Not So Clever Hound

Hard no... but tedious as hell Sure, and SC Assassin perma-Vanishing Strike and so on, but I think the OP only wanted to discuss Blood Mage builds.

Could you stack 2+ frenzy-like effects from Amra with that? That could be massive too.

If that is so, then indeed it significantly impacts the survivability of many builds, provided you don't use other exploits to replace the nerfed effects... that would probably bump up the Assassin Blood Mage (who relies on ambushing from stealth and escaping/resetting the fight to survive) and probably the Arcane Knight with his unlimited health regen and high defenses (probably then a Blood Mage /Steel Garrote to maximize that self healing).

Awesome! I'm eager to hear how things come together for you with Amra and a couple more abilities to play with. Thanks again for sharing!

as long as they grab the weapon by the handle and not by the blade, they should mostly be fine One day they shall dual wield Magran's Favor and Slayer's Claw and be very happy about it.

OP mentioned that Blood Sacrifice will now come with a -100% healing effect for 6s. I'm not sure whether this effect would be somewaht prolonged by WoD or reduced by high RES etc. But it would severely get in the way of Unbending heals if you spam Blood Sacrifice I suspect. Much better to have a Cannot Die effect then. EDIT... didn't see your edit I have no idea. I can't remember if the CON afflictions for example reduce Unbending healing?

Yeah Brilliant from Wit of Death's Herald, Brilliant from Shroud of the Phantasm... but AFIK it would only restore your Discipline as it would in vanilla, you would still have the nerf on restoring Blood Mage spells.

I bet it made him sad! If only the Fear Ward was PL3 and not PL4, he would have terrified all the pigs and lizards. Sure, but either way you are not bringing pride upon your Dojo.

I thought you might . How did you manage the early game? I can't see a proud Barb sneak past the Dig Site or ask for help. I haven't tried in a while but I seem to remember that even with usual combos of Monastic Unarmed Training, Necklace of Fireballs, Hylea's Bounty and the best other stuff you can buy in Port Maje I struggled - significantly more than with any other class I'd played. I also remember trying to build high AR but it was still sub-par. EDIT: also SSS must have been a huge grind, was it not?

I don't think this fundamentally alters the strongest, well-documented builds and playstyles with Blood Mage. If anything the nerf to Brilliant would make Blood Sacrifice standout even more as an incredibly powerful ability. As far as I understand you can still spam Blood Sacrifice in very hard fights with a permanent Cannot Die effect (BDD/PotFS + WoD) to replenish all your spells at will. The only thing I guess is that you couldn't use Blood Sacrifice anymore when relying on Unbending Trunk + WoD to stay alive. But that's hardly a problem (see my previous point ). So I'm assuming best Pure Casters will still be Thaumaturge (BM + Wael/Skaen) and SC Blood Mage (my personal favorite). Best Tanky Caster will remain Arcane Knight (BM + Whatever). Best Sneaky Caster will remain Spellblade (BM + Assassin). Best Martial Casters shall still be Battlemage (BM + maybe Devoted in this case, not Tactician?) or Sage (BM + Helwalker) with Spirit Lance + respectively Clear Out and Stunning Surge, and CC spells like the Ryngrim series. Warlock (BM + Zerker or Fury Shaper) will also remain real nice but IMHO not quite on the same end-game level as others. Every other combination would still be great . Yawn.

That, I 100% agree with. If you knew how much I've tried to make a Solo SC Barbarian work one way or another. How many times those little barbs died at the Dig Site. I was only left with the nostalgia of the Hours of St Rumbalt + Accurate Carnage.

That's interesting perspective, thanks for sharing! I would still argue that for many multi/single class, PL 6 and PL 7 abilities are important milestones. Maybe not things that will completely change your life, but steps that can significantly enhance your gameplay. I would also argue that in my opinion, Obsidian aimed at balancing out the Multiclass feature by giving access to very powerful and potentially transformational abilities at PL 8 & 9 only for Single Class. When playing single class at least I think it's really interesting to see what those power levels have to offer before locking your opinion on that class. I'm with you on the idea that it's not super fun to play a toon that is quite weak until it unlocks something specific at like, lvl 19, but at the same time it's also nice to play toons that have an objective, a proverbial carrot to chase in terms of end-game potential. For example with an Assassin getting permanent Vanishing Strike with Strand of Favor which I know is your favorite thing in the world . Ok sorry I will see myself out.

Fair point, I should have clarified that I was talking about being (reasonably) completionist and playing through all DLCs, in which case with a full party of 6 it's not 70/30 but probably closer to 50/50 maybe? That's what I assumed the OP would want to do given they haven't completed a playthrough yet, but it's indeed good to clarify. Regardless, in my experience most builds/playstyles will really start coalescing around lvl 16+ so it's hard to get a solid opinion on a class before.

I speak mostly from Solo experience, but you should keep in mind that Deadfire being quite generous with both content and XP, you will play 70%+ of the game at max level. And most classes at max level play very differently than at low level. This is true for single and multiclass and for certain combos, late game is totally transformational (e.g. SC Monk, MC Fighter/Wizard Spirit Lance...). So you can't effectively judge a class by playing it a few hours and giving up . Pick a theme you like and stick to it. Finally - most classes will sometimes have hard times at the beginning, it's normal. Difficulty in Deadfire is loaded at the beginning of the game and in highest level end-game content. Only very few builds can blast through the game from lvl 1 on Veteran or especially PotD, and in my experience they are mostly Assassin combos using stealth to one-shot and reset fights.

