gkathellar

No, no, no. The OP's request is absurd. Give me Ydwin. I'm the one who really loves her. Me. Not us. ME.

There's an event at sea where you see a big rainbow fish thing, and if you kill it you get morale but Eder is unhappy.

Yeah, Helwalker is great for ranged combatants and spellcasters in general. Since cipher excels as a ranged combatant/spellcaster ... your math is spot on, is what I'm saying.

This is actually a very good suggestion. If my Godlike can't wear helmets because they don't fit his head, how come my Aumaua and Dwarf can use the same armor? Because it's a standard trope, and it's easy to overlook given the same basic body shape. If you want a good rationalization, you're not going to find one - any half-decent suit of armor is fitted to an individual, and wearing poorly-fitted armor (read: any suit that hasn't been made or modified for you, specifically) makes it difficult to walk, run, stand, sit, ride, climb, roll, fight, and breathe. However, since stripping corpses and wearing their stuff is one of the things people love about this genre, it's not really worth questioning. Meanwhile, the mechanical premise of godlike is and has always been, "you can't wear a hat but you get minor superpowers." Changing that up because we want to be consistently surreal doesn't really strike me as desirable.

Nobody could sound bored like Orson Welles. Yea, we will have the most bored-sounding of all narrators!

Seems like a natural fit for a Wahai Poraga herald.

Given one pair of abilities increases your damage against targets with afflictions significantly, and the other speeds you up whenever you kill something, I would say that they're not similar enough to say one is better than the other. They function in very different ways, towards very different ends.

It's not just that paladin's high level abilities are bad (although they are) - it's also that paladins are super boring, and serve best as a supplement to something more interesting.

I am not sure what is fundamentally wrong with passives. In POE Priests of Skaen got a mini Sneak Attack. Seems fine to me. It's not really comparable. That was a deeply different system of abilities and progression, in which priests of different gods didn't receive bonus spells by default and in which all priests had access to all of their spells at all times. Consider the main casters in Deadfire - priest, druid, and wizard. Every priest and druid receives a bonus spell for each PL, while wizards have grimoires. This ensures that, by design, a main caster will always have at least one spell of every available PL, meaning that they never have a section of their resources that they simply can't use. I don't object to priests having access to more passive abilities on principle, but I also don't think they should come at the expense of those bonus spells, which are effectively there as a baseline and fail-safe. Now that said, Barbs of Condemnation is totally inappropriate and it should go. But I'd rather replace it with an active ability.

You remember correctly. Abydon's Hammer started Legendary and went Mythic after completing White March II. The Unlabored Blade started Superb and got gradually worse until, after doing a ginormous amount of damage while it was Terrible, it upgraded to full Mythic power. All other Soulbound Weapons capped off at Superb. And yeah, LD's Voulge is fine.

My two (three?) pand: I'm fond of the "mini multi-class" model used by Wael (illusionist), Skaen (rogue), and Berath (druid), and think it should be extended and universalized. I generally think that priests can pick out their own priest spells - non-priest spells are what they really want. This leaves open the question of what classes, exactly, Eothas and Magran should ape. In the former case, I guess you could go paladin, but that feels wrong to me - Eothas is never really characterized as a warrior god. For Magran, I could see either of two routes: either play up the warrior-goddess bit and give her a bunch of fighter abilities (plus maybe FoD?), or alternately load her up with fire spells from wizard and druid as a mini-evoker. Some of both could work, but I think role focus is desirable here. No passives. Yes, that rules out minor Sneak Attack for Skaenites, but I don't think it's a good idea to decouple these abilities from the caster resource system at random.

I'm surprised you didn't mention helwalker as a synergy. +15 might and +10 intellect buffs moon's light and moonwell through the roof. You're frail if you play carelessly, but if you avoid taking focused fire from multiple attackers, your healing makes yourself and the whole party extremely hard to kill. Monk. Good god I knew I forgot something. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Lifegiver is good, either on its own or multiclassed. Unless you use lots of Druid summons, it plays pretty much like an animist with stronger heals. Druids get some really good heals, so Lifegiver's benefit is nice. Some thoughts on multiclass synergy, if you go that route: Barbarian: Frenzy is good for any caster. Lots of good passives. Chanter: Always good. Summons from multiple classes are incompatible anyway, so your subclass choice becomes painless. Cipher: This is fine, and IIRC the couple of physical attack spells a druid gets generate focus. Not sure it beats top-level spells. Fighter: You can shift and murder everything with fighter powers with the best of them, but constant recovery may be a touch wasted on you. Monk: Gives you easy access to some really good inspirations, Duality of Mortal Presence, and more. Even without crazy defense, Dance of Death is quite usable for wound generation on a back-line character. Helwalker in particular is great for casters. Paladin: Basically always good for the defenses and FoD and passives. Note that, if you go Bleak Walker, you can grab the Corrode and Burn passives for even better penetration, something only multiclassed paladin/casters can do. Priest: Skip it unless you have something fancy in mind. A universalist is better off going fury or animist. You don't need more support power. Ranger: Pass. You've got your own DoTs to worry about. Rogue: Good for similar reasons to fighter. Avoid redundancies in your affliction package and you'll be fine. Trickster is the best way to grab wizard defensive buffs, if you want them. Wizard: I'd avoid it. A single-classed lifegiver will do pretty much everything that a sorcerer can do, except better.

