Marigoldran

They all die kinda easy compared to chanter summons.

For party: Troubadour/St. Elca (because of their awesome Lay of Hands- which prevents death on allies!) For solo: Troubadour/Goldpact for Gilded Enmity (more tankiness and Brand Enemy is half your damage on solo).

Try it and you'll find out. There's no substantive difference in what paladin subclass to choose. Just make a herald or two, make them troubadours and win.

There's only a limited number of casts of Withdraw.

Anyone? I may have to restart as I just realized how awful Hylea's challenge is. (You cannot control Vela. She moves on her own).

Helwalker/Ascendant (Monk and Cipher). Grab the essence interrupter bow which you can get immediately at the beginning of the game and summon things by killing them. For monk abilities, get Dance of Death and Swift Strikes and Tenacious Blows. For cipher, get Echoplastic Echo, Mind Blades, and all of the extra penetration cipher passives. I guess if you don't want more chanters, a druid is fine. Get him Lord Darryn's Voulge and Deltro's Cage (provides electric power levels) and besides summoning stuff he'll electrocute everything around him.

Romance is kinda iffy in this game. POTD means Path of the Damned- the hardest mode (which isn't that hard with heralds and chanters). Just go all chanters and heralds and you'll do fine. Easiest classes in the game.

2 heralds, 1 paladin, 1 Berserker with GraveCaller, and a helwalker ascendant, Another (simpler) possibility is 2 heralds, 2 chanters, and a hellwalker ascendant. Once you've got an army on the field to buffer, the ascendant can spam amplified waves and win. Once you've got enough weapon summons on the field, the monks really aren't necessary. What's amusing about this comp is with pure chanters, you can buff your summoned weapons to have more penetration and to have more Might and Constitution.

If you're going to mass summon, play POTD. Trust me, you'll do fine. Paladins are great everywhere. If you're going mass summons, no point in Priest, Druid or Ranger. Go all chanters with some multiclasses into barb, paladin, or monk.

And here you're telling me I'm tunnel visioned. I mean, I am tunnel visioned, but so are you.

Someone else's idea, but Watershaper Rod with Driving Flight, Twin shots, and the Arcane Archer's Death spell is pretty good. The downside is you can only do it 2 or 3 times, but really for most fights that's all you need.

Injuries are a problem so have a Herald nearby spam the "you cannot be killed for 4 seconds spell" that all St. Elca Paladins get at level 1 as you burn everything around you. With a Votary (Monk/Paladin) with Turning wheel, that's 10 seconds of invincibility. No point in priests when Paladins can do pretty much everything important a priest can do, but better. Use Beckoner skellies. They die in one hit. There's also the minor point that with Infinite Zeal you can buff forever. And Paladin buffs are instacast.

Sure. I cede on Debonaire, but you're missing some interesting Arcane Archer and Steel Garrote builds as you have some tunnel vision, too. Steel Garrote's have the Old Seic (PL 6) chant for free! That's a pretty big deal.

Holy shi-. Someone else's idea first, but it deserves its own thread. Ok, no one ever thinks about Paladin single classes as the general consensus is "they're not that great." But Divine Retribution (PL 9) gives +2 Zeal on Downed allies. SUMMONS COUNT AS DOWNED ALLIES. So the idea is to give your Paladin have Ring of Focused flame, Magran's Favor, Sun and Moon and get fire buffing chants from nearby chanter/herald and spam Light of Pure Zeal for massive foe only fire damage. Regenerate zeal with Divine Retribution as the summons get killed by the enemies. You can also, you know, Immolate yourself and rise again like the Phoenix (as you'll never run out of Zeal thanks to summons dying left and right around you). Win!

Oh shi- I never even thought about that. Downed allies includes SUMMONS.

Test it yourself. I could be wrong but last time I Beckonered the summons were super short duration. To be safe, just make everyone a Troubadour. You can never go wrong with Troubadours. No need for priests in a summon party. Paladins do everything better. Yes, confused Berserker attacks everyone in the party (downside!). But for a Herald that's not a big deal as they're tanky as hell.

1. Heralds can use everything up to level 7. However, they'll only get level 7 ancient weapons (the best summons in the game) at level 19. For most of the game you'll be using Ogres or wurms (which you'll get immediately with Berath's Blessings start at level 4 bonus). 2. If you're going to do nothing but summon low level minions, Beckoners are better. 3. However, for high level minions, Troubadour is simply better. The problem with Beckoner is that your summons have -50% duration time, which means that you can't continuously keep up high level summons (as it takes a long time to build up the chants to summon things like ancient weapons). 4. Spores can charm enemies. That's the only reason to get them. Otherwise, ancient weapons is ALWAYS better. That's the one you want to aim for. 5. Your auras will buff your summons. 6. Your summons are independent of you and you do not lose anything if they get damage or killed. 7. Berserker/Chanter involves the weapon known as Grave Caller. Berserkers are confused, meaning that their attacks hit friend and foe. Grave Caller summons imps every time you kill a skeleton. So the idea is to have a Berserker in the party AND a chanter (or a multiclass of the two). The chanter summons the skeletons and the berserker kills them, thereby summoning an army of imps. 8. A variant on this is the Essence Interrupter Crit Machine Heath Orlan Rogue/Ranger. Get your critical chance as high as possible and use essence interrupter to attack summons made by a chanter in your party. Every time you crit with this weapon, and the target you crit dies, it summons a random minion. 9. Paladins multiclass make chanter super tanky, BUT it means you won't get Ancient Weapons until really really late. It's up to you if you think it's worth it but having two heralds in the party is NEVER a bad idea as the auras the Paladins generate buff the minions, too. Besides, Paladins with a fire-based build hit pretty hard. 10. Another good synergy is Hellwalker (monk)/Chanter. Idea is to use Turning Wheel for +10 int for longer duration of summons. With Turning Wheel, you can easily get up to 35 int for 80 second duration summons. If you're a Troubadour, that means you'll have time the time to cast other invocations like the "Energize yourself invocation," which is literally the best inspiration in the game. With Helwalker you get +10 might so you're dishing out a good deal of damage, too in the backlines behind the summons. To get wounds, use Dance of Death.

