yorname

The only downside of Ancient is needing a lot of ability points. We don't really need both stag and aspect. I personally would use Xoti as multiclass priest, because her symbol is also fire damage (you always get Storm of Holy Fire), and her extra spells are not great. Tekehu is unique however you play him, but imo SC druid is not as interesting as the other 2 choices. Other than unique summons, the only extra spell that matters for him is Chill Fog, which multiclass watershaper can get. He also has low PER and can't use head gear, so his accuracy will be much lower than a customized druid. Overall I think the offensive potential of a SC druid is kind of wasted on him. For casters, an optimized character with high MIG, PER and INT is very different from companions, so even if you use them as SC priest/druid, a customized priest or druid is still worth playing. I really think you can play as either. But if you want to do good damage from the start, then definitely go with druid. Priest will have to be a buffbot for a long time. Before tier-7 most of their offensive spells can't compete with buffing spells.

It's an cliche answer but still, they fill different roles. Defensive and buffing: For SC priest, SoT feels less game-breaking with BPM, so you can count Dire Blessing + Devotions for the Faithful + Salvation of Time as a "basic offensive buffing" set. Priest can easily counter MIG/PER/INT/RES afflictions. Minor Intercession is also much better than vanilla, so you have an actually usable "defensive dispel". For SC druid, they can provide much more healing, easily counter CON afflictions, and make the party immune to DEX afflictions. Weather the Storm is even more useful than vanilla. As you can see, they almost don't overlap at all. I personally think a priest is slightly more essential for a party, since with BPM chanters can also provide DEX affliction immunity, and also has good AOE healing. Offensive: Both are pretty much the same as vanilla. SC priest's good offensive spells are mostly in tier 7-9, while druid's are spread across all tiers. This is kind of important due to the Brilliant nerf. SC druid can now extend their shapeshift duration with crits, it's very different from vanilla experience. Summons: I haven't tried many Incarnates, so can't speak for the priest. As for the druid, Ancient's tier-1 sporelings are very good in BPM. High level summons are also stronger, but just like vanilla, their offensive potential still can't match your characters, so would you spend a high tier slot (more precious due to Brilliant nerf) for one of those, or spend a tier-1 slot for 2 sporelings, which are almost as tanky individually and don't even underpenetrate very often? That's worth considering. If you want to play a SC priest, build a party with many summons that you can control (e.g. not skeletons from Many Lives). Spark the Souls of the Righteous is simply a different spell with 10+ creatures. For SC druid, I think ancient is the way to go, because only they have unique spells, except Tekehu of course. Cat form + Confounding Blind + Blade of the Endless Paths (from other party members) will allow you to stay in shapeshift forever, dealing weapon damage comparable to martial classes, while also being a full caster.

Spellblade is a fun class to try. Wizard gives you good AOE weapons (arguably better than any gear) to use the debuffing Rogue abilities. For example an AOE Confounding Blind is very powerful and quite hard to find an alternative from other classes. The only downside is it doesn't need a lot of optimizing, so Aloth as spellblade is almost as good as the watcher. Barbarian for PoE and a barbarian multiclass for Deadfire makes sense in terms of both consistency and metagaming. In PoE you get a barbarian really late, yet it's a very strong class, so playing as one yourself is ideal. Barbarian in Deadfire can use some optimizations, so playing as the watcher, who you have total control and can potentially get much higher stats is much better than a companion barbarian. Single class barbarian is kind of meh until lv19, so I recommend multiclass. But if you don't mind the power curve, single class barbarian is still a solid choice. For single class barbarian, Furyshaper is the "base barbarian plus", Blood Ward is very useful. For multiclass, choose either base class or Berserker. The two wards Furyshaper get doesn't scale very well into late game. Corpse-Eater and Mage Slayer are basically downgrades if you don't use mods. Since in Deadfire Carnage doesn't synergize with many things, a monk who can massively improve your action speed, MIG and INT is one of the better multiclass options. Check @Boeroer's guide here. If you feel it's too risky, you can replace either side, or even both, with base classes, and it still works very well.

Can't believe I didn't see the change to SC druid's wildstrike all this time. It just feels right this way. Corrode route seems to be really good at boss fights.

