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This is off-topic, but I wanted to share a very interesting interaction I ran into during my tests with Grave Calling. While attacking a Many Lives skeleton summon to trigger Chillfogs from Grave Calling, I happened to have another Chanter nearby who was using the Mith Fyr chant. I noticed that a skeleton affected by the Mith Fyr chant was completely invulnerable to weapon damage from Grave Calling; the combat log would state that the attack was cancelled out even if the hit landed. This is due to the interaction between Mith Fyr's Fire keyword and Grave Calling's Frost keyword, and them being counters to each other. This got me wondering, though, if it would be somehow possible to cheese this and render the party invulnerable to weapon attacks by forcing a keyword onto enemy attacks and then applying a counter keyword to the party. My first thought was to cast Moonwell on the party, which is Water keyworded. I'm sure many people have noticed how it not only heals but also nullifies incoming damage from Fire spells. Now, the tricky part was finding a way of applying a Fire keyword onto enemies because it couldn't just be a direct Fire damage spell which would just harm the target, but rather some kind of buff or effect that would make the Fire keyword "stick" onto enemies. I first tried a Berserker/Chanter to see if I could deliberately Confuse myself with Berserker Frenzy and perhaps apply Mith Fyr to enemies that way. Unfortunately, the positive chant effect of Mith Fyr didn't get applied to enemies even while the caster was confused. I next tried it with a Paladin/Berserker, again using Berserker Frenzy to Confuse myself and using Paladin's Shared Flames attack. Sure enough, I was able to grant Shared Flames to enemies while confused and put them under the effect of the Fire keyword. However, when enemies with Shared Flames attacked my party who were under the effect of Moonwell, their damage still went through. I think I figured out why Mith Fyr/Grave Calling counters each other out while Shared Flames/Moonwell doesn't, and it has to do with Grave Calling and how its elemental damage and keyword is coded. Though it appears to be an elemental lash similar to Shared Flames, Grave Calling's freeze lash is inherent to the weapon which makes even its auto-attacks Frost keyworded. It's probably why it and other elemental weapons like Thundercrack Pistol, which has a similar Shock lash, are able to be used by Arcane Archers without suffering the subclass penalty when auto-attacking. So you'll see Moonwell countering Fire keyworded abilities, but it's not going to be able to counter auto-attacks like my cheese idea unless you were somehow able to grant enemies inherently Fire keyworded weapons. If only spells like Firebrand weren't self-targeted! Just thought I'd share this cheese idea for keyword counters in the hopes someone more clever than me can figure out a way to make it work.

I did some more testing with Grave Calling, and the behavior I mentioned above with Skald Phrase generation was consistent across repeated attempts. To be fair, it may have been too much to expect uncapped Skald Phrase generation, on top of Grave Calling's already powerful ability to create multiple Chillfogs that can also generate Focus on Ciphers. I also added St. Drogga's Skull and Keeper of the Flame to the list of tested gear in the OP. While I was at it, I also tested some of the armors that do retribution damage like Kahako Nihi and the High Harbiner's Robes. I wasn't really expecting them to generate Focus or Skald Phrases but wanted to see on the off chance if there was some weird implementation where the game considers it a weapon attack. Unfortunately, they don't generate either Focus or Phrases, as you would predict. I can confirm that Offensive Parry will generate both Focus and Skald Phrases. I think a Soul Blade/Skald like my test character, who wanted to gain "free" and passive class resources this way from counter attacks, would actually be a fairly decent fit for Whispers of the Endless Paths. You have the +20 Accuracy/Defenses from Borrowed Instincts, which you can stack with your multiple sources of Perception and Resolve Inspirations, plus engagement slots from Tactical Meld. While you wouldn't be able to stack your deflection as high as some of the other dedicated WotEP builds, you have various abilities to debuff enemy accuracy and deflection to partly make up for it. Additionally, you have some nice synergies like penetration boosts from Hammering Thoughts and Their Champion Braved, which you can combine with enemy armor debuffs like Body Attunement or Hel Hyraf, enemy under-penetration potential with the aforementioned Body Attunement granting you armor and WotEP inflicting Daze, and the ability to direct Soul Annihilation in an AoE cone with the weapon.

So the Chillfogs from Grave Calling are very unusual for Skald phrase generation. I believe it is actually only 1 phrase possible per instance of Chillfog. What I observed at least was that you can potentially gain a Skald phrase from only the initial pulse. Subsequent pulses from the same Chillfog don't appear to be able to generate further phrases. This does make it less exciting as a resource generator for Skalds compared to a Cipher who can get a lot of Focus this way. I'll test this more thoroughly later, or maybe someone else can corroborate these findings with their own testing in the meantime.

