The Generic, subclass talents: Which are your favourite?

[FacesOfMu]

There's a series of talents from about level 12 or 13 that all classes seem to be able to take that grants a baby version of another classes's skill or passive.

Which of these do you prefer the most? Do you have favourites for specific classes?

 

I think I made a mistake and went for the chanter's skeletons a few times. I thought it'd be neat to have extra summons, until I realised human skeletons are pretty weak (though I haven't tried it yet. Maybe in TWM they scale up nicely?). I was also tempted to get the zealous focus, too, until I thought they'd probably suppress each other

[Heijoushin]

There's already a couple of threads on this, but as far as I can see, the baby sneak attack is the most popular. It's basically free damage for any melee character.

 

I think the aura is also okay if you don't have a paladin, and fighters recovery can't hurt your survivability.

 

I'm too impatient to wait for those skeletons... (which is why I don't use chanters to begin with)

Edited September 5, 2015 by Heijoushin

[Blave]

The paladin ability is pretty nice. Doesn't stack with the +accuracy aury of an actual paladin, but it's great if you don't have a paladin, use another aura on your paladin or as a free +4 accuracy for caster/ranged characters that keep their distance and thus are out of range of the fronline. It's nice because it also affects abilities and you only need one talent to gain a bonus for at least half of your party.

 

There's a bug report about the monk ability not affecting the spiritshift forms of the druid. If that's fixed at some point, the talent will be very useful for druids.

 

Sneak attack is always good.

 

I guess the cipher ability and the ranger ability could be useful, too.

 

The others are all mediocre once per rest abilities which is a terrible use of a talent.

[Wolken3156]

Aspirant's Mark and Enigma's Charm are really good on a Priest. You can probably give them to other classes as well, but early game, a Priest will probably prefer these over Interdiction, unless you don't have a Wizard.

 

Initiate's Sneak Attack is probably the best though. Its very nice on Skaen Priests too, since it stacks with Prey on the Weak!

[Ymarsakar]

The paladin ability is pretty nice. Doesn't stack with the +accuracy aury of an actual paladin, but it's great if you don't have a paladin, use another aura on your paladin or as a free +4 accuracy for caster/ranged characters that keep their distance and thus are out of range of the fronline. It's nice because it also affects abilities and you only need one talent to gain a bonus for at least half of your party.

 

There's a bug report about the monk ability not affecting the spiritshift forms of the druid. If that's fixed at some point, the talent will be very useful for druids.

 

Sneak attack is always good.

 

I guess the cipher ability and the ranger ability could be useful, too.

 

The others are all mediocre once per rest abilities which is a terrible use of a talent.

 

Yea, I think per rest abilities for a talent is pretty bad as well given how weak they are individually. They should take a look at it in the White March part 2 or whatever else patch they are working on for now.

 

The skeletons were always weak on the chanter. They aren't going to get better with a weaker mini talent.

 

The spirit though, that stuns on a hit. For a level 1 invocation. Hard to beat that.

Edited September 5, 2015 by Ymarsakar

[Tequilaflavor]

The Charm is pretty strong, but has the usual downside of counting the enemy towards your team for the duration (regarding outgoing buffs etc.)

 

The weaker Sneak Attack can be really strong with a decent set-up (obviously best on a "pure" damage dealer).

 

The Ranger ability that hobbles the enemy could be really nice on a ranged Rogue, but I have yet to try it.

[globalCooldown]

I, too, enjoy the baby Sneak Attack. The fighter regen is also a personal favorite.

 

And to everyone who thinks the skeletons suck: yes, but you should be using them for flanking and distractions!

Once, I had Kana, chanter Watcher, and another party member with the mini-chanter talent all use their skeletons at once. Eight skeletons, all at once. Every enemy ever was flanked, and wasting time hitting skeletons while my party happily wailed on them. It was glorious.

[Delta57Dash]

Skeletons are very useful early-mid game, get weaker later on so I'd recommend eventually rerolling that talent come late-game.

