Zoda

I just realized that Tuotilo's Palm counts as unarmed. In my last playthrough I made a swashbuckler with the idea of using Magran's Blessing (that I evnetually dropped for the adra shield... can't remember the name), because it felt useless. I'll definitely try something with Tuotilo's palm now, but I just played Trickster/Tactician in my last playthrough, so probably something different this time (in hindsight, unbroken or even devoted would have been better probably...). I really got warmed up to the idea of playing a stalker (in part for roleplaying reasons), and even if a bit tedious, he can get great deflection bonuses eventually with the innate and Beast's Claw, but not sure how useful the pet would be if I multiclass. Definitely needs a chipher buddy to keep up Ancestor's Memory. I usually go ghost heart on any ranger, but I wonder how much damage the pet can do with all the passives taken . During the midgame I can just target kith with Beast's Claw I guess, then for bosses I'll already have Ancestor's Memory running. If I do multiclass, would Beast's Claw stack with various other sources of deflection? (Trickster or Helwalker sounds like decent mc choices, depending on how much it hurts the pet) Or maybe I can tank with pistol + shield?

That's a build I tried and played it up to lvl 9 or 10, but decided that it'd not pack enough punch in the more troublesome encounters (megabosses, SSS fights), and hordes of melee mobs can be roflstomped in more than enough ways. I had no trouble completing POTD on either of my playthroughs (first as Ghost Heart/cipher then as Tactician/Soulblade), I even did the ooze megaboss on my seer, and felt like I could get Dorudungan down too with a bit of practice, but I wanted a build like my dumped RES dps tanks in PoE1, something that can solo tank regular encounters (even if not bosses), and dish out nearly as much dps as a build optimized for it. Had really high hopes for Steel Garrote/zerker with the rage upgrade that staggers foes for constant draining, and all the armor stacking that combination provides, but even that felt underwhelming compated to the PoE1 builds. Maybe it's just Shod-in-Faith was bonkers, and I grown completely reliant on it for building melee in PoE1. I just feel like ranged has a huge edge over melee here, especially with gearing (+5 acc helm/ring, +10 acc ring if you use Dragon's Dowery, +10% dmg +3 acc pet...), maybe it's just my knowledge still being limmited. Also godlikes don't really feel like godlikes in the sequel

I recently started playing Deadfire, played 2 builds to lvl 20 so far, finished FS and all the main questlines (with reloads). In PoE1 I really liked tanky dps frontliners for my watcher, I played moon godlike barb and fire godlike monk and they just smashed content on POTD, however I have difficulty finding such high dps frontline tank builds in Deadfire. I tried stacking armor as steel garrote zerker or use unbending, as tactician/soulblade, but haven't got the results I was used to in PoE1. Are there such builds available in Deadfire without abusing the more cheesy abilities of the game? I want to do all bosses with them.