thelee

Any Perception inspiration will negate any Perception affliction for the duration of the inspiration, and vice versa. It's not even "for the duration of the inspiration" it's a complete counter/dispel. If you have like a 60s tier 3 perception inspiration, a 2 second distraction will completely dispel it. (Actually quite annoying against bosses with Persistent Distraction, your melee characters basically can't ever get a perception buff to stick.) The only exception are "permanent inspirations" like you can see with Galawain's Challenge, they can't be countered

I would like it more if it weren't for the fact that its duration is so short. In many PotD fights a single target debuff needs to be really good (because there are many more enemies) or be durable (because you're fighting a single tough target) and I think Barb's fails at both. I do like Divine Mark at 3 because -25 deflection is huge even if the duration picture isn't that much better (it's also fire keyworded which is more advantageous)

Dire Blessing *is* that spell.The low-level AL1 buffs (Holy Power and Blessing) are still relevant later on because enemies also get better about using might and perception afflictions. Am I like the only one who tries to counter or protect their party members from these effects? +50% recovery time in particular is extremely brutal for anyone and given how common blind and disorient is I will use Blessing (even after getting Dire Blessing) to cancel them out. I'm not following...doesn't Blessing just give you +5 Per? Are you saying it also removes or reduce Per afflictions? Even so, why not more strategic casts of Dire Blessing than taking up two slots for essentially the same spell, major and minor versions? For that reason I would not call Blessing "great". Man, it's the entire inspiration/affliction system... Any inspiration counters or provides a defense against a related affliction and vice versa. E.G. if you have Strong, a Stun effect won't Stun you, it'll only counter and dispel Strong. If you are Blinded then a Blessing will counter the Blind. (Similarly, you can block a dominate or charm by hitting yourself with a Prayer for the Spirit). And the point of it is that Blessing and Holy Power are good when you get it, and because of the affliction/inspiration system they stay pretty relevant even though there are virtually strictly better effects at higher levels (Triumph, Dire Blessing).

Dire Blessing *is* that spell. The low-level AL1 buffs (Holy Power and Blessing) are still relevant later on because enemies also get better about using might and perception afflictions. Am I like the only one who tries to counter or protect their party members from these effects? +50% recovery time in particular is extremely brutal for anyone and given how common blind and disorient is I will use Blessing (even after getting Dire Blessing) to cancel them out.

can't empathize with that viewpoint because every single-class priest i've ever rolled/recruited has picked up dismissal

As others have said, Gorecci Street can be very hard with very little room for error due to how few options you personally have so early in the game. Have you even tried the dig site yet on PotD? That might ruin your day even more and that's part of the critical path. Two things that will greatly make it easier to deal with: 1) hire some hirelings (to get up to full party of five). you can always ditch them as you recruit other characters, if that's your thing. 2) split up the west/east enemies into two encounters using sparkcrackers and sneak (you can also use traps or anything else that makes a lot of noise and attracts attention). Don't know if it's as easy to do this kind of pulling in TB, but an encounter against 3 followed by an encounter against 4 is way way easier than an encounter against all 7 at once. Both these tips (full party of five, splitting up the encounter via pulling) will help you a lot at the Engwithan Dig Site as well.

Restore heals only 30 health in a much tighter radius, without any damage, and is still a very easy first pick at AL1. Iconic Projection is slower but can heal an entirely spread out party, while also getting in free damage. It works especially well in multiples. And actually, 20 is quite a bit less than one hit for a non-tank character in any reasonably challenging playthrough, most of my non-tanks can barely withstand more than a few hits of dedicated punishment before knockout, even with Tough. The point is not sustain, but buying time or recovering after getting to safety. If you're relying on priest instant heals to sustain party in a tough fight, you're doing it wrong; I'm not sure I would even consider priest a top 3 overall healer, their main benefit to healing is selection and the instantaneous nature of most of their heals. And I stand by my assessment. What else is "wrong" about what I picked?

fun thing about resonant touch is that you can break carefully scripted encounters. bosses and megabosses frequently have health triggers, and with enough resonant stacks that you activate at once you can just blow through their health at once and bypass all sorts of health-triggered abilities. did this with the SSS boss, the BoW boss, and have read about someone doing this with Dorudugan.

