Which character class?

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Yeah, i feel like monks were never intended to be full on tanks, though giving them weapons with the draining mod on them helps them a great deal. (20% of damage restored as endurance)

 

Crap, draining weapons can help anyone in melee! Draining is one of the best abilities, IMO, you can get on melee weapons!

I had an epic fight against one of the groups that you get a bounty to hunt down where only Eder and Pallegina were still left on their feet and there were still about 5-6 enemies. Both Eder and Pallegina were using draining weapons in this brawl and managed to take down that mob by their lonesome in an incredible battle that seemed to last for 5 minutes of real time (from the point that it was just the 2 of them vs the mob). (IIRC, this battle occurred during my monk PC party run back in late April.) What an epic fight this was!!! Between Eder's draining weapon, his Rapid Recovery, and whatever exceptional armor he was wearing, it was practically impossible for the enemy to get him seriously hurt. Bot overall, their victory was made possible because each of them was wielding a draining weapon.

 

Yep, fighters are OP. I read a thread on the official forum where someone posted a video of themselves soloing sky dragon on PotD with a paladin, using pause, summons, potions, etc., and then someone replied with a video of them soloing the dragon with a fighter by just rushing it.




Although the recent paladin update did make them somewhat better than they were at that point.

 

I don't know about Fighters being OP, though the Constant Recovery (plus the Rapid Recovery upgrade) seem excessively powerful. A fighter with a sufficiently high DEFL and pretty decent armor can avoid taking a lot of hits and major damage, and Constant/Rapid Recovery can cover for the few hits and damage they do take, which seems to me to give them a considerable advantage over the other "warrior" classes.

Other than that, Fighters don't seem to be quite the offensive powerhouses that classes like barbarians or rogues can be when properly applied. That said, a well built Offensive fighter can be pretty darned effective, if you give them a strong DEX, pick the Armored Grace talent (to reduce recovery time), and wear lighter, faster recovery time armor (at the cost of a lower DR). You basically trade a lower DR for getting off more attacks, possibly considerably more attacks. And in the process, you can often kill off enemies faster, thus giving them less time to hurt you.

I played such an offensively oriented Fighter as my last PC. A high Might, fairly high DEX, good PER and RES Island Aumaua who was kicking serious monster butt (preferably dual wielding sabers), particularly towards the end of the game, after I'd managed to equip her with +3 stat bonus items for those 4 attributes (Might, DEX, PER, and RES).

 

Yeah, draining weapons are especially suited to those characters/builds that can tank well, they won't be taking a ton of damage, allowing them to out-heal the damage they do take with the draining off their weapon.

Monks, while not the pure tanks fighters are, are still quite good at it. And i feel like draining has an extra utility here to help them regain the damage they inevitably have to take to generate wounds.

 

I went with a Wizard. I was disappointed at first but, once I hit 5th level spells it started getting interesting and it was game over for everything else with 6th level spells. The final fight ended up being extremely anti-climactic when I petrified every enemy less the big baddie .

 

Wizards are powerful from the onset if you take the right spells. More if you take feats like Gunner/Marksman and use a good ranged weapon.

At low levels the key spells are the debuffs like Slicken, Chill Fog and Bewildering Spectacle. Pretty much guaranteed knockdowns/blinds/confuse (massive accuracy bonus to allies/more crits, massive deflection penalties to enemies) and guaranteed sneak attacks for the party rogue (seriously, bring a rogue if you have a wizard). I rarely use my low level wizards to nuke stuff, why bother if you can kill enemies quickly and safely with normal attacks after a good debuff cast.

It's a lot like the IE games (Sleep > Magic Missile for most of BG1) except PoE wizards can potentially hit as hard/as often/as accurately as the fighter classes with their normal attacks.

 

Petrified is widely considered the cheesiest condition in the game. Most hardcore players purposefully avoid it because it ruins the challenge.

It's a lot like D&D in general. DPS is secondary. Anyone can be a good DPS character, but the casters' job is to shut down and control the battlefield or support the team with buffs and summons.

