NotDumbEnough

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.).

I'm not sure what you mean, but you can chain Mob Stance procs for multiple kills. Had a lot of fun with a Fighter/Monk once where Mob Stance and Swift Flurry/Heartbeat Drumming procced off of one another

That's just a case of the game's auto-generated tooltips sometimes being weird, you should look at the written description to understand. It's already very good as is, SC barbarian can chain together loads of kills with retaliate and whatnot.

I think that Blackjacket's Rapid Recovery should be buffed a bit, so that the marginal benefit of taking it to improve Constant Recovery is the same as a regular Fighter. It makes sense to have a weaker Constant Recovery because that's the subclass penalty, but I don't think it makes sense that you get less out of spending a skill point in one particular passive ability as compared to a normal fighter. i.e.: Currently Fighter Constant Recovery regen rate is A, with Rapid Recovery regen rate is A + B. Right now Blackjacket Constant Recovery is roughly A/2, and with Rapid Recovery it is roughly A/2 + B/2. I think with Rapid Recovery it should instead be A/2 + B, so that just like a normal fighter the benefit of putting a skill point in Rapid Recovery is B. IIRC this is how other upgrades to core class passives work, so that all subclasses benefit equally. So Ascendant Soul Whip upgrade gets you the same marginal benefit as a normal cipher does.

There's a secondary mod that gives each form its own cooldown iirc. I do think a shared cooldown is good, otherwise Shifter pretty much has only upsides and no downsides. Shift into each form, use their active abilities, then immediately shift back and cast spells.

The Sky Dragon Wurm is one of the better pets in the early game but is only available depending on your actions to the Sky Dragon. In the unmodded game this is bugged out (search online for details, Nexus has a mod that fixes this iirc) so the history that you have to choose for it doesn't really make sense. Make sure to bury Wael's scroll in the first game or he will troll you in Deadfire in a very unpleasant way.

While it's true early game DoTs can do ridiculous amounts of damage, they have severe penetration problems. There's really no way to use a spell with ~10 penetration at level 20, unless you have an incredible amount of setup (food/Tenacious for +2 pen, and -AR debuffs on the enemy) because on PotD you are going to see lots of enemies with 15+ AR.

I still think Blood Wizard is pretty strong. PoE2 is generally easy enough that I don't really need to use either Blood Sacrifice or Empower for most fights, so subclass downsides are not really existent. In fights where you do need resource replenishment, the ability to repeatedly use Blood Sacrifice is much better than a one off Empower I think.

You can do this but it's not necessary. Keep in mind that it's always harder to hit stuff at the start, but as you scale upwards your accuracy scales twice (innate accuracy increase on level up + weapon quality upgrades/spell power level upgrades) while defenses only scale once (+3 all defenses on level up) unless you have a shield. This also applies to enemies, so in general as the game goes on your attacks become more and more accurate (as does the enemies'). This is doubly so if you don't enable upscaling for them. Unless you badly need crits (usually only for physical attacks vs Deflection as lots of weapons have unique effects on crit) you don't need to lower their defenses too much, it's often sufficient to just kill them straight away. For the pike in particular, keep in mind that it is a debuff effect. This means that flanked debuffs from perception afflictions do not stack with it. So pike modal+physically flanking the enemy does stack. Using pike modal vs an enemy affected by Chill Fog or rogue's Persistent Distraction is pointless.

The tornado invocation with all the extra bounces is extremely powerful and is basically 80% of the reason you might want to single class a Skald. You're also able to pick all of the +damage/accuracy/penetration with empowered attacks perks which further makes it absolutely ridiculous, as long as the enemy doesn't have spell reflection you can end many fights with just a single invocation.

I don't bother scripting it. Just shift-queue all your spells at the beginning of each fight.

Did you test it out yourself? I'm pretty sure it didn't work like that in the past (you get only one stack per weapon regardless of how many hits).

A high intellect monk should be able to just use Blade Turning infinitely against him as long as Dance of Death is active.

Yes, you often get hit by the afflictions you were trying to avoid in the first place due to having -16 will, unless you already dumped intellect on character creation.

Linear AoE's are affected though to a lesser extent. Intellect governs the range of these abilities. A 3 int barbarian will have to stand much closer for Driving Roar than a 23 int barbarian.

It is effectively just a reverse version of the Beast of Winter helmet.

The recovery times for consumables are generally too long. Sometimes they are useful early game when your casters run out of spells, but otherwise it is often not worth spending 4 seconds applying a poison or drinking a potion in combat.