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=================================== Tuono e Fulmine =================================== Difficulty: PotD v.1.1.0.0035 -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Herald (Frermas mes Canc Suolias + Chanter) -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Avian Godlike -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: Vailian Republics (Soldier) -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats (char creation, no Berath's Blessings): MIG: 12 CON: 13 DEX: 11 PER: 14 INT: 13 RES: 15 -------------------------------------------------------------- Important Skills: Athletics, Intimidation -------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities (a=auto, r=recommended, !=important) PL1 Paladin Sworn Enemy (a) Wrath of Five Suns (a) Flames of Devotion (a) (!) Deep Faith Chanter Blessed was Wengridh (a) (!) Not Felled by the Axe, Nor Broken by the Storm (a) Common Fast Runner (!) PL2 Paladin Zealous Aura (!) Divine Purpose Chanter At the Sound of his Voice, the Killers Froze Stiff ® Common Two Handed Style ® PL3 Paladin Eternal Devotion (!) Aegis of Loyalty (!) Glorious Beacon ® Chanter The Fox from the Farmer did Run and Leap (!) PL4 Paladin Exalted Charge (!) Scion of Flame (!) Chanter ...And Their Fear Followed Them into Foothills (!) Common Tumbling (!) PL5 Paladin Inspired Beacon ® Righteous Soul Abjuration Chanter ...Nor Flame, Nor Thrusted Blade PL6 Paladin Virtuous Triumph Chanter They Shielded Their Eyes 'Gainst the Fampyr's Gaze (!) Old Siec Would Not Rest til' His Hunger Was Sated Their Champion Braved The Horde Alone ® PL7 Paladin Sacred Immolation Chanter Boil Their Flesh from Skin to Bone Many Lives Pass By, Each Leaving Footprints --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (*=additional enchantments; !=important, r=recommended): Weapon set 1: Whispers of the Endless Paths (Offensive Parry*!, Spinning Assault*!) (!) Weapon set 2: Kitchen Stove (Thunderous Report*!) (!), Xefa's Empirical Explication (Inexplicable Mass*, Open Choke*) Chest: Nomad's Brigandine (Feigned Retreat*!, Head of the Column*!) (!) Helmet: N/A Amulet: Heart-Chime Amulet (Winged Steps) (!) Cloak: The Magnificent Escape Cape (!) Gloves: Gatecrashers (!) Ring: Ring of the Solitary Wanderer ® Ring: Chameleon's Touch ® Belt: Gwyn's Bridal Garter ® Boots: Boots of Speed (!) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Tuono e Fulmine (Thunder and Lightning) is a build designed specifically for Pallegina, geared for battle tactics that synergize as perfectly as possible with her unique racial abilities. With this build, Pallegina is able to hit like Thunder, and strike swift as Lightning. Thunder The first seconds of the battle is Pallegina's "Thunder" phase, which involves her use of the Kitchen Stove and Xefa's Empirical Explications blunderbusses. This is where a part of her racial comes into play; Vigilant Quarry gives her Resistance to Intellect and (more importantly) Perception Afflictions, and what this means is that she can use the Powder Burns Blunderbuss modal without drawbacks, since it cancels the Distracted status with each and every shot. This makes Pallegina a natural blunderbuss wielder, as there is no reason for her not to use the modal. After marking a target with Wrath of Five Suns for the increased Accuracy, Pallegina's next move would be to use Eternal Devotion on that same target, which makes her do a Full Attack with double Burn bonuses (Powder Burns + Eternal Devotion) at the target, and gives her a Burn lash on her attacks for the next little while. But once she has discharged both shots, it is possible to make her fire a third shot immediately afterwards. The trick is Kitchen Stove's enchantment, Thunderous Report; apart from being thematic to the build, this ability allows Pallegina to do massive amounts of terrible, terrible damage once every encounter. Command her to use Thunderous Report immediately after she's completed her Eternal Devotion shots, and you can get results like this; Afterwards, this is typically when Pallegina should transition into the "Lightning" phase for the rest of the battle. However, she does not have to stay there indefinitely (although that's how it usually works out in most encounters); in certain circumstances, where ordering Pallegina into melee combat is either infeasible or unnecessary, she can always transition back to the "Thunder" phase to feed the enemy another barrage of burning shot, and/or refresh her Eternal Devotion at the same time. Lightning The "Lightning" phase is centered around the Whispers of the Endless Paths greatsword, and more specifically its Offensive Parry enchantment. The core of the idea is that Pallegina would make her enemies miss their attacks against her, and retaliate with alacrity. But to make that happen, she would need fairly high Deflection. And as it so happens, she can achieve that specifically by provoking Disengagement attacks, provided she had the right setup. And said setup includes the following; the Zealous Charge Paladin aura, the Fox from the Farmer Chant, the Tumbling passive, The Magnificent Escape Cape, and the Boots of Speed all provide Disengagement Defense. In addition, the Nomad's Brigandine with the Feigned Retreat enchantment not only lowers whatever damage Pallegina might take from a successful Disengagement attack, but gives her another shot at retaliating against the one making the attempt. But the one thing that makes Pallegina uniquely suited for this strategy is the Heart-Chime Amulet; equipped on her, the Winged Steps trait gives her even more Disengagement Defense. And as of the time of writing, there is no helmet that offers the same bonus, nor is there any amulet - not even the Heart-Chime Amulet itself - that does the same, even for any other Godlike. As the sole playable Avian Godlike in the whole game, Pallegina enjoys an edge that no other Companion, Sidekick, hireling, or even the Watcher him/herself can match when it comes to provoking Disengagement attacks and retaliating accordingly. And that's how you get her doing things like this; Couple that with the Stride boosts from Zealous Charge, Boots of Speed, Fast Runner, Winged Steps, and Blessed was Wengridh, and you have a recipe for a Herald who zips across the battlefield faster than anyone else, counterattacks anyone who tries to take a shot at her, and can always be counted upon to position herself wherever you need her; in short, she strikes like Lightning. Final Thoughts This build is so suited to Pallegina's unique strengths, I consider it my headcanon for her setup and will use it for all future playthroughs. Feel free to have fun with this one.

BLUF: Hung up on the decision to go Vaniila Wiz/Helwalker or Blood Mage/Helwalker and optimization choices (POTD, all DLC content, with a story companion party) I've looked at some of Cyrus_Blackfeather's and Whimper's builds on the list but they are somewhat dated so don't know if they are viable. I have also seen Waski's solo mega boss fights with a Sage (BM/HW) but don't know if that will work with a party or if it's better to just go vanilla wizard with a party. ***I understand the different playstyles and have messed around with them in some old saves.*** Context: I played through POE 1 a long time ago as a Cipher and recently revisited it as a Wizard. I am now looking to play through Deadfire on PoTD as a similar character with a full party of my team from POE1, plus extras (Eder, Pallegina, Xoti, and Ydwin) . I've played through on Veteran difficulty and PoTD with other classes to include Votary, Arcane Knight, SC Wizard, and Transcendent (with other party combinations), but never as a Sage. I found some of the Paladin multi-classes fun, but "safe" and I tend to like the higher risk/reward play-style better. I also am a big fan of versatility and typically gravitate to casters, but fast paced melee is also appealing. With that said, and after reading through many of the topics on these boards I am finding it difficult to decide between between blood mage or vanilla mage for the xxx/Helwalker as the optimal choice. From what I understand for Solo runs the Blood Mage is optimal but would it still be fun and viable with a party or would vanilla wiz end up more powerful with party support? Any other tips or advice regarding race, culture, etc are also welcome. Thanks in advance!

Does anyone know if Kuaru’s prize and Griffin’s Blade (Hound’s Courage) affect damage output of passive chants or active offensive invocations?

=================================== The Valkyrie of Gaun, Ultimate Edition =================================== Difficulty: PotD v5.0.0.0040 -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Contemplative (Harvester of Gaun + Sister of the Reaping Moon) -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Meadow-Savannah Human -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: Readceras (Farmer) -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats (char creation, no Berath's Blessings): MIG: 11 CON: 12 DEX: 15 PER: 12 INT: 14 RES: 11 -------------------------------------------------------------- Active Skill: Athletics (!) Passive Skill: Religion (!) -------------------------------------------------------------- Weapon Proficiencies: Small Shield (a) Dagger (a) Hatchet (a) Crossbow (a) Quarterstaff War Bow ® Greatsword ® Flail Arbalest -------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities (a=auto, r=recommended, !=important) PL1 Priest Blessed Harvest (a) Restoration (a) Suppress Affliction Monk Swift Strikes (a) Force of Anguish PL2 Priest Withdraw (a) Spiritual Weapon Monk Clarity of Agony Common Two Handed Style ® Weapon and Shield Style PL3 Priest Vile Thorns (a) Consecrated Ground ® Dire Blessing (!) Monk Swift Flurry (!) Efficient Anguish PL4 Priest Circle of Protection (a) Devotions for the Faithful (!) Monk Thunderous Blows ® Duality of Mortal Presence (!) Rooting Pain (!) PL5 Priest Wicked Briars (a) Revive the Fallen ® Barring Death’s Door (!) Practiced Healer ® Monk Enervating Blows PL6 Priest Minor Intercession (a) Salvation of Time (!) Monk Turning Wheel (!) Iron Wheel (!) Common Improved Critical ® PL7 Priest Wall of Thorns (a) Resurrection (!) Cleansing Flame Monk Heartbeat Drumming (!) --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (*=additional enchantments; !=important, r=recommended): Weapon set 1: The Twin Eels (Renewal*!) (!) Weapon set 2: Saint Omaku’s Mercy (Sacrifice of Saints*!, Galawain’s Harry*) (!) Chest: Furrante’s Breastplate (Love of Life*!, Intervention*!) Helmet: Helm of the Falcon ® Amulet: Bone Setter’s Torc (!) Trinket: Waidwen's Sundial Cloak: Nemnok’s Cloak (!) Gloves: Hylea’s Talons ® Ring: Halgot’s Warmth (!) Ring: Voidward ® Belt: The Undying Burden (!) Boots: Footprints of Ahu Taka (!) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Xoti is one of the most maligned Companions in the game for many reasons, not least of which concerns her role in the party. As a Harvester of Gaun, she’s a variation on the Priest of Eothas that doesn’t offer that much of interest compared to Priests of Skaen or Wael; as a Sister of the Reaping Moon, her starting lantern and sickle doesn’t give her enough DPS to take advantage of her subclass’s ability to gain Wounds on kill, and is crippled even further by the increased Wound cost for her Monk abilities. And as a Contemplative, she loses access both to the useful Tier VIII and IX Priest spells, as well as 2 PLs on her Monk fists; with no apparent synergy, a multiclass Xoti can seem to combine the worst parts of both her subclasses. Small wonder then, that most would recommend keeping her either a single-class Priest or Monk. That said, there is a way to make a multiclass Xoti not only viable, but also more effective as a combat support specialist. With this build, Xoti can keep her party members topped up on health while contributing to damage at the same time, generate plenty of Wounds to feed her increased ability costs, and make her party that much tougher simply by being there; in short, she’ll truly fulfill her role as Gaun’s Chooser of the Slain. (Note on “Ultimate Edition” builds: With the release of the Ultimate Edition on PS4 and XBox, there will be many first-time players of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire who will be searching for builds online, only to find that most available builds were created for earlier versions of the game. While many of those are still viable even in the final version of Deadfire, this would not be apparent to new players; thus, builds such as this will be tagged as “Ultimate Edition” to indicate that they’ve been tested for version 5.0.0 of Deadfire, including all DLCs.) Xoti, the Reaping Most people who note the ability of Xoti’s Monk subclass to gain Wounds on Kill seem to think that she has to be built as a DPS to make use of it, and thus are left disappointed when Xoti’s Sickle inevitably fails to make the cut as a weapon capable of dealing sufficient damage. And while letting her rely on her Monk fists lets her do decent DPS, it only works best for her as a single-class Monk; making her a Contemplative makes her Monk fists less effective due to the loss of PL. That’s why her sickle as well as Xoti’s Lantern are usually seen as trap choices for Xoti DPS builds; it would be a different story if her lantern could be used as a bashing shield, and both it and the sickle scaled with Monk levels like Tuotilo’s Palm, but there’s no accounting for the dev’s design choices. That said, I feel that’s the wrong way to look at it. To make use of her Wound gain on kill ability, I don’t think Xoti has to be a DPS. She doesn’t have to deliver that much damage, nor throw as many attacks as Monks tend to do. All she needs to do is throw one good hit. Specifically, the last one. With that in mind, the sickle and lantern still isn’t going to cut it; she needs a weapon that can help her killsteal her own party members as reliably as possible. Ideally, the weapon would; - Have high base damage so Xoti can land the one good hit for the kill; that pretty much means a 2H weapon. - Has enchantments that helps with maximising the damage per hit as much as possible, and - Comes with an on-kill effect to further incentivise Xoti making the kill. Now, if you’re anything like me, you probably max’d out Xoti’s Religion passive skill as a reflection of her… evangelistic tendencies. That said, doing so makes one weapon in particular hit all three points above; specifically, The Twin Eels Greatsword. The offensive potential of The Twin Eels lies in its Death’s Embrace enchantment, a Hit-to-Crit percentage that scales with Religion; in other words, perfect for Xoti who’s likely to have the most Religion in the party. This can be boosted with an additional Hit-to-Crit roll from the Bone Setter’s Torc Amulet, increased attack speed thanks to the Helm of the Falcon, and complemented with the Swift Flurry-Heartbeat Drumming Monk combo. And the fact that Xoti can gain Wounds for each kill means that she can access a synergy specific to her alone; it turns Rooting Pain from a retaliatory passive into an offensive one, since Xoti earning 3 Wounds per kill also means she gets 3 rolls of the dice to activate it on enemies unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. And when all of this comes together, it can look like this; Also, there are a number of weapons with on-kill effects in the game, but only The Twin Eels has a Heal-on-kill that also scales with Xoti’s Religion skill. With max Religion, plus healing boosts from the Love of Life enchantment on Furrante's Breastplate, Bone Setter’s Torc, Footprints of Ahu Taka and Practiced Healer, the Health that Xoti can heal with each killsteal can add up to a pretty decent amount indeed; With this setup, Xoti is best played not as a DPS per se, but positioned just behind the frontline doing Priest things such as healing and buffing… until her party members have reduced an enemy to Near Death, at which point she becomes an opportunistic killstealer charging in to deliver the final blow, gaining Wounds and healing her party members when she lands it. This let's Xoti contribute to the fight while not neglecting her healing duties, making the best of both her subclasses. Xoti, the Sacrificing With Furrante’s Breastplate, Xoti makes her party members that much tougher thanks to the Bodyguard enchantment, which makes them take 10% less damage as long as she sticks close to them. This comes with the flipside that Xoti herself takes 15% more damage from all sources, making her squishier than usual. This would be bad in most cases, but as a Monk, it also helps to fuel her Wound generation as well, making it a win-win proposition. She can double down on that with the Intervention enchantment, which gives her access to the Take the Hit ability usually reserved for single-classed Fighters. This makes her party members even tougher for a short period of time, at the cost of causing more damage to Xoti herself… fueling her Wound generation even further. And at times when a party member is close to dying and desperately needs a burst heal, Xoti can provide with the Sacrifice of Saints enchantment from the Saint Omaku’s Mercy Warbow; With max Religion, Xoti can heal any party member from dying up to near full Health once per Rest, which comes at the cost of Xoti herself eating Raw damage… which again fuels her Wound generation. Along with Priest staples such as Restoration, Consecrated Ground, Revive the Fallen, Barring Death’s Door and Resurrection, Xoti can thus keep her party alive that much longer simply by being there. However, all this utility comes at a cost of making her pretty damn fragile. So, how do I keep Xoti alive in the face of all this? Xoti, the Undying I do it by giving her The Undying Burden Belt, which reduces the incoming weapon damage Xoti suffers by up to 30% as she loses Health (it also gives her a second use of Second Wind, which is why I recommended Athletics as her active Skill). On top of it, I also gave her the Voidward Ring, which reduces the Raw damage she takes by 25%; very useful for minimising the damage taken from Sacrifice of Saints and Take the Hit in particular. But the key piece of gear that really helps keep Xoti on her feet is Nemnok’s Cloak; while it makes Xoti even more squishy by making her take an additional 15% damage, it also gives her Spirit Shield and Ironskin when she falls below half Health. Together with Iron Wheel, Xoti can go up to 22 AR; It certainly doesn’t hurt that the Cloak also gives Xoti a free Barring Death’s Door when she’s… well, at death’s door. And should all these defenses still not suffice to keep her from falling to 0 HP, the Renewal enchantment from The Twin Eels (which also scales Health regained with Religion) lets Xoti automatically revive for free once per Rest, letting her stand up to get right back it again; This means that Xoti is capable of saving lost fights single-handedly, bringing her fallen party members back to their feet in turn. All these means that despite taking more damage than the rest of the party, this build makes Xoti a tough cookie in her own right, and capable of filling in as an off-tank in a pinch. Final Thoughts Pros: - Contributes to party DPS and Health at the same time by killstealing for fun and profit. - Makes her party members tougher just by existing, and is capable of pulling them back from near death. - Is unexpectedly tough in her own right, and can save seemingly-lost fights by her own hand. Cons: - Several key pieces of equipment are late-game gear (Furrante’s Breastplate, Nemnok’s Cloak), which means this build will not be fully realized until rather late in the game. - Tier VIII and IX Priest and Monk abilities are some of the most powerful in Deadfire, which means the Valkyrie build, despite its effectiveness, still involves trade-offs. - As effective as the Valkyrie of Gaun is, it doesn’t do anything to mitigate Xoti’s zealous and sometimes-annoying personality. Last but not least, see the attached file for the AI script I created for Xoti as the Valkyrie of Gaun. Xoti Custom (Contemplative) (Druid Monk Priest) (e38db4a0-68b9-4f2c-ac8a-5bd58d0a69e3).customai

Hi there, Bought both games on their respective launches but ended up not having time to play them (well, steam says I have 12 hrs on PoE1) but now I have some time on my hands and plan to play both of them porting the save. I'll do a run of Kingmaker after that if time allows. Now, the games are not current anymore and even though I've read till my eyes burn, most of the builds are heavily outdated, at least for what I want to play, Back in the day when I first played, blunderbuss ciphers were all the rage. So I'd like to ask for some help with a more or less detailed build and recommended party for what I want. I plan on playing on normal with story companions. I'm not a competitive player, don't want it super easy but don't want to bang my head on the wall just for beating the game on hard or PoTD. I want to enjoy the story. I want to play a Dual Wield Melee Cipher, because it's the unique class to this game and the most similar to a Battlecaster. I have always liked the idea of casting magic while slashing with a sword. Since I also like dual wielding and in this game there's no need to have an empty hand to cast like Geralt (or Magus on Kingmaker).... I'm not about minmaxing so, as long as I don't die terribly on each fight during all the game I prefer to have fun and roleplay my character instead of searching for the most OP Can this be done? Can you help me please? Thanks!

