PrimeJunta

Yes and no. The companion attributes are distributed in a kind of safe, average way that let you skew them in several different directions. So yes, they're sub-optimal for just about any build you'd want to try for him. But no, in that he'd specifically need more MIG and CON and less DEX and INT. The specific attributes you want depend on what kind of fighter you want him to be. And the trade-off you'd like to make is by no means optimal for many or even most of them. (If anything, he already has too much Con for most builds for one thing.)

Never tried this, but I'd imagine it's gonna be pretty hard with any character, at PotD anyway, and I can't think how I'd do that with a paladin (or fighter or rogue for that matter). Maybe a ranger with a wolf companion he can use to pull them, and then run away to recover before he gets clobbered? Or a chanter with Reny Daret's Ghost, who runs away until the phrase counter fills up, and uses the ghost to whack them one by one? Maybe some cipher strategy...?

We must play in pretty different styles. It's true that the fighter can't perform many actions that, say, a chanter couldn't. The difference is that a fighter is good at performing those actions. Want him to stand his ground? He bloody well will. Want him to hit hard? He will. Want a group of them to disengage, mob a single enemy, and beat him to a pulp? They will. A typical Rauatai Bonebreakers encounter includes stuff like this: 1. Sneak into position. Select ranged weapon set. 2. Fire! 3. Select melee set: swords up front, pikes in the back. 4. Rush a high-value-target. 5. When getting pressed, pull back and regroup. 6. Repeat step 4. 7. Enemy about to fire off a spell or nasty ability: Knockdown! 8. Pull back to a choke point, have front line switch to shield + warhammer, second line: pikes or arbalests. Grind them down. And that's just one style of encounter. There are others which play in even different ways. This is way more dynamic than playing with chanters. I mean sure, you can perform all those actions with a chanter, but he won't be able to hold the line, clobber down the target, or interrupt the caster. With a chanter, it's basically 1. Select chant 2. Wait for phrase count to fill up 3. Fire off your most powerful invocation Whatever else you do is mostly flavour, as it won't make much difference. I mean, I have Kana in the second row switching weapons with the rest of 'em, I've given him all the best defensive items so he won't bleed to death, and he hangs in there fine. When his phrase counter fills up, he can even turn around an encounter. It's just very rote and repetitive. Bottom line, I really like fighters. They change the whole feel of the game from rock-paper-scissors with buffs and debuffs to movement, targeting, and positioning. I wouldn't always want to play this way, mind, but I very much appreciate the possibility. And, since chanters can't really time their abilities, you can't really do the rock-paper-scissors thing with them either, unlike with the other casters. At the very least, please raise the phrase counter cap so they can store up a couple of invocations in an encounter that goes on longer.

In my parties, casters are rarely at the top of the damage stats list. I find chanters boring for a number of reasons: their chant and invocation repertoire is extremely limited, they have barely any class-specific talents, they're kind of average at everything, and . Fighters OTOH can be built several ways and can switch between a number of highly effective tactics. Playing a chanter is rote: he's hanging there with the rest of the gang not being very effective, and when the counter goes "bleep" I fire off an invocation. Usually the same invocation every time. Or at best there are like, two good options. It's dull, rote, and repetitive. As to the AI, I honestly don't see how you can describe it that way. In version 1, the AI used active abilities a lot less, cast spells a lot less, almost always targeted your closest toon, and almost never broke engagement. You could play the entire game by building a tanky fighter with lots of engagement capability, marching him to the front, and having the beasties fruitlessly hammer him while you wrecked them with your damagers.

(1) Chanters are kinda boring and they have a long relatively flat stretch between about level 5 and about level 9. Not crap though. They will get some love in version 3.0.0 due out with WM2. (2) Wizards and druids are still powerhouses, yes, very much so. (3) Paladins are an incredibly versatile class that can be built lots of ways. It's my favourite class ATM actually. There are several radically different builds right on this forum, from Boeroer's Dull Runner (fast-moving striker) to Torm51's Darcozzi Forward Observer and my variant of it, the Darcozzi Commendatore. What's more, paladins give your entire party more tactical options. (4) If you build them that way, fighters are serious damage-dealers. My current party is paladin + chanter + 4 x fighter. It's very enjoyable to play as they can both dish it out and take it. Not as much absolute damage potential as with rogues or rangers, but they need a lot less babying too. I don't know that any of these have changed much actually. They always were more or less like this. The biggest changes have been with enemy AI (especially ability use and targeting) and resistances/immunities. Simplistic tank-and-spank doesn't really work anymore as the AI will just ignore your tank and go for your squishies, so you have to vary things more.

Big yeah for grenades. Shouldn't even be difficult -- they'd basically work just like scrolls except that they'd use Mechanics rather than Lore as the skill req.

Fun is the key. Some players enjoy the challenge of finishing the game with a gimped build, but most don't. A game should let you gimp a build intentionally if you want to, but trap choices that do it unintentionally are for the most part bad, as is forcing a class into a straitjacket. (The latter BTW is why I dislike D&D3 prestige classes. To get there, you have to make the exact class, stat and feat choices prescribed by whoever wrote it up. It's the character-building equivalent of a colouring book. Where's the fun and creativity with that?)

I've seen enemy paladins use Liberating Exhortations on their friends when I've slapped status effects on them. Not sure if I've seen enemy priests use Suppress Affliction though. (OTOH I usually target them first so I don't know if they'd make it that far.) I have seen spellbound abilities fire, but I think those have mostly been the auto-firing variety (e.g. Frenzy on Sanguine Plate). Gotta keep an eye out for that actually.

