thelee

you choose right at the start. right after you pick gender and race, you choose single/multiclass, and then you can pick subclasses as part of that process. you can respec later in the game, but you can never change the decisions you make at level 1 (which means your class/subclass or single/multiclass picks are permanent). single-class you advance up the "levels" of abilities every odd level at first, and then slow down starting at 13 to every three levels (13, 16, 19). multi-class you advance up the "levels" of abilities every three levels the entire time (1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19). normally you gain two ability points every time you unlock a new tier, and one ability point otherwise (multi-class has to spend their two ability points for a new tier, one on each class)

there's a whole heck of a lot of ways that rangers fit in-universe to deadfire, so i wouldn't worry. here are some minimal-spoilery examples of how a ranger can fit into the world, some thematic hyptotheticals, some in-game examples: pirate, pirate sharpshooters. bounty hunters and trackers large military presence in the archipelago (Maia, a story character ranger, is a sharpshooter/scout for the royal deadfire company) a contingent of boreal dwarfs who have settled an island some islands are bigger and have dense foliage and need trackers/rangers one of several ways to refer to the eighth "level" of abilities that (single-class, and only single-class) characters can get (multi-class stop at the seventh). PL is short for "power-level." I've personally taken to start referring to it by other means (I say "tier") because it's a pretty jargon-y acronym that is also confusingly the same as a only-kind-of-related "power level" mechanic that scales your ability power.

try pallegina as a chanter. Herald is quite a beefy MC, can easily be a melee tank. Instead of picking up summons, pick up things like "Her Revenge" or the Reny Daret frightened blast (when upgraded to also grant penalty to all defenses is pretty brutal). if you can afford to wait, Vatnir might make for an interesting priest/chanter. His priest subclass comes with lots of free offensive spells, which makes for an interesting take on priest. have you tried maia as ranged dps? she's pretty much S-tier ranged ranger due to her unique subclass and her unique armor. even though ranger lack fancy abilities, in my current run maia was #1 in party damage for 99% of the game (until my caster hit level 20, and still may not be true if pet damage is included). A single-classed Xoti can also be good. Can help tank early on with her free small shield proficiency, there is a great monk small shield, and any single-classed monk will eventually single-handedly carry your party if you want it to (whispers of the wind + stalking cloak)

Flavor-wise, dwarf with a boar may really want this hunting bow, which grants special bonuses for a dwarf wielder. A ranger can get stupid amounts of accuracy, so once you get stalker's link and marked for prey you could leave the hunting bow modal on (-50% recovery time, but -15 accuracy) without hurting your acc relative to the enemies and wreck house. Only problem with that suggestion is that hunting bows have low PEN, which is a major problem on higher difficulties. I would recommend Sharpshooter ranger SC (who can get close for bonus PEN), or an MC with a devoted fighter (+2 PEN with hunting bow, but you go all in on it). Just a suggestion since you specifically called out dwarf. much of the ranger's big wins can be easily had with multiclass as well (the stupid high accuracy), but there are a couple of good end-game abilities. I have enjoyed heart seeker in my current run, which is a bit skill-intensive to use versus other abilities, but is really really good in the right setup.

what's supposed to happen: 1. you defeat ner 2. you go inside and find vatnir 3. come back out, ner gets back up and then sucked into the vytmadh how does "the dragon just die?" any idea? i wonder if some mechanism that is thoroughly killing ner is breaking some trigger.

i believe they should have fixed it - it was in the pre-5.0 issues. i don't do TB a lot though so I can't personally vouch for it.

not that i've been able to figure out, unfortunately. it's a shame, because especially the knockdown ability is absolutely game-changing to be able to spam. i ended up getting a gamer keyboard (not strictly for deadfire, it was when pandemic WFH began and i was spending a lot more time at home) where I made a macro that could spam a hotkey over and over, and I just quick-hotkey knockdown (or any other weapon ability) and use the macro. works well enough, but obviously is a financial investment.

i also picked an enchanter for a recent run (MC). yeah, by far the best thing enchantment seems to be simply the schools it has access to. I rely enough on self-buffing, expose vulnerabilities, and call to slumber that the +2 PL is still worth it over a generalist. Free Action has saved my skin a couple times, too. but nothing compared to evoker's bonus (or even conjuration, even if it's a bit of an antisynergy) the tier 7 dragon enchantment spell is pretty darn good though.