I've been refining a Soul Blade/Skald build and decided to test an assortment of weapon and shields that have retaliation, counter-attacks, or AoE damage procs to see which of these can generate Focus for Ciphers or Phrases for Skalds (50% chance to generate a Phrase with melee critical hits). Here are some of the results: Grave Calling – Chilling Grave generates Focus and Phrases Akola's Apex Ward – Shark Teeth Counter does not generate Focus or Phrases Tuotilo's Palm – Outward Spikes generates Focus and Phrases Wintertide Bulkwark – Frostbitten Palisades does not generate Focus or Phrases Magran's Blessing – Fire Shield generates Focus and Phrases (only when the Fire Shield is active, of course) Eager Blade – Bounding Strikes + Kaul's Retort generate Focus but do not appear to generate Phrases. I only saw a Phrase generated if the initial weapon hit that procced Bounding Strikes also crit, and I never saw Kaul's Retort generate a Phrase after proccing a couple dozen crits with it. May require more testing or code delving. Engoliero do Espirs – Cruel Blade generates Focus but does not appear to generate Phrases. Again, I only saw it generate a Phrase if the weapon hit that procced Ghost Blades also crit. Whispers of the Endless Path – Offensive Parry generates Focus and Phrases Voidwheel – Necrotic Heart generates Focus. It may or may not generate Phrases since the Necrotic Lance is conditional on a weapon crit anyway. Karaboru – Bloody Momentum generates Focus. It may or may not generate Phrases since Bloody Momentum is conditional on a weapon crit anyway. Chromoprismatic Quarterstaff – Soul Storm generates Focus and Phrases St. Drogga's Skull – Flames of Retribution generates Focus. It does not appear to generate Phrases – the only time I saw a Phrase generated was if the initial weapon hit also crit. Keeper of the Flame – Magran's Wrath does not generate Focus. It does not appear to generate Phrases – the only time I saw a Phrase generated was if the initial weapon hit also crit. Some more observations: It appears there is a hardcoded limit of only 1 Phrase that can be gained per attack with the Skald subclass bonus. Even when critting multiple targets with an AoE auto-attacking weapon like Whispers of the Endless Path or layering multiple Chillfogs with Grave Calling, I never saw the Phrase count jump up by more than 1 Phrase at a time. For testing methodology, I turned off chanting entirely on my Skald/Soul Blade test character so the only way to generate Phrases was through weapon critical hits during testing. It was really hard to determine whether weapons that procced AoE damage from crits provided any Skald Phrase generation because I wasn't sure if the initial weapon crit was what created the Phrase and not crits with the AoE. If they do count, they may assist with providing more hit rolls for Skald's 50% chance to trigger. With the 1 Phrase hard limit and the conditional based on weapon crits, I can't say definitively, just based on observation, whether the weapon AoEs trigger Skald phrases.

Very cool and funny implementation! I love the image of repeatedly pointing your Thundercrack Pistol at enemies who are too scared to do anything except freeze and raise their hands in the air every time you swap to it. I know you say you can turn off the AI script at a certain point once you've locked down enemies long enough with the Thundercrack Pistol's debuff, but I was wondering what would be the best build for this strategy if you wanted to keep the AI script on and just have a character who only stands around and continuously swap weapons like we joked about in the other thread? Obviously it would need to be at least a Chanter to get the benefit of SSS's recovery reduction. One idea is to go with the Skald subclass, only because selecting the highest costing non-offensive invocation available will increase your maximum Phrase capacity +1, which does help the scaling of SSS's recovery reduction. It's a small bonus and maybe not necessary, I admit. I think the better idea is is to go with the Troubadour subclass and stack Intellect as high as possible so you can have the effects of multiple chants going at once or you can turn on Brisk Recitation and get faster hits with the offensive chants or more skeletons with Many Lives. I think a tank role makes the most sense in that case to get more value out of a character that can't actively attack. A couple of quirks does make tanking complicated in this scenario if you're constantly swapping weapons, unfortunately. First, when you switch weapon sets, engagement briefly deactivates and it takes a second after switching before engagement reacquires targets. If you're switching weapon sets constantly, it might not give your engagement slots enough time to latch onto enemies. Secondly, you can only activate self-buffs when you're not in recovery, so you'll have to depend on passive bonuses since you'll be stuck in recovery from constant weapon swapping. So I guess you can have Whispers of the Endless Paths in the other weapon slot to swap over and hopefully trigger counterattacks and combine that with Rogue and Riposte for more passive attack opportunities, or maybe Paladin for the passive deflection bonus. I think multiclassing with a Black Jacket might still be a good idea here because they can still activate their self-buffs like Refreshing Defense and Unbending Trunk thanks to their subclass bonus and Quick Switch allowing them to bypass swap recovery. Of course, if you didn't care about the spirit of a purely passive build and allowed buffing in between or before turning the AI script for weapon swapping, you have a lot more possibilities such as Trickster Rogue abilities like Mirrored Image to buff WotEP and Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage for a fear aura when standing around enemies.

Now I'm picturing something like a Bard from Icewind Dale standing around only playing bardsong, except it's a POE Chanter who buffs his party by constantly juggling his weapon sets like a jester

I ran a quick test of both of your ideas. It looks like Modwyr's Eager Lover enchantment doesn't work, unfortunately. I suspect it is because the Eager Lover action speed buff is a persistent effect that is applied directly to the character (you see the Eager Lover stacks showing up next to the character portrait which stay on the user even after switching off Modwyr). If instead Modwyr's action speed bonus was tied to the weapon itself, I think it would let you infinitely reapply it with Black Jacket weapon swapping like the case with Squid's Grasp. However, Sasha's Singing Scimitar does work like this. Not only that, but the Companion's Prelude upgrade works on the whole party like you speculated! So a Black Jacket / Chanter with this weapon can infinitely reduce recovery for your entire team by pausing and repeatedly weapon swapping. That's a pretty insane feature for that particular multiclass!

