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Auto recharge is a godsend, because if you don't have the spells you need, it doesn't matter how many slots for them you have. And honestly, I had more spell slots than I needed with her after a few upgrades.
But at least we can agree that Lini is the best
Seoni is amazing, however, especially with abyssal sorceress and the ability to sac followers to draw extra cards. Initially I found Ezren's role abilities to be underwhelming but the more I look at him the more I think they don't matter because his starter abilities are so good.
The more important thing about having 8-11 spells compared to the Sorc's 3-6 is that unless you take damage you pretty much never have to worry about your deck being in the discard pile.
Plus the Wizard's recharge skills apply to things like the elemental orbs and wands, so he can even recharge support items.
I do need to use the Sorceress a little more, but I definitely think Bard or Wizard have higher potential.
That said, there does seem to be more need for Charisma than straight Intelligence checks in the game, with at least two scenarios where the entire point is to collect allies. Often when it's an intelligence check it also includes Arcane, so this is one point where the Sorceress does have an advantage.
Monk may be the hardest class to use from the beginning but have you put any creativity into making one? He's probably the best character in the game if you take the drunken master path. Put your remaining 2 skill points into constitution and add in an amulet of fortitude with 2x healing potions and he is invincible. All he needs is 1 erastil for each combat and the rest can go into helping others or exploration/combat. He cycles his deck really fast and when played right has an answer to every situation the game throws at him.
Merisiel and amiri rated higher than anything else on that list is just.... no. They both have bad exploration and you're speaking about how the monk is only good in combat well these two are definitely only good for this role. Meri's low weapon count means more often than not she wont even start with one, selectively making her the worst team player and combat.
Reading into your post further makes me really think you havent played most of these characters to their fullest. Kira and seoni rated low, especially being outclassed by a bard, just means i cant take this list seriously.
There a number of problems with the bard and its that he truly is a master of none. He sucks in combat and he sucks at recharging. Anyone can recharge low cost spells but what about the higher ones which he so desperately needs to be any good? He recharges to give bonuses to himself but before you know it he's out of cards and just ends up giving up his own turn to reset his hand. He has potential but is he nowhere better than many others. Probably better than meri or amiri but thats about it.
I know that the bard has more trouble recharging than the Wizard, Druid, and Sorcerer, but being able to recharge both spell types is a pretty big advantage, especially because he can load up on two or three cure spells to recharge spells he fails to get after he casts them. It's this feature, the extra spell slot, and the fact his music is generally more useful than the Sorcereress' innate active ability that makes me think he at least beats the Sorc.
As for the Rogue, as I said she's my least used character right now. I'll have to play with her a bit more
The healing potion thing for the monk is a great idea, and the high number of blessings makes it seem like it makes up for his weaknesses. I'll definitely try this - drunken monk seems to be his most interesting feature. However I do worry his low stats (besides dex) to take advantage of the blessings and his low starting hand size might stunt his comparative potential.
I'd like to turn the discussion more to the positives of the Cleric and Sorcerer, and what advantages it gives them over the Barbarian and Fighter. I'm genuinely curious what not seeing there.
A good example is Amiri's unique power, Move Fast. In a standard game it's a gimmick that's rarely used to cover a new Location right after closing one, or to play around with Location powers. But in Legendary, it's an extremely useful power since movement limitations change the playstyle.
Then there's the fact that you need to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of your team to be able to handle all the challenges ahead. A character's main role can cover a crucial weakness of one team but be completely redundant in another.
For example, Erzen is literally the only high Int character in the game. Most Int checks are for Int/Arcane so you can use an arcane spellcaster who relies on Charisma. Knowledge checks aren't t as common and a few characters have that skill (like the Bard!) or you can use the Tome of Knowledge when you need it to close. Int/Craft is even rarer (and only the alt Monk has that skill). So if your team can carry a couple of items to auto-pass a few of these tests, you can do without Erzen, or you can rely on a team with plenty of blessings a couple of Iori to pump those D6, or you can use Improved Aid/Guidance spells.
A better example is probably Harsk. The one thing he does great is supporting other characters in battle. If you have teammates that can struggle with combat (like the awesome druid), that's great, but if everyone can take care of themselves, your ranger will be mostly useless.
Another issue is that a few characters are not obvious about how they best use their skills and powers.
That said! Here are a few of my impressions.
Wait, what? I think there might be a misunderstanding. Are you talking about the Elf Rogue when you say "Merisiel"? Because combat is far from her only, or even main, use.