I think in this respect druids gets hit the hardest. I actually don't see much of a problem for priests because subclass bonus spells are very varied and frequently pull from other class's ability trees (or are completely unique, like Woedica). Only Eothas kinda gets screwed. Druids, on the other hand, didn't get any really special free spells until 4.0 gave the Ancient. They had more interesting subclass bonuses than priests, but especially at AL8/9 the amount of variance you could have in a druid started getting really tight, especially if you picked a lifegiver or fury and can't even take some of those very few spells at those levels.

Litany for the Body is a super long way to get +2 AR pretty easily on a tank, I would say it's easily worth the point without much effort. Prayer, though... Also: with respect I always find your posts a little hard to follow, but are you essentially arguing that priests are "at the bottom" because single-class priests lack a lot of design space? That's an interesting take, sure, but even if there were only one optimal way to build a priest (a sentiment I would disagree with but for sake of argument), if that one optimal is really good I'm not sure I would consider it the bottom. But hey, I guess that's the point of "pick a loser, dare you" (alternative formulation: what do you call the person who graduated last in their class in med school? a doctor)

spells and consumables don't benefit from legendary scaling, and consumables in particular don't benefit from PER, so generic accuracy bonus (like which the ranger has huge access to) can be massive improvement. EDIT: though i find that even with top-end gear, in FS and with megabosses accuracy is still a concern even for mythic-weapon characters. acc buffs and deflection debuffs (either directly or in the form of PER/RES affliction/inspirations) are still useful.

I think for hte patient Hunter's Claw helps fill that role for rangers, but it requires a lot of metagame knowledge to when to and the patience to actually build up the stacks (and not playing on Woedica's or Eothas's challenge).

For everyone - Prestige. I think chanters get the lamest PL scaling of any class, but even then Prestige is worth it and is only available for single-class. Even martial classes will like it, monks and rogues especially. Monk specifically both Whispers of the Wind and Inner Death are good (the latter empowered and comboed with Empowered Strikes - basically an instakill for most normal enemies, and a hugely punishing attack on most bosses, whiel whispers of the wind can still be stupidly metagamed). I think you might be implicitly focusing on martial classes, because I think all casters have AL8/9 spells that are exceptional without much thought. I think compared to martial classes in fact, casters are more "worth it" to go single-class, due to how spellcasting resources work (you get dedicated AL8 and AL9 casts, whereas martial abilities have to compete with lower-level abilities for the same resource). As an illustration, some samples of great caster abilities from 8 and 9 (not an exhaustive list, but really just to show how easy it is to find great high-level abilities): wizard AL8 Caedabold's Bow - the bouncing terrify effect that triggers on each hit basically lets you stunlock two enemies the entire time you have this up (provided no resolve resistance) AL9 Petrification - another thread brought to my attention that people might not know that "Petrification" is a pseudo-tier 4 affliction, which means even bosses and megabosses that merely have dexterity affliction or body affliction resistance will still get "Paralyzed" instead of being resisted down to "Immobilized". The perma-petrify/paralyze effect at near death still works on bosses/megabosses, which is basically an instakill if you can land it. (A blood mage with backup healing can probably just lock down the hardest fights in the game by repeatedly casting this and an average of three blood sacrifices to replenish the AL9 cast... or have a cipher backup who will just buff you with brilliant) priest AL8 Hand of Weal and Woe - damages and heals every second not every tick, which means even your squishes will be able to facetank the hardest enemies in the game with this, all while you clear out non-fire-immune trash mobs trivially. AL9 Magran's Might - at last check, each projectile (spaced out every couple seconds or so) interrupts on hit, so not only are you stripping the enemy of all buffs with each hit but you are basically keeping them stunlocked the entire time. chanter AL8 "eld nary" upgrade - you get a crap ton of extra bounces. if you roll a bellower you can get +6 or +7 PL bonus and clear out most enemies by yourself. AL9 "They did sing a song of carnage fair" - animated weapon is already a sick summon, and this gets you an additional weapon (with an Arcane Assault ability) druid AL8 avenging storm - metagamable for lots of damage AL9 great maelstrom - stupid amounts of aoe damage

Holy Power, Blessing, Dire Blessing, Restore, Halt, Pillar of Faith, Prayer for the Spirit, Consecrated Ground, Despondent Blows, Iconic Projection, Spiritual Weapon, etc. are all great abilities available in the earlier spell slots. Subclasses can get even more (Magran, Wael, Skaen especially, and Woedica for their fists).

priest of wael really should belong to your column A, makes me reiterate that we really should be talking about subclasses because some subclasses are so transformative to the experience (like how you call out trickster). also, barbarians are real great. I've never done deadly deadfire mod, but I don't understand how they couldn't be considered in at least column B (possibly column A).

