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Kaigen42

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Everything posted by Kaigen42

  1. I seem to remember someone saying that enemy accuracy is boosted by +20 for PotD. If that's the case defenses up to 150+ should serve you just fine. Your high Perception and Resolve will give you plenty of good dialog choices, so no need to worry there. For skills, I'd suggest getting Athletics up to 4, then raising Lore and Survival more or less evenly, as they both unlock additional dialog options. If you're going Shieldbearer, I'm a fan of picking up Lay on Hands and Shielding Touch as an early defense buff. Other people prefer Flames of Devotion and Shielding Flames, as that buffs deflection for your party, but it doesn't buff the Paladin, only allies, and I find Lay on Hands a more useful ability overall for a tank. On the other hand, if you're running with low Intellect, Lay on Hands may not be that useful after all, since its duration will be much shorter. As for other abilities, the recent patch made auras a lot better and improved exhortations a bit, so the options aren't quite as dire as my OP suggests. Take whatever aura you like best, and consider picking up Sworn Enemy at level 5 and looking for a weapon with a good on-hit effect. Reviving Exhortation has been fixed (though I haven't had the chance to test it yet), so you can grab that at 7, and then everything that opens up at 9 is good, though with your specific build Righteous Soul might be the best option to compensate for that lower Will defense.
  2. Your combined Might/Con is a little low for hitting 170+. Just to double-check, though, are you playing on PotD difficulty level? Because it's not actually necessary to get your stats that high unless you are, since enemies get bonus Accuracy at that difficulty level. If you are on PotD, consider going The Living Lands/Colonist to shift a point from Perception to Might and get a bonus to Survival. The build relies on high Survival to make all those food bonuses stretch, but there's little room for Survival-boosting gear, whereas you get a class bonus to Lore and one of the best armors in the game provides a +2 Lore bonus. The tricky part about the max defenses build is that hitting the 170+ point in 3 out of 4 defenses requires leveraging a lot of specific pieces of gear and food and resting bonuses, which might be daunting for someone on their first playthrough. That being said, even if you fall short of that goal, you'll still be in excellent shape against anything short of the Adra Dragon.
  3. I would hesitate to dump Might on a Chanter, since some chants/invocations rely on it to modify their damage output. Dex can be safely dumped, though. You're right that a Chanter is a great character to have as a designated scroll user (as a side benefit, high lore will give you even more conversation options). Druid stat build is basically the same as the Priest stat build, so you're on target there. If it helps you from a thematic standpoint, keep in mind that a major part of the plot is figuring out what's causing children to be Hollowborn, which represents a huge break in the natural cycle that a Druid would certainly be motivated to investigate. As for the Barbarian, being having a reach weapon on hand for choke points isn't a bad idea. Soldier weapons are probably your best option for that, as you can switch between great swords and pikes depending on the situation. If you were more inclined to dual wield, you could go with Peasant weapons for spears and quarterstaves, but there aren't many good quarterstaves in the game, and one of the better spears requires you to make a specific choice in order to obtain it.
  4. I agree with Zwiebelchen that moving your Chanter into more of a tanky build might be a good call. Pumping up Perception and Resolve will require some sacrifices, but it will improve your conversation options and deflection considerably. You might be able to get away with sacrificing some Int (along with Dex) to get those stats up, as Int mainly affects the radius of your chants, and with a smaller party combat is likely to be considerably less spread out, meaning you don't have to cover as much of an area. That's assuming that you're going to be using powerful phrases like The Dragon Thrashes as opposed to throwing out lots of invocations. That said, Chanters have a lower base deflection than other classes and no class-specific way to improve it, so you won't want to use your Chanter as your main-tank. They'll be a little squishy for the first few levels until you can get Weapon and Shield style and Cautious Attack in place to bump up Deflection. Druid is also a good call, as they have more efficient healing than a Priest, and better offensive powers to boot. IE Mod has an option to fix Faith and Conviction for NPC Paladins, but using Aloth as a mage-tank will give you more tactical flexibility. Throwing a Barbarian into the mix means your entire party has good AoE damage potential, which will be handy for negating your numbers disadvantage. If you're worried about healing, the Moon Godlike Barbarian might be a better option, especially considering that the Fire Godlike retaliation build had its offensive power cut down by the One Stands Alone fix in 1.05. It's still a good build, mind you, but the Moonlike's passive healing is also a big plus. I think both of the builds you posted are overdoing it on Con and underserving Dexterity, though.
