Jayd

This is the complete opposite of my experience, where I have struggled to fit Wizards and Priests around my Druids. Druids are the best healers in the game, with Moonwell and Garden of Life able to sustain your entire party for long durations + other spot healing options if you want them. Add to that the ability to cause constant raw damage to every enemy on the field, and a Druid's presence just tips the scales of any fight heavily in your favour. Throw in summons, storm spells, and one of the clutchest defensive party buffs in the game, Form of the Delemgan (immunity to dex afflictions and + 6 armor against the majority of ranged weapons and many melee ones and spells) and you have a class that covers all your bases without slouching in any. With one Druid you don't have to worry about healing and your damage is well under way. My current playthrough will be my first without a Druid and I feel insecure as hell about it. But I want to try the Stormspeaker idea mentioned above and Fassina as SC Blackbow specialist. Druid is my favourite class though so I'll stan for it all day like Thelee does with Priests

Cool strat. This seems like the best use of his pure Chanter class even more so. He gets AS as an invocation and then has Sure Handed Ila on top. Plus several ways to overcome blunderbuss's low penetration. Energized would even let him interrupt each time a pellet crits, right? I'm tempted to try that in my current playthrough if only I didn't need a main healer... How do people normally handle their healing? I've actually never had a playthrough without a Druid on my team so I don't know how to do it without crutching on Moonwell. Is a Chanter and Priest enough healing? What about a SC Chanter + Pallegina as Herald?

Foe-only Ninagauth's Pillar, Maelstrom, and Pollen Patch can all be great. PL8 is kinda weak, though. How many hits does Entropy last for? Feels like 3. It should have a traditional duration. I ran her like this last playthrough. I like it more than Chanter for her, but there's not really any secret tech to it that I noticed (just the obvious, like Infuse helping with spells, etc). I'm just a sucker for heals and like Druid spells. Access to Draining Wall + Ancestor's Memory cheese lets you spam spells and keep buffs forever, too (edit: this should include spiritshift, too! I didn't even think of that until now lol she gets wolf form). Next playthrough I'm planning to run her SC and build around Blackbow since I heard that summoned phantoms copy it. Seems like it could be pretty fun.

You'll be fine. I've used most of those in endgame content myself and they do well. Plus it's hard to make a "big mistake" in this game with class choices alone, especially for single class characters. The only questionable thing imo is Pallegina, since Herald and Crusader are much more popular than pure Paladin, as the multiclasses add great survivability and/or damage while Paladin PL8/9 don't seem lifechanging to me. Never used a pure Paladin though so maybe I'm missing out. And for Ydwin, Mindstalker is better for straight up weapon damage and quick focus gen because of deathblows, etc., and it has the added utility of Escape and invisibility when in trouble. But SC Cipher has some very powerful utility and doesn't slouch for damage either. I don't think one is strictly better than the other but the difference is significant enough for you to think about.

No comment about the symbol spells? I really am trying to understand why people don't recommend SC Priest more because of them.

You don't miss Symbol of Rymrgand? I just did a playthrough with him and that spell alone was worth his slot. The symbol spells in general are so good I'm surprised people don't talk about them more. The axes sound cool though. Is there somewhere I can learn the specifics of each priest's summoned weapons? The wikis don't seem to have details.

I thought it was understood that the whole dagger thing was a fantasy play on a roguish character who uses short blades because they are easily concealed for stealth attacks. Crucially, their small size also makes them easily handled so that you can quickly and accurately strike vitals when the opportunity presents itself. Obviously this isn't applicable to a game like Pillars' combat because not every fight is going to end in sneak attacks, so they end up being included as toe-to-toe weapons because that's how the game plays. Usually in these games they are given higher crit damage or chance to indicate that they are meant for deliberate, definitive strikes. It might have been interesting for daggers to have very high bonuses to crit damage against sneak-attack vulnerable targets, or something like that. Skyrim handled it by giving daggers absurd damage from stealth and they were weak for hacking and slashing. Stealth characters (i.e. everyone) therefore put out the most damage with daggers when they could avoid being detected. That is all fair and good, because if you are trying to gouge people's throats before they register you as a threat you are not going to use a longsword. This applies when your target is in any sort of armor as well, obviously. You aim at the gaps (something that's near impossible to do unless the target is unaware or incapacitated). So yeah, daggers and stilettos would have a more flavourful and "realistic" (were my quotes big enough?) presence in Pillars if their damage was heavily reliant on stealth and sneak attack. The unique ones tend to nod in this direction. But this is very hard to balance as it usually ends up with daggers doing much better damage than anything else, or being inconsistent.

