NotDumbEnough

I believe so, yes. You can look at the recovery bar over the heads of each character.

Yeah it has to do with conversions on both the attacker's and defender's ends.

If you want to use it exactly once at the start of combat, I think you might be able to check your own bond value. If Ranger has Maximum Bond, use Bonded Fury.

I've never thought about it like this before, but you get increasing returns with each Wildrhymer in your party. Since you don't care too much about PL you can use Spell Shaping to hit all of your dead pets simultaneously with ...And Face Your Foes. Rezzing up to five dead pets with a single cast is an excellent deal, and since they don't get injuries and you don't care too much if they die again, they also make better usage of the bonus to all defenses. It's like one of those fantasy tropes where people get started on necromancy by trying to bring back their dead dogs and cats.

IIRC the problem with having things like 999 second cooldowns in AI script is that it doesn't reset or stop counting when you finish a battle. You're likely to fight more than one battle every 999 seconds, but if you set it too low your guy starts doing stupid things mid-battle. IMO the best Arquebus user is generally a Scout with Chanter backup for Swift-Handed. Sneak Attack and Deathblows help offset the damage reduction from Driving Flight, with Maia using Red Hand I've seen extremely good damage from even the bounced shot, unless I build my watcher as a glass cannon she usually ends up with the highest damage output in my party.

+Fortitude is the most useful as lots of enemy interrupts and debuffs tend to target it. +Will is less important (most non-humanoid type enemies like wild animals don't tend to target Will too much). +Reflex is not important unless you are worried about friendly fire from spells.

There's a cipher passive which increases effect AOEs with the amount of focus you have. This works with scrolls and bombs too and it's immensely powerful since your ordinary intellect modifier to AOE doesn't work for consumables.

Maybe give them an ability similar to Monk's Parting Sorrow while they are using a shield (% chance to restore Discipline if enemy breaks engagement) as a consolation prize if the enemy is a rogue or has some other kind of teleportation ability. I find that the AI almost never breaks engagement intentionally (outside of teleporting), it makes a lot of the bonuses for disengagement attacks not very interesting unless you can terrify the enemy to force them to disengage. Alternatively, since Unbending and Refreshing Defense incentivize the Fighter to take lots of hits rather than trying to avoid them, maybe give Unbroken some sort of passive ability like +0.5 seconds to positive effect durations when enemies miss an attack against you, as a compensation. Should probably be a small number since it might add up quite quickly and encourage infinite Brilliant etc.

Step in and out of AOE's that repeatedly apply afflictions, Druid has quite a few of these.

In my experience the Arcane Blaster is best against single targets. Veilpiercer is quite powerful in fights against multiple enemies, with Twinned Shots and Driving Flight you only need one of the four shots to crit to reset your recovery, so you can simply dump all your Bond to quickly alpha strike the enemy.

Regarding the original question, Ciphers do not have a lot of great single target damaging spells outside of Disintegration. Amplified Wave spam is pretty good on Ascendants if you are fighting a crowd. Against single targets ciphers mostly play a supportive role with Ancestor's Memory and Reaping Knives (high DPS weapons that also help a lot if target has high armor). Also consider Psychovampiric Shield (-10 resolve makes target much easier to hit, and makes all other debuffs last much longer) and of course Detonate as a finisher.

Mod files for BPM usually fix or alter each individual ability separately, just download and install the mod, find the file for that ability and delete all other files.

I'm sure Shadow Step does not function like an attack ability when it applies the paralyze. For pretty much everything else the answer should be yes.

I don't think Wildrhymer offers much that can't be done by a singleclass chanter or a ranger multiclassed with something else. Sure-handed Ila makes you shoot VERY fast with guns (an all gun/crossbow team with this chant is very strong) but there's nothing preventing you from running it on another chanter in your party. As a high level SC chanter in general you are mostly choosing between opening a fight with an empowered Eld Nary (use Sasha's Singing Scimitar for infinite empower points) which will end most smaller fights instantly by itself. If there's a particularly durable single target you generally summon weapons for sustained damage output. The dragon looks cool but is a bit less useful in high level fights where enemies like fampyrs can just teleport past the dragon and go straight for you; it's extremely slow and clunky and isn't that great against enemies that are smart enough to switch targets.

Maybe adding an interrupt on graze would help? I think their primary issue is that high level Paladins don't really spam Flames of Devotion to deal damage, it's just not cost efficient to spam it like Rogues and Fighters do with their 1 cost attacks. So boosting that ability in particular for purely offensive purposes is not too interesting.