NotDumbEnough

If you can get the enemy to attack the barbarian, the battleaxe modal combined with retaliation on crit can deal pretty decent single target damage. The retaliation attack bypasses the downside of the recovery time penalty from the battleaxe modal. Obviously this incentivizes high intellect and low resolve so that the bleed lasts longer and you get crit more often.

https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/354 Are you running this mod just to be sure? I usually do no rest runs and I have never seen my resting bonuses clear unless I intentionally rest.

This example is too extreme, most characters cannot deal 200 damage in a single blow. Because Soul Annihilation is most efficient at low focus, usually you are using it every other attack, so even in late game you are only going to reasonably deal maybe 60 weapon damage at most in most scenarios. That is roughly 36 vs 60 focus, for SA that is 16.5 vs 22.5 damage in the next hit before PL and damage modifiers. It is a 6 damage difference (before modifiers) on every other attack, whereas for Biting Whip you are dealing 12 damage (after modifiers) from the lash on every attack assuming you always hit for 60. For Draining Whip to keep up in terms of sheer damage you need about +300% damage on your weapon, which is pretty difficult to reach even for a level 20 rogue using the best weapons. Most likely it is somewhere around +200% or +250% bonus. Biting Whip therefore usually deals a small amount more damage, and is less prone to overkill damage for Soul Annihilation, while Draining Whip obviously favors casting spells.

Hold a melee weapon in offhand to fool the game. But it doesn't work everywhere, you're not allowed to Mule Kick with a ranged weapon.

In my experience Biting Whip is OK on a Soulblade. Having slightly less focus for your Soul Annihilation is not THAT much of a penalty to your damage and the lash makes up for it. Even a 10 focus Soul Annihilation deals nice damage and most importantly gets the PL-based damage bonus. With a multiclass (e.g. Streetfighter Soulblade) you are often just hitting the enemy all the time so not having much focus to cast spells doesn't matter much either. For the other subclasses Biting Whip is indeed not great.

Sure, a human Streetfighter at low health will hit like a truck. Perhaps consider multiclassing with Devoted Fighter for more penetration and accuracy if you want to use only greatswords, or Soul Blade for Soul Annihilation attacks that can deal ridiculous damage.

Some of the chants do not really need very large AoE. The skeleton chant does not care at all, the one that removes concentration too since most enemies don't have concentration. Most of the chants that buff your allies do not need a big AoE since you can just group up a bit, with high intellect the AoE is sufficient. The upside is extremely powerful, I think the only issue I have with the subclass is that the power level bonus lasts only an instant so it does not interact well with things like Eld Nary.

1. Most of the time the strongest way to open a fight from stealth is with a spell. If you have more than one caster, you can synchronize their timings so the spells go off at the same time. Combos like Pull of Eora+Symbol of Deity can more or less win fights by themselves. 2. Non-hostile spells do not break stealth. I usually build Xoti as a stealth priest who spams buffs from stealth. While in stealth your recovery is extremely fast, almost doubling the rate at which you cast spells. 3. Keep in mind that the AI is dumb and will not attempt to run away from hazardous AOEs. Put your Chillfog in a choke point and stand right outside it, and the enemies will fight inside it and get blinded for the entire fight. Also consider using Chillfog's blind to herd ranged enemies closer to your parties so that you can hit more targets with AoE spells.

There's even a mod that lets you keep achievements after using iroll20s. By the way, I thought this only happened to helmets. It's only ever happened to helmets for me. Also it's only ever made them lose ALL of their properties, but they don't seem to be all gone here.

The Moon's Light and Nature's Balm, much like all other healing over time abilities, scale very powerfully as you gain power levels, as you get both additional ticks and additional heal per tick with power level scaling. A high level Lifegiver can heal someone back to full HP, sometimes several times over, with a single cast of The Moon's Light.

I used Deadly Deadfire, though you may have to do your own tweaking to get the exact effects you want.

Pull of Eora spam with Arcane Archer can very easily lead to enemies being stuck in place for more or less the entire fight. The more you stack the more likely it is that the enemy will just get permanently stuck in the ragdoll animation and be entirely unable to act.

