I got so worn out by Chapter 4 that I did something I don't think I've ever done before: I started playthrough #2 before finishing playthrough #1.
As planned, this time I'm LARPing a goody-two-shoes Azata Bard, with a focus on melee and making everyone shit themselves in fear with sky-high Persuasion, Dazzling Display and Cornugon Smash, then doing a metric fuckload of damage with Attacks of Opportunity as the victims are running away.
It's a vastly different playthrough, and I mean mechanically too, not just narratively. With my merged Sorc/Lich, I'm mostly a one-man party, draining everyone of levels and Attribute points to death or blasting them with no SR, no Save damage Spells, while the rest of the party is mostly there to tank and clean up.
With the Azata Bard, the party functions much more like a cohesive unit, in which p. much everyone is empowered to be a fucking beast in their own right, then beefed up even further by party synergy. I was actually able to annihilate the Red Dragon in Chapter 3 with nothing but buffs and regular attacks in 2 rounds, and if you remember, I was crying about how I had to cheese it with a million Animate Dead skeletons and Exsanguinate spam earlier. I was not even aware of Guarded Hearth before, I found out about it while looking up a decent build for Sosiel, and that ability is ridiculously overpowered, a real game-changer in fights against these sky-high AC bosses.
My current MC feels a lot weaker than the Sorc/Lich one, but the party overall is definitively stronger and I'm having a lot of fun with it - being able to pass p. much every Skill Check put in front of me, which was not the case before, is also pretty neat. Though, I am already starting to miss those ridiculous DCs and Caster Levels, so I'll probably go back to the previous character as soon as I hit Chapter 4 with the current one.
ark of Justice.