I believe most AOE weapons only triggers carnage once, making them worse than normal weapons just because of lower base damage, at least for carnage. I tested Wahai Pōraga on dummies, but I really couldn't make sense of the messy combat log. Does it trigger carnage multiple times? Are there other weapon effects that interacts with carnage? By the way, does the Static Charge damage of Lord Darryn's Voulge benefit from Hot Razor Skewers? I can't see the penetration numbers in the logs, but it seems to be always underpenetrating.

One of Neketaka or Crookspur shrine gives +2 RES and might trigger the encounter, to give a chance of praying without resting. It's said to be the Poko Kohara one, but I believe it's only possible on Neketaka or Crookspur.

My problem is that I simply can't prevent deaths in my party. They have ranged stun, paralyze and stuck, which require 3 different priest spells to be immune to, and stun immunity is a single target spell. So there is no time to give enough protection to even a single character before my whole party get stunned. I also tried sending 1 character to start the combat while others stay back and get buffs up, and that character just got CC-ed to death in a few seconds before the buffs are up. That's even very optimistic. When Wraiths use the abduct ability, that character is guaranteed to die. Either they abduct my tanks before my priest finishes 2 spells, leaving others unprotected, or they abduct the priest and I have to reload. It's not unbeatable, but every time I fight them it gets super messy and I have to rest. Makes me think I'm missing something. Edit: so far the more successful strategy is to give stun + paralyze immunity to my barbarian ASAP and let him more or less solo the fight. There are a couple of fights start with the party surrounded, I guess casualties are inevitable.

I didn't know that, will try for my next playthrough Edit: I haven't gotten the arsonist event yet, but I can confirm you can get +2 CON from The Hika on top of +2 RES

What's the fish event?

Thank you, for some reason I never realized I could edit the areamusictable. If anyone is trying to do the same: make a backup of PillarsOfEternity_Data\data\areamusictable open it with a text editor, and replace every "CombatTrackFile":"something something" with "CombatTrackFile":""

DND lore is just so filled up with the superhero comic sh*t like world reboots, gods behaving like ordinary people, retcons... I don't have a good word for it. I used to think it's WotC's fault, but after reading Greenwood's twitter about Bhaalspawn's story (ACtUaLly dead Bhaal could control every Bhaalspawn and made charname decide to give up his divine essence, thus making his return possible), it's clear the whole IP is not capable of producing anything other than garbage stories. BG1&2's writting wasn't some masterpiece of humanity, but at least it focused on mortals, their motives and actions. BG3 just wanted to impress people with "OMG it's actually Jergal helping us" "OMG Shar just spoke to me" while the actual characters, especially villains are boring AF.

I feel this is similar to the case for Psion: spamming low level damage spells works, but in the end they're doing a less impactful loop. Sure you can cast 10 Mind Waves or Soul Shocks with merely 50 focus, but it's not even as good as only 1 or 2 AoE spells from wizard or druid, and your DPS is just Lv1 spell/cast. Soulblade has even less of a reason to do this, since nothing keeps them from gaining more focus with AoE weapons and dump it with better spells.

I don't think bellower (or chanter in general) helps much with soulblade. You really want to heavily use SA as a soulblade, or they're just ciphers but worse. Chanter doesn't add any speed or damage to your attack - SA loop. The only synergy is a lash, another chanter can simply give you that. Every time you cast a chanter spell, you're slowing down the attack - SA loop. Remember the retaliation of WotEP comes with a Dazed affliction, which makes enemies unable to engage you, so using disengagement attacks only works once in a while. I've tried using WotEP with Nomad's Brigandine, which makes enemy disengagement attacks automatically miss, and it's still meh, so WoTEP with The Fox... chant is just not worth it. If you want to improve single target damage of a chanter, you can: spamming Her Revenge... as skald (single or multi-class). It actually hits really hard Stand next to the target and cast Seven Nights... and its upgrade. If you hit it with at least 3 bolts, it's probably better than Her Revenge... in terms of efficiency. make use of Sure-handed... with ranged weapons and ranged-focused classes as caster, you can simply multiclass with wizard. Multiclass wizard still has incredible offensive single-target spells, provides speed bonus to the chanter, and benefits from Their Champion... They also want exactly the same attributes, which makes them easier to build than chanter/martial multiclass.

