thelee

unfortunately doesn't work with bellower in RTWP, only in TB mode. eld nary is so slow to bounce that the bonus power level effect from the bellower actually expires before you actually get extra bounces from it even with really high int (you basically need salvation of time). you get some scaling for the initial couple hits, but the potential is wasted on a bellower. TB mode is different because the game politely waits for the spell to fully finish before advancing time and expiring the bellower buff.

i would say that lay on hands is great for occasional burst healing against something stupid happening, but upgrading lay on hands is utterly unnecessary on pallegina as a herald. for newer players, i suspect ancient memory and zealous endurance seem like really subtle sources of healing, and numerically they do seem low, but the fact that you can keep them going for free throughout the length of an entire fight is truly astounding. chanter has even more sources of defense and sustain, but those two on a herald are easy-peasy and available early. and kaylon isn't exaggerating. way back early in deadfire's history when the first two megabosses were released, i had pallegina as a herald and i basically stumbled into beating both the spider and slime because pallegina could carry my party indefinitely with her sustain and chants (and repeatable weapon summons).

it's pretty complicated. if you want the gory details, you can read the pinned post in this forum, or my best attempt here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions and then a section specifically about action time and recovery: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/action-speed-recovery-time the tl;dr is that it's the dual-wielding and 2w style that are great, because they give you tons of speed for "free." So yes, they make patinated plate tolerable, but they would make any other armor much faster. You are still suffering a lot from patinated plate, it's just that dual wielding with 2w style talent makes it a bit more bearable than if you were 1h style or weapon + shield style or 2h weapon style. but anyone who's dual wielding with 2w style would be even faster (much more so, in fact) with medium or light or no armor.

you can also just let troubadour chant at normal speed. then it's like a normal chanter (albeit a bit slower on invocations bc they all cost +1). i tend to just let troubadour chant at normal speed so i can get a lot more chant uptime and only switch on the super-fast invocations if i need to spam a shout for some reason (or to trigger resistance/shield chants repeatedly)

i'm more saying that you need to have something specific in mind. i mentioned SC barbarian retaliation because that's not a "tank," that's someone who blindly charges in and aggros as many enemies as possible because they want to get critically hit by bad guys. if you don't have something specific in mind, you're probably better off with well-enchanted medium armors. Eder (and other fighters) also get automatic recovery for a while, which makes medium armor extremely viable at all stages even as tank (though i'd get a shield in that situation, back to that conundrum). offensive parry/riposte only procs on misses, so AR is largely not important for riposte strategies. in fact you're better off with medium armor bc there's a unique medium armor that gives you +deflection that scales on your intimidation. same as above, if you have insane deflection why bother with AR? you can just ignore attacks and put on a robe or something for amazing speed. you could do this, but you're honestly nerfing the best part of streetfighter, which is just stupid fast speed. in addition, many people find it easy to trigger streetfighter bonuses using a blinding effect like chill fog - this only works because the streetfighter bonus is so huge that it overwhelms the malus from chill fog. you add a huge additional malus from patinated plate to that and you lose a lot of the point of being a streetfighter.

frankly i like SC bellower. getting massive scaling on lower-level chants, and getting a massive-duration dragon at tier 9. but cantor (helwalker), war caller (tactile barrage and conqueror stance to boost chant/invocation effectiveness), or even a melee wildrhymer (stalker, extra defense and lots of accuracy abilities) can be all good imo while leaning into bellower playstyle.

nit-picky follow-up post i would be very careful about how you talk about maluses. "-70 speed" is very different with deadfire math from "+70% recovery time penalty", which is what patinated plate actually is (+55% from heavy armor and additional +15% from malus). also i'm not sure about your math. do you know about deadfire's inversion math? with the enchant that grants -15% recovery time bonus and 2w style + dual wield, you actually take a +70% recovery time penalty and get it down to a -7% recovery time bonus. (dual-wielding grants you a -30% recovery time bonus, and 2w style grants you a further -15% recovery time bonus. the -15% recovery time bonus from the enchant doesn't simply take away 15% from the recovery penalty because of inversions, it actually overpowers it.)