I don't know why this didn't occur to me originally but I just re-tested it and it works exactly the way @Constentin Lévine speculated. You can pause after an action and then keep switching back and forth to Squid's Grasp and it will progressively decrease your recovery bar every time you swap back. You can keep doing it until recovery becomes close to 0s (the bar moves less and less each time but it is technically possible to reduce it down to like 0.0001 millisecond). Honestly, I only figured to swap to Squid's Grasp once when I first tested this and was pretty happy when it worked the one time. The fact that it can recursively reduce recovery is pretty crazy! Sorry, maybe "refreshes" is the wrong word when talking about Magistrate's Cudgel and Black Jacket quick swapping. To be more precise, when the Deliberations buff wears off, you can just swap back to Magistrate's Cudgel and endlessly reactivate the buff by re-engaging an enemy. Like I said previously, the Deliberations buff will persist even after you switch to a different weapon set. One noteworthy thing is that the +1 Penetration from the Deliberations buff is a universal bonus, meaning it can also apply to spells! This and a couple of other spellcasting supplementing weapons like @thelee's choice of Lance of the Midwood Stag in the OP makes Black Jacket a pretty interesting subclass choice for spellcasting multiclasses aside from the more obvious choice of Tactician.

Black Jackets are really fun to play around with and have a lot of interesting combos. I sometimes think even 4 slots isn't enough to do everything I want with them. A few suggestions and ideas: Bronlar's Phalanx - I know you've already got Tactical Barrage, but I like the fact that this shield gives you a free Intellect inspiration and can at least save you 1 point of Discipline. As a Black Jacket, you can also take its stronger Stand Firm upgrade for the added deflection, armor, and health regen and not have to worry about the immobilization downside since you can freely switch out of it at will. The scaling deflection bonus and regen helps make up for low resolve and the subclass's weaker Fighter recovery. Granted, the health regen is conditional and not party wide like Lethandria's Devotion, but it could still be a nice alternative shield choice if you don't want to indulge in the Lethandria's Devotion swap cheese. Magistrate's Cudgel - soulbinding it to a Fighter makes this a nice buffing tool when paired with a shield or an offhand weapon with engagement, giving you either +1 AR, +1 pen, or minus 20% recovery. The nice thing is that these buff persists even when you swap to a different weapon set, and you can swap back whenever you want to refresh it. Squid's Grasp - I tested this a while back and found that the plus 20% action speed from the Attempted Parley will also reduce in progress recovery. In other words, you can swap over to this weapon whenever you've just performed an action and it will cut down on its recovery time (provided you are surrounded by 3 enemies - the Flanking immunity you get with this weapon helps mitigate some of the danger). It depends on your tolerance with micromanagement, but it could be a worthwhile addition to your arsenal especially on a spellcasting multiclass like this to speed up some of the slower spells.

I like Wizard summoned weapons, but I don't think Conjurer does anything particularly noteworthy with them to justify going as that subclass for that kind of build. Like I said in the post up the thread, the Conjuration PL bonus only translates into more duration for summoned weapons, which gives you some more seconds of uptime with your weapon and may save you from having to recast it again during longer fights. In practice, this bonus duration might not even be relevant for encounters beaten before your original summoned weapon wears off. If Wizard summoned weapons scaled with PL like Monk fists, I would think it more worthwhile to try to stack PL for them as a Conjurer, but as it is in the game currently, I am simply unexcited by additional duration being my only benefit in this application. The bigger issue for me is losing Illusion spells as a Conjurer, especially if I'm going as a more melee-focused build with summoned weapons because the Illusion school offers some very welcome defensive buffs. Again, it's not the end of the world for a frontline Conjurer without Illusions spells since you can get defensive buffs from the non-restricted Enchantment spells such as Llengrath's Safeguard or Citzal's Martial Power, plus they won't actually suffer the increased recovery penalty as non-Conjuration spells due to being instant cast anyways. However, these spells have awkward conditionals such as requiring you to drop to half health before triggering or preventing subsequent spellcasting. Meanwhile, Illusion spells like Wizard's Double, Mirrored Image, and Llengrath's Displaced Image provide straightforward and effective defensive buffs while also being available much sooner than the aforementioned Enchantment alternatives. You might not need these defensive bonuses if you instead go for ranged summoned weapons like Minor Blights or Blackbow, but even then you're still only getting bonus duration with these weapons as a Conjurer. The PL bonus is just not that impressive for Conjuration spells, and I feel like it doesn't nearly make up for the tradeoff of losing Illusion and Evocation spells when you go Conjurer subclass. I feel like you don't even look at the subclass PL bonus when going Conjurer, and just get creative like @Constentin Lévine's suggestion of cycling Conjure Familiar to get as many stat bonuses as possible. There's an opportunity cost of having to cast Conjure Familiar over and over again and needing to apply the Brilliant inspiration on the Conjurer to allow this, but at least it would be a stronger bonus compared to the subclass' innate Conjuration PL bonus.

