grasida

I just tested it and it did get patched out. Sorry about that!

I’ve been out of the loop for quite some time, but hel beckoning and grave calling, the two weapons specifically asked about, used to benefit spells and in fact stack with each other. Sasha’s singing scimitar’s lightning lash upgrade also benefits spells. I think those are the only ones that do, though, barring some new DLC weapons.

I’ve never played any tabletop D&D, but what you say about 5 really seems like a better way of doing it. The balance of subclass to main class rarely works out in Deadfire. It seems too difficult to design substantial situational advantages and disadvantages that can’t be manipulated by the player to always work out as an advantage. And that’s basically what the player is looking for from a subclass, too. People generally seem pretty happy with subclasses that are stronger than base classes, but complain a lot when a subclass is weaker. Of course, I also think a straight up classless system would be better still, but that’s too much to hope for. But that hardly means that the developers should design subclasses to straight up be better while still giving you the choice of the base class. Perfect balance is unattainable, and Obsidian seems less concerned with it overall in Deadfire than PoE 1, but that doesn’t mean that trap options should be an explicit design goal.

I’d much rather arcane archer just not get the accuracy boost from arcana to imbue and also not get the accuracy penalty to most weapons. First, the current system arbitrarily pushes them into putting all points into one skill, which is not great design at the class level. Nalpazca has a somewhat similar issue, but nalpazca is also pretty messed up, balance-wise, and alchemy investment has a much softer incentive. Second, the weapon restrictions don’t serve as an effective power-check on the character, and only are a somewhat flavorful limitation on what weapons it can use. As Boeroer mentioned, an elemental ranged weapon is available very early, meaning as soon as you get the essence interruptor, you face effectively no downside except that you’re restricted to only use a random range of weapons that are all really good anyway. It might be fun to make a melee/ranged wanderer, for example, using arcane archer imbues for utility and melee for damage, but you’re dissuaded from this for no good reason by the accuracy penalty. The accuracy bonus and penalty have flavor, but they’re also confusing. I don’t think the extra complication added by these properties makes the class any more interesting or that the flavor is worth the confusion and unnecessary restrictions it causes. It’s just a design that’s complicated for complexity’s sake.

I wouldn’t go to Final Fantasy as an example of how to build a creative, different, but popular setting. First of all, as a point of historical interest, the original Final Fantasy was a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with some different mechanics and with the serial number filed off. It has elves and dwarves, as well as mindflayers and beholders (renamed in the English release). Of course, it also has space stations and robots armed with nuclear weapons, so the imitation only goes so far. Regardless, the series clearly moved on from imitating traditional western fantasy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not based on it’s own set of easily accessible cliches. Anime and Manga is to Final Fantasy what Dungeons and Dragons is to western RPGs. Final Fantasy games don’t demand all that much from the player, everyone going into one pretty much knows what to expect and will feel solidly within their comfort zone. People who don’t like certain aspects of the game, or who just like to post negative rants online, feel vindicated by the poor sales. But there are plenty of people in the thread saying that Deadfire will be remembered as a great RPG for a long time, in spite of the sales numbers.

