Kaigen42

We have dramatically different experiences with engagement. As an experiment, I tried toggling Eder's Defender modal in the game I'm currently running. With it on, they mob around him. With it off, one sticks around while the rest briefly tip their hats to him before running at my back line. Do you run melee-heavy parties? I could see engagement being negligible in that case, as it does nothing to stop enemies from turning to attack anyone they can reach. @eubatham, I could see dropping Might and Int, but where are you going to put the extra points? You don't need Con because you're sturdy enough already, and Dex does even less for you than any of the other stats.

I'm finding myself persuaded by the arguments that Sworn Enemy is a valid alternate ability to pick up at level 5 or 7. The only thing seems to be that one-handed weapons with on-hit effects appear to be pretty scarce on the ground, especially before Act 3. Starcaller is a fun weapon, though. Maybe I'm just overly attached to that +1 engagement from Shatterstar/Sheathed in Autumn. What are people's preferred weapons for most of the game on their tanks?

Yeah, in the end I regretted pumping Con so high and dumping Might, though LoH was still plenty useful for the first 6 levels or so. I'm torn on whether Might 18/Int 15 or Might 15/Int 18 is the better way to go, though. That extra Intellect could be the difference between reaching your back line with your aura or not (though in my run I seemed to hit a bug at some point where my auras stayed on my party regardless of how far away they got). @Exoduss I'm not a big fan of the Kind Wayfarer talents on a tank. You're not going to get killing blows, and going with Flames of Devotion instead of Lay on Hands trades a good single target heal for a mediocre AoE heal tacked onto a mediocre attack. The tank build just doesn't have the damage modifiers to make Flames of Devotion sing. @MoxyWoo Considering the Liberating Exhortation's drawbacks, I wouldn't fault anyone who decided to take Sworn Enemy instead, but I don't think it's enough to put your Paladin's damage on a respectable level. It's true that if you're a Moon Godlike you probably will find Lay on Hands a little redundant, though. It's still handy for archers messing with your back line.