The truth of the Painted Masks was a revelation that shook Aloth to the core. As he continued on his journey with the Watcher of Caed Nua, he found himself questioning his effectiveness of his work regarding the Leaden Key, and doubting in his own ability to see his cause through. But then the Defiant landed on the Black Isle, and the party arrived at the Halls Obscured. Although the Elf was as shocked as anyone else in the party at the horrors witnessed in the Collections, the seed of a whole new scheme was planted in Aloth's mind when he saw the Archives. And by the time they were done with everything they had come to accomplish and were making to leave, that seed germinated and bore fruit. After all, he may have spent much effort to little avail over the last few years trying to track down each and every cell of the Leaden Key... but if there were ever any records on where in all Eora they could be found, would they not be located somewhere in the Central Stacks? On top of that, the Watcher had just so conveniently disposed of the Oracle, the Halls' erstwhile caretaker. Plus, with the passing of Fyonlecg, there was a gap in the leadership of the Hand Occult, and the accoutrements of the Weyc were right there for his taking... With that in mind, Aloth resolved to seize the opportunity which had presented itself. In the aftermath of their encounter with Eothas at Ukaizo, Aloth claimed what he needed for his next task, bade farewell to the Watcher, and chartered a ship to his next destination. So see nothing of Weyc Engferth, for she watches you still. =================================== The Weyc Engferth, Ultimate Edition =================================== Difficulty: PotD v5.0.0.0040 -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Wizard -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Wood Elf -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: Aedyr (Gentry) -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats (char creation, no Berath's Blessings): MIG: 12 CON: 10 DEX: 15 PER: 15 INT: 16 RES: 10 -------------------------------------------------------------- Active Skill: Any Passive Skill: Any -------------------------------------------------------------- Weapon Proficiencies: Rapier (a) Scepter (a) Small Shield ® Wand ® Sword ® Battle Axe Quarterstaff -------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities (a=auto, r=recommended, !=important) PL1 Wizard Minoletta's Minor Missiles (a) (!) Thrust of Tattered Veils (!) PL2 Wizard Mirrored Images ® Infuse with Vital Essence Combusting Wounds (!) PL3 Wizard Deleterious Alacrity of Motion Llengrath's Displaced Image Arcane Dampener (!) PL4 Wizard Minor Arcane Reflection ® Flame Shield Pull of Eora ® PL5 Wizard Blast of Frost Ryngrim's Enervating Terror Llengrath's Safeguard ® PL6 Wizard Minoletta's Precisely Piercing Burst Chain Lightning Common Spell Resistance PL7 Wizard Wall of Draining (!) Tayn's Chaotic Orb Common Penetrating Empower ® Potent Empower ® PL8 Wall of Many Colors ® Kalakoth's Freezing Rake Temporal Cocoon Common Great Soul (!) PL9 Wizard Minoletta's Missile Salvo (!) Petrification Common Prestige (!) --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (*=additional enchantments; !=important, r=recommended): Weapon set 1: The Weyc's Wand (soulbound, Wael's Sight!) (!), The Weyc's Oracular Focus (Strengthened Enlarge Shield, Lasting Channeled Shield ®) Weapon set 2: Magran's Favor (Blazing Core, Enduring Flame), Griffin's Blade (Hound's Courage*®) ® Chest: Robes of the Weyc (soulbound, Mirrored Empower®, Omnipotence!) (!) Helmet: The Mask of the Weyc ® Amulet: The Third Eye ® Grimore/Trinket: Ninagauth's Teachings (!)/Iron-clasped Grimoire (!) Cloak: Shroud of the Phantasm (!) Gloves: Firethrower's Gloves ® Ring: Kuaru's Prize ® Ring: Ring of Boundless Stars Belt: Least Unstable Coil (!) Boots: Vithrack Silk Slippers ® ----------------------------------------------------------------- When I theorycraft in Deadfire, I usually prefer to work on multi-class builds. That's because I enjoy finding synergies between the skills of both classes, and putting together something that works better than the sum of its parts. But Aloth is the only exception to that rule to date, because the Wizard's PL8 and PL9 spells are just that good, and I've yet to figure out any synergies that can match their power in either of his multiclass options. On top of that, Aloth is the only one amongst the Companions and Sidekicks who can be a single-class pure Wizard (Fassina doesn't count). Because of this, I had to search for synergies that work with him through equipment, and I eventually found that the Weyc set from the Forgotten Sanctum DLC offers a truly powerful synergy with Aloth like nothing else I've seen so far. Therefore, while Aloth is always an asset to the party throughout (because Wizard), he becomes practically indispensable after FS, especially for the toughest encounters in the entire game. (Note on “Ultimate Edition” builds: With the release of the Ultimate Edition on PS4 and XBox, there will be many first-time players of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire who will be searching for builds online, only to find that most available builds were created for earlier versions of the game. While many of those are still viable even in the final version of Deadfire, this would not be apparent to new players; thus, builds such as this will be tagged as “Ultimate Edition” to indicate that they’ve been tested for version 5.0.0 of Deadfire, including all DLCs.) The Wrath of the Weyc And it all stems from a couple of simple interactions; when soulbound to a Wizard like Aloth, The Weyc's Wand offers the Wael's Sight enchantment, which converts 100% of Misses into Grazes on an Empowered attack. Which doesn't sound all that powerful, to be sure. But here's the thing; it applies to every single missile that's produced by the PL9 Wizard spell Minoletta's Missile Salvo. That means it doesn't matter how high an enemy's defenses are, Aloth... Just... Can't... ****ing... ...Miss. Of course, Aloth can only pull this off once per encounter, so even that isn't enough to take out the Megabosses by itself. But while the sheer damage that a laser-guided Missile Salvo can do is spectacular in its own right, the true value lies in its synergy with the Least Unstable Coil; the Empowered Being enchantment that's also activated with the Empowerment of Minoletta's Missile Salvo gives a random Tier 3 Inspiration with every hit scored by a spell. And apparently not only do Grazes count for proccing it, but Empowered Being activates for every single laser-guided missile produced by the Salvo. This means that after the Wael-Empowered Minoletta's Missile Salvo hits, Aloth will achieve demigod mode with all six Tier 3 Inspirations active on his person. And giving Aloth the Robes of the Weyc means his Empowerment of Minoletta's Missile Salvo also activates the Omnipotence enchantment on the armor, which gives the Brilliant Inspiration to all nearby party members as well. So keep a Priest nearby Aloth when he fires it off, and you can spam Salvation of Time to extend Aloth's demigod-hood until the end of the encounter, no matter how long it lasts. At this point, the only question left is; how well can you make use of all that power while it lasts? Final Thoughts Pros: Empowerment gives a single use of Minoletta's Missile Salvo that can bypass all defenses, even that of the Megabosses. It also gives Aloth Energized, Robust, Swift, Intuitive, Brilliant, and Courageous in one go. It even gives nearby allies Brilliant as well, so a Priest can keep all his Inspirations going with Salvation of Time spam. For the cherry on the cake, this build can be replicated by any Watcher or hireling Wizard with better-optimised Races and Attributes. Cons: Cannot be replicated with Wizard multiclasses (no access to PL9 Wizard spells), Conjurors and Transmuters (no access to Evocation), or Blood Mages (no access to Empowerment). Doesn't do anything to help with the stick up Aloth's arse, unfortunately.

=================================== Arcane Hunter =================================== Difficulty: PotD v5.0.0.0040 -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Hunter (Blackjacket + Arcane Archer) -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Hearth Orlan -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: White that Wends, Mystic -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats (char creation, no Berath's Blessings): MIG: 10 CON: 7 DEX: 18 PER: 21 INT: 18 RES: 3 -------------------------------------------------------------- Active Skill: Acana (!) Passive Skill: Metaphysics ® -------------------------------------------------------------- Weapon Proficiencies: Arquebus ® Hunting Bow (!) Dagger ® War Bow (!) Mace ® Flail ® Saber ® Battle Axe ® -------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities ( r=recommended, !=important) note: You don't have to get the skills in the order they are listed. Some of the Abilities such as (Quick Switch or Beast's Claw) won't help you until later in the game. PL1 Fighter Disciplined Barrage (!) Arms Bearer Ranger Companion Bear ® Wounding Shot Marked Prey Resilient Companion ® PL2 Fighter Fighter Stances ® Confident Aim ® Two-Handed Style Ranger Marksman ® Protective Companion PL3 Fighter Disciplined Strike (!) Penetrating Strike ® Ranger Accurate Wounding Shot ® Evasive Roll or Charge (!) PL4 Fighter Vigorous Defense® Quick Switch (!) Weapon Specialization ® Ranger Hunter's Claw ® Stalker's Link PL5 Fighter Armored Grace (!) Conqueror Stance ® Unbending Ranger Driving Flight (!) PL6 Fighter Clear Out (!) Improved Critical Ranger Beast's Claw ® Survival of the Fittest ® PL7 Fighter (if you don't take Arms Bearer you can take Weapon Mastery here but I like the flexibility of having 4 weapons choices) Ranger --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (*=additional enchantments; !=important, r=recommended): Weapon set 1: Magistrate's Cudgel + Sun and Moon ® Weapon set 2: Scordeo’s Edge (Blade Cascade*!, Strategic Shot*!) (!), Slayer’s Claw (!) Weapon set 3: Frostseeker(!)(!) Weapon set 4:Essence Interrupter(Thermal Conduit, Soul Diplomacy) (!) / Vielpiercer(Weightless Draw!, Disruptive Arrow®) ® Chest: Miscreant's Leather / Devil of Caroc Breast Plate / Gipon Prudensco ® Helmet: Heaven's Cacophony (!) Amulet: Strand of Favor Cloak: Shroud of the Phantasm (!) Gloves: Firethrower's Gloves/ Left Hand of the Obscured ® Ring: Ring of Clenched Muscle (!) Ring: Ring of Prosperity’s Fortune (!) Belt: Gwyn's Bridal Garter Boots: Rakhan Field Boots (!) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Basic Goals: This build has a surprisingly easy start considering it is somewhat of a glass cannon cannon and has several huge power spikes along the way. In the very early game Blackjacket and Ranger have a few tricks that can make life much easier for you than it would be for most characters. As a Blackjacket you can take advantage of the Arquebus Weapon Modal and start combat with a well aimed Wounding Shot before switching to a Hunting Bow with Rapid Shot. If needed you can always switch to a Dagger with Modal and Shield (a great time to use scrolls) to survive a dangerous situation. This combined with having an extra Tank from the Ranger Companion means you should be able to cruise through your first fights. Also don't forget to use scrolls (you have the Arcana for it!) in my opinion some of the first fights are among the most difficult all game and a well timed scroll can tip the tide in your favor. The first power spike comes from getting Essence Interrupter. This is probably the best Hunting Bow in the game and will get you through Port Maje no problem and is useful vs enemies that are weak to Electricity all game (just be sure to focus down far away enemies E.g Spellcasters/Ranged, first so the Summons don't attack you). It isn't cheap but if you do some pickpocketing around Port Maje you can afford it before even having a real fight. Before long you will get access to Imbue: Web. This isn't the most game changing ability but at this time in the game you will cast it with about 15 bonus Accuracy (10 from Arcane Archer Arcana bonus and 5 from Fighter stance) not to mention your high perception, this WILL hit most enemies you encounter at this stage giving you the opportunity to focus down enemies one at a time. Opening combat like this makes things easy. Your next big power spike comes from Frostseeker. You have slowly been stacking Accuracy and Hit to Crit buffs and Frostseeker will Crit ALL the time! After grabbing Frostseeker go buy Heaven's Cacophony and once per Rest you can cast Avenging Storm and absolutely shred through mobs. This may only come once per rest but soon you can cast Avenging Storm scrolls and don't have to plan on resting nearly as much. The next thing to look forward to is level 13 where you get Armored Grace and Driving Flight, your electric ice storms are now almost twice as effective. Now would be a good time to pickup Magistrate's Cudgel, Sun and Moon and Veilpiercer. Getting the Cudgel is a little tricky but there is more than enough ways to stack Resolve temporarily (Cloak of Poverty +5, Pet +2, Rings +2, Amulet, +2, Boots +1, Resting +2, Berath's Blessing +2 ). Magistrate's Cudgel gives you a random bonus of +1 Armor, +1 Penetration or -20% Recovery when you first engage an enemy and instantly kills lower level Kith on Crit. Combine this with its Weapon Modal,a Flail using the Modal and Clear Out ( later No Quarter) and you can open combat with a Buff for yourself and great Debuff (-25 Reflex, -1Armor) to a group of enemies, making them extra Vulnerable to your elemental storm and then quickly Evasive Roll to safety. Veilpiercer won't be your main damage dealer but it can be very useful against bosses or high level spell casters and being able to swap it in and out with no penalty is incredibly useful. Disruptive Arrow is especially useful vs Mega Bosses. Your next goal should be to pick up Shroud of the Phantasm. This gives you another once per rest "god mode". Living Illusions summons 4 copies of your character including your weapons and buffs! The most hilarious part is it also summons a copy of your Companion Animal so not only do your enemies have to deal with the heavens erupting with ice and lightning but also 5 hungry bears come charging as well! Around now you can switch from using Imbue Web to Imbue Eora. This packs everyone nicely together to make your elemental storm all the more effective. Make sure to give your companions immunity to Pull effects if they are going to use Melee. Next you should be able to pick up Rakhan Field Boots and Scodeo's Edge. You can combine these to start combat jumping in to a group of enemies, doing a Full Attack to each one, potentially using Clear Out to do even more Primary Attacks before Evasive Rolling to safety. You should easily get between 5 and 10 Primary Attacks in, which increases your ranged Accuracy between 15-30 and has a 20-40% chance to cast Blade Cascade. Blade Cascade is insane especially when you can instantly switch to a bow. With all your Intelligence you should have time for a Priest to throw on a Salvation of Time to keep it going. The last three things you should work towards is Ooblit, Slayer's Claw and Ring of Clenched Muscle. Ooblit increases your beneficial effects by 3 seconds which is great since your most powerful abilities (Blade Cascade, Living Illusions) have a fairly short duration. 3 seconds might not seem like much but its actually really really good its a 60% increase on blade cascade and 30% on Living Illusions. Slayer's Claw is great because after getting a priest to cast Champion's Boon on you, you will now Interrupt on Crits even from range and it also gives you access to another No Quarter style attack which significantly increases your chances of triggering Blade Cascade. Ring of Clenched Muscle turns you into an absolute Affliction king. You hit so many enemies so quickly it doesn't take long before they all have all tier 1 Afflictions. If things still aren't easy enough for you make sure to "prep" with Hunter's Claw/Beast's Claw before your bigger fights. The best way to do this is to use two one handed weapons including Sun and Moon. This will get you 3 stacks per use saving you some time. A Blunderbus used to work better for this but I think it got fixed. Another weapon that can be fun in certain situations is Lover's Embrace. Attacking from stealth and using No Quarter from your boots you can do an area of effect permanent Raw Damage over time attack and have a good chance of giving yourself Frenzy before Evasive Rolling to safety. Miscellaneous Thoughts: Once you get Brilliant having access to both Penetrating Strike and Accurate Wounding Shot becomes very useful because you can rotate between them since your Resources replenish fairly slowly. You also never need marked for the hunt. Marking is only really useful vs hard to kill bosses. You will Crit most enemies easy enough without it and far too often the Mark moves to a Tank when you should be focusing on something squishier. Vigorous Defense and Unbending don't have the longest duration but most of your best buffs aren't too long and you want to use Salvation of Time to extend all your buffs anyways. Anyways you should have enough Intelligence and fire power that it is rare things expire before the fight is over. You don't have the highest deflection but Vigorous Defense and Hunter's Claw can get you over 120 of each type of Defense. This Build is fully viable the whole game but it does get a bit silly towards the end. I had fun with it but sometimes it feels a bit like cheating. The biggest weakness is the need for an optimized party to really take advantage of the builds strength. You need a Priest for Salvation of Time, some way to access Brilliant because of how quickly you can go through Resources, a good Tank especially early game because you can be quite squishy and a reliable source of healing. You can solo as well but you have to rely on a lot of cheese in the early game and vs mega bosses. I hope you have as much fun testing this as I had making it. I feel like Blackjackets and Arcane Archers don't usually get that much love around here but they offer so much versatility and really encourage you to use more weapons and scrolls than you normally would.

Hi, I'd like to build an melee cipher with Modwyr, but i have some questions Singleclass or multiclass? What about subclass? How to distribute attributes? What to take in the second hand?

He needed help to mount his build as a pure cipher. With other classes it is not difficult for me to do the builds on my own, but with this one it is a bit uuhhhihugyf and I don't know what to choose between skills and passives. I remain in a catatonic state when reading the descriptions. Tips on essential skills and passives? My idea is to go to with a war arc in second linea. Thank you.

