thelee

you're not *really* going to get good aoe with a trickster/ranger though. That doesn't happen IMO until tier 8, which is only for single-classed tricksters. you'll get some good debuffing though and a lot of extra survivability. in such a case going melee ranger would be good imo.

early on I agree with you, but later on I feel like one generally has enough ability points or spells and action economy is more of a thing that empowering an ability/spell starts making more sense. Accurate Empower goes a long way into making empowering an ability/spell really worth it. As alluded above, I pick up Acc Empower on most characters that can when they're high enough level. There are some exceptions - for example a martial multiclass barbarians I may not have anything worth empowering (oh yay a longer frenzy...). After that it depends on the class. Single-class damage dealers get penetrating empower, then potent empower. Single-class misc classes get lasting empower, and then maybe the other two if needed. The only specific "rule" I have about empowering is sasha's, like others have said, but also least unstable coil + the right caster, and weyc's equipment. Other than that, I just suggest that even on upscaled PotD you don't really need all those spells - a properly empowered high-level spell will obviate the need for more spells because you'll be doing so much more extra that the fight will be over much sooner. E.G. one cast of a fully-upgraded empowered missile salvo will be enough to kill most FS bosses on its own. I'd also suggest that empowering an ability is much more useful for a chanter because getting half your resources back is rarely ever nearly as good when you're automatically generating them. (Somewhat true as well for monk and cipher) it's a little tougher with martial classes because they are more constrained. i may also have specific uses that i'd rather have the efficiency of more ability points than making one ability use more powerful - for example, mc fighters or mc/sc rangers i use are typically interrupt machines [mule kick or concussive/tranq shot] so i'd much rather just keep interrupting than make one interrupt slightly better. but otherwise i wouldn't underestimate how effective e.g. an empowered dazing shout, empowered inspired strike, empowered tier 9 paladins [properly geared] can be.

not to necro this thread, but ime the priest subclasses offer a suprising amount of dialogue changes, compared to the others. nothing totally unique, but you can bypass some fights easier than other classes, which might rely on specific reputation or stats otherwise. and there's a few "encounter" specific interactions that yield extra benefits that i've found only exist for a specific priest subclass (wael for a ship encounter, skaen for the effigy encounter). i haven't played much paladin as mainchar, so paladin orders might get something similar, but i was honestly surprised at the amount of options the right deity choice gave compared to other classes (especially since in poe1 priest order hardly mattered at all aside from a special feat). edit: ciphers also get occasional options in encounters along the lines of "search for the presence of other spirits." those two classes get the most impact in dialogue imo.

I did not play this solo. But wards do not count as pets. My stalker would flee away from the wards, or get it destroyed, and that was never a determining factor in getting bonded grief. Only distance from pet or pet knock out would do it.

many ranged weapons lack a way to boost PEN, or have low PEN to begin with, so one could argue that therefore the ranger has some special problems given that they tend to be built as a ranged class. but it's definitely not unique to ranger. and anyway, a warbow or an extremely high accuracy helps a lot (for crits). the ranger has a bunch of the latter. i played a stalker/furyshaper and wards will definitely not trigger bonded grief.

one can dream!

depends on how much support MSFT is throwing obsidian's way. game dev cycles are long, so it might even be the case that the team is small now for "pre-production" and ramp up as the other projects get close to done so that Obsidian has a regular cadence of releases now that they're in MSFT's financial kingdom.

the answer to your first few questions are indeed, chanter, chanter. Troubadour if you want chanter on ez mode i had an incredibly effective theurge (animist/skald) that is probably my favoritest multiclass i've done. i posted it in these forums, and also wrote it up here on gamefaqs (edit: here's the forum link which has a bit more discussion and explanation of how it comes together). i would also argue that compared to cipher or druid, chanters are uniquely positioned to excelling at single-classing - their top-end summons are bonkers, and upgraded el-nary is a huge DD spell against anyone not frost immune, and even the PEN invocation is situationally amazing. the tier 8/9 chants are also situationally good too. druids get maelstrom, but it can be a bit extremely same-y to spam that every fight (and i feel that druids suffer a bit too much like ciphers in lacking truly great set of tier 8/9 stuff; not that they're bad, but compared to the extra versatility and options you get from MC, a bit uninspiring).