This is a tank build for PotD. It's designed to be an unmovable object, putting up with any punishment your enemies throw at you, while providing a modicum of support for your party. It does very little else. If you want a tank you can micromanage, or one that can deliver a respectable amount of damage or CC, you need a different class. Also, I would recommend this build only for the Watcher, since Faith and Conviction is currently bugged on hireling Paladins and you need those extra defenses. Note: There's a lot of discussion on this board about whether Paladins are weaker than other classes (yes) and what should be done to improve them. I'd prefer if that discussion remain in preexisting threads and not migrate here. This is for taking the Paladin class as it currently stands and making the most useful tank of it we can, not for debating what the class should and should not be. Race: Wild Orlan has the best ability bonuses for pumping Deflection, and Defiant Resolve gives you a nice defensive buff when Will gets targeted. As an added bonus, Orlan PCs seem to get more race-specific dialogue than other options, thanks to Fantasy Racism. Your other good options are Coastal Aumaua for the bonus against Proning and Stunning attacks, since those break your engagements, or Moon Godlike if you want some extra healing for you and your party, though later in the game you might find that your Endurance doesn't dip much or very often. Pale Elves are also nice for the added DR against Fire and Frost. Order: I recommend picking based on how you want to roleplay your character. If that's not a factor, you could consider them based on order-specific talents, but to be honest, most of them aren't useful for this build. Of the talents that are useful, most of them are only useful for getting through the early game and don't scale well beyond that. Since the Darcozzi Paladini have the one order talent that's useful the whole game, I recommend them if you don't care about roleplaying factors. If all you want is to get Faith and Conviction up quickly, however, you might go with the Goldpact Knights, as Rational and Stoic seem to be very easy to raise quickly. Attributes: The build I used for my PotD run was Might 2/Con 15/Dex 3/Per 20/Int 18/Res 19. After seeing how little use I got out of that extra health beyond the first few levels, though, I'd be inclined to swap Might and Con for better healing off of Lay on Hands. In fact, since the base durations on a lot of your abilities are pretty high to begin with, the best route might be Might 17/Con 3/Dex 3/Per 20/Int 15/Res 19, though that might give you trouble extending your aura over the whole party. I wouldn't bother with Dexterity in any case, as you don't have the melee damage to care about attack speed or enough active abilities to worry about how quickly you can fire them off. You can't dump Might and Con or your Fort defense will be terrible, and if you dump Intellect you're weakening Lay on Hands and might have problems getting your aura to stretch over the party. Skills/Culture: Take either Aedyr or Ixamitl Plains for the extra Resolve to keep Deflection and Concentration high, and grab your favorite +2 Lore background. Your stats and lack of anything better to do make you one of the better options for scroll-user in the party and it gives you more dialogue options. You've got a good baseline in Athletics already, so if you want to pump that too for scripted interactions, you're in good shape. Survival unlocks a few dialogue options if you have it in the 4-6 range (though I spotted one at 9) and can provide a nice boost to the duration of food and potions if you have points to spare, but I'd rely on someone else for scripted interactions with it. A little bit of stealth is nice for positioning, but otherwise skippable (I've only seen one dialogue option unlocked by Stealth, and that was at level 4, for the record). Abilities/Talents: Now to the nuts and bolts of the guide. I'll go level by level. Level 1: Lay on Hands. The tooltip on this one is misleading; it's actually one of the more powerful heals available in the early game, especially if you have high Intellect to boost it. It's single target, so only really good for helping a party member who's getting focused, but for that job it's better than what Priests or Druids will be able to provide for several levels. It can even be used on yourself if you need it. Level 2: Hold the Line. You need that extra engagement to tank properly, end of story. Level 3: Aura. This comes down to preference and party composition. The elephant in the room is the Priest; two of the Priest's bread-and-butter buffs, Armor of Faith and Bless, don't stack with the bonuses provided by Zealous Endurance and Zealous Focus, respectively. I prefer Zealous Endurance anyway, because it's only slightly worse than Armor of Faith, and that makes for one less spell your Priest needs to cast. If, for some reason, you aren't running with a Priest in your party, you might want Zealous Focus instead to make up for the missing accuracy; you can also take it and the Critical Focus talent if you want to stack hit-to-crit conversion. I prefer holding choke points to kiting, so I don't see much use in Zealous Charge, but if it fits your tactics, go for it. Level 4: Weapon and Shield Style. Cornerstone tanking talent which gives you a nice boost to deflection and shores up your Reflex defense, which is hurting a little from dumping Dexterity. If you're playing a Shieldbearer, you might consider Shielding Touch, as the deflection bonus is still pretty useful at this level, especially since you're already using Lay on Hands on allies getting focused by melee or ranged attackers, in all likelihood. The bonus doesn't scale, though, so it will become negligible later on. Level 5: Liberating Exhortation. This is not a very good ability. Most debuffs are AoE, so this is like trying to put out a forest fire with a tea cup full of water, and you can't even use it on Charmed or Dominated party members. At best, you can use it to negate a paralyze or stun on a party member you need active, or neutralize accuracy debuffs on one of your casters before they fire off some CC. If you're playing Darcozzi, though, you're about to get a talent that will make it worthwhile. Level 6: Inspiring Liberation (Darcozzi). +10 to accuracy for 20 seconds (boosted by Intellect) twice each encounter is nothing to sneeze at. The fact that it also cancels any debuffs on your ally is icing. If you're not a Darcozzi, just move up the schedule of defensive talents, or you could slip in Critical Focus if you grabbed the Zealous Focus aura. Level 7: Reviving Exhortation. The best of a bad lot. It's an encounter revive, which isn't bad per se, but the ability is currently bugged. It'll get your ally back up, but it'll probably drop them back down after the duration is up thanks to the massive Endurance penalty it inflicts. The only other option here that's worth anything is Deprive the Unworthy, which is useful in a couple of fights, but most of the tough enemies you encounter aren't tough because of their buffs, and you probably have someone else who can suppress buffs. Edit: Alternate Pick: A few people recommend taking Sworn Enemy here as an accuracy boost and a way to slip in a bit more damage. It works well if you've got a weapon property that debuffs on a hit/crit, like Disorienting or Stunning. If you're not playing a Darcozzi, you could even take this at level 5 instead of Liberating Exhortation, in case you want Deprive the Unworthy or are holding out for a bug fix on Reviving Exhortation. Level 8: Cautious Attack. More deflection. Level 9: Reinforcing Exhortation. Once again, the best of bad options. Your Paladin probably doesn't have anything better to do, so dropping a Deflection buff on an ally taking heat is something at least. Assuming your Priest can't be bothered to lay down a Circle of Protection or the like. You might consider going back for Deprive the Unworthy instead, if you need that buff suppression. There's also Righteous Spirit, but enemies don't seem inclined to try to Charm or Dominate your Paladin in the first place so it's somewhat marginal. Level 10: Superior Deflection. More deflection. You might actually be doing pretty well on deflection by now, in which case you can swap this one with the level 12 talent. Level 11: Hastening Exhortation. Finally something good. Attack speed buffs aren't that common, and now you've got one that lasts 30+ seconds. Level 12: Deep Faith. Rounding out the defensive bonuses here. Now, if you aren't playing Darcozzi or didn't pick up Critical Focus or any of the other order talents, you have a spare talent here. There's really not that much left that's useful. You could take Greater Lay on Hands, but you probably stopped relying on that ability a long time ago. You could take Fast Runner or Graceful Retreat for those times when you really need to re-position your Paladin, but that doesn't come up much at all. Your Fortitude defense is probably still lagging behind your other defenses, so you could always take Bear's Fortitude. This is why I'm not too opposed to taking an order talent that helps you out in the early game but doesn't scale; once you've got those core defensive talents, there's nothing else to take, really. Equipment: Grab a hatchet early for the extra deflection and use the best shield you can find. Your weapon damage is unimportant, so look for something that has a good support special. Shatterstar and Measured Restraint both have Guarding to give you an extra engagement and can be obtained relatively early. If you think you're just fine with two engagements, you could use something with Draining, but you probably don't hit hard enough or often enough for that to be significant. Look for something with Disorienting or Marking (assuming that one actually works) to help your allies out instead. After you retrieve the stolen shipment for the blacksmith in Gilded Vale, you should buy the Outworn Buckler, strap it to your arm, and never take it off. The Herald ability provides a +5 bonus to all defenses, including Deflection, to your entire party. That makes it a +13/+5/+5/+5 shield. Make it Fine/Exceptional when you get the resources and level necessary, and it will treat you well. Aside from those considerations, try to keep your Paladin equipped with the best Of Deflection/Protection items you can find, and prioritize Resolve and Perception boosting items while also boosting Might and Intellect if you can. The best Resolve/Perception boosting items go in the Neck slot, so focus on getting Rings for your protection items. If you need to stretch your aura further, the Boots of Zealous Command can be bought from Winfrith in Dyrford. There's not much else that's useful for you in the Boot slot, so you may as well. There you have it, a tough tank with some situational support abilities that you can point at enemies and forget about. If anybody can think of a good talent I've overlooked for that last non-Darcozzi talent slot, let me know.