depends a little bit on what difficulty you play and what settings. IM(very extensive)E, on potd with upscaling, heavy armor is generally just a niche choice regardless of character build: on POTD enemies start with such huge boosts to PEN that the bonus AR from heavy armor doesn't typically help mitigate damage, but you suffer a significantly larger recovery penalty all the time further hurts that you getting magical heavy armor is very slow, so it doesn't keep up with enemy scaling further hurts that you can easily steal an exceptional medium armor as soon as you land on nekataka, which actually gives you better than normal heavy armor protection[1], for less recovery penalty, at a time when normal heavy armor is hard to come by [1] even with equal-enchantment medium and heavy armor, heavy armor has weaknesses as bad as medium armor (medium armor has 7 AR by default, but only 5AR against two types. heavy armor goes up to 9AR, but still only 5AR against two types). on top of that, the most common heavy armor at first is brigandine, which has a weakness to pierce. this is actually pretty brutal - pierce is very common, and notably a major source of ranged damage. normal breast plate (medium armor) will actually probably give you better all-around protection because it doesn't have pierce as a weakness. it's basically not until you stat finding exceptional plate armor (which doesn't have a pierce weakness) that the tough defense really comes online, but at the same time you're starting to find great medium armor as well. magnera's chain is fantastic medium armor because you can enchant it to basically cover every weakness possible, and it's extra tough against pierce damage. contender's armor can be enchanted to give an unconditional +1 AR, which puts it in spitting distance of heavy armor, but with less vulnerable weaknesses and faster recovery time. tl;dr - on POTD go with medium armor unless you have a very specific synergy in mind (patina's plate is useful for a sc barbarian taking advantage of retaliation - you're going to get hit tons so the stun effect on enemies can be a huge survivability boost). on normal/veteran, heavy armor is a better survivability boost, but i would only switch to using heavy if you're actually finding survivability in combat difficult, and even then mostly rely on plate armor (the "actually" is important because you might be able to be just as survivable in combat with decently-enchanted medium armor). tl;tl;dr: - wait to see how it plays out in-game.

it's not just about making his active abilities faster, it's about making him entirely more responsive. if you're not playing RTWP it doesn't matter. but in RTWP, a medium-armor slow-weapon 1h will take 5.3s to recover (assuming +35% medium armor, eder's starting 11 dex). If you're 1.5s into recovering during which you get brought to near death, you have to wait another 3.8s before you can do anything else, like Second Wind or potions or whatever. A medium-armor Eder using magran's blessing and 2w style will take 3.1s (+35% medium armor, -30% dual wielding, -15% two weapon style, eder's starting 11 dex) with either slow weapon or shield. In the same scenario, if you're 1.5s into recovering when something happens, you now only have to wait 1.6s to do anything else. That is a massive improvement in reactivity, and you'll readily notice it in hard fights - the second eder might do a little less damage, but you'll be able to respond quicker to changing circumstances (for me it mostly means needing to use a second wind or drink a healing potion). the situation is more extreme when interrupts are involved. when interrupted, you end up having to recover for 2s. if you get interrupted multiple times, then that stacks. the only upper limit to this is your recovery time. the first eder can easily become extremely sluggish in a fight where interrupts are involved. extremely common with rogue-type enemies, who also like to dual-wield; a successful dual-wielded crippling strike will knock the first eder's recover back 4s. the second eder can only ever be knocked back at most by 3.1s, a significant improvement in interrupt resiliency. i.e., if both eders had 1.5s left before their next action (again, maybe a queued Second Wind to heal) and got hit by a dual-wielded rogue's interrupt, the first eder would reset completely to 5.3s recovery, whereas the second eder would get back to 3.1s; you only lost 1.6s versus losing almost the full 4s. on especially harder potd fights you can definitely be in a situation where the first eder barely gets to do anything at all before getting knocked out. general responsiveness is a huge win. edit: this is also why reloading ranged weapons are very good, even though they come with significant downsides compared to bows and implements. being able to do anything else in the middle of reloading versus having to wait for a recovery period is an extremely huge advantage in a complex fight.

