Black jacket tank full debuff modals build

[Yellow-eye four]

Hello. I am quite new to the game, but not that new to crpg in general having played BG, DOS, pathfinder series,.

Playing on potd upscale after a few classic restarts. Due to sheer defensive stats of mobs, I am thinking hiring a club, flail, mace, morning star and pike wielding Black jacket. The idea is max INT to make the debuff stick, swap weapon and add more debuff. He will be using flail main to make mortar bois and wizard reflex- focused land their hits.

Should I multiclass?

I saw fighter have AoE attacks at high PL, does that work with modals?

 

[Okkes]

This is very powerful in theory but its getting very boring all that switching vs. Morningstar Barbarian-Monk is very good and simple since you can decrease fortitude very low with help of your casters and chain crit heartbeat drum,swift flurry with brute force(it comes pretty late though when multiclassing)

[Boeroer]

If you want to apply all those modals in every fight and switch around all the time then it is indeed a grind at some point and it would be more practical to distribute those weapons+modals across the party instead. If you just want to be a swiss army knife of debuffing and just have the indeal weapon-modal at hand then it doesn't become so tedious imo and is good to have. 
 

2 hours ago, Yellow-eye four said:

I saw fighter have AoE attacks at high PL, does that work with modals?

This is true. You can apply a modal like Body Blows to a whole bunch of enemies with Clear Out (or the upgrades Clear the Path and Clean Sweep).
Check out this page to learn more about them: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/fighter#:~:text=Clear Out%2C Clean Sweep%2C and Clear the Path

Note that Clear Out targets fortitude instead of deflection (like normal attacks would do). Then Clear Out (and upgrades) pushes enemies around - which often messes up the targeting for the party members who want to profit from the defense debuff (like for example Wizards, Druids and so on). But if you have the enemies in confinded spaces so that they don't get scattered too much it's very nice.

A combination with a Monk is not bad imo because the added INT (Turning Wheel) makes the Area of Effect of Clear Out much bigger. Also Monks can provide additional accuracy which is sometimes needed to reliably apply the debuff. 

Single class Fighter would have the advantage of Clean the Path (very long AoE, pushes enemies in one direction so they don't scatter as much) and Clean Sweep (very big circular base AoE, scales very well with additional INT and stuff like Ring of Overseeing, the pet Loki etc. - but pushes enemies in all kinds of directions away from you). Besides that the single class Fighter isn't particularly appealing in my book.  

 

 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Boeroer

[Yellow-eye four]

39 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

 Then Clear Out (and upgrades) pushes enemies around - which often messes up the targeting for the party members who want to profit from the defense debuff (like for example Wizards, Druids and so on). But if you have the enemies in confinded spaces so that they don't get scattered too much it's very nice.

Still, if wizard drop pull of eora on in front of fighter then mobs will get pull back?

About pull of eora, is it if fortitude to not be pulled? So black jacket should clean sweep with morning stars first? then flail later.

 

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

If you want to apply all those modals in every fight and switch around all the time then it is indeed a grind at some point

i haven't done too much turn-based (mostly just using the S4 mod for some high-level play), but in turn-based mode I find this to be a much more practical strategy since you have the time to do this every round. If somehow Deadfire was a sweaty esports game, then I would totally anticipate some tryhards doing this in RTwP mode to optimize every tiny fraction out of this game.

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

i haven't done too much turn-based (mostly just using the S4 mod for some high-level play), but in turn-based mode I find this to be a much more practical strategy since you have the time to do this every round. If somehow Deadfire was a sweaty esports game, then I would totally anticipate some tryhards doing this in RTwP mode to optimize every tiny fraction out of this game.

Right, with Turn Based Mode this would be less of a problem I think.

[Boeroer]

20 hours ago, Yellow-eye four said:

Still, if wizard drop pull of eora on in front of fighter then mobs will get pull back?