=================================== The Hound of Yezuha, Ultimate Edition =================================== Difficulty: PotD v5.0.0.0040 -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Brawler (Fighter + Monk) -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Storm Human -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: Yezuha (Missionary) -------------------------------------------------------------- Stats (char creation, no Berath's Blessings): MIG: 11 CON: 10 DEX: 15 PER: 14 INT: 14 RES: 11 -------------------------------------------------------------- Active Skill: Athletics ® Passive Skill: Any -------------------------------------------------------------- Weapon Proficiencies: Sword (a) Greatsword (a) Small Shield ® Sabre (!) Battle Axe (!) Flail Hatchet -------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities (a=auto, r=recommended, !=important) PL1 Fighter Knock Down (a) Disciplined Barrage (!) Monk Swift Strikes (a) Force of Anguish PL2 Fighter Fighter Stances Confident Aim Monk Clarity of Agony Common Two Weapon Style (!) PL3 Fighter Disciplined Strike (!) Mule Kick ® Monk Swift Flurry (!) Efficient Anguish ® PL4 Fighter Charge ® Weapon Specialization ® Monk Thunderous Blows (!) Duality of Mortal Presence ® PL5 Fighter Armored Grace (!) Conqueror Stance Monk Enervating Blows ® Common Uncanny Luck ® PL6 Fighter Clear Out Monk Turning Wheel ® Flagellant’s Path ® Common Improved Critical ® PL7 Fighter Unbreakable Weapon Mastery ® Monk Heartbeat Drumming (!) --------------------------------------------------------------- Items (*=additional enchantments; !=important, r=recommended): Weapon set 1: Scordeo’s Edge (Blade Cascade*!, Adaptive*!) (!), Slayer’s Claw (!) Weapon set 2: Unarmed, Tuotilo’s Palm (Balanced Shield*, Pugilist*) ® Chest: Contender’s Armor (Heavy Mobility*) ® Helmet: Fair Favor (!) Amulet: Cauldron Shard (!) Cloak: Cape of the Falling Star Gloves: Burglar’s Gloves ® Ring: Finality’s Claim (!) Ring: Ring of Prosperity’s Fortune ® Belt: Ngati’s Girdle ® Boots: Rakhan Field Boots (!) ----------------------------------------------------------------- As Companions and Sidekicks go, Rekke is one of the most vanilla as they come. Which is not a bad thing in itself; his stats lends itself to a DPS build, and his vanilla class choices make him very adaptable, which is more than can be said for several of his peers (looking at you, Fassina). Since pretty much any DPS build would be viable for Rekke, I decided instead to design a build that won’t be realized until near the end-game, but sets him up to take on one of the Megabosses in particular. Using some fairly simple interactions between his class abilities and specific weapon enchantments, this build makes Rekke an interrupt-lock machine that can, with the proper support, take on his intended target mano-a-mano. Thus the name of his build, the Hound of Yezuha; it is not only a testament of Rekke’s ferocity in battle, but it’s also a tribute to the man who killed the Mountain. (Note on “Ultimate Edition” builds: With the release of the Ultimate Edition on PS4 and XBox, there will be many first-time players of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire who will be searching for builds online, only to find that most available builds were created for earlier versions of the game. While many of those are still viable even in the final version of Deadfire, this would not be apparent to new players; thus, builds such as this will be tagged as “Ultimate Edition” to indicate that they’ve been tested for version 5.0.0 of Deadfire, including all DLCs.) Cutting the Voracious Mountain Down to Size Apart from its own set of nasty tricks, Hauani o Whe also hits like a mack truck. However, it has the lowest Deflection of the four Megabosses, and is also vulnerable to interrupts. Therefore, the trick to defeating the Voracious Mountain is to exploit these two weak points mercilessly. And the Hound of Yezuha can achieve this through a couple of fairly simple interactions. Firstly, the Slayer’s Claw increases any Might Inspirations applied to its wield by one tier. In the hands of a Monk, that means Thunderous Blows doesn’t give Tenacious, but Energized instead; that’s why I made Rekke a Fighter/Monk, and it guarantees that he’ll interrupt with every crit. Pair that with Scordeo’s Edge with the Adaptive enchantment, and Rekke will work his way up to +20 Accuracy with both weapons in time. Add the hit-to-crit bonuses from Disciplined Strikes (Intuitive) and Fair Favor (which applies to Scordeo’s Edge), and you get a Rekke who can crit and interrupt the giant ooze with practically every other strike. (This also makes Rekke ideal as a mage-hunter, which is why I gave him both Charge and Flagellant's Path; so he can dive into the backline and immediately start dismantling enemy spellcasters.) Double down on that with the Blade Cascade enchantment, and now whenever it activates, Rekke can ignore Recovery and interrupt-lock Hauani for around 5-6 seconds each time. Pretty sweet, isn’t it? Now imagine what happens when Rekke has a Priest and Cipher to provide the Ancestor’s Memory-Salvation of Time combo. That’s right; Rekke can now wail away at the giant ooze throughtout the whole fight, keeping it pancaked and unable to do much of anything whatsoever, all the way until it ****ing dies. (On a side note, Valkyrie Xoti is ideal as the Priest for the Hauani o Whe fight, because she singlehandedly turns the Symbiote debuff from an annoyance into an asset for your party. The little oozes are OHKs with The Twin Eels, and each one heals the whole party every time.) Sure, you’d still have to watch out and make sure that the smaller oozes don’t merge back into the big one. But properly supported, the Hound of Yezuha is all the DPS you’re going to need for this Megaboss fight, including the clean-up after the hard part. Enduring the Crushing Weight But to get the Blade Cascade started in the first place, Rekke has to begin the encounter with attacks on Hauani o Whe at normal recovery. Therefore he’s still going to take some hits in the first few seconds, and needs sufficient protection to help him survive for at least that long. The one thing to keep in mind about Hauani’s attacks is that it does Crush/Corrode damage. This means that the most useful type of armor against the giant ooze are Breastplates, since it is the armor type with the highest AR that doesn’t have a penalty against either Crush or Corrode. And when you think about Breastplates, the obvious choice is the Devil of Caroc Breastplate, which remains one of if not the best Unique Armor in Deadfire even in the Ultimate Edition. And while you can certainly give it to Rekke, I would actually not recommend it… precisely because it’s so good, I’m assuming it’s likely going to someone who needs it more (like your Watcher) and therefore not available for Rekke. With that context in mind, I’ll suggest the next best thing instead. And in Rekke’s case, that’s the Contender’s Armor from the SSS DLC, with the Heavy Mobility enchantment. With high Athletics and Armored Grace, it’s one of only 3 armors in the entire game that can potentially let the wearer attack even faster than if wearing no armor at all (the others being DoC Breastplate and Miscreant’s Leather); so even without Blade Cascade, Rekke can still attack at a brisk pace with this setup. To further boost Rekke’s AR against Hauani’s attacks, I also gave him the Cauldron Shard amulet and Rakhan Field Boots for additional Corrode AR, as well as Ngati’s Girdle for more Crush AR. Cauldron Shard also comes with a 20% chance to turn Hauani’s Corrode attacks into healing for Rekke instead, helping his survivability against the ooze that much further. On top of that, Rekke gets the Finality’s Claim Ring, which gives him a 25% chance to ignore its attacks altogether (it actually reflects the attack back to Hauani, but the giant ooze doesn’t take any damage from its own reflected attacks, so). Final Thoughts Pros: - Is set up to be your MVP during the Hauani o Whe Megaboss fight. - Also makes him useful as a mage-hunter, so you can use him in that capacity in normal fights. - Is perfectly viable even with a vanilla Brawler like Rekke. Cons: - Can only be fully realized as a build near endgame, because Scordeo's Edge is key to this build. - Going for this build locks you into the Slayer path in the SSS DLC, as Slayer's Claw is key to this build. - Foregoes all defensive abilities available to Fighters/Monks in favour of more DPS, so Rekke will need party support to survive in more difficult encounters. - Requires Priest and Cipher support to reach it's full potential, which can limit your choices of party composition. Last but not least, see the attached file for the AI script I created for Rekke as the Hound of Yezuha Rekke Custom (Brawler) (Fighter Monk) (08e33d71-36e8-46eb-9c8d-b3af9b6cdbac).customai

I play on PS4 and I am new to pillars. I am playing the deadfire ultimate addition. I like to start with a good Paladin (single class), a shieldbearer. A tank with a shield and mace. I’ve deducted that the attributes most beneficial to me would be; might, constitution, resolve, intellect. Am I correct, and what are the best numbers for those stats?

Hello Can You guys share with me good build for solo PotD Paladin? I only know I can dump int but I don’t know which class I should chose (I prefer human) and what talents are “must have”. Thanks

Why hello there. The name's Gaylor Stonks. Let me introduce myself: Very High Charm Very High Intelligence High Perception Average Dexterity Low Strength Low Temperament Tier 1 Perks: The Negotiator, High Maintenance, Strider, Cheetah, Slow the World, Quick and the Dead. Tier 2 Perks: Snake Oil Salesman, Soliloquy, Scanner, The Reaper. Tier 3 Perk: Revenge. Flaw: Far-sighted. Main skills: Dialogue, Science. Secondary skills: Long Guns, Lockpick, Hack, Determination. Not a single point in those awfully primitive Melee or Defense skills, thank you very much. Gaylor is a man of class, and a shameless opportunist to boot. He speaks with the refined elegance of a bohemian who's never had to work a day in his life, instead having spent his time lazily attending university lectures on particle physics and economic theory while talking his fellow students' ear off. Knowledge and wealth, the two facets of power. That's not to say Gaylor can't get his hands a little dirty now and then. He is a fair hand with a lockpick and knows his way around computers. It's just that he prefers to finger-wag and ass-cover his way out of any unpleasantries, letting his loyal companions pick up the slack instead. And if push does comes to shove, Gaylor's honeyed words are backed with nuclear weapons. It started out as a regular Plasma Rifle that he reappropriated from a cupboard in the Cannery. The astute observer may note that instead of superheated plasma it launches globs of concentrated acid, thanks to a Mag2Melt modification he bought at a huge discount. The weapon's high base damage lends itself well to the armor-piercing qualities of the Corrosive effect, and to top it off it has been outfitted with an ExactoSight which makes this synergy even more potent. The result is a reliable big iron that blows a large, smoking hole in whatever you point it at. In Gaylor's hands it becomes even more formidable due to his beefy Science skill, his keen eye for critical hits and weak spots, and his borderline supernatural time dilation ability. This removes the need for unbecoming sneak attacks or fancy tactical positioning. Even on Supernova difficulty Gaylor can just stand still and vaporize his enemies one by one, and run like the wind to recharge his meter while his companions mop up any remaining stragglers. Sure, the lack of regenerating health hurts his economy, and his gun is neither cheap to reload nor tinker with, but money is as air to Gaylor. He can rub two bit cartridges together and create a third. This lets him deck out his posse in the best gear available, keeping them safe as he slithers and slips his way around the galaxy to make even more money for himself. If only he could romance that absolute daddy of a Vicar his life would be perfect, but that's what DLCs are for. When you think quality of life, think Stonks. Gaylor Stonks.

I just finished the Ultimate achievement in the first game, so I want to play the second one now I was looking for builds here but all are from old versions, which builds are quite strong in the current patch for Triple Crown (party)? Preferably paladin, cypher or wiz if possible. I know that I should do any build, but I don't wanna a weak build and die every time.

im doing a retrain with universalist. is the spell despondent blows worth it? or should i replace it with divine mark after i have devotions of the faithful ? btw , what could be a good definitive build for universalists ? preferably a build for solo character.

Hello! I will soon be returning to pillars and hopefully finally finish it (or at least get past Maerwald) before December when POE2 releases for PS4. I want to do a talkative build that works well in a team (and solo? I dunno if there are many fights you HAVE to do solo) on POTD. Also, havin POE2 in mind, are there some creation choices from POE1 that highly affect conversations in part 2? Stats and build dont matter to me much, as I like pretty much all playstyles in these types of games Races I find the most interesting: Orlan, Aumaua, Godlike Classes i find the most interesting: Paladin, Cipher, Priest While I like slaves or scholars the most, I am open to other backgrounds. For geographic origins I have no preferences at all, though I guess Deadfire would have the largest impact in POE2? Any advice is much appreciated ;D

Hi all, I've looked everywhere I could think of and couldn't find any PotD solo turn based build so I've decided to ask for one here. I've already finished the game on PotD solo RTwP with a Devoted/Streetfighter and it was a lot of fun. However, this build obviously won't work on TB. I'm really interested in FINALLY trying the new turn based system but I only play solo PotD so here's that. A few points for this potential build: 1. I'm using Berath's Blessings so builds that are very weak at the beginning are still fine (I hope). 2. This build should be able to win against every boss (including expansions), including optionals such as the annoying Fampyr's Crypt. 3. I would very like for the build to be able to win against one of the Mega Bosses (I don't care which one), but I don't really expect to find one which does. :(( 4. Tested builds are preferred. Thanks in advance for anyone who tries to help.