Charm 1/encounter is very good, baby sneak-attack can be very good on everyone who isn't a CC/healing bot.  Mini-paladin aura is good if you're averse to taking Pallegina.

Multiple wounding shots are hilarious with Combusting Wounds.

Fist talent is surprisingly fine.

Otherwise they're kind of meh.

[Blurry_Eyes]

Why not the endurance regeneration? Every character may use a little more regen while fighting.

[pi2repsion]

Why not the endurance regeneration? Every character may use a little more regen while fighting.

Because it is miniscule, doesn't scale with hitpoint pool size, and there are much better talents to pick. Fighter regeneration isn't all that important to fighter survival in the first place, even if you use the unique fighter cloak to enhance it, being dwarfed by healing from other sources in any tough fight, and the baby version is even less impressive.

 

It is useful, of course - any regeneration is useful - but given that it is doubtful that fighter regeneration is worth a talent point when compared to the generic defensive talents,  the baby version certainly isn't. If you want a defensive talent, you are better off picking any of the passive +10 to this or that defense you are weak in or +5 deflection.

[jsaving]

Well put.  It would always be worthwhile if you could somehow get a multiclass talent for free, but since you can't, the question is whether any of them are good enough to "bump" an existing talent from your build.  And in all honesty, most of them aren't good enough to do so, or do so only for specific party configurations. 

 

The cipher, rogue, and possibly ranger talents are generally regarded as the strongest general-interest multiclass talents.  The fighter talent just doesn't add enough durability to be competitive with other deflection-boosting talents if you are a tank (or damage-boosting talents if you aren't).  

[Mechalibur]

I've been playing around with a fighter that takes the Novice's Suffering Talent. It causes fists to be the highest base damage 1 handed weapons, which makes talents like Weapon Mastery and Specialization, as well as Confident Aim have more obvious effects. It's not amazing, but it works pretty well; each attack is doing around 40-45 base damage, and with the two weapon style it attacks pretty quick.

 

I kind of want to try it on paladin too. Not because it would be good, but because I really want to see a flaming punch attack :D

[MunoValente]

Pretty much all my melee fighters and my ranger took the rogue talent this past game.  My fairly passive tank chanter took the paladin one.

[Akos]

My only issue with the monk talent is that I inevitably have to ask myself why I'm not just using a monk if I wanted to punch everyone. That said, Mechalibur might be onto something by making a punch-fighter. Gives you some role playing options if nothing else. 

Fighter's baby-regen simply doesn't do enough healing to be worth burning a talent for. There are a myriad of much better options for damage mitigation available to every class, and talents are too limited to be wasting them on things that aren't going to give you an edge in combat.  

Gallant's Focus seems like a pretty decent pick on my main character, although it doesn't appear to stack so it loses a bit of its' appeal after more than a single person has it or if you have a reliable method of granting your party a higher accuracy bonus through some other avenue. It's pretty mechanically sound, offering +4 accuracy to everyone nearby and on a Barbarian with an emphasis on Intelligence that tends to work out to being most of my melee characters. Stacked with a weapon focus talent that's +10 accuracy pretty early on which definitely gives an edge in combat. From a role playing perspective I like that it allows my main character, who is supposed to fulfill the "leader" role, an ability that demonstrates the idea that his party feels encouraged by being nearby him. 

Apprentice Sneak Attack is also pretty decent, especially if you already have a rogue in your party; You'll be setting up flanking opportunities for the rogue anyway so it makes sense that some of your other fighters can also benefit from it. There are generally more important damage increasing abilities to pick first depending on the character, but it's a sound talent to pick up at some point regardless. 

I haven't really given much attention or tried out any of the others. A lot of them are per-rest while being simultaneously worse than they are on the main-class they come from. Since I play on hard and refuse to trot back to the inn after every boo-boo (I can't imagine the game was meant to be played that way) I don't have a lot of use for per-rest abilities that aren't going to make a dramatic difference in combat.