Wizards in general do not make great tanks in PoE2. The AI in this game tends to stick to the first enemy they engage and never move again unless they have an ability to break engagement and someone else is doing large amounts of damage. Therefore you want your tanks to run towards the enemy ASAP, but wizards tend to spend the first few seconds of combat just casting self-buff spells. Not to mention that most of the wizard self buffs tend to prioritize damage avoidance and therefore dissuade the enemy from approaching.

The mirror fight has an easy cheese where you just strip naked before the fight, then re-equip all your stuff after you load into the arena.

This is cheesy, but priests are the most tolerant class for skimping on defenses. None of your spells break stealth if they do not hit an enemy, i.e. you can cast all of your party buffs from stealth. Pump stealth and simply don't take offensive actions until you're buffed up. Also, you skip 85% of your recovery time while casting from stealth. Generally speaking I always pump stealth on Xoti and she can go through a whole fight without revealing herself. I don't think any other class can do their job entirely from stealth like this. I guess you could do a sneaky Beckoner but you generally want chanters to do some fighting while waiting for phrases to regenerate. Other spellcasters don't have that many support spells.

I tend to do the double-crossing route where I take Cotta's advance payment, then initiate the fight by blowing up the powder barrels next to him. His group drops somewhat useful gear so it's still worth fighting them.

Summons only get increased duration from PL boosts. However certain summons keep up better depending on your character's level by scaling their armor and weapons. Note that increased duration by itself is still quite powerful. Non-beckoner summons tend to be incredibly tanky and only really die from running down their timer. Having a longer duration means that you can use other invocations too and not just recasting your summons.

Priest has minor avatar, but cannot give others a dex inspiration. Many characters such as multiclass Fighter/Rogue otherwise cannot get a dex inspiration at all outside of item abilities and Paladin spending Zeal to individually buff them. Some classes can give themselves a dex inspiration for a short time but it is not economical to spam them over and over (e.g. ranger and barbarian) especially if they have low intellect. Chanter's The Bride is powerful because it is the only cheap and efficient way to provide your whole team with a dex inspiration. What I mean is that all of your buff invocations always affect yourself first before anyone else. Travel time is not instant. Therefore the Smart inspiration takes effect before the buffs reach your teammates.

I don't think The Bride really needs a buff -- it's more expensive because dexterity inspirations are much rarer than the others (priest doesn't have it at all), you can get single target dex inspiration from Paladin or self buffs from certain classes but that's about it. Teamwide perception and intellect inspirations are also very rare outside of priests. It's also worth noting that the chanter is always affected by the intellect inspiration first, so the buff lasts slightly longer on the other teammates. The other invocation is cheaper because only teamwide might inspiration is rare (priest has to hug teammates to use Holy Power on all of them). Priest gets teamwide T2 resolve inspiration as opposed to T1 from the invocation, druid has two ways to provide teamwide constitution inspiration.

IIRC recovery speed does not update instantly. The most obvious example is to have a streetfighter lose health, they won't suddenly recover faster after going under half health. Instead they only start receiving the benefit after they perform their next action.

You need Berath's Challenge enabled to proc Brilliant, or else going invisible with the whole party causes the enemy to disengage and the fight will end after a while.

I think a less extreme value (like +25%/-25%) in exchange for keeping the current 0 cost and no recovery would be nice, otherwise the ability feels a bit too reliant on high intellect to be efficient.

I think if you wanted to make Take the Hit into a pseudo-taunt like effect, it could be done. Generally my experience is that enemies will prioritize damage dealers (e.g., bring a priest and Eder to the first construct + revenant fight in the cave. Have priest use Radiance, watch all of the revenants come for you) and targets with low defenses/low hp. Unfortunately AI is extremely conservative about risking disengagement attacks and will almost never try to break engagement just by walking (will still use Leap, Escape etc.) even if the disengagement attack doesn't hurt at all. So if you wanted a taunt effect for Take the Hit it might look like: -50 deflection and +10 (or some other ludicrous number) engagement for the fighter +50 deflection for nearby allies, but they cannot engage

So if the fighter himself does not get hit, allies will take less damage, but fighter will not take any damage? I guess that might be interesting on, say, a ranged Fighter that simply aims to never get hit.

I personally like the current state of Take the Hit. It's especially good with the paladin immolation upgrade that heals allies, as the fighter shares half of the self damage then immediately gets healed. I'm not too sure what you mean by your proposal, does the fighter get bonus damage for protecting allies, or is he also debuffing allies' damage output?