  5. If you want to be safe, I wouldn't play a beta patch with an ongoing game, as there's a possibility that your saved game might get corrupted by an unforeseen problem. I'd either wait for the official patch or start a new playthrough for the beta.
  6. There are a few other vendors who carry Binding Copper. IIRC Cartugo in Ondra's Gift has a supply, and if you build the curio shop in the stronghold, they will sell it too (along with randomly generating it among other ingredients in the treasury). Aside from buying it, Binding Copper is generally dropped by Animats. If you haven't done the Clandestine Cargo quest in Ondra's Gift yet, there are Animats there you can fight. You'll also find them in Cliaban Rilag.
  7. 1. Free in terms of per-rest resources, perhaps, but not in terms of time. If you want to have your Priest queue up to cast Armor of Faith and Bless at the beginning of every fight, go ahead. Mine has better things to do. 2. The Fighter's Defender ability doesn't give a deflection bonus, the Wary Defender talent gives a deflection bonus. In contrast, the Fighter's Guardian Stance doesn't stack with Priest buffs (It wouldn't be a good ability even if it did, but that's neither here nor there). Cautious Attack will not stack with active deflection buffs either. Defender is the outlier here, not the Paladin's auras. Besides, with the new patch, Paladin auras now provide bonuses that you can't get from other active abilities and so will stack with anything anyway. So huzzah, Paladins have a purpose again. Thank goodness. It's not the individual accuracy bonus that's the problem; it's the cumulative effect of extra stacking bonuses, especially when combined with new abilities that might be developed for the expansion, which might not take into account that the developers made an extra-special exception for Paladins so people would stop complaining.
  8. Completely devalued. By having one of their abilities being overwritten by a resource-limited active ability. Sure. As for the "can of worms," I see two. The first is the task of coding your suggested exception where the Paladin's auras (and not other modals) stack specifically with the Priest's spells (and not other active abilities). I don't imagine that's a trivial task. The second is the potentially unbalancing affect of allowing accuracy (or DR) buffs to accumulate without limit, especially with an expansion on the way where they may be considering giving the Paladin access to more powerful auras/upgrades for existing auras, along with more powerful accuracy buffs. The Darcozzi Paladin already has the questionable ability to stack +20 Accuracy on one character by double-casting Inspiring Liberation. Do we really want to see what happens to game balance when a Battlemage is stacking upwards of 90-100 extra accuracy on top of level bonuses and talents?
  9. Pallegina makes just about any armor look good, though that's as much down to the good job they did with the armor designs for female models in general as Pallegina's qualities.
  10. Right, grazing with the elemental damage talent is a net -30% damage, not +20% damage divided by two. What's the character's Might? With an 18 Might you could be looking at -6% damage on a graze, which could easily return 15.9 damage from a base of 12-18.
  11. Penetrating Shot (and its melee counterpart) is basically worth it on anything, but it's especially worth it if you're using a Blunderbuss. And Lead Splitter is still one of the best ranged weapons in the game against mid-to-low DR targets. The patch just means you should carry a Pistol in your other weapon slot for high DR targets. Or use a War Bow, which is very close to the Ruffian guns in damage output and possibly better depending on a few factors. Silent Scream's slower casting speed was non-starter for me as well. In theory it's like a Mental Binding that does damage, but in practice it's much slower than you want it to be. Even with the nerf, Soul Shock is still pretty good if you can't/won't make Antipathetic Field work for you. Overall, I think your build is still pretty spot on. The only thing I'd quibble about is the talent order, and that largely comes down to preference.