I really prefer to be given new mechanics in a sequel, to the point that I’m quite disappointed if a game plays too similarly to its predecessor. I know some people can be really put off by big changes, but I don’t think they were significant enough in the transition from PoE to Deadfire to result in such a big drop in sales. I doubt that a very large portion of those who bought PoE didn’t by Deadfire because of a deep attachment to the first game’s combat mechanics. If I had to guess at a list of reasons for Deadfire’s poor performance it would be: 1) PoE enjoyed significant success based on its position as a successor to the infinity engine classics. But, aside from a small group, most potential customers were satisfied with one nostalgia purchase. Deadfire continued to aim for that nostalgia, but missed because it couldn’t succeed in convincing people to buy it on it’s own merits. 2) One of the primary appeal of RPGs is the power fantasy, and Deadfire minimizes that or even strips it away, starting right from the beginning of the game. 3) Deadfire demands too much for the average player. It’s not a game you can just “pick up”. Pillars was somewhat similar, but Deadfire demands much more. While Pillars had lots of jaw-cracking Welsh words, Deadfire keeps those and adds a very unfamiliar setting with even more “foreign” names and concepts. On top of that, the game adds multiclassing, subclasses, lots of skills, and AI scripting. The switch to per encounter means you are pressured to make a lot more decisions for each character per each fight, and I doubt the AI scripting was seen as a mitigating factor for that by the vast majority of potential players. I really respect the developers for writing the game in such a novel setting. Although I think it’s a little weird to see a Polynesian setting written, modeled and voiced almost entirely by people of European descent. I would have prefered a subversive take on a traditional European setting, which Aedyr, for example, seems perfectly set up to do. 4) The game has crunchy combat and deep class mechanics, but the exploration and narrative often conflict with the combat. See the complaints about lack of dungeon crawls, the lack of attrition and the trivial nature of resting as an example. The game targeted two audiences, the one that cares more about gameplay, combat and mechanics, and the one that cares about narrative and explanation, but it missed both of them. The narrative felt clunky and poorly integrated into the gameplay for people who wanted combat, and the depth of the combat and character build decisions got in the way of exploration and narrative for people who cared more about that. I love Deadfire and think it’s an improvement on Pillars in almost every way. And I won’t be surprised at all if it’s much better loved 5-10 years from now than it is today. But I think it’s clear Obsidian tried to do too much with it and ended up with a lack of focus. My personal dream is a smaller scale, more combat and gameplay focused RPG from Obsidian like Icewind Dale (preferably turn-based, though, or with heavy modifications to the real time with pause system) but with the acquisition by Microsoft that seems a little unlikely.

Do we know how the -35% is implemented? Is it a multiplicative effect or additive, like most similar effects? I would guess it’s addictive, but affected by the dreaded double inversion.

The overall damage isn't just higher if you go under 3 second duration, it's always higher if the duration is shorter. That's because the first tick doesn't "count" for the total damage of the DoT. The total damage starting from the second tick is the fixed damage that stays the same regardless of duration, but you get the damage of the first tick on top of that. So if each tick is bigger, you have more total damage, since you're getting more "free" damage from the first tick. The weird thing that happens when the duration goes under 3 seconds is that the first tick will do more damage than the expected total of the DoT, proportionally to how low the duration is under 3 seconds. Then the second tick does exactly the total expected damage. I've only tested that with cleansing flame, though. As an example: If cleansing flame has a duration of 6 seconds, it will do 3 ticks of 40, 40, 40 = 120 total damage. If cleansing flame has a duration of 5 seconds, it will do 3 ticks of 48, 48, 32 = 128 total damage. If cleansing flame has a duration of 1.4 seconds (1 int), it will do 2 ticks of 175, 80 = 255 total damage.

Trickster/Soul blade isn’t terribly MAD, unless you’re trying to be tanky (which you absolutely have the tools to do, if you want to). You don’t need too much might, since you have sneak attack and can mostly ignore damage spells. You can afford to go lowish on constitution and resolve, since you get lots of really strong defensive spells and powerful debuffs. You really only need perception and dexterity high, since you have no good access to action speed boosts and really want to land your cipher spells. Spare points can easily go into intellect. You can spare a few seconds once or twice a fight to cast secret horrors, then eye strike, which really messes up a lot of enemies at once. Harbinger is a little worse. I feel like you have to choose between might and focusing on damage invocations or intellect and focusing on debuffs, skald gives you fewer defensive perks than cipher, so it’s more painful to drop defensive stats and you’re even hungrier for speed and accuracy. But a harbinger built around delivering afflictions should be quite good at that job and still have decent melee damage too.