I see you are a man of culture as well. "Death to both your houses!"

Several of the threads in the build forums from self-proclaimed new players have specified that they are playing turn-based mode, which suggests that it actually is attractive to potential new players.

You know the difference. The normal model is that the maker of the game creates the product with their own resources, then monetizes the product to regain the money spent on its development + profit. In this case the maker is creating the game with the consumer's money, and then monetizing it in exactly the same way. It's an arrangement that is transparently much better for them and much worse for the consumer.

Any corporation would absolutely love crowdfunding because it is literally their consumers paying them to profit from them. It is free money. There are no significant downsides for them. No one has answered my question about whether a major company has ever had a product crowdfunded before. I've tried to look but can't find anything. I suspect we are talking about an unprecedented level of consumer sacrifice here. If it happens I bet we'll see media articles calling it the next phase in anti-consumerism in the video game industry: now players have to pay for development too! Get ready for more hate targeted at Obsidian.

Are there any existing examples of the public directly funding a product for a major company?

While we're complaining about Rangers, they also have a bloated number of no-brainer passives that severely limits build options, especially when multi-class. For example, Vicious Companion and Resilient Companion should not exist - they should just be the pet's base stats; Protective Companion and Stalker's Link do not need to be separate perks, etc. Also note that these passives are extremely passive. They literally just raise stats, instead of having interesting interactions to build around. Whenever I build a Ranger multiclass, I end up disappointed with how one-note it is because of a lack of abilities, or how unoptimized it feels because I didn't have space for passives that would be very helpful. Am I alone in this experience?

As far as differences in motivation go, "I can't afford to do this" and "I can afford to do this but don't think it's worth my resources" are just about as significant as they get. I understand that people may be willing to crowdfund the game regardless because the input and output are the same. I badly want to see another PoE, so I would even be in favour. But subsidizing a major company's production of a for-profit product because they are unwilling to take the risk themselves is something that many people will be quite justified in not wanting to do. We (or at least many sensible people) don't want to encourage situations in which rich companies are profiting off products that were funded by the public (we already have this via state subsidies and publicly funded research that is then adopted by private companies).

I wasn't around for the early days so bear with me, but wasn't the motivation for crowdfunding the idea that Obsidian didn't have the capital to create PoE on their own? Microsoft has the capital. That's the difference.

Ouch. That makes these abilities really quite bad, then. SC Druids are not going to be doing a huge amount of auto-attack killing, Considering it's PL8 and taking the limitations of spiritshifting + not casting spells + no access to martial passives, I don't even know if those abilities would be too strong on hit, never mind on kill. If it's not super strong, why spec into shifted auto-attacks at all instead of more spells and spell passives? Thank you for testing this as I never had the time to. Yeah, this is the key tension. Spiritshift can feel pretty nice if multiclassed with a martial class like monk or rogue. I'm playing a Shifter/Helwalker right now and going between casting and meleeing feels really fun and effective (+10 Turning Wheel Helwalker means both crazy powerful spells and you can delete some enemy squishies with a single spiritshift Flagellant's Path - so much fun). But for spiritshift to feel worth it offensively on a SC Druid then the Frenzy talents should be very, VERY good. Why bother otherwise? Careful not to equivocate between "on kill abilities are sweet" and "'on kill' is a sweet trigger condition". There may be really good abilities that trigger on kill, but they would only be that much better with better trigger conditions, like 'on hit' or 'on crit'. There are worse conditions like "on being knocked out", but that's very rare.

This is one of my favourite games of all time, and I do love a challenge, but stuff like this is why I don't care to fight megabosses. They are such sharp deviations from the normal parameters of combat in this game that character strength simply doesn't translate from context A (the whole game except megabosses) to context B (megabosses exclusively). Rather, they focus on making sure you have specific strategies that can pick apart the encounters, not because those strategies are inherently strong, but because they are the only way to deal with this or that aspect of a megaboss, where that aspect is often just how high a defense stat or their HP pool is. That's a dull and awkward way to design endgame encounters. They should feel like culminations of the skills and knowledge you gained throughout the game, not utter departures from your previous challenges. It's like taking tennis players and having them do a challenge that requires good tennis skills but also demands other qualities that are only tangentially related to regular tennis rules (maybe only very tall people can do it comfortably). That wouldn't be taken seriously as an ultimate challenge for tennis players because it's not really the same game. Encounters like Nemnok and the FS boss are more in line with what peak challenges should look like, though they are a bit easy for that. Anyway, the point is, I don't think megabosses should influence anyone's opinion on how "strong" any type of character is (not that that's what you were saying, heldred).

