Sage Advice

[HumanChalice640]

I just started playing Pillars of Eternity 2. My first character is a druid and I've been having fun with it but I've been seeing a lot about using a Sage for the benefit of Citzal's Lance. However, I'm curious if it's possible to push for a mostly unarmed Monk playing style until I can get the lance,  if that makes since. I am open to suggestions.

[Tomucci]

Yes unarmed is still perfectly viable until you get lance, the other summoned weapons you get along the way are also pretty good, wizard has good buffs for a front line monk (mirror image, spirit shield ect), and monk abilities are great for the wizard as well (buffs to int/con, tenacious, action speed), its a very good multiclass with lots of synergy

[Shai Hulud]

Yeah monk fists have good penetration and damage so you'll be fine going unarmed. Also crush is the least resisted physical damage type.

Best thing about the lance is it will distribute monk abilities like stunning surge, skyward kick, force of anguish, whatever. So if you have decent accuracy you can spam stunning surge. You'll stun everyone in the AOE (if you make the roll) and if you crit even one you get back the mortification. I believe you can actually get back more than 2 mortification if you crit multiple enemies but I haven't tested this recently. 

Helwalker will do the most damage but is a bit squishy. Still, with the pike you can attack from behind your tank, and wizards have tons of defenses so helwalker / blood mage is my favorite sage combo (blood mage for replenishable spells but also to get wounds). 

With helwalker you can dump MIG a bit so personally I'd do a stat spread something like this

MIG/CON/DEX/PER/INT/RES - 8/13/15/19/18/3

You could lower DEX if you want more MIG or CON. Take Turning Wheel for max stun duration and lance AOE.

If you want a tanky sage though I probably wouldn't take helwalker at all so the stats would be pretty different. Can take nalpazca or generic monk, nalpazca is better but takes a lot of micromanagement to feed him drugs. In either case I'd do something like

MIG/CON/DEX/PER/INT/RES - 10/10/7/14/18/18, and probably take iron wheel

Should be noted iron wheel armor bonus doesn't stack with llengrath's safeguard, but it does protect you until you're bloodied so you might want it anyway

If you want to focus on unarmed entirely then forbidden fist / blood mage is the best and you'd just stick with forbidden fist attacks, using distro something like 18/3/9/18/10/19 with iron wheel, wear helm of the white void when you get it

Edited June 18, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Shai Hulud said:

I believe you can actually get back more than 2 mortification if you crit multiple enemies but I haven't tested this recently. 

Unfortunately you cannot. It used to be that way in the early days - but that got patched quickly.

 

 

 

[HumanChalice640]

3 hours ago, Shai Hulud said:

Yeah monk fists have good penetration and damage so you'll be fine going unarmed. Also crush is the least resisted physical damage type.

Best thing about the lance is it will distribute monk abilities like stunning surge, skyward kick, force of anguish, whatever. So if you have decent accuracy you can spam stunning surge. You'll stun everyone in the AOE (if you make the roll) and if you crit even one you get back the mortification. I believe you can actually get back more than 2 mortification if you crit multiple enemies but I haven't tested this recently. 

Helwalker will do the most damage but is a bit squishy. Still, with the pike you can attack from behind your tank, and wizards have tons of defenses so helwalker / blood mage is my favorite sage combo (blood mage for replenishable spells but also to get wounds). 

With helwalker you can dump MIG a bit so personally I'd do a stat spread something like this

MIG/CON/DEX/PER/INT/RES - 8/13/15/19/18/3

You could lower DEX if you want more MIG or CON. Take Turning Wheel for max stun duration and lance AOE.

If you want a tanky sage though I probably wouldn't take helwalker at all so the stats would be pretty different. Can take nalpazca or generic monk, nalpazca is better but takes a lot of micromanagement to feed him drugs. In either case I'd do something like

MIG/CON/DEX/PER/INT/RES - 10/10/7/14/18/18, and probably take iron wheel

Should be noted iron wheel armor bonus doesn't stack with llengrath's safeguard, but it does protect you until you're bloodied so you might want it anyway

If you want to focus on unarmed entirely then forbidden fist / blood mage is the best and you'd just stick with forbidden fist attacks, using distro something like 18/3/9/18/10/19 with iron wheel, wear helm of the white void when you get it

This is good info. Ok so would it be too much to ask if you could share your attribute distribution between each class? Or do you have a link I could view that shows the best way to distribute the points? I'm torn between the helwalker and pure monk. Does the lance work better with helwalker than pure monk?

[Shai Hulud]

On 6/18/2023 at 8:29 AM, HumanChalice640 said:

This is good info. Ok so would it be too much to ask if you could share your attribute distribution between each class? Or do you have a link I could view that shows the best way to distribute the points? I'm torn between the helwalker and pure monk. Does the lance work better with helwalker than pure monk?

Sorry, been busy this week. 

I don't have a full build guide for these but would use the stat distributions as suggested in the previous post. I assume by pure monk you mean monk/blood mage.  For helwalker/blood mage you could do something like MIG/CON/DEX/PER/INT/RES - 8/13/15/19/18/3, and for a regular monk you'd just increase MIG a bit at the expense of some other stats but you don't need as much CON because regular monks don't take more damage based on wounds like helwalkers, so something like MIG/CON/DEX/PER/INT/RES - 10/10/7/14/18/18. The high resolve version will help make the monk more sturdy. I go low resolve with helwalkers and just keep them off the front lines unless you are buffed to the max with wizard spells or potions of final stand (not relevant until high level). You could also do a pure monk with dumped resolve, something like 12/11/13/19/18/3, it just depends how you want to use the character. For tanks you generally want max resolve, if not a tank you can usually just dump it. But even with dumped resolve you can have decent defenses since wizards have so many ways to buff deflection. And keep in mind once at L10 you can take turning wheel or iron wheel (or both) but only one active at a time, which gives +1 INT per wound and a fire damage lash, or +1 CON per wound and some armor. Armor doesn't stack with llengrath's safeguard though, which you'd want active basically always. 

The main difference for helwalkers is they get +1 MIG per wound and +5% damage per wound, so at 10 wounds you have +10 MIG that stacks with other sources like Thunderous Blows, but you also take +50% damage. So they are tremendous damage dealers with the bonus might, but getting hit hurts a lot more. Citzal's spirit lance works well with both, you just do more damage per hit with a helwalker, and possibly attack faster if you dumped resolve for dex, and you generate wounds more quickly so you can spam wound-based monk abilities more. Once you get wall of draining at L19 the helwalker will be considerably more powerful since you can negate the damage malus by drinking potions of final stand. These give brief invulnerability, which can be extended indefinitely with wall of draining spell. So as long as you cast wall of draining every roughly 30 seconds, and use blood sacrifice enough to get back wall of draining to recast, you can maintain invulnerability while doing tremendous damage and spamming monk abilities.

Basically the helwalker/blood mage is more powerful but squishier and requires more care so he doesn't die. Vanilla monk/blood mage are plenty powerful though if you don't want to risk the increased damage.