 

It doesn't hurt to have magic Missile (or whatever the new name for it is) in your Grimoire, but it'll be mostly a backup. Chill Fog is a lot more useful spell. I imagine that Slicken is as well, though I'll admit to not having used it because I've depended on Chill Fog so much.

As for Gunner, I'm not sure that I'd waste a talent on it. I think that I'd either stick with magical implements (with the Blast talent picked) or maybe a nice warbow. The problem I have with guns and low accuracy characters is that guns come with an inherent accuracy penalty, so I tend to prefer leaving guns for high accuracy classes to use, and have the lower accuracy classes use bows, xbows, arbalests, or magical implements for wizards. But that's a personal preference.

 

out of all the minoletta (magic missile) spells, the only one i even consider worth taking is the highest tier one, "Minoletta's Precisely Piercing Burst" - since it actually bypasses some DR.
The 1st,3rd and 4th level variants of the spell just don't do enough vs opponents with a decent DR, and they are everywhere.

 

In my opinion, the Paladin is the best player character class I can recommend from a team-leading, role-playing perspective. Even before the 1.06 patch, which made them even better. If you like a good heroic type, Shieldbearer of Elgca is the way to go.

Now, once you've beaten the game and role-play aspects mean less and less, any lead character is viable. But for a great experience on your first few runs, this is my recommendation. Here's why.

Aside from them being fantastic tanks with many useful per-encounter abilities and auras, their primary stats are the best for dialogue options. Due to this, for beginners, I highly recommend a Paladin with a 10/10/10/16/16/16 stat allocation. You'll be able to do everything you need without min-maxing, which I never recommend. That said, I often take an approach which meets min-maxing in the middle. In this case, for this build, you can do 14/6/10/16/16/16 to do a bit more damage and healing, or to really max out defense, go 10/6/10/17/17/18. 6 is as low as I'm comfortable dumping any stat. These characters are supposed to be heroes, after all, and no one is heroic with a 3 an anything - they're disabled.

I'm sure someone will chime in with their ideal whatever and how wrong I am and who cares, but if you like a traditional heroic knight type as a PC, this is the best build I've found. It works well and I've had a blast with it in two playthroughs now. With this character and Eder tanking, the other 4 characters can focus on dealing damage and disabling.

My best frontline is my PC (Shieldbearer), Eder (Fighter), and a second row Paladin Kind Wayfarer. PC boosts everyone's defense, and the KW steals kills with a pike and constantly heals the party (thanks to Strange Mercy). The 3 in the back row are completely optional, but I've enjoyed having Durance (arquebus and buffing), Kana (arbalast and singing), and Grieving Mother (blunderbuss and disabling) in the back row. With this setup, I rarely have anyone get knocked out in battle. That said, the back 3 are fairly optional. In my next playthrough, I think I may try a Rogue, Druid, and GM in the back (can't do without GM - I find her too important for RP reasons).

 

DRabbit, I'm not that impressed with paladins in PoE because they're too stat dependent on PER, INT, and RES stats. Also, I guess that I don't like the entire design philosophy behind the PoE paladin. I don't give a rat's behind about the leader/warlord concept of the character. I'd much rather that paladins were holy warrior types, champions of their diety who lead by example, rather than lead by buffing auras, etc. And as such, the PoE paladin seems like a rather bland, boring, and wimpy front liner to me. And speaking as a person who always loved paladins in the IE DnD games and loved to have one in my party, I can't bring myself to use one of these sorry excuses for a "paladin".

If PoE "paladins" float your boat, more power to ya. But I can tell you this, I doubt that I'll play them until and unless they return them to the noble status of Holy Warrior, rather than wimpy "leader".

 

Bah! Nothing is more boring than a hero without any notable disabilities.

 

The wizard class doesn't exactly count as a low accuracy class in practice. Sure its accuracy it lower than average if you don't use any spell/debuff, but that's all relative. What actually happens is that the sheer number of +accuracy bonuses from gear/racials/potions/effects/etc. is more than enough to compensate for its low base accuracy, and when it comes to the fights that actually matter you're looking at a class which specializes in casting spells that inflict status effects like prone and blind. That's like what? +20 accuracy total at the very least? We've not even started on the buffs yet.

