NotDumbEnough

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.

It is worth noting that +defenses to affliction is very strong (such as passives on Fighter and Paladin skill tree). If, for example, you have +20 defenses against dexterity afflictions and a rogue attempts to use crippling strike on you, you get +20 deflection against the actual weapon attack as well as +20 fortitude for the hobbled roll.

This game, like oldschool CRPGs and certain other games like new XCOM, does not have clearly defined roles for classes. Most classes often have multiple roles, and it's easier to list what a given class CAN'T do than what it can, e.g. Wizards can't buff their teammates in any way with their usual spells. But pretty much everything else they can do.

For absolute single target burst damage Streetfighter/Soulblade is highest imo. With your streetfighter passive you can easily hit for hundreds of damage.

Are you sure the skeletons are not poison immune? It's been a while, but I believe at least enemy skeletons are.

A correction: Stunning Surge not only refunds Mortification, but actually gives you wounds on crit IIRC. If your accuracy is decent it's a very powerful wound generator on Forbidden Fist who might otherwise lack wounds.

The change for Resonant Touch is a bit misleading, for a moment I thought you deleted the ability from the game.

That might be it, I think I was fighting the escaped slaves with their beasts, and some of the beast attacks bypassed Blade Turning.

I would be careful. I used to goof around with Streetfighter/Helwalker where I essentially played as a glass cannon and dumped all defenses and solely relied on Blade Turning to not die in melee (as it is fairly useful with high intellect and recovery time bonus). However, it does not appear to work against all attacks, though I don't know why. Sometimes I would fight in melee and an attack would circumvent Blade Turning, even though the previous attack and the following attack do not. I did not move at all. I guess Blade Turning is not 100% reliable so be careful of blowing up your own monk.

Is it possible to make The Long Pain summon a melee weapon with very long range rather than a ranged weapon? The primary problem with the ability, I think, is that it is ranged and does not work with many monk abilities.

The symbol spells have lower penetration, quite low cast range and deal their damage over a longer duration (i.e. you cannot cast from stealth and kill everything before they ever reach you).