Dual wield is better than two-handers, but you're overstating the problem. -The talent gives a 15% recovery speed bonus, not a 20% boost. -Only some one handers are faster than two handers if you're not dual wielding, and not by 80%. Slow one handers like swords, battle axes and sabers are the same speed as two handers, at a base 4 second recovery. Fast one handers have a 3 second recovery. Your other points are correct. And there's another one that you didn't mention, which is that all other things being equal, hitting really fast, but for low damage per hit is always better than hitting very slowly, but for very high damage per hit. First, attacking quickly lets you adjust more quickly to what's happening in combat. Say you're a paladin fighting on the front line -- if your time between attacks is short, you can use lay on hands on a badly injured ally quickly. If you're a fighter, fast recovery time makes interrupt powers like knockdown more useful as well since you can react to dangerous enemy moves faster. Second, hitting hard but slow is more likely to waste damage on overkill. For example, if you hit for 100 damage every 10 seconds and attack an enemy with 20 hp left, you waste 80 damage. A character that hits for 10 damage every second, though it has the same dps on paper, is actually going to do more damage typically over the course of a fight. But, in spite of that, dual wield would be close enough to two handers to be acceptable if it weren't for full attacks. The fact that there are so many ways for weapon damage builds to deal nearly double damage when dual wielding, but almost no benefits on any skill tree exist for any other weapon styles really makes dual wield the clearly superior choice. Note that according to Josh Sawyer on the Something Awful forums, obsidian is aware of this and they're experimenting with a solution to making full attacks less insane with dual wielding.

Some people have reported disposition changes that weren't marked in dialogue and weren't immediately obvious as belonging to a certain disposition. So people's bleakwalkers have ended up with a point in benevolent that seems to have come from nowhere, etc. That could be user error, though. This was especially prominent right on release when disposition changes occurred extremely quickly. There is a place where you can notice something strange, try to point it out to the person you're talking to, then at release get a whole point in shady just from that. And there was no way to know trying to point that out would result in gaining shady reputation. You don't get a whole point from that now, but the game does tell you that your shady disposition increased for doing it.

You can empower a bigger invocation at the start of a fight, then hold onto phrases later. Or, for a skald, you can hover at your phrase max while using 2 phrase cost offensive invocations. That let's you keep the benefit of the scimitar while also taking advantage of it's ability to empower. Upgraded, empowered eld nary is just absurdly powerful. Because the projectile is slow and takes a second to bounce it doesn't deal all its damage instantly, but a single cast easily does over 1000 damage overall. Testing against dummies with low fortitude, it was doing more than 2000 damage overall on the opening cast. With a skald using the scimitar, you can open every fight with empowered eld nary's then instantly cast it again. I wonder whether a helwalker cantor or a berserker howler could beat a single class skald in overall damage output given how powerful the upgrade to eld nary's is. I guess multiclasses would be better against large single targets in fights without adds because they still get the upgrade to seven nights. But in most fights I'm not sure the multiclass would pull ahead.

I'm surprised you didn't mention helwalker as a synergy. +15 might and +10 intellect buffs moon's light and moonwell through the roof. You're frail if you play carelessly, but if you avoid taking focused fire from multiple attackers, your healing makes yourself and the whole party extremely hard to kill.

Some damage over time powers behave a number of strange ways. I think this applies to any DoT that has a buggy description (see issue #1) or that has a "wounding" effect that applies a fixed percentage of weapon damage. 1) Their description is incorrect. The description of disintegrate, for example, states the damage dealt as 240 raw damage per 3 seconds, but this is actually an (incorrect) description of the total damage of the spell. 2) The description of powers like disintegrate doesn't account for the first tick of damage, which applies as soon as the spell hits. So the 240 damage mentioned above is only counting from the second tick, that applies after 3 seconds. 3) These DoTs with the buggy description don't scale their total damage duration. Disintegrate will always do 240 total damage + first tick's damage regardless of its duration. This means lower intellect and grazes results in higher dps, while higher intellect and crits results in lower dps. 4) Because the first tick isn't counted for the fixed total damage, but still (usually) does the same damage as a standard tick, low intellect and grazes results in higher overall damage for these DoTs, not just higher dps, since it shorter duration increases damage per tick, thus increasing the value of the freebie first tick. 5) If the duration of one of these DoTs goes under 3 seconds, things get really weird. The damage of the first tick seems to scale inversely to duration at a high rate when duration is shorter than a single tick. For example, cleansing flame with 10 might, 1 intellect and on a graze (1.4 second duration) deals 175 damage on its first tick. The next tick does exactly 80 damage (the appropriate total damage of the DoT). I tested all of these against cre_dummy spawned through the console. I assume it has 10 resolve. Per a report already made by thundercleese here it seems likely targets with higher resolve will take more damage from these attacks. Link to Save: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5947c9d2yikb8l9/Watcher%20%28CaptainsCabin%29%20%28685faa65-299d-4557-afab-c3f6aaf7641b%29%20%28LAX-2D%29%20%28916973636%29.savegame?dl=0

