Davos

The point is that chanters are specifically best in long lasting fights, and have constant passive buffs that let them be useful in all situations. Where basically every other class is going to use their per-encounter abilities very quickly in fights and will reach their peak usefulness in a quick period of time, chanters have a slower build up but will remain at peak usefulness as they are able to keep using chants and invocations throughout a battle.

Same damage every second

No

You could do this pretty easily with a fighter given that the skills for lockpicking and searching for traps is something totally separate from class, so if you just want a fighter that can do rogue utility stuff that's easy. Keep in mind that you could also make a rogue that is more of an upfront fighter and who wields a greatsword, but will be squishier than the fighter alternative in exchange for much higher damage. A rogue in this game is basically an offensive oriented combatant that specialized in fighting dirty, they're not necessarily the typical sneaky dagger wielding assassin (though you can build one that way)

Turn off expert mode and you'll be able to see the aoe radius of spells

Endurance is your short-term 'battle health' whilst your health is your long-term 'real health'. In battle your endurance will be primarily attacked but some of that damage will go through to your actual health. If you run out of endurance your character will simply be knocked out and can be revived during combat with various abilities or spells, but run out of health and your character will be dead. No revivals, no resurrections, dead as dead gets. While endurance can be healed in various ways in combat and always restores fully after combat, health can only be healed by resting. Thus while low endurance may prove your defeat in a single fight, health is the long-term limiting factor of your adventuring as you must return to town to rest periodically let a character be completely killed.

I know that over the course of development the way in which damage that caused wounds would be dealt changed from the initial concept described about them being applied as delayed DoTs unless the wounds were used to fuel abilities, but with the wiki out of date on so many things I'm not sure exactly as to how they work right now. Is there any kind of mitigation of delay of damage that causes a wound to build on a monk, or is that damage just applied normally and a wound added? Say your monk has a threshhold of 2 damage needed to build a wound and an enemy attack comes in that hits for 10. Does the monk take 10 damage and gain one wound, or does the wound 'bucket' take 2 damage away leaving the monk to only be dealt 8?

I think the key aspect of Heart of the Fury is that carnage still applies on those attacks, making it potentially able to clear a group in one hit. Imagine you're a barbarian attacking 5 enemies in a pentagon around you, situated such that a carnage attack on ones hits the two adjacent to him. Heart of the Fury means that not only do you strike each foe once, but the carnage on those adjacent them to is applied, leading to each enemy being hit by one attack and two carnages instantly. Higher intellect could lead to that being exponentially more damaging. But, as with all barbarian abilities, its effectiveness scales only with number of enemies nearby

So I've been bouncing around the various classes trying to decide on what exactly I want to roll come release. After playing around with a barbarian in the beta I found the class to be a lot of fun with its focus on melee offense and the aoe effect of carnage making them extremely effective against groups of enemies. However I'm concerned about whether encounters against large groups of enemies may be the only place where the barbarian is of use. Pretty much all of their abilities seems to be focused on attacking many foes at once or engaging while outnumbered, but in a situation where it would be something like the whole party vs. a dragon or some other singular, powerful boss they don't seem to have anything of real use. In comparison to this we have other damage-focused classes like rogue, monk, druid, etc. which have abilities that can both be of use against a group and powerful single target attacks. So I'm wondering if anyone with greater experience or knowledge of the game might be able to give some input on whether barbarians are of any use in those situations where they aren't fighting a group of foes?

Not possible. The game is designed around all characters having unique dialogue options based on their stats rather than just shoving them all under intelligence or charisma. Without cheating to get max stats and skills you're never going to have a perfect "rp" character, so just make a character that seems interesting to roleplay and run with that rather than trying to win the conversations. Also, selecting a locked conversation options won't always get you the best outcome in a situation. Sure you might be able to use your high lore skill to tell the bandits that they're camping in a hallowed ground of historical importance and suggest they move to a new hideout, but they might not be as happy to hear your advice as they would have if you have used your high might to threaten them with force.

I unfortunately lack access to the backer beta, and so in my research to figure out what class I'll play on my first runthrough of the game I'm finding myself wondering about how 'active' some of the classes are. Specifically I'm interesting in rolling a more melee oriented character, however I'm concerned about how many of the abilities on the melee classes actually involve active use vs. giving passive buffs. From what I can tell it seems like the Fighter and Paladin, for instance, have a lot of abilities that just buff their own combat capabilities or that of their party whilst having relatively few abilities which are actively cast. Any suggestions on what melee oriented classes are the most 'active' to play?