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The +1 PL from the conjurer familiar stacks with those. Could be very easy way to get +3 PL for every single fight (not even having to use stone of power stacking cheese). edit: downside to conjurer is missing out on a bunch of defensive wizard spells though (no illusion magic), though you do get arcane veil. but deleterious alacrity of motion is probably the best defensive spell, if you don't mind some micromanagement, and you still get that. edit 2: yeah sage is probably better at fist punching specifically, but don't sleep on monastic unarmed training plus other skills. i did a pretty sloppily put together fighter/priest one (tactical barrage for acute, nature godlike, stone of power, and then priest of wael of tons of defensive spells and light synergies like champion's boon + mob stance) and it was still extremely effective at punch punch punching but also had pretty decent other capabilities.

what part of rekke doesn't feel as good as eder? in general, i would honestly move away from 2h. i'd dual-wield 4s-recovery weapons (e.g. swords) or pick up monastic unarmed training. i did this with rekke, and found him to be very effective (with tactical barrage, adventurer/conqueror stance, confident aim). i mostly reserved his fighter resources for a scripted refresh of tactical barrage because uptime on that really helps his overall effectiveness. 2h on a barbarian honestly feels bad to me, except once you get to high levels, even if mathematically the sustained damage is the same as typical 2w slow weapons. in case you're not aware, when it comes to a question of barbarians, accuracy actually gives you increasing returns (at least until high values). it's because carnage only triggers on a hit, and must itself at least graze to actually do anything (if carnage auto-hit, or if it always triggered, you'd get normal diminishing returns). so higher accuracy (adventurer/conq stance, which you don't take) really helps carnage "feel" better. weapon specialization is OK for primarily auto-attackers, but low priority. but yeah on a barbarian multiclass, you get even less value out of weapon specialization (carnage isn't affected).

summons are ace. dragon is also great, just a huge bullet sponge to face tank Belranga, but upgraded skeletons are definitely way more accessible.

duplicating stats + equipment can be pretty metagame-able. it's not going to be quite the level of wizard shenanigans (who can just also summon powerful summoned weapons and double-up on them innately, along with a lot of other unique item shenanigans [edit: technically a generic druid has firebrand, but tekehu doesn't get firebrand.]), but it's still very metagameable. the fact that tekehu's clone doesn't use any abilities is basically irrelevant - i actually prefer the lower level wizard phantom spell because the abilities for the higher level phantom is a waste of time compared to doubling up on potentially powerful weapon attacks (frankly, i forgot that the watery double is even supposed to have abilities to use, that's how little that registers for me) edit: if all you do is equip a wand and wear some generic cloth and cast phantom/watery double, then yeah it's going to be pretty underwhelming. use a scroll/cast a minor blight and then phantom/watery double and you've already tapped into something pretty decent without much effort. edit 2: even just something as simple as casting watery double while you're spiritshifted while significantly boost the effectiveness of watery double, esp if you have wildstrike talents.

his stats are lame and his spiritshift also lame, but he gets very excellent bonus spells (watery double alone is pretty slick) and party-friendly water/ice spells. he's not going to heal as well as a lifegiver, but i think overall he has pretty strong subclasses (both druid and chanter)

it might be useful to track what the invocations are that you use that lead to the never-generate-phrases bug. i wonder if it's related somehow to whether or not you get bonus phrase at start of combat or not. either way, i'm not discounting that it's happening to you, but it definitely is not a common occurence, i've run lots of chanters, and definitely a decent number of skalds (incl konstanten).

iirc, you start with the maximum chants you can sing ignoring any subclass-specific boosts. (edit: but you're still limited by subclass-specific penalties) that is definitely a bug. does this happen 100%? with any invocation? i've definitely gotten into a situation where i don't appear to be generating any phrases, but i feel like if it was as simple as this, i would've run into it a lot more.