  12. This has already been discussed a bit, but I think it's worth highlighting: Concelhaut's Staff is really good; it does way more damage than the wizard could hope to do with any non-summoned weapon. Given that, the fact that using it is an efficient way to parcel out your 1st level spell uses until you hit level 9, and the likelihood that you will not be using Citzal's Spirit Lance in every single encounter after level 9, I think that there's a solid argument to be made for taking Weapon Focus: Peasant at first and putting off Weapon Focus: Soldier until later on. The downside is that your weapon options when not using Concelhaut's Staff are a bit worse, meaning you'll probably be stuck poking at enemies with a quarterstaff from behind another melee character in that event, but I think it's a viable alternate build.
  13. Short answer: Yes Long answer: Yes, though against enemies with super-low DR you can technically get more DPS with it off. I played around with the damage spreadsheet assuming a Fighter with a net 85% damage bonus (20 Might, Exceptional Weapon, Specialization and Mastery) and 20 Dex wielding an Estoc with an elemental lash, and Vulnerable Attack does more damage against DR 9+ enemies. For a non-Estoc two-handed weapon, Vulnerable Attack is dead even at DR 4 and does more damage at DR 5+. Naturally, as you move to faster weapons with lower base damage the value of Vulnerable attack increases. As there are very few enemies with DR less than 4, and most of those are easy to kill anyway (Vithracks being a possible exception of note), this gives us some very easy rules of thumb: Get Vulnerable Attack and keep it on. If you're using weapons with built in DR bypass, you should have it on whenever enemy DR is 3 or 4 points beyond what you can bypass without it, which more or less amounts to the same thing, since anything with DR below 7 or 8 probably isn't difficult to kill anyway. Drake's Bell might be the one melee weapon that's an exception to this, since it has a native 8 DR bypass. All of that's for melee weapons, specifically, but it largely holds true for ranged weapons and Penetrating Shot as well. Even the mighty Arquebus with its high base damage and built-in DR bypass can expect to do more damage with Penetrating Shot against anything with DR 10 or higher.
  14. Soldier looks pretty good then Tidefall: Draining & Wounding Hours of St. Rumbal : Prone Tall Grass: Prone Strike Hard: Disorientating You can have fun with that all over; Adventurer: The White Spire (Estoc, Disorienting), Half-Mast (Pollaxe, Prone), Gaun's Share (Flail, Draining), and Starcaller (Flail, Stunning, Spell-Striking) Noble: Drawn in Spring (Dagger, Wounding), Mosquito (Rapier, Draining) Ruffian: Azureith's Stiletto (Spell-Striking), Oidhreacht (Stiletto, Draining), Blesca's Labor (Club, Draining), and Purgatory (Sabre, Draining) And a personal favorite, Peasant: The Vile Loner's Lance (Spear, Disorienting) and Cladhaliath (Spear, Stunning)
  15. For what it's worth, when it comes to the question of elemental lashes on weapons, those are only checked against 25% of the enemies DR. If you compare enemies' highest elemental DR to their lowest, and divide by 4, it usually comes out to 3-5 points per hit at worst. If you've got a relevant elemental damage talent, that DR differential may be small enough to consider using a damage type that's normally not as useful.
  16. A Paladin taking Zealous Charge is probably trying to avoid taking an ability that overlaps with a Priest buff, or else leading a party that kites enemies a lot. Rushing behind enemy lines is an option; if your Priest likes to drop Bless as one of their first spells, you won't really miss the accuracy from Zealous Focus. For my money, though, I'd rather take Zealous Endurance and just never cast Armor of Faith again. Once 1.06 hits, "redundancy" probably won't be as significant a complaint with ZF and ZE anyway.
  17. [Cipher + Fractured Volition + Rogue + Deathblows] Fractured Volition inflicts two debuffs that enable sneak attack with one power for a good duration, making it a fast route to Deathblow heaven. Potentially even better is [Druid + Spreading Plague + Rogue + Deathblows], as it inflicts the same debuffs as Fractured Volition for a longer duration and can jump to multiple enemies. The Hobble + Weakened combination also inflicts massive move speed penalties, which is handy.
  18. Previously, Vincent Dwellier had a few weapons that actually had unique properties mixed in with the rest of his stock, such as The Vile Loner's Lance. Have those weapons had their unique properties scrubbed, have they been removed (possibly to another vendor), or did you just miss them amidst the specially named crap?