interesting! that opens up more classes that can trigger a lot of least unstable coil inspirations.

there are some other storybook encounters that select specific characters. what you're talking about is visible in the storybook encounter as greyed out characters. but IIRC, some examples include SSS storybook where an arbitrary character is chosen to suffer some consequences or make choices, or on the island where you can find eccea's blaster, there's a bridge where if you don't have adequate athletics like party member #4 is chosen to pass checks or die.

if you're indecisive, troubadour is the all-around better choice IMO. i have a lot of fun with bellower but it comes with limitations that you need to work with/around, whereas troubadour is a good all-purpose chanter.

yeah, it'd be better than what i was saying because monk fist scaling is better than monastic unarmed training. that's how i play xoti as a monk or monk/priest. even if you did keep her sickle, tuolito's palm would still scale pretty well as monk/contemplative. i don't mind the lantern that much on a contemplative though because it can be a way to restore mortification available in the early game (it hurts monk dps quite a bit, but as priest you get that tier 1 harvest spell that is very good at finishing enemies off)

the one exception to this is tuolito's palm if you have monastic unarmed training, i crunched some numbers in a spreadsheet relatively recently. you get reduced recovery time AND you do actually get a DPS boost. the actual DPS boost goes down the better your mainhand weapon, but monastic unarmed training makes the shield bash so un-bad (and it actually scales up, if slowly) that it's a net positive for most reasonable cases. edit: also i wouldn't sleep on the +1 engagement you get. downside to straight-up 2w is you lack battlefield control w/out investing ability points or getting specific +engagement items (like a spear). fighter especially has mob stance which can be real good but really needs a lot of engagement, so a bashing shield gets you engagement w/out completley nuking your dps like a normal shield.

nope. a push or pull temporarily grants immunity to disengagement... importantly that immunity actually lasts a little bit after the push or push/pull effect ends. poorly used, this can actually make it harder to manage/control combat for that reason. however, when terrified, characters are not granted immunity to disengagement, so you can do tons of damage by terrifying melee-engaged enemies (unfortunately the same is true for you, though enemies that terrify are rather rare).

yeah it's a pretty neat trick. i think someone here even posted an aI script they used to automate the upgrade to tier 3 inspirations.

yeah IMO the DLC are much more tuned for challenge than the main game. you can kinda brute force the main game especially on lower difficulties, but you really need some mastery of game mechanics to help manage the DLC. even though BoW is theoretically an early teens-level DLC based on how many skulls I see for my party level, on PotD especially there are some parts of it (the ones with the burning archers) that are just absolute wrecking balls in difficulty if you're not prepared for it.

hm, there's definitely some diminishing returns. if you're on a rogue/cipher, you also have access to an incredible accuracy buff. if you plan to pick that one up, i'd definitely go for might or intellect. ciphers get really punished if you're unable to penetrate the enemy's armor, and for that reason might is probably a good choice.

60% is still decent for a good CC, especially when a little bit of CC can really swing the fight your way. it is definitely rough early game, but i think ~70% is what i get to by mid-game and i'm pretty happy with that. anything more feels like i'm already trending towards a fight that is one that i'm dominating. clubs, flails, and morningstars are more foolproof ways to debuff enemy stats.

i always have a hard time remembering to use watcher abilities for some reason. but unless you have a lot of ranged, i think immobilization is kind of a weak-sauce debuff. doesn't stop casters, doesn't stop melee that are already in melee range. if you do have lots of ranged or have good mobility, then immobilization can be a handy way to harmlessly take out melee foes. but bc it requires some setup, i tend to like No Time For the Lost (getting rid of debuffs on you is pretty good) cipher is a little weak with brilliant but rogue is great. getting 1 guile back every 6 seconds when you only have 9 guile or 11 guile at max levels (depending on MC or SC) is huge. with good intellect and PL scaling you could get back most of your guile. if you have good accuracy and crit rates, you could consider the might one - interrupting on a crit is nice too.