Depends on the disposition, with Honest appearing to be one of the harder ones to increase quickly (along with Diplomatic, unfortunately for my Shieldbearer). I just started a PotD playthrough and focused on rushing to grab companions ASAP, and noticed that I hit Rational 2 and Stoic 2 before I even hit Defiance Bay to pick up Pallegina. That could also be because I was chatting up all the NPCs as I recruited them; if you're running with a hireling party it might take you a little bit longer to get those dispositions up.

Okay I did some testing of the unique weapons. Conclusions up front for those who don't care to read the entire experiment: I am reasonably confident that the interrupt ratings listed on Mosquito, Shatterstar, and The Vile Loner's Lance are accurate. At any rate, I'm confident they have a higher rating than other weapons of their type. Methodology: I made a Cipher (because that was the character I was going to roll next anyway) on PotD difficulty and got him through Cilant Lis. Then I used IE Mod to level him to level 12 and gave him Draining Whip, all of the requisite Weapon Focus feats, and one-handed style (in hindsight, a bad pick, as more grazes would have made it easier to extend the bear's life) in order to assure that I had enough accuracy to hit every time. I set Might to 1 (which was as low as I could get it) and punched the bear's cubs to death to fill up my focus pool and switch off soul whip and minimize damage. I set Con and Resolve to 100 to ensure I wouldn't die or be interrupted myself, and set Perception to 100 to ensure that every hit was an interrupt. Dex was left at 19, and no armor was worn to ensure a significant number of attacks got in. I let the bear swing at me for 60 seconds in order to establish a baseline. Unfortunately, since I had to attack the bear with actual weapons in order to conduct this test, when I tested the weapons, most of them killed in the bear in less than 60 seconds. This is the disclaimer then: I'm extrapolating from fuzzy data. When left alone, the bear got in 13 attacks in 60 seconds. It appears to have a ~4 second recovery time in between each attack animation. When attacked with a warhammer, the bear got in 9 attacks before dying right at the 60 second mark. This was the only weapon test where the bear survived the full 60 seconds. It gives a (very) rough idea of what one quick melee attacker can accomplish in interrupting an enemy with long recovery times. When attacked with a normal rapier, the bear died in 39 seconds after getting 5 attacks in. If we extrapolate out, this looks roughly the same as the warhammer, which jives with my attack speed vs. interrupt rating calculations. The Mosquito killed the bear in 32 seconds, during which the bear got in 3 attacks. The Vile Loner's Lance killed the bear in 28 seconds, during which the bear got in 3 attacks. Shatterstar killed the bear in 46 seconds, during which it got in 4 attacks. Obviously we would need to be way more rigorous in order to pin down the exact interrupt values of the weapons through in-game tests, but I think the differences are significant enough to conclude that the unique weapons are better than the baseline, and so their descriptions are probably accurate.

