NotDumbEnough

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?

It is quite frankly difficult to find much use vs late game vessels because it rolls vs fortitude, and lots of late game vessels have really high fortitude (fampyrs, steelclad, etc.). The damage is good, but not amazing compared to barbarian shout spam (probably the closest comparison as a spell-like ability on a martial class). The healing is definitely strong, though. Low penetration would not necessarily be a very serious issue given that Paladin would have 3 different damage types to choose from, and the self immolation abilities have very high penetration. Even with 1 or 2 underpenetration the damage would still be respectable.

I personally don't think that paying 1 more Zeal for 10s Robust or 15s Courageous is that bad. I do actually think Lay on Hands itself is slightly weak, due to the recovery time. In easy fights you don't need to use it, in hard fights the enemy deals damage faster than you can heal it, so it is better to either use some other ability to kill or disable the enemy faster, or help the injured ally run away (with Swift inspiration, BDD, Withdraw, etc.) and regenerate with more cost-efficient AoE heals. Spending 5 seconds using Lay on Hands is just very poor action economy.

I don't really see how SC barbarian is weak in any way. The shouts are amazing, you can literally end most fights just by shouting the enemies to death with the long range shout, or keep them permanently dazed + deal decent damage with the other one. Retaliation is also extremely strong, especially if you really dump your deflection. With heavy armor (especially Patinated Plate), Fire Godlike and the daze shout, you can keep the enemy permanently underpenetrating against your armor, even if they crit. Leap is also very good, a very fast, spammable AoE 6 second stun + damage is ridiculous for 2 resources (compare vs Gaze of the Adragan). I get the feeling that you are looking at the classes in the context of megaboss fights which is not the right idea IMO. The game is not balanced around megaboss fights and outside of maybe Belranga they are very poorly designed due to ridiculously high boss defenses and the need for resource regeneration.

I think reduction of hostile effect duration is quite strong especially later on where you might have many debuffs on you at the same time (such as fampyr fights). It is not -5 seconds of one hostile effect, but potentially 3 or 4 or 5. That said a buff would not make it broken. I do think more Zeal regen for Paladins is good. They have a tendency to draw out fights and make otherwise short encounters last a long time, and can often run out of resources. I do think Paladin needs some non-fire damage. I also think LoPZ should really not roll vs fortitude as lots and lots of vessels (especially fampyrs) have really high fortitude. If LoPZ was shock/cold damage vs. enemy will, I would definitely pick it a lot more (I basically don't pick it right now). Would also add a niche in having a direct damage ability vs will, as most cipher abilities vs will either have low damage or are damage over time, and most other classes don't have damage rolls vs will at all.

I think pets kind of lack DPS because they don't have dual wielding attack speed bonuses, or any attack speed/recovery time bonuses in general. Also since you inherently have a ranger dealing large amounts of ranged damage, enemies tend to die before the pet reaches them even on higher difficulties. So technically, yes, your pet does have legendary tier weapons. But a multiclass chanter summoning weapons has 3x legendary weapons, each with their own class abilities for extra damage, and are inherently disposable so you don't care if they die. A single class Beckoner has 8x legendary weapons, though for a shorter duration and they are very flimsy. Also, the pets are extremely bad at dealing with Arcane Archer friendly fire. They will spend the majority in the fight caught in a web or sucked in by Pull of Eora, it's absolutely pointless to take anything other than boar or bear for Arcane Archer.

Yes I think Swift would have been kind of redundant for ghost heart as well. I actually think Shadowed Hunters healing could use a nerf. It is a bit too powerful and eclipses previous pet healing abilities in the tree. Having 4 different abilities to heal the pet feels overly redundant. Maybe straight up remove the healing but cut the bond cost by 1 or 2 even.

Yeah, in general I think Bonded Fury should provide significantly better buffs than priests, chanters, etc. can for your team. If you have some priests and chanters a SC ranger's pet just does not feel that much stronger than a MC ranger's pet. Right now Bonded Fury merely provides "cheaper" buffs for your pet but that's not really relevant because lots of inspirations are AoE effects anyways, with the exception of Tenacious, or are already attached to lower tier abilities available to MC rangers. Giving the pet Intuitive via Shadowed Hunters was a good idea but I think giving the pet 25% hit to crit when its baseline damage output is extremely low isn't sufficient by itself, something that Bonded Fury could help in doing. However I think it's also worth pointing out that SC Ranger as a whole is pretty good in BPM. Twinned Shots and Whirling Strikes are already very powerful. It's just that your pet is very underwhelming, I did a SC Sharpshooter run a while ago and basically just killed everything before my pet could get in melee most of the time (you get 2 shots + 2 bounces from Twinned Shots, if any one of them crits Veilpiercer negates your recovery and you essentially have ranged Scordeo's Edge). So perhaps a rework to Bonded Fury might have to be accompanied by a nerf elsewhere.

I do think proper offensive use of the pet should be rewarded (i.e. attacking vulnerable targets instead of just using it as a meat shield), so maybe make it only give bond on crit? Say, 50% chance. I also think it would be cool to have Bonded Fury give just Energized instead of all 6 tier 2 inspirations, as many of these inspirations are easily provided by other party members or are already present on the ranger skill tree. That way the pet is a real threat to low deflection enemies.

I actually think Bonded Fury is a bit weak. Tenacious -- pretty good, but since baseline damage output of pet is not that great, not worth 2 Bond by itself Hardy -- meh, if you have Paladin in the party you would have likely gotten +1 AR anyways. +5 constitution is still good Nimble -- not significantly more useful than just Quick Aware -- overridden by one of your tier 9 abilities Acute -- barely useful on the pet Resolute -- pets don't care that much about interrupts, only somewhat more useful than Steadfast. What I mean to say is that if you have an AoE buff on your team such as a Chanter that provides tier 1 inspirations you don't really get that much out of Bonded Fury. Personally I also think Distraction Training tends to be a bit weak, a lot of enemies in the late game can easily break engagement with various skills, and pet damage output is too low to draw enemy aggro. If you are fighting Fampyrs they are just all going to jump away for example. Or your pet might just die from ranged attacks or spells, even with Superior Camouflage, making the fact that it only works vs melee redundant. Perhaps make the pet more useful when the enemy is ignoring it. e.g. -5 accuracy to engaged enemies, similar to a defensive version of Rogue's Persistent Distraction. Or have pet generate Bond when enemies break engagement similar to Monk's Parting Sorrow. I think Twinned Shots and Whirling Strikes are both fine, actually quite strong with the correct unique weapons (the warbow that recovers instantly on crit for Twinned Shots, Beast of Winter scepter in offhand for Whirling Strikes, etc.).