thelee

iirc the way the resistance chants work this is not quite true. normally this is true because resistances don't stack, but the way the resistance chants work is that they are checked the moment they are applied and not just when an affliction tries to happen. this means that every time a resistance chance applies, it re-downgrades all existing afflictions, even if all it's doing is refreshing its own buff or applying on a character that already has resistance somehow. so e.g. if you have a wild orlan buffed with one dozen and gets hit with frightened, it'll downgrade to shakened (as expected, no stacking). if that same wild orlan doesn't have one dozen and gets hit with frightened, it'll downgrade to shakened (again, as expected). however, in either case, once one dozen refreshes, that shakened gets downgraded to nothing at all, even though theoretically a wild orlan shouldn't benefit at all. (edit: it's been a while on me having this specific interaction active [i prefer hearth orlans] so i might be wrong on this, and i don't have a party handy that can easily test this. but i am pretty confident on my memory of this) a troubadour can make really meaty resistance chants with brisk recitation; the pulse every 3s (instead of every 6s) means you can pretty much cleanse your entire party of any affliction rapidly.

One final thing I forgot about ordering chants. My play style means that in the opening moments of combat I’m staying back and letting enemies approach while I buff or keep parts of my party hidden. So I don’t put offensive chants first and favor defensive chants first in my all-purpose songs. It might not seem like it matters a lot but on PotD things can snowball and spiral out of control from the opening moments of a fight, so just having the right first chant can be relevant.

is "reached a limit" code for "this is too much of a money sink?"

i have to add that over time i've grown really fond of the chanter in deadfire (i've started bringing one along in some shape or from pretty regularly). i used to stan for priests back in the day and while i'm still pretty big on priests, i think chanters just have a lot of interesting potential especially with how you can complement your party in different ways, and there are enough oddball chants and invocations to give you a lot of fun possibilities for how to take your character. for a psion/troubadour you might want to give extra consideration to "thick grew their tongues" and "long night's" chants. thick will make sure enemies will always be vulnerable to your soul whip interrupts, and long night will soften enemies up for the cipher's fortitude powers, of which the cipher has a lot and sometimes they are very hard hitting (like disintegrate or soul ignition) edit: oops forgot to add that for a troubadour in particular, brisk recitation + the damage shield chant or the skeleton chant are aces. a troubadour with the damage shield chant and brisk recitation can carry a party against Hauane O Whe, for example.

i always do a lot of ahead-planning with chanters, because it's easy to go "bad" on the chants IMO. if you have too many it's hard to make good use of them all. chant mechanics are also significantly different from poe1, just as a reminder. (everything is a flat 6s on, 3s linger [except for troubadour stuff], whereas in poe1 it varied based on character level and chant level) to your questions: i love all the resistance chants. in order of usefulness, i would go "one dozen" (resolve/con resistance), "fampyr's gaze" (int/perception resistance), and then "hit the deck" (might/dex). one dozen because i always do megabosses so a chanter is an easy way to fight auranic, plus i find frightened and sickened/weakened awful common for how annoying they are. int/perception because charm/dominate is super annoying in fights where it has, and perception resistance is super useful especially in fights where enemies have persistent distraction. because they're so niche, it helps avoid the "too many chants" problem because i create one or two songs that just focus on the resistance chants and switch to them only if needed. i always start with the one dozen chant in any "resistance" song, because especially when sickened/weakened/enfeebled kick in i want to dispel it asap so i can heal. literally every chanter i ever have these days (and in like the past 500-600 hours of gameplay) picks up one dozen, that's how much i love having it around. really punches above its weight for being just a tier-two chant. i used to love thick grew their tongue a lot in the earlier days, but i have a lot more ways to deal with concentration and am more deliberate about interrupts so it's a little bit less important. everything else is more situational on what my party/chanter are like and what my design goal is. i'd say ancient memory is a pretty safe choice for all setups because of its great utility. sometimes ordering can help, especially when you consider that when you use an invocation or you switch songs you immediately jump back to your first chant, so effects that can double up or benefit from being refreshed faster or are offensive and need attack rolls so having multiple checks are good. like the skeleton summoning chant, or the damage shield chant, or the anti-concentration chant. it might not sounds like it comes up a lot, but in practice with the most obvious indication (the skeleton summoning chant) i would end up with a lot of extra skeletons just from having it as the first song. there are also a couple minor synergies, like having mercy mercy (+50% heal) or one dozen before an ancient memory chant, to boost the healing effectiveness. in general though i would argue against having more than three songs in a chant. the math changes a bit with a troubadour's better linger (up to four maybe), but typically beyond three you're not really adding more power and you're just adding more variability: with any choice in a game, there's always a "best" choice, a "second best" choice, etc. when you fill up chants in a song, what you're really doing is selecting a "best" chant, a "second best" chant, etc. after a certain point, each additional chant you add to a song lowers the average quality of that song. ideally you don't exceed two chants in a song, because with proper intellect you have 100% uptime on your two best chants. but in practice i find it a worthwhile to add a third to add a little bit more flexibility (especially if it's adding something like ancient memory where even a little goes a long way) even at the cost of uptime of your other arguably better chants. this is different than in poe1 where the different chant durations and the reduced active chant time as you level up means there's some interesting math and strategizing about mixing in shorter chants with longer chants that have huge linger.