IIRC it doesn’t matter how many beneficial effects are on the enemy. I believe what matters is the number of affected enemies, not number of affected buffs. and yeah, Judged can be fuel for Wall of Draining. ISTR stumbling into it in a recent-ish run.

ah good find, i just wrongly assumed the top post was updated with all findings.

hm, @Constentin Lévine did some digging into weapons in general over here: I assumed they tested pretty much everything, so I assume the cudgel is buffed in a way that it only affects the weapon itself. (IIRC even the "judged" de/buff only affects the weapon)

they're not really deep changes, but you do get varying levels of acknowledgement, mostly as just a bit of flavor on occasion. i documented a bit in my write-up: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/priest, though I honestly to revisit that section with the DLC and the impacts of patch 4.0 in tow. most of the quest changes can generally be got through alternative means (e.g. it's not exclusive a priest subclass benefit), they just help you avoid varying skill requirements and some such. exception being: getting the effigy item as a skaen subclass, since i don't think there is any other way, other than sacrificing a party member, which is a steep price to pay for a 1-use item (and if you fight the skaenites, you don't get the item iirc). iirc, aside from what i mentioned there I believe priest of wael gets an easier time in some of the final dialogue checks in FS, which is pretty substantial (other dialogue checks that priest subclasses help you avoid might have been pretty easy to meet in other ways).

Miscast is un-fun, but is also not as dangerous as it used to be, just (as Shai Hulud says) keep spending your focus. Honestly, there are worse: random affliction random inspiration invisibility push Those don't come up in discussion much, and "random affliction" is categorized by one of the wiki as a good effect and "random inspiration" as a bad effect, but having tried to make Serafen work through several runs, I can attest to several things: those things, esp random affliction and inspirations do not care about who you are targeting. So a buff can also apply a random affliction and a debuff/damage spell can apply a random inspiration, which is why those fan wiki categories don't make sense. same thing with invisibility. you can make enemies invisible, but you can also make your own party members invisible depending on what procced the effect. general unpredictability is bad. worse than miscast. miscast you can kind of prepare for a bit (keep your armor up by being appropriately geared, keep spending your focus). but randomly hard-CCing your party members, or granting something like energized or robust to an enemy (or multiple enemies, if it's a multi-target effect) is extremely annoying and can easily take you from a fight that you were a winning to fight that you might lose. controlled invisibility is great. random invisibility is horrible. it's an invisibility that doesn't seem to break until duration runs out. on enemies it's annoying enough, but most of the time i just start running away until the enemy re-appears. but on party members, i've literally had party members get KO-ed by DoTs (and at least a handful of times, completely annihilated in FS due to all the high-level cipher-types around) because they suddenly get turned invisible and while they're invisible they can't be targeted with anything, such as heals. push is a great way to have all your plans messed up, depending on what effect procced it. on the forums i'm probably one of the most negative on serafen. i think his cipher is a trap class. you get all sorts of unpredictability and there's no real payoff. at least in other system equivalents (wild mages or wellspring mages) your actual benefit is that you can get/cast more spells (and the randomness is properly treated as a cost). so i guess what i'm saying is that, if you're really keen on giving seraphen cipher a full go, miscast is not really the effect you should be super worried about. instead i think you should be more concerned about casting conservatively and having defensive redundancies (like the resist foods/items kaylon mentions). it's also a warning that serafen as a cipher is not really "fun" imo, but more an experience in coping with things suddenly going sideways or pre-limiting yourself in what you do with a cipher. (though tbf many of the times a wild surge happens, it's a nothingburger. that's what adds into the annoyingness of it.)

the one thing i've found her to shine at (at least compared to any other paladin build) is to proc a bajillion stacks of Combusting Wounds using her otherwise-extremely-lame Wrath of the Five Suns. (most of the time IMO it's not worth using over just a normal Sworn Enemey, esp on PotD. it does real lame damage (on PotD it's basically doomed to always underpenetrate, too), and it uses *2* zeal, which is far more limiting)

with a druid, you already have a powerful healer. a priest isn't really great for dedicated healing - a druid will heal gobs more health. a priest is more useful for spot healing (with one exception - consecrated ground is pretty powerful) and coming back from defeat with revives or withdraw. that being said, i think priest's role as buffer and debuffer is underrated. it's not as necessary on veteran and below, but on PotD I feel like having buffs and debuffs at your disposal really smooths out fights, especially when even a tier 1 buff spell can protect you from tier 3 afflictions. for a fifth slot, it really feels to me like you could use more party damage. ironically a priest can help fill that gap in the late game, but in the meantime a swashbuckler could work fine, just focus more on the rogue side with lighter armor to make it less of a tank and more of a sturdy dps. you could probably get a lot of utility out of riposte with the right setup (esp stacked with whispers of the endless paths), especially since fighters have higher innate deflection, a feat for further deflection, and you can pick up conqueror stance for an additional +5 to +10 deflection.

