thelee

sorry i don't have much experience with turn-based. i think the general consensus is that dex is not very important, and for most casters it might be optimal to tank it (so that you go after everyone else and don't face any risk of interrupt)

they both accomplish the same core effect - healing over time. moonlight, being a higher tier, is generally more powerful across the board (including in terms of total healing done). that being said, some considerations: maybe you have some other important spells at tier two or tier four. if that's the case, you would want to use the heal in the other tier, so that you reserve your casts for those other important spells if you can. moonwell's defense bonus is nice (being an +all defense bonus, it stacks with specific defense bonuses like illusion magic) and the heal overall has a larger area of effect moonwell heal-over-time counts as a water effect and so will provide you protection from a fire effect, or cancel an ongoing fire effect sometimes this is what you want, but sometimes this is not what you want (you'd rather have the healing) at which point moon's light is a better choice the protection from fire is absolute - it guarantees you one "counterspell" from any fire-keyworded ability. For example, Dorudugan is a megaboss that has a special fire attack that can do literally hundreds of damage. If all else fails, you can cast Moonwell on everyone and survive one blast. at the same time, if you're hit with an extremely minor fire effect (like a tick from Wall of Fire or a Combusting Wounds debuff) moonwell will absolutely be a loser spell because you'll take like 3 damage and then that'll cancel the many tens of healing and defense buff you were going to get. moon light casts faster, which means you might be able to get it off more successfully when enemies are using interrupt effects

you still need to be able to generate that much focus over a fight, though, right? or are you talking about having so many stacks of the soul blade effect that your starting focus is already gigantic?

maybe the way beckoner and skald are treated for the phrase adjustments are handled differently? I was about to post my understanding, but then I just realized that my experience between my skald and beckoner are different, much like you. i always was one phrase short of my best summon as beckoner, but with skald i have enough phrases to start off with my most expensive non-offensive invocation (for me it's the revive effect, which is mostly just a decoy to increase my max phrases to 5) edit: i'm 90% sure that troubadour is like beckoner - always one phrase shy of max of my max in my recollection. maybe skald i just buggy compared to the otners?

somehow i missed this when first posted. looks real neat and flavorfull! excellent discovery here

if i'm understanding correctly, what you're talking about is your limited per-encounter casting resources (the "plant point.") you are correct in that in every fight you have to decide how to use your casts, and there's no normal way to get it back outside of self-empower. most of hte time though, you will not need to cast every single heal spell you have (especially mid-late game); your healing is so powerful that if you are proactive, you shouldn't need to use them all in most situations. there should be plenty of space to do offense and defense. the problem is when all you do is cast heals, even unnecessarily, or don't even pick up offensive abilities.

i would also add there's a factor here that a lot of us here are veterans of the game and so there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to multiclassing (literally 55 options before you even consider subclasses), so you're going to get over-exposed to discussion about multiclassing vs single-classing, and you shouldn't take that as an indication that single-classing is worse than multiclassing or anything.

if you thought there were some hard fights in early veteran, PotD would take you for a wild ride. Forum consensus is that PotD gorecci street and digsite are hardest fights in the game. I would only recommend taking PotD if you are comfortable relaoding a lot and bashing your head against a metaphorical wall. Even with huuuuge hours under my belt, I still occasionally have fights in PotD that are brutal, exhausting, and still result in failure after like 20 minutes of tedious pausing/unpausing. For some, the fun is in the challenge it can offer, and for veterans of the genre it might be the only difficulty that provides a challenge, but it's not for everyone.

intellect by far. for a lifegiver, much of your heals are in the form of heal-over-time effects, which means pound-for-pound intellect gives you a better increase in healing (+5% duration per point) than might (+3% per point). [technically, yes, there's a time-discount factor to consider that makes the intellect less good than the +5% duration suggests, but intellect also increases AoE, which is super important for a couple of the druid's heals because of the lack of flexibility you have for aiming them] dexterity next. all the heals in the world don't matter if you can't cast them fast enough to save someone. after that i would suggest might. on higher difficulties i recommend con as well. on lower difficulties resolve instead. perception is pretty low priority for a healer, but i wouldn't go so far as to dump it (see endnote). i would easily suggest maxing intellect; everything else you can fudge a bit, something like 12 might/13 con/15 dex/9 perception/18 intellect/10 resolve is what i might personally do, before racial and background bonuses. cat form is my favorite because you get cat flurry, which for a short while gives you a massive +33% action speed bonus. since you'll mainly be spiritshifting to get extra oomph out of your heals, the +33% really helps you get off your heals faster for cases of emergency. as runner up i suggest bear or boar since both have survivability elements (bear has extra armor, boar has self-healing). endnote: important not to completely neglect offense. lifegiver gets a lot of great heals, but i would still make sure you are able to do some offense - at the end of the day, if you spend all your resources healing, you might actually end up being less effective than a build that heals some but also does some attacking. sometimes the best defense is a good offense. this is why i don't recommend dumping perception, so you are still able to occasionally hit enemies with spells and attacks. (though if your perception is lowered, you can also invest in explosives and arcana to supplement your offense that way, since both of those ignore your perception stat)