I notice on occasion when under pull or push effects, the target will sometimes get "stuck" on an object where they will be in the push/pull animation and sort of continually hover in place. When it happens to a party member, they end up being unresponsive and effectively stuck in place for the rest of the combat. It's obviously a bug, but I tried to see if I could exploit this by summoning a Furyshaper ward and knocking enemies into it but it doesn't work unfortunately. It only seems to work on map objects with collision, like a table for instance. I also tried using Withdraw on the Furyshaper ward to see if it would somehow turn it into a hard object but it still didn't work. I suspect it is because it's treated like a unit, albeit a stationary one, so it has that coding/behavior where units kind of clip through each other sometimes if trying to fill the same space. If there's a way to summon something that makes a space non-traversable it may work, but as far as I know there isn't. As far as ways to make use of the push effect, there's always traps and seal spells that you can place ahead of time and knock enemies into. But it's not like push is really helpful for those since just placing them between yourself and the enemy is generally enough to have them trigger with proper placement. Another idea is the Hobble traps dropped from the Footsteps of the Beast that would allow you to push enemies away and use the created distance to drop the Hobble traps and kite enemies into. It is admittedly not too useful of a strategy and it would conflict with gun usage since you wouldn't be able to reload while moving, though.

Here are the numbers from the testing: No-subclass Wizard Necrotic Lance = 11.5 pen, 9.4 sec Necrotic Lance (Voidwheel) = 13 pen, 6.8 sec Necrotic Lance (Substantial Phantom) = 11.3 pen, 8.1 sec Ghost Blades = 11.3 pen Ghost Blades (Engoliero do Espirs) = 13 pen Conjurer Necrotic Lance = 12 pen, 10.1 sec Necrotic Lance (Voidwheel) = 13 pen, 6.8 sec Necrotic Lance (Substantial Phantom) = 11.3 pen, 8.1 sec Ghost Blades = 11.8 pen Ghost Blades (Engoliero do Espirs) = 13 pen I only kept track of the penetration and duration differences since those were straightforward factors to see if the PL bonus was applying in the combat log. Both characters had identical attribute spreads of 18, 18, 4, 18, 17, 3 and were both moon godlikes. I'm really trying to give Conjurer a fair shake as a subclass by finding a decent use case for their PL bonus, but it's hard to see the benefit. Like I said earlier, the Conjuration PL bonus kind of goes to waste on summoned weapons since all it's giving you is more duration and has no bearing on adjusting quality levels or imparting any other kind of benefit. In practical terms, the added duration might save you from having to recast your summoned weapon again in really long fights. But that's the best case scenario for a fairly marginal benefit, when you consider that that spell slot you save for other usage is going to be limited by the fact that you're cut off from two other spell schools. It seems even less meaningful when you factor in the ability to extend duration with Wall of Draining or compare it to a Blood Mage's ability to regain spells. I've been looking at Minoletta's Piercing Sigil and Cloak of Death as the explicitly Conjuration-keyworded, non-summon high level spells that would profit more from PL, going single-classed and stacking PL via Prestige and Conjure Familiar. My idea so far is a low deflection, high health retaliation tank, with the moon godlike racial for healing. MSP and CoD can both proc off the same retaliation and it would be worthwhile having both spells up since they target different stats of your attackers. However, I foresee MSP's push effect and CoD's effect that turns enemies invisible being a major pain in the ass that can throw off the targeting for the rest of your party. I'm also unsure how viable a single-classed Conjurer without access to defensive Illusions spells will be on the frontlines. As a Conjurer, you still have access to Enchantment school defensive buffs like Citzal's Martial Power and Llengrath's Safeguard which will both stack and won't suffer the Conjurer recovery penalty with non-Conjuration spells since they're zero recovery. The problem is that Citzal's Martial Power cuts off spellcasting while it's up and Llengrath's Safeguard doesn't trigger until you're at half health. Having high deflection from those spells would also be at cross purposes of MSP and CoD which requires enemies to hit you in order to proc. I think it might be better just to cast buffs like Ironskin and Infuse With Vital Essence and gearing with heavy armor and Cadhu Scalth to help mitigate the incoming damage. I've done some preliminary testing with this build and I can't say I love it. The moon godlike healing isn't substantive enough to rely solely upon, so I'm having to consider some of the life-drain spells from the Transmutation school (with the slower recovery penalty) or maybe summoning Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff just to poke enemies to get some health back. While I do love the idea of being a prickly porcupine that enemies don't want to touch, the fact is your effectiveness with this strategy is going to be limited by how long you can stand up to the damage and how often enemies are going to attack you in melee (summoning an Essential/Substantial Phantom after casting these retaliation spells unfortunately doesn't impart those buffs to your copies so you can't double the odds this way). It's a convoluted way to do damage and crowd control, but I think it's way less effective than many of the other competing power level 8 and 9 spells from other schools.

