thelee

does it get more generous PL scaling? I know carnage gets +10% per PL instead of +5%, so perhaps it was an ability that missed the PL rebalancing or deliberately has more generous damage scaling. the order of operations might also be generous. in your screenshot you have +3 PL based on your acc/pen bonuses; you also have 15 might at least (from devotions of the faithful). 120 * 1.3 * 1.15 => 179, and then i could see troll being further than just at near death to get around 160+

would it be a terrible idea to just limit the spells that can be regenerated to 1-3 ? it is good, but not necessarily buh-roken for martial classes, and in past discussions it seems to me that hte major problem is being able to get like a tier 9 spell back every 6 seconds, which would be roughly equivalent to 4 ticks or so for a martial class (in terms of how abilities get costed). plus, the more abusable caster effects are higher up (salvation of time, petrify/paralyze effects).

wow the whole gang is back together again

Problem with that spreadsheet is that it doesn't appear to really highlight when the breakpoints are important. (Reminding me of the joke about the statistician who drowned while trying to cross a river that was on average only 3 feet/1 meter deep.) I only have an intuitive sense based on experience: Intimidate is extremely important for one armor (extra deflection) and you need like 20+ for a non-violent resolution to pre-porokoa SSS. You also need high metaphysics (and possibly arcana?) to solve the three beings the most "correctly." Metaphysics is also useful for several items. Religion is somewhat important depending on items (off the top of my head, a great sword, a bow, xoti's sickle, the fire flail) but is otherwise mostly flavor. History is very important if you want to maximize the cloak that gives you +all non-deflection defenses, but is very weak flavor everywhere else Survival is important for many world map encounters, but I don't think you need more than 10 or so. IIRC Survival/Alchemy on the scale of 10-15 is needed to have a peaceful resolution with the fungi in FS. Athletics is notably useful for that island with the bridge crossing, though honestly sometimes I create a sacrifical character. Diplomacy is useful, but if you have ~10 that solves most of the places where you can use it help with quest resolution. (I don't know what the 17 check is in that spreadsheet, sorry.) I'm not sure the high Bluff checks actually help with quest resolution. This is sort of the problem - sometimes there's no alternate outcomes or a redundant alternative outcome so you just get some extremely difficult-to-hit fluff. At least in Fallout: New Vegas you'd get experience for succeeding at difficult but irrelevant checks. Insight, Streetwise have little to no value to me. edit: i did some research for SSS and FS breakpoints as part of my ultimate run planning but I honestly can't find them anywhere. If I was more motivated I'd dig through the ultimate thread or go through my videos, but eh...

ironically despite my support of priests/chanters i've only done a celebrant fully once, and it was more of a tanky/summon build. (i find it's very hard to satisfyingly mesh them because there's so much party-role overlap) my most recent run i was doing vatnir as a celebrant, but got bored with mainchar-ing a fury and restarted with a beastmaster. but i did enjoy vatnir as a celebrant way more than other possible priest-chanter combos because vatnir's subclass is so unique. nothing terribly exciting, but what i had going: long night's chant + ben fidel's neck was exposed => much better priest-side spell casting (lots of fortitude targeting from vatnir's bonus spells) their companion plus champion's boon => much better PEN and damage for priest-side spellcasting (both for redundancy since a stun/daze will wipe it out). their companion will also let you interrupt on hits, though it wasn't a focus the shield cracks + freezing pillar => some partial synergy with the damage from freezing pillar extending the shield cracks, though this wasn't the strongest synergy. eventually i was planning on mixing in mercy and kindness to enhance spot heals. #1 was more effective than i thought - vatnir ended up doing quite a bit of damage despite his short time in my party. it also helped that i picked up his spiritual weapon and would use that in conjunction with shield cracks (if i had planned it better i would've picked up aefyllath); dual-wielded spiritual axes is pretty slick (+25% lash for being an npc, but very nice with the bleeding wounds modal; the auto-scale to superb and legendary at mid/high levels is very nice). sasha's is always an easy way to enhance any chanter setup like dgray62 suggests, though my eventual plan was to empower priest spells so the synergy wasn't there. he was definitely going to be a weyc's build instead.

there's some items that give you dexterity resistance. you could equip one of them so you're merely immobilized when proccing reforge the flesh. then you can just repeatedly re-equip the item to cheese it down to nothing at all.

oh lol i didn't even know about this interaction. i guess i can finally make use of that +1 might/resolve per party member knock out accessory.

oh yeah, this is great. it used to be a lot better before they broke the chant somewhere along the way between 4.0 -> 5.0 (the skeleton no longer scales with level). before, a lone troubadour could probably attrition out any fight in the game. now, you can't quite do that, but the skeletons help flank, and every spell or melee hit that takes out a skeleton is a wasted enemy action, and ironically because of their low defenses/health now they tend to be extra-favored for targeting. i wonder if it would be extremely effective on turn-based mode: the action economy is so much more constrained so having enemies waste it on garbage that you resummon for free 2x every turn sounds neat.

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.