yeah that's reasonable; i'm going to chalk it up to ApplyOverTime just being a really weird-ass thing to have in the game and just not really well-tested because of how uncommon it is.

yeah, so the way the applyovertime effect is bugged is that it takes your might bonus and divides it by the number of ticks, and then applies *that* divided damage over the entire duration. so if you only get 1 tick, then you divide by 1, and then divide by 1 again. so then you get the full effect of might. edit: even though it's a direct consequence of the bug, i never actually really thought about the impact on this for a short duration effect like cleansing flame. i wonder if there are any interesting build ramifications of this?

I don’t think wall of draining is cheesy most of time, same thing with Salvation of Time. It’s once you get into very specific effect combinations that you start getting derangedly cheesy. both spells lie in a weird zone where they are either merely interesting for their level or even bad (imagine using a SoT or Wall of Draining just to extend a chanter chant) to, with a bit of metagaming, utterly busted. edit: anyway the point was that Psion can accomplish things innately that would require some explicit cheese to do in other situations, if less powerful than spamming Disintegrate left and right. Like, once you get to a certain level, you can nonstop spam hard CC, which is like a WoD-Ascendant-lite.

the easy metric to consider here is effective damage done. you're right in that it's not strictly diminishing returns when you first get a crit chance, but the overall trend with accuracy is diminishing: a) if you have have -76 accuracy (so that you miss 100% of the time), a +1 accuracy (you graze 1% of the time) would be an infinite% increase in effective average damage b) if you have +100 accuracy (so that you crit 100% of the time), a +1 accuracy would do literally nothing, so you get a 0% increase in effective average damage. (it's obviously a little more complicated than just those two points, but it's a broad illustration of it being diminishing) even if the metric or consideration is not effective damage done, the overall trend is still true, because even debuffs need to hit, and you can still make the same A) and B) points with a debuff - a debuff that crits all the time gets literally 0 returns from an additional point of accuracy. i write a little about it here (but it's pretty much the same argument, written slightly different): https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/defenses-are-increasing-returns just because it has diminishing returns doesn't mean it can't be very very important. the flip side to it having diminishing returns on high values is essentially that at very low values, perception/accuracy is very important. Playing on PotD where you start off massively down versus the typical enemy would basically normalize this for much of the early-mid game (until you gear up enough or overlevel encounters). i wrote up a bigger analysis somewhere on the forums where i used a script to simulate lots of encounters and basically walked away with the conclusion that: dex is king stat (very close to 3% increase in effective damage done per point) and has linear returns. both each point of might and each point of perception average out to about a 2% increase in effective damage done (yes, i know might nominally gives you 3%, but it's "effective damage" and thus takes into account that might is an additive bonus and that there are plenty of other damage bonuses for weapons), BUT this average is heavily conditional on the stage of the game. Perception does really well early on when you're down quite a bit versus enemy defenses, and in cases where you underpenetrate the enemy (and thus crits give you outsize returns compared to crits in other situations), but tapers off pretty significantly the higher your net accuracy. Might is also skewed in importance earlier on when you don't have many enchantments or other sources of damage, and also tapers off, but less so (especially for spells). (edit: and of course might has 0 returns if you're primarily focused on debuffs) also, general trends don't necessarily apply to specific builds. my big game hunter build goes all-in on accuracy, and it's so that you can AI script a fight against dorudugan using the druid petrify spell and never miss. the accuracy is basically overkill for the typical fight, but the point of the build was to be a fire-and-forget boss killer, which requires being "inefficient" with stats, because a 1-2% chance to miss is basically unacceptable across a bunch of boss and megaboss fights. similarly, my mainchair or main merc (whomever is my typical offensive/debuff caster) almost always is a hearth orlan maxing out at 21 perception for reasons given above - the hardest part of the game by far (especially for offensive casters) is the early-mid game, and heavy investment in perception takes the sting out of that, even if it ends up being overkill for typical mid-late game and a different stat spread would'v been more useful in the end. but outside of specific considerations, the general trends means that for offensive party members, perception is roughly on par with might and because of diminishing returns you're better off maxing out dex and probably int and then balancing out might and perception.