I've been theorycrafting a Conjurer build that makes use of the +2 PL bonus with Conjuration spells in a way that's more substantive than the conventional wisdom of using summoned weapons with them, as I find that the mere +duration you get with Conjurer summoned weapons isn't a particularly advantageous usage of the power level bonus, especially for the tradeoff of losing two other spell schools for it. I was looking at the damage spells from the Conjuration school to better leverage the subclass bonus when it occurred to me that Voidwheel can cast Necrotic Lance and Engoliero do Espirs can cast Ghost Blades, both of which are Conjuration spells. I wanted to see if the spells cast from these weapons would get the Conjurer PL bonus on top of the weapon quality scaling. To that end, I tested this by creating two single-classed Wizards, one a Conjurer and the other no-subclass, with identical stats. For a control group, I had them cast Necrotic Lance and Ghost Blades as spells from their spellbooks. As expected, the Conjurer got +0.5 higher penetration and had longer duration in the case of Necrotic Lance's secondary DoT damage effect. However, proccing these spells from the weapons did not get the Conjurer's +2 Conjuration PL bonus. While you do get scaling from the weapon quality, these weapon-triggered spells performed the same in the hands of both the subclass-less Wizard and Conjurer. One interesting thing I noted was that the duration of the secondary DoT from Voidwheel's Necrotic Lance was lower than the duration of the casted spell version. I suspect the weapon just uses base duration (it, however, still gets Intellect scaling as normal since casting Infuse With Vital Essence increased the duration). While I was at it, I wanted to test if Substantial Phantom got the Conjurer's PL bonus since it does get Necrotic Lance as part of the selection of spells it's able to cast. Unfortunately, the Conjurer's PL bonus does not get carried over to the Substantial Phantom copy when it casts the relevant Conjuration spell. Again, the Substantial Phantom performed identically between the Conjurer and no-subclass Wizard. Interestingly, the version of Necrotic Lance casted by the Substantial Phantom was slightly inferior to the no-subclass Wizard, having less penetration and secondary DoT length. Weapons copied over to the Phantoms also didn't make any difference in terms of the spells procced from them. Just thought I should share these findings to the board for the sake of posterity and in case anyone else was curious about this interaction. This is on the vanilla version of the game without the community or balance patches, by the way. I'm posting this on my lunchbreak but I'll throw up the hard numbers from the test later when I get back home.

I did some testing on this and it does appear that an action speed bonus does dynamically adjust recovery time, even for an action that is currently in progress. I created a Black Jacket test character who had the Quick Switch talent along with a minimum Dexterity score, equipped with heavy armor, and attacking with a Rod with the Blast modal on (+50% recovery time). My thinking was that any increase to action speed would be more noticeable and easier to observe on a character with a low baseline speed. Anyway, I spawned 3 adjacent test dummies next to my character to ensure that I would get Attempted Parley's 20% action speed bonus when switching to Squid's Grasp (I also double checked that it was correctly applying the bonus in the weapon details). I ran a few tests attacking with just the rod to establish a control group and got an average of 24 real-life seconds of recovery time while running the game at the lowest combat speed (there was a variance of a few milliseconds in this string which you can chalk up to human error while starting and stopping the stopwatch based on visual observation of the recovery bar starting and ending). I then did the same attacks with the Rod, but this time I paused as soon as the attack completed and immediately swapped to Squid's Grasp with the Attempted Parley upgrade. Upon switching to Squid's Grasp, with the game still paused, I observed the recovery bar immediately dropping from full to roughly 90% full. The overall recovery time dropped down to 21 seconds when holding Squid's Grasp (again, some milliseconds of variance here). For the sake of thoroughness, I also used a separate Chanter to cast "Bride Caught their Ruse..." (Quick inspiration) on this Black Jacket character during his recovery phase after a Rod attack. This was a little bit harder to accurately observe and record since I couldn't precisely get the invocation to finish casting at the same exact time as the Black Jacket began recovery, but the same trend was observed: the recovery bar immediately dropped and the overall recovery time was reduced. Hopefully this is of some use for other people. I do love Black Jacket fighters and this small technique of being able to decrease recovery time for free with some micromanagement with Squid's Grasp is a fun way of illustrating this subclass's utility.

Does anyone know if a bonus to action speed will live update an ongoing action? What I mean is if, for instance, you cast a Quick inspiration like the "Bride Caught their Ruse..." invocation on an ally who has just made a weapon attack, will that lower the recovery time of their just executed attack or will it only apply to the next action? The reason I ask is because the weapon tool tip will show the faster speeds but I'm not sure if that applies for actions that are already in progress / started at a slower action speed before the buff was applied. I'm planning out a Black Jacket/Bellower build who swaps to a defensive loadout (such as large shield + hatchet or dagger with the modal active) during their recovery stage since Quick Switch allows BJ fighters to swap weapon slots instantaneously and without penalty. I was considering equipping Squid's Grasp just for its Flanking immunity but then remembered it also had the Attempted Parley enchantment which gives you +20 action speed bonus when surrounded by enemies. Now I'm thinking I can do something like attack with a slower recovery two handed weapon and then swap to Squid's Grasp and shield in between attacks to get both an increase in defense and also to speed up the recovery of my just performed attack (assuming that Squid's Grasp's action speed bonus applies here) which I think would justify that level of micromanagement for me. Just wanted to check here if anyone has ever tested or made note of this before. Either way, I'm planning to test this myself over the weekend but I'm not very sure of a good testing methodology (maybe just test it with a very slow character armed with a slow weapon with slower recovery modal activated like a Rod and then see if the recovery bar visibly drops when switching to Squid's Grasp, or just do a stopwatch comparison with and without Squid's Grasp equipped).