no? has this been timed? I assumed it was just a tooltip error

i might be late to the party here, but have you considered a fighter (or devoted)/priest of berath? I ran this specific build and it was quite fun. if you RP the berath part right, you'll have a spiritual weapon that is a legendary greatsword with a +31% corrode lash, which is immensely hard to beat with non-spiritual weapons (because lashes are multiplicative). Maybe voidwheel has the best chance of being competitive, because it too come with a lash and can proc a pretty powerful effect. You also get spells that you can use to be more "DK"-like (i'm unfamiliar with the wow version having stopped at burning crusade, but thinking of the WC3 version). The fighter part helps with action economy (mob stance, armored grace) and spell casting (tactical barrage). You can summon a helper friend at high levels and spread disease (spreading plague) and you have a backup disease weapon if you can't reach the enemy (a tight doorway or something) via rot skulls. in endgame i equipped blackened plate with the AR and health sapping auras, had both a pet that reduced armor penalty, and with armored grace, making me both very tanky and also relatively speedy.

like some others here i mostly use antidotes early on (xaurip skirmishers and spiders are an absolute pain if they land a paralyze, dank spores with dominate) and then my use of them goes down significantly until around SSS (a few bad fights) and belranga. just to clear up some confusion - the sporelings have something called "dominating spores" or some such that can be cured/prevented by antidote. this doesn't actually dominate. it reduces your will, per stack. Dank Spores and other some such can just dominate/charm straight-up, but this can also be prevented with antidote. I used to think the former had something to do with the latter, but really the former just softens you up so that characters with lots of the former are more likely to get hit hard by the latter. there's also an incentive to use antidote pre-emptively (e.g. before you get poisoned). The game appears to treat the poison immunity of being buffed with antidote and the poison-cancellation of consuming antidote very differently. So in fights where you expect poison to get tossed around (fungus, xaurips, spiders, some SSS challenges, belranga) periodic antidote usage can give you complete immunity to certain effects, whereas taking antidote after the fact will only clear the specific effect that can be countered by antidote. (My go to example is Plague of Insects; if you use antidote before a naga or delemgan casts it, you are completely immune. If you use it after its already hit you, it only clears the sickened affliction, but does not get rid of the DoT)

alas, no. Barring Death's Door (another priest spell) can, but reviving exhortation appears to be like the one type of damage that can actually get past Withdraw. edit: i still sometimes find it worthwhile to use withdraw, because it heals them and gives them protection taht on a party member with enough max health it still helps them avoid getting knocked out. this only tends to be worthwhile if i have berath's challenge (knockout = permadeath) and lack of revives.

yeah, you basically become an immense healing machine since you basically can heal almost as much as a priest restore, except you can spam it many times in a fight, all while also doing damage (and buffing yourself or party members, depending on upgrade). it's also pretty generous - if the enemy dies from the first attack of the two weapons, your second attack is "saved" (instead of wasted) so that when you attack someone else, you still get the healing from it.

some chants are great just from being applied, in addition to (or even regardless of) their duration. the resistance chants are like this - every time they are applied, they immediately resist down effects that already exist. with brisk recitation, 6s is all you need to clear away all of a target affliction (12s for non-troub). similarly, "thick grew their tongues" is less important the duration, but the initial application on an enemy immediately clears all concentration. on tough baddies you want to interrupt, getting 2x the concentration-clearing attempts in the same time is great. The damage shield chant only regenerates its shield upon reapplication - once its depleted, the hypothetical remaining duration doesn't do anything. With Brisk Recitation, every 3s, you get a 10pt shield every 3s. This can be significantly more effective than a typical 6s+linger. (I use the example of Hauane O Whe where a troubadour using just this chant can carry the entire party because it lets you completely ignore a duration-less raw damage lash that the megaboss can create that does slightly less than 10 damage every 3s.) The chant that summons skeletons doesn't actually use normal chant/linger mechanics. The summoned skeletons have a base duration of 10s + intellect bonuses. A troubadour can summon a cannon fodder army with no downside here, since the "linger" is not actually a thing. edit: there's also some niche cases as well. I have a build that relies on Energized to interrupt enemies en masse. I picked a Skald for that build, but also suggested a Troubadour since a Troubadour with an offensive chant on Brisk Recitation will get an interrupt chance every 3s versus every 6 for a skald. edit2 - oops ninja'ed by boeroer on this point