aaaaaw yeah, that's the stuff! scratch that, now THAT'S the stuff (just had some grandparents visit for a week and got some quality gaming in while the kids were off playing with them)

I did a shaman that was a corpse-eater and skaen. it was... alright. wael is probably a better choice, i just wanted to do something different. (edit: i would also not pick corpse-eater in the future. it's alright, but adds to the action economy issues when i'm busy eating corpses) i would recommend against magran mostly because the action economy is not great with barbarian - if yo uactually want to carnage it up, the more the game goes on the more spells you'll be casting and the fewer actual weapon attacks you'll be making. another reason why wael [to a lesser extent skaen] is good choice - fast spells. writs are great, but if you're thinking about a barbarian the most useful one early on for a MC is easily taken care of by a barbarian - the lack of engagement writ is very good for survivability/mobility, but a barbarian can get spirit frenzy which will stagger everything very easily which also does the same thing (procs off carnage and any other ability, including priest spells; don't upgrade to spirit tornado which breaks this unintentional stagger-happy spreading). Writ of War and Sorcery are pretty good late game MC woedica effects. Frightened are ineffective in shutting down enemy abilities that can still be extremely annoying (wizard summons, arcane reflection, priest/druid buffs, lay on hands) and these give you ways to shut them down. There will still be some abilities that can get through though.

there are some cases where you can take advantage of this (a bit, or at least it won't hurt as much). e.g. two of the shield modals give you a recovery penalty. many weapon modals give you a worse recovery penalty. it means that if you're doing sword and board and you turn on a weapon modal, you can turn on your shield modal for no downside.

a more up to date version is here, which covers your specific question a bit more directly: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/paladin TL;DR: hirelings obey their own disposition but are affected by the WATCHER's actions, so you have to watch out a bit. Obsidian-made NPCs (Pallegina, Vatnir, Xoti) have *no* favored dispositions, so they fit in any party without penalty [but also get no bonuses]

wow if this is consistent, this significantly boosts the utility of that chant

oh yeah, that forum link is still mostly true (i skimmed it to double-check), but a easier-to-digest format i put here (with tables)

the base damage is still calculated internally - it's only at the "very final" step that the immunity prevents it from occurring. the lash is based off of damage before this "very final" step, and even before PEN is considered. So you should still be able to do burn damage. In fact, because lash damage is calculated before even PEN is considered, there are some narrow situations when a lash does a different damage type where this means that it will do more damage than your main weapon. (E.G. your main weapon underpenetrates by -75% but you have a 30% lash)

dah! i'm so unused to caring about confusion as an affliction that it doesn't occur to me how easily it is to deal with it. This makes me remember that Wild Mare always has a supply of Wael's Wind in stock, too, which grants mind affliction resistance. now i'm curious about combining berserker with fury... still worried about the raw damage though late game.

well, actually, thinking about this more, DR and healing recieved both do the same thing - make healing more effective. just with different flavor. so i dunno. it's probably fine.

i get that it's a bit out of flavor, but adding DR to tough doesn't sound seem like it would buff con so much as slightly buff tough. I'm still not incentivized to take boost con or have high-con characters pick up tough, because tough generally gives me so much extra effective health already, even for my squishy characters. healing received however, does actually solve a problem depending on the #s involved (problem being: hard to heal a vast health pool). ideally it'd be attached to con itself somehow, but failing that, it seems second-best choice of attaching it as a bonus effect to tough would be great.