Whoops, re-read your post and saw that you meant the Deltro armor which is where you're getting the shock healing from. In which case this could be a very cool setup for a blood mage who launches all their nukes, then casts reflected Ray of Fire/Avenging Storm combo for even more damage and healing to fuel blood sacrifice.

Good to know. For what it's worth, I wasn't able to get it trigger at all in all of the testing that I did, though I am using it in weird circumstances. Here are the results from further testing. The Avenging Storm + Boltcatchers + Deltro's Caged Helm + Effort + Ray of Fire suggestion from @Constentin Lévine does work and applies Avenging Storm attacks every time Ray of Fire procs. However, when you reflect it back to the caster, you will quickly melt yourself since you may be immune to the burn beam but not to the added shock damage. I don't think there's a way to get shock immunity, is there? Maybe Fury spiritshifting into a storm blight? This setup destroys everything in its path already so it might be good enough even without the reflect trick to make more beams. The ability to create extra, separate beams only works if you reflect it off of the original beam. I was thinking since a new beam is created and starts with its own duration, you could maybe daisy chain Ray of Fire between multiple party members with reflect so that as soon as the beam starts to die, you juggle a new beam between another pair of party members. Alas, it doesn't work this way and you can't endless carry the torch of one Ray of Fire casting throughout the entire combat encounter. I'm still obsessed with getting Minoletta's Piercing Sigil to work with the reflect trick while wielding Effort but I don't think it's possible. I tried making my wizard confused to see if that would work but still nothing. Based on the tooltip description (which I know isn't necessarily accurate a lot of the times), it seems like it needs to be triggered by an enemy. Maybe if you got charmed by an enemy after getting Ray of Fire to reflect on yourself, MSP would possibly proc on self-reflected beam hits, but then I'm not sure if it would target the caster, a random enemy, or who knows what. When you trigger the frost blast from Acolyte's Frostbite, for instance, it aims it in the direction of the monk who created the reflected beam, sometimes hitting empty air if there's no one there. Just thinking of other ways to implement the self-reflected hit rolls, you could maybe make a Forbidden Fist/Wizard to get something out of the fact that Effort will Hobble and Sicken you and can provide Forbidden Fist wounds when those afflictions expire. The only problem is that the duration of these afflictions are fairly long and Ray of Fire procs pretty frequently so it will constantly restart the timer, making it so that they will only expire once Ray of Fire ends. Not sure if getting just two wounds is worth it considering the loss of healing you get from Sicken.

You are right, a Wizard with reflection spells or any other character with reflect items like Mirrorback and Collar of Eothas's Light does work the same way so you don't necessarily need a Monk with Soul Mirror to be your reflect source. I should mention in my testing that my character had on Rekvu's Scorched Cloak, Rekvu's Fractured Casque, Brooch of Inevitable Winter, High Harbinger's Robes, Kuaru's Prize, Ring of Focused Flame, Firethrowers Gloves, Sash of Judgment, Magran's Favor, Griffins Blade, 23 Might, and and was using Crusted Swordfish food bonus to get the 20-30 damage numbers per tick. I think a lower might score would actually be better as a Blood Mage here so you would take less self damage from Blood Sacrifice and just depend on items for more spell damage/healing. Okura's Kettle didn't seem to work when I used it with Effort. I think the problem is that it might need to be triggered from damage coming from an enemy specifically. Minoletta's Piercing Sigil wasn't working either with Effort for the same reason, I believe. Your suggestion of Avenging Storm and the shock items sounds promising. I'll test it later tomorrow and see how it goes.

This was a discovery I made while testing out friendly fire spells on a Forbidden Fist. The monk passive ability Soul Mirror will not only reflect back missed ranged weapon attacks, but also some spells, including beam spells. When a beam gets reflected by a monk this way, it creates an entirely new, separate beam that originates from the monk and bounces back at the caster without further harming the monk. This new beam also uses the stats of the original caster to calculate damage, accuracy, and penetration, though visually it looks like the monk is the one firing it back at the original caster. Additionally, the monk doesn't need to be the initial target of the beam for this to work. They can walk into the path of a beam, get missed and start reflecting it, then walk out of the path to safety. Here is a screenshot if this is not clear: In this example, I used my wizard to cast Ray of Fire on the Rotghast. I then walked both of my monks into the path of the spell, waited until it missed and reflected new beams, and then walked the monks out of the way so they wouldn't get hurt any more. So the middle beam is the original hitting the Rotghast, while the two new branching beams are reflecting from the monks back at the wizard. Why is this noteworthy and how can it be exploited? The obvious choice is for the wizard to use the Ray of Fire beam and wear Rekvu's Scorching Cloak while suffering from an injury (Serious Burn giving the most synergy here) so that they are immune to fire damage and can convert 10 percent of that damage into healing. With high might and a couple of spell damage modifying items, I was able to deal an average of 20-30 fire damage, translating to 2-3 health gained per tick. While this may not seem like a lot, compare that to Wall of Flame, another fire spell that I'm sure others have tried to use with Rekvu's Scorching Cloak for healing purposes. The problem with using Wall of Flame this way is its base damage is simply too low, so you'll often see it giving 0 health back when it ticks. Meanwhile, Ray of Fire does enough damage to consistently heal, and it ticks off at a decent rate and for a good amount of times during the spell's duration. Not to mention the fact that duplicating the beams with this Soul Mirror trick is a literal damage multiplier for no additional cost other than having to move your monks around and taking some initial damage for them to create more beams. The more monks with Soul Mirror you have in your party, the more beams you can create for additional amounts of healing and damage. If you also cast Combusting Wounds on your enemies, you can deal even more damage from the rapid-fire procs coming from multiple beams. Another part of this interaction you can exploit is the fact that the reflected beams are making attack rolls against the wizard but not harming them due to their fire immunity. So you can use it to trigger items that have on-hit effects while safely not taking damage. For example, wielding the Lover's Embrace dagger, upgraded with the Lover's Quarrel enchantment to match your wizard's gender, can give you Frenzy when you crit yourself with Ray of Fire, and if you also have Slayer's Claw in your offhand, you can get +2 penetration from the upgraded might inspiration. Acolyte's Frostbite has an enchantment called Vengeful Cold which creates a frost blast upon getting crit, however it is tricky to utilize here because it requires you to be a minimum distance away from your allies before it will trigger and its attack will be directed towards the monk whose beam triggered it. The Effort with Hemorrhaging trick to turn your beam attacks into melee attacks also works here, but I haven't found a good way of leveraging this yet. I tried using it with Minoletta's Piercing Sigil and Okura's Kettle, thinking I could trigger their AoE effects, but they unfortunately didn't work. I think it's because they need the attacks to come from an enemy and not yourself. If anyone is able to come up with ways of benefitting from nondamaging self attacks (which can be melee coded if you also use Effort), please share!

