thelee

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.

i think on balance you should probably go 2h. there are some good 2h weapons that will benefit bloodmage casting (e.g. chromoprismatic staff or shea's war staff). a barbarian also really wants morningstar, because the weapon modal will lower fortitude defenses by a lot, and combined with brute force means loooots of hits and crits; lower fort will also boost some of your magic casting as well. the only downside is the longer recovery versus dual wielding, which is sort of an anti-synergy for a caster who wants to be very reactive and responsive with spells. but i think the benefits outweigh the downsides.

i'm actually not very wild about magran's symbol, because fire damage is oh so prevalent already in the priest's repertoire and fire immunity and absorption is relatively common in deadfire. blinding is also an extremely easy affliction to provide, including within the priest's own spell list. i actually think magran is best for multiclassing since they get so many free damage spells synergizing it with a martial class that can provide buffs for that (ranger, fighter, monk, even barbarian) seems real good, in particular because the top-end tier 8 or tier 9 spells aren't anythign special compared to other priests.

even as a fighter main with goodies from priest works. salvation of time plus unbending will make you temporarily immortal, as will barring death's door. i also underline champion's boon again (maybe people undervalue it): +3 engagement means much faster mob stance (getting -25% recovery time bonus is not out of the question), you get tougher (resolute inspiration for extra deflection, which is already a good defense for a fighter; periodic concentration), and helpful for PotD/Veteran you get Tenacious (+2 PEN) which fighter normally doesn't have access to. litany for the body is super useful on Veteran/PotD because it is an easy, fast, long-lasting source of +2 AR. of course there's also minor avatar and spiritual weapons. depending on subclass, you can get even more: my wael build was fighter-primary, because on top of other benefits wael gives you a bunch of fast-cast defensive spells that is arguably more favorable than an actual wizard for this kind of multiclass (Arcane Veil and Mirror Image are on separate spell levels for a wael versus sharing one for a wizard, so you get 2x those casts, and 2x more from self-empowerment; plus you get +1 Arcane Veil spell cast pretty easily from certain rest/bathing/pet bonuses). i think skaen would also make for an interesting fighter-first cleric. woedica to a lesser extent (mostly for having probably the best weapons in the game)

not sure i quite understand the confusion about fighter/priest (it is probably one of my more frequently used priest multiclass), but here are just a small set of pointers: disciplined barrage/tactical barrage/disiplined strikes all also affects non-weapon attack rolls. +5 accuracy (from perception), plus graze->hit chance helps offensive spellcasting a lot. so does the upgrade, where you either get hit->crit chance, or +5 int and +1 PL. adventurer/conqueror stance's accuracy bonuses also applies to spells (won't stack with devotions). casters also get some benefit from the deflection boost. in close range, with lots of engagement, mob stance's recovery time bonus also helps with spellcasting. priests also have a spell (champion's boon) that gives you lots of engagement, since normally mob stance fighters don't have a lot of engagement without shields. armored grace means casters can be faster while wearing armor, possibly even wearing more armor than they would normally priest gets access to fast runner and uncanny luck, which are two "universal" passives that the priest normally does not get access to IMO, fighter + any caster is one of the more easily synergistic builds you can set up, so i'm a little surprised that one has to ask "why does this even exist?" off the top of my head, i've done a berath and wael multiclass with fighter. the berath was like a battleship spellcaster, slower and heavy hitting. the wael one was a glass cannon build using monastic unarmed training. i think i also did magran, but i don't remember too much what i did (was pretty early in my deadfire playing history)

Does your gut push you to go for a specific build? If you roll a dice with each side assigned to a particular mainchar build, do you kind of, ever-so-slightly want it to come out with a specific result? If so, I would just go for that and not worry about getting the "ideal" build the first time around and instead focus on getting through the game with something that you're partial to and sounds fun. I have the same anxiety about not getting the right choice when I do a game (really maddening every time I pick up a new RPG), and I just have to remember to embrace the fact that I'm not going to get it right the first time and it's more important just to move forward. As for your specific questions: it'll mostly be tedious, but if you automate an AI script it'll take care of itself. also for a forbidden first, you generally don't want that much intellect (but I wouldn't dump it completely), and you want resolve instead, which helps synergize it with it being a tankier build. absolutely invest in intellect, it's the main way to extend ascendant duration since it doesn't scale with power levels. you'll eventually be able to use items/pets/spells like Meppu or Strand of Favor or Ooblit that'll lengthen the duration, but pound-for-pound intellect is super important. perception is pretty unimportant, as you say, because the ranger has so many ways to generate tons of it. the only reason why i would stack on any perception at all for such a setup is if i planned on taking on the megabosses and my ghostheart/ascendant had an important debuff i needed to land, at which point every point of accuracy counts. but even then i wouldn't worry too much about it. i played a lot of priests, and the most challenging build i had to get right was a celebrant (priest/chanter). while you can certainly put one together, but in my opinion it's hard to put together a satisfying synergistic build since there's so much unsatisfying overlap in their roles. on the other hand, fighter/priest is a real easy way to get a good synergistic build. you don't have to be a tank - the fighter offers a *lot* for a caster build (e.g. tactical barrage gives you a recurring acute buff, adventurer/conquerer stance makes you hardier and lets you use debuffs and damage spells more effectively, armored grace means you can be a caster and still wear medium or so armor without hurting your spellcasting badly, etc.) i would go for fighter/priest over a priest/chanter. if you want a priest/chanter i would just pick up vatnir. vatnir's unique priest subclass comes with a lot of acid/decay/frost damage spells that synergizes a lot better with a chanter's abilities (eg shield cracks, ben fidel's neck was exposed, the long night chant). yep, so it's better to use spells when you can to really max out the effectiveness of those 3-4 hits (assassinate bonus on a pillar of holy fire is pretty brutal). and you should use smoke veil instead of shadowing beyond if you can (cheaper, more generous for stealth attacks, but you need high intellect and PL scaling and low recovery to actually get a spell cast done before smoke veil runs out). you can get potions of invisibility. but there's also slippers of the assassin later on, which will let you re-invis upon a kill. by my count assassin/skaen will be able to go invisible alot. 11 guile -> 5 smoke veils, plus 2 shadowing beyonds from skaen. self-empower and then you get 3 more smoke veils and 1 more shadowing beyond. that's eleven invisibilities, not counting an opening stealth attack or procs from slippers of the assassin. more than enough for a typical mob fight.