Welcome to the new and updated list of current builds from these boards. The actual list is down below (scroll down a bit). Each of the several classes and multiclasses in the game are listed below in alphabetical order (single classes first, then multiclasses), with each build listed alphabetically underneath. If there's no build yet for a class/multiclass then you won't find the class name/section. I will add those once class builds come flying in. I don't order by subclasses. If you think I should and can tell my why I will consider it. For each build you'll find a short descriptor, an indication of the game version it was built for and/or it uses gear and abilities from, and whether it has been meant or tested for solo play. --- DISCLAIMER: SOLO PLAY I assume solo play to be untested for all builds that do not explicitly mention solo play in the OP. If anyone tested any of these builds for solo play and would like their experience to be reflected in this thread, please PM me specifying the build you used, the difficulty you tried, and whether you could beat the game. Similarly, if you want your build's descriptor updated, contact us with the updated descriptor. DISCLAIMER II: THREAD NAMING/TAGGING Included in this list are only builds that got send via PM or posted with the "class build" or "build" tag or with [CLASS BUILD] in the title. Since there is so much info posted atm I can't search the forums for every untagged build/build idea that is floating around. If your build is missing, please PM me with the relevant information (link, descriptor, game version, solo play) and I will add it. DISCLAIMER III: LABELS Builds can get tagged with different labels. At the moment there are three: |HOT| marks builds that got a substantical amount of feedback from the community (in form of responses, currently 20+), |POPULAR| will be put on builds that have surpassed a certain number of likes (currently 10+). Unmaintained builds or builds that won't work anymore because of patches will get tagged with |DEPRECATED| until they get updated. If they don't get updated they might get removed eventually after some time. Builds that need a mod (for example to unlock certain subclasses that are otherwise only usable by NPCs or companions) to work will be labeled with |MOD| . --- FORMAT: Build Name [links to the build's thread] Subclass(es) Short descriptor of what the build does or specializes in. Author: The user who made the build. Game version: What game version the build was created for, and/or uses equipment and abilities from. Difficulty: On which difficulty level this build was played Solo: Whether the build is suitable or intended for solo play:"Yes [Difficulty]" - The build was either created or tested for solo play on the specified difficulty level. "No [Difficulty]" - The build was tested for solo play on the specified difficulty level and the game could not be beaten. "Untested" - The build wasn't born with solo play in mind, but for all we know it might as well work—except nobody's tried yet. Companion: Does this build fit any of the official companions or sidekicks? If "yes", just add the name of the companion/sidekick here​. Usually it's only one name I guess. If you are searching for a companion-build you can simply use the search funktion of your browser (ctrl+f) to search for a companion name. --- SINGLE CLASSES (bold=there's a build): Barbarian, Chanter, Cipher, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Priest, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard MULTICLASSES (bold=there's a build): Arcane Knight, Ascetic, Battlemage, Beastmaster, Brawler, Brute, Cantor, Celebrant, Cleric, Contemplative, Crusader, Fanatic, Geomancer, Harbinger, Herald, Hierophant, Holy Slayer, Howler, Hunter, Inquisitor, Itinerant, Liberator, Loremaster, Marauder, Mindstalker, Mystic, Oracle, Pathfinder, Psyblade, Ravager, Sage, Savage, Scout, Seer, Shadowdancer, Shaman, Shepherd, Sorcerer, Spellblade, Spiritualist, Swashbuckler, Tempest, Templar, Thaumaturge, Theurge, Transcendent, Universalist, Votary, Wanderer, War Caller, Warden, Warlock, Wildrhymer, Witch, Zealot COMPANION & SIDEKICK BUILDS (bold=there's a build): Aloth, Edér, Fassina, Konstanten, Maia Rua, Mirke, Pallegina, Rekke, Serafen, Tekehu, Vatnir, Xoti, Ydwin Ok, fire away! ------------------------------ ----------BUILD LIST---------- ------------------------------ ---------SINGLE CLASS--------- Barbarian The Ultimate Suicide Bomb |HOT| |DEPRECATED| an offense heavy build that discards any defense to max AoE (shock) damage output Subclass: Berserker Author: dunehunter Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Cipher Dat Arsehole Ascendant A pure dps cipher build Subclass: Ascendant Author: 1TTFFSSE Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Fighter The Intelligent Captain a smart tactician and leader that has a lot of options and uses underrated abilities with great efficiency Subclass: - Author: Myrtillo Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Undying Titan Maximizing the effect of Unbending Subclass: Unbroken (any other works as well) Author: Esajin Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: Edér, Rekke ------------------------------ Monk The Flagellant A ranged dps monk who generates wounds through controlled self damage Subclass: Helwalker Author: ntavanga Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Priest The End Bringer A powerful offensive Priest of Rymrgand, unlockable through a mod or playable with Vatnir Subclass: Priest of Rymrgand Author: Stardusk78 Game Version: 2.0 (+mod) Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: Vatnir ------------------------------ Ranger The Arcana Archer An archer who combines certain scrolls with Frostseeker in a very effective way, dealing massive AoE damage Subclass: Ghost Heart Author: Dorftek Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: Maia Rua ------------------------------ Rogue The Duelling Corsair A veritable fencer without the need for stealthy tactics Subclass: Streetfighter Author: Myrtillo Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: Veteran Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Wizard The Combusting Wizard Very high dps Wizard with lots of versatility for group or solo runs Subclass: - Author: eschu101 Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: Aloth The Master of Missiles <no description provided> Subclass: Evoker Author: knownastherat Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - Tormentor of Mind and Body excellent crowd controller and debuffer Subclass: Illusionist Author: Silvaren Game Version: 4.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ----------MULTICLASS---------- Arcane Knight (Paladin/Wizard) The Angel of Death A dual wielding, self buffing tank with great AoE dmg Subclasses: Bleak Walker/Evoker Author: Sarnael Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Archknight Goldmagi Dual-wielding, self buffing killing machine with tanking capacity and endless zeal resource Subclasses:Goldpact Knight/Evoker Author: Enurale Game Version: 4.1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Solo Arcane Knight |HOT| What happens when you have 210+ deflection? Subclasses: Goldpact Knight/- Author: Sfzrx Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Ascetic (Druid/Monk) The Fate Testarossa |HOT| |POPULAR| or: how to accidentally make your Watcher more anime than Ydwin Subclasses: Fury/Helwalker Author: Ascaloth Game version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Battlemage (Fighter/Wizard) Cuchulain Battlemage who focuses on Citzal's Spirit Lance Subclasses: Devoted/- Author: Cyrus Blackfeather Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Lightning Rod |HOT| Battlemage caster able to unleash calamitous amounts of lightning damage on self and foes Subclasses: -/Evoker (optional) Author: Elebhral Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Brawler (Fighter/Monk) Gypsy Thunder |HOT| a harbinger of storm, mowing enemies with her lightning machinegun Subclasses: Devoted/Nalpazca Author: Giftmefood Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Lady of Pain |HOT| |POPULAR| DEPRECATED due to patch 1.1 High-speed, medium-armored dps great sword user Subclasses: Devoted/Helwalker Author: AndreaColombo Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Tornado |HOT| A brawler who's standing in a pack of enemies and spinning like crazy in order to cause as much damage as possible Subclasses: Devoted/- (vanilla or any subclass) Author: BalkothTheFeared Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Brute Guts - Frenzied Berserker |HOT| Build with great tanking possibilities, good self healing, good damage against solo targets and devastating power against crowds Subclass: Berserk/Devoted Author: seed_ls Game Version: 1.0-1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Lady of Endless Whispers A relentless and tempered brute, good damage and area of effect Subclass: -/Devoted Author: Kenneth77 Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - Wiliiam "Will" Breaker A howling immortal one man army that smashes everything in its path with high hit-to-crit conversion Subclass: Berserker/Devoted Author: Vonmama Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Contemplative (Monk/Priest) The Fists of Vengeance |HOT| does excellent single target and aoe damage and is very versatile Subclasses: Helwalker/Priest of Woedica |MOD| Author: 1TTFFSSE Game Version: 2.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - Skaen's Godsworn Ripping enemies to shreds with Skaen's blessed weapons or your fists Subclasses: Helwalker/Priest of Skaen Author: Wolken3156 Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Crusader (Fighter/Paladin) Bloodsail - The Pirate Paladin Crusader version: stand your ground, Devoted and Goldpact passives/heals make him very tanky; dps is good Subclasses: Goldpact Knight/Devoted Author: diamondsforever Game Version: 3.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Fanatic (Barbarian/Paladin) The Brutish Knight |HOT| A tanking barbarian in light armor Subclasses: Berserker/Kind Wayfarer Author: Pharaun159 Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Imperial Fanatic Pumping out crits with the Last Word, silencing mobs while being resistant to every affliction Subclasses: Berserker/Bleak Walker Author: Theosupus Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Harbinger (Chanter/Rogue) The Cunning Duelist Subclasses: Skald/Trickster A hamstringing specialist capable of inflicting all types of afflictions Author: Ascaloth Game version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Harbinger of Berath A tank who's using key gear, Persistent Distraction and Chanter phrases simultaneously to boosts defenses an armor rating and to unlock Deathblows passively. Subclasses: Troubadour/Streetfighter Author: Ganrich Game Version: 1.1(beta) Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Sweeper Agent The Sweeper's main focus is an interrupt and utility build that is tuned more towards range, but it can handle well also as a midline melee. Subclasses: Troubadour/Streetfighter Author: Metaturtle Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Herald (Chanter/Paladin) The Fire-Breathing Drake Beathes fire with Dragon’s Dowry, summons an army of fire-breathing drakes to her side and buffs her allies with the Mith Fyr and Shared Flames Subclasses: Troubadour/Shieldbearer Author: TheMetaphysician Game Version: 4.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: Pallegina The Healing Wall |HOT| A main tank who doubles as powerful endurance healer Subclasses: Troubadour/Shieldbearer Author: Climhazzard Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - Sir Sit-a-Lot What is the most effective but laziest way of soloing PotD? Subclasses: doesn't matter/doesn't matter Author: Marigoldran Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: Pallegina The Sword Singer (A) |HOT| Single or AOE tanky high melee DPS with extreme self healing, CC/offensive spells, summons, AOE healing/buffs and infinite Resources on Level 19 Subclasses: Troubadour/Kind Wayfarer Author: Voltron Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - Tuono e Fulmine |POPULAR| how to make Pallegina hit like thunder and strike like lightning Author: Ascaloth Game version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: Pallegina ------------------------------ Holy Slayer (Paladin/Rogue) Bloodsail - The Pirate Paladin Holy Slayer version: getting flanked an/or bloodied, utilizing Streetfighter bonuses to dish out great DPS while using Goldpacts Gilded Enmity to lessen damage Subclasses: Goldpact Knight/Streetfighter Author: diamondsforever Game Version: 3.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Bleak Huntress |HOT| Sniper assassin with high initial burst damage, high accuracy and nice roleplay fluff Subclasses: Bleak Walker/Assassin Author: Voltron Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Faceless Dancer |HOT| Solo retaliation tank Subclasses: Bleak Walker/Trickster Author: 1TTFFSSE Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Holy Hand Grenadier Lob explosives which debuff your foes with DOTs and afflictions. Paladin defenses let you safely self-afflict distracted with the blunderbuss modal and have constant streetfigther speed bonus. Subclasses: Goldpact||Bleak Walker||Kind Wayfarer/Streetfighter Author: arkane83 Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - Stop-N-Go extremely tanky high dps build that hovers in the Bloodied/Near Death zone while stacking stand-still abilities and teleporting around the battlefield Subclasses: Goldpact Knight/Streetfighter Author: whimper Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Howler (Barbarian/Chanter) The Lord of the Imps |HOT| |POPULAR| Summon small, squishy skeletons, smash them with Gravecaller, triggering Blood Thirst and generating an army of imps Subclasses: Berserker/Beckoner Author: Dortek Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Inquisitor (Cipher/Paladin) The Adra Infused Duelist Fast, deadly and can strip enemy defenses down to allow allies to pummel away Subclasses: Soulblade/Kind Wayfarer Author: dbarbarian14 Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Redeemer |HOT| 2h solo character built around the synergy between paladin (high defenses and survivability), cipher (high damage) and The Whispers of the Endless Paths (AoE, Riposte) Subclasses: Soulblade/Goldpact Knight Author: Kaylon Game Version: 3.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Three Aspects of the Inquisitor no FoD Inquisitor for solo PotD Subclasses: Soulblade/Goldpact Knight Author: Vonmara Game Version: 3.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Loremaster (Chanter/Wizard) The Stress-free Master |POPULAR| The most stress-free PotD solo runner Subclasses: Beckoner/Evoker Author: ppscurry Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Marauder (Barbarian/Rogue) The Lightning Sphinx |HOT| self-buffing lightning lash Marauder Subclasses: Berserker/Assassin Author: 1TTFFSSE Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Mindstalker (Cipher/Rogue) The Company Man Roleplaying build for PotD Subclasses: Ascendant/Streetfighter Author: Cyrus Blackfeather Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Dishonored Play like Corvo: stick to the outskirts of combat backstabbing to build up focus then firing off cipher abilities. Subclasses: Soulblade/Assassin Author: Statis_Sword Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: Veteran Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Ravager (Barbarian/Monk) The Furry Ravager Tmaximize the spamming of bonus attacks via crits and the right weapon choice. Subclasses: Berserker/Helwalker Author: thundercleese Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Slayer The Slayer is constantly trying to die, but is just too good at killing to have succeeded at his goal yet Subclasses: Berserker/Helwalker Author: Theosupus Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Tiny Smasher Tiny AoE damage dealer with the goal of maximizing Might and Intellect or Constitution Subclasses: Berserker/Helwalker Author: Belegc Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: Classic Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Sage (Monk/Wizard) The Burning Sage Capable of high damage magic and highly buffed melee dps Subclasses: Helwalker/- Author: Lokithecat Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Mirrorback Can shift between powerful AOE blasting, single target DPS and a "mirror mode" in which it reflects attacks and spells back at attackers Subclasses: Helwalker/- Author: whimper Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Lancer of Galawain Using Citzal's Spirit Lance to generate lots of wounds with autoattacks Subclasses: Shattered Pillar/- Author: Cyrus Blackfeather Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - Thougt and Memory Long range striker who carpet-bombs enemies with spells and pokes them from afar with Citzal's Spirit Lance + Instruments of Pain Subclasses: Helwalker/- Author: Cyrus Blackfeather Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Scout (Ranger/Rogue) The Deep Leap |HOT| |POPULAR| deceiving and evading AoE *booom* fake Assassin Subclasses: Ghost Heart/Trickster Author: Boeroer Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Seer (Cipher/Ranger) The Glanfathan Soul Hunter a defensive ranged build, puppet master, high acc Subclasses: Ascendant/Ghost Heart Author: mant2si Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - One-Eyed Jack Versatile dual-wielding melee and ranged striker with crowd control capabilities Subclasses: Soulblade/Ghost Heart Author: doggiep0op Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: Veteran Solo: Untested Companion: - The Will-Bender |HOT| Turns Whisper of Treason (and other mind control) into a highly accurate ability - and comes with a bodyguard! Subclasses: Ascendant/- Author: Braven Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Shadowdancer (Monk/Rogue) A Dance with Death A seemingly fragile glass cannon that can attacks fast, dodge everything, deal with mobs, and get out of the stickiest situations alive Subclasses: Helwalker/Trickster Author: Vonmara Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Drunken Master Wander around in an alcohol and drug fueled stupor lulling your enemies into surrounding you then suddenly explode into motion Subclasses: Nalpasca/Streetfighter Author: Theosupus Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Eccentric Scepter-Trick single target dps and good debuffer Subclasses: Helwalker/Assassin Author: Silvaren Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - The Fast Assassin the classical rogue: a dual wielding backstabber who attacks as fast as possible and is good in debuffing enemies Subclasses: Shattered Pillar/Assassin Author: Madscientiest Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: Veteran Solo: No Companion: - The Howitzer ranged crowd control/dps Subclasses: Nalpasca/Assassin Author: Dorftek Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Shaman (Barbarian/Priest) The Harbinger of Doom Dark Shaman build: Burn and sacrifice yourself and enemies for Skaen's sake Subclasses: Berserker/Priest of Skaen Author: mant2si Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Shepherd (Paladin/Ranger) Commander Shephard A sniper arquebus build with an insane amount of accuracy Subclasses: Bleak Walker/Sharpshooter Author: ppscurry Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Sorcerer (Druid/Wizard) Elemental Arsenal Stay back, buff, throw a Stun/Blind/Paralyse, look for the smallest AR/Defense rating, cast, repeat. Plenty of room for adaptation, no grimoire/weapon switching, no PL to keep track of. Subclasses: Fury/- Author: Beriel Game Version: 3.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Spellblade (Rogue/Wizard) The Spymaster Makes use of Wizard's defensive spells as well as high Constitution to maintain Flanked and Bloodied status for the Streetfighter's speed/damage bonuses Subclasses: Streetfighter/- Author: Cyrus Blackfeather Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Spiritualist (Chanter/Cipher) Rymrgand's Artitst |HOT| snowballs early into a biawac of destruction and test the power of your gaming contraption Subclasses: Beckoner||Skald||Troubadour/Soulblade||Ascendant Author: Metaturtle Game Version: 2.1 Difficulty: Veteran Solo: Solo Companion: - The Siren The Siren is about control - both of your enemies and of summons - with a good amount of debuffs on top. Subclasses: Beckoner/Beguiler Author: Toadbat Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: Veteran Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Swashbuckler (Fighter/Rogue) Armorbreaker |HOT| Sturdy two-handed striker, focusing on high penetration estocs and area of effect capabilities Subclasses: Devoted/Streetfighter Author: Haplok Game Version: 2.01 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Iron Hammer Fights defensively and outlasts his enemies by locking them down in engagement and picking his moment for devastating retaliatory attacks Subclasses: Unbroken/Trickster Author: Theosupus Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Queen's Executioner Heavy AoE alpha strikes with Oathbreaker's End with respectable single target damage to mop up Subclasses: -/Assassin Author: thundercleese Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Templar (Paladin/Priest) The Champion of Magran Mixes the best support spells and abilities with the strongest fire based abilities to make a strong flexible dps/support char Subclasses: Bleak Walker/Priest of Magran Author: Ansalon Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - The Dark Knight of Wael |HOT| High defense single-target damage dealer Subclasses: Bleak Walker/Priest of Wael Author: BalkothThe Feared Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Thaumaturge (Priest/Wizard) Effigy's Bombardement |HOT| Caster that combines both divine and arcane magic Subclasses: Priest of Skaen/- Author: araj123 Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Deathless Thaumaturge - no short description - Subclasses: <any Priest subclass>/Bloodmage Author: brasilgringo Game Version: 4.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Electric Dyslexic |HOT| Self-empowerment by taking in the absolute highest lightning damage you can generate through use of Maelstrom Scrolls Subclasses: Priest of Wael/- Author: Hulk'O'Saurus Game Version: 3.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Theurge (Chanter/Druid) The Healbot Party heal bot for heavy duty healing Subclasses: Troubadour/Livegiver Author: 1TTFFSSE Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: Tekehu (minus the Troubadour perks) Tāwhirimātea, the God of Storms Shock, freeze, and heal in a single package Subclasses: Stormspeaker/Watershaper Author: Ascaloth Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: Tekehu ------------------------------ Transcendent (Cipher/Monk) The Transcendent A midline skirmisher that can debuff and charm enemies Subclasses: Soul Blade/Nalpasca Author: Climhazzard Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Universalist (Druid/Priest) The Keeper of the Wheel support/ healer as well as a consistent buffer/debuffer and reliable DOT dealer Subclasses: Animist/Priest of Berath Author: Stardusk78 Game Version: 1.1 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Votary (Monk/Paladin) Burn Baby Burn! |HOT| Gives Paladin both superb single target burst and a AoE nuking option. Subclasses: Helwalker/Shieldbearer Author: Voltron Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Eternal Votary |HOT| A tanky yet potent damage dealer for soloing PotD Subclasses: Helwalker/Paladin Author: Sharp Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - No Pain - no Brains A retaliation based build where you also retaliate against yourself. Triggers rooting pain constantly while not dying. Subclasses: Helwalker/Paladin Author: Braven Game Version: 1.0.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ Wanderer (Monk/Ranger) The Big Game Hunter Capable of inflicting massive single target damage at range with an arquebus. Subclasses: Helwalker/Ghost Heart Author: bigwillystyle Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Untested Companion: - ------------------------------ War Caller (Chanter/Fighter) The Sword Singer (B) |HOT| |DEPRECATED| Single or AOE tanky high melee DPS with extreme self healing, CC/offensive spells, summons, AOE healing/buffs and infinite Resources on Level 19 Subclasses: Troubadour/Devoted Author: Voltron Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - The Turbocharger |HOT| |DEPRECATED| A dual wielding melee crit monster, which recovers resources, enabling it to spam charge Subclasses: Troubadour/Devoted Author: Raven Darkholme Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - ------------------------------ Warden (Druid/Fighter) The Green Knight A frontline bruiser/support/healer Subclasses: Devoted/Lifegiver Author: ntavanga Game Version: 1.0 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: - ------------------------------ Zealot (Priest/Rogue) The Undying |HOT| High risk and very high dps by stacking near death enhancing effects Subclasses: Priest of Skaen/Streetfighter Author: Dorftek Game Version: 1.2 (beta) Difficulty: PotD Solo: Yes Companion: - Let's learn with Umezawa! |HOT| Versatile and mobile Zealot, tanking on huge packs of enemies or jumping around behind enemy lines to assassinate troublesome foes Subclasses: Priest of Wael/Streetfighter Author: thelee Game Version: 1.2 Difficulty: PotD Solo: No Companion: -

I'm planning my next run on PotD Upscaled and I'd love to play a ranged guy who dual wields scepters. As it was already pointed out, scepters have one of the best modal in game: + 2 PEN and + 20% Damage with no substantial drawbacks. But... how would you build a ranged character who dual wields scepters to maximize his DPS output? Has anyone tried such a character? I've seen the "Eccentric Scepter-trick Shadowdancer" build by Silvaren, but I'm not convinced about going Helwalker/Assassin (I've just played an Assassin and the assassinate bonus doesn't apply to the attack made with the off-hand weapon, so the ability seems kind of wasted). How about a Devoted/Helwalker? Would it be better to go Devoted/Ranger instead? Could a wizard+something multiclass build work with dual scepters? Any kind of advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hello everyone! i just started playing POE 2 and man, what a blast! in PoE1 i played Boeroer's paladin with a lot of item options and it was really fun! Now im playing a blood mage/Fury shaper fun but i want to make a second build,one with a lot of use of items like scrolls and bombs and stuff like Myrtillo's intelligent captains build. i would like to craft a lot! so, do you know what kind of class could i play to have a lot of fun with that? thanks by the way.

This is an armor tier list i threw together. It's just my opinion based on reading their ingame description. Most of them i've never worn. Some can go up or down a tier depending if you use them in a specific build. List will be updated for Beast of Winter when I have time. Channel links: Twitch Channel Youtube Channel Donate via Streamlabs Reddit Discussion Steam Guide S - tier: Best in Slot Miscreant's Leathers: Hands down the best armor for dps due to the reduced recovery time Sharpshooter's Garb: Best Armor for Arbalest/Arquebus/Crossbow users. Reduces reload time. Devil of Caroc Breastplate: Reduced Recovery time and +2 Power Pool. Especially good on Multi class since both classes benefit from the increased Power Pool Reckless Brigandine: Increased Action speed per engaged target. Best armor for tanks with a lot of engagement slots A - tier: Very strong but is probably either situational or outperformed by a similar armor The Bloody Links: Exceptionally strong on Streetfighter/Humans due to proccs on bloodied Swift Hunter's Garb: Reduced Recovery Time. Outperformed by Miscreant's Leathers. Pale Hide: Very good on dps off tank. Incoming hit to grazes conversion and low recovery time. AoE fear Hearth Defender's Scale: Bonuses if good Relations with the Watcher, Penalties if bad. Very strong on a frontline support. Casità Samelia's Legacy: Deflection scaling with Intimidate. Very strong if stacking Intimidate & Deflection Patinated Plate: Chance to Stun attackers when hit with melee weapon. +armor against melee attacks. Strong on a pure tank but makes you super slow. Very good on chanter tanks, less useful on builds that care more about recovery. Deltro's Cage: +2 All Electricity Power Levels could have been great on Fury (Druid subclass) but 55% recovery time makes it garbage. Apparently you can make some very powerful builds with this armor. 55% recovery time keeps it out of beeing S - Tier. Sidenote, outside those synergies the armor is fairly useless. B - Tier: For when all your other good armors are taken Fleshmender: Health/sec and Incoming hit to grazes conversion Very good on dps off tank. Effigy's Husk: Decent on a Ranged Streetfighter but Bloody Links is way better. Does have 0% Recovery though Furrante's Breastplate: Reduces damage taken by party memebers and increases healing. Grants Concentration. Good for frontline Casters Blackened Plate Armor - Grants damage or heal over time aura. Random Mind Inspiration when bloodied. Second Aura deals damage over time and reduces armor by 1. Gipon Prudensco: +25 defense vs disengagement attacks. +1 deflection/+2 reflex when hit in combat (stacks 10x). Immunity to Flanked. Can get Immunity to disengagement attacks instead. Good if you want to rush past frontline to get into backline with your frontliner or to retreat with your backliner. Imo best used as a defensive option for a squishy frontliner. C - Tier: Decent to wear before you get the good armors. Can be situationally good Garari Cuirass: Incoming hit to grazes conversion. Reduced damage from weapons. Cabalist's Gambeson: Very good against spellcasters. Spider Silk Robe: Immune to Dexterity afflictions and Grants Binding Web. Magnera's Chain: Increases recovery time on attacker when getting crit with melee weapons. Resistant to Might affliction. Ok for tank. Iridescent Scale: Can be enchanted to be exceptionally strong vs a specific dmg type. Conjure Greater Blight. Saint's War Armor: Revives the wearer when they get knocked unconcious 1/per combat. Decent but with correct play they shouldn't be knocked unconcious in the first place Desgraza Breastplate: Reduced Damage the lower health the wearer has. Ok for tanking Five Suns Breastplate: See above Honor Guard Breastplate: See above Humility: 20% Resist Slash/Pierce attacks. Not bad on a backliner just not very good either D - Tier: Don't waste your money on enchants Nomad's Brigandine: Can get Immunity to disengagement attacks but if you are a dedicated tank you probably dont care about that. Too much recovery for an offtank Edit: Moved Patinated Plate into tier A. More useful on chanter tanks or builds that doesn't care about recovery then i gave it credit for. Moved Humility to Tier C. Slash/Pierce attacks are rather common in the game. Moved Casita Samelia's Legacy into tier A. Moved Deltro's Cage up to Tier A based on siggestions for build synergies. Moved Gipon Prudensco to Tier B

The Imperial Fanatic This is another thematic build (so not 100% min/max). It ends up being tank enough to just run into the fray (with support) and most of boss fights were WAY easier than they should have been because of the amount of crits I could pump out with Last Word silencing the mobs. I just wanted to make a Warrior Priest and this was the result. It was a really fun toon to play that was resistant to every affliction and I even got the party efficient enough that I could let my custom AI run almost all the fights (with a little micro for consumables and empowers). Last word locking down Concelhaut for the whole fight was HILARIOUS Game Version: 2.0 Difficulty: PotD (+all Upscale, no mods) Solo: Untested Race: Human Class: Fanatic [berserker/Bleakwalker] Home: The Living Lands Background: Explorer Stats: (not including blessings) Mig: 20 Con: 10 Dex: 16 Per: 16 Int: 12 Res: 4 Skills: Active: Split Alchemy : Athletics Passive: History Abilities: Frenzy FoD Sworn enemy Deep faith Blooded Thick skin Zealous aura Two weapon style Divine purpose One stands alone Eternal Devotion Bloodlust Sworn rival Blood frenzy Exalted focus Mental fortress Inspired path Interrupting blows Scion of flame Iron gut or Clear head (based on which enchant you put on DoC BP) Righteous Soul Brute force Virtuous Triumph Barbaric blow Barbaric smash Retribution Bloodthirst Equipment Main weapon: Magran’s favor + Last Word (used lastword + bardatto’s until I could get Resounding call, double hammer so win on looks, until I could get the axe) Backup weapons: Glacierbane + Last Word Heaven’s Cacophony Charm of Bones Devil of Caroc BP (plan the resistance to complement ability choice) Ring of greater regen Ring of Focused Flame Boots of the stone The Giftbearer’s Cloth Boltcatchers Gwyn’s bridal garter Pet: Nalvi (Used Abraham until I got Nalvi)