Nice; thank you for the testing. I felt like enemies at the edge took less damage but didn't know how dramatic it was. That's good info because it's really tempting to try to get some enemies right next to your party with just the edge of the circle. As for the penetration controversy, doesn't seem like much of an issue. Ivan showed how much PEN you get just for existing so the base PEN listed on tooltips is silly to base an argument on and get upset about.

Even as a Druid/shapeshifting enthusiast I never spent too much time thinking about these passives because "on kill" is generally the worst trigger and the effects didn't seem gamechanging. I just realized, though, that I always assumed they only proc on weapon kills even though the abilities don't say actually say so. A SC Druid built for damage can kill mobs pretty quickly and effectively with spells (much more so than with auto-attacks). If spell kills do proc the frenzy abilities, you could cast some strong spells early-mid fight and then transform. As your spells wrack up kills, your shift duration will extend and you'll do waves of foe-only damage and debuffs. Could be cool. Can anyone confirm whether it does proc on spell kill? If so, is the AoE centred around the Druid or the enemy killed? What is the radius of the AoE? How impactful is it in a fight? Opinions on what the strongest one is?

Can Meteor Shower be spell shaped? I noticed that Storm of Holy Fire cannot be and they are very similar spells. I guess it's a balance thing since Storm would benefit too much from a smaller radius? Do the MS projectiles actually target enemies? I'm pretty sure SoHF projectiles just come down as they see fit.

What I said has nothing to do with how it "feels" dude... let me see if I can explain with an example... Imagine a ridiculous case in which a weapon has a 0.1% chance to do one billion damage. So long as you use it enough that the chance proc at least once in a playthrough approaches 1, your expected damage output expressed as a mathematical average is going to dwarf anything else that exists in the game by a whole lot. But that still doesn't mean much of anything in practical terms because in almost every fight you are ever in, the ability will do absolutely nothing. The same thing is true with Arcane bolts on a caster: once in a while you will get a spike of damage, but the vast majority of the time it simply will not help. Abstracting total damage across a playthrough is a useful tool of comparison in many cases, but it misses much that is of real, tangible value to an actual person playing a video game, where the pertinent question is not so much "what is the max theoretical damage value I can hit as an average across 200hrs of play?" and more "which abilities do I choose so that my character can most effectively kill the baddies I want him to kill, when I want him to kill them?"

Thematically I guess you're looking at Goldpact Knight, any Rogue, Priest of Skaen, and probably any Rangers and Barbarians. That's already five classes and you can mix and match with others to cover your bases (don't overlook the power of single-class though! Think long and hard before sacrificing something as powerful as, say, Symbol of Skaen)

No, I'm going to stick to my guns on what I said. If you only auto-attack 2-3 times in a fight, the chance that you will experience the damage bonus of your 15% chance is very low. This means that in most fights you will experience absolutely no benefit to your DPS. With elemental bolts you will always get an increase to your DPS in every fight. Mathematical averages across an entire playthrough are unhelpful with these kinds of issues IMO. The relevant question is, "how helpful will this be for me in any given fight?" Or: "If I'm struggling with a fight, how likely is this to make a difference?" Arcane bolts are not likely to be helpful at all in any given fight for a caster as the chance to see the effect is so low. If you are playing a weapon-attack focused character, however, who attacks frequently during every fight, you may expect arcane bolts to be helpful in any given fight.

I'd go with elemental. Since you're a wizard and won't be auto-attacking very often, you aren't often going to see the 15% chance proc. Elemental will help no matter how frequently or infrequently you shoot. I also imagine that the missiles can get reflected by enemy wizards, which would be kinda annoying.

If it didn't have a check it would be fine and a pretty cool idea for a tier-9 spell. But as others have said, it rolls against Will (uniquely for death spells). @thelee I'm with you in principle about not comparing across classes, but you can just stay in the Druid tree if you like and look at the other PL9 spells. It would be acceptable as a very weak death spell if it appeared at a lower power level. To put such a weak spell at the peak of the Druid tree is just bad design. It's like giving a Wizard Nature's Vigor at PL9 and saying "well, party buffs aren't really Wizard's forte". That doesn't matter - the spell is out of place there.