There’s a little “copy” button you can click on the corner of your weapon’s icon that will let you duplicate it into another set.

Pollaxes have really good penetration! My experience with lord darryn’s voulge is that you basically don’t have to worry about penetration at all, and that was before the buff to two-handers. Personally, I’d choose the weapon for aesthetic reasons. If you want a swashbuckler image, I’d go for a sword or saber and tuotilo’s palm (it counts as “fists”, so devoted is automatically profficient with it). The palm is especially nice for a devoted since you have lots of cheap, powerful primary attacks to spam that you can spam at higher than normal speed because of the shield. If you want a brutish image, I’d go for the pollaxe or battle axe, though the battle axe will be rough at the start of the game. Regarding swords vs. sabers, scordeo’s edge is a top-tier dps weapon, but swords have some nice advantages. Not only are dual types really good for a devoted, the modal is much better than the saber modal. Both give penetration, but the sword modal doesn’t reduce dps to do it.

That’s not how it works, it’s on graze, hit or crit. At least that’s how it’s set in the game’s files, so if it doesn’t work that way, it’s almost certainly a bug. Yes, the description is confusing and misleading, since sometimes when Obsidian says hit, they mean graze, hit or crit, and sometimes they mean only hit or crit, but not graze. But as far as I know, they never mean only on hit and not crit. Clear out is a good move for scordeo’s edge, since by hitting a bunch more times, you’re increasing your chance to proc blade cascade.

Regarding priests of Eothas, I’d like to see more off-class spells for them. Infuse with vital essence might be okay, but sun lance would compete with pillar of holy fire, which does more damage and in an AoE at the same level. Personally, I’d like to see them get some Paladin powers, like lay on hands, hands of light, inspired beacon and maybe even sacred immolation. As Maxquest pointed out in the other thread, a fun thing about priests is the ability to get powerful abilities from other classes. It makes for strong synergies and it’s fun, but priests of Eothas miss out on that, which kind of sucks.