About pull of eora, is it if fortitude to not be pulled? So black jacket should clean sweep with morning stars first? then flail later.

 

In theory this works and it will also work in real fights from time to time - but usually fights are always a bit messy. It makes them even messier if you scatter a whole group of enemies that you would rather have assembled in one spot. So, using Clear Out with a wall in the back or so will be a lot more convenient than doing it in the open field.

But of course it's better to apply a debuff in an AoE instead of doing it to a single target only. So Clear Out (and upgrades) can ideed be a nice debuffing tool. It's jsut not that easy to use a Black Jacket and then switch through your weapon sets and apply those debuffs to a group of enemy one after the other. There will be some micromanagement involved in order to hit the same enemies again. It can make the whole process a bit tedious and less fun to use as one might have anticipated. Just saying... 
I find with Clear the Path it's less of a problem because the enemies usually get thrown into the same direction which is less messy than having them fly into all kinds of directions (Clean Sweep) or at least fly away in a cone (Clear Out).   

By the way (this is an obscure mechanic, not mentioned in the game description): Clear Out is very good as a single target damage tool, too. It's not expensive and it will attack the initial enemy (the one you click on) twice(!). On top it knocks them prone of course which is always useful if you want to interrupt them. Now if you use a Morning Star + modal then the first attack roll will lower the target's Fortitude - and the second attack roll will already profit from that debuffed fortitude (bc. Clear Out itself targets fortitude). So basically if the first roll grazes/hits/crits the second one has the equivalent of +25 accuracy. 

Another trick: Clear Out and upgr. with a weapon that does AoE damage by itself (Whispers of the Endless Paths, Keeper of the Flame, Citzal's Spirit Lance for example) will do tremendous damage to a group of tightly packed enemies and also send them sprawlng even more wildly. Because every graze/hit/crit of Clear Out on the enemy will trigger the AoE attack of the weapon. Tons of interrupts and hit rols are the result. So a Fighter/Wizard with Spirit Lance can be a lot of fun. However: if you use a summned weapon you will have trouble switching your weapon sets. So maybe Black Jacket with the intend to switch a lot during a single fight + summoned weapons is not a good choice. But something like Whispers of the Endless Paths + Clean the Path with high INT can be really funny. Imagine your Fighter already debuffed the enemies and now just wants to deal great AoE damage and the enemies just happen to line up perfectly for a Clear the Path use: switch to WotEP and whip them across the screen for great damage, then switch back to another weapon ad finish off the scattered individuals which have survived. And it's foe-only, too (unless you are confused).   

[Yellow-eye four]

I ended up using Eder fighter with +1 pet blessing and just quick switch. Black jacket self heal seems a lot less than normal fighter.

Btw, do mortars trigger double powder burns? Or my game is bugged? Normal blunderbluss does not do it.

6 hours ago, Boeroer said:

lear Out is very good as a single target damage tool, too. It's not expensive and it will attack the initial enemy (the one you click on) twice(!).

Nice. That aoe two handed sword can do some works.

[NotDumbEnough]

You can do this but it's not necessary. Keep in mind that it's always harder to hit stuff at the start, but as you scale upwards your accuracy scales twice (innate accuracy increase on level up + weapon quality upgrades/spell power level upgrades) while defenses only scale once (+3 all defenses on level up) unless you have a shield. This also applies to enemies, so in general as the game goes on your attacks become more and more accurate (as does the enemies'). This is doubly so if you don't enable upscaling for them. Unless you badly need crits (usually only for physical attacks vs Deflection as lots of weapons have unique effects on crit) you don't need to lower their defenses too much, it's often sufficient to just kill them straight away.

 

For the pike in particular, keep in mind that it is a debuff effect. This means that flanked debuffs from perception afflictions do not stack with it. So pike modal+physically flanking the enemy does stack. Using pike modal vs an enemy affected by Chill Fog or rogue's Persistent Distraction is pointless.