She's got the best Dex in the game, which is the most widely required attribute, she's the only one with Disable which is the most useful skill against Barriers and required to use a few things. She also has really great Acrobatics (which is often useful) and is the only one with Stealth (more limited but still good). Then she's got the evasion power, which is huge for recon and reckless exploration and spotting great boons specialized for other characters. On top of that, she has decent stats and card selection to handle most situations and support the team.
As for not being great at combat ... with Evasion she doesn't need a weapon to explore, and her many cards that can recharge (like items) along with her hand size means she can quickly cycle to get one. But then again, with Sneak Attack she doesn't even have to have a weapon to win fights. Even barehanded she is close to the ranger in battle prowess. She has enough weapon cards in her deck to get one quickly, but not so many that she's burdened with cards that can't be used to explore.
Amiri, though ... yeah. Her alternate version lets her use Rage on Survival checks, which are often useful outside of combat. She's one of the best character to handle Survival tasks, after the Druid and the vanila Paladin. And she has Move Fast, potentially very useful in Legendary (more notable in large groups). That's about it. She's not notably better than Valeros at combat, Strength and especially Constitution are the least useful attributes for exploration.
Lini the Druid: A~S tier
Using Animal Trick on every roll and Shapeshifting when needed makes her great at everything ... as long as you have the right cards. Having your animal sniped by a Traitor or a forced random discard will really hurt her. And if she is unlucky enough to take a bunch of damage, it's going to be harder for her to bounce back up than for other characters.
Not having any weapon in her deck (or good fighting skills) makes her very vulnerable to combat if she's not properly prepared. Some give her a keen rapier (counts 4s on D4 as a 5) and just chuck many D4s at average monsters (requires a card feat). Some have her grab any weapon she can and shapechange a lot, with plenty of Cure spells to keep her healthy (works better with a teammate like Valeros that can easily throw her something to use on the first turn). Some load her with as many combat spells as they can and build her deck to cycle fast so she can reuse them regularly.
So if you can cover for her vulnerabilities, she's definitely S class. Otherwise, she's very powerful but a bit unreliable, so I'd rate her A.
Harsk the Ranger: C~B rank
Then only things he's good at doing is combat and Fortitude. Fortitude is very rarely useful and can be made trivial by recharging an Amulet. In battle, he's not even that good, with a weak main stat and not very impressive weapons and no powers to help. I have lost track of how many times he was having more trouble dispatching monsters than the priest and the rogue.
But that's not why you take him. You take him for his powers, recon and combat support. The sniper shot doesn't add a lot (+2.5) but it increases pretty fast as you improve it and it's really reliable (not much room to be disappointed by a D4+2). And he can use that extremely easily, with almost no cost. In fact, by recharging his entire hand every turn to support the rest of the team, he can make his deck cycle amazingly fast and thus reuse recycling boons exceedingly well (note that it'll completely cripple his ability to explore).
The ability to recon cards lets you do more than avoid bad surprises. It lets you know you need to send the Wizard to pick up the Component Pouch rather than have it banish when Harsk fails to acquire it. It lets you spot the Villain/Henchman and plan your overall strategy. By checking the card on the bottom, you can avoid the situation where you have to explore the entire deck to get to the boss (provided you can force it to shuffle).
If your team has characters that really stuggle with combat or have unreliable fighting abilities (like the Wizard not having an attack spell or Lini being in a tight spot), the sniper cover will be great, amazing. If you don't have anyone to handle a a critical closing check, you can give him an item to auto-pass it to cover that weakness. Not only can he cycle faster than (almost) anyone so he can get the situational card ready when the situation arises, but he can use any card as ammo so he's not weighted down too much by card he isn't usually playing. Notable examples include the Tome of Knowledge (auto-pass knowledge, great if your team suck at Int) and potions (Banish on use, sure, but you won't need them often anyway).
Overall a C rank for unimpressive combat abilities and limited usefulness of his skills, but he can provide some of the best support to a team. That can certainly be worth his lower ability to close stuff himself.
Ezren the Wizard: B~S
A lot has been said on him, so I won't go into too much details. Picking exactly what spells to use will radically change the way he works. His ability to get bonus explorations is much more useful later in the game where almost everything is magic (and if he can handle many explorations in a row rather than being specced for support). So if you don't have the right spells to make him reliably contribute, he can be very hit and miss at the start, so he gets a B rank. If you kit him properly, he can tear through pretty much anything and provide a wide variety of different roles, hence the A rank.
But have you heard of Ezren the Time Wizard? Once you have cleaned his deck of cards he can't draw with his spellbook (just the 3 allies with the Alt version) he can draw a card every single time he casts a spell. With good recharging ability, he can be 100% to recharge Haste (the Cat is a very easy way to help this, of course the Component Pouch is great but those without the Obsidian Edition of the game won't easily get it). Load his deck with a bunch of cards you can cast at any time during his turn, like the very powerful Augury (and Haste...), and then a miracle happens. He can literally cycle his deck infinitely fast (which is why Harsk isn't the fastest at all...).