i wouldn't sleep on psion. i was thinking mostly in terms of--from the perspective of a player who doesn't know about or doesn't use cheesy interactions. wall of draining doesn't factor in, at which point psion can pull off the chain-CC that a properly cheesed up ascendant can pull off.

is this on mainchar or a party member? if the latter, i wonder if removing them and then re-adding them to your party would fix it.

I think it's important to note that despite the fact that Deadfire is relatively old at this point, a lot of metagame interactions are actually pretty recently discovered. The strand of favor, minor grimoire imprint, and in particular strand of favor with soul blade buff that are IIRC used by shai hulud's build are all pretty new discoveries (they in fact post-date many The Ultimate runs, you only start seeing Strand of Favor crop up in the latter set of runs), well after the bulk of players probably played and put together guides. Before then, I would imagine a hierophant would struggle a bit or require a higher player touch because of typical caster/cipher anti-synergies (namely, that a typical cipher needs to attack to build focus, but a typical caster wants to be casting spells, not attacking)*. that being said, even without some of the newer metagame stuff, i think a hierophant that hooks into a psion would be very powerful. removes the basic anti-synergy between having two casters, and then you just have the nice mix of stuff between wizard and psion. but psion was also a pretty late addition - when the game was nearing end of life cycle, so again well after the bulk of builds and players were done. *a wizard is slightly different because you could summon some pretty powerful weapons that help supercharge focus generation, but this still requires a little bit higher level of deliberation that might explain a lack of hierophant content.

perception has diminishing returns in general, but monk in particular has synergy with crits, so it's worth investing in perception for many builds. example of synergies: you can weaken on crit, you can interrupt on crit, you can get resource refunds on crit. with swift flurry, you can even chain together free attacks on crits, an each free attack can trigger further free attacks if you crit. (only a 33% chance, so it's still diminishing returns, but point is for monk even if the returns are diminishing they are diminishing very very very very slowly) also, you should basically ignore from consideration that you get +3 accuracy upon level up. Because everyone also gets +3 defenses on level up, so they cancel each other out. All the accuracy bonus on level up does is help you keep pace with other targets at your level, and make it harder for lower-level characters to fight above their level.

Monks are pretty much an S-tier class in Deadfire, especially single-class. Hard to go wrong with them. There is no cap to action speed bonuses. In PoE1, I don't believe there was a cap to speed bonuses, but there were complicated stacking rules, so probably you drank the potion and it got suppressed by a different effect. In Deadfire, action speed gives you linear returns, so you can stack as much action speed as you want without concern. Though do be warned, Deadfire has its own stacking rules: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/stacking-rules i think you might be a little confused, it sounds like you're referencing PoE1 items. Deadfire isn't simply a PoE1 copy or direct continuation. It has its own gear and its own stuff.

if you want to fit in the bride and ugprade, i would recommend ditching "seven men" and "fampyr's gaze". of the resistance chants, i generally find those the less important ones (in fact, most of the time i just pick up one dozen and i'm done, unless i'm single-classing a chanter). Things like weakened and terrified really ruin my day and seem a little more common than other day-ruining afflictions (e.g. i don't really consider things like staggered or immobilized worth switching on a chant for); neriscyrlas and auranic and drakes are some examples of predictable sources of terrify that it's worth keeping one dozen for, vs the others. kind of the problem with the fampyr's gaze one is that if you lose a party member to charm/dominate, you can't use the chant to bring them back, so it doesn't work as well reactively, whereas you can always bring back your party from frightened and con afflictions, and the terrify cases are frequently predictable/consistent as mentioned. Plus! With the upgraded The Bride, you basically get mini-versions of the other resist chants (esp fampyr's gaze) anyway, since by buffing int, dex, perception, you are also protected from a hit from each of an int, dex, and perception affictions.

Hey congrats! Welcome to an extremely exclusive club. I hope both you and Shai Hulud get verified soon.