotD a lil' more challenging. I like it. The spell was busted for any build. What do you think ?

I agree. For what it's worth : I heard that vendor prices scale with difficulty. Maybe PotD economy is just supposed to be scuffed (you can lower your difficulty to easy while bying from merchants then switch it back to PotD but... yeah.. meh)

Correct

Yes you can ! You'd deal less damage than a with a 2 hander, and attack slower than with DW, but you can parry. (You can also zoom that way with a single pistol)

A simple fix would be to cap the quality of unique in act 1 to Fine, act 2 to Exceptionnal and so on... This way we would still be able to "invest" in this feature but not break the game, transforming all uniques from act 1/2 to superb is just too much. Personnally I dont know the exact numbers behind the quality system. Before the patch it was something like 90% reduction/increase i'd guess. But you're right, now it's much smoother.

AFAIK it's impossible. And yes it's a shame. DW allows you to attack twice as fast if you can spam both mouse buttons correctly Also double charged attacks only work with guns. Which is a shame too.

Actually you can use the skill that makes you invisible to "sneak attack" while in combat. It's quite strong. But yeah overall the game is lacking in terms of stealth gameplay. Bows are silent but as stated above stealth gameplay is somewhat underwhelming. Also Bows are 2-handers so you miss the versatility of pistols which are one handers and therefore can be paired with other things. Still bows are quite cool and faster than guns. As @omgFIREBALLS said, everything should work even in PotD so just play whatever you like the most. The game mecanics are not that deep/well balanced but PotD difficulty is not very challenging compared to PoE.

Lol, I didn't even realise your post was 2 month old Beeing unable to use the parry skill as soon as you have anything in your off hand locked me out of all my fun roguish/spellblade builds ideas

The exact route you have to follow in order to achieve Superb +3 ASAP is the following : 1) Choose a non-unique weapon you will upgrade all the way to Superb (this does not require adra, only gold). Preferably a one hander because it's less expensive. Let's call this weapon your "Template". Note that you can buy a Fine weapon from an act 1 vendor, could be better (in terms of gold/material economy) than starting from scratch (this I cant tell but it shouldn't make a huge diff). 2) Skip all lootable unique weapons in the game (you need to make sure you NEVER display their tooltip because, as soon as you make the game "load" their tooltip, their quality will be set forever and they will stop scaling with your Template's quality). (Note : vendor uniques upscale the same way but they cost a lot more gold when upgraded... not worth imo) 3) As soon as you are able to pick the scavenger rank 2 talent (cant remember the exact level), start upgrading your Template as a madman. The key part here is you can upgrade any material *3 for 1 material of the tier above. 4) When you are short on mats, go ahead and pick-up some unique weapons you left behind in order to scavenge them (they should've upgrade to match the quality of your Template), but not all of them, just enough to have the materials you need to upgrade your Template to Superb. 5) As soon as your Template reach Superb, go loot THE unique weapon you want to use for your build, along with any other unique you left behind. Salvage those useless uniques and upgrade your weapon of choice to Superb +3. 6) GGs you broke the game. Note 1 : you now have tons on adra by salvaging all those Superb uniques so you could upgrade any other unique you want. Note 2 : you can do exaclty the same with armors... Note 3 : upgrading your Template will cost you about 15k gold (in PotD) so spare your gold accordingly, you dont need to salvage everything you loot, just enough to upgrade your Template, vendor all the rest. Also you could use a unique weapon as your Template, this will cost you adra instead of gold BUT you will be stuck at Exceptionnal +3 until you learn how to craft Corrupted Adra (and I wont spoil when that is). Edit: There might be a better route but this is how I achieved it quite early in the game (before reloading because the game was way too trivial )

I tested this feature extensively and I must warn you that it makes the game way too easy (even in PotD). When I reached act 2 I just stopped metagaming around unique scaling because it completely broke the game. The breakpoint for me is when you start to NOT loot uniques to let them upscale and THEN you come back later to salvage them. If you do that, you will have access to way more high level materials/adra than you should and you will completely destroy the game. Dont salvage uniques, it will just spoil your experience. This is my own rule now : I never salvage uniques. That's my advice, you do you, but you've been warned EDIT: on the other hand, if you are willing to exploit this "feature" to the max, you SHOULD be able to upgrade a weapon all the way to Superb +3 mid act 2 (or even late act 1 if you're a gamer but i'm not sure whether the unique "pool" is large enough to achieve that or not). I'm sure you can imagine how this would break the game... EDIT2 : if you can craft Adra Ban with corrupted adra (I doubt this knowing how previous adra recipes unlock), you may even be able to reach Legendary as early in the game... Scavenger rank 2 will help a ton here.

The only dual wield setup I use in my PotD run is dual pistols. It's really strong cuz you can either double charge pistol attacks or shoot one while reloading the other (while also maintaining slowmo effect from steady aim). On top of that you have access to 2 strong unique pistols quite early in the game. Also, pistols beeing one-handed, they enable strong versatility : you can use a shield, a grimoire or a melee weapon along with a pistol. Needless to say that ranged weapons enable headshots which make crit chance completely unecessary. Pistols benefit from that too. Finally, a pistol talent setup allows you to also use bows and therefore to have a more sneaky approach in combat if you need to. All these reasons make me believe pistol is the strongest weapon type in the game right now. Regarding dual wielding melee weapons I wont be able to tell cuz I haven't tested it extensively enough, but i'm pretty sure you cannot double charge attack (which in lame in my opinion).