@Elric Galad is pretty much right. In contrast to some other classes, priests gain quite a bit from being single-classed; when multi-classed you miss out on some incredible top-end spells; not just the symbol, but also hand of weal and woe, dismissal, call of rymrgand, magran's might, etc. what's less obvious, is that you're actually missing out on 3 power levels, because you don't get access to Prestige, which is a "you should definitely take this" single-class passive that grants +1 PL at tier 9. you also are able to get all the empowered passives. might not sound like much for a first time game/lower difficulties, but by potd/end game is stupidly good. A fully jacked up empowered priest symbol will clear even most DLC fights on its own (on top of possibly triggering empowered-related effects on certain late-game gear). the big question though is whether you care about being more priest or priest-ish. If you want to be more priest, no amount of multi-classing will get you the priest qualities of getting tier 8/9 abilities. if you only want to be priest-like, then it won't matter that you can empower hand of weal and woe to make your party invulnerable compared to the extra role/ability diversity multi-classing gets you. that might be a question only you can answer for yourself, unfortunately. just know that both MC/SC priests are great options (whereas some classes might be better off being MC-ed due to a lack of really compelling tier 8 or 9 options).

i would not consider furyshaper/ancient to be that bad. you don't have to use the sporelings and wild growth, and in fights where they would be a really important carry (which can happen early on), you don't have to use wards. it's a wee bit of anti-synergy early on, but later on, +10% ward and +25% action speed from frenzy is a whole lot of casting speed. great for emptying your spellbook real fast. when you run low on spells, replace teh +10% ward with the fear ward for good times. why is everyone so keen on berserker/fury? the confusion seems like a deal breaker for much of the game, and raw damage later quite a liability [esp as fury you lack as much sustain]. Of all casters, fury needs +PEN the least.

hey welcome, sorry you haven't gotten a reply yet! barbarians and priests are "weaker" in poe2, but that shouldn't be a cause for concern because they could be stupid good in poe1. By far the biggest downgrade for barbarian is the much less generous carnage damage and aoe. but barbarians are still very effective. priests still have great support capabilities, they just aren't an omni-carry for your entire party like they were in poe1. (the way i've described it in the past - the priest was so good that basically my poe1 games could really be divided into two sections, before-"devotions for the faithful" and after-"devotions for the faithful", such is the step change in power due to certain abilities) hm, none of these include a chanter like you mentioned! i hope you know that poe2 has party-size of five, not six. of the two options personally i think the second is stronger. A priest actually doesn't have a whole lot of healing capabilities on PotD compared to poe1 - in terms of sustain they're good for emergencies and revives until really late game when you get things like minor intercession or hand of weal and woe; so your first option is kinda brittle. the second option gives you a ton more sustain (paladin lay on hands, druid has tons of good heals), which might be better for a first time pass on poe2 PotD (which I find to be generally much harder than poe1).

if you're familiar with it, it's akin to a harmonic mean, e.g. how do you combine different "rates" of stuff (e.g. CAFE fuel efficiency standards in the US). in the example of -50% dr and -10% dr, the way the game actually treats it is to consider them "rates" and combine them by inverting them: -50% dr => 1/(1 - .5) => 2 -10% dr => 1/(1 - .1) => 1.11 if it's just negative modifiers, you just add them together after subtracting, subtract out a 1, and then re-invert them: 2 + 1.11 - 1 => 2.11 1/2.11 => .474, 1 - .474 => -52.6% DR it gets more complicated if there are also positive modifiers edit: ninja'd; you basically got it

double inversion fiasco. you can see this take place with things like that girdle that gives you -% weapon damage at lower health plus fighter's guardian stance.

not just for healing, but health as well. we only have 5% for health right now because they buffed it because a simple +/-3% was too weak. 3% health plus 3% healing effect is nicely symmetric with other stats and would probably work well in total (tho would need testing)

we already have some redundancy of durations via intellect (outgoing durations) and resolve (incoming hostile durations), so I do not think it's a bad thing if CON duplicates might on the healing end. con is already weird in that extra health is even less useful because healing from a given caster grants the same absolute amount on a 300 health char as a 200 health char, so essentially once you eat up the extra 100 health "reserve" the 300 character has over the 200 character, the two characters essentially don't have different health, unless you manage to overheal the 200-health character a lot. The overhealing is more relevant earlier on when health amounts are lower and it's more likely you can overheal, but ironically CON is even less effective at that point because it's a percentage boost off a very tiny base -- class differences in health will probably matter more. i forget which rtwp RPG it was where most healing effects healed a % of health (maybe it was tyranny?). i thought it solved the con problem quite nicely. you could dump con on your squishy wizard, but then your potions would hardly help you out, whereas healing a paltry 20% on a beefy tank could still be a huge save.