Blood mage and tactician are "very good" not "the only good". both also require a little bit of work/skill to really exploit to attain "very good" status (tactician especially). Psions do not suck - they are almost extremely purpose-built for multiclassing with a caster, because their focus generation means they have no action economy or opportunity cost concerns with casting (not to mention being a caster will mean not meleeing, e.g. less likely to take incidental damage). Even outside of that, psions are immune to PEN concerns for focus gen, which is highly relevant on PotD+upscaling. Also don't underestimate the focus generation you can get with even a little bit of +PL bonus. Boeroer is right about Ancient and Debonaire. Just to add also that the downsides to the ancient are extremely narrow, so might even be a better general-purpose druid than a vanilla druid (animist) itself. You are also definitely overrating arcane archer and steel garrote. Garrote is nice, but let's be clear it's a 2 zeal ability, and if you want good crowd control you should really roll a dedicated crowd controller which a paladin definitely is not; healing from sneak attack-eligible damage is ok, but also selfish (again a bit of an anti-synergy for a paladin). And frankly I think the bond costs for the arcane archer imbue abilities are too high for the arcane archer to be really that good. No, the garrote passives are good. 15% healing from damage in combo with barb or rogue offense and paladin defenses is no joke. For example, Streetfighter with Garrote's 15% healing from damage is a very very tough tank that hits hard. Combine that with a Herald next to you chanting Old Siec and you're getting 27% healing from the damage that you'll do on TOP of whatever auras you're pumping out. Another combo is Berserker/Garrote being confused and surrounded by minions. Use the Barbaric Shout to debuff everything (allies and foes alike). Then use like Wahai Poraga to hit everything around you. As you carnage and hit everything around you, you get massive healing!

Hoo.

You target the priest in the back with the Essence Interrupter. It has longer range than the mortar meaning that you can build focus earlier (and keeps you safer). By the time you can shoot the mortar against a clump of enemies, you've already gotten 2 shots off with the Essence Interrupter (it takes only 3-3.4 seconds to get off 2 shots with this amazing bow). If you got lucky with a crit you've already killed a target by the time you've ascended AND summoned a creature (average ascension time is 5-7 shots of battle start) If there are no priests in the back then it's not a tough fight. Against megabosses, neither mortar nor Essence will work well.

Yes, but Essence has SHOCK damage type making its pen significantly better than Mortars penetration-wise. I guarantee the Essence hits reliably thanks to Dance of Death. I've been using it the entire game (now past Nemnok). Dance of Death completely cancels the accuracy debuff. Most enemies that have good pierce armor also have stinky shock armor making the damage types of Essence Interrupter perfect.

2 Heralds (1 Troubadour, 1 Beckoner). 2 Chanters (1 Troubadour, 1 Beckoner) 1 Ascendant/Helwalker (for echoplastic echo and amplified waves). Idea's pretty simple: Summon weapons or allies. Use troubadours to buff them for more penetration. Amplify wave everything. Win. The great thing about this is you can just let the AI handle everything since you can't pause the game.

The only good new subclasses are Bloodmage and Tactician and Arcane Archer and Steel Garrote. Psions simply suck. The other druid subclasses are generally better than Ancient. Debonaire is stinky as the bonuses are only good against some enemies. Forbidden fist is weaker than Helwalker. Steel Garrote/Streetfighter or Berserker is definitely a good idea. Steel Garrote heals from damage. Berserker or Streetfighter does lots of damage. Good synergies. Easy to use, too.

I can never get enough penetration in the tough fights to ascend quickly with the stupid blunderbusses. Besides, the blunderbuss unique abilities only work once/encounter. After that you may as well switch to Essence Interrupter. The essence interrupter is not just any hunting bow. It's a hunting bow that has shock damage type, which many many enemies are vulnerable too AND summons stuff and does extra damage with more Metaphysics. [Also, Monk/Ascendant gets more penetration than Rogue/Ascendant. That's a big deal for ascending].

Actually, Beckoners DO summon armies. A chanter with Beckoner subclass can, with one invocation, summon EIGHT living weapons. 5 Beckoners = 40 Living Weapons on the field at one time.