Haha, figured you'd have found a way to make it work. :D

Anyone else here put some effort into naming things? Characters, animal companions, chants etc? I usually name my characters with phonetically-somewhat-appropriate names that are at the same time stupid puns. I use Helsinki street names for Rauatai characters with a few apostrophes inserted for example. Hakaniemenkat'u sounds pretty Rauatai I think. Or slightly twisted Spanish or Italian vegetable names for Vailians. Scorzonero for example is a kind of root vegetable but sounds pretty cool. And then I had the Boreal Dwarf rangers with names punning on Finnish, and their pets Puuqi (bear) and Snuupi (wolf). As to chants, I name them to suit their purpose, so at the moment I have Kana singing his greatest hits "Die Already F....g F.....s!," "Run Away! Run Away!" and "I'm Not Scared Really I'm Not." Anyone else?

You don't need to max INT or any other must-have stat. You just can't afford to dump it. 14-15 is fine in all cases.

[stoic] I'll be back...

Exhortations and Lay on Hands also. Almost all the paladin's abiltiies have either AoE or duration, so they benefit from Int. Some of the paladin orders even have talents which give Flames of Devotion duration-based abilities. Int is almost as important for the paladin as it is for straight-up casters. DEX on the other hand is dumpable for most paladin builds. Damage from standard attacks is pretty bad compared to other martial classes, and all the other abilities benefit more from good timing than the possibility to use them in quick succession. CON also isn't that important because paladins get very high defenses from Faith and Conviction (plus Deep Faith if you pick it, as you should for defensive builds). INT is really the only must-have. For a Flames of Devotion-based offensive build, PER and MIG are highly desirable; for a support/tank, you'll want RES and some MIG (for the healing abilities).

I think the AI is pretty good already. They actively go after the squishiest and most dangerous characters in your party, and use their abilities actively and relatively intelligently. It's come a long way.

Yeah, that's probably the reason. It is immershun-breaking but having unlimited traps would make it too easy to cheese the hard fights.

Bond of Duty. Goldpact Knights can take that talent. It gives a massive, massive boost to defence against Dominate, Charm, and Confuse. Stack that on top of a Faithful Companion wolf, and you've got a fast, disposable Dominate magnet which is as close to immune to Dominate as it gets. Edit: yes I was playing without a priest, so yes, the scroll thing does bother me more

Nah, I was actually thinking about it from the PoV of the defender here. If you're facing two fampyrs and both graze with a Dominate, that's very close to the functional equivalent of both hitting or critting with it. I think it'd be more interesting if proper planning would mitigate the effect instead of just lowering the probability of a hit or a graze.

Yeah. I'm thinking of reactivating/redoing the Rauatai Bonebreakers when WM2 is out as I really dig their style. The faster phrases on Chanters should make them acceptable crowd-controllers even at relatively low-mid levels so I can keep GySgt Rua onboard, and the new Aumaua Barbarian companion would be a welcome story-companion addition to the squad and would fit in great. I have some other changes in mind also for Version 2...

My solution would've been to put the Afflictions on a ladder, and have grazes downgrade it in addition to reducing the duration. Dominate > Charm > Confuse > Daze for example. Conversely, a Crit could upgrade the Affliction, so that e.g. a crit by a dank spore would Charm instead of Confuse. Then add buffs that specifically push these afflictions down the ladder. So if you had the buff that downgraded mental afflictions by two steps and were facing fampyrs, you'd know that they would Confuse on a hit, Daze on a graze, and Charm on a crit, whereas without it they would Dominate on a hit or crit and Charm on a graze. That way buffing your Will or specific defence against Dominate wouldn't be a hard counter (=100% immunity), but would greatly mitigate it. The current system is too on-off and a half-duration Graze is usually just about as nasty as a Hit.

Yeah overall Pillars has come a long way. I'm not so sure about the hard counters though -- as it is, dealing with stuff like Dominate or Terrify is an interesting mini-challenge that you can't resolve with a single brute-force fix. (I'm pretty proud at figuring out that a ranger's Faithful Companion buffed by a Goldpact Knight's Liberating Exhortation makes a great Dominate-magnet f.ex.) Making the Prayers hard counters and letting anyone use them as scrolls will replace that with a one-size-fits-all solution. It simplifies the gameplay in a not-good way IMO.

Hard counters are back, eh? Bit of a U-turn there...

Paladins are my favourite class, ATM anyway. Why? Versatility. You can build them lots of different ways -- ranged, melee, support, tank, alpha-strike, various combinations of these -- and more importantly, they give the party fantastic tactical flexibility and staying power: they can revive, liberate, make you hit harder, make you run faster, whatever. One super-important thing about those paladin abilities (Lay on Hands, the Exhortations, etc) is that they're fast. If someone's in trouble, the paladin can save them now, whereas quite often a caster's spell would come in too late. Having a paladin or two onboard just makes the whole game more fun because you have soooo many more options at your disposal.

If you're dying constantly against them, you're doing something wrong. PotD will throw enemies like that at you a lot -- something that'll either hit so hard you die, or be so hard to hit they'll wear you down. You have to figure out how to neutralise their attacks and get past their defences. Once you do, they become pretty easy really. So study them a bit and figure out the right tactics to beat them. You will need to be doing that a quite a bit in PotD. (Or it could be you're just underleveled. Going there with just you, Edér, and Aloth at level 3 is not going to be easy whatever you do.)

Inbreeding will do that.

^ You really like your Combusting Wounds don't you? (I just found a ring. Hee hee hee...)