Exactly)It would also make soulblade much more useful during ship battles with a lot of enemies. At least it would help to avoid thoughts of the "I'd rather have an aoe ascendant right now" sort. Definitely gonna check it on the weekend then. Here we go Priest: Subclasses:Overall: getting spells from other classes is very useful, since in a way you multi-class not 2 classes but two and a half; and depending on the synergy between them player can get pretty nice results. Now let's take a look how many cross-class spells/abilities each subclass gets: Priest of Berath: 4 druid spells Priest of Eothas: 1 druid spell Priest of Magran: 4 evocation spells Priest of Skaen: 3 rogue abilities Priest of Wael: 1 conjuration and 5 illusion spells No wonder many find priest of Eothas to be the least flexible option. And priest of Skaen kinda viable but hard to make an optimal build with (as the player can multi-class into an actual martial class instead)At the same time, priest of Wael has the most variants when it comes to multi-classing. He is great for a debilitator type of character; and also for a plethora of other builds that just need those extra defenses. That's why I would make a few adjustments to these bonus spell selections. Priest of Berath: looking at Touch of Rot and Rot Skulls, this subclass is mostly meant for DoT focused characters. I.e. those who would increase MIG and INT, and ofc have decent PER to actually apply their effects. That's why Holy Meditation looks a bit unfitting from building point of view; and would definitely switch it with Autumn's Decay or Insect Swarm. And Spreading Plague with Infestation of Maggots. Priest of Eothas: 8 out of 9 predefined spells are all about buffing and healing. And it makes you wonder, why Sunbeam is there.This subclass requires either more spells that deal [damage + affliction] in order to support such sunbeam archetype, or get rid of this spell and go full buffer/healer instead. The second way is easier and doesn't clash with Wael. That's why I would swap Sunbeam with Nature's Vigor. Also: having just 1 non-priest spell doesn't differentiate enough this subclass from other kinds of priests. Thus would end up with: 1. Nature's Vigor; 2. Withdraw; 3. Nature's Balm; 4. Circle of Protection; 5. Cleansing Wind; 6. Minor Intercesion; 7. Ressurection or Nature's Bounty Priest of Magran: It's weird that if I want to create a fire priest... Berath and Wael are supperior options. Reason being: the most damage is dealt via DoTs. Ray of Fire and Flame Shield don't look all that amazing, and are the spells that I'll rarely cast. Not to mention that casting Torrent of Flame as rank 7 spell instead of Cleansing Flames just not going to happen.I would much prefer the following spell selection: 1. Fan of Flames; 2. Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon or Combusting Wounds; 3. Fireball; 4. Shinning Beacon; 5. Wall of Flame or Torrent of Flame; 6. Pillar of Holy Fire; 7. Cleansing Flames Priest of Skaen: first of all ask yourself how would you build such a priest in order for him to be competitive and not getting trumped by possible alternatives? Why would a fighter multi-class with Scaen and not assassin/streetfighter/trickster instead? Is bleakwalker/skaen on par with bleakwalker/devout or bleakwalker/berserker? Atm the only evident synergy is between skaen and assassin because of Shadowing Beyond at rank 5; and that's not really enough.Thus suggesting the following selection: 1. Cripling Strike; 2. Spiritual Weapon; 3. Sneak Attack; 4. Confounding Blind; 5. Shadowing Beyond; 6. Eliminating Blow; 7. Minor Avatar Priest of Wael: comes with 5 wonderful wizard spells, a less wonderful Confusion (which was really strong in PoE1 and is meh in Deadfire) and Iconic Projection which just doesn't fit here (because Wael selection is focused on defences and cc; all being effective even with dumped MIG). Also Wael violates the following principle: a priest cannot get wizard spell earlier than wizard. And I am referring to Arcane Veil here, which is a rank 2 spell.Thus suggesting the following selection: 1. Spirit Shield; 2. Arcane Veil; 3. Curse of Blackened Sight; 4. Llengrath's Displaced Image; 5. Minor Grimoire Imprint; 6. Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment; 7. Gaze of Adragan Spells:First I'll list the spells I like - i.e. the ones looking at which I'm thinking, hmm, maybe I can find a spot for priest in my party?: Suppress Afflictions: losing control of your tanks or dps'ers is always unpleasant, this spell gives you time to deal with it. Withdraw: shenanigans stuff Consecrated Ground (before nerf): it's an AoE Heal over Time, meaning that with decent PL, MIG and INT and can result in a decent amount of total healing. The -28% nerf substantially reduced it through, and it feels like it's asking for multi-classing with Helwalker now. Shining Beacon: bread and butter spell for a damage dealing priest. It has 20% lower base damage than in PoE1 and you can't cast 5 of them, but it's still good enough to want a fire priest. Triumph of Crusaders: enables a glass-cannon dps party member with decent self-sustainance. Although a bit fades away in late game, provided that health pools increase faster than healing scaling Devotions for the Faithful (before the nerf): was a very strong spell. +20/-20 acc in medium aoe can hardly be under-appreciated. Now through it's just a shadow of former glory. It's still decent, but the fact that it is an active effect, makes it less useful when you have other +acc actives, like a paladin with Zealous Focus Circle of Protection: on average, it's like reducing the total damage your party takes by ~30% and even more on characters with already relatively high defenses Barring Deaths Door: shenanigans stuff and eternal love of streetfighters, berserkers, death godlikes.. Salvation of Time: buffs prolongation and shenanigans stuff Cleansing Flames: respectable damage, and double dps on all