i didn't see anything in the community patch notes about it, so just for good measure i quickly loaded up my fury save and added some xp (hope work doesn't mind ) here are the reciepts:

a few weeks ago, first for some preliminary research to plan out my fury via a level 19 adventurer that i hired--this is when i first discovered it and i crossed out those spells from my character plan in my notebook--and then again playing the character for real as a mainchar. i can double-check again, but i doubt anything has changed. do you have any mods? i don't use any mods. but i think one of the big bug fixes/tweaks of either the community patch or something similar floating around here in the forums is keyword-fixing, and fury + those spells would definitely be impacted by it.

it is blocked. i was planning out a fury and those healing-style spells (cleansing wind, garden of life, nature's bounty) cannot be selected by a fury, despite lacking the appropriate keyword.

yeah, minor avatar is pretty good, but it comes so late for a multiclass, that i'm not sure it's quite worth building around.

lol i completely forgot about this most obvious synergy

also, to OP's thread, I'm rolling a shifter/stalker beastmaster right now. it's still early days, but generous boar form DoT plus high ranger accuracy (will also help w/ spellcasting against megabosses where shift form is less useful due to finite duration), plus +1 AR and +5 Deflection from being near pet is promising. A bear form will have stupidly high AR by end-game (better than mythic plate, with no recovery penalty), stag form will have good defenses [especially if I pick up Beast's Claw later on], and of course boar form will just eat up everything else with stupid high accuracy. plus there's some misc synergy - shifter gets a lot of DoT spells for free, which goes well with predator's sense in the ranger tree. ranger has good utility effects that you can use while shifted (like evasive roll). it might not be as stupidly high DPS as a helwalker/shifter or streetfighter/shifter, but it seems like it has good promise.

I recently discovered that WF is kinda buggy somehow. I end up getting way more than +4 secs per kill. I think I pinged @Elric Galad if he could look into it as part of his mechanics deep dives/modding, don't know if he ever got around to it. It was remarkable enough that I changed my recommendation about it in my guide, for single-class it's a great way to extend your duration since it's pretty hard to do so otherwise (versus a multi-class). The extra aoe becomes a nice cherry on the top at that point. edit: quoting an excerpt from my guide "Despite the wording, kills only extend the spirishift duration, not any beneficial effect. However, this duration extension is quite buggy in your favor: while the first kill only gets you the 4s as expected, the duration extension dramatically increases the more kills you get. In a simple test, I was getting up to an additional minute from a kill. This can be obviously extremely powerful effect for spiritshift-heavy builds, since even for a shifter it is otherwise quite hard to get a long spiritshift duration." this same bug might affect similar other abilities (like the chanter might/con/resolve buff invocation upgrade)

is this true? i think the aoe is automatic. some effects require a hit (carnage), or crit (some weapons), but i've never seen an aoe that actually relies on actual damage to trigger.

