Quarterstaff, not monk?

[kroonermanblack]

I've been wobbling around Pathfinder over my holidays break, but can't really get into Wrath, and then I remembered I never finished Deadfire.

So I thought I'd come back and start a new run. I've always liked quarterstaff and two-handed spears as weapons, is there any build that isn't a monk I could use? Ideally the QS would be the primary weapon, rather than 'a stat-stick the mage holds while casting' type thing. Front line damage or tanky type guy?

I'll just play on normal, and I know, 'anything can work on normal', but I didn't know what might be good or synergize well or which weapons to grab.

If possible, I'd love to be able to pass most skill checks, especially social ones. I love talking my way into quest solutions in CRPGs, since fighting is basically most of the game anyway.

[thelee]

a glass cannon build would be pretty good for staff and pikes, a build i used to do a lot back in the poe1 days. make sure you have a good tank with good engagement and you can reach over their shoulder to safely output a lot damage. drop constitution lower than you'd like without fear and invest in dex, perception. (i'd suggest dropping resolve too but resolve is used for some in-game chat resolutions. though most dialogue checks use your actual passive skills.) rogues in particular do well with this at-distance approach, especially streetfighter, since they can output a lot of damage and they tend not to be very tough.

many quarterstaffs do fall into "stat stick" territory and are geared for casters or spellswords, but i like to use street sweeper a lot - the cleansing ability is real nice in harder fights. you can enchant it to only cleanse away buffs, but i frankly find the cleansing of debuffs to also be useful if a party member gets his with something bad, i can whack them a few times.

pikes are also good, especially their weapon proficiency modal, which is an easy way to lower deflection. ngati's tusk has a sweeeeet effect (lowers enemy defenses based on your survival). it's part of my anti-megaboss toolkit.

[dgray62]

The chromoprismatic quarterstaff is a great weapon. It's most often used as a stat stick by casters, but it is also a great melee weapon, so long as you pump up the metaphysics skill, since it give an increase in damage and attack speed linked to this skill. You can also enchant it to give you elemental lashes and a raw damage AOE, both of which are nice. You could do serious damage with the weapon, and also be pretty tanky depending on your build. This might be a great weapon for a bleak walker/berserker fanatic. The Bleakwalker's black flames will benefit from both the +1 fire and +1 acid boost from bound blights, and the paladin side will make you tankier with good defenses and healing. The berserker will add you to your DPS in multiple ways; you'll be faster, stronger and will overall hit much harder. Reach weapons are particularly nice with barbarian carnage; you can aim the weapon to get the maximum number of foes in the carnage radius. Also, you'll have so many lashes that you'll even be able to kill the few crush immune foes that are out there.

[Boeroer]

An Arcane Knight - Steel Garrote/Bloodmage - with Citzal's Parasitic Staff (summoned weapon from spell tier 1) is pretty cool. Later you can use the Chromoprismatic Staff, too.

The staff itself drains life from enemies for you with every hit and the Steel Garrote has a passive that does this as well (if the enemy has an affliction which is easy to achieve with a Wizard in general). So you will heal quite a bit just by hitting enemies. It's also fun to use the Essential Phantom spell in order to get two quarterstaff wielders on the field. 

The Arcane Knight also makes good use of higher Resolve - it can be a very sturdy class and is working well in the front lines. And you can always cast spells, too. 

 

A Berserker/Streetfighter with Chromoprismatic Staff can be quite fun to play from behind the front line in rel. safety because his attack speed can be so nice  - and also it's cool to cause Carnage from the backline. But he can go down very quickly due to the self damage he receives from Frenzy - it's a glasscannon basically. The opposite of the Arcane Kight.

 

 

 

[kroonermanblack]

Thanks! I fired up the game today and have to re-learn what all the stats do. I read something in passing that basically said dex isn't useful in 5.0 and I might as well drop it to 3? I'll keep looking at general classes, but what stats should I keep, drop, etc.?