party DoT. Superb spell. Storm of Holy Fire: do love the periodic damage. As it also results in respectable total damage amount. Spark the Souls of the Righteous: high damage potential if you have enough summons or dominated enemies. Hand of Weal and Woe: high damage, high healing. Symbol of X: great all around. The rest of the spells, I personally find less useful. Either because of cast times, or because they share the same rank (and they fight for the slot), or because of the nature of the fights.And encounter design imho is the reason why priest inspirations aren't that impactful. Let's take Holy Power: AoE Strong inspiration could be fight breaking, if there was a numerous amount of fights were enemy throws a stun with huge radius and accuracy. In this case priest could run to his party and unstun them. But since I haven't encountered such scenario, it's just a measy give +5 MIG to all in a tiny aoe, and do nothing for 7s. Holy Power would also be useful if there were a lot of high-AR enemies, that would also toss quick Dazed aoes. And the only way to penetrate them would be to get rid of this might affliction. But again, don't really remember that happening. Not to mention that Holy Power has only 1.5m radius, and it would require a squishy priest to run into close range and risk getting focused; or if it's an armored frontline priest, enjoy a quite long recovery. Thus I would rather look at other means to get rid of Dazed. It could be liberating exhortation, or frenzy, some fast stuff. At the same time, if all these inspirations had faster cast/recovery time, it could potentially be unpleasant to play vs enemy priests, who could potentially quickly cancel a lot of hard-cc effects. What gives? - either increase the +stat on all inspirations from +5 to +7, to make them more desirable from +stat/+defence pov; not just as anti-cc - or increase the aoe - or let them give some bonus +acc or +defense - or give 1 inspiration per-rank for free? So these would end to be just situational spells - or prayers and litanies could give one tier better inspiration than they currently do So, here are the changes that I would make: Interdiction: either increase duration from 7 to 8s; or increase the area; or make it 1.5s cast time Restore: this spell doesn't scale as fast as health pools with level. Could get +15% per PL? Holy Power: 1.5m radius -> 2.5m radius, and +5% damage Barbs of Condemnation: target takes damage, and all enemies in 1.5m aoe get -7 to all defenses Halt: immobilize -> suspend beneficial effects and immobilize; or immobilize and reduce range by 50% Holy Meditation: 2.5m -> 5.0m aoe Repulsing Seal: 4.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 1.5s cast + 3.0s recovery Pillar of Faith: 4.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 3.0s cast + 4.0s recovery and 2.5m radius Warding Seal: 4.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 3.0s cast + 3.0s recovery Consecrated Ground: 5hp/3s -> 6hp/3s Divine Mark: 4.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 3.0s cast + 3.0s recovery; optionally could deal 20% less damage, as it doesn't compare with DW Full Attacks, and is taken more for that -25 deflection malus, but being mia for 7.5s is a bit too much;Or instead of casting time reduction; it could deal 20% more damage in order to be somewhat competitive dps-wise Despondent Blows: 1.5m radius -> 2.5m Litany for the Body: 3.0s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 1.5s cast + 3.0s recovery | and Hardy -> Nimble and Fit (rank 4 has a lot of good spells, having this litany provide just hardy, is not enough provided the opportunity cost) Litany for the Spirit: 0.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 1.5s cast + 3.0s recovery | and Acute -> Resolute and Smart Triumph of Crusaders: 80 -> 100 health restored Circle of Protection: 4.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 3.0s cast + 4.0s recovery Searing Seal: 4.5s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 3.0s cast + 3.0s recovery Champion's Boon: 3.0s cast + 3.0s recovery -> 1.5s cast + 3.0s recovery Minor Avatar: +20% damage with weapons -> +25% damage with everything; +40 max hp -> +80 max hp Crowns for the Faithful: 1.5m radius -> 2.5m; ar as suggested by mosspit: provide tier 2 inspirations instead of tier 1 Rank 9 spells: in addition to their effects, add +10s to Minor Avatar duration if active. And last thing: looking at the possibility of building a soft debuffing priest (wael with interdiction, despondent blows/divine mark, devotions and so on), the rank 2 looks to lack an affliction inflicting spell. Some kind of "Berath's Grasp": sicken all enemies in 2.0m aoe would be really handy. This would enable a low-might debilitating priest that dazes, blinds, and indirectly deals damage by lowering enemy constitution. I haven’t had the time to reply in the detail that I’d like, but I have two points. First, regarding the inspiration spells, in addition to the ideas you suggested, here’s another one — have spells like holy power “pulse” every 3 seconds. This doesn’t increase the strength of their effect, but it does give near immunity to the relevant affliction type for the duration of the spell while ensuring the inspiration stays up. Second, I don’t 100% agree with your analysis on priest subclasses. I feel like it’s derived from a motivation to associate each subclass with a highly specialized role. I think allowing a vague sense of role, as well as flavor to guide the spells assigned makes for more interesting choices, since that 1) allows players to feel less bad about choosing a damage-focused priest of Eothas, for example, and 2) a “mushier” list means some spells might be relevant to some builds with other spells relevant to others. That increases build diversity, though we don’t really have that now either because the usefulness of the spells is so variable. I do agree with the way you rank the subclasses and why, though.

