gkathellar

Aye, in general the best tanks include Wizard, Priest of Wael, or Trickster. Crusader can manage the same level of combined defense, but only at the expense of a lot of other stuff. That's not to say other combinations aren't worthwhile, but they're not hitting the same raw defensive numbers.

Cunning Duelist? Otherwise, yeah, you got me.

In fairness, Animancer's Energy Blade is the pits.

Templar of Wael.

Ascendant all day every day. Ciphers already need downtime between casts due to focus mechanics, so ascendant doesn't really cost you anything, and brings with it a whole bunch of shenanigans.

Yes. You'll probably want to shuffle some of the gear around, but the basic thing still works fine.

Real talk: I can't speak for anyone else, but for me the waifu thing is more of a running joke. Back during the Fig campaign, when they were adding companions with stretch goals, Ydwin was the first one whose design and basic concept actually made me stop and say, "oh wow, that's cool." I want her as a full companion because I haven't changed my mind - but it's also amusing to me, personally, to cast it in the context of a perverse interest in vampires wearing glasses. besides we all know rekke fans just want that husbando

Not quite. Privateering was a legal concept involving salvage and port of call. During the Age of Sail, if you got caught in port with a captured ship and/or stolen cargo, you were in a hell of a lot of trouble, and at the very least you weren't going to get to keep any of your ill-gotten gains. A Letter of Marque guaranteed that the local admiralty court wouldn't prosecute you, so long as the captured vessel/salvage came from a country that your port of call was at war with, and that you would get at least a percentage on the salvage's value. AFAIK, taking letters of marque from multiple parties at war with each other was a great way to end up dead in a ditch somewhere. In general, governments take a pretty dim view of piracy, and it's only by operating in areas of political instability, hiring out as faux-mercenaries, or targeting vessels affiliated with weaker polities that pirates could get away with what they did. Of course, if you had ports unwilling or unable to enforce piracy laws (generally only possible in areas of tremendous instability), you didn't need a Letter of Marque, which seems to be the situation in Deadfire. It's made slightly more plausible given that you scuttle any vessel you defeat, rather than hauling it back into port, so I think we just have to presume that the factions can't track you down by salvage sales. I guess it's easier to get away with assassinations that conventional piracy?

No, but fwiw, not everybody is especially concerned with the revelation. Hiravias was actually one of the most devout party members in the first game, and his response was pretty much, "huh, that's interesting."

My one concern is that the Priest of Woedica seems designed almost specifically as an anti-player subclass, what with its ability to shut down consumable and ability usage. It's designed to make you say, "oh crap," but I worry that coming from the player it'd potentially just make things dull (or do nothing at all, against some enemies). While it is finished, I think it needs tweaking if it's to be made available for general play.

Okay this is pretty sweet. IIRC, you can actually get Deltro's Cage without angering Pallegina by getting the two parties to meet and negotiate a settlement, and then failing to bring them to terms. They'll all fight to the death and you can loot the bodies. :D

I used Lord Darryn's Voulge in my 1.02 game - I'm not sure how badly the changes they made to it affected it, but I'd love to use it for this character too, since it's really fitting. I also saw there's a more battleaxe looking pollaxe in the DLC, so that looks cool. I like the idea of axes, battleaxes especially, as a pirate weapon. The Obnoxious Medieval Combat Nerd in me feels the need to point out that it's realistic, too! Axes and pikes were staples of seaborne warfare in the Age of Sail.

[insert sh!tpost referencing that one insane clown posse song]

Oh snap Ryona? Guys get ready soon we're gonna be able to whine about not being able to romance a ghost and a vampire.