  19. Um, I don't want to rain on your parade, but I'm pretty sure anyone can one-hit the angry villagers threatening Aloth. It's designed to be a ridiculously easy encounter because the player is going to hit it with high fatigue and possibly low health (depending on whether they camped after getting out of Cilant Lis).
  20. I don't think it makes sense to pan Druid spells purely because they target Fort. I mean, it's not like you're a Wizard who has to worry about Fort-targeting spells taking up too much space in your grimoire. Plague of Insects is awesome because it deals raw damage, massively debuffs Concentration while being a DoT (meaning it can take advantage of its own debuff to interrupt more), and also applies a steep debuff to Will and Fort. Even if 70% of the time you're fighting enemies for whom Fort is the highest defense, it's a fantastic spell to have around that other 30% of the time, especially for fights against spirits and Vithrack, who all have Fort as their lowest defense.
  21. I think the hit/graze conversion effects are a good way to give the auras some kind of unique bonus to make them useful when you have a Priest without opening the can of worms of letting them stack with anything.
  22. @MadDemiurg: Well, like I said, it was some rough math, and I was specifically comparing Dulcanale/Lead Splitter to Cloudpiercer without taking accuracy (or crits) into account, so it's probable that my numbers are off by a bit. Edit: I played around with that spreadsheet a bit. Assuming 20 Dex, 2 damage mod (30% Exceptional Weapon, 40% Biting Whip, 30% Might 20 = +100%), -0.2 attack speed (Penetrating Shot), 1.2 reload mod (Gunner), and 8 DR bypass (Penetrating Shot and Rending) average DPS across weapon types is WB 6.18; BB 6.86; Pistol 5.19. Looking at the DPS vs. DR chart, Lead Splitter leads over Cloudpiercer at DR values less than 17, while Dulcanale outperforms Cloudpiercer at DR values over 16. This doesn't account for Cloudpiercer's 1/encounter Jolting Touch, but it also doesn't account for Dulcanale's Annihilation property.
  23. @Zweibelchen: Interrupting Blows was fixed in 1.05. Some back-of-the-napkin math I did after 1.05 suggests that pistol/blunderbuss does more damage than the war bow even accounting for attack rate, provided you have the Gunner talent. That said, the starting focus nerf on Ciphers makes Greater Focus a much more tempting option (especially early), and a gun-using Cipher will have difficulty fitting that into their build, which is a good argument for using the war bow.
  24. A verb used primarily in MMOs to describe initiating combat at a distance from an enemy group, such that they move (are "pulled") towards the player to be engaged on the ground of the player's choosing. This is mainly used to move the battle away from other enemy groups who may be patrolling the area and might be drawn into the fight as reinforcements (see the Ogre Cave as one place in PoE where this is useful), but can also be used to exploit terrain features or traps. The term can also be used more generally as a noun to refer to a coherent instance of combat (see also "fight" or "encounter") or to a set of enemies that engage as a group and are difficult or impossible to fight separately. More on topic, "needing to rest" can be thought of in terms party health vs. party per rest abilities as resources (assuming the problem isn't excessive fatigue because of too low Athletics). If you need to rest because you're out of per-rest abilities, you may be over using them. If you need to rest because health is low, you might not be making good enough use of your per-rest abilities to prevent damage. Perfect equilibrium is very difficult and arguably undesirable, as it implies that you almost lost the last fight and might not have had sufficient resources to survive if you had been less lucky. Keeping the two resources roughly even in terms of rate of use will help you feel like you aren't resting too much, though.
  25. Yeah, ranged weapons in this game aren't all that fast. Implements shoot at roughly the same speed as bows. Your list of damage bonuses looks about right, though I've heard Swift Strikes can be finicky. I don't have a lot of direct experience with Monks, though, so if you're missing something, I might not spot it. Transcendent Suffering also provides a flat damage bonus added after your base damage is multiplied by your damage bonuses if you're attacking unarmed, but that's not relevant to the build you're looking at. When you add in talents, you can also add +25% for Dangerous Implement and 5 DR bypass from Penetrating Shot.
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