Firearms have a -.15 multiplier, no? The window in which firearms did less damage on a crit was like 1.0 and shortly after, before the blunted criticals effect got nerfed.

AD&D 2e had no AoOs, and that was the D&D version that all of the IE games except for IWD2 were based. I also wouldn't be surprised if grognards also hated 3e's changes to D&D compared to AD&D.

arterial strike is close. grog means that even if your hobble misses or the enemy is dex affliction resistant, you can still force them to chase you around while they bleed to death.

Tyranny did it first. Boy that was a surprising learning curve coming in from PoE1 and seeing my attacks miss because the enemy moved a bit.

That's the point of the pet, as Boeroer says (along with the history lesson). What in my mind makes Grog secret tech is in Deadfire, as an enemy winds up a melee attack (i.e. they aren't recovering anymore and their ability icon starts filling), the inability for enemies to engage you means you can move your character out of melee range without consequence. (Ordinarily a disengagement attack would be made at +20 accuracy and +100% damage which uh is pretty brutal coming from a boss.) That melee attack still completes because AI doesn't know how to cancel, but because you are now no longer in melee range, in the combat log you see that the attack misses due to "(out of range)". It's probably way too much of a micromanagement headache for most fights, but when we're talking about a boss or a megaboss of which there might be only one and who might have powerful melee attacks, this effectively means you can infinitely tank a boss without ever taking damage, unless they do a ranged attack. EDIT - also old infinity engine games had no concept of "knockout", being reduced to 0 health was death. This is probably another thing these grognards were bitter about. (Though strictly speaking it was not permadeath unless you got hit with significant excess damage.)

one thing that would mess up the initial rating is the wtffail of forbidden fist monk. if we're taking an average of the subclasses, that hurts the monk's standing quite a bit on its own. really you'd have to break out the subclasses and rank them alongside vanilla classes. re: wizard, i would put blood mages over the top, but possibly transmuters worse than other wizard variants. similarly, chanters in general are pretty good, but i think there's a pretty clear tiering between the various subclasses (troubadour, anyone?) and as for cipher, i could go either way for most of them, but wild mind deserves to sit in the corner along with foribdden fist.

Am I the only no-AI micromanager who finds "knock up" abilities annoying as hell because they break targeting? you're not the only one. it's really annoying for an enemy to miss out on being hit by a spell because a knock up went off at the right time. knock up is good enough that i'm willing to work through that annoyance though.

I played a little bit with my own Bubbling Chalice last night as well. I think by default Bubbling Chalice has an inherent AL of 13. It uses the buggy consumable scaling (also applies to Monastic Unarmed Order) of always using single-class PL scaling, even if multi-classed. Because the ability is keyworded like the wizard flame shield spell, it benefits both from generic PL scaling, alchemy scaling as well as fire and evocation PL boosts. I had a character with an alchemy of 13 as well as prestige and they had +50% on the duration, which aligns with my above theory and the numbers you are getting. So with all our sleuthing, the solution should be: re-balance the bubbling chalice to have an AL of 0.

If you're going for like a phalanx thing, it seems like Unbroken is tailor-made for this approach. Single class devoted + bladed weapon (single-weapon style or like an estoc) seems reminiscent of samurai tropes to me.

I haven't seen much mention of this pet - if you're not familiar, it provides you resolve affliction immunity and engagement immunity, at the cost of being unable to engage and being utterly annihilated when reduced to 0 health (instead of knocked out). Party-wide engagement immunity I suspected was really good, since Deadfire lets you run out of range of melee attacks. And sure enough, I just gave it a try with Dorudugan (the vessel megaboss). I just kept an eye on Dorudugan's attacks and ran Mirke out of range every single time, while everyone else pelted it with ranged attacks -- basically granted me infinite tanking ability. It also made the global pulling effect irrelevant because all my party members could just run away again without taking disengagement attacks. I don't know if Grog would be great to generally have, but for some big fights might be the most powerful tool you have in your toolbox, if you're up for some micromanagement. Might not be as good solo since Nomad's Brigandine can be enchanted for engagement immunity anyway. But Grog can be combined with any armor. (And yes, I did manage to beat Dorudugan with this strategy. Mirke only ended up getting hit by Dorudugan twice or thrice by my own failure to pause/pay attention at the right time. Also lack of engagement made it extremely easy to kite Dorudugan around the map to avoid letting it self heal from fire damage.)