You should def go for steady aim and dual pistol (and maybe weave a bit of magic for CC). Steady aim rank 3 will drastically slow the pace of combats (while allowing you to land very deadly headshots) I'm sure you can dispatch most of the mob with very limited movement in Normal difficulty with this base setup. Also I found 1st person much less "nauseous" than 3rd person but maybe it's just me. You should also use heavy armors, this will limit the amount of movement you have to do in order to stay alive, and honestly ranged builds dont really need endurance (compared to melee). Hope it'll help Cheers

All the things you mention in your post are things that also seemed disappointing to me, however I have to admit that this game still features some good ideas (rewarding exploration, beautiful and engaging open world, ...). Overall I think it is complicated to compare Avowed with PoE2. It just doesn't target the same audience, you can see that right from the beggining at character creation.. Personally this is what shocked me the most in this game, I don't understand why it contains so many references to PoE lore (mostly fan service) when it is clearly not aimed at PoE enthousiasts. Feels a bit weird. That, and also the quality of the side quests which is completely uneven. Some were written and worked with a lot of love and diligence, others are just: find this item, talk to this guy, come back to me... Also you didn't mentionned it in your post but i'm completly triggered by the "uniques quality scaling" system (if you own an exceptionnal quality weapon, all unique weapons you drop will be exceptionnal). Forced me into metagaming I didn't want to deal with during my first playthrough.

Yes, imo uniques should be a fixed quality drop (prob the same quality as the mob they drop from or something like that) because this design encourages weird and non-intuitive metagaming. The difference between having all blue and all green unique weapons and armors is huge in term of versatility and wealth management (at least in the first act/zone). Upgrading all uniques to blue quality costs tons of materials... If you say they continue scaling while you progress into the game, then it's even worse Beeing forced to not loot uniques is just bad.

Hey, playing PotD (I'm about 20h into the game) and just realised something-I-really-wish-I-knew-before regarding quality of dropped unique weapons (I'm pretty sure it works the same with armor, I didn't tested it though). Here it is : If you own a Fine quality weapon (unique or not, does not matter), all unique weapons you will drop will be Fine quality too !!! So you need to upgrade at least one weapon to Fine as soon as you can ! This will save you tons of materials (especially adra because unique gear requires adra to upgrade !) I was hoarding my materials while looking for all unique gear in the first zone and thought I would upgrade the weapon I like the most after I get everthing. This was terrible idea because now all my unique gear is common quality and I need tons of adra to upgrade it to Fine Quality ! As I said I only tested it with weapons, but it's probably the same with armors. Bad design imo but it is what it is. Hope it saves you some frustration EDIT after further testing : It seems that the quality of an item is set forever as soon as you display its tooltip. Even if you let it on the ground and come back later to pick it up, its quality will remain the same. On the other hand, if you manage to not "see" the item (i.e. to not display its tooltip), the game will not lock its quality and it will continue to upgrade as you upgrade your own items.

I didn't know Divine Retribution proc'ed on summons' death. Seems quite effective indeed considering the healing potential of a dual wielding KWF. Quite a late game thing but definitely cool Also for the ranger option I was thinking about Maia but I dont know if you can have Tekehu + Maia in the grp for all the DLCs etc (can't properly remember when some choices have to be done ie: if it's viable to have 2 different "faction" companions in your party for the long run). If I chose to recruit a Cipher/Ranger what subclasses would you advice ? (I cant tell what is highest-maintenance between Ascendant and Beguiler, one is doing Soulwhip Damage all the time but has those Ascended "phases" i'll have to manage, the other is gonna stop soul whiping when full focus... idk ). Maybe i'll pick a full Cipher (Psion ? Beguiler ?)... Maybe Ydwin, never played with her. We'll see. I'll prob start my run tonight ! I'll come back when I need advices and to let you know how it goes Cant thank you enough for all this insight

Thanks a lot for the insight After spending some time reading about the Sage multiclass I think i'll go that route (Helwalker/Bloodmage). I couldnt find any proper guide so I may have some more questions about a few things. - Regarding Draining Touch, do we agree that it doesn't have any weapon type ? Does it scale with MuT or any weapon modal ? - I understand why club modal is very strong but what about Tuotilo's ? Is it ok to use it when I wanna tank a bit more for whatever reason ? (I guess with the def/reflex per wound enchantment). I also guess +5 ACC enchant is better than +10% damage, am I right ? - What weapons modals are "safe" to pick at character creation then ? Club + ? Is there a modal working with Spirit Lance ? Is it relevant ? - For party comp i'm quite set with : Eder (fighter/rogue tank) and Xoti (full priest) but still undecided for the 2 remaining slots. Do you see obvious includes that could fit with this core composition ? My initial thought was Tekehu as full chanter or multiclass because I kinda like him and I also like chanter (or maybe Aloth but thought 2 wizards could overlap/ask to much micromanagment), + a custom recruit that would fill the gaps in my comp, something easy to manage but still helpful (I was thinking about a Ranger/Cipher: ranger cause it stays far and do not need a lot of management, and Cipher just because it could be a nice thing to have probably, but I'm honestly not sure about this one...). I already did the Troubadour/Psion sidekick in one of my playthrough and I want to innovate a bit - For attributes I was about to go something like this : 8/13/16/19/18/4 (as human, BB should be added on top of that). I bet it's ok to dump RES because of all the defensive buffs Wizard features. I kept MIG low so i dont oneshot myself with blood sacrifice all the time. what else can I say.. is 13 CON (+2 BB) enough for Helwalker wounds + blood sac not beeing cringe ? Also human seems good to me but maybe there's some obviously stronger pick ? - While leveling I was about to pick mainly monk skills or wizard passives and let grimoires give me access to all the wizard spells repertoire. Is it a good plan ? If I need to pick some wizard spells i'm sure to use all the time, what those would be ? - And lastly : what important gear should I aim for (appart from those already mentioned in this thread) ? again any obvious things I should not miss out on ? Thanks again for your anwsers, helps me a lot