cctobias

Well that mother did also like slaