Delterius

I can't imagine this was intentional design but Iconic Projection has no baseline penetration for its damage component.

That's what Priests are for, to be honest.

You do realize that you can control what all the characters in your party do, right? I think that he's just saying is that an NPC character won't be custom tailored (attribute wise) for your purposes, while, OTOH, being a main Priest isn't as appealing as other classes.

I'm trying to work as a caster of Wael of sorts. Of course this wouldn't be the only person targeting Will for damage, or debuffing the enemy and whatnot. But it would make more sense to me as a Waelite to use the few CC Illusion spells they give you at PL5+ in conjunction with Shining Beacon, Divine Mark and assorted charms from Cipher than just spaming Mirror Image as a Gish Build of sorts.

Do you know of any Priest/Caster combos that might be synergetic? I'm thinking of trying Priest of Wael / Psion with the upcoming patch and focus on targeting and debuffing enemy Will saves. Seems like something Wael would approve, know what I mean?

Going by the stickied thread, a spell only gains PEN from power level if it already has Penetration in the first place. Which explains reports of really weak summons, mostly useless Incarnates and confirms my fear that half of Priest's nukes don't actually deal much damage at all.

But this is not exactly news to me or to the OP. The point isn't that Priests aren't effective at what they do. No character is truly ineffective. But rather that we went from a first game where Priest's buffs were mandatory to one where they are less powerful, but also one where you can cherrypicking those few most useful spells from PLs 4 and 5 with a martial class like Rogue and Monk and pretty much have all the usefulness of a Priest without having to do with the full class' pitfalls. Speaking of understanding the system, I asked for a clarification on Penetration mechanics above. Half of the Priest's damage spells seem to lack it. Shining Beacon and most of their crowning PLs. Am I to understand that all those spells hit with 70% malus against anything more armored than a ghoul? Just to be clear, when I say the class feels superfluous I mean just that. Not that its useless. I don't think its even possible to create an useless character in a Pillars game. But rather that wherever I look, Priests are a poor man's version of someone with while using some gimmick from PL 4/5 to justify itself. Like the Streetfighter with Arcane Veil or the Ascendant with Salvation of Time. Not exactly what I had in mind for a multiclass character. I can see why these builds would appeal to some people here, but I don't really plan on playing PoE2 more than once or twice. And I can't see much of a point in not multiclassing Rogue with Wizard or Druid for just about better casting than Priest has Just to be clear, when I say the class is superfluous I mean just that. Not that its useless. I don't think its even possible to create an useless character in a Pillars game. But rather that wherever I look, Priests are a poor man's version of someone with a Gimmick from PL4/5. There's the Ascendant build that uses Salvation of Time, or the Streetfighter build with Arcane Veil and the like. I get why those exist and how they can appeal to some people where, but I don't really plan to play this game more than once or twice. And for the life of me I can't understand why I wouldn't play or multiclass with Druid or especially Wizard for better flavor and way better spellcasting. But I do understand that the answer is to reclass since I don't think anything's been really done about Priest since release.

I don't understand. I read on multiple posts that Summons (and the Incarnate in particular) and about half of all damaging Priest spells have no penetration tied to them. Meaning that something like Spark the Souls should hit for with a 70% damage malus most of the time. I guess you can exploit that spell in particular with a party of Beckoners, yeah, but that's a PL8 that can barely stand on its own. You said earlier that you never found Priests to be boring. Surely you concede that goes against prevailing wisdom somewhat? The greatest Priest builds seems to amount to being a Rogue with Arcane Veil, or an Ascendant with Salvation of Time. Always a martial class ditching the party priest for one of their 3 broken spells.

Pretty much. That's how I felt reading posts on Deadfire Priests. You can be a specialist healer/buffer, and you'll do an ok job at tbat even though other classes can avoid afflictions just swell on their own. Or you can use the Priest as an excuse to give The One or Two broken spells to a mostly martial classed character. After all, their PL9 isn't even that interesting so there isn't much to sacrifice either way. Hopefully, using Priest of Wael for debilitations and Cipher for charms and damage while targeting Will is going to lead to an interesting and thematic caster. I sure wish that Wael didn't give 3 Deflection buffs one after the other, though.

I chose to quit Deadfire halfway through way back when to wait for all the patches and DLC. Semed like a good choice to let the game age a bit. Now that we are all getting ready for 4.0, I wonder if I should care to import my Priest character from PoE1. My impression was that the Priest was a broken class in a game where you can only cast two spells from each circle, where you have to pick from a list of situational abilities, where buffs rarely stack and where even the martials can likely buff themselves out of trouble without half a dozen seconds of cast time to boot. I mean, its all nice and dandy to use Wael as an excuse to give martials Arcane Veil but I really wanted to play as a caster of the God of ???????????. Further, being the Devotions for the Faithful bot doesn't seem very interesting at all. Lately I've considered making a Priest/Cipher that focuses on targeting and debuffing enemy Will with spells like Shining Beacon, Divine Terror and all the goodies from Ciphers. If the Psion subclass gets some tweaks by next week this could be interesting, even if suboptimal. TL;DR: should I play a caster Priest or should I just play a Wizard?

One thing that is valid to remember is that DA:O makes use of level scalling (blergh) and Zathrian's number of adds vary a lot. I don't really remember Zathrian being particularly lethal, my biggest issue was his Blizzard spell, which would kill my mobility enabling the add's true lethality. That fight was more about keeping him from casting that and Cone of Cold.

Hence my second post in the thread. Even if you're up to accepting whatever plot outcome appears, merely having the spine to accept it isn't as fun as both/all possible outcomes being interesting. That's why I posed the writers may want to avoid straight wins and losses in favour of more interesting twists to either, as a example, the plan described on the OP working well (but with unforeseen consequences) or only partially.

Its hard to explain and english isn't my native language, so bear with me. D&D is heroic fantasy, it deals with things fantastic and improbable that you'd see straight out of a novel. Like a supposedly normal person surviving chain lightning and so on. To simulate that, the rules could be either very detailed on the coincidences necessary for a lucky hero to survive improbable odds, which would bad for a PnP game, or very abstract, relieving the players of more complicated math and allowing for creative storytelling - that is, you take the circumstances a kind of damage was dealt, such as a mage casting fire and brimstone, apply the random result of unexpectedly the spell dealing subpar damage at (relatively) ordinary hero and chalk it up to something like miscasting (where other rules apply) or some other coincidence. Its like reading a LP of Baldur's Gate where the player can freely interprete the dice rolls. If <Fighter character> underperformed in battle, it could be due to anything the player can larp (imagine, interprete) and the story told via the mechanics is only limited to imagination or how much of it the player is willing to apply. Maybe he tripped on the corpses of the skeletons you just killed, he might have a pretty low WIS score after all that pumping of STR. However, if the game systems only elaborate on combat, then there's a disconnect between the player and the virtual reality. I think that if all we have to picture a character are the abstraction of combat, the only way to, say, deduce how physically strong a fighter is is to compare him to another fighter - and the damage each fighter or differing abilities deal to someone else's hitpoint bar. The result is that you can easily tell who's the stronger fighter (it says so in their character sheet) but you can barely connect to a more ample reality. Or rather, what I'm trying to say is that if the devs elaborate the game's virtual reality beyond simply combat, and integrate those secondary gameplay systems to attributes (such as the inventory system's weight allowance being connected to the attrib. of Strenght), then you get a clearer picture of the character. A character that deals <damage> under <X-Y> rolls may be stronger or weaker than another, but you know a character better is he's as strong as being able to carry XXX pounds. My question/request and the whole point of the thread is if you can do that to other attributes than strenght. If there's a way to integrate Dex, Con and such to systems other than combat - and if people agree there's really a point for that.

Why?

Kinda hard when you bump the thread.