keep in mind that the bellower chant boost is a temporary buff that is triggered when you start an invocation, versus empower which is like attached to the ability you empower for its entire length. most of the time it doesn't matter, but for eld nary's invocation (the bouncing tornado) the ability is way too slow to get mileage out of the bellower boost and an empower. but for stuff like summons (which only check PL at creation) or fast effects like revenge or paralyze, it's fine. (though it does mean with poor intellect and poor dex, you could actualy run out of the bellower's PL buff before a slow invocation is even cast) if you don't care about resting a lot, the upgrade that refreshes all your phrases is a beast with bellower, since you can start off with a full-phrase invocation, work your way up to a revenge that you empower (only 3 phrases and you get +8 PL to it, plus empower passive boosts) to get you up to full blast with another full-phrase invocation. if you also have least unstable coil you can really go full-hog, since that empowered revenge will all but surely give you a brilliant inspiration as well since each bolt is considered a separate trigger for least unstable coil.

a big thing is that a bellower uses up all their phrases per invocation. so there's still a "downside" depending on how you define it. (edit: darn, ninja-ed by boeroer) whereas i would consider the troubadour virtually downside free due to how much versatility it has. also important to note that invocations aren't the end-all, be-all. troubadour is strong because you can do some insane things with 3s chants (in addition to supercharging your invocation rate). edit: i never really considered the -50% chant radius that big of a downside since you can work with the positioning a bit more carefully. in the bellower vs troubadour competition it really does just boil down to how much swiss-army-knife utility a troubadour has, which is much more valuable when you don't have companions. don't get me wrong, i really like bellower, but for solo the troubadour really does shine.

what's your paladin type? if you are kind wayfarers, then dual-wielding weapons are great. a flail like ball and chain is handy (chain breaker is great). if you are 2h style, then a great sword like twin eels with a high religion skill can you give some aoe heal upon a kill, in addition to a once/rest self-revive

spreading plague actually does wander quite a bit, but the catch is that it wanders very slowly. so there's quite a bit of a delay between each bounce. i do like it though - in large, drawn-out fights you can end up covering the entire battlefield. yeah, wizards are king at resolve afflictions in this respect. it's more useful if you're using e.g. fassina (who doesn't have access to illusion magic). i hate to disappoint, but the spell is niche enough that it might disappoint. The key thing is that the duration is so short, and fights where just the more standard -2/-1 AR effects on top of +2 weapon modals isn't enough to penetrate, the enemy tends to have so much health that you need a lot of casts to get good mileage out of it, and multiclasses aren't great for that (they only get 1 cast).

the only thing i can suggest is to study your veteran playstyle and see what you might be doing wrong. e.g. are you paying attention to armor and penetration? are you making good use of player abilities (pausing a lot) and not just AI? are you trying out tactics (e.g. trying to draw enemies away from each other to separtate the fight)? there are other areas in the digsite you can try to explore where you can get your characters to level 4 (you also need to have done all the quests in port maje). there's a bit of a step change, so veteran will feel very different from classic. it's a good sign! if you're able to work your way through the digsite (which is a pretty hard fight--pretty much one of the hardest in the game, especially on PotD because of how low level you are) you might develop the right know-how to do the rest of veteran at a satisfying level of difficulty.

i think you might be mistaking it for something else; charge gives you bonus movement speed, and then bonus evasion. yeah the lack of armor stacking really is lame once you plan out your party a bit because you can easily find several ways to get more than +1 as an active bonus. that being said, the heal does stack with ancient memory. HoTs and DoTs all stack, so long as they are different spell or ability names. (Some HoTs and DoTs even stack with themselves, with deranged outcomes.) Honestly that's the best part of the endurance aura - upgrading it for the persistent, free, eternal heal. it might be worth trying a wael priest for like the intro area just to see how it feels, since it seems like you are quite partial to a goldpact paladin. you get Arcane Veil right at the start, so you can already get a preview for what it is. Wael works really well with martial classes for the type of gameplay you talk about in the first post because of how many evasive spells they get for free, and in ways that are sometimes more advantageous than a true wizard. And then you can periodically mix in buffs or debuffs as opportunities allow (and champion's boon and minor avatar at the top is real nice for a melee-oriented build). I've probably used the wael subclass more than any other subclass in the game, in a wide array of builds. Skaen is also extremely versatile and one of the bonus spells is straight up weapon-based (Finishing Blow), but alas you don't really get to get a feel for it until you at least unlock their second-tier spells (for Escape). gonna plug my guide a bit in case it helps understand some of the aspects of the paladin or priest: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/paladin and https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/priest