[thelee]

27 minutes ago, kroonermanblack said:

I read something in passing that basically said dex isn't useful in 5.0 and I might as well drop it to 3?

whoa whoa, hold on there.

in turn-based mode, many ppl have argued that dex isn't that useful, especially for casters. edit: i haven't done much turn-based so i can't speak it to personally, but it seems like the main advice these days.

in real-time mode, dex is still basically a king stat (shared with intellect).

Edited January 19, 2022 by thelee

[thelee]

13 hours ago, kroonermanblack said:

what stats should I keep, drop, etc.?

just to add on to my last post:

• intellect is all around useful, i consider it an S-tier stat on virtually ever build, but on some classes it's lower and closer to equal footing as dexterity
• dexterity is a king stat in RTWP. especially for DPS, it's close to a 3% true damage multiplier. even for non-DPS, being responsive in fights is extremely valuable.
• perception and might are roughly similar in terms of effectiveness for pure offense - they translate to about a 2% true damage multiplier. on lower difficulties, might is more effective. on higher difficulties, perception is more effective. both become less effective as the game goes on, especially perception (eventually when you have 100% chance to hit/crit, the returns are pretty small). (edit: for offensive casters, there are few other damage bonuses, so might's effectiveness doesn't drop off as much as it does for weapon-based classes.) ideally you want to balance these out (for the same reason to the fact that to maximize the area of a quadrangle with a fixed perimeter, you prefer a square instead of a rectangle), but there are some cases where a class might want more of one than the other:
  • for barbarians, because carnage only happens on a hit (not all the time), perception actually gives super-linear returns to barbarians up to a certain point, so barbarians want to invest in perception more
  • rangers already have tons of accuracy bonuses, so perception is less valuable.
  • for healer casters, might is more important
  • for debuff casters, perception is more important
  • etc
• resolve and constitution both get a bit of the short-shrift because they're defensive stats and defensive isn't how you win fights. resolve has increasing returns so in certain builds can be infinitely powerful. i tend to prefer stealing points out of resolve over stealing points from constitution since on potd i want my squishies to be able to survive incidental spells or hits (i also get frequently get Tough).

edit: there are always exceptions/nuances plus the stats aren't strongly thresholded so it's hard to end up with a  bad build, so don't feel like these are ironclad rules. for example, some casters might want to do with less dexterity in favor of other stats, since while being responsive (and avoiding interrupts) is good, for some casters all high dexterity means is that you just run out of spells faster, whereas putting those points into might/perception will make those same spells (albeit slower) individually more impactful. at the same time, there are a couple of items that really want you to have 25 might, so if you want to take a particularly item-flavored build, investing heavily in might at teh expense of other stats might make sense to you.

Edited January 19, 2022 by thelee

[Not So Clever Hound]

12 hours ago, thelee said:

(for the same reason to the fact that to maximize the area of a quadrangle with a fixed perimeter, you prefer a square instead of a rectangle)

Welcome to our "Learning is Fun" series! Master the basics of arithmetic and geometry with @thelee while playing Deadfire!

Module 1: Inversions. Chapter 1: "Why does it suck so bad when I Graze vs. Hit?"

 

Edited January 19, 2022 by Not So Clever Hound

[kroonermanblack]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'm still fiddling with builds, but I may end up going fighter/barb and trying to carnage all the things. Less perfect build, but looks fun, and it's only 'regular' difficulty so should be fine.

[dgray62]

Fighter/barb is a great combination too. The only reason I suggested paladin/barb was the synergy between bleakwalker's black flames and the chromoprismatic quarterstaff. But a brute could make excellent use of it too. For a brute, however, you might consider Amra, a one-handed great axes. A brute or ravager wielding it is fantastic, since you can knock your foe back into your carnage zone, hitting them with your primary strike, barbarian carnage and Amra's gore. Most foes melt quickly with this treatment.

Edited January 20, 2022 by dgray62
Error correction

[Not So Clever Hound]

44 minutes ago, dgray62 said:

A brute or ravager wielding it is fantastic, since you can knock your foe back into your carnage zone, hitting them with your primary strike, barbarian carnage and Amra's gore. Most foes melt quickly with this treatment.

I am an Amra Fan, and I support this message. All of it, even the gruesome, chunky parts. Though Amra is a two-hander.  

