tnc

"He" who made this video and me who posted the link are actually one and the same .. And you CAN tell from the video - might bonus gets into the formula like everything else and it does NOT modify weapon base damage .. Only thing that I'm aware of altering weapon base damage numbers is the fighter skill "confident aim" . Pls check without fixing the base damage coz i'm not satisfied.

Yeah, i didn't mean to say you should forego strength entirely, having a good score in it is important as well. However, i feel that 16 base is enough, you can get +2/3 from item bonus easily. I feel that beyond that you start to see diminishing returns on investing pure stat points into might. As far as abilities and talents go, here's what i have on my lvl 10 barbarian at the moment: Lvl 1 : Frenzy - for obvious reasons, the +might and con are nice, the increased attack speed is very nice to have since i only have 10 dex. Lvl 2 : Accurate carnage - more accuracy means more hits and crits. Lvl 3 : Savage defiance - Gets you through lvl 3 and 4, nice to have all around - you can't do damage if you're laying on the ground unconscious. Lvl 4 : Stalwart Defiance - beefs up savage defiance to give +10 to all defenses, really nice to have, since i usually use savage defiance after frenzy has worn off - this offsets the loss of offense by giving me better defense. nice for those longer battles. Lvl 5 : One stands along - For obvious reasons. +20 damage on all hits and being able to engage 1 more enemy before being flanked is really OP, pretty much the ability that makes this class work as well as it does. Lvl 6 : Two weapon style - More attack speed. Lvl 7 : Bloodlust : It's easy to down 2 enemies fast as a barb because our melee AoE's, this passive gives you x1.2 attack speed for 8 seconds once you do. This, paired with the attack speed from 2 weapon style and frenzy, pus the fact that i am using 2 rapiers, wich are both fast weapons i hit very often. not as much of a shotgun as a monk with 20 dex and 2 weapon style, but close enough. Lvl 8 : Weapon focus : Noble : Adds +6 accuracy to attacks with my rapiers. i use 2 rapiers because they get a +5 accuracy bonnus on their own. together with the bonus from accurate carnage that's +21 accuracy right there. Lvl 9 : Thick skinned : 2 more DR vs melee attacks is never a bad thing. Barbarian shout is also a good contender, but i prefer thick skinned since i dont need to activate it, it's allways 'on' since it's a passive. Lvl 10 : Savage attack : my 2nd reason for stacking accuracy. this modal ability lets you trade in 5 accuracy for 1.2x the attack damage. gives you a bigger damage bonus then might stacking I plan on taking heart of fury for lvl 11, not sure about what i'll do at level 12 - i might go for wild sprint, so i can close the distance with ranged enemies and spellcasters quicker. As you can see, i don't really get any bonus might from my talents (besides the base +4 during frenzy), instead relying on one stands alone and savage attack to boost my damage. I could swap around some talents to focus more on might and get a bit more damage out of my character, but i'd be taking a significant hit to my survivability, and more importantly to my attack speed - meaning that in the end, i'll hit harder but less often, doing less total damage in the same time span. Funny you say accuracy is really important and not take brute force/threatening presence. With sickened and weakened effects (there's a per encounter weakening/dazing on priest, its really useful) you can debuff the enemy fortitude by 30 points. It'll give you accuracy bonus on like %90 of the enemies because even if their fortitude is high it will be debuffed. The enemies with low fortitude will get crit most of the time and the ones with high fortitude you can still hit easier depending on the value. It more than makes up for barbarian's low starting accuracy. Some of the most annoying creatures in the game(shades/phantoms/casters) have low fortitude and they'll go down REALLY fast with this combo. On top of this accuracy bonus, you keep a -30 fortitude debuff on the enemy almost permanently (sickened is always active around barbarian, and weakened has a huge aoe and long duration) and it will allow your spells/prone abilities (some of the best spells in the game like gaze of adragan, anything that paralyzes or petrifies attacks fortitude) to be much more effective.

you could watch the 4 minute video, or you could keep wondering ... You cant tell from the video because he makes the base damage a fixed value...

You might want to raise that con to 10 because later on in some fights you'll get hit unless you're using really well planned tactics and with low con like that you can't keep on fighting, you'll have 1 hp while your other companions have plenty hp and thus it'll make your character useless until you rest.

What i wonder is does the might bonus change your base damage or is it just a multiplier like everything else ?