I prefer Gunner/Marksman simply because if I wanted my wizard to do light AoE damage I already have encounter powers/spells for that. PoE fights also tend to go a LOT smoother if you take down key targets, like rogues and casters, quickly. It's like giving a Restore Minor Endurance ring to Durance. What's the point?
Perhaps if I wanted my wizard to be a dedicated attacker (or if he was my main) I would take Blast + related talents and use the minor blights spell and then craft a really good implement for him late game. Even then, I would consider crafting gear for my dedicated attackers (like the party rogue) first.

 

Quote from the PoE Official WIKI regarding fighters.

Defense is a keyword here. I first made the mistake when creating one of thinking of them as offense. Once I understood their role better I did a much better job of building one. Now Eder can withstand a melee attack quite well and so can one I hire.

 

There are ways to turn their great defense into a great offense, mainly by using gear with retribution on it (If hit by a Melee Attack, retaliate for 10-15 piercing damage, affected by damage modifiers)
The great thing here is that retaliate on a shield (Sura's Supper Plate) will stack with the retaliate on armor/accessories like Hiro's mantle or the Vengiatta Rugia armor.
No idea if this is intended/will be fixed though.
Make him/her a fire godlike for their inherent retaliation-like ability (gain DR, and does fire damage to enemy attackers when under 50% endurance) and beef that up with the scion of flame talent.
Finally, give your fighter a weapon with the draining mod on it, and just toss him/her into the frontlines, chances are most enmies will destroy themselves before your fighter even has a chance to drop dead.

 

Hasn't retaliation been nerfed in a recent update?

 

Looks like they did yeah. i haven't used retaliation on my chars since 1.04, but i figure it should still help tanks a lot even after the 1.05 nerf.

 

Nakia, the PC in my last party was an offensively oriented Fighter. I used Eder as my defensively oriented fighter to hold the line, and my offensive Fighter, named Takka, an Island Aumaua, usually fought along side him, hacking the enemies who were attacking him into little monster bits with dualed sabers she preferred to use. I initially had her using chain mail, but as the game progressed, I moved her into lighter and lighter armor, finally ending up with her using an Exceptional Leather armor named Kerdhed Pames, which also gave a +3 bonus to Resolve (effectively a +3 to DEFL).

Takka's initial stats were something like: 18 MGT, 8 CON, 16 DEX, 12 PER, 8 INT, and 16 RES, and she'd collected four items with +3 bonuses to her 4 strong stats (not to mention some of the permanent stat adds that occur throughout the game, like the +1 MGT for agreeing to do what Gawain wants done with the collected Hollowborn souls). And on top of her high DEX, and quick recovering Leather armor, she'd taken the Armored Grace ability (-16% recovery speed) and Two Weapon Style (+20% attack speed). So in combat, she was attacking and recovering at seemingly incredible speeds, and doing consistently excellent damage (constantly over 30 with normal hits) due to her great strength, as well as mastery in Ruffian weapons.

Offensive fighters are entirely possible to build and succeed with in PoE. That said, it's still a good idea to have at least one defensive tank holding the line.

 

Like I said – it's my recommendation, which obviously means it's my preference. The OP said they couldn't decide. I don't expect everyone to like it, especially those into powergaming. But for someone like me, I want all the story elements and dialogue options I can get, especially on my first few runs when the game can still surprise me. I don't see a better class to do just that – since there is no other class that benefits from having high marks perception, intelligence, and resolve all at once, and the story rewards an adept linguist. Since the PC is the only one who speaks in conversations, this is crucial - again, for my playstyle.

The build does reliable damage (though certainly not the most), but you don't build a tank to do damage - you build them to soak damage. It's intended to be a party leader, charge in first, boost the entire party significantly with auras (especially after 1.06) and bail people out in a pinch with exhortations. That's a role I prefer for a Paladin: a commander, not a holy sword swinging maniac. This character never fails me, both in and out of combat, even when everyone else is getting their asses kicked. If that doesn't appeal to you, there are plenty of other options.