I tried it again by cheating up Resolve to the 35 cap on my test monk to get Hylea's Talons under 2 seconds and still couldn't get it to work. The problem is the attack strings between WotW are practically instantaneous or at least so quick that Hylea's Talons doesn't wear off fast enough before the monk has teleported to the next target and restarted the duration with a fresh proc, even when I place the enemies well far apart. The most I observed is two wounds if I get "lucky" and Hylea's Talons procs once early, doesn't proc again for the next couple of hits so that the first disappears, and then procs for the final hit of WotW. I think I could squeeze more wounds out of it if I wielded a single or two-handed weapon to reduce the number of attacks I made during WotW and thus the chances for Hylea's Talons to trigger again before it can wear off, but like Boeroer said earlier, that kind of micromanagement is probably counterintuitive at that point.

I don't see too much of an issue with lowering might in favor of more resolve for a tank Herald, especially if you're not going to be using healing auras. And as you've already discovered, Heralds don't necessarily have to put out a lot of damage on their own when they can use summons to do that for them. I would caution that might contributes to your fortitude defense so you could be getting knocked down more if you dump it completely.

That's a fair clarification. The belt just gives you immunity from Pull of Eora's push/pull effect. The actual wound generation comes from the stride debuff. I tested both of these and it doesn't quite work the way you describe. What happens when you get hit by a hostile effect in very quick succession (such as from using Hylea's Talons with Whispers of the Wind or getting hit by multiple instances of Pull of Eora at the same time) is that the new effect just overrides and essentially resets the timer of the previous hostile effect. So the first hostile effect never actually has a chance to expire and it ends up limiting your Forbidden Fist wound. I guess if you get the hostile effect duration really, really low, you could get the hostile effect to expire before a new one ticks but it seems unlikely given how fast Pull of Eora and WotW procs.

I have some thoughts on this specific section which may help you narrow down what you want for your main character. In terms of Devoted vs. Bleak Walker, the Devoted can get accuracy and crit conversions from Conqueror Stance and Disciplined Strikes, along with the passive graze to hit conversion and added damage from their weapon proficiency feats, while the Bleak Walker can modify their Flames of Devotion attack with gear that provides a lot of added accuracy such as the Ring of Focused Flame and Helm of the White Void and also gains added accuracy and crit conversion from Exalted Focus aura, penetration with Scion of Flame, and a refundable mark ability with Sworn Rival. Keep in mind that both weapons suffer from blunted criticals, however, which somewhat lessens the impact of getting high accuracy and leveraging it for crits with them. Regarding Spearcaster vs. Dragon's Dowry, Spearcaster may get more penetration in the hands of a Devoted, but the bigger issue for ranged combatants is dealing with enemies with pierce immunity rather than high pierce armor, in which case Dragon's Dowry in the hands of a Bleak Walker has an easier time dealing damage due to their burn and corrode lash. Spearcaster does have very useful on-hit effects, including an interrupt modal which can be invaluable in boss fights. Both classes can always switch to bows for alternative damage types (I recommend Frostseeker and Essence Interrupter because they play nicely with Arcane Archers) when dealing with pierce immune enemies, but the Devoted is going to suffer the accuracy penalty for not using their specialized weapon. Also note for Arcane Archers, the Arcana skill gives added accuracy specifically when using Imbue abilities, and the Imbue abilities that do damage are hampered by the fact that they don't scale properly, making Imbue: Web and Imbue: Eora a little more useful. I would say high Arcana makes more of a difference with Spearcaster because the skill will give added accuracy for normal attacks, which is needed to overcome the penalty for being a non-elemental weapon in the hands of an Arcane Archer. The Devoted also gets armor recovery bonus, translating to a slight increase in DPS, while the Bleak Walker gets a chance to regain class resources upon kill. It does sound like you really want a Herald and also a tank on your team, so I think making the Herald into a tank as opposed to another ranged member would be useful here. If you can get their intellect to 20, a Troubadour could keep two chants up at once with Brisk Recitation turned off, allowing you to maintain Sure-Handed Ila for your ranged main character while also getting the effects of another chant of your choice. If you do end up going with the AA/Bleak Walker for your main, a Steel Garrote/Troubadour could still work in the same party due to non-conflicting dispositions, though a Shieldbearer as others have suggested may be more useful in this role for the added engagement. I don't mean to complicate your choices even further, but I think a Steel Garrote/Troubadour would actually benefit from the Daze effect granted by Spearcaster because it would activate their life steal if you still want to go ranged. Or Blightheart could be a nice alternative for more chanter phrases upon kill. I still personally think going with a Herald tank simplifies the matter, however.

