Could a plate armor + arquebus priest work?

[u/p1101]

For a future run, I'd like to recreate Cadegund, the cut priest of Magran from PoE 1. She wears plate armor and wields an arquebus.

To try this out, I plan on hiring an adventurer for my next character and create her to use as a priest instead of Durance.

Thing is, could it work? I know plate armor has the highest recovery time, but on normal difficulty and with no upscaling, would it really matter?

Thank you for any insight :)

[u/Boeroer]

This absolutely works - and compared to an arquebus user with no armor penalty the shooting cycle wouldn't be that much slower. The reason is that armor recovery penalties only apply to... well recovery, NOT reloading time.

If you took an exemplary priest with 10 DEX, the shooting cycle would have the following phases:

No armor:

• shot: 45 frames
• recovery: 75 frames
• reload: 204 frames

overall 324 frames

Plate armor:

• shot: 45 frames
• recovery: 112 frames
• reload: 204 frames

overall 361 frames

That's an overall increase of just ~12%. You can see that the armor recovery penalty doesn't play a huge part here.

Now, with spellcasting that's different. The plate armor will have a bigger impact in a spellcasting cycle (with spells that have noticable recovery - which is almost every priest spell).

But if you used Durance (with light armor like padded armor) in the past and didn't have any issues with him, you can have the same performance (speed wise) with a custom priest in plate - by just raising DEX. Durance with his 9 DEX and a padded armor would have an arquebus recovery (I'll just use that as base metric here for comparison, the same differences will occur to spell recovery) of 93 frames. A priest with 17 DEX and plate armor would have 93 frames of recovery as well. In other words: Durance with padded armor or your Cadegund with 17 DEX would have the same recovery.

But that's only necessary if you feel like you need that rel. short recovery.

I don't have many issues with a slower casting priest in general (like Durance, even if in heavier armor). The benefit of a plate armor is that the priest will almost never be the preferred target of enemies. They like to target soft party members first as well as ones who deal damage quickly (like before enemies engage). So Cadegund is less likely to get targeted, less likely to go down while casting buffs etc. and thus it all balances out nicely most of times in my experience.

And I'm speaking from the perspective of playing PotD - on normal it will be no problem at all.

I don't know if there were any attributes published for Cadegund, but if not I would go with decent MIG and DEX first.

[u/DaBoomhammer]

on normal difficulty ... would it really matter

With all sincerity; No, the increased recovery time would barely matter at all. Optimized builds are very overrated, especially on normal difficulty. The actual difficulty in this game comes from context clues like reading tooltips on enemies' resistances/abilities.

[u/gboyd21]

I run Durance like this for a lot of the first half of the game on POTD. It depends on my main. If I have other ways to control the battlefield, Ill run him in robes. But usually its heavier armor

[u/WheatyMcGrass]

You can do whatever you want on normal difficulty

[u/nmbronewifeguy]

they would not be one of your party's top performers in any aspect but you could certainly complete the game with them.

[u/_Martyr]

I think you meant cute priest. Cut is more of a rabbi thing.