It should though. Make sure when it dies it has Disintegration

Does destroy effect count as cheese?

I wonder if there is a way to deal with the Rathun ones in ship combat? IIRC they always try to board and even without Ondra challenge you can't outrun them? Maybe with abosolute max speed it's possible?

This happened to me twice now: Reinstall BG3 After an hour at character creation screen, I realized how I've played most half-decent builds in less than a handful of playthroughs, and no the story is not worth it Uninstall

Just use the wiki to find out the combination that needs least grimoire switch for you. The one with unique spells are mostly niche. Iron-Clapsed is the most useful, giving Crushing Doom and Draining Missiles. Ninagauth's Teachings' unique spells aren't as good, but it has a good selection, and is completely free without any combat. Zandethus' Draconic Fury is great on a spellblade, and maybe soulblade/wiz?

Problem is the same tier you get Freezing Pillar, which scales way better than one-hit spells. You would be stacking penetration on offensive caster anyway so the high penetration of MPPB is kind of redundant. Even if say enemies only take half damage from Freezing Pillar because of underpen, it will still deal more damage, and it comes with an affliction so potentially +10 ACC. The most useful moment of MPPB is probably when multiple enemies dive into your formation and other damage spells all have friendly fire.

We can learn new things of this game after so many years! Only because they decided to use inversion in the first place and nobody can be sure about basic mechanics lol

So here's all the results: First graze with AWT: 11.2s subsequent hits/grazes with AWT: almost always 22.4s, fits inversion miasma graze: 3.4s, only makes sense if we get 6.85s with inversion, then *0.5 from graze miasma graze after AWT: 8.5s, only makes sense if we get 17.0s with inversion, then *0.5 from graze So far the conclusion I can get is, duration does use inversion, but graze is multiplicative. And AWT is super weird: The first hit or graze will apply -5/-10 RES first, then calculate the durations seperately, and can graze. So the 11.2s was actually 22.4s*0.5 (graze), not from non-inversion. Even if I hit a creature with 35 RES, it's calculated with 25 RES. I'm sure miasma does not behave this way. If the target has -5/-10 versions on it, subsequent grazes of that version count as hits and give full duration I can get as many as 3 or more debuffs called AWT on the target, seems due to my charater being killed and instantly revived, and they count as different spells? This might mean AWT from multiple casters can get even weirder. They don'y stack ofc, just durations can get funky.

It gets weirder, because after I hit it for the first time, subsequent hits did use inversion. I got 22.4s on hits, which is closer to 30*1.1*1/(1-(0.35+1-1/(1-0.45))) = ~22.5s rather than 30*1.1*1.35*(1-0.45) = ~24.5s This does need a full test.

If only we can get it with anyone other than Tekehu... With 10 PER and no head slot , that's more than 20 accuracy difference compared to the MC I haven't used him offensively since forever ago, maybe worth it if I run a party with full fortitude debuffs I was going to ask if we're sure duration also uses inversion, but I decided a quick test and found AWT has an advantage over miasma: it seems to apply its full duration on graze (at least main target), while miasma's graze has the normal -50% duration penalty. And I think duration might not be using inversion: my character with PL7, 17 INT hits Doru with AWT for the first time, if it's inversion, it should be 30*1.1*1/(1-(0.35+1-1/(1-0.75))) = 9.04s however the effect was actually 11.2s, seems to be just 30*1.1*1.35*(1-0.75) = 11.1375s with some rounding problems.

How good is Firebrand though, I tried it and felt it's like in the "good but do I want to be auto attacking with this?" territory. Maybe viable when out of spells but I didn't find it build-defining like it was in 1.

Sorcerer vs Wizard is quantity vs quality. Pure wizard is better as offensive caster, sorcerer is better only if you actually want their healing power, e.g. to save a party slot. Skald/Wizard is more of a pure offensive caster than sorcerer, with a easier action economy and burst damage a multiclass wizard tends to lack.