gkathellar

The other issue with dual blunderbuss is that you can easily find yourself effectively in melee due to short range. That's good for some builds, but if you specfically want a ranged character, it may not meet your needs. Ranger/Cipher and Rogue/Cipher both deserve mention as excellent ranged options.

Or you don't get the extra CON and just accept the additional squishiness, which is kinda the point of the subclass. And it's really not that big of a deal if you're attacking from range and aren't likely to get hit all that much. And in practice it won't actually be 15% more damage anyway, since it's an additively stacking damage modifier. Indeed. The whole point of assassin is that you specifically build around not taking damage, such that you render the slight increase to damage received irrelevant. They could probably use a small buff, but they are perfectly serviceable as-is.

Trickster sacrifices 10% additive damage for a bunch of really strong defensive and crowd-control abilities, several of which actually help you do more damage. It does not make you into a support character, it makes you into a warrior-illusionist deflection-tank murder machine with or without a party.

Re: Shattered Pillar, the single biggest problem at this point is the numbers. You need to do something like 30 damage (25 w/Lesser Wounds) to build a single wound. If it were more like 15/12, or even 20/15, it'd be manageable. Persistent Distraction means every enemy you have engaged is Flanked all the time, on account of Distracted adding Flanked. This works wonders in combination with Stalker's Patience.

Aye, given that random NPCs in the street already have all sorts of scripted behaviors, it doesn't seem too crazy to expect them to run away when a fight starts, and then come back when it ends.

Shattered Pillar is bad and you should never use it. Nalpazca is significantly better if you want to spend wounds.

Trickster is phenomenal for any kind of tank. Assassin is pretty great if you can keep your distance and/or are MCing with something absurdly durable. Even a vanilla rogue gets some great single-target powers in general.

arkane83's pretty much got it - Skald is not very good but works best, by far, as a Howler for Frenzy nonsense or Warcaller for fighters being generally pretty badass.

Gromnir did you just shout your own name every patch rebalances talents and skills and items. most o' the low level buffs, such as holy meditation, got buffs. on the other hand, triumph of the crusaders, a level four talent available to our contemplative only after reaching level ten (not level one) got a significant nerf post release. obsidian made changes to our character after we invested tens of hours into a game. the point o' retrain is, in part, so we need not restart a game to take advantage o' changes to game by obsidian or due to epiphany moments resulting from many hours o' gameplay. this "fix" results in us utilize a restart to take advantage o' the correction... which largely defeats the need. oh, and in the very definition o' "people unclear on the concept," you miss the fact that it is the level one abilities which we lose with retrain in a pre 1.2.2 scenario. the reason for the complaint is we is robbed o' the highly efficacious level 1 monk abilities we chose at character creation by utilizing retrain. *insert eye roll here* HA! Good Fun! Also: responding to "wow this bug sure is an obnoxious bug and you sure haven't fixed it for most intents and purposes," with "git gud" strikes me as ... entirely missing the point? A bug is a bug, just because you can get around it by planning your build from level 1 doesn't make it any less of a bug.

FWIW, there's a simple mod that adds the "hostile to a faction" ships to the map without having to piss them off.

Unbroken/Trickster is beastly. ... but then, Trickster in general is beastly. :D

Arcane Dampener is generally kind of a mess right now. It almost makes me miss NWN and its comically over-elaborate dispelling mechanics. Almost.

Terrible. You give up illusion and transmutation for what amounts to a duration increase on some buffs. Bonus power level is much more geared towards damage spells... It's especially bad because Enchantment and Illusion have a lot of cross-dependency in their impressive defensive packages. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons Evoker is usable - it gets both Enchantment and Illusion, and so gets almost all of the wizard's big defensive spells. If it didn't get both, I'm not sure even the greater synergy of PL with damage spells would matter.

It does, but in practice Berserker/Troubadour will frequently outperform it.

I don't mind the items that have per-rest active abilities, but I really dislike it with respect to triggered passives. It's entirely possible not to realize that you've lost a critical part of your build's defensive package.

I like the general notion of increasing the wizard's grimoire dependence and focusing their ability selection around passives, and I think the fact that they didn't do so is mostly a continuity question. Wizards in the first game look as though they were intended to switch grimoires a whole bunch, but didn't end up that way because in practice four spells per level was more than enough and you could switch them between fights. An effort has been made to intensify that aspect in Deadfire, but at the same time, it seems like they were unwilling to commit to it entirely. I expect that's because people would have never stopped complaining about it.

I agree that it would be nice to skip straight to the part where you get your boat, which is where the game really starts, in a lot of respects. The Port Maje stuff is good, but it's good in the same way that the Irenicus Chateau or the Fade or lots of "tons of fun the first time through, gets repetitive" stuff is good. OP didn't say anything about procedural generation. They said they wanted to be able to skip to the meat of the game and try builds and stuff. "Small random quests," were mentioned, but that's not exactly the same thing. Even if they had asked for procedural generation, which they didn't, it's not exactly crazy for them to think, "wow I really like this gameplay and ruleset, wouldn't it be cool if it could be fitted to a different gameplay structure that I also like?" I wouldn't want Obsidian to pour their time and energy into such either, but saying that the OP clearly wants a different game is a misstatement of what was said in the first place. Also: D3 and Path of Exile don't use procedural area or enemy generation (they do have random loot, but in D3 it becomes almost totally irrelevant around level 55, and in PoExile it's the single most hateful part of the game). D3 has pseudo-random event spawns at defined nodes of prebuilt areas. PoExile has occasional random events based on prophecies or League bonuses. Not even their post-games are procedural.

Nope. Why? Why???? Because it would be awkward to implement and require significant GUI changes for basically no meaningful return, presumably.

Are the other the major DLCs also going to center around a particular deity? Because if so, I'd like to nominate Galawain, the Best God.

Yep. The Protective Eothasian Charm is the same way.

This one doesn't even make sense, either. Like ... okay, Gift From the Machine and Effigy's Resentment were both actual soul shenanigans. This is just like ... "welp you got your crew to try to kill you I guess you should get +5% damage forever now."

Hooray!

Not only that, but also the selection of forbidden schools. I mean it would be great if we could choose which two schools to ban ourselves. For example I would gladly take Illusionist in my current party, and ban evocation and conjuration schools, because: - I want a few of those enchanting spells - am not going to cast evocation stuff because the character has 3-MIG and is specced for cc not damage I know that's doable from a progression table perspective, and I think it'd play nice with the character creation GUI so long as it was done up the same way as Animal Companion/Spiritshift selection.

Huh. And that bonus is applied forever? That's interesting. Guess we have another jerks-only bonus? How does one even trigger a mutiny? Let morale drift down to 0?

Ooh, cool. It's nice to see alternatives to the standard Trickster/Bleak Walker build for Holy Slayer. How do you find your AoE potential? Paladin and Rogue are both pretty single-target - are the basic attack AoEs really enough for dealing with crowds?