JerekKruger

Brilliant Radiance will make Holy Radiance do a 20 damage (modified by Might etc.) DoT to non-vessels, which is pretty bad. I am fairly certain the main damage of Holy Radiance remains vessel-only.

I don't think the Fine Greatsword at Magran's Fork is guaranteed to be a Greatsword. I am fairly certain it's a "random" loot cache and will generate a "random" Fine weapon (possibly always a melee weapon). You can get Raedric's Greatsword fairly early on, which is a good starting point for a Greatsword wielder, then if you get lucky (or cheese the random loot tables) with Gloves of Manipulation you get get Tidefall very early on, and if not you can go with The Hours of St. Rumbalt instead. That's what I love about Greatswords: they are available early and you can get the top tier ones quickly. I wouldn't recommend bothering with Brilliant Radiance. Holy Radiance, when fully upgraded, does something like 150 Burn damage over 3s (plus any other modifiers like Might etc.). Brilliant Radiance adds 20 to that, so about 13.5% extra. Remember that Holy Radiance is once per encounter, so you're spending an entire Talent point on a 13.5% damage increase on a once per encounter power. I don't think that's worth it (if Boeroer disagrees with me then follow his advice though since, you know, he's Boeroer).

You... liquefied your belongings before transporting them I hope the move goes well anyway. In about an hour or so I'll finally start this Cipher run. I'll keep this thread posted as it goes then make a new thread for the final build once I've beaten everything which can then go in the build list.

My (completely uneducated guess) would be that only the base damage of Holy Radiance increases with disposition. By the way, I don't know whether you knew it already, but the negative to healing with Aggrandizing Radiance only applies to the Priest. All allies in the radius still get healed for full. I mention this because the wording always seemed ambiguous to me, and it makes Aggrandizing Radiance a lot more appealing.

Whiffing? Do you mean missing? If so, that's unlikely given that you are a priest and have access to the full suite of ridiculous Priestly Accuracy buffs.

That's a point, I've never really understood what that 20% beam damage bit in AF means.

Well my idea was simply this: Berath is the god of death or, more precisely, the god in charge of the cycle that souls go through, hence it seemed natural that Vessels would be anathema to him. My build idea was a Berathian Priest who specialised in killing Vessels: take the talents that improve Holy Radiance (which already does pretty good damage against Vessels), take high Might and Intellect to further improve its damage and area of effect, and take the talent that improves damage against Vessels (Sanctifier I think). The Greatsword aspect simply came from the fact that the Berathian Priest's unique talent gives +10 to accuracy with Greatswords (and something else, I forget what), and Tidefall specifically since it's by far the best Greatsword in the game. That's as far as I got with the idea. In my head I had named him "Berath's Reaper", since I envisaged him as a Priest who made it his personal mission to reap those souls wrong imprisoned in vessels. I can't speak for exactly what Boeroer had in mind. Perhaps we can poke him until he writes us a full class build for it

Last question before I start my character: powers, what's good? In particular what's good early game and is Antipathetic Field worth taking for a melee Cipher? For level one and two, the only powers I absolutely know I'll take are Whisper of Treason and Mental Binding.

Yeah, I realised afterwards that "interesting" could be interpreted as "I am not convinced", which wasn't the intended meaning. At this point I must admit I am probably settled on Bittercut + shield (in my defence, I have literally never used Bittercut before*), which is part of the reason I want to), although I will probably mess around with a few other options to see how they play for me. I will say that I won't be benefiting from Silver Tide. I rarely take Godlikes these days, but even when I do I never take Moon ones. This is mainly because I don't like the way they look, but partly a carryover from the early days of PoE where the solution to anything difficult seemed to be "use a Moon Godlike and it becomes easy". I am sure balance has been improved since then, but there's always a voice in the back of my head telling me taking a Moon Godlike is taking the easy path (silly, I know). *It was fairly recently that I understood exactly why it's such a good weapon - and to be fair, the reasons aren't all obvious - and before that I always avoided it, rather sillily, because of the penalty to Poison Defence.

Frenzy comes with a buff to Might and Constitution I guess (and perhaps importantly as a result, a pretty hefty buff to Fortitude), but otherwise it does seem rather redundant.