Maybe it's because they are big and cover a larger area when u swing it. But personally i'd make them have a large interrupt bonus that way it would be a good weapon for dual wield barbarian cavemen I also wish there were two handed clubs like in temple of elemental evil. I remember when i crit with it in that game the animation was so awesome. Wish crits in this game had special animations too.

I took it because i try to stack might as high as i can. I find out that if you keep stacking it you gain more and more damage because there are also other factors that increase your damage depending on your base damage with a weapon. So the impact of 2 might can be more than 1 or 2 damage. I started with 19 might i get +3 might from an item and when i activate upgraded frenzy it becomes 28 might which means %54 bonus damage and you can tear through the high DR enemies with a two handed weapon and aoe carnage attacks will also have big damage numbers. Also there's a level 5 priest spell that gives a big might bonus u might want to check that out. I find that stacking on might is really not an optimal way of increasing your damage output beyond a certain point, like savior99 pointed out, the +2 might doesn't amount to a lot of extra damage, on top of it only being active during frenzy. First and foremost, taking one stands alone is absolutely necessary, the tooltip only mentions how you do extra damage when engaging 2+ enemies, what it neglects to mention is that this actually amounts to +20 damage after the hit/grace check and on both the initial hit and the carnage AoE. This on top of the fact that the skill is a passive, and you will be engaging 2 or more enemies 80%+ of the time, easily - so you get a lot more mileage out of it. Now, don't get me wrong - having a decent might score is important (my barb has 16 base, +2 from gauntlets) but int is more important, so your carnage's AoE is bigger and you hit more enemies in 1 hit. For example, having a huge AoE and slightly less damage, i can be hitting 4 or 5 (or more) enemies for 40 damage a strike, which translates in 160 and 200 damage per strike respectively, whereas focusing completely on stacking damage and neglecting the AoE range means i'm only hitting 3 enemies max in 1 strike for 50 damage, which is only a total of 150 damage per strike. Granted, you're not always engaging more then 3 enemies, but the potential for a lot more damage is there. So you see, damage is not the problem with the barbarian, in fact i would say accuracy is a bigger issue, since if you miss your initial hit, carnage won't be triggered at all, meaning 0 damage for you. Personally i'd take Accurate Carnage over Greater frenzy. as has been pointed out, greater frenzy is only active when you actually frenzy, only adding 2 more might on top of the 4 the standard frenzy already adds, whereas accurate carnage adds +5 accuracy every time carnage triggers, which is every time you strike a melee hit, regardless of if you are using frenzy or not. As a cherry on the top, because out attack rolls are resolved by subtracting an enemies defenses from our accuracy, the higher our accuracy is, the more critical hits we will be scoring. (read this post for an explanation on how accuracy helps you to hit/crit : http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/77153-attack-resolution-accuracy-how-exactly-does-it-work-with-graphs/ ) So, in conclusion : Yeah, over-stacking might and damage bonuses might get us a nice on-screen display number of our damage, but it is by far not the optimal way of reaching the highest damage output possible. Why not stack both might and accuracy though? There aren't many worthwhile offensive melee talents anyway. I take all three class talents and can still take 3 offensive talents which covers the most important ones. I've seen barbaric blow crit for like 90+ damage even on character level 8-9. Late game it becomes even more op. As for intelligence i also raise it to at least 16 and i don't care about -8 deflection that comes from low per. and res. I can make up for it easily with some items and buffs and a bit of good positioning in combat. Keeps the game challenging but rewarding.

Master barb did you take "greater frenzy"? That gives +2 might during frenzy that means 6% more damage. With the weapon i am using now it means roughly 1 or 2 extra damage per hit. It does not sound like something i should use a talent for, what do you think ? I took it because i try to stack might as high as i can. I find out that if you keep stacking it you gain more and more damage because there are also other factors that increase your damage depending on your base damage with a weapon. So the impact of 2 might can be more than 1 or 2 damage. I started with 19 might i get +3 might from an item and when i activate upgraded frenzy it becomes 28 might which means %54 bonus damage and you can tear through the high DR enemies with a two handed weapon and aoe carnage attacks will also have big damage numbers. Also there's a level 5 priest spell that gives a big might bonus u might want to check that out.

Playing on hard and I never had to skip any combat, i even soloed the two bears at start with a bit of luck and potion/food buff. I took the companions as quickly as i could and i had a 5 men party before taking the fortress so i think that helped a lot early on. I explore everything and clear every area so it makes me strong and i can keep up with the difficulty. I imagine however you'd have to skip some encounters on PotD and if you're soloing you just must skip some.