As long as your deck doesn't contain more cards than spells you can cast any time, you can cycle your spells infinitely. Which means you can reuse Haste any number of times. Which means literally infinite Explorations. With an item that lets him move between Locations (cape of escape first, then boots of levitation) he can easily close multiple location every turn. And note that infinite exploration means he can abuse turn-long boosts like flasks and Sagacity and such. And you can make sure he always has the spell you want from your deck ready to go, given how wide his repertoire can be, that makes him extremely versatile. And casting an infinite amount of Haste/Stride lets you redeploy the team at will. And with Improved Mending you can reuse discarding equipments at will, and ...
Yeah. When you get him going, Ezren is crazy powerful.
Seelah the Paladin: A
Her Inspired Grace gives a bigger bonus than Lini's Animal trick, and you can actually use it any time, no risk to be caught without the right card in hand. I often hear that you have to load her deck with Blessings and Spells to make use of it, and even then you risk losing crucial cards. I disagree. First, once she has a good weapon in hand, you don't want to draw another, it's actually better to send them from the top of your deck to the discard than to draw them, that way you can get a blessing or something else actually useful. You don't need to carry multiple armors in your hand, in fact you might be better off with all your armors in the discard so you don't draw them and they don't take up hand space. Allies you can discard them to explore (or do something else) the moment you get them, then they're no longer at a risk of being lost.
Simply put: is discarding a card from your deck actually going to hurt you? Depends. If you risk running out of life, then yes. If you lose a card you really need and can't get it back, then yes. Otherwise, not so much. If you're really worried you'll lose your best weapon before drawing it, you can carry a Mending spell, so you can send it from the discard to your hand.
Another problem I had at first was that she'd keep sending her spells to the bottom of the deck and couldn't cast them. But then, I realized that Recharging does not suffle the deck. When you Recharge a spell you want to use again, just count how many cards are in your deck at that moment. Keep track of how many cards you draw (and discard/recharge from the top of your deck) so you know when you're about to draw it.
I once built Seelah to get rid of the cards she didn't need in her hand (by Burying them or gifting them to another character) and abuse Cure. With a deck containing nothing but Cures and Blessings, she'd burn all her blessings to explore again and again, relying on Inspired Grace (and one good weapon in hand) to pass all the checks. Then cast Cure to send them back into the deck and keep at it. Not only did she nearly empty her hand every turn, she'd recharge a lot of cards from the top, making her cycle her deck so fast she could cast the same Cure every turn...
And to conclude, just a couple tricks with the Bard and the Monk.
Yes, Lem the Bard sucks at recharging powerful spells. That's OK, you often don't want him to recharge powerful spells. Because if he doesn't, you can swap it back into your hand by discarding a spell you wouldn't use. If you had recharged it, you would need to cycle the entire deck before using it again. But by doing that, you can use it immediately on the next turn.
Sajaan the Monk does not have outstanding skills, but note how he doesn't have any weak one either. And he has a ton of blessings. The difference between adding blessings on a D4 skill and a D6 one is huge. That makes him capable of handling pretty much any task in the game. With a wide variety of blessings, you can send him to handle nearly any type of closing check (just make sure to get the one blessing you need in your hand by recharging all the blessings you can even if you don't need to win the fight). He's really surprisingly good at providing critical skill check support, and not only about battle.
Anyway I've moved the monk up and the barbarian down based on considering these comments.
That's also amazing about the Wizard too... once I get back on a PC I'll definitely need to move him above the Ranger.
If you have a really small team, you have less need for combat support and suffer more from lack of closing skills, so I think he's definitely C rank then. If you have a larger team that can really use his support, he certainly earns a solid B rank. Of course, this is once again merely my opinion. I really like Harsk, but this game doesn't have any bad characters. He's just not outstanding as Lini, Erzen, Seelah...
When you are playing the original game with permadeath and only a single attempt at each mission before a game over, you have to really get your characters to work at their best level if you want to reliably beat the Rise of the Runelords.
The digital version is much more accessible. You can keep playing and progress through the game without having to become an expert at using the system. You can get used to things a little at a time. Like how important it is to cycle through your deck to get the cards you need (or recharge the same one more often), how exploration/life points balances out depending on the size of the team, how some rolls are OK to attempt at 50% chance while others are too risky to do without a Blessing if you don't have 90%, knowing what sort of skill checks are required to overcome the dangerous banes at the various levels, how to place your characters based on the deck composition...