[CLASS BUILD] The Stress-free Master Evoker/Beckoner Description: This build is intended for people who want to have the most stress-free PotD solo run without being overly cheesy with their strats. This might not have the best DPS or the best survivability but what it does have is sustainability, great survivability and great dps without being too dependent on end-game gear. This build works smoothly from start to finish. Yes, even at level 1. Race: Whatever you fancy but here's a ranking anyway. Honestly, it makes no difference. Remember, 'Stress-free' No.1: Nature Godlike for the power levels No.2: Meh, Moon Godlike just for an easier time early on. Wood Elf is pretty nice for the resistance to affliction. No.3: Meh. Difficulty: POTD Solo: Yes Stats : 18 Might 10 Con 10 Dex 18 Per 18 Intelligence 3 Resolve Maxing might is obvious. 10 Con is honestly all you will ever need, most of your survivability will come from your shield/nemnok staff once you get it, plus your wizard spells. 10 Dex because with all that tankiness, casting super fast isn't that much of an issue compared to accuracy and duration+aoe. Max Perception because you can never have enough accuracy. Max Intelligence because of duration and aoes for your chants. Resolve is just junk. Period. Everything hits you on PotD anyway and even with 3 resolve, I have 100+ deflection without my chant buffs. That's more than enough to prevent permanent crits on you. As for status effects, just outtank them and chanter has a ton of resistance to afflictions so stuns/para/charms aren't even an issue. Skills: Go for hunter for the mechanics. Boost mechanics till you reach 4 minimum/6 if you don't have hylea's blessing or if you don't want to use it. Boost Survival till 2 or 4 for convenience sake. Everything into metaphysics after that. As for the other skills, I suggest mechanics up to 8 some athletics. You can retrain anyway so don't worry too much other than the initial two steps I managed. I will elaborate more on that later. Proficiency: Large Shield, Sabre. As you level up, flail, battle axe, quarterstaff. Whatever you have leftover doesn't matter. Flail modal is important since it gives a reflex debuff. I don't really use it much but without modal, there's really no reason to use a flail. Quarterstaff modal is useful but only once you get Nemnok's staff. Blessing of Berath: Highly Recommended: Unique Vendor Recommended: Double Skill bonus and bonus attributes. Great if you have it: 50k gold Whatever: The rest. Gear: I will split it up into early/mid/late game for those who are newer. Early: Firethrower's Glove: Unique Vendor in Port Majo(?). You need the Blessing of Berath for this. Otherwise, go for some generic +2 Might gauntlets (There's one sold in the vendor in Queen's Landing.) Burglar's Gloves: Just for the mechanics boost. Optional but quality of life item. Vendor Item (Nekataka? or Crookspur? I forgot.) Belt: Some generic +2 con belt or just nothing if you want to be fancy. Boots: Boots of the Stone for the affliction resistance Cloak: Cloak of protection/greater protection. Once again, doesn't matter too much. Armor: Depending on your gold, either the best breastplate you got or Devil of Caroc(Nekataka Vendor, Periki's Overlook) (useful throughout). Alternative is Miscreant Leather from Fort Deadlight (Benweth). Essentially you want the most armor rating for the least recovery penalty. These two options give bonus to recovery as well. Ultimately, you want to switch to Devil of Caroc for the armor rating (IMPORTANT) Weapon Mainhand: Sasha Singing Scimitar (Nekataka Vendor, Periki's Overlook). If you don't have the gold, go for the best option you have but gold shouldn't be an issue, I'll explain why later. Offhand: Best large shield you can get. Cadhu Scalth is your shield of choice (Old City, Gullet from the two cornett quest. It is possible to sneak past the boss and avoid fights if you are experienced with the area. I suggest picking up the cornett of the depths from the initial half of the old city before re-entering using the Undercroft's entrance. Complete the Delver's Row(Gullet) questline (Dereo). His questline will lead you the rest of the way.) Cadhu Scalth boosts your survivability by a LOT so it is important to get it by the late mid-game. Necklace: Stone of Power. You don't really have to buy this, I just happen on a ton of these. Great for fireball alpha strikes. Alternative is the +perception necklace in (Port Maje? or Majo) Rings: Ring of Focused Flame (Nekataka vendor, Periki's Overlook ), Kuara's Prize (Ori o Koiki , you can bribe the doorlady, at least I was able to (2000g)) Otherwise, it doesn't really matter much, only the Ring of Focused Flame is useful for this early stage. Helmet: Recruit Aloth and take his helmet. (I made him leaden key in my history) Once you unlock delver's row (Nekataka, Gullet) pay the assassin to kill the vithrack to get Whitewitch Mask. Pet: You want something that boosts your spells, perception, might or aoe. Honestly, it doesn't matter much but I settled on Nalvi in the end. I don't remember where I got him. Nalvi reduces recovery penalties. Grimoire: Ninagauth's Teachings (Arkemyr's mansion, Nekataka, Periki's Overlook). ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL and easy to get too. Walkthrough on how to grab the grimoire: Grab a thief's putty, Burglar's gloves, and rest with Hylea's Blessing to boost your mechanics to 10 artificially. Alternatively, do the quest for the vendor in the dark cauldron (in the same area) to gain entry, but you still require a degree of mechanics to pass this area easily. I forgot if there was a lock on the chest with Ninagauth's Teachings so just get your mechanics up to 4/6 as a precaution. Unlock the front door, pop your thief's putty if your stealth sucks and avoid the patrols as you head straight down the corridor. Open the main doors and head to the upper floor. On the upper floor, you will come upon an exit on your southwest. Take it and you will enter a rampart of sorts. Walk northwards to another door and enter it. Once you do, follow the path to Arkemyr's bedroom. Loot the entire room and read any notes you find. One of them give you a password to use. Equip Arkemyr's robes. Proceed back to the upper floor and this time, open the first door on the right to find an imp inside. He has a gem you can grab off him by pretending you are Arkemyr and using the password you found in his bedroom. From this point on, all the patrols won't be alerted by presence. Head downstairs to the first floor and search Arkemyr's study for another piece of note with the vault combination (middle room on the right). Once you do so, head down to the lab using the stairs. From here, head straight and take a right, you should a wheel like object you can interact with. That's the vault mechanism. If you did everything right, you can open it. Once you open it, watch out for traps etc. There's a 10 mechanics locked chest in there. Grab the quest item, the grimoire, and the figurine. Mid-game: Gloves: Firethrower's Gloves Belt: Maker's Own Power (A belt that petrifies you and heals you but I cannot recall where I got it. It's an easy bounty with a construct) Boots: Boots of the Stone or whatever you fancy, assuming your affliction resistance is taken care of. Cloak: Cloak of Greater Protection, easily found and bought from vendors Armor: Devil of Caroc Weapon Mainhand: Magran's Favor (Kohopa's Fang mini-dungeon) Right at the northern edge of the map. Slightly left of the middle line.) Shield: Cadhu Scalth. Absolutely critical, if your game is bugged, rip you. In that case, equip the best large shield or shield you can find. Alternative Weapon: Sasha (Enchanted to give empower points. Either works fine honestly.) Necklace: Orishia, gives a minor dmg shield, action speed, recovery speed, penetration, blah blah. A whole ton of stuff really. Grab it from a bounty (Flamewalker Vessali) Somewhere mid-east. Not entirely sure. Rings: Ring of Focused Flame, Kuara's Prize. Helmet: Whitewitch Mask Pet: Nalvi or whatever you fancy Grimoire: Concelhaut's grimoire (Berkana Observatory) You need to kill concelhaut for this and it will probably be a boring fight (really long). I did it around level 12 or 13? Save your raw damage spells for the right moment. Ensure you have resistance to resolve afflictions. Use ogre summons to bash him, very very slowly. When he tries to use his finger spell (that's the icon) run away from him since that spell heals him. Another key strategy is carefully pull mobs. Engage from as far as possible and run backwards, making use of the fog of war to kite the melee mobs away to the stairs. You will get it after a few tries. After grabbing the grimoire, it's not necessary to swap to it since power level 7 is the main reason to get it. End-game: Cloak: Giftbearer's Cloth. Gives defenses, additional quick item slots and weapon slots. Mini-dungeon (Fampyr's Crypt, south and slightly east of Nemnok) I suggest grabbing the resistance chant for this fight but it's doable without it. Once again, careful pulling is required since they are really a pain to deal with together. Mainhand: Magran's Favor with Cadhu Scalth Sasha (or a flail) with Cadhu Scalth Chromoprismatic Quarterstaff. (From Nemnok's questline, Drowned Barrows/Junvik Village. Northwest corner on the edge of the line) Grab the defensive and +power level enchantments. Everything else is the same. This section is optional tbh. Making Money early on: Stock up on the cheapest crew, food, water you can find. Grab four imperial long gun (dunnage and neketaka), aedryan hull treatment and cottonweave sails. Ensure your supplies are maxed and go ship hunting. Start with the easier foes first to build up crew experience. With this build you can tackle most of the ships you find in this game except for the rathun ships and Takabna. You might have to reload sometimes. Just remember to repair your ship mid fight. By farming like this, you can level easily, earn easy superb, legendary, uniques and grab a ton of experience and money from bounty quests. Ability Choices: Initial Choice: Minoletta Minor Missiles(WIZ) and a chant (CHAN) Next: Summon Skeleton. Then just grab spirit shield(PL1), mirror image(PL2), displacement(PL3). You need to rely on your grimoire for attack spells. PL3: Minoletta's Bounding Missiles (not necessary but it's reliable compared to fireball) PL4: Summon Ogre. As for chants, they don't really matter till you get to the resistance chants or the ancient memory chants. Grab Minoletta's Concussive Missiles and Ironskin. If you have Concelhaut's grimoire, feel free to retrain out of Minoletta's Concussive Missiles. Feel free to respec and get rid of skeletons at this point. PL5: Garbage. I rather passives. Ryngrim's Enervating Terror is a pretty nice pick but I didn't find much use in this build. Feel free to pick it. PL6: So Singt Thy Biting Winds o'Eld Nary (CHAN) and Minoletta's Precisely Piercing Burst. PL7: Set to their purpose they all knew their part (CHAN, requires a previous pick at PL5 I believe). ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. GRAB THIS FIRST. At level 20, grab Set to His Bidding, the Ancient Instruments of Death (CHAN). Wiz spells from your grimoire. Passives: Potent Empower, Quick Summoning, Rapid Casting, Scion of Flame (not necessary but I'm going for the delayed fireball theme). Weapon and Shield Style. Combat Focus Chants: One Dozen stood against the power of the saint, Blessed was Wengridh, Ancient Memory, Seven Men onto the deck they went, They shield their eyes against the fampyr's gaze. There were two other chants I picked but I didn't really like them, feel free to use those two talent points for something else. One was a PL1 chant and the other was a PL5 chant. Strategy: Rely on your skeletons and ogres to coast through the ****ty phase of being a wizard. Essentially, the start and whenever you are out of spells. Powerful combos include: Empowered fireball: With your evoker power level and gloves and empower and nature godlike (if you used it, I didn't). You can severely cripple a whole mob right away. Use your ogres to bash the rest up. They hit really hard. Really. Empowered Minoletta's Concussive Missiles: Once you have this, don't empower fireballs unless they have resistances to crushing. This combo murders entire mobs even at high levels. Concelhaut's Crushing Doom: Works on every major boss except for the last one. Keeps them cced for a really really long time. Set to their purpose they all knew their part: The meat of this build. Other than the summons, this is the other reason to pick a chanter. This gives you resource points(spells). With this, you can spam as many defensive spells as you want. Eg. Arcane Reflection, Iron skin, displaced, mirrored image, spirit shield. Also turbocharges your phrase generation. You will never run out of resources period so just spam whatever you like. Summons: Ogres will get you through most of the early levels. Once you pick up the PL7 weapons summon, use that instead. Summons are really really good. Without summons, you have to cheese a lot more. With them, you can just sit in the back line and quietly heal up and watch your ogres bash them up. Empowering summons kinda suck so don't do it. Just empower your minoletta. Opening Rotation (non-PL7): Spam your defensive buffs, summon ogres, empowered minoletta. Most monsters won't be able to kill you fast with your shield and buffs so don't worry. PL7 Opening: Spam your defensive buffs, cast Set to their Purpose, empowered minoletta or delayed fireball (depends if you need them dead earlier or later). Cast your swords. Keep up your buffs and spam whatever spells you like, they won't run out anyway lol. Use Concelhaut draining missiles to heal up. You're even tankier now since you can spam arcane reflection without using up a spell point. You can basically face tank whatever you want. Reminder: Remember to check the enemy's resistances and make your own judgement as necessary. This build gives you a lot of leeway to make decisions and mistakes but that doesn't mean you don't need to think either. (Fampyrs are still annoying and running into a giant mob for no reason is still a bad idea.) Choices I Abandoned: Drakes: Worthless at the initial stage and I didn't find them worthwhile to spend two ability points on. AoE Frost Invocation: I forgot the name, it's the one with spikes and smaller spikes. I didn't want to spend two points on a purely frost spell that also relies on reflex for accuracy. Heals: With a tanky shield, all you need are your phrases and draining missiles to sustain you. Chugging a potion might be necessary from time to time. Fireball: Honestly, you can swap to the other grimoire if you like it that much. It's not a really reliable dps spell compared to the minoletta missiles series. Ryngrim: Why debuff them when you can blow them up? Your helmet has this spell anyway. Why Evoker/Beckoner: Beckoner is for the cheaper and increased number of summons. It helps a lot earlier on to have more bodies and the reduced cost ensures that even if you make a mistake, you can recover faster. Evoker is mostly for the increased power level. You can choose a normal wizard if you wish. If you do, you gain access to chill fog(instead of minoletta's minor missiles) and at PL6, you can pick up Ninagaulth Freezing Pillar instead of Minoletta. Conclusion: You still can't beat a pure wizard's empowered meteor shower but you have a lot more tankiness to afflictions and sustainability. Remember, the keyword is stress-free. With Minoletta and Delayed Fireball, you can blow everything up anyway, who needs wilting wind or meteor shower?

Hi there. Relatively new player here (played 20 hours last year at launch), looking to create a ranged mindstalker for a Classic playthrough using the Turn-Based mode. I was hoping to get some advice re: stat priority, weapons (2h vs DW), and key abilities to really make the multi-class shine. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

WHAT THIS IS Trying to do something different here. I'm going to discuss a character build that I had a lot of fun putting together and playing on 1.1 PotD (probably the most fun I've had in Deadfire so far), but I'm going to use it as an entrypoint to teach-by-doing various game mechanics and how to think about them and use them for your own builds. People already comfortable with min-maxing their way through Deadfire might not get much out of this, but hopefully for everyone else there's something useful here, because there's a lot of information scattered through this forum, reddit, and the in-game cyclopedia and I hope to consolidate some of it here and put them to actual use. In fact, I would say something like 90% of this is just going to be talking about game mechanics, because understanding the game mechanics thoroughly is key to understanding this character build. I hope you find this useful! Oct 2018 - Updated stats, items, build for 3.0+, added alternatives, and god challenges notes July 4 2017 - Updated stats for patch 1.2. July 3 2017 - Partially updated for patch 1.2. TABLE OF CONTENTS - Introduction - What does this build do - The build itself - TL;DR playstyle - Detailed playstyle - Details - Armor - Details - Weapons - Details - Surviving - Details - Consumables - Details - Miscellaneous spells and abilities - Details - Stats - Conclusion/Putting it all together - Alternatives - Rejected approaches - Notes for Magran's Fires - Appendix: Linear returns INTRODUCTION "What the hell is an 'Umezawa?'" Well, while I don't play it anymore, I still follow and am a big fan of Magic: The Gathering. And with one of the more recent sets out (Dominaria), I got to thinking about a couple of cards that struck me as particularly flavorful: The latter card is actually from a set more than a decade old and is/was so stupidly powerful that it's banned in one of the super-powered tournament formats (banned in Modern). The former card is just a nostalgic callback to the latter that was in Dominaria (which itself was a set all about nostalgic callbacks). It's not particularly tournament-worthy.(*) (*) If you're a M:TG lore purist out there, yes yes I know that the Umezawa on the left is not the Umezawa that the Jitte on the right is named for. Even if you don't play Magic: The Gathering, the takeaway here is a fragile, weak, but elusive hero, and a stupidly powerful tool-kit of a weapon that the hero is lorewise linked to. I liked the idea of taking a very blue (crafty, subtle, evasive) approach to stupid levels of power, and decided to personify it in Deadfire as a Streetfighter/Wael multiclass that I'll just brand here as an Umezawa build. WHAT DOES THIS BUILD DO This character is very versatile and mobile, tanking on huge packs of enemies or jumping around behind enemy lines to assassinate troublesome foes. This character is not going to be great at doing burst or area of effect damage (at least until you have a steady supply of explosives), but it will do frankly a stupid amount of sustained damage, maximizing uptime for the Streetfighter's special (at least without resorting to just being a ranged blunderbuss dummy). While this is probably not the most powerful Streetfighter build you can make (a Streetfighter/Monk is probably better for pure damage) and is fairly micromanagement-intensive, it can nonetheless be a very fun and engaging way to play. THE BUILD ITSELF Before diving into the mechanics of it all, let's just lay out the build order. UMEZAWA CLASS: zealot - streetfighter + priest of wael RACE: wood elf BACKGROUND: living lands + scientist STATS: 10 (9+1 living lands) might, 10 constitution, 17 dexterity, 16 perception, 18 intellect, 7 resolve SKILLS: roughly 2:1 ratio between Explosives to Alchemy. For your secondary skill, shove as much as you can into Religion, though you can respec out of this after a certain point. Be sure to pay 3000g each to train both Explosives and Alchemy. STORY ABILITIES: be clever at the first summons to the gods so you get Wit of Death's Herald ABILITIES: (active priest abilities with arabic numerals, active rogue abilities marked with roman numerals for their power levels, automatic priest spells in angle brackets, weapon choices in italics) Updated for 3.0: some skills reordered, dropped Searing Seal for Champion's Boon, weapon proficiency recs changed 1. Restore (1), Escape (I) <Arcane Veil (1)>; hatchet, blunderbuss 2. Fast Runner 3. Arms Bearer 4. Holy Meditation (2), Smoke Veil (II) <Iconic Projection (2)>; large shield 5. Weapon and Shield Style 6. Two Weapon Style 7. Despondent Blows (3), Riposte <Mirrored Image (3)> 8. Deep Pockets; mace, sabre, or stiletto 9. Prayer for the Spirit (3) 10. Devotions for the Faithful (4), Dirty Fighting <Llengrath's Displaced Image (4)> 11. Persistent Distraction 12. Pillar of Faith (2); mace, sabre, or stiletto 13. Barring Death's Door (5), Tough <Confusion (5)> 14. Champion's Boon (5) 15. Uncanny Luck 16. Salvation of Time (6), Smoke Cloud (V) <Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment (6)>; dagger 17. Rapid Casting 18. Pillar of Holy Fire (6) 19. Cleansing Flame (7), Deathblows <Gaze of the Adragan (7)> 20. Smoke Grenade (VII); remainder of mace, sabre, or stilleto or your favorite end-game weapon here IMPORTANT ITEMS: Sparkcrackers and Cinder Bombs as explosives. Deadeye, Potion of Ascension, Potion of the Last Stand, Potion of Deftness, Potion of Impediment, and Potion of Piercing Strikes for alchemical goods. Mix in other stuff as desired. IMPORTANT FOOD/DRINK: Meppu, Roe, Forgotten Night IMPORTANT GEAR: Miscreant's Leather, Cutthroat Cosmo (the special pig pet), Xoti's Sickle (early on), Marux Amanth (soulbound to priest), Fair Favor, Nemnok's Cloak, Entonia Signet Ring, Shorewalker Sandals RECOMMENDED GEAR: Pukestabber, Frostfall Mace, Rust's Poignard, Animancer's Energy Blade, Bronlar's Phalanx, Wintertide Bulwark, etc or whatever else floats your boat. TL;DR PLAYSTYLE Early on (when your health is super low, like levels 1-4) you are going to dual-wield a hatchet and a blunderbuss with Powder Burns enabled. You'll attack at range with a blunderbuss to trigger the Streetfighter's Heating Up bonus, then run in for melee. When the Powder Burns self-debuff has ~3.5 seconds left (first reload) or ~1-2 seconds left (subsequent reloads), you'll shoot at an enemy or ally 3-5m away and refresh the Powder Burns debuff. (Early on you may just run out of range manually and shoot your current target.) Once you have a bit more health and a bit more abilities under your belt, the playstyle is very aggressive. Instead of relying on Powder Burns, you'll rely on one of: blindly charging in and getting flanked; blindly charging in and getting your health pummeled really fast; or manually triggering your Streetfighter special by hitting yourself with Sparkcrackers or, in a pinch, Cinder Bombs. So depending on the situation, you might be tanking for your entire party, or you may be dodging back behind enemy lines to take out important casters. For boss fights, you'll drink a Potion of Impediment and try to pin the enemy down with repeated interrupts. DETAILED PLAYSTYLE This character is a "build-around" on the Streetfighter's special. To reiterate here, when you are flanked or bloodied, you get a special buff (Heating Up) which gives you a whopping -50% recovery time, along with a +50% damage bonus against sneak attack-enabled targets (effectively it is a souped up sneak attack damage bonus). If you are both flanked and bloodied, you get a special buff (On the Edge) which not only grants you the same bonuses as Heating Up but gives you a further +100% crit damage bonus. Both the damage bonuses are additive with other damage bonuses, so while they are certainly very good, it's not insane. The real star here is the -50% recovery time. -50% recovery time is equivalent to a whopping +100% action speed for your recovery, or the equivalent of getting +33 dexterity during your recovery. Furthermore, contrary to what you might think or read elsewhere, speed bonuses offer linear returns(*), so you can add on a bunch more recovery time reductions or action speed boosts and get to really fast levels (translating to high damage output). This is especially important for maximizing Potion of Impediment, which can really shine with a "Heating Up" Streetfighter's very fast attack speed. (*) Linear returns may end up being one of the most controversial things I'll say mechanically in this entire post, but is mathematically true and I will fight anyone who says otherwise . There'll be an appendix at the end that will go through the ugly math and details of it. Notably, unlike Pillars of Eternity 1, Deadfire distinguishes between action speed adjustments and recovery time adjustments and they are very different and expressed in different ways, and is responsible for a lot of confusion about how action/recovery works. The Streetfighter's bonus only applies to your recovery, leaving the attack part untouched. This means this bonus heavily favors weapon attacks, potions, and throwing bombs, because weapon attacks, potions, and bombs have very short attack times and the bulk of the time spent using them is just recovery. By contrast, spell casting has significant attack ("cast') times that will be left untouched by the Streetfighter's special. (Scrolls sit in between, having slower attack times than other consumables, but faster recovery than spells.) But the way cast times work in Deadfire is that they generally follow a pattern where spells with faster cast times have longer recovery, and slower cast times have shorter recovery; this means that, ironically, a very slow spell cast (6s) will have a much shorter recovery time (typically 2s) than even a very fast cast spell (0.5s cast, up to 4.5s recovery). (The standard progression for spell timing is 3s cast/4.5s recovery, 4.5s cast/3s recovery, 6s cast/2s recovery so the total action time spent doing a spell cast monotonically increases with slower spells, even if the recovery is less.) This means that we can still get some benefit out of the Streetfighter's special if we focus on casting fast (3s) and some average (4.5s) spells, because shaving off 2.25s or 1.5s off your recovery is still incredible (shaving 2.25s off a fast spell cast is roughly equivalent to a +42% action speed or almost like taking three stacking copies of the Rapid Casting passive talent, even though it's all weighted towards the recovery phase instead of the cast phase). The major downsides to the Streetfighter are twofold, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit downside is that while you are neither flanked nor bloodied, you get a +20% recovery time penalty. The implicit downside is that to maximize the Streetfighter, you have to be at least flanked or bloodied which is generally a very dangerous situation to be in. This character focuses on letting you survive in those situations while trying to not take away from the Streetfighter's strengths. DETAILS - ARMOR A really important piece of gear is actually your pet. The cosmo pirate pet (unlocked by doing the deadfire scavenger hunt or special non-achievement-disabling console commands) gives your main character a reduction in their armor penalty. The effect varies on armor, but this variance is because of the weird way it's implemented (which is identical to how a Fighter's Armored Grace is implemented). Internally, the game stores armor recovery penalties of +20%, +35%, and +55% roughly as coefficients of .83, .74, and .65. (What these numbers mean is not important right now.) Instead of applying a consistent effect on the listed recovery penalty, the cosmo pirate pet adds a flat .1 to these internal coefficients, which means these coefficients become .93, .84, and .75, which means the armor recovery penalty becomes +7%, +19%, and +34%. This means that the armor recovery penalty reduction is actually strongest for heavy armor, but that's not the important point here. The important part is the interaction with Miscreant's Leather (a light armor you can get for doing the first Principi quest by killing Benweth). Miscreant's Leather comes with a special enchantment that reduces recovery time by -10%. Theoretically, this was supposed to have the net effect of mitigating a majority(*) of the of the +20% light armor recovery time. However, with the cosmo pirate pig, your base armor recovery time penalty is +7%, which means the -10% recovery time enchantment makes wearing Miscreant's Leather actually faster than wearing any +0% recovery time clothing. (*) one of the ongoing confusions that one might have about recovery time is that you can't just add up your various recovery time adjustments and expect to get a sane answer. In fact, the best way to think about adjustments to your action time is that there is a different "native unit of measurement" depending on whether it's a bonus (either a +X% action speed or -Y% recovery time) or a penalty (either a -X% action speed or a +Y% recovery time). For bonuses, the native unit is "action speed," whereas for penalties the native unit is "action time." This is a weird distinction but is important for understanding how modifiers are combined. You can read the Appendix for further discussion. Anyway, for our purposes here what you need to know is that the -10% recovery time bonus needs to first be translated into its native unit as an action speed adjustment, or +11% action speed. The +20% light armor recovery time is in its correct native unit so we don't need to change it. Now (and for you people who took science classes in high school and pay attention to your bases/units this might hurt your head but is how Deadfire does it), you subtract the recovery time from the action speed and get a unitless -9%; because it's negative the effect is considered a recovery time penalty, and so the net effect of the -10% recovery time adjustment is that the armor effectively has a +9% recovery time penalty instead of a +20% recovery time penalty. TL;DR: a +20% recovery penalty combined with a -10% recovery time bonus does not equal a net +10% recovery penalty. In fact, the -10% recovery time bonus is actually more powerful than an equivalent recovery time penalty. This will come up again later, and I will go into further detail about the math then. So, as one of the few mandated pieces of gear, you should really have a cosmo pirate pig pet, and you should prioritize getting Miscreant's Leather. It will give you extra protection than cloth and be faster than cloth. Plus, it has a really useful enchantment for this build (Kidney Guard, which reduces received flanked damage by -10%). For the early part of the game before you get the leather, you should otherwise be in +0% recovery time clothing. If you're struggling a bit too much in early game, you can equip other light armor and the cosmo pirate pet. 3.0+ Update We now also have Epsilon as a good pet choice (available in Dunnage). In addition to reduced armory recovery time, its party-wide bonus is extra stride speed, which can be a much more useful bonus than Cosmo's firearms damage obnus. DETAILS - WEAPONS A hatchet and a blunderbuss (along with their proficiencies) are your absolute #1 priorities early on, followed up by a large shield. A hatchet is important because it provides a stacking +3 deflection against melee and its weapon modal applies a -10 accuracy (regardless of attack type) to the enemy, both of which you'll soon see is very important for this build. The blunderbuss is important because Powder Burns applies the Distracted affliction on you every time you attack, and conveniently for the Streetfighter, all Perception afflictions also apply Flanked which will trigger the Streetfighter special. (In fact, I'm sure many people have discovered you can create a stupidly good ranged attacker by just making a Streetfighter equip at least a blunderbuss.) Early on, using a blunderbuss at the start of the fight is a good, safe way to trigger the special, and the powder burns aoe damage is generally so low that it's ok to occasionally hit armored allies with it. Later on, Powder Burns is still a useful way to trigger your special in small fights or when you're isolated by yourself against important targets away from everyone else. An important pickle with gun reloads is that any adjustments to their reload speed is delayed by one reload. This means that after you fire your Powder Burns blunderbuss, the immediate next reload will not benefit from the -50% recovery time bonus. However, subsequent reloads will. I believe this also works in reverse. If you start reloading your blunderbuss while benefiting from the -50% recovery time bonus and Powder Burns wears off, you still benefit from the faster reload until the next time you need to reload (though by then you will already have refreshed it). For this character, you will want to dual-wield your blunderbuss with a melee weapon (early on, a hatchet). Because of game mechanics (even if it doesn't make logical sense), dual-wielding a melee weapon with a ranged weapon means that outside of melee range you only use your ranged weapon, and in melee range you only use your melee weapon, but you do both as if you were dual-wielding, so you get the -30% recovery time bonus from dual-wielding (plus an additional -15% recovery time bonus from two weapon style), even though you're just repeatedly attacking with the same weapon. In fact, in some parts of the game, you may have a melee weapon that is so good that you don't want to switch off with a weaker second melee weapon, which makes it a perfect candidate for pairing with a blunderbuss. In practice, it also means you can blunderbuss, melee, and then re-blunderbuss a ranged target (to re-trigger Powder Burns) without having to switch between weapon slots, which incurs a costly 2s recovery each time. This is a relatively painless (if micromanagement intensive) way to get 100% uptime with your Streetfighter special. Note that blunderbusses have a low range (4-5m, depending) so when you are in this melee/blunderbuss mode you should be cognizant of viable blunderbluss targets, particularly since for a good amount of that range your character will want to melee or take a step in order to melee. It is actually worth shooting your own allies (and positioning them close to do so) because for armored tanky allies they will take negligible damage that is well worth the continued uptime of Heating Up. In the worst case (if you're not engaged by your target), you can just step away from your target and fire at range. This downtime of running back and forth will still be outweighed by the significant damage boost you get from having constant uptime on your Heating Up effect. Do remember that for your first reload you need to give yourself 3-4s of time (depending on stats and gear) though subsequent reloads will only need a little more than a second. At level 4 you pick up large shield proficiency because this build has two very large weaknesses. I'll go into the second one later, but the first and most common weakness is enemy gunfire. See, this build leans on Arcane Veil heavily for protection, and Arcane Veil unfortunately offers no protection against "veil-piercing" attacks, of which enemy gunfire is the most common type. In such a situation, the large shield modal gives you an astounding defense against ranged attacks, -50% to ranged damage, on top of the natively large deflection bonus (coupled with Weapon and Shield Style) that will work against gunfire. It's such an extreme survivability difference that in any fight involving guns (at least early to mid game), you should switch to using a large shield and prioritize taking out the gunners. The downside to the large shield modal is that you are immobile, but fortunately we pick up Escape at level 1, which will let us hop around the map without having to toggle the large shield modal on and off (in addition to providing a nice, gun-effective deflection bonus for a short time). Note that even outside of gunners, many ranged attackers in Deadfire have stupidly high accuracy bonuses for their attacks that it may still be worth switching to large shield in ranged-heavy fights in early-to-mid game, both for the extra deflection, and for the significant damage mitigation. As you go up levels, you'll need to pick up some blunt weapon proficiency for damage diversity. I prefer flails and clubs for two reasons: they are fast (3s base recovery) and their weapon modals let you reduce enemy reflex or will by -25, which is huge. Clubs in particular are good because two of your most important spells (Despondent Blows and Devotions for the Faithful) target will. If you don't want your weapons lots to be oversubscribed, you can give a party member a club to do the debuffing for you. 3.0+ update With some of the rebalancing that has occured since this guide was first written (especially PotD enemy scaling) a weakness that glass cannon builds like this have is penetration. On PotD enemies can sometimes have substantial armor, and if you can't penetrate their armor, a glass cannon can't do the high damage output needed to balance out its relative fragility, which means you're just a fragile character with little upside. As a result, I no longer recommend fast blunt weapons, which lack penetration weapon modals. Instead I recommend diving into maces (which have high inherent penetration and whose weapon modal debuffs armor for everyone in the party), sabres (for access to Animancer's Energy Blade, which does raw damage; you don't technically need the weapon proficiency to take advantage of this, but sabres are just a good class of weapon to have proficiency with early on), and/or stilettos (high inherent penetration, access to Rust's Poignard). Both stilettos and sabres benefit from the Fair Favor hat, which this build already uses. In addition, as I'll mention later, I recommend picking up Champion's Boon instead of Searing Seal for the extra penetration from the Tenacious inspiration. This character will also pick up dagger proficiency. For reasons that I'll elaborate on in a moment, the weapon modal isn't too important, but what is valuable is getting the Fair Favor hat and getting a Marux Amanth soulbound to your priest class. Fair Favor gives you hit-to-crit and bonus crit damage with daggers (among other weapons). Marux Amanth has very useful abilities for this character when fully unlocked: Worthy Sacrifice (which is an instakill against Near Death targets if you hit them), Corona of the Soul (10% chance for a decent burn aoe effect), and Echoes of Faith (10% chance to re-cast any priest spell a half second after the initial cast). Echoes of Faith is a particularly good ability; 10% isn't very common, but when it does happen can be a tide-changingly good effect. We actually pick up certain spells basically because they would be really good to have duplicated (Pillar of Faith, Pillar of Holy Fire, Cleansing Flame). Still others get good benefit (Salvation of Time), and at the very least you get double chances to afflict enemies with Despondent Blows or Devotions for the Faithful. Corona of the Soul is also a decent ability and works well with this character because we will be attacking so fast that we'll be close to maximizing the number of times we can proc the burn aoe (which does ~10-20 in about ~1.5m) in any given amount of time(*). As an extra plus, imagine that the Marux Amanth is the Deadfire equivalent of Umezawa's Jitte from above . (*) Funnily enough, while trying to test some Deathblows-related issues, I discovered that Corona of the Soul has its damage boosted by damage modifiers that affect any weapon, including Deathblows itself (and any lash effect). This appears to apply to any weapon-based proc. (See below screenshots--click to enlarge--the left is a Corona of the Soul proc in the combat log and the right is a Sungrazer proc in the combat log, though unlike Corona of the Soul it doesn't have a special name in the combat log. I also tested some other procs and verified those get boosted, too.) This is both a general thing to keep in mind for your own builds, especially rogues who can sneak attack and Deathblows, but is especially good for a Streetfighter who can easily get an additional +50% from Heating Up and a further +100% from critting while On The Edge. As far as other unique weapons go, steal Xoti's Sickle as soon as you can, you'll be able to put better use to it. Not only does it have the benefit of having two damage types unlike other hatchets (giving you much-needed damage diversity), but its power-up effect (additive +5% plus .5% per religion skill to sickle damage until end of fight, up to 4 stacks) is very good and likely to trigger since this character will be doing a lot of finishing blows. I highly recommend you enchant it to have Urgent Harvest, which gives you 15% plus .5% per religion skill action speed bonus to Xoti's Sickle the moment any enemy dies anywhere, regardless of whether or not you did the killing blow. Importantly, due to stacking rules (which I'll go into further later), this combines with the Streetfighter special, with Potions of Deftness, etc so you can get stupidly fast attack speeds with the sickle. Mid-to-late game better hatchet options will open up. Acolyte's can be straight up better than a Xoti's Sickle because its Freezing Lash is always active (whereas Xoti's Sickle needs to power up upon kills) and is a multiplicative bonus with the total damage you did, which means a +15% freeze damage lash is worth much more than a +15% xoti's sickle damage. The combination of sneak attack damage (up to +60% additive) and Streetfighter special (another +50% additive) and possibly the Streetfighter On the Edge bonus (another +100% additive from crits) can make that lash worth more than a fully-powered up xoti's sickle. Later on when you have more survivability tools at your disposal and the +3 deflection bonus from a hatchet (or +6 from two hatchets) is less important and the -10 accuracy weapon modal more redundant, you can start ignoring hatchets all together. I like pairing Marux Amanth and Pukestabber together; when Pukestabber is enchanted with Mad Drunk, while under the effects of alcohol, both daggers will have +20% additive damage and +20% action speed; plus, both of them will benefit from the Fair Favor hat. Regardless of what weapons you choose, you'll have three weapon slots each with an important role: one that has a blunderbuss/melee pair, one for dual-wielding, and one for a large shield. Your dual-wielding one will be your main slot past the early game, but you'll need to be ready to switch to one of the other slots as the situation demands. And be sure to have damage type diversity, because this character will lose a lot of steam if you're stuck in a 25% No Pen situation against most of the foes in an encounter. In fact, I recommend keeping your high penetration backup weapon as your blunderbuss/melee pair - this is essentially your "boss mode" set up where you can both do high penetration and trigger self-flank at will throughout a long fight without having to repeatedly weapon switch. 