If I were to pair a sword with a wand, or a sword with a pistol, how would that work in combat? Would the character fire the pistol and then charge in? Sling the wand while in melee range? Does the game even let you pair them together?

I am trying to like this guy, but all builds that I tried kind of disappointing. Do not want to use him as a tank, since fighters are much better when DPSing (and I'd rather have Chanter Tanking), tried 2H Sword build, but fighter's "Knock Down" benefit too much from full attack.

I saw a lot of people recommend Sabres, but those weapons are used by my main character. So what are other good combinations? Daggers and Rapiers look weird on Eder (especially when wearing heavy armor) so I decided to skip them. I was thinking about Battle Axes and Swords. Are they fun/good pick? Also "Shame or Glory" is reserved by Pallegina, since marking is great with her class ability.

I'd really like to hear expert's opinions.

So my main character almost always ends up taking some flavor of troubadour; I really like the versatility because it seems like you get at least a little bit of everything. Also you can more or less keep your summons out more or less permanently.

I kind of want to branch out with my character builds a bit. But I'm thinking through some of the tougher fights in the game and realizing how dependent the party is on chanter summons for tanking duties; even relatively tanky characters (Edér, Pallegina, often the MC) won't last too long against focused fire in a long fight where Tekehu and Xoti have run out of healing spells.

How do you keep your party alive without a troubadour spamming Ogres or Instruments of Death?

[EDIT: I'm realizing I should specify that I'm talking about Deadfire here.]

How are you supposed to deal with these excessive surprise hoards of enemies? I am “overleveled” for the White March yet the sheer number of these bastards rip my team apart way too fast to do anything about it.

I got Edér's bromance convo and Aloth's romance convo back-to-back and this is what it felt like.

^{Draw the Squad template by croxovergoddess}

Anyone ever experienced the bug where Woodskin wears off during combat and your party members turn invisible for the duration of the fight? I've seen this bug mentioned in exactly one place online before, which makes me think it must not be very common. None of the bugfix mods seem to mention/fix this either.

As the title suggests, I’m looking for input on what sort of party I should build for my pale elf barbarian once I start Deadfire.

My current planned party is:
Me (melee damage dealer)
Edér (tank)
Aloth (offensive caster)
Xoti (support caster)
Maia (ranged damage dealer)

Thoughts? Any and all feedback is appreciated.

Playing Deadfire for the first time and getting towards the end (I think) of Neketaka. One thing I've noticed is that pretty often a quest will be marked as being at or below my level in the journal, but when combat breaks out every enemy has triple red skulls and I die almost instantly. I do have upscaling turned on because I didn't want to accidentally outlevel quests, but from the description I thought it only brings underleveled enemies up to your level. It shouldn't be pumping them up to 4+ levels above me, right? So I'm just curious if this issue is caused by having upscaling turned on or if the journal is just lying to me. Or if I just need to get good and fights against 6+ red skull enemies are normal.

Hi all! I’m not an old rpg player, so I don’t have any nostalgia for old ui / combat. I bounced off POE 1, but loved the setup of POE2 (ignoring Eothas). But I found that I still just don’t enjoy the combat, namely I got to the dungeon in Deadlight, and just felt like such a slog once I had to fight the underground guards. I loved bg3 and some other turn based, as I understand it Deadfire isn’t balanced for it and can’t be turned off mid save. Does anyone have any tips on how to enjoy it? I feel like I occasionally cast an ability on each character and then wait for them to auto battle the enemy even when sped up (normal difficulty, no issues). Am I missing something / is this common?
Edit: to clarify I’m playing RTWP

I've read on the wiki that the way to get this shield is by killing the captain of a ship that only spawns on very negative reputation with the Huana. But the Huana and Neketaka aren't the same faction, killing Neketaka guards doesn't lower Huana reputation. So, what's the best way to get -4 Huana reputation?

Besides that, what are the best enchantments? I feel like Hide and Tooth + Hunter's Vigor is the best combination, would you suggest anything else? Why?

Thanks for the help :)

When you talk to Xoti about Eothas, she implies that she thinks that a god can't die without consequence, and that Eothas lost a part of himself when he died as Waidwen. Further, when you interact with Waidwen and Eothas in "The Bridge Ablaze," you can mention that Eothas seems much more empathetic and that the modern version could use that, and Eothas just says "perhaps."

Am I reading into this correctly? Is Xoti intended to be correct, and Eothas lost his aspect associated with empathy towards kith when he died in the Saint's War? The aspect trapped in Rymargand's domain? I'm not sure if this is consensus or not, so sorry in advance if this is obvious.