Well, the short answer is that I compare high level Priest spells to spells of other casters because I don't think you can meaningfully compare those to the abilities of non-casters. You may as well compare Repulsing seal or Pillar of Faith to the Fighter's Clear Out. But to go in order... Priest spells are great for having AoE's and being fast casting, but when I compare my 2 Might Paladin to my 19 Might Priest, the Priest has to drop level 4 or better spells to heal a single target as much as the Paladin's Lay on Hands. Priest buffs are pretty amazing, as is only proper, considering the Priest is a dedicated spellcaster. The Priest doesn't get any attack speed buffs, though. How are we even comparing a 2nd level spell that does flat damage to an encounter ability you get at level 1 that buffs a melee attack? One is equipment dependent and the other isn't. Flames of Devotion deals 50% of the damage dealt by the Paladin's attack before DR is taken into account, like a double-strength elemental lash. Taken as a whole, an FoD attack from a high level, two-handed weapon wieldng DPS Paladin can deal more damage than a Priest's Divine Mark. Of course, Divine Mark has a Deflection debuff and better high level damaging spells, but they've got to be compensated for venturing into melee as a low endurance, low deflection class. As I said before, I think the Paladin's support abilities could use some work, especially the exhortations (with the notable exception of Hastening). Liberating Exhortation is too limited to be useful as anything but a delivery mechanism for an accuracy buff as a Darcozzi. Reinforcing Exhortation comes long after the Priest has had access to the superior Circle of Protection. Reviving Exhortation doesn't even work properly, but at least it sort of does something useful Going beyond Exhortations, Inspiring Triumph provides a laughable buff for the trouble you have to go through to get it. I used Deprive the Unworthy all of once in my PotD run, because most of the tough enemies in the game are tough because they have innately high stats, not from buffs. Sworn Enemy isn't bad for a DPS build, but it only helps the Paladin. I haven't used Coordinated Attacks, but while a passive accuracy bonus is nice, the party member you want to have more accuracy probably isn't the one standing closest to your Paladin. Edit: That's what I get for trying to use the wiki for abilities I haven't personally used, it looks like Coordinated Attacks got cut and instead we have Righteous Soul, which is...okay I guess? It's a nice idea, but my Paladins generally don't get targeted with charms/dominates to begin with, and the other status effects aren't dangerous enough to spend an ability slot on. I'm not saying Paladins don't have problems (though I do think they're more serviceable than some give them credit for being). But I don't think their level 1 abilities or auras are where those problems lie. It's between level 3 and 11 where the Paladin has a lot of issues.

Bridging off the Interrupt Build thread. I had an idea for a "Mosquitoes of Eir Glanfath" party composed of Wood Elves and Orlans devoted to interrupting as much as possible. Barbarian, Chanter, Druid, Wizard, Ranger, and Priest. Barbarian, Wizard, and Ranger all have ways to hit multiple enemies with auto-attacks to spread interrupts around. Druid, Chanter, Wizard, and Barbarian can all debuff enemy Concentration. And the Priest can buff the party's Perception and Accuracy (since interrupts are more likely to occur on hits than grazes and on crits than hits). If I can confirm that the unique weapons with superior interrupt ratings for their type actually work, I'll have to distribute those amongst the party. Of course, I have to wait for them to fix Interrupting Blows first if I want to really push this concept.