Master barb here. Take threatening presence/brute force on barb. Take 1/encounter dazing/weakening ability on priest, you use it every fight great debuff to start a fight. Enjoy your almost permanent huge -30 fortitude debuff on enemies and a barb that keeps criting aoe, especially the ones with low fortitude. Make sure you take frenzy and also one stands alone. I dont take heal because if u take that much damage in a combat (like twice ur endurance) you'll have to rest soon anyway. I try not to get hit and debuff the enemy acc while buffing my deflection/dr.

you'll be fine with that build especially after act 2 your paladin won't even get hit but maybe get an offtank (doesnt need to be that tanky just tank 1-2 ppl) such as monk, barb, chanter.

There's like a %1 chance that your companion will die. My aloth was raped and slain by bandits.

actually that might be a good idea for disables. The ranking on the disables is already pretty clear imo and it wouldn't be so hard to implement this into the game. For example petrify>paralysis>prone>stun.

I find the combat to be repetitive especially if you do the side quests and become overleveled and it's also same in PotD. I send in the tank cast buffs/debuffs send in melee dps start nuking and it's done. For me around %50 of the fights are like this. %40 of the fights i don't even cast any spells just use per encounter abilities. The remaining %10 are fights that are tactically challenging such as the ones in the early game against shades/phantoms and some rare encounters like bounty quests/adra dragon etc. And the bears at start lol.

One thing i found out is that when you do defend against a mental attack it's hard to notice because a lot of stuff are going on during to combat and it's easy to miss in the combat log because it moves really fast. It might actually seem like your will save doesn't work but it actually does once you get it to high levels. You feel like you're getting hit by mental attacks all the time because it's very noticable once you do get hit; it really affects the combat and sometimes it may cause a party-wipe in higher difficulties. Also the fact that grazes still affect you with half duration contributes to this feeling of getting charmed/dominated all the time.

An easy way to fix this is to make the PotD difficulty actually hard for those hardcore players. Currently PotD does not satisfy me in terms of difficulty because as you said I explore everything pick every item i can find and do all the side quests. I'm a completionist in rpg games like these and i'm sure a big portion of the backers have a similar play style to mine. After act 2 the game becomes really easy for us and it takes away most of the fun. Also, how about making the game way harder in PotD and put some unique items specially designed for PotD ? That'd be really rewarding for hardcore gamers. Would love to see that in the next game or the expansion.

Just pick up the chanter companion it's easy to reach you don't even need to fight to get him. And btw going to raedric should be the last thing you do before act 2. The boss fight there is probably the hardest fight in act 1. (act 2 starts once you get to big city)

On hard you can make everyone except your tank cloth/light armor and get away with it easily. The fight will end in ten seconds anyway Might be different in PotD but my backrow rarely gets hit due to good positioning and i doubt that'll change in PotD.

Level 2 blindness is actually better than chill fog because it attacks will. People you want to blind are mostly melee enemies and they have lower will than fortitude.

Obvious answer is because better unique weapons. Like the best greatsword that has endurance leech or the best estoc that has extra attack speed. Also i find no use for reach weapons. I can still hit and stay uninterrupted with my 2h barb with a non reach weapon. Easy to get a good position.

You need to BE ENGAGED by 2 people for it to work. Doesnt matter how many people you engage.

Chanters are kinda meh for me. The fight is over before he's able to cast the second spell, sometimes even the first. Hard difficulty. So that is why i created a barb and he slaughters everyone with frenzied aoe 2H attacks. My party is Monk(main char, dps), Barb, Eder(full tank), Durance, Grieving mother, Hiravias. 3 Melee 3 Ranged. Took the best four companions.(imo) Enough tankiness, lots of buffs, more than enough dps.

Rangers don't have spells. That's an ability and you'll have very few abilities compared to spells. Like 3-4 of them. It's just how those classes work there is less micro managing, but it's okay since you have six people to manage

+0.3 crit multiplier is huge because the default is +0.5... Definately go for house doemenel if your main character is dps. Buff your acc in fights and you'll hurt a lot with crits.

Iconic Projection is such a good spell for level 2 because it has a huge area of effect it basically heals all your party and damages all the enemy party. The check is made against reflex so if you debuff reflex the effects are huge. If you keep spamming it it's direct win for some toughest fights. Cast accuracy buff, reflex debuff then spam the spell 4-5 times and the fight is over. I'd definately make it 10/10