Yeah, I played Templar, but most of my berath experiences are with fighter (Cleric), for the simple reason that--what you're experiencing--is that the action economy kinda sucks with a paladin, and there's some unsynergistic overlap between paladin and priest (for similar reasons I found it very hard to find a satisfying chanter/priest build). At least with a fighter, you get instant buffs (disciplined barrage/strikes line of skills, vigorous defense), attacks that go with your normal attacks (e.g. mule kick), and you also get straight-up action economy boosts (armored grace and mob stance), whereas you don't get much of that with paladin. And even then it felt like sometimes I had too much to do that I wasn't getting many weapon hits out of it (but it didn't always need to be; morning star debuff mule kick every once and a while to make sure my fort-targeting spells land was fine). The templar I ended up going with was actually Eothas + Kind Wayfarers. It's still not truly synergistic, but it "felt" a lot better as an all-purpose healer/defensive character; Kind Wayfarers can dual-wield and turn lay on hands into a supreme area heal; combine that with priest defensiveness and I don't have to worry about my lame offensive output and instead act as a heal-monkey/buffer. Honestly, for a more optimal offensive paladin setup I would have gone with Skaen or Wael as priests; they fit much better with your desired offensive role and they have far fewer action economy issues due to so many of their bonus spells being instant and/or no recovery. I would also boost your dexterity as reasonably as high it can go; the less time you spend casting, the more time you have to attack (and you can also easily buff other non-dex stats as a priest). Unfortunately I'm not sure I have great ideas to tweak your existing build to what you want outside of rebooting. I have a few that can help adjust and maybe that'll help enough: One is to go armor-light (light or cloth) if you aren't already. This will speed you up versus trying to tank attacks with heavy armor. the goldpact ability will still give you a bit of survivability; and then priest spells become more about aiding your survivability and maybe you won't feel like you're casting buffs all the time instead of being a damage-dealer. Another is to just focus on one or two buffs and put the rest into more niche abilities so that they're still useful but you're not wasting all your time using them instead of your favorite whacking activity (devotions is a great candidate for a main buff. stuff like champion's boon, resurrection, or revive the fallen are extremely powerful to have in you pocket so won't feel like a "waste" if you're not using them in every fight). pay attention to the specific name for the buffs. Active generic accuracy buffs won't stack with zealous focus. Active generic +AR buffs won't stack with Endurance. Unfortunately in either case it means some redundancy with priest buffs (devotions grants +10 generic accuracy so will override zealous focus; litany for the body will provide hardy (+2 AR) which will override zealous endurance; even goldpact knight bonus will override zealous endurance instead of stacking). Active boosts to perception will stack with zealous focus, because even though the net effect is still an accuracy boost, perception is a different "type" of buff. All hit->crit and similar effects operate differently; every single one will be applicable, but they are each checked independently (so unlike everywhere else in the game, they stack multiplicatively; e.g. a 10% hit to crit plus upgraded zealous focus will equal (1 - .9 * .95) = 14.5% hit->crit instead of (10% + 5%) = 15%. Anyway, this is part of why I like Exalted/Zealous Charge for aura - stride and the hit downgrade effects are really hard to clash in terms of stacking and can be extremely useful.

Really? What happens?

if you have wildstrike, is that a lash that is attached to the weapon? or like the boar dot, something granted by the spiritshift?

All the mage multiclasses are eminently doable with blood mage. Fighter (as tactician) is doable, thought it may involve your fair share of cheese depending on your setup. (Fighter/Cipher less so since they can flank everyone with abilities). I think any chanter option revolves around summons. My best reckoning is that rogue/mage is probably the most powerful - you get escape options and synergy with invisibility and various wizard spells, and if all else fails you can take down some of the hardest foes with just one Gouging Strike iirc (you may need berath's challenge on, i forget); probably assassin/blood mage.