Yeah, when there's going to be a keep attack you get a notification several days in advance and have the option to auto-resolve it or go back to the keep and defend it. Prestige seems to increase the potential money you can get from taxes and allows you to get better guests. With low prestige, you'll get a lot of drunkards wandering in. With high prestige you'll see lords and war heroes which will boost your prestige further. None of that is particularly important, but if prestige has any impact on getting the rare items merchant to show up (hard to say, since I just did everything in the game and he never appeared once), it's worth increasing.

The tricky bit about the Paladin auras is that I think they are balanced with Priest spells in mind. Zealous Endurance doesn't stack with Armor of Faith and is slightly worse, balancing an always on effect vs. something with a duration that your Priest has to take time to cast. Similarly, Zealous Focus doesn't stack with the Accuracy buff from Blessing (though either will stack with Inspiring Radiance or Devotions of the Faithful). In that case, Zealous Focus is slightly better, but doesn't come with the damage buff of Blessing. Honestly, I think auras are in a decent place right now; they're not flashy, but they take on some of the minor buffing duties of the Cleric in a passive way that allows you to shift your focus elsewhere. If the Paladin is going to get a balance adjustment, I'd rather it focused on their support abilities and class talents, rather than messing with auras. In my experience, enemy melee attackers retargeting your back line when not Engaged by tanks is pretty common, while Disengagements are pretty rare apart from certain enemies (mainly teleporters and fampyrs). That said, there's an upper limit to the meaningful number of engagements your tanks can have, considering there's only so much room adjacent to them and big enemy groups tend to crest around them after the vanguard makes contact. In my mind, the real advantage of Defender is that it frees the Fighter up to skip/put off Hold the Line and Guarding weapons (or alternately use those and skip Defender to preserve their attack speed).

Essentially. Longer duration from Intellect allows for the effect to tick more. If your Int increase your duration by 50%, you get 50% more ticks, for 50% more total damage (roughly speaking, as there may be breakpoints depending on how frequently the effect ticks). The same applies to heal over time effects. Edit: Just tested Soul Ignition with a 24 Int (70% duration increase) Cipher (Resting bonus FTW). Base duration is 10 seconds. Int-boosted duration is 17 seconds. Crit duration is 25.5 seconds, which means that Intellect and Crits stack multiplicatively for DoT duration. Damage per tick appears to be unaffected.

I find Whispers of Treason to be a very useful power early on. Yes, it has a long casting time, but it takes at least one enemy out of the fight, and often distracts more as other enemies will turn to attack the charmed target. Who has debuffed defenses. It takes the damage output of multiple enemies and turns it against themselves, as opposed to just stopping one from doing anything.

That's my big question, since I've located two other weapons that have a boosted interrupt rating listed, but at this point I'm not willing to take the game at its word that any magic item property works. Now that I've got IE Mod updated, I'll have to see if I can produce a measurable difference between them and normal weapons of the same type.

I can say based on the exhortations I currently have available that Hastening and Reinforcing are ally only, while Liberating Exhortation can be cast on yourself. I would assume that Reviving Exhortation is ally only.

Well, to be fair, there are guaranteed items that boost the other skills, so if you really need extra Survival for a conversation/scripted event, you can figure out where to get it and go from there. Mechanics seems to be the only one without a guaranteed item boost.

Just allies. Same with Inspiring Triumph.

Not necessarily. The short answer is: Dexterity can still help you mitigate the recovery penalty of armor. My 3 Dex Paladin in plate has outrageously long recovery times, which means that if I want to use one of her support abilities and she just made an attack, I will be waiting several seconds before she can actually use it. High Dex would probably cut that down to a 2-3 second delay or so. But we're way off topic already without me going into a long-winded explanation of how attack speed and recovery modifiers work and where Dex fits in with that. Edit: @Crucis, Yeah, Might remains important for anything that's hard to boost otherwise, mainly damaging spells and healing abilities. If you had to choose, a caster probably gets more mileage from pumping up Might and Intellect to get the most from each spell as opposed to pumping Dexterity to fire them off a little bit faster.