for turn-based mode, dex is pretty unimportant; i've even seen arguments suggesting that tanking dex is a good idea so you go last and can make sure your spells are never interrupted. Generally speaking Con is also pretty unimportant, because offense > defense. Resolve is really all-or-nothing. i play on PotD and Con/Resolve are my least invested stats. In certain situations [tank/deflection builds] I'll pump max resolve, but there's hardly ever a situation where I actually invest points into con. I know that some people don't like the idea of dumping stats (I hate dumping), but I'm going to suggest that at the very least dropping resolve to 8 will give you a couple more extra points without noticably hurting you that bad. My general finding is that might and perception are roughly equivalent in their net effect on your damage, and if you just care about damage, you should roughly balance them (for the same reason that maximizing the area of a 4-sided figure is to make it a square). This is only true for real time though, the graze range is huger in turn-based mode, so i think might may be better in general. However, depending on your build this rough guidance may not be the same. IMO for a Fury Druid, for example, you really really want your Relentless Storm, and Returning Storm to successfully debuff enemies (on turn-based the storms only stun on crit making it even more important to have high acc), so it may be that perception is more useful. You're also not going to be doing any healing as a fury druid, so it's not like might is going to help you heal anyway. Either way, intellect is a king stat for a caster, and is pretty good still for non-casters. On TB mode there are some awkward rounding thresholds for this, but I feel like if you go fury druid route, it's a no brainer to maximize this since you get larger AoE as well. (edit - one suggestion for TB fury druid stat spread: 13 m, 10 c, 10 d, 18 int, 18 p, 8 r; choose a background and race at your discretion. on rtwp i would invest less in perception and might and more in dexterity) i would also suggest just get going with something so you can get a better feel for the game, and don't be too worried about abandoning a character that's not working out.

just in case it wasn't on top of mind (didn't see it mentioned here) - deleterious alacrity is an insane survival spell for wizards if you can micromanage. sure it gives you action speed which is nice, but swift = doubled movement and can't be engaged (even if the game erroneously shows a red line indicating you are engaged, there's no consequence ot you moving out of melee range). if you manage to step away from a melee enemy just as they are winding up an attack (e.g. their action circle is filling up, they're not in recovery), you can make their attack miss (in combat log it is "(out of range)"), and then you can just step back in for your own attack. because you can't be engaged there's no way for enemies to punish you for doing this. if you have gear/abilities with riposte functionality, this is also a easy way to proc riposte a lot. (rannig's wrath doesn't have a riposte, but has a very similar effect that you could trigger like this). edit - forcing a melee enemy to miss like this may even trigger the small shield's binding block modal!

ooops yea yes. both my bellower and skald builds dual-wielded weapons and stayed up at the front. they weren't built to be tanks so wouldn't be able to survive dedicated enemy attention, but they weren't terribly squishy (though i did invest a bit in the gear and making sure i pick up tough; i play on PotD). you could easily do a tank build, but i would stick with small shield (or else invocations get acc penalties), pick up the silver knight chant, and be either a bellower or troubadour. Skald really wants dual-wielding or single-weapon style to maximize on crits. i actually had a short run--abandoned for now--where i was building tekehu into kind of a DD+tank hybrid using hatchet/small shield plus silver knight to help tank and survive and it wasn't bad. in such a setup i would actually put more points into resolve and give up a few--one each from perception and intellect and maybe a couple from might. the incidental loss in net damage from each of those points may be made up for by the increasing returns you get from higher resolve on top of the other tanky stuff you'd be doing.

chants for damage is a no-go in PoE1. On higher difficulties, even the tier one chant ("come come") may even do more damage than dragon thrashed, simply because of PEN issues. bellower, skald, and troubadour can certainly dish out lots of DD. the lightning bolt invocation, eld nary [more useful for skald/troubadour, but amazing for bellower on turn-based], and then the ice damage one are all great DD invocations, and skald and troubadour can punt them out very fast. Bellower can't punt them out very fast, but gets very nice damage scaling because of all the bonus PL. Even the healing/resolve-defense invocation can be upgraded to do sick damage indoors (the two rays of light will bounce, and with proper aiming in tight corridors you can get them to repeatedly bounce through your enemy and the bad guys, healing you up to full while wiping vulnerable enemies out). i had a bellower build that was actually top party damage dealer for the longest stretch of the game almost purely just off the lightning bolt invocation. i have a skald right now that is in the trades for top/second party damage dealer with my dps sorcerer build, which was also originally off of the lightning bolt invocation but now is thanks to fast and cheap eld nary's wiping out the battlefield.

No deleterious alacrity? i personally think some mobility will help, dependin gyour difficulty (enemies may make it hard to get into position for some of your offensive spells). bounding boots, the 4th tier teleportation spell [can't remember name], or charge for fighter would help. there's also a unique spell in zandethus's spellbook (spindle man in delver's row has it) that's worth keeping an eye on for a melee build, because it provides two different 15% lashes and terrifies enemies that hit you.