3.0+ update There have been some random changes to how dual-wielding a ranged weapon and a melee weapon work. First, you can no longer attack destructibles at range if you are main-handing a melee weapon; your ranged weapon must be in your main hand. Second and more relevantly for this build, you cannot actually engage enemies unless you are main-handing a melee weapon. This is important because a good crutch for this build was to main-hand the blunderbuss, so that the range indicator properly indicates the range of the firearm so you know how far away to go before it's too far when trying to trigger Powder Burns. You can still do that, but you can no longer engage foes if you do this. Since engagement can be pretty important, if you don't need the visual aid of the blunderbuss range indicator, you should main-hand a melee weapon and keep the blunderbuss in your off-hand. DETAILS - SURVIVING The basic point of this character is getting into dangerous situations to trigger the Streetfighter special and then surviving, which is a harder task when playing on Veteran or Path of the Damned. Before we dive into the many tools that we'll lean on, we need to talk about how effect stacking works in Deadfire. On the face of it, the rule is pretty simple, paraphrasing the in-game cyclopedia: all passive effects stack, but the highest active effect suppresses all other active effects. While the rule is simple, the devil is in the details and thinking through the implications of this is important for your own gameplay. A "passive effect" can be thought of as constant item effects (like a Ring of Minor Deflection), innately triggered item effects (like Xoti's Sickle's Urgent Harvest or its damage boost or Entonia Signet Ring's defense bonuses), and passive class abilities (anything in the passive column and always-on innate effects like the Helwalker's might bonus from wounds). Everything else is an active effect, including weapon modals, paladin auras, and stances. This is relevant because one of the ways that we'll lean on surviving in dangerous situations is by having a high deflection. Veteran min-maxers will know the finer points of getting your deflection to sky-high levels, but the important detail for us is that when it comes to defensive abilities we actually have a lot of redundancy, and surviving will involve avoiding that redundancy. Look at the following table for ways that we will make it harder and easier for enemies to hit us, and what active effects fall into each stacking category (this is not a comprehensive effect of all things in the game, just common ones relevant to this character): +Deflection | +Deflection from Resolve Arcane Veil (+50 vs non-guns)| Any resolve inspiration (+5) Escape (+50) | Ripple Sponge (+2) Mirror Image (+30) | Llengrath's... (+10) | dagger modal (+10) | Coral Snuff (+5) | ------------------------------------------------------------- -Enemy accuracy | -Enemy accuracy from Perception Despondent Blows (-15 melee) | Arkemyr's Wondrous Torment (-10, jumps to -5) hatchet modal (-10) | Any perception affliction (-5) Devotions for... (-10) | Blinded affliction (-10) | ------------------------------------------------------------- -Deflection | -Deflection from Resolve Flanked (-10) | Any resolve affliction (-5) This means that any given time, you can have around a 85-point net swing in your relative deflection to the enemy's accuracy. This is by combining Arcane Veil, a resolve inspiration, a Despondent Blows debuff on the enemy, and a perception affliction on the enemy, though you will likely also have a constant -10 from being flanked. Still a 75-point net swing after being flanked is still pretty huge and this is still ignoring stackable passive effects like the hatchet innate weapon bonus (+3 deflection against melee), Entonia Signet Ring (+2 all defenses per enemy engaging you [which is different from enemies that you engage]), a large shield with weapon and shield style (+12, +6, plus an additional +2 per large shield enchantment level), Cloak of Deflection (+7), Minor Ring of Deflection (+2), Shorewalker Sandals (+1 resolve), etc. However, this also means that if you have Mirror Image active, there is no reason to have your dagger modal active. If you've hit all the enemies nearby with a blinded affliction, there is literally no reason to have your hatchet modal active and casting Devotions for the Faithful could potentially just be a waste of time. Juggling all these various stacking effects will constitute a good chunk of the micromanagement of this character. You certainly could just leave your dagger or hatchet modal on all the time, but you'd be giving up a significant chunk of damage unnecessarily. Now, a big question is, say all enemies nearby are hit with Devotions for the Faithful (-10 accuracy); is it worth the opportunity cost(*) of casting Despondent Blows on top of that (it would be a net change of an additional -5 accuracy)? Similarly, if you are already protected by Arcane Veil, is it worth the time to get a resolve inspiration? The answer, my friend is that defenses offer increasing returns(**). Basically, look at the combat log. If the enemies don't have too much of a negative penalty to their attack roll, then it's probably not worth it. If they have a pretty huge negative penalty (but less than -75), then yes it's probably worth it. Even then, this guideline isn't perfect because if you're trying to get hit to get low enough health to trigger On the Edge or a perma-Heating Up (common later on in the game), then you may never find it worth it to cast even the hard-hitting stuff to begin with. (*) "Opportunity cost" is a crucial concept for this character, and an important concept for any other character. There's an idea that there's an "action economy" in games like Deadfire, that is, you only have enough time to do so many things before combat ends, one way or the other. You certainly could cast every single buff or debuff in your arsenal willy-nilly, but then you'll spend actually very little doing anything of import. When you eventually are able to attack about once/second for a significant amount of damage (40-50 a pop, with potential Corona of the Soul triggers), you'll have to judge very carefully whether it's worth instead spending 3-6 seconds (i.e. giving up 150-300 damage) by casting a spell or using an ability. (**) Defenses offer increasing returns because of the way attack rolls work in Pillars/Deadfire. The higher the relative defenses to an attacker, the more significant each additional point of defense becomes. A pair of examples illustrating this: let's say you have 0 defense against an attacker with 25 accuracy. What would the impact of 5 additional defense be? Well, with Deadfire's rolls, you'll go from being graze/hit/crit by the attacker 100% of the time to 95% of the time. Not much of a change in your total survivability. Now, let's say that you have 95 defense against that same attacker. What would the impact of 5 additional defense be? You'll go from being grazed 5% of the time to never being touched ever again. You will have gone from having finite--if huge--survivability to literally infinite survivability: that enemy could attack you until the heat death of the universe and they will never so much as reduce your health by 1 point, where with a 5% chance to graze they could probably kill you within an hour if you do nothing but stand there. This might sound like an absurd example, but for many types of "The Ultimate" runs for Pillars of Eternity 1 (beat the entire game solo on the hardest difficulty in iron man mode) some fights could literally last for more than an hour and the difference between being grazed 5% of the time and never being touched could be the difference between a successful run and one that fails after many hours of playing. Plus, when you are surrounded by enemies in melee and targeted by enemies at range, even a 5% chance to be grazed can be significant; when there are ten enemies on the battlefield one will be expected to graze you every other attack, which will quickly add up to something fatal if you aren't killing things quickly). You'll note that I list Escape as a source of deflection. And while it lasts an extremely short time (3s), with decent intellect and stuff like Meppu/Roe it can last almost 5s. Early on it can be a way to get some extra emergency protection without burning an Arcane Veil (especially since you don't have many other non-situational Guile-spenders you can potentially just chain together a bunch of Escapes to your current location since it has only a .5s base action time and no recovery), and at all points in the game can be used so that you can jump straight behind enemy lines and have a few seconds of unconditional +50 deflection protection to buff yourself or do something else. (If you want to be tricky, you can use Salvation of Time to extend the unconditional +50 defense of Escape by 20 seconds.) Now, it's important to highlight that this character is not intended to be an immortal riposte build. We could just leave a large shield equipped and stack on all sorts of bonuses to be untouchable, but frankly I find that playstyle boring (I did that for my own The Ultimate achievement run and while it was certainly impregnable it was also tedious). What we really just shoot for is enough defenses and debuffs to not be squished into oblivion within a few seconds of being flanked, so that we can go on a killing rampage. This character picks up riposte not because we are going to rely on it for as a centerpiece for our damage, but as an accent of some additional damage in certain situations (which we maximize by dual-wielding since riposte does a full attack). In fact, in the late game, we may just want to deliberately get to near death ourselves and not worry so much about defenses, which leads me to another aspect of the survivability equation: CAN NOT DIE EFFECTS If you played Pillars of Eternity 1 with a priest, you'll be forgiven for ignoring Barring Death's Door and similar effects in Deadfire, since the effect in Pillars 1 was pretty lame. All they did was prevent you from dying, and dying in Pillars of Eternity 1 meant getting knocked down to 0 health (as opposed to 0 endurance), which would have been a permadeath instead of just a knockout. What Barring Death's Door and similar effects do in Deadfire is prevent anything from reducing your health below 1 (even instant kill effects from something like Death Ring). Fortunately for the Streetfighter, one way to trigger Heating Up is to get Bloodied or lower, and the only way to get On The Edge is a combination of being Bloodied or lower and being flanked. Both Barring Death's Door and Potion of the Final Stand give us a nearly foolproof way to trigger Heating Up and sustain On The Edge. But both Potion of the Final Stand and Barring Death's Door have low base duration. It's for this reason why we pick up something like Prayer for the Spirit (+5 intellect means an extra +25% of base duration for Barring Death's Door), invest in Alchemy (+5% duration per point in Alchemy to Potion of the Final Stand), and love food/drink like Meppu/Roe (+15% beneficial effect duration, additively stacks with intellect and power level scaling) and importantly why one of our most important late-game spells is Salvation of Time (+10 seconds to beneficial effects but as of 1.2 actually grants +20 seconds at least the first time you cast it per encounter). This stuff also helps Arcane Veil--which has a fairly short duration as well--but is more critical for these "can not die" effects because the moment they wear off with you at 1 health, you are probably going to be knocked out. This leads to the second of this character's weaknesses, and it is Arcane Dampener. It's not too common for much of the game, but during the Paradise of the Mind quest and Nemnok the Devourer quest, literally every enemy wizard will try to hit you (and especially this character) with Arcane Dampener at least once; will Arcane Dampener temporarily suspend any current protections for a long time. You can try to hope that your will defense--which will be sizable thanks to a high intellect (buffed further by Prayer for the Spirit)--protects you, but this hope is dangerous because even a graze will dispel all your protections for a few seconds, which is more than enough time for you to be interrupt-locked to your death. You have two main approaches. First, you can try to use Smoke Veil to go invisible the moment you see the Arcane Dampener icon appear above wizards' heads (they tend to all cast it at the start of the fight, so if you see one you will probably see a lot) and let the enemy wizards re-target it to another member of your party who is less reliant on spell protection for survival. Second, you can try to use Smoke Grenade/Smoke Cloud or something like Grenades or Concussion Bombs to interrupt them while they are trying to cast it. This is very risky because if you miss you don't get another chance to interrupt them, so generally prefer the first approach. Either way, you should then eliminate the enemy wizards with extreme prejudice, because some of them will hang on to their third level spell cast to try again later. DETAILS - CONSUMABLES In addition to blunderbussing with Powder Burns or charging in to get flanked/brought to Bloodied quickly, an additional way you are going to get uptime with Heating Up and On The Edge is with explosives. Sparkcrackers is the way to do it for much of the game, since it will afflict you with Distraction and with a high explosives skill can last ~30s on a hit. The catch is that it needs to hit deflection first, so it will not work very well if you have already buffed your deflection or are in the middle of an Escape. A smaller catch is that your Intellect and possibly your Resolve are high, so your will defense will be high, making it hard for Sparkcrackers to hit, so only do this if you're desperate for a buff or are under the effects of Deadeye, Potion of Deftness, or something like Potion of Perfect Aim (all of which will give you a modest boost to accuracy). Do note that with a modest intellect, Sparkcrackers will attempt to hit you twice: one upon contact and once again a second later; its distraction effect triggers every second and Sparkcrackers actually has a base aoe duration of 1s.(*) (*) Note that patch 1.2 significantly weakened the effects of Deadeye and Potion of Deftness (no additional accuracy from alchemy) and somewhat weakened Sparkcrackers (no extra duration scaling from intellect). If all else fails, you can use Cinder Bombs (or rely on a friendly wizard to cast something like Chill Fog). Unlike Sparkcrackers, Cinder Bombs don't need to hit deflection first and instead of targeting will targets reflex which may not be as high if you have a perception affliction. Note that the blinded affliction is much worse for you than being distracted, because in addition to being flanked and losing 5 perception, you will also have an additional -10 accuracy penalty and a severe +50% recovery time penalty. However, even though the +50% recovery time penalty has the same magnitude as Heating Up's -50% recovery time bonus, the recovery time bonus is much more powerful than an equivalent magnitude penalty, and so you will still gain a significant speed up from being blinded(*). Cinder Bombs can also be used suicidally in a pinch if you want to lose some health to either trigger On The Edge or get into Heating Up in the first place, but do pay attention to that ongoing damage because it would be stupid if you ended up actually killing yourself. In higher-level fights, Cinder Bombs can also be a useful protection since if you're blinded you cannot be hit by Fampyr's Dominating or Charm Gaze. (Theoretically, blinding enemies also blocks them from using gaze attacks, but as of 1.1.1 this is bugged and doesn't work.) (*) This point comes up again and seems confusing, and is a minor disagreement I have with MaxQuest's otherwise excellent work on action speed; in the pinned post he asserts that all maluses (through something he calls "double-inversion") are stronger than their equivalent magnitude bonuses. This may be true for damage, but is not quite the right way to think about this in terms of action/recovery because action/recovery has different "native units" depending on whether it's a bonus or a penalty. The true complexity is left for the appendix, but for here it serves us just to remind you that because of the different "native units" a -50% recovery time bonus is not countered by a +50% recovery time penalty. Instead, if you are at all familiar with investing or finance, it's related to why if your investment loses 10% of its value one year, you actually need more than a 10% gain the following year to make up for it, because you're starting from a smaller base. In fact, let's stick with this investment analogy and swap in numbers from Deadfire here: imagine you had $1000 worth of stocks that lost 50% of its value one year. What return would you need the next year to make it back? If you lost 50% of your $1000, you are down to $500. So you would actually need a 100% return (doubling your money) the next year to get your money back. And in fact, this holds true for the blinded/Heating Up interaction. For the blinded affliction to cancel out the -50% Streetfighter recovery time bonus, it would need to be a +100% recovery time penalty. Sure enough, you can verify this in-game by looking at your weapon recovery time and then blinding yourself. Even though you have a +50% time penalty from being blinded your recovery time will go significantly down. To get the magnitude of the specific effect, we have to convert to our native units; -50% recovery time bonus is natively a +100% action speed during your recovery; a +50% recovery time penalty is already in its correct native unit; we take the +100% and subtract the +50% recovery time penalty; the answer is positive, so we treat it as an action speed adjustment of +50%, or a net recovery time bonus of -33% which is still significant. Yes, this math is weird. Other than those explosives, you should load up on whatever else floats your boat. Remember that, like weapons, explosives have a short action time and a longer recovery, so the Streetfighter with their special will be able to spam explosives like nobody's business. because of this Grenade and Concussion Bombs are a little less useful than others because spamming bombs is a little harder to do when Grenade and Concussion bombs are knocking everyone around. For alchemical uses, Deadeye and Potions of Deftness are mostly there as accuracy bonuses (though the action speed bonus from the potions of deftness is a nice plus), not just for landing Sparkcrackers but also because even with 17 perception there's a high likelihood that you have a perception affliction, so you are going to find that sometimes you need the accuracy help. Note that once you get Devotions for the Faithful, you can just use that for a powerful if slower accuracy boost (though it may be too slow for just trying to trigger Sparkcrackers early on since you'll have to go through at least one slow spell recovery from Devotions before attempting a Sparkcrackers).(*) (*) As of patch 1.2, Devotions for the Faithful's +10 accuracy bonus is the best active common accuracy bonus that I can immediately think of. This is because patch 1.2 significantly nerfed all consumables but in particular Deadeye and Potion of Deftness by no longer letting their accuracy bonuses scale upwards with your alchemy skill, so Devotions's +10 bonus got significantly better as a result. In addition, Devotions is special because most other accuracy bonuses come from being perception inspirations (like Fighter's Disciplined Barrage), so the +10 accuracy will stack freely with other perception inspirations and importantly for this build won't counter perception afflictions. Potions for the Final Stand are a good, if uncommon, supplement to Barring Death's Door (and your main option--aside from a friendly Shieldbearer Paladin--before you get Barring Death's Door). Potion of Impediment meshes extremely well with the Streetfighter's ultra-low-recovery rate for weapon attacks; as of 1.2 you no longer get effect scaling with alchemy but with a 30% interrupt chance and a fast attack rate you can still prevent a dangerous enemy from getting much done (interrupts, in addition to countering any active ability adds a little extra time to their current recovery). And lastly, a major weakness is that the Streetfighter/Wael lacks a lot of good ways to penetrate enemy armor (you won't be picking up any weapon modals that give you bonus penetration, and there are no armor penetration skills), so when you can, keep a Potion of Piercing Strikes ready to give you bonus penetration for big, hard fights.(*) For much of the game, you'll also want Potions of Minor Healing (nothing stronger) just to help you when your health gets too low. (*) Due to the fact that damage maluses are significantly stronger than damage bonuses due to double-inversion, under-penetration can lead to severe loss of damage. 25% underpenetration cancels out upwards of +300% worth of damage bonuses (it's a similar situation to a -75% recovery time bonus requiring an equivalent +300% recovery time penalty to cancel out), which is well more than what even a Streetfighter that is On the Edge and critically sneak attacking can put out. Even just going up to a 50% underpenetration (which only cancels out +100% worth of damage bonuses) can actually more than double your damage output. E.G. a neutral might, level 20 streetfighter/wael on the edge, sneak attacking, critically hitting, at 25% underpenetration would have a net damage adjustment of almost -40% (-3 + .6 + .5 + 1 + .25 = -.65 => 1/1.65 = .61 => -39%) whereas just managing to go up to even 50% underpenetration would have a net damage adjustment of +35% (-1 + .6 + .5 + 1 + .25 = 1.35 => +35%) which is a 2.25x increase in damage. Shows you how important penetration can be. DETAILS - MISCELLANEOUS SPELLS AND ABILITIES As mentioned before, we pick up Pillar of Faith, Pillar of Holy Fire, and Cleansing Flame just to do some extra damage and cause some interrupts (for Pillar of Faith), and hopefully trigger a Marux Amanth double-cast. Remember that opportunity cost is very important; make sure with all of these that you are doing something that, on its own, is worth giving up the melee damage you are foregoing by not auto-attacking instead. For Pillar of Faith, that means trying to interrupt several enemies in one go (remember that the prone itself targets Fortitude whereas the damage targets Reflex). Pillar of Holy Fire against groups of enemies (and potentially yourself if you're trying to trigger Bloodied). Cleansing Flame to eliminate enemy buffs and when it looks likely you'll get some good jumps off of it. Holy Meditation is just for some early resolve inspiration if needed, and later on as a way to cancel out a growing number of ways that enemies can Terrify your party. This character doesn't have many offensive abilities, so Frightened is not actually that big a deal, though the resolve hit can be a liability. Searing Seal is there as an additional source of blind and a way to lure enemies and blind them for free. That's because if you cast a spell outside of combat and you stay out of combat for a few seconds, you get that spent resource back. For many abilities this is not too useful. Seals, however, have a long duration. So you can cast it, wait for your resource to come back, and either lure enemies into it or wait for them to walk over and be hit by it. In fact, so long as you cast it a decent distance from enemies away, but still close enough to alert them by its noise, they will walk over the seal and be affected just after you get your 5th level spell cast restored. Because your 5th power level of spells is going to be oversubscribed (Barring Death's Door is just so good in this build), an opportunity for a free blind is too good to ignore. 3.0+ update I no longer recommend Searing Seal and instead recommend Champion's Boon. Champion's Boon solves several problems for us. First, it gives us +2 penetration from its Tenacious inspiration; this won't stack with a sabre or stiletto weapon modal, but will stack with the mace effect (because the mace gets extra penetration by implementing it as a debuff on the enemy, not as a buff on yourself) and importantly is the only consistent way we have to boost the penetration of daggers. In fact, for daggers this is better than a weapon modal because most other bonus penetration weapon modals give you a significant recovery penalty, whereas Tenacious gives us the +2 penetration without any drawback. The second and smaller perk is that Champion's Boon gives us +3 engagement. Combined with Persistent Distraction, this means up to four nearby enemies will be Distracted. Combined with the inherent Resolute inspiration Champion's Boon gives you, this is a net 10-point hit chance swing in your favor, in a way that stacks with accuracy penalties from Despondent Blows or Devotions of the Faithful or the hatchet weapon modal. It also means your Riposte attacks have an easier chance to hit on virtually anyone attacking you. The downside to this choice is that we no longer have a "free" spell like we did with Searing Seal. Because Barring Death's Door is so important for survival, you really should evaluate your combat situation carefully and weigh whether or not you are going to need the bonus penetration or you're going to need to prevent death/trigger On The Edge. We pick up Smoke Cloud solely as a prerequisite for Smoke Grenade. And we pick up Smoke Grenade for two reasons: as an additional fast interrupt, and as a way to help enable Deathblows. Persistent Distraction will take care of Deathblows for you automatically (the free flanked that perception afflictions bestow counts as a second affliction), but Smoke Grenade will be useful for triggering Deathblows on enemies you are not able to engage and for situations where the enemy is resistant to perception afflictions (you get the weakened effect from Smoke Grenade, and then rely on either manual flanking or some other explosive or party member to apply another affliction). If you have no problem with keeping near 100% Deathblows up-time without Smoke Grenade's help and don't mind the friendly fire, you can pick up Pernicious Cloud instead for the extra damage. 