This. So much of this. Pre-colored minis are, almost without exception, going to look bad. The short-lived D&D Miniatures game from back in the mid-to-late aughts was an exception, but afaik that was because their minis were made from pre-colored plastic, not painted (and even those didn't look great). If you want a good paint job, you're going to have to (a) do it yourself, and (b) be pretty good at painting miniatures. Here's a 1d4chan article expanding on the point (this page is safe for work). Yes, well, you bought them from Paizo. You knew who you were doing business with.

I kind of like this idea, and I think it would even be possible to implement, given that several non-wizard subclasses do similar things.

Numbers! Oh, I dunno. I play on PotD and I don't say yes. Unless, "yes," consists of, "significant enemy AI optimizations." But hell if I want more numerical cheating. Give me puzzles, not walls to bang my head into!

Sadly it seems his negatives from wildmind far outweights the positive, since all the positive aspect like debuffs or charm is already covered by base Cipher abilities. The problem is the wildmind explosion which if happens immediately kills at least 2 of my team members. I wonder if send him to melee range and let him be a bomb would be better, that way he stack up focus and wildmind explodes the enemies rather than my own, but dude is a paper in melee and dies faster than my wizard. As a witch, he's generally durable enough to make the inevitable kaboom count. But yeah, under no circumstances should you use him as a ranged combatant. Wild Mind is bad, but it's considerably more tolerable on a witch than on a straight cipher.

It doesn't, but it does hamper one of the best Tuotilo's Palm upgrades, which grants +1 Deflection and Reflex per wound. However, I would strongly advise you that Shattered Pillar renders Shattered Pillar worthless. As is, there are three problems: You only gain wounds from damage dealt with auto-attacks. This means you spend a lot of time getting ready to do cool stuff, instead of just doing cool stuff. The actual amount of damage you have to do to inflict a wound is fairly ridiculous, especially since, again, it has to be done with auto-attacks. Being limited to five wounds seriously hampers one of the monk's other best abilities, Duality of Mortal Presence.

*snrrk*

I like Enchanting as a specialization for multiclass melee wizards. The sage (monk/enchanter) class is my favorite. From an optimization perspective, you're getting virtually nothing out of your subclass choice, though. Enchanting spells derive virtually no benefit from increased power levels (tiny duration increase, but that's it), and losing illusion puts a gaping hole in your defensive arsenal compared to a non-specialist wizard. More power to you if you enjoy it, but you're effectively trading something for nothing.

You mean ... the problem is the existence of random mobs of enemies with no particular significance to the narrative or to gameplay in general, who won't be meaningfully challenging as a matter of course? GOLLY (I have been whining about this for an ungodly length of time. It is always nice to agree with someone.)

But vessels have a very specific set of properties in Eora...such as the need to feed on living soul essence. A vessel is a soul that has been artificially tethered to a body, whether that body is its own (most undead), something else's (Wichts), or an artificial one (animats, constructs). Very few Vessels are permanent, which makes "become a vessel" a mediocre choice for most immortality-seekers. Most undead lose soul essence at a regular pace and need regular infusions of it to survive (read: eating living or recently-living things), and while constructs are comparatively stable and may last years at a time, they will eventually break down. Animats endure longer by force of sheer fanatical devotion, but that's hard to plan for. A lich gets around the problem through magic and surgery. First, they carve a bunch of arcane runes and symbols into their own skull, effectively binding their soul to their physical body with a network of complex spells. Then, they drill a hole in their skull, which they plug with a chunk of adra. The phylactery is, as Concelhaut clarifies in the first game, actually the skull itself. The process of becoming a lich (lichification?) seems to stop their soul from leaking altogether, but the resulting at the cost of their vanity: a lich's body will gradually become cold, dead, and emaciated. (Sources: PoE1 bestiary entries for constructs, animats, liches, and guls.)

Oh man, more music. Hell yes.

I feel like this is a crass joke but I can't figure it out >_>

Take a look this single-rapier trickster/skald if that's what you're into. I hear that Trickster/Berserker works, and yeah, dual whatevers will probably be fine. Bear in mind that about half of Trickster's unique benefits are defensive, so you'll be using those to mitigate any potential squishiness. The other half are AoE debuffs, so you're probably gonna want to make a bee line to some sort of Confusion mitigation.