For late game, wizards get a soulbound rapier in SSS. teh big thing is that it does stacking raw damage DoT, and it gives some extra mobility as well. Might also be worth looking at.

on a devoted, i would go for hunting bow. hunting bow hits like a truck compared to warbow, but hunting bow's weakness is lack of PEN, which devoted fixes, and there are a couple nice hunting bows; i recommend creating a dwarf if you want to use aamiina's legacy, otherwise max out metaphysics for essence interrupter.

the ukaizo fight is a bullet sponge fight if you clear all the megabosses, so getting +4 pl for that would be still quite nice. i'm assumign this also works for wall of draining? a wizard that can get perpetually +4 PL *and* the party member back would be pretty good for whatever remaining fights you have.

this is actually my bad, i confused luminous adra potion with the potion of ascension, the latter of which has no duration but doesn't last past combat.

neat setup. i always overfixate on being able to MC a trickster for glass cannon setups, so seeing one that abuses the high-level power spamming is neat. also i love the use of monastic unarmed training - a quirky passive that makes for some unique takes and i like seeing people find uses for it. one question though, under permabuffs you have: is there a trick to getting this outside of combat and persisting it? sorry if you mentioned how already and i missed it.

imo, yeah. especially frost or fire. huge chunks of DLC where enemies are just straight up immune to frost. huge part of the main quest and base game where enemies are immune to fire or even absorb fire as health. imo corrode is the "safest" to go all-in on but there are still a handful of corrode-immune or high-corrode AR enemies.

all i can say is that something *has* to have been changing, condition-wise - stats or PL or some such. I know there can be some oddities with trying to queue up an empowered ability when you already have an ability in the process of being used*, but otherwise i don't know what else would cause such a change. * oh boy this might be another thing like that grimoire borrowed spells that i mostly dismissed as an annoyance but might be cheese potential.

i just gave this a test and alas, crits do not keep any persistent PEN bonus - they just constantly track your current effective ability PEN and the target's defensive AR and forget any effect that's not currently active - they don't even remember that you empowered them for purposes of PEN (but they do remember you empowered for purposes of PL-based damage bonuses [not the +15% empowered damage passive though]). So crits on DoTs are *only* useful for multiplicative duration increase. In a way, this makes sense within Deadfire-rules, because DoTs also do not wake up sleeping enemies from Call to Slumber or eliminate Takedown Combo - better to think of DoTs primarily as debuffs with a certain effect that causes health loss rather than as a damage effect.

oof that's a tough tradeoff then. -10% recovery is pretty sweet, even if conditional.

i've never ever paid much attention to dread howl before because that hit to graze was so juicy, so it's good to hear that it is much better than i expected; namely - large aoe, long duration, and per encounter. will have to give it a try next time.

Hm, this is worth re-testing. I did some playing around with Pernicious Cloud back in the day (huge corrode aoe makes it easy to hit a lot of enemies and players and get lots of results), don't remember how that played out, and then checked my guide, and based on the wording I put I don't actually remember what I intended to mean about how DoT + PEN works or if i just had some oversight. I suspect the boosted PEN lasts the entire time, and dynamic adjustments to your PEN while the DoT is going will adjust the base that the crit is based off.

yeah this right here is key. i played a debonaire and really enjoyed it but if you're not going to try to ambush enemies with charm (which is great fun and is where debonaire shines at wrecking enemy kith encounters), the accuracy penalty is really going to work against your desired playstyle. different named DoTs will stack. (some DoTs will stack with themselves, but they are less common) toxic/gouging/nannasin/deep wounds will all stack. i think the things that many people will find underwhelming about poisons on a higher difficulty is that a lot of easy to make ones target fort (which, while not as annoyingly high as in poe1, still tend to be hard defenses) and there's a severe action economy to them in combat, coupled with a bug where you have to consciously disable AI [or be in stealth which implicitly disables AI] or your character will ignore your usage of potions and instead do whatever their autoattack or AI script dictates. on potd especially you need a lot of alchemy points to get favorable accuracy/damage/duration scaling on poisons, they've been hit so hard with the nerfbat. however, i find that Corrosive Soul Essence is a good all-purpose poison - extremely easy to make [spirit residue is real easy to come across] becomes super plentiful with BoW, does raw damage (less sensitive to needing lots of PL to penetrate enemy AR) and targets will, which you can easily debuff in a bajillion ways - a simple way is just to have your rogue use a club with bewildering blows [and clubs are +5 acc and are fast weapons]. (note: the wiki says it needs a mushroom too, but in my memory it only needs spirit residue and rune powder, which is why it's so easy to make. worth double-checking in game). if you apply it before ambushing an enemy with an attack (careful application makes noise), or if you apply it combat while still stealthed (and you get a -85% recovery bonus) you get rid of the action economy problems of trying to use poisons in combat, and dodge the buggy AI issues. other poisons can have their uses but are more niche or harder to make so i use them more sparingly, and hopefully with a morningstar debuff. edit: direct PL bonuses are a real good way to improve poisons - they get around the half-PL-per-alchemy penalty so effetively are worth double their value in alchemy points, and poisons do scale generously (all of damage, duration, PEN, accuracy) you can try weapons that are not axes but also have a dot. dagger -> true love's kiss, for example (and is slashing dmg). assassin's slippers are great for any stealth/ambush build. it's hard to get re-invised in fights, and assassin's slippers gives it to you for free. even just once in a fight can be huge.