Depends on whether you're focusing on damage or defenses with your Paladin. Kind Wayfarer talents are nice, but only if your Paladin has the damage and attack rate to land killing blows reliably, which can be hard to do if you're walking around in plate mail swinging a hatchet. Darcozzi talents, on the other hand, fit well with a defensive Paladin that's there to take hits and support the party. Inspiring Liberation is a big accuracy buff, and can be used even if your ally doesn't have a debuff they need suppressed. Keep in mind also that some talents can help you get through the rough early game, but become marginal later on. I like Shielding Touch on a tanky paladin because that extra deflection combined with a heal does a great job of keeping someone being focused alive, but it's a drop in the bucket by act 3. Likewise, the healing from The Sword and the Shepard is handy early on, but I barely notice it any more in my current game. I'm not saying don't take those talents, because they help you get through the challenging growing period, but make sure you won't be disappointed later on when TS&TS is doing nothing but keeping you from taking Savage Attack. On the whole, I agree with CriticalFailure; the talents aren't worth having to play a character in a way you dislike. Even if the Bleak Walkers had amazing talents, I still wouldn't want to walk around being a jerk to everyone in the game.

If you're looking for a spear, the vendor in the Club at the Salty Mast sells one with the disorienting special. The only special hatchet available for most of the game is in the Woodend Plains, but it's on a corpse with a bunch of lions around, so I don't know if you could get it without adding to your kill count.

I wouldn't say that weapon quality is insignificant because it improves accuracy as well as damage, and the difference between a superb weapon and a normal weapon is quite large. I would say that since you can enchant weapons up to exceptional without too much difficulty, finding a good special on a weapon is more important than using the first Superb weapon you can find. As far as Might goes, that's something of a point of contention in the Combat Mechanics thread, especially regarding its importance vs. Dexterity. One the one hand, it's true that as you pile up more damage bonuses from weapon qualities and your class that Might becomes a proportionally smaller part of your DPS and Dexterity becomes more important. On the other hand, the hardest part of the game is often the early game, and Might is very significant there for helping you do good damage past enemy DR, and some classes will never have a lot of reliable damage bonuses. On the gripping hand, there are very few DPS builds where you don't have the points to max Might and Dex anyway, so you might as well.

The recovery time penalty on armor affects any action that has a recovery period, including spellcasting. The question of whether or not wearing armor is worth the penalty depends on a lot of things, ranging from party composition to the enemies you're fighting to play style. For instance, in my current PotD run I have three cloth wearers standing in the back. They're generally fine, but fights against enemies with a lot of archers or casters can get dicey. I counteract that by focusing ranged damage, using CC from my Cipher, and generally getting more aggressive with my use of spells. It also helps that I'm running a Paladin tank with Zealous Endurance active and a high Intellect to cover the party, but you could just as easily have a Priest cast Armor of Faith or a Druid use Woodskin, which protects against the three damage types your back line is mostly likely to have to deal with. Remember also that you can enchant normal clothing to have a small amount of DR. My cloth wearers are all wearing clothing that's Fine (+2 DR) and Pierce-Proof (+3 DR against piercing for those annoying archers), both of which are pretty cheap enchantments.

Look, this is a case where you're either going to need to record a video, or Epsilon Rose is going to need to test it personally to satisfy. Achilles has shown that you can use interrupts to keep an enemy from getting an attack off before you kill it. Epsilon Rose seems to want to quantify that in terms of how many attacks you prevented with interrupts in the time it took to kill the enemy. Since the combat log doesn't have time stamps, the only way to demonstrate that is to record video showing how many times the ogre can attack over a certain period of time if you stand there and do nothing, then quickloading and showing how many attacks it gets over the same period of time while under a barrage of interrupts.