I ran a couple clerics (fighter/berath, fighter/wael) and have run a couple zealots (two streetfighter/waels, assassin/skaen), a templar (kind wayfarer/eothas), a shaman (corpse-eater/skaen) and frankly i think the melee priest + buff/debuff approach is a very solid one. if you're worried about repetitive casting or tedium, you can set up AI scripts to automate the most important buffs. of course, the priest deity really helps a lot. wael and skaen work particularly well for meleeing, in case you didn't notice a pattern in my list. edit: deadfire is not as strict about various classes going "out of role" since much of the melee capability for traditional melee class comes in their passives that you have to actively pick as opposed to inherent, automatic gains. I say this because i've also done a single-class Skaen that was also a melee-focused build, and it worked fine enough; I just had to build it and play it more of like a melee class. It wouldn't output as much damage or survive as much as a well-built fighter or rogue, but all the various spells added a lot of versatility

not as high, but you can still get a bit. there's just a lot of ways to boost fire and/or evocation-keyworded spells, and less so for other keywords. prestige (+1), the special lance or weyc's wand (+3), stone of power (+1), plus empower point (+5) would get you +10 to any one spell for any caster. you could get even higher with a nature godlike with a body inspiration, which gives an additional +1 to any build. also, special just for fire keywords is the ring of focused flame, which gives you +10 acc. though if you're just interested in maxing out fire damage, a single-class priest isn't the way to go. i put together something here; it has less overall PL bonuses, but more overall damage because you can get a lot more from multiclassing than you can from a few more +PLs:

have you considered creating a sacrificial game, enabling console commands, giving yourself the item, and exporting that? you could then import that character into your normal game without having had to have befouled your "real" game with cheaty console commands.

it's for everyone. magnetic overdrive can be pretty brutal. (example: magnetic overdrive sucks in some people, your squishies get hit by the fire explosion, then they get engaged, and then dorudugan turns around and whacks them out.) also, i'm much better at avoiding getting knocked out with grog than avoiding engagement with my entire party. in some party setups, i can get better dps with additional melee folks (e.g. reaping knives or animancer's saber) and grog helps protect them, too.

lol yeah if dorudugan had like half the health it would be less of an ordeal. dorudugan pretty much demands cheese for anyone whose time has any worth

xbows and arbalest proficiency are your friend. if beating it without disintegrate, once you get past HoW's first form, the deflection on the oozes is low enough that it's pretty easy to hit/graze at near 100% with only minor metagaming. (and in the first form you save a lot of stress with periodic interrupts even with HoW's higher defenses) You have to micromanage a bit to make sure you're properly interrupting the oozes, but HoW can be pretty flexible in how you take it.

