AFA

Is there a way to get rid of her? No matter what save import I use, she is always there, even though I never once kept her, and I believe I actually sacrificed her every time

So, I am a wizard (or sorcerer) guy through-and-through. All the Infinity Engine game, on tabletop, etc. In PoE, I kept gravitating to Cipher (and not because it was OP AF, though it was). I kept restarting back and forth between wizard and cipher, before finally going by my old faithful wizzy. Come Deadfire, and I was thinking hierophant was the best of both worlds. Apparently, it sucks somehow. Now, I don't know if it simply isn't uber optimal or min/maxy, and is treated like garbage as a result, or if it is genuinely useless. Anyone have hierophant advice? General Wizard + Beguiler looks natural for a nuker/debuffer, and seem to compliment each other. I may be better off doing a pure gen Wizard in my first playthrough, with a pure Ascendant in the second, but just wanted some hierophant advice

Speaking of small minority, no matter what save I import, Vela is always part of my crew. I'm guessing this is a bug brought about because people were complaining about her being missing in the previous build. Seems like a nice character, but only a tiny fraction of the playerbase must have kept the baby. It was basically a joking nod to Neverwinter Nights in the first place.

The game has been out a month, balance patches are a standard in the industry now. There was a ton of complaining about PoE1 when Ciphers were pulled slightly down from their godly perch, or when Spell Mastery was introduced. I enjoy wizards and ciphers, but I realized they were broken as hell before the patches. People managed to adjust just fine to the changes. And this was months into the release, when people had all kinds of min/max guides up that were invalidated.

Loaded an endgame save from 2015, so no expansions or anything, where, again, I sacrificed her. She still shows up. So, sounds like an import bug

I have the same problem. Just picked up Deadfire today and imported an endgame save from last night where I sacrificed the baby. Imported into Deadfire, I get to the beach, and Vela is hanging out with the priest, talking about booze. So, I went back to PoE, confirmed in the journal that I sacrificed her, and then beat Thaos again. This generated a fresh endgame file, which is just imported. Same result. I have the GOG version of both games, all the expansions for the first, got the Obsidian Edition for Deadfire