That's a very cool setup. I wonder though, how safe would you be from not eventually hitting yourself with the AoE since WotW is going to be making a lot of hit rolls, especially if you're able to spam it a lot. My concern is that the AoE might eventually land twice and cancel out the armor's Reflex immunity. I assume the AoE uses your character's accuracy and the accuracy from the weapon quality, so maybe you could just not upgrade the quality for more safety? Or is it not much of a concern in practice, as long as you keep your Reflex defense high? I love the idea of this, though. And yeah, I'm beginning to comprehend just how powerful Imagined Pain is with a tanky monk. The interrupt AoE from Rooting Pain also seems very strong on a Forbidden Fist if you are able to generate wounds at a decent pace. It gave me an idea for a Tactician/Forbidden fist that spams the Forbidden Fist ability to constantly generate wounds which then triggers Rooting Pain's AoE interrupt at regular intervals, giving the Tactician subclass a decent chance to interrupt enemies and gain Discipline for Fighter abilities. You could then keep Vigorous Defense and Crucible of Suffering constantly on and stack your defenses really high (assuming those abilities stack, which I believe they should, but worth testing out). Equipping Gipon Prudensco and Squid's Grasp would give you flanking immunity to handle the issue of Tactical Dilemma. Of course, you do lose out on Imagined Pain and Whispers of the Wind as a multiclass. Very high defenses also works against you a little if you think about it, since hostile effects might miss you entirely now, limiting your wound generation as a Forbidden Fist, unless you are relying on spamming the Forbidden Fist ability like I'm planning to do. So it would definitely be a big tradeoff between offense and better defense by making it a fighter/monk multiclass, but it could be nice if you wanted to make a more tanky monk with great defenses, more engagement, and endless regeneration.

So I did some more testing to figure out good ways of gaining wounds via hostile effects expiring on Forbidden Fists. Based on this recent thread by Tomucci, I can corroborate that using resistance affliction gear such as Defiant Apparel (for Perception Resistance) and also Engwithan Bracers (for Dexterity Resistance) will not give you a wound if it downgrades an affliction effect, which is really unfortunate. Using the test examples in that linked thread, hitting a Forbidden Fist with Chillfog while wearing Defiant Apparel and Web while wearing Engwithan Bracers won't give you a wound once their effects expire. Immunity to afflictions will also not grant you a wound, but that is to be expected (I tested it anyway in the hopes that it worked in the funky way that Immunity to Disengagement worked). However, the push/pull immunity from the Upright Captain's Belt will work with Pull of Eora and still give you a wound. I think I read about this in another thread by Boeroer, so credit to him for that idea, I just tested to confirm it works. Imagined Pain is also a great way of generating wounds as suggested by Constentin. It's not unique to Forbidden Fists, but it's really useful for this subclass since you tend to have high defenses due to stacking resolve and having Crucible of Suffering active most of the time. In fact, Imagined Pain makes Pull of Eora doubly effective here because you will now gain wounds even if it misses. The trick then becomes reducing the duration of each instance of Pull of Eora on yourself so that it can apply again for the next time it ticks and hits you. With Clarity of Agony active, I was able to get an average of 8-9 wounds from one casting of Pull of Eora. This was just with testing with affliction resistance gear so I'm sure you could get even more wounds with better optimization. I think with how quickly Pull of Eora ticks, the short duration of it's effect, and the relative harmlessness of having reduced stride, this is my ideal spell to use with Forbidden Fists for wound generation, and it's a spell that I tend to cast frequently anyway. This is slightly off topic, but I also discovered during testing that Soul Mirror reflects spells. I always thought it only reflected ranged weapon attacks, but I was using Necrotic Lance and Ninagauth's Bitter Mooring and was surprised to find that they bounced back to hit my friendly wizard when I used it against my monk. Ninagauth's Bitter Mooring is especially weird because I could also cast it on an enemy, have my monk step between them into the beam, and then it would start reflect back into my wizard. Moving my monk would then produce a separate beam that bounced back at the wizard (see the screenshot below). Not sure if that effect has been documented elsewhere online, but someone might be able to come up with a cool way of using this if it also applies to other beam spells. Maybe a way of first making the caster resistant or immune to the damage type and then creating an extra free beam?