The Drunken Lizard Pub

I was planning to use the same build as I used in the book 1 (ranger with pretty much maxed bow/dex) however I was a little disappointed by the various nerfs to critical chance and nefarious attack.

The critical chance was increasing by 1% for each skill point invested in your weapon (I had 97% crit chance in book1) and I was expecting to finally reach 100% in book2. However it seems you get now only 0.5%chance after lvl40 in bow and you'll finish at best with around 80% critical chance...

Nefarious attack also has become useless for a high critical chance build... Not only the damage bonus was reduced from 100% to 50%, but it can't happen at the same time as a critical anymore. Also it has priority over a critical which means if the game has to choose between a critical and a nefarious attack it will pick the later - thus for someone with over 50% critical chance the nefarious attack will actually lower your dps (because it will lower your damage by 50% more often than it will increase it by 50%)...

In Book II optimal builds change a lot. In my opinion the new weapon feats largely prevent the need for critical hits. It's easy to only make feat attacks by midgame.

I don't like to be dependent on feats; investing heavily in bow/dex allows playing with power mode always activated and keeping the tohit high at any range. As for optimal builds I still believe the pure archer offers the best damage/armor overall while having good versatility using trained skills and items.

PS. Here's the kind of stats an optimized endgame archer can achieve:

Nice, Kaylon. I'm intrigued that you built a dedicated archer starting the character as a magic user.

I started as a caster to get a scroll at the beginning and have a little more money (to be able to train foraging as much as possible). But really the starting class doesn't matter. Also since I started with 15INT (the requirement for learning Portal later) I figured being able to learn some elemental spells at the beginning might help me.

PS. Now, if I had to start again, I would pick a class with divination, do the main quest to obtain the necklace +3int/+3wis (that puts you at 1900xp and you don't have to level up before training bow to and learn first create food before training foraging and making money for the other skills/items.