endolex

Emptiness. I said I don't feel like microing *every single encounter*. Microing special, more difficult fights is something I enjoy immensely. But movement and positioning *is* something I expect to sort itself out by formation and weapon ranges, so Melees will always melee and ranged will always stop moving at main range - leaving the chanter either to close at the front or the back, at least in my experience. Even in narrow dungeon corridors you have this problem of having to fiddle a lot to cover everyone with phrases, and I just don't believe this is the way it's supposed to be.

"You create one with 18-20 Int like most everybody else" -- How am I supposed to know that, if game + documentation recommends something else entirely? Am I that silly in assuming that a chanters dev-designed purpose is to buff everyone / debuff all enemies, so stats are recommended for exactly that purpose? "but since YOU are designing your Chanter for a specific purpose" -- that a Chanter being able to buff the entire party / debuff all enemies should NOT be a "specific purpose" (as in: deviation from the intended functionality of a chanter) is exactly the point of my original post

So how do I create a chanter with 24 INT and without severely hobbling them in other areas than being able to perform their core functionality? Since I'm trying to play a chanter as my main character, I'd like to have more dialogue options than just those provided by INT (apart from the fact that I don't feel like playing a 'superhuman genius level intellect' chanter to begin with - why Int affects chanter range and not Resolve is beyond me anyway). 16 INT should be more than enough for a 'highly recommended stat' at character creation (since Con and Res are recommended as well). And no, I don't agree that being able to buff the whole party / debuff all enemies would be overpowered. The buffs are overall weak enough as it is, they don't to be limited even more in this way. The problem is if I don't pick a very short ranged weapon I will always have to micromanage the positioning of the chanter for them to have any desired effect, because otherwise they will stop moving once they are in minimum range for their weapon. And I'm not the kind of player who likes to tell party members where to go every single encounter. In the end, there is no point in the game where you are told these kind of things. You could very well pick a lot of phrases at character creation and leveling that you never get to use properly because of AoE circles being too damn small.

When I read 'LARGE, AoE low-level buffs and debuffs' in the chanter's description, I thought "great, I can help and hinder across the entire battlefield with my chants!' Not quite. The chant circles are really small, even with max INT, so if I stay at maximum range with a ranged weapon (playing an elf here), my chants do not even come close to reaching the melee camp (or enemies, for that matter). So the way it is now, I have to decide if I want to be a melee chanter and buff the melee camp (and choose some debuff auras for enemies too) or be a ranged chanter and buff the ranged camp (and forget about debuffing enemies because the point of being a ranged fighter is staying the hell away from them, and the aura never reaches them). So this greatly diminishes the effectiveness of any chants in my opinion. Is it really supposed to be this way? Because 'forget chants, invocations is where the meat is' is really not that great if you have to wait three ore more turns before being able to cast anything useful and otherwise giving only slight buffs to half of your party at best, essentialy making you a mediocre fighter most of the time. The way I see it right now, Priests and Paladins have all the real buffs, and their limited spells per day don't matter much if you can rest anywhere anytime anyway.