there are some ways to kill dorudugan legit (i assume means no brilliant shenanigans). here's a few (i've done the first two myself) - - for any party, you can just use Grog and lots of scepters (plus eccea's* and essence). Grog means your tank can run out of melee attack/cleave range without getting hit (dorudugan will miss with "out of range"). Do that for half an hour. You'll need some sources of immune to push/pull or withdrawal or invisibility to avoid dorudugan's magnetic overdrive for squishier characters (since you can't afford a knockout) - a priest or some potions of refuge and scrolls of withdrawal are good. - for a party with a sc chanter, use the dragon summon to tank dorudugan and everyone else uses scepters (plus eccea's* and essence). The dragon is immune to fire and is so big your party can just hide behind him and the dragon will body-block and prevent your characters from being sucked in by magnetic overdrive. The dragon has *sooooo* much health that you can just re-summon him and get 100% uptime. - a long time ago, someone stacked enough AR to straight-up face tank dorudugan. you'd need 21 crush AR on potd to get dorudugan to -75% pen. off the top of my head, i'm not quite sure how they did that though i think mythic brigandine plus several stacks of potions of spirit shield plus paladin stoic shield and inspired defense would get you quite a bit (14 + 3 + 3 + 1 => 20). a stalker/paladin or an unbroken/paladin and/or ngati's girdle and/or the maker's own power for an additional +1. best would probably be stalker/paladin or unbroken/paladin** so that you can leave belt slot open for using undying burden (increasing weapon damage reduction as health lost, typically -10% to -20% at "safe" health levels); plus refusal on claim/refusal would get you further damage reduction (-10%). the plus side to this approach is that you can always just hire this hireling just for dorudugan (though they'd be at level 19 unless you saved some XP for them before dorudugan). * eccea's enchanted to legendary and upgraded with elemental shot: frost and fractured bullet, wielded single-weapon style with weapon modal and imbued ammunition active is A+ dorudugan weapon. edit - ** now that i'm thinking about it more, the person might have done it not-on-potd, before veteran got buffed to also given enemies +1 AR. I still think it's do-able in a post-5.0 world with this approach. a stalker/paladin could use beast's claw on vessels beforehand to get +20 all defenses to vessels (in addition to the +5 stalker deflection, up to +15 deep faith) as well as a tough medium shield with the shield modal on (since IIRC dorudugan's attacks count as weapons so you have a 30% resist chance taht way). lethandria's devotion is probably ideal because of the regen. (though with sufficient defenses, a large shield yields superior returns than 30% resist so maybe cadhu scalth or bronlar's phalanx)

ah, well depending on how much metagaming you're including, i would say priest is king support character. basically any scenario in which you can generate brilliant, priest has salvation of time otherwise, for 90% of fights, i would say priest and priest variants are still king support character even though some bits of the priest are nerfed from poe1. all those mass party buffs at will are reeeeal handy, even the tier one spells are still effective late game when it means trying to clear up some afflictions. for the remaining of 10% of fights, chanter and chanter variants pull ahead because of their resource regen and recurring chants (a properly geared up herald pulls ahead faster).

SC Lifegiver by far, imo, is the best overall healer. However, to mjo2138's point about the best defense being a good offense, in my experience, if you go too all-in on healing with an SC lifegiver (or similar other classes), your offense will be so low that you'll end up having to do more healing than than you would have with a more normal setup, squandering some of the advantage. Fortunately for both the SC chanter and SC lifegiver, they have a bunch of other stuff so you can avoid this trap pretty easily (for lifegiver they get all their heals as free spells, so it becomes even easier to avoid this trap; edit - just make sure to do some offense instead of just holding your spells back to heal).

it's best not to think of megabosses as normal fights, but puzzles to be solved. if you go in using all of your standard tricks, you are pretty much going to be roflstomped into the ground. even with all mythic gear somehow. there's probably a lot of resources out there, but rather than regurgitate myself or other people, you might want to take a read through this: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/megabosses the good news is that 3/4 megabosses are very possible with a wide variety of character builds and party setups (sigilmaster auranic is pretty rigid in how you take the fight imo). Having someone with regenerating resources as boeroer suggests is very good, but you can also sub in a brilliant inspiration source somewhere. (loooong time ago i did the fights without resource regeneration and it frankly isn't worth the time versus having a chanter, cipher, monk, blood mage, and/or a source of brilliant)

well, that's the way it always is with any incremental change. it's not going to overpoweringly be obvious, but it will matter over the long term. same with with a random +1 PL here and there, or a +1 stat here and there, each individual won't be blindingly obvious, but will incrementally make fights easier, until you have enough of them and *then* it becomes obvious. on POTD though you might notice 1 PL a lot more, because -1 PL might be *just* enough to make you miss full penetration and get a -25% damage penalty, or worse, go from -50% penalty (sucks but you can try to knuckle through it) to -75% penalty (basically not worth doing, a further halving of your damage from -50%)

in practice, i think this is more of an issue for wael (where you either waste its buff or suboptimally target enemiesjust to get a sort of mediocre buff). the +15 all defenses is good enough that i don't mind giving up a few juicy enemy targets to protect my party a bit.