The deflection boost from casita is not as good as immunity to flanked on a tank that’s typically likely to be surrounded. Of course you can get immunity to flanked from other sources and casita provides more AR than gipon prudensco, but overall is think it’s really odd to rank gipon prudensco as weaker when it’s light armor that’s stacked up with tons of extremely powerful defensive enchantments.

My impression of D:OS 1 was that it was decent, but it would be really fun with coop. I started D:OS 2 and bounced off of it really hard. I expect it would also fun with coop, but unfortunately very few of my friends like video games at all, so I don’t think I could ever find someone to coop with.

Okay, things get really wacky with cleansing flame. Cleansing flame is a "stupid" DoT, in that it states its total damage up front. And it works like disintegrate, in that the first tick is "free" and not covered by the description. But, cleansing flame has a very short duration, short enough to go under 3 seconds with low int or on a graze. So testing cleansing flame with 1 int, I got: 1) On hit -- 87 damage, 80 damage, 2.8 second duration. 2) On crit -- 175 (!!) damage, 80 damage, 1.4 second duration.

Graze only influences the duration of DoTs. Most DoTs adjust their total damage according to duration, so if you graze and roll a shorter duration, you do less total damage. For those DoTs, reducing damage on a graze as well would be overly punishing, since you'd multiply the total damage twice. Similarly, crits only affect the duration -- if they applied to damage as well, that would be overpowered, since total damage usually scales with duration. But there are a good number of DoTs that do the same amount of damage regardless of the duration (or actually, more damage with a lower duration, though I've only checked that specifically with disintegrate). For those, reducing the duration means you apply the total damage over a shorter duration and deal more damage per tick. The way to tell the difference seems to be DoTs that have a bugged description and state their total damage in the description as per tick don't scale their damage according to duration. DoTs with a normal description do. Going from other threads, not my own personal testing, "wounding" type DoTs that do a percent of your damage over time don't scale with duration, and therefore are the "stupid" type.

Okay, no scratch what I said, it does more total damage on graze with lower int. The reason seems to be that the damage presented in the description is the total damage after the first tick. The first tick that applies as soon as the spell lands doesn't count. So with a bigger first tick, you do overall more damage. With 10 might and 1 int, on a graze and with no other damage boosts, I did 175, 175, 65 with a listed duration of 4.5 seconds. On a crit, I did 70, 70, 70, 70, 31 with a listed duration of 10.3 seconds. On a hit, I did 87, 87, 87, 65 with a duration of 8.3 seconds.

More dps, definitely not more overall damage. But I tested it a few weeks ago and I can't remember exactly what I did and what the numbers were.