Check the Combat Mechanics thread in this forum. There's a lot to sift through, but they establish around page 5-6 that damage multipliers, including ones from weapon qualities like Fine or Damage 2 (but with the notable exception of the "Lash" effects), stack additively and affect the weapon's base damage, despite misleading tooltips to the contrary. What you should be paying attention to is not the weapon tooltip, but the damage range listed on the left side of the character sheet. Example: My Ranger has Borresaine, which lists its damage as 20-30 in her hands. She has Vicious Aim active, which should provide a 20% damage bonus, bringing it up to 24-36. Instead her character sheet lists 22-34, which, if you add up her damage bonuses (36% Might + 20% Vicious Aim + 15% Fine = 71%) and multiple by the War Bow base damage of 13-20, works out. If you want to see this starkly demonstrated, acquire a couple of two-handed weapons of the same type with different damage qualities, and compare them in the hands of a Fighter with Two-Handed Style, Savage Attack, and Weapon Specialization + Weapon Mastery. If the weapon quality really did improve base damage, then that extra 60% always-on damage applied to that extra base damage would lead to a massive increase. Instead, the difference between them is those hands is the same as the difference between them in the hands of a 2 Might character with no damage modifiers (4-6, in the case of the Fine Llawran's Stick vs. the Superb Wend-Walker). This means that you won't actually see a huge damage difference between a Superb weapon like Aedrin's Wrecker and an Exceptional one of the same type, because that extra damage is not itself multiplied by any other bonuses. The extra accuracy, on the other hand, may be more significant. At any rate, it's an excuse to pay more attention to other special qualities, such as the Wrecker's Stunning crits, which are a little redundant with the Prone effect, but stack some nice debuffs to enemy defenses. Another area where tooltips are misleading you is with regards to damage/healing over time effects. The tooltip displays the total amount healed/inflict over the base duration of the effect and doesn't adjust that total for higher or lower durations from Intellect. If you observe those powers in action, however (which I did using the Cipher's Soul Ignition power), you'll find that the amount per tick is constant, and that a shorter duration means fewer ticks and a longer duration means more ticks.

It's not just ranged weapons. I was testing melee weapons with speed and there doesn't appear to be any effect. Given that, Hold Wall is no better than a normal arbalest, and The Rain of Godagh Field is "just" a superb war bow. With the options you gave, I would stick with Aedrin's Wrecker. @Climhazzard I believe I read somewhere that Lenas Er is a possible reward from the quest "Hunter, Brother" depending on how you resolve the quest. I haven't quite gotten there to check for myself if that's the case.

So, in the interests of establishing a theoretical baseline for theorycrafting weapon loadouts for interrupt-focused characters, I ran some tests. I used an Orlan Barbarian with 21 Dex and the Two Weapon Style talent (no armor) attacking my tank for thirty-second periods and counted the number of attacks made. I then multiplied that by the interrupt rating of the weapons and compared the results to the 30 seconds total time. Note that this is purely theoretical; I'm assuming every attack hits and every attack interrupts in order to determine how effect weapons are in perfect conditions. In a practical situation, you're going to miss, you're going to fail some interrupts, some interrupts might land during a period in which your opponent is not doing anything that can be interrupted, and you'll probably be wearing some kind of armor if you're that close to the enemy. Average speed one-handed weapons have ~40% uptime for interrupts. Fast speed one-handed weapons are virtually the same, averaging out to 39% uptime. Normal two-handed weapons have a 37.5% uptime. So those are all very close. If you want to use a reach weapon for a bit of safety, you'll lose a little bit of interrupt potential, but not much. Morning stars, on the other hand, have a 50% uptime. So there's a noticeable benefit from using morning stars over other weapon choices, but I'm not convinced it's worth the sacrifices you make compared to having other weapon properties. It might be a useful thing to have in your back pocket for certain enemies like Ogres, especially if you use Swords or Battle Axes as your primary weapons. In the process of doing my testing, I also discovered that there is a second one-handed weapon with a 1.0 second listed interrupt rating: the unique spear The Vile Loner's Lance. If one were to dual wield that or Shatterstar with another average speed weapon, you're looking at 60% uptime. If you were crazy enough to use both together you'd theoretically have an 80% uptime. Over every 30 seconds you'd delay the opponent 24. I don't think that's a particularly practical strategy, though, given that neither of those weapons have the draining special and you're melee attacking while practically naked. I am curious as to whether the retaliate effect uses the interrupt rating of whatever weapon is equipped, or whether it has its own. It's probably the latter, but if it were the former, then you could get some serious mileage out of giving Shatterstar and The Vile Loner's Lance to a pair of shield-using tanks with retaliate gear. All this assumes that the weapon descriptions are accurate and not some mistake left behind in a previous revamp of the interrupt mechanic, as I haven't tested to see if these weapons actually delay as much as they report. I wanted to test speed weapons to see what kind of impact they'd have, but the answer is zero, because I couldn't find a speed weapon that actually had a noticeable effect. I had read posts on this forum about the quality not functioning on ranged weapons, but didn't realize that it didn't work on melee either. Or at least, it doesn't work on Strike Hard, Unforgiven, Sword of Daenysis, or Llawran's Stick, regardless of whether you have Two Weapon Style, or are wielding them by themselves, or wearing armor (it won't cancel out the recovery penalty from Padded Armor, for example).