Eh, yes and no. There's something to be said for realism in any milieu, if only because it's involving and because the past is actually a really fascinating place with a lot of cool stuff to draw upon. Pillars in general draws a lot of its aesthetic from the Renaissance and high medieval, and I think it's a lot cooler than the aesthetic of Standard European Fantasy for its trouble. It gets the Medieval Combat Nerd in me going, and that makes me happy. YMMV. That said, I am not advocating for "realistic" combat in a game like this. In general, I feel it can't be done, and attempts to move away from abstraction and towards realism often just end up being surreal in new, interesting ways. Nods towards reality are cool, but once you get into the particulars, it can get real stupid, real fast. (The only reason I brought up realism earlier was to note that in terms of shield stances snd design, Emo Elf in the OP already isn't any better than Soulsguy, so that's not an excuse for being less cool.) Break? You mean 'bend' right?And swords made of spring steel will not bend either. Swords of any type can break as a result metal fatigue, and so-called "spring steel," loses the ability to snap back into place with time and stress until either it shatters or the bend becomes permanent (spring steel is trash, incidentally). This is why most blades have a designated portion meant for different types of parry - for Japanese and most Chinese swords, virtually any kind of impact is going to be taken on a deliberately overbuilt and typically unsharpened section extending roughly 10-30 cm up from the hilt (European fencing refers to this part of the sword as "the strong," because not only is the blade physically thicker and stronger there, but so is the fighter, as the strong is the section of the weapon closest to the hand). Far greater than the risk of bending or outright snapping is the risk of a chipped or damaged edge, which is mitigated by using the flat and the unsharpened strong to absorb solid impacts whenever possible. Japanese fencing has a comparatively greater emphasis on voiding (dodging, to use a non-fencer's terminology) than the comparable German longsword, in part because it is much harder to avoid blocking with the edge. That said, the katana's rigidity and strong spine make it excellent at absorbing blows with the strong, and there's a strong tradition of binding as well as block-counter in most historical Japanese fencing styles that belies the commonly-cited notion that these swords were fragile or poorly made. In fact, one of the draws of Japan's crappy volcanic iron is that it's riddled with impurities that are actually really good for making single-edged swords. Naturally occurring alloys of tungsten and molybdenum? Yes please.

Poleaxes have the distinction of two truly weird items, both of which are very nearly build defining: Wahai Poraga, and Lord Darryn's Voulge (which is so barbarian-oriented that it feels wasted on anyone else, imo).

Goldpact Knight/Cipher gets the highest number of special responses possible without being a Priest, and will do alright with high mental stats all around (although most of the stuff you're getting from Goldpact Knight is pretty insubstantial, "HAVE I MENTIONED I AM A MERCENARY THIS MORNING?" type of stuff).

To the best of my knowledge, the "tower shield" of Standard European Fantasy is almost entirely an RPG-ism - likely inspired by misunderstood depictions of the pavise, which is more of a semi-portable man-sized fortification than a shield in the conventional sense. The classical Greeks did use some very large shields, but in the context of Greek phalanx, and in keeping with the large shields sometimes seen in aboriginal warfare, these were usually comprised of a wooden frame with leather or hide stretched across the surface. The closest thing in the post-Roman European milieu to the eponymous tower shield was the the actual kite shield, a family of design from the late Dark Ages and early medieval, which had a distinctive teardrop shape to minimize weight relative to protection and to make the shield harder to grab and control. Incidentally, the size of shields tends to be negatively correlated with the protective quality of armor - once you get plate, or even mail, you're generally well-protected enough that a smaller shield that can be brought to bear in the bind or even at grappling range tends to be more effective. For all that Dark Souls Guy is rockin' it up there, his shield is ridiculously impractical and is mostly just a giant lever with which to dislocate his should and floor him.

Neither is particularly realistic (nor is either shield).

In the interests of completeness, there's a ring added with the Deck of Many Things DLC that gives you resistance to Int/Per/Res afflictions, but at the cost of -8 Intellect. I'm pretty confident no one in their right mind will ever use it, but it does exist! So those items basically make a powerbuss streetfighter who is flanked and heating up even more "op"? Because the streetfighter is afflicted (perception). Precisely. But I console browse the items and have no idea how to procure this. Depending at the progress you can get this, it might be more convenient to get intentional flanked. But yes, streetfighter came to mind when I saw this as it kinda counters the blunderbuss modal effects. Although the standard flanked doesn't cut it (as it is not exactly an affliction), it needs to be Distracted or worse. Are you positive that gives you a +10 accuracy while afflicted? To me, it seems to read as, "you gain +10 accuracy with with attacks that cause afflictions."

yisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

This. Good god, this. There's a reason that Sword Coast Stratagems is a damn classic. "No pausing in our RTWP game," doesn't make the game harder so much as it demands you compile a bunch of AI scripts to play the game for you.

As a partial complete aside, I will be really pleased the day I see a game where dual wielding does not mean, "alternates between swinging one weapon and the other." That's not how it works, guys! Combat realism in games is impossible, but it's just ... I'm offended by how ubiquitous the gameplay trope is, if nothing else.

Oh, for sure. People would throw fits. There'd be riots. Riots! (There would not be actual riots.) I think Obsidian knows that, and I doubt they'll make any grand structural changes for that reason among others - although nerfing individual full attack abilities seems like it could happen. But from an armchair designer perspective, I think full attacks do need some kind of structural reexamining.

Try 38. Mind, the significance of those dialog options may not be extremely high, but there are 38 of them.