this is all well and good but is not actually a part of the Deadfire narrative, so for all intents and purposes is head-canon. deadfire's narrative would be so much more cohesive with poe if they even just had one like minor quest in the early crit path where you DID try to say something about the fakeness of the gods (even just to a companion) and what you're talking about happened. instead, it feels really disjointed from poe1. there are some callbacks about the god artificiality (like two of three of the BoW branches) which makes it all the more baffling that it's a non-factor for the main part of deadfire when it was like THE revelation of poe1.

keeping in mind boeroer's apt point [which would also explain why you can't just go around shouting to everyone that the gods aren't real in deadfire], it is definitely the case that at least in deadfire there's a lot of talk about how flawed the natural process was (hollowborn, etc.) and so the engwithans wanted to fix the natural process and also improve humanity in the process (of course they basically genocided so many peoples in the process of stripping away all other competing belief systems and creating the gods in the first place so...). eothas being eothas also takes this to mean that gods become obsolete over time, whereas woedica seems to think it's the constant tyrannical rule of gods that will do this. this might have to be one of those moments where we just "embrace the mystery" and hope in the distant future some retcon clarifies it.

Many of the gods in Deadfire are quite explicitly clear that this was their (the Engwithans') goal. Woedica (in the burned book) and Eothas especially.

but engwithans wanted to improve natural process, not just incarnate them. shouldn't berath and the wheel make sure soul entropy never happens?

yeah i don't know how you got to that state, but that seems pretty bugged. IIRC, this is what's supposed to happen the first time you meet aeldys, after dealing with benweth. this sounds like what happens when you finish all the pre-act iv faction quests and they're waiting for you to do the critical path, not your first aeldys meeting. i don't have any good advice for you because it looks like things are so tangled up it might be hard to fix with a few console commands.

lol, funnily even with blade cascade and no recovery dexterity still speeds up the action time to land the hit, so it still matters just as much as before, except now probably there are some extreme rounding breakpoints (i don't know how much precision deadfire keeps track off beyond 1/10's fraction).

i actually consider this a feature, not a cheese. it makes real-time combat a lot more satisfyingly tactical (and makes me feel like an RTS e-sports player with the benefit of pausing to execute such precise actions). it would be extremely bad if enemy AI could abuse it as bad as you could, sure, but i get a nice blast of endorphins every time i manage to dodge an Engwithan Digsite boar's "gore" attack that would have one-hit-knocked-out a level 3 hireling just by stepping out of the way.

to add on to what others said, i've used streetfighter builds that generally are constantly distracted or blinded and so have a perception around what you have (or worse), but the massive speed boost more than makes up for it. back a while ago i ran some simulations and found that dexterity adds about 3% net damage per point, and perception 2% per point (similar with might), so in the long run, even with low accuracy, the trade-off works in dexterity's favor. (and later on, exceptional, superb, etc. enchantments give you higher chance to hit and most enemies' defenses dont' have similar scaling bonuses) (in case it isn't clear, even though might adds +3% to damage, it amounts to only around 2% net damage due to the fact that the damage bonus is additive and the non-linearity of graze and underpenetration damage penalties. dexterity benefits in that there are very few standard ways to interact with action speed, so the +3% action speed is very nearly 1:1 a 3% net damage increase) edit: these are just averages. they do not apply to specific scenarios. these days i prize accuracy hugely on casters and debuffers, because i always fight megabosses, and all the averages in the world don't work if i can't land a spell or debuff consistently in the hardest fights that i absolutely need to land them in. something to consider for solo potd (since unlike with a party you can't swap characters in an out in case you need some extra stats somewhere). but standard critical path and DLCs should probably be fine.