3.0+ update I added a story choice to the build--to be snarky at the gods when they first summon you after leaving Port Maje. This is because this unlocks the Wit of Death's Herald upgrade to your Death's Herald watcher ability (it also fits in with Wael's preferred disposition of being clever, coincidentally). Wit of Death's Herald adds on an intellect inspiration to the base effect, so is a "free" way to cast Prayer for the Spirit once/rest without using up a PL3 slot. DETAILS - STATS The last part of this is just the easiest: why are stats the way they are? Intellect is the only mandatory max-out, because you want to squeeze as much duration and area of effect out of everything you have. Resolve/deflection is an important stat, but after the consumable nerfs of patch 1.2, this build really needs the accuracy help due to perpetually being hit with a perception affliction (and no longer able to rely on Deadeye or Potions of Deftness with a high alchemy), so we actually skip resolve and invest in perception instead. We'll eventually get Shorewalker Sandals for its +1 Resolve to get up to 10, but we don't actually want more than that, because patch 1.2 also weakened Sparkcrackers' duration, so having too high of a resolve will negate many Explosives skill points. Basically we'll rely on deflection-boosting buffs, enemy-accuracy-penalizing debuffs, and Holy Meditation for our survivability instead of requiring a high inherent resolve. If things are too rough for you early game, you can put on a Cloak of +7 Deflection or some resolve boosting gear or some such, but as you get more tools you will generally want to dump some of that stuff just so that it can be easier to self-Sparkcrackers when you need to. (By contrast, we like Entonia Signet Ring because its defense bonus only occurs while you are actively engaged by enemies and you frequently are going to be doing Sparkcrackers while you aren't actively being engaged yet. Perfect for this build.) A lower resolve means we're going to get hit more regardless of what we do, so we don't dump constitution anymore. We don't have the spare points to invest in it, but we also don't want to make ourselves squisher than we need to be. In fact we pick up Tough later on for extra buffer room against high-impact enemy spells/abilities, but it's really a double-edged sword. More health means you can stay at Bloodied or below for longer, and there's more room for mistakes (like not paying attention to the fact that your Arcane Veil just ran out or that your Arcane Veil isn't doing anything because the enemy is using guns even while you melee them), but it also means it takes a lot longer to get to Bloodied. Whatever might adjustments you make here will be generally dwarfed by the huge amount of damage bonuses you'll get from a Streetfighter sneak attack (the base +30% plus power level scaling, plus the +50% from the Heating Up special). We opt for a neutral score to put the points elsewhere (and we want to avoid a penalty because damage penalties are stronger than bonuses). We put points into dexterity because action speed stuff has linear returns (see appendix) so we'll be able to be even faster, and importantly our spell cast times aren't affected by the Streetfighter special (just their recovery), so dexterity is the main way we'll make our spell casts a little more nimbler. (Picking up Rapid Casting later on will help, too.) Wood elf background is pretty important for its Dexterity affliction resistance. This character really wants mobility, and being able to shrug off hobbling, and convert a near-lethal Paralyze into a not-bad-at-all Immobilize is pretty valuable. You can find gear that provides Dexterity resistance, but this way you can reserve those inventory slots for more interesting stuff. CONCLUSION/PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Whew! That was a lot of text to read. If you made it this far, congratulations! And I hope you learned a thing or two. If this build still sounds really abstract to you, here are a couple typical examples of mid-to-high level encounters and how an Umezawa would handle it. SCENARIO: mixed group of melee 0. already affected by deadeye. 1. main tank charges in, unstealthed, while Umezawa is still stealthed. Targets self with a Sparkcrackers with ~70% accuracy (which is almost a guarantee to graze/hit, and the will effect will be likely to at least graze), if the main tank pulled right maybe an enemy gets affected too. 2. Escape towards the bulk of the enemies. While you still have the +50 Escape bonus active, make sure hatchet modal is enabled (in case Riposte procs you can debuff enemy accuracy), and then self-buff with Prayer for the Spirit and then cast Despondent Blows before disabling your hatchet modal and then casting Arcane Veil. 3. DPS everything down. Throw some bombs if you feel like it. Re-cast Arcane Veil if necessary. If fight is still going on and you're out of Arcane Veil, self-empower, chain Escapes together, use Mirror Image, etc. SCENARIO: high-level mixed group of melee and casters 1. Charge in. Notice that casters start casting Arcane Dampener. 2. Use Smoke Veil to go invisible. Continue to run Umezawa towards the back while the Arcane Dampener gets retargeted to your other party members. 3. Unstealth by throwing Sparkcrackers at point-blank range with one of the back casters, hopefully affecting yourself with Distraction. Cast Prayer For the Spirit, then Barring Death's Door as enemies reconverge on you. 4. Let them bring you down to 1 health and flank you while you DPS the caster down (you can also self-target with Pillar of Holy Fire to help bring your health down), and Escape to target the next caster. If you see another Arcane Dampener start getting fired, use Smoke Veil or Smoke Grenade. 5. When all the casters are gone, DPS everything else down. Use Salvation of Time for extra Barring Death's Door time. If you're in a situation where Riposte could be relevant and you're already at 1 health, go ahead and use Arcane Veil just for the added damage from your counterattacks. If you run out of Salvations of Time and Barring Death's Door, self-empower for another round of both. SCENARIO: "deal with it" nemnok fight. 1. Let main tank unstealth and trigger everything. 2. While stealthed, Umezawa either Powder Burns or self-Sparkcrackers. 3. Carpet bomb the area with Lightning Bombs and whatever else you got (Immolator, Frost Bombs, Blister Bomb) and mix in a couple of Smoke Grenades to lower enemy fort/reflex and reduce their ability to heal back from this hellscape you're creating. 4. Watch the entire enemy fight disappear under a hail of bombs exploding every other second. SCENARIO: single-enemy tough fight 0. Start off with deadeye already enabled. 1. Start off with your melee/blunderbuss weapon slot, the melee weapon being a fast (base 3s recovery) weapon. If you are able to land a non-graze self-sparkcrackers, switch to your dual-wield. Otherwise stay with this weapon slot and just find ways to keep Powder Burns uptime for the rest of this scenario. 2. Drink Potion of Impediment. (The interrupt chance from this and Deadeye are multiplicative with each other, so you'll have a net 40% [1 - .7 * .85] chance of interrupting with any given attack.) 3. Attack the enemy with a fast weapon. While as of 1.2 you won't completely interrupt-lock the enemy, attacking almost every second with a 40% chance to interrupt will turn down the danger level of any given tough enemy a lot. 4. Use Salvation of Time if necessary. Use Cinder Bomb, Pillar of Holy Fire, or other explosive to get your health down if you also want to be On The Edge while doing this. ALTERNATIVES After having dug up how monastic unarmed training works, I suggest two alternatives that rely on picking up Monastic Unarmed Training instead of Fast Runner. (You can pick up Fast Runner later in lieu of e.g. Holy Meditation or Pillar of Faith). TL;DR: Monastic Unarmed Training gives you potentially extremely fast, high-penetration weapons, but you need to find bonus sources of PL to really get mileage out of it (ideally at least +3, hopefully even +6). Option 1: Nature Godlike Until you pick up Champion's Boon you are going to a friendly party member who can buff you with a body inspiration, but you get +1 PL, and then you can get up to another +2 PL from either food (+1 PL) or a Potion of Ascension (+2 PL). +2 PL is enough to get you better-than-superb fists pretty early on, though not quite enough to get better-than-legendary, so you'd need to start crafting/buying Potions of Ascension on a regular basis to get to better-than-legendary scaling (at level 19). This is the "consistent" option, but is dependent on party composition. Option 2: Death Godlike For much of the game you won't get much bonus PL, but once you unlock Barring Death's Door, you can hover around Near Death for +3 PL, with the possibility of another +2 PL form either food (+1 PL) or a Potion of Ascension (+2 PL). +3 PL is enough to get you better-than-legendary fists by the end of the game (level 19), and conditionally +5 PL will get that for you by level 13. Unfortunately I don't think there exists another way to stack on another +1 PL to get better-than-mythic fists by the end of the game, at least without exploiting a bug(*). If there does exist another source, do let me know (it would have to be a non-class/keyword-specific PL bonus that comes from an item). This is the "spikey" option, but doesn't require you to have a body-inspiration-buffing-capable party member. (*) The Heart-Chime Amulet (reward for Pallegina's quest) is supposed to give you a variable bonus as a godlike or watcher, but is currently bugged to always give you the bonus that a Moon Godlike should get, which is a +1 PL stackable bonus. You can use it here to get +6 PL, but be warned that Obsidian will fix this bug and it's only a matter of time before this loophole goes away. In either option your main dual-wielding set of weapons will be your fists, which you can treat as fast blunt weapons with bonus inherent accuracy, damage, and penetration and a +30% damage lash. The weapon modal proficiency for fists is an additional +2 penetration, so you could theoretically re-drop Champion's Boon and bring back Searing Seal. You'll have a strong early game due to how the monastic unarmed training talent works, and the bonus PL will help ensure that you continue to scale at a reasonable pace. Though you need to be a Death Godlike comfortable with dancing with Barring Death's Door to really take advantage of it; fortunately for this build lots of good things happen at near death, so you'd be really leaning into that "glass cannon" philosophy. You're giving up a head slot, but this build was mostly using it for Fair Favor, which you don't need if you're busy punching everything in the face. REJECTED APPROACHES One immediate alternative approach to an Umezawa build you might think of is to pair a Streetfighter with an Illusionist, or at least a Wizard. You get a lot more opportunity-cost-worth-it damage spells and ways to afflict enemies. You also get Infuse With Vital Essence with is like a super-charged version of Prayer for the Spirit (since you are mostly using it as a self-buff in this build anyway). Plus, the Wizard has access to Wizard's Double, which, with a sufficiently high deflection, its duration-less unconditional +40 deflection is the best defensive spell you can use. The problem is that the Wizard actually has its defensive spells inefficiently distributed for our purposes. Both Arcane Veil and Mirror Image are at PL2, which means a Priest of Wael actually effectively gets twice as many casts as the wizard, since for the priest Arcane Veil is at PL1 and Mirror Image is at PL3. The fact that Arcane Veil is a PL1 is also a bigger deal than you may think. For one, early-game (Port Maje) 1.1 Path of the Damned is a fair challenge, and a wizard multiclass won't get two casts of PL2 spells until level 7, which is after when you probably most desperately need it. In addition, there are several resting effects in the game that give you a bonus +1 level spell cast (The Wild Mare and the Luminous Adra Bathhouse immediately come to mind). This is great for a Priest of Wael because it potentially means 3 casts of Arcane Veil, plus an additional 2 upon a self-empower. There's basically no equivalent for a wizard. And while Wizard's Double is good, it won't be that good for much of the early game because your deflection just won't be high enough to really milk it for what it's worth, and by the time you can take advantage of it, the Wael version will be picking up new tricks. Speaking of which, wizards lack the following spells that really help tie the Umezawa together: Despondent Blows, Devotions for the Faithful, Barring Death's Door, and Salvation of Time. It makes for some great general party utility and combat versatility. While I'm sure there is a great Streetfighter/Wizard build out there, I am fairly confident that for this specific playstyle (as opposed to an immortal high-deflection riposte build, which a wizard could do better) Streetfighter/Wael is the way to go. The Umezawa build as of now is also not a solo PotD build. A soloable version of Umezawa would be closer to an immortal, high-deflection riposte build, because the way this build is now the Umezawa is a team player. Frankly, without a lot of delicate pulling of enemies or just constantly equipping a large shield, there's just no way that the Umezawa can sustain all the enemy hate in the world because while your deflection is high to mitigate a significant portion of damage, it's not going to be high enough. Even with access to Barring Death's Door, encounters would probably just take too long and you'll be left out of steam with enemies still standing. Umezawa can work great in smaller-than-5 parties, but a completely soloable build would likely be unrecognizable to the one being presented here today. NOTES FOR MAGRAN'S FIRES Abydon: not recommended. This build leans hard on certain unique weapons and armor and you can really run up an expensive repair bill versus other characters that can use generics instead. Berath: nothing relevant to worry about. Eothas: nothing relevant to worry about. Galawain: be on the look out for Unstoppable and Bullish enemies. Unstoppable can't be afflicted, but they can be flanked; important to keep in mind for keeping your DPS up. Bullish enemies interrupt and knock back at will, so make sure you don't drop your best deflection bonuses (Arcane Veil or Escape) before trying to cast something at point-blank range. Magran: if you can pull off this build along with a party on this challenge you should probably quit your job and become a professional DOTA or Starcraft 2 player. Skaen: if you want to use this character to help illuminate things, the sabre proficiency is more important early on, and then you can use the sabre-torch. If you don't have access to the sabre-torch, well... *shrug*. Normal torches are still usable but represent a huge DPS loss. APPENDIX: LINEAR RETURNS I made the assertion earlier that speed adjustments offers linear returns. I've fought similar debates re: World of Warcraft and Diablo 3, and I'll fight it again now. But before we go onto my analysis and conclusion, we need to be clear what we mean by "linear returns." If you've taken calculus, then the easiest way to express what "linear returns" means is that for a given differentiable function f where f'' is the second-derivative and f consumes a stat x to yield a metric y, then if f(x) = y, ∃x₀: ∀x > x₀ f''(x) = 0. Putting it into words, we mean that after a certain point for x the second-derivative of f(x) is 0. Analogously, "increasing returns" is when f''(x) > 0, and "diminishing returns" is when f''(x) < 0. Put in less math-y speak, a stat has "linear returns" when for a given absolute change in that stat, the resultant metric always yields the same absolute change as well, regardless of what our starting point was. By contrast a stat has "increasing returns" when for a given absolute change in the stat, the resultant metric yields continually larger absolute changes the higher our initial stat was. Similarly a stat has "diminishing returns" when for a given absolute change in the state, the resultant metric yields continually smaller absolute changes the higher our initial stat was. A key point to this is properly identifying what the "metric" is. The poster child for this is resolve(deflection) and perception(accuracy). I've talked to and read posts by people who assume that because +1 deflection gives the enemy a -1 penalty on the attack roll and a +1 accuracy gives you a +1 on the attack roll that deflection and accuracy have linear returns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because the actual metric is "effective health." That is, how much effective health do you have? And as this is the true metric it becomes very clear that deflection/resolve has increasing returns, because at very low deflection another point hardly matters, but at the top-end each point of deflection is so important that eventually it gives you infinite survivability. Accuracy, by contrast, has diminishing returns, because it's the flip side to that deflection equation. When you go from missing all the time to grazing some of the time, you just got an infinite increase in your damage potential (which was previously zero). However, when you already have accuracy so high that you are critting all the time, another point of accuracy will do literally nothing. With regards to action speed and recovery times, a lot of people get hung up on the fact that when it comes to speed adjustments, the more bonuses you have the smaller your reduction in your action time and recovery time, and they therefore conclude that therefore the returns are diminishing. This is wrong for two interrelated reasons. One, the action time/recovery time is not actually the metric. It is in fact just a mere component of our true metric, and is in fact the denominator. Two, because it is the denominator for our true metric, the smaller our starting value, the smaller the change needs to be to accomplish the same net effect. For example, reducing your recovery time by .1s when you're starting at 1.5s is way better than reducing your recovery time by .1s when you're starting at 5s. So just the mere fact that you get less recovery time reduction the more action speed you already have does not, by itself, mean you have diminishing returns. Instead, you have to look at the true metric. So what is the true metric? Basically, damage per second, or damage over time. More generally, it is "how many things can we accomplish in a given amount of time?" Now, does this metric get linear returns from speed bonuses? Or is it diminishing? Or is it increasing? Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where you attack and on average do 15 damage to the target, and you do so every 5 seconds. Using the action speed equation, we can draw a graph of how much damage you are capable of doing for different levels of +action speed. See that smooth diagonal line going up(*) in the graph below (click to enlargen)? That's literally the definition of linear returns. (*) Note that for a game like Diablo 2 or Diablo 3, it's not quite this simple. At a certain point, because attack animations are connected to whole numbers of frames (frames as in "frames per second"; whole numbers as in no fractional frames) you start running into a "breakpoints" where you actually get 0 returns for a while until you get enough accumulated attack speed improvements to "round" down to the next lower number of frames per attack. So at a certain point it stops being a smooth diagonal line and starts becoming a steadily embiggening staircase. It averages out to be linear returns, but in truth it no longer really is any sort of well-defined returns because the function is no longer differentiable at that point, which was an important part of defining any kind of returns above. It is possible that at the extreme, Deadfire hits similar issues, but in truth it is clear that Deadfire retains recovery time to two decimal places (even if it rounds to one-decimal place in tooltips), and it is likely that it is impossible to accumulate so much action speed so as to hit "breakpoint" issues. Plus, if Deadfire allows for fractional attack frames, then breakpoints are a non-issue altogether. Now one hiccup here is the fact that the way Deadfire treats adjustments to your action time and recovery time is that it has different native units of measurement depending on whether it's a bonus or a penalty (malus). In effect, the native stat for bonuses is action speed. The native stat for maluses is action time. So when you have a -50% recovery time bonus, it is actually truly a +100% action speed adjustment. However, if you have a -20% action speed penalty, it is actually truly a +25% action time adjustment. Why is this relevant? Because it affects how Deadfire combines the numbers behind the scenes. When you're combining bonuses, you translate anything that's not an action speed into an action speed adjustment and then just add them up; you then optionally reconvert it into whatever unit (recovery time adjustment or action speed adjustment) the tool-tip requires; e.g. a -50% recovery time penalty and a +15% action speed bonus becomes a +100% action speed adjustment and a +15% action speed adjustment which becomes a +115% action speed adjustment for the recovery, which turns into a -53.5% recovery time bonus (and just a -13% action time bonus). When you're combining maluses, you translate anything that's not a recovery time penalty into a recovery time adjustment and then just add them up e.g. two -20% action speed adjustments become two +25% recovery time penalties that add to become a +50% recovery time penalty, which you can then reconvert back for display purposes into a -33% action speed adjustment if needed. When you're combining bonuses and maluses, you convert all bonuses into positive action speed adjustments and sum them, and then convert all maluses into negative recovery time adjustments and sum them, and then you subtract the latter from the former even though they are two completely different units of measure; so a -50% recovery time bonus and a -20% action speed adjustment becomes a +100% action speed adjustment minus a +25% recovery time penalty. The resulting number's unit depends on its sign. If it's positive, the resulting answer is determined to be an action speed adjustment. If it's negative, the resulting answer is determined to be a sign-flipped recovery time penalty. This is needless to say weird. Anyway, this is to say that yes, penalties can drag your numbers down because a -20% action speed is actually much more powerful than a +20% action speed. But unlike what MaxQuest says in his otherwise really useful action speed post, it's not just maluses that do this because of double-inversion (unlike damage penalties). For similar reasons, a -50% recovery time bonus is much more powerful than a +50% recovery time penalty. It's because you have to first convert to the "native units" at which point you see that a -20% action speed is actually a +25% recovery time penalty, which is more powerful than the +20% action speed; and the -50% recovery time bonus is actually a +100% action speed bonus which has a larger magnitude than the +50% recovery time penalty. Yes, again, this is weird and confusing. This odd use of native units of measurement also has an effect on the full understanding of our linear returns. When all you have are action speed bonuses, the linear returns are easy to see as a diagonal graph going up and to the right. When all you have are recovery time penalties, it is trivial to see that e.g. each +10% recovery penalty you add to your 5s recovery is a flat .5 second, which is also linear. But when you are combining bonuses and penalties, things get a little harder to compute and things don't add up as trivially. But if you remember about "native units" then it looks a little less weird that a -75% recovery time bonus can cancel out as much as a +300% recovery time penalty (which can make it intuitively feel like there's increasing returns to time/speed modifiers) or that a -20% action speed penalty outweighs a +20% action speed bonus (which can make it intuitively feel like there's diminishing returns to time/speed modifiers). And this is why it's so important that you get x and y right when analyzing whether for an f(x) = y, that f''(x) = 0 . Now, astute observers will note that with linear returns, the more you have of something, the less any further gain is worth relative to what you already have. MaxQuest has called this "intrinsic diminishing returns" for lack of a better term. I don't quite like the terminology because "diminishing returns" has a specific meaning, but I also don't have a better suggestion. Anyway, it is certainly true that if you have +500% action speed, another net +25% action speed is going to be a relatively less impact than when you had +0% action speed. This point is relevant if you're trying to decide between investing in damage or investing in speed, because to maximize total damage over time you want to balance out your bonuses as much as possible (for the same reason that given a rectangle with sides a and b with a fixed combined length of a + b = c, to maximize the area, a = b. In other words you get more area from being a square than from being an extremely skinny rectangle). But if you're not actively concerned about a tradeoff between damage or speed (such as when choosing how to allocate points between might or dexterity) the fact that the relative gain is less and less is completely irrelevant to whether or not you get linear returns, and sort of an orthogonal point altogether. Why? In general, a good way to think about increasing, linear, and diminishing returns is this: if something has increasing returns you generally want to invest a lot in it; if something has diminishing returns a little bit of investment might be worth it but it's definitely not worth it after a certain point(*); if something has linear returns, you're always going to get value out of it. If instead of this being Deadfire and us talking about speed bonuses, we were instead talking about Baldur's Gate and equipment that gives you bonus damage to weapons (like a pair of gloves that might give you +1 to weapon damage rolls), literally no one would be saying "oh I guess you have +5 total damage bonus now. Not worth getting more" unless it was some sort of tradeoff between equipment that gave you +1 damage or one that gave you +1 extra attack. In fact, everyone would probably be trying to stack on as much weapon damage bonus as possible after maximizing their attacks per round. It's the same thing here. When you're not trading off for damage, there's basically no reason to not get more speed if you can. (*) This is very simplified and glosses over a lot of nuance. Something can have such extremely slow increasing returns that it may never be worth investing in, and something can have such extremely slow diminishing returns that over a reasonable range of stats it may never not be worth investing in. Similarly, if every action speed and recovery time adjustment in Deadfire were suddenly decimated to literally one tenth of their current value, even though speed adjustment would still be linear returns, the gains would be so small that even though they would still be linear returns, you would be getting linear crap returns. The linear returns for investment in speed works out for us players in Deadfire because in large part Obsidian purposefully balanced speed with damage (see the Might/Dexterity correspondence). So that's it. What are you still doing here? Show's over! Hope you found this useful, entertaining, or at least educational!