I really like what you say, dgray, because I've found (5.0 patch) Chromoprismatic a bit of a let-down - I want to build around it but it's never as awesome as I want. So I appreciate your thoughts on how to make it real good. I like the blackflames synergy, but it's rough to miss the other half of the highly accurate full attack without a monk's heartbeat drumming/swift flurry, isn't it?

[dgray62]

Like you and Boeroer, I am a big Amra fan too. In my experience it is a much more powerful weapon for melee users, and I would go with Amra for a brute or ravager. I do not think that Chromoprismatic would do nearly as well for a melee build, but since kroonermanblack  asked for melee builds with reach weapons, I suggested this. Among the pikes and quarterstaffs, I think that Chromoprismatic is probably the best (albeit among relatively sparse competition), and especially for a Bleakwalker since black flames will get a double PL boost with it. I'm not sure how to make it better; I would have to tinker around with builds with this weapon. I am reluctant to do so, however, since it seems a shame to design a build around a weapon that comes so late in the game. Personally, I think that Boeroer is right that the ideal build for a melee with a reach weapon is a martial wizard multi class with Citzal's. Here either an arcane knight, sage or battlemage would be great. As Boeroer suggests, for front line/tanky arcane knight is fantastic, especially steel garrote/blood mage. You could start out with Whispers of the Endless Paths, which is available as soon as lvl 6, and then start using Citzal's once you reach lvl 13 and gain access to the spell. However, you may find that you prefer WotEP; it's amazing with a steel garrote arcane knight due to its offensive parry upgrade.

[Constentin Lévine]

2 hours ago, dgray62 said:

Among the pikes and quarterstaffs, I think that Chromoprismatic is probably the best

Ngati's Tusk is really nice too, especially with CC support : you are in the melee but you are also a debuff! Pikes and Quaterstaffs get a really good reach with Monk's Instruments of Pain by the way , and I prefer Shea's War Staff rather than Chromoprismatic because I multiclass monk with caster and I have the impression that profit as well for both MC parts. Really good weapon with Forbidden First - Skald in my experience.

[dgray62]

Ngati's Tusk is a great weapon. As for Shea's War Staff, I've never used it since it comes so late, but I can see that it would be great for a martial-caster MC. As for forbidden fist/skald, this is probably one of my favorite combos. Do you think the war staff would outperform the sun and moon, which you wrote about earlier in your "Maelstrom Hand" post?

Edited January 21, 2022 by dgray62
error correction

[Constentin Lévine]

5 hours ago, dgray62 said:

Ngati's Tusk is a great weapon. As for Shea's War Staff, I've never used it since it comes so late, but I can see that it would be great for a martial-caster MC. As for forbidden fist/skald, this is probably one of my favorite combos. Do you think the war staff would outperform the sun and moon, which you wrote about earlier in your "Maelstrom Hand" post?

I dont think any of them outperform others, they just correspond to different playstyle purposes : Sun and Moon greatly enhance the martial part, the weapon hit twice, meaning 2 avenging storm lighhning, 2 chances to swift flurry proc, 2 combusting wounds , etc per hand equipped. The war staff "prevent" interrupt when that crit, and at melee, it is not easy to cast any spell without the risk of failure, on top of the vulnerabily during the cast and fail time. But casting a spell grow the chance to crit, then to prevent interrupt for the next cast, and Monk-Skald is in my opinion a really nice Melee Caster class.

Another good weapon for Monk is the Keeper of the Flame with Instrument of pain and Avenging Storm, the burn AoE deal poor damage but around the target (not around the caster) and proc avenging Storm etc.

It is the same for Citzal's Spirit Lance, but with lesser range and one handing. Both of these AoE doesnt proc swift flurry or Heart of Drumming howhever. But initial weapon crit does, then (with Avenging Storm) the DPS is comparable I think since dual Keeper of the Flame is more faster than the lance. 

[Boeroer]

I guess the comparison between Shea's War Staff/Sun & Moon was about how they fare for a Skald (who can get phrases on critical hits)?

I think nothing beats Sun & Moon when it's about melee crits per strike.