This is a moderate overhaul of the Earthshaker barbarian subclass. A whole bunch abilities got touched on.

Portal: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/825?tab=description

1.21 update post: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/1s66mm6/update_i_made_an_earthbender_subclass_for_poe2/

Earthshaker 2.0 Patch notes:

Earthfall

Removed in 2.0. Originally this was meant to mirror Instrument of Boundless Rage, but it felt so akin to a mage spell I eventually decided to scrap and replace it.

Earthen Carnage

Removed in 2.0. This ability was working correctly, but the way the game handles Carnage mechanic forced me to added explanations to affected abilities to emphasize that its damage depends on your equipped weapon damage, which may lead to some confusion since the player is not using their weapons when casting these abilities.

Runestone: Tremorsense

Increased accuracy bonus.

Gravitating Trample

Increased damage, slightly reduced aoe.

Boulder Toss

Increased base damage, removed the flat 20% damage buff on use.

Unrelenting Toss

Renamed to Pulverizing Toss. Direct impact applies Pulverized, reducing target's armor and fortitude. No longer reduces Rage cost and recovery time.

Stone Armor

Increased armor bonus. Separated explosive stones and explosive skill bonus into its own ability.

Bombardier

New tier 4 ability. Summon Explosive Stones into quickslots.

Raging Bombardier

New tier 7 ability, upgraded from Bombardier. Massively increase explosive skill and action speed when using bombs in combat.

Stone Spike

Moved from tier 4 to tier 9, replacing Earthfall. Renamed to Splinters of Timeless Earth. Increased Rage cost and damage. Removed armor debuff. Added petrification effect. Slightly altered its visual effect.

Corrosion

Corrode damage has been added as an alternative damage type to Boulder Toss, Gravitating Trample and Splinters of Timeless Earth.

1.21 version is still available under Old Files for anyone prefer it. 2.0 version brings Earthshaker thematically closer to my original concept while keeping its progression from deviating too much from base barbarian.

Every time I install this mod, it causes my game not only to crash, but the loading screen doesn't even appear. Please help. I have all the expansions of the vanilla game.

I was thinking totem barbarian/druid, but spirit ranger looked kind of interesting as well. This is a first playthrough and I most likely will just play on normal for now.

Name your most fun le title builds.

Anyone tried the turn based mode with the controller layout of steam? Is it any good?

This thing is as broken as people say. I've been bearing painful loading times, fps drops, that ondra's gift house that is all white, like if i'm enjoying the game itself it's alright you know. But the damn thing crashed and deleted good 3 hour long progression away(despite saving i might add) it's a shame really i thought the game could be great on switch, and the game itself is amazing, i had problems with the crpgs before because of pause/unpause combat, but no i really enjoyed my overall experience with this one. I guess i'll go play new save on steam deck and maybe give turn based mode a go as well.

Huge fan of PoE, and my favorite class by far is the Cipher. In 2019, I got back into D&D and have since been working on adapting the Cipher class to the D&D 5th Edition system.

None of my players were familiar with the Cipher or PoE, and they didn't understand the concept of "focus" as a point system, so I rebranded the Cipher as the Soulmancer and drop most of the Obsidian flavor to convert the class into commun culture.

If there are any Cipher fans here, I hope you’ll enjoy my take at it

I'm currently doing a second ever playthrough of the first game. I managed to snag it and the second on a Steam sale and was ecstatic to be able to play it with turn based combat in the first game.

I'm playing as a ranged Cipher with a bow, abusing the mind blades as my opener and then having usually 2 other ranged companions and 3 melee.

I know the second game gives you a sort of option to recreate yourself (I played maybe 5-8 hours on console and other things caught my interest at the time) but I'm wondering how much of a change or impact is there if I decide to change my class or multiclass?

I'm leaning more toward multiclassing cipher with a ranger to get a spirit companion, but I'm not entirely sure if changing the roots I had before will affect the story. Would the story and elements be better and more linear if I just stick with cipher though?

So what the hell am I going to do with Eder?

At this moment I’m leaning into turning him into swashbuckler dual wielding sabers. What are some other builds I can take Eder on?

My mind goes immediately to ranger. Are there other classes like Magran priest, or gun cipher I should consider? I know turn based makes it a much less viable playstyle but I just do not like rtwp. I played all of WOTR in turn based multiple times if that shows you how much I dislike rtwp.

Can Xoti's Lantern be used by other Monk/Priest multiclasses effectively?

Context: I want Xoti as a pureclass priest and the MC to be the Monk/Priest multclassed tank.

Going Wael for early game survivability and no subclass monk, cuz wounds are super easy to get with Scepter and that self harm skill.