this is normally me - it's not only the micro that's annoying, it's that you're blocked out from selecting chants a) a few seconds after an invocation b) a few seconds after a chant starts and c) from stealth. if you do an invocation A & B actually double-up into two distinct phases of blocked out. so even if i wanted to micro, i'm frequently blocked out from changing my chants even when i want to (and then i forget by the time i'm no longer locked out). my current run is where i actually have two main chants i like to use, one that has the fire lash song, and the other that has the reload/ranged-attack-speed song (among other). it's because i have a "flex" character who switches between weapons, one of which is The Red Hand arquebus. when they switch to arquebus mode I change to the reload chant. when they switch to melee or after a fight ends, i switch back to the fire lash chant. this is probably the most i've ever actually micro-managed a chanter's singing before. CC is absolutely not pointless. I play on PotD with challenges and up-scaling, and CC is worth a lot more to me than just straight up damage (e.g. citzal's). I even use CC on megabosses. cast Slicken a couple times on a batch of foes and see how little the enemy will manage to get done the entire time. CC is hard at the start of the game on potd because enemy defenses are really high relative to you bc you don't have much of a choice in progression yet (wheras after port maje you can go do some other quest if something is too hard), but the same goes for basically every attack or spell. why no fist? fists are extremely powerful. also, frankly a herald is immensely powerful sustain and buffing. if you've never played one, you're underestimating it. if you have played one and think it can't carry your party, you did it wrong . a herald can be your single point of sustain and defense. heck a paladin alone carries a lot of healing/buff duty. lay on hands from a paladin is extremely spammable (costing only 1 zeal) and extremely effective healing. you can upgrade zealous endurance to bestow regeneration (in addition to a small AR boost). you can insta-res party members with an exhortation (and if you didn't put on too much might and the target has decent health or you have barring death's door, they'll even stay alive once the exhortation runs out). chanter gives you even more regeneration (ancient memory), with options for more defense (silver knight), more healing (the beams of light), another res source, or even more sustain (there's a vampiric chant and/or the health shield chant and/or the chant that boosts healing effective). and you can also summon powerful allies like ogres, drakes, or ancient weapons. edit: the first time i ever attempted the ooze megaboss i stumbled into victory because i happened ot have pallegina set up as a herald and she literally carried the entire party/fight between her immense, resource-free health regen and her infinite summons.

Just chiming in late here to say that the arcane devices are basically a win-more aspect to the fight. They are surprisingly tough, and will soak up a lot of damage. If you’re already doing well you’ll have excess capacity to take down the devices which will stun the oracle and help you there. so I wouldn’t go out of my way to take them down, but if you already are tuned enough to have the spare capacity to take them out, they’ll help you out.

i'm pretty meh on wounding shot in general. I think it's mostly useful as melee ranger support. And even then, I would prefer Hunter's Claw until I'm maxed out on stacks (20, though you could cheese your way to more) Stunning Shots doesn't stun like in PoE1, but interrupt is much better than in PoE1. I haven't played too many SC rangers, but all of them have happily taken stunning shots. good enough it might even make a case for putting a point into accurate wounding shot.

mid-game: Kapana Taga and St Drogga's Skull (I play almost 100% of the time with Skaen's challenge so illumination is very important) i have a second weapon set that is Endre's Flog of Obedience (a flail to penalize reflex can be great with a beam spell, though increasingly i rely on my merc to debuff reflex) with a simple torch (torches count as a club so despite the DPS hit, it's still blunt damage and it can still debuff will). Kapana Taga has low penetration, so a backup is helpful. This second weapon set was/is more important when i have a spear equipped (due to common pierce immunity). late-game plan: Stalker's Patience and St Drogga's Skull. I probably will sub in Shattered Vengeance for megabosses, that damage debuff is so good for long fights.

your intuition is right. there are very few ways to boost spell damage, so what boosts you can find (might, griffin's blade) can be close to a pure multiplicative boost instead of an additive boost for weapons that gets diluted by enchantments and such. that being said, for offensive casters i tend ot prefer intellect and perception over might still.