Hi @dgray62 thanks for sharing, I love it and I do think it's very viable especially with the mod to tweak cipher buffing powers. For the record I had strongly considered it and the only reason I hadn't followed through was because I couldn't self buff with cipher powers. Strong thematic fit and synergies between the 2 classes. You can potentially do really fun things like several high-DMG stealth attacks on squishies + wanton gore to supercharge your Soul Annihilation for a tough enemy. I think in terms of Focus management you will end up using Soul Annihilation with Assassin bonuses a lot more than casting buffs/debuffs but it will still give you a lot of versatility. Two things that I'd pay attention to: Investigate focus generation with Rogue attacks (to charge powers and Soul Annihilation). As you remember, this was an interesting quirk of the ranged Mindstalker: a lot of rogue alpha strikes weren't consistently generating focus, so you could basically have Biting Whip always on, which was great in that case. With this particular build you DO want to generate focus, so I'd make sure it doesn't become an issue here. Have the right tempo to attack/restealth/attack/cast/etc. without ending combat prematurely (which would reset your focus, end your "borrowed" types of buff etc). This is always a thing with Solo Assassin but especially with a Focus-user that is going to cast the occasional spell from stealth. You may consider attacking one enemy with Gouging Strike at the beginning of the fight, then it will not end until this enemy is dead. Problem solved. You could also activate Berath's challenge but I'm not 100% sure about the ease of doing certain fights before you can get Brilliant self-cast at lvl 19. I think it is feasible though - after all you have Whispers of Treason . I love the rash lash you could call your toon The Plague Carrier

I remember going all the way up to lvl 19 on a solo Priest/Ascendant to discover this because I hadn't researched the build properly .

Yes, this is a build I've made for solo PotD. Read also the discussion/comments below and you'll be all set. EDIT: to be clear, my build is just a suggestion, there are many other ways to do a solo Bloodmage. This one is pretty sweet though and enabled me to complete everything I could possibly want to .

I do agree they have a lot of funny features including this one but go on a Lone Wolf completionist run on Tactician difficulty with just the bag/chest trick without going insane. I feel like for how funny/broken certain things are, there is always a sense of balance. But again, I may be very wrong!

If I may, that sounds a lot like you need a mage . Why not try a single class Bloodmage to get the jist of the game with the most flex (it will also enable you to do everything everywhere) and come back to other tasty combinations once (said respectfully) you fully know what you're doing in the game? Chanter is also very versatile, but Bloodmage can use every single grimoire they find - you can have fun with many buff/debuff, inspirations/afflictions, damage-type interactions in the game that way, without respec. I personally find that Bloodmage is the best learning tool that also doesn't limit yourself in anything you want to achieve in the game.

I really like the constructive and friendly turn that this discussion unexpectedly took . Everybody is bringing up really interesting and thoughtful arguments. If I was being somewhat sarcastic (which I'm not) I'd see a bunch of hardcore gamers suddenly wearing Entonia's Signet Ring with all skill points spent in Diplomacy! #cute. What is striking to me personally is how I love Infinity and Unity Engines both for being somewhat rigid but very rewarding when you "get it" while offering many unexpected loopholes (yet another way to say cheese/exploits but not cheating actions ) that are fun to use for the experienced player. Now, of course Unity games are a lot more advanced than Infinity games but you will probably get what I'm trying to say if you've played both. That being said, games like the Original Sins series or even better the Dishonored series (while clearly off-genre) have this sandbox / co-creation approach that feels almost cheese-proof because the premise is that you can do whatever you want but the game has already figured out a higher order of boundaries for you. As far as I know (and I may be very wrong!) those games are in a way cheese/abuse/whatever-free, because stretching the ruleset is part of the experience. To be clear, my perspective is that of a player, not a developer so you might rightfully laugh at what I'm saying. Also, I love all those games for different reasons and I am definitely not trying to start a stupid debate on which direction is "better" because there isn't. I enjoy Unity enough that I have stopped looking into the hours I spent either playing or thinking about PoE 1 or PoE 2 builds . Anyway, if you've got a strong opinion about any part of my blurb I'd be curious to hear it out. Now, I'll go back to one-shotting Amelissan with hundreds of pre-cast Skull Traps at her spawning point... sorry I meant Belranga with WoD/PotFS/Cloak of Death.

Frenzy is nice with spellcasting, Barb + Druid or Barb + Mage are sweet combinations. In particular, Fury + Furyshaper could fit thematically very well with what you're looking for, but you shouldn't be spending your time in melee.

Slightly OT but are you saying in a party, or would you also vouch for solo PotD? I had a lot of fun with solo druid in PoE1 (the Britney Spears build or whatever ) but never managed to pull off anything like that in Deadfire, not for lack of tries. In my experience Druids are slow and struggle to defend/buff in front of serious opposition. I'd love to though, if you have any pointers.

As far as I've experienced, all beam spells have a fixed duration not affected by INT, PL etc. But they don't all have the same duration. Antipathetic Field is 6sec, Ray of Fire/Ninagauth's Death Ray is 10sec but Ninagauth's Bitter's Mooring is 12sec for example.

SoF shenanigans are here to stay and unlock possibilities outside of priest/bloodmage for total OP-ness in Ultimate and such. Total OP-ness from SoF outside of Ultimate makes the game very dull in my very humble opinion. But anyone is entitled to do whatever they want. I don't think anyone here is trying to take anything away from any player. Just a healthy, friendly discussion about the game's intended and less intended features. I think we have here more a group of players interested in a good talk about exploits and such rather than a group of Ayatollah of Deadfire Exploits( ADE).