Thanks for the clarification Max. I always knew Lashes were good, partly because everyone always said they were good, but the fact they are multiplicative really explains why they are so good. I need to be less stingy with my hordes of enchanting materials in my next game. Don't worry about that, I've had this thread open whilst scribbling on a (physical*) notepad to decide on this build so I'm not missing the earlier advice. In fact I'm particularly interested in Braven's suggestion of self targetting with Psychovampiric Shield before combat. With Shod-in-Faith I'm tempted to put them on another, higher Might melee character (perhaps Zahua) and rely on the AoE overlapping my Cipher. That might be a little riskier though, since if my Cipher gets critted whilst Zahua doesn't then there's no proc happening. Part of me is now tempted to also run a Berathian priest at the same time as my Cipher, but if I do it'll really have to be the main character, and at that point it'll be hard to tell if the Cipher's really viable or is just being carried by the overpoweredness of a Priest who isn't Durance. I think I will stick with just one player made character. *I'm an old man. If this were the world of Logan's Run** I'd be dead. **Book or Movie!

Yeah, I suspect we'll either not get multiclassing, or we'll get multiclassing but all existing classes will be significantly rebalanced in the sequel. I can't see any way that simply adding multiclassing to the current system won't end up with horrendously overpowered builds. I'm not talking Kensai/Mage levels of overpowered, I am talking builds which make the Kensai/Mage seem weak.

How do Might and Lashes fit into the damage calculation? I want to calculate how much damage Bittercut will do on a Cipher with Biting Whip, Spirit of Decay, Savage Attacks and a Corrosive Lash. At the moment I have: (11-16)*(1 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.4 + 0.2) = 22 - 32 For everything other than the Lash and any Might contribution. What I don't know is whether Lashes and Might and additive like everything else, or are mulitplicative (I vaguely remember seeing someone refer to Lashes as multiplicative, and since Dexterity works differently to +Attack Speed I thought Might might also work different to other +Damage sources). EDIT: based on this thread it seems that Lashes are multiplicative whilst Might is additive, so the correct calculation would be: (11-16)*(1 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.4 + 0.2 + x)*1.3 ≥ 28.6 - 41.6, where x is the Might modifier (1.3 for the Lash because Spirit of Decay applies to it). Throwing on a quality enchant will push this even higher obviously. That seems like pretty good damage to be doing with a single one handed weapon.

I wasn't sceptical mosspit, just surprised (and interested).

Of Berath? I was playing around with the idea of Berathian Priest using Tidefall and focused on being a Vessel killer. Holy Radiance can do some pretty high damage when maxed out but I wasn't sure if it would benefit from the vessel killer talent (Sanctifier?). Also I noticed that Eyeless Ones are immune to fire which, perhaps wrongly, put me off. Interesting. Drake's Bell (Boeroer got an item name wrong ) is one of those weapons I never end up using, but that additional DR reduction is pretty useful, and Beast Slayer is not bad either. I am, however, somewhat paranoid about single damage type weapons. Are there many enemies of significance that are immune to pierce, or that have significantly higher pierce DR than others (by significantly I guess I mean more than 5 for BotEP and... loads?... for Drake's Bell). I always forget that Tidefall has Draining. In my head it's "Tidefall, is Superb, has Wounding" and I stop there since even if that was all it had, that would be amazing. Interesting that you were able to remain in melee with most of the tougher fights in the game.

It's certainly a weapon I'm fond of so I'll give it a try. It's not like there's a rush to decide on a weapon.

I'd agree with one caveat: give us more just-swords. In PoE there are several really good Greatswords, a couple of really good Estocs, three or four really good Sabres and very few good just-swords. Actually there are a couple of pretty good just-swords, but they are available so late in the game that it's basically over and you hardly get to use them. I'd love to see a "spell schools" system added along with specializations.

Yeah, when you learn what exactly his staff is, and how it's linked to him, it really makes a lot of sense for it to be Soulbound, and it would get around the fact that the Magran specific talent is for Swords and Arquebuses rather than Staves. I am, however, fairly certain it's never going to be patched in now sadly.

I'm not yet set on sabre, but it is hard to resist the temptation of Bittercut and if I go weapon and shield I'll want my weapon to do decent damage. I considered the Novice's Suffering route, but the fist damage there just didn't seem that good, and whilst staves are perfectly good weapons none of the staves in the game is "exciting" if you understand what I mean.

I thought that might be the case. Good to know. I might use Durance's Staff in the early game. After all, I probably won't take a Weapon Focus till after at least the two Whip upgrade talents, and it might be helpful in the early game to poke at people from behind Edér et al.

