thelee

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.

oo, yikes, I haven't heard/run across this before, but I can definitely believe that the interaction of spiritshift weapons and a prior summoned weapon is uh... not ideal. good to know for my own run, was going to juggle firebrand, spiritshift, and occasional uniques.

To paraphrase an old American quote: "Nobody ever got fired for picking Troubadour" I would virtually never pick a vanilla chanter. If any time one considers a vanilla chanter, get a Troubadour instead. The fact that pallegina, vatnir, and fassina come as generic chanters is a huge hit for them as party chanters unfortunately. (original quote: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", though nowadays they probably should)

An extra plus, in case it wasn't obvious, is that because chants happen automatically and have a fixed rate of progression (6s each, down to 3s with troubadour brisk recitation), chanters are spellcasters that are not nearly as significantly impacted by heavier armor, which gives you some equipment flexibility. Your invocation recoveries will be slower, but they make up a far smaller % of actions than a different spellcasting class's spells. If you wanted you could create a super melee tanky chanter and still be almost at full chanting effectiveness as one wearing robes. I agree that Deadfire chanters are probably one of the best bard implementations in an RPG, and I played a lot of IWD2 (IWD and IWD2 did both have great bard implementations... relative to the AD&D/3e source material)

a plug for my guide which definitely agrees paladin is a good healer: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/paladin If you want to amp up paladin heal capability, you can pick up kind wayfarers and you can spam flames of devotion to do aoe party heals while also doing some decent damage.

skald is great for that, but if you also want general diversity as well, bellower is a good choice. you don't get the cheaper offensive chants, but you also don't get more expensive non-offensive chants (which includes a chant or two that are also offensive support), and all your invocations are much more powerful (but you have to make sure to use invocations when you can). if you play on a higher difficulty, bellower can also do great for your dps because the bonus PL will help you penetrate enemy AR, which is more of a problem on PotD.

Does this change the stutter one gets when Mirror Image is cast?

IIRC you are not locked in at that point - you can still betray them, and you can side with one of the other factions - you might not be locked in until you actually use the Engolio de Espiers to summon the ghost ship. Unlike most of the other factions, the principi questline does not burning bridges with the other factions in the way huana, RDC, or VTC do.

what difficulty are you playing on? can you elaborate what feels "bad"? like... not enough damage, not enough to do, etc.?

I don't even think save and reload are critically necessary. They may be a more reliable way to trigger some underlying issue, but I'm going to refer back to my case where I was able to invoke some stack-ability just by zoning through some areas (no reloads at all). I wasn't able to figure out why, and at the time the other person I was talking to couldn't reproduce it. Maybe the pause/rest exploit in the process of doing that also triggers whatever underlying issue is occuring, and so bypasses save/reload. Who knows. edit: at the same time, i need to reiterate that save/reload is also not guaranteed to trigger it.

My main point is that the effect of "different types of buffs" stacking in different ways is not a workable hypothesis. E.G. it's not that some aspect of hylea's is able to stack because of the way it is set up, versus jayd's food, but something weird and underlying inconsistency how the game handles one of: save/loads, zone transitions, memory in the game engine, assets, etc, with regards to arbitrary rest/food bonuses. The rest of it we can chalk up to this being text on the internet and sometimes nuance of how we use words gets lost in the transmission. edit: while we're talking about personal experiences, rum and rymsjodda are very consistent for me in terms of not stacking. i have to juggle it pretty aggressively across many types of characters i play (with my theurge it meant making sure that if i have rum i consume deftness, if i have rymsjodda i consume coral snuff, rymsjodda with nature's bounty, etc.) if there's some inevitability that occurs, i don't run into it very much with that particular setup, and I pretty aggressively consult action speed/recovery time tooltips, especially when i mess up some combination of food/drug/potions (my mindset is pretty frequently a hopeful "maybe i was wrong about that" when i do that)

I'm going to confirm with a quick scan of Mohora Wraps that they are also classified as active, as are a bunch of other foods i accidentally dumped out due to a malformed regex. Re-quoting jayd edit: i don't know why my quote of jayd is so malformed, ah well

I mean outside of the "pause-before-you-rest" exploit to get an arbitrarily large number of rest bonuses

i'm requoting this: I and several other ppl actually tried this and could not come up with a consistent rule. It might even be non-deterministic! Or maybe in a long-running game with no or low rests (which would otherwise reset food/rest bonuses) stack-ability becomes inevitable because of some deep underlying bug. Sometimes when I could get it to stack, it persisted that way the entire session (easily redo-able), sometimes it did not (again, I have no idea why just zoning through some areas happened to work in one case). But please, barreling in with some categorical declarations of how something "always" worked which flies in the face of both tests and anecdotal experiences is not helpful.

I did read what you wrote - you're arguing that it comes down to the specific buff types (not true) and said I happened to test the ones that don't stack (if somehow the first was true, this is not true). it comes off as sheer gaslighting. In that Ultimate thread you seemed to be operating under the assumption that it wasn't the specific buff, but some interaction with save/loads that causes it to stack (which is exactly what I've been saying in this thread! and now in this thread somehow it's always been some completely other effect) and in fact I tested the precise buff you said worked (as did others, ocelloter, decadence, and i believe waski as well). And sometimes it did work! Sometimes it didn't. Speaking for myself, I could not figure out the mechanism that made it work, so I didn't rely on it - so when it did end up stacking later on in my run, it was just a fun bonus that made the run a bit easier.

Here's Hylea's Bounty in particular from the gamedata: https://pastebin.com/kk7864Qc note the two major lines: I'm happy for anyone to determine the cases in which resting bonuses can be made to trivially stack, consistently, outside of exploits.

what's extra frustrating is that going through the ultimate thread to see other people talking about seeing suppressed food bonuses versus not stacking, @Raven Darkholme is there themselves talking about the buggy mechanism by which you can get food/rest bonuses to stack with other bonuses (which later I and a couple people test out to try to clarify, and that's when I was able to get somethign to stack simply with zone transitions (no save/load), and both me and ocelettor failed to understand the exact mechanism by which a save/load can get a stack consistently) The viewpoints being expressed here is just historical revisionism compared to that. *headshake* The idea that I'm testing a category that doesn't stack is some maddening re-imagining of the past. Throughout all the various bits of testing I've done, among other things, I was testing something that you literally claimed as able to be stacked via a bug (and in situations I was able to get it stacked! and others, not. similar with others, including Decadence who themselves didn't rely on the mechanism for their own early ultimate run because their own tests couldn't produce a stack)