Here are a few tricks that I can think off the top of my head:
One thing that makes Kyra great is her advanced ability to recharge Blessings of Sarenae. With her large hand size and numerous blessings, you can have her throw a ridiculous amount of blessings at her companions every turn and heal instead of exploring because her hand is empty. A character doesn't need to explore a location if you know there's no Villain there (because you found a Henchman), they can just sit on it to temporary close when needed.
Each card you keep in your hand at the end of the turn is one less card you're going to draw, so if a character doesn't need to care too much about life points, they often benefit from using the optional discard phase to get rid of anything they don't absolutely want to keep. For example, Merisiel the rogue can discard situational items that are unlikely to be relevant to draw her weapon faster, Erzen can throw away Allies (or items if he can't draw them) to purge his deck, same for Kyra or Seelah turning their decks into pure blessings they can recharge at will.
You may want to use cards that bury on use specifically to keep them out of your discard if you're going to use healing a lot to recover plenty of blessings (or allies for explorations and stuff). Another way to keep your deck clean like that is to gift cards to other players. For example you can have Seoni the sorceress bury the items she's not going to use to make sure her deck is only spells and cards she can discard to explore, and burn through her entire hand each turn, with a powerful healer keeping her going.
When you already have good decks, the vast majority of cards you pick up aren't going to be good enough for you to keep after the adventure, meaning you're effectively going to banish them for some gold. That's why you can easily use spells with non-casters and such when you happen to pick them up. It can be surprisingly helpful.
Support characters can gift their blessings to other characters so they can explore more. Or they can gift any other cards for the power-player to have more cards than their normal max when they start in order to fuel some powers (like Seoni's arcane burst or Amiri's rage).
Characters that have their advanced blessing power as "Blessings with the X keyword add a D12 instead of the usual die" are more useful than you might think. Seoni doesn't need to add D12 to her Arcane checks, she can already use D12s. Amiri doesn't need to add D12 to her Strength combat checks either. But they can use these blessings to add to their horrible stats to add D12 instead of D4, which makes them vastly more versatile. And they can also use it as support for other characters who don't have such good skill dice to rely on.
Your team often has trouble with Dexterity when facing barriers? Get Seoni to use a basic Agility spell for +3 and throw in a Blessing of Pharasma for another 2d12, and suddenly even the D4 characters can pick lock and dodge like champions.
You have characters that can have serious vulnerability in combat and Harsk D4 won't cut it? For example if Ezren is facing a monster immune to attack spells. Well, Amiri can help his wimpy strength with a couple of D12.
Advanced Blessing powers that go "recharge when you use a blessing on your X check" are powerful, but tend to be overkill. Merisiel usually doens't have to use a Blessing to pass a Dex check. Those that turn blessings dice on a specific skill to D12 tend to be worthless, because they can only use it on their own rolls. I'm not sure if there's a good way to use them.
As a Healer, she can improve it to shuffle blessings of Sarenae rather than recharging them, that means they're in a random place in the deck rather than the last card. That can be useful. And the Healer's special power of drawing a bonus card when healing means she can get a Blessing to explore despite using her power (or provide even more support to the team).
As an Exorcist, though, the improved version lets her put them back on top of her deck. That means that she can have 7 Blessings of Sarenae in her hand, use them every single turn, and draw them all again immediately. That's pretty rad. In fact, it turns the restoration spell into "draw another 2 blessings you can use for free".
That illustrates the the really important part of some prestige classes is not the obvious thing. For example what makes Ezren Evoker path viable is not the bonus to Evocation. It's the fact that he gets to increase his hand size by 1 more. Which is huge for him. Merisiel's Thief path only has one of the Sabotage powers instead of both, but that's actually a good thing, because it means she can learn to Sabotage Locations (great to have +2 to every closing check) without wasting a power feat on learning how to sabotage barriers (which she's already awesome at).
When comparing advanced classes, you shouldn't just pay attention to what class powers they have, but also which ones they don't. And heir hand size limitations, because one more hand size is effectively "you can draw an additional card every single turn", which is a better version than some of Harsk's and Sajaan's best powers.
cleric is probably the strongest overall
rogue kinda breaks the game.
I think Cleric is one of the weaker chars. She doesn't do much combat wise, and her stats are akward (You want to up STR to make her fight good, but you also want to up WIS). Healing isn't that important even on legendary so her other aiblity isn't great. Yes you can use it to get blessings back to explore, but that sitll puts you back a turn, you might not get those blessings back, and you may roll poorly.
The Sorc and Wiz are both really good, it's just a matter of preference. I like the wizard better, but the Sorc does great (Someitmes I use both becuase Arcane spells are just that good)