I've just carefully reread all the replies in the thread and now know for certain that either dual wielding, a two-hander, a reach weapon, or a shield is best. Damn it people, why can't you all agree At the moment I am tending towards using a weapon and (small) shield. Precisely which weapon will probably depend on aesthetics and thematic considerations, plus of course effectiveness. @Eric Galad: Tall Grass is a great weapon, but it occurs to me that a Cipher can cause Prone easily already with Mind Wave (admittedly the targeting is a little tricky), or indeed Paralyse via Mental Binding. Hence I think I'd prefer a weapon that has some bonus to damage done, like Annihilation, to speed up focus generation, and rely on my powers for crowd control. Meanwhile a Barbarian could be using Tall Grass and knocking multiple enemies prone with each hit. EDIT: a couple of questions on weapons: I notice that Max recommended Purgatory rather than Bittercut. Roughly how do these two stack up against each other? As I understand it, Spirit of Decay adds 20% damage to all attacks made with Bittercut, regardless of which damage type it uses, so we're comparing +20% all the time against +50% on crits. Also Bittercut does two damage types, so is less likely to be completely resisted and more likely to be facing a lower DR than Purgatory. Thoughts? Does the Wounding Enchantment build Focus? Related to this, does Wounding stack with itself and am I right in thinking Wounding is actually best with lower Intellect characters (due to the damage being concentrated into a shorter duration DoT)? The second question obviously relates to the excellent Drawn in Spring dagger, which it occurs to me would probably be good both with a Shield or dual wielded with itself using the Helwax Mold. I have to say, if I were to use DiS with a shield I think I would have to play with an Orlan or a Dwarf, since I feel it looks weird on larger characters.

Just a quick post to say thanks for all the replies. At some point today I'll sit down and read them carefully and have a go at coming up with something. Then, if you guys want to you can tell me where it can be improved.

The first character I played through (most*) of the game with was a melee Cipher, and it has been a class build that I have returned to time and again since then. However when I build my Cipher in this way he inevitably spends a significant portion of his combat time taking a nap, and ever since respeccing was added to the game I've usually respecced him to a ranged Cipher at some point out of frustration. Despite this, I still want to complete the game with a melee Cipher and, more importantly, have fun doing so, so I thought I'd turn to the good people of the "Pillars of Eternity: Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning)" forum for advice. I also noticed that of the three Cipher builds in the build list, two are ranged and the sole melee one is an outdated (though still effective) retaliation build of Boeroer's. A secondary objective of this thread would be to end up with a new melee Cipher build to add to the list so that other players who are, like me, struggling to make this class build work will have a solid example of it easily available. Ideally this would include some interesting item synergies (if there are any) that are not immediately obvious to less experienced players Since ranged Ciphers are relatively easy to build and tend to be very effective, perhaps the place to start is with the two major differences between them and melee Ciphers (that I can see), and how to accommodate them. So, here goes: Ranged Cipher's can, generally speaking, afford to have low Resolve and wear light (or even no) armour since they shouldn't be getting hit much. A melee Cipher doesn't necessarily have that luxury. How much additional protection would you give a melee Cipher? (What Resolve, what armour, would you give them a shield and, if so, which type etc.) Because of their positioning in Combat some powers seem less effective for melee Cipher's than for ranged Cipher's. In particular Antipathetic Field, which comes highly recommended in many Cipher guides seems much less effective for a melee Cipher since they can less easily manoeuvre themselves into a position to use it effectively and their targets will generally speaking be less far away, leading to a shorter beam. Are there any powers that you would not take on a melee Cipher that you would on a ranged one, and vice versa? If so, why No doubt there are other differences, so feel free to outline them and explain how you would modify a build for them. Beyond that we can get onto specifics. What sort of Attribute spread would people recommend? What gear should a melee Cipher use? What Powers and Talents should they take? The list goes on... *I have a terrible habit of abandoning playthroughs part way through Act III.

Ah my mistake, I saw the word durable and assumed you were building a shield user. I'd still be cautious of your low Fortitude and would personally drop your Perception (perhaps to 15) a few points to raise Constitution and/or Might, and I'd definitely take Bear's Fortitude at some point.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I actually don't think the above is all that durable. Sure, you've given yourself +6 deflection but that only brings you 21, lower than Fighters, Chanters, Monks and Paladins (due to Faith and Conviction) and if you take Reckless Assault you're back down to 13, lower than everyone apart from a Wizard (and the Wizard will have a bunch of spells to temporarily buff their Deflection when needed). Meanwhile, your Fortitude defence (the most important defence, particularly for a melee class) is at -2. That just seems to be asking for trouble (note that mosspit's build has +5 Fortitude from Attributes and +10 from Bear's Fortitude). Also, if you use a shield and take Weapon and Shield style your Reflex defence is going to be high already, so you really don't need the +16 from having both Dexterity and Perception at 18. If anything, I'd favour dropping Perception down (you're already the class that has the highest innate Accuracy potential) and raising your Might and/or Constitution to bring your Fortitude defence back up (as well as the other benefits from those Attributes being higher). Of course, someone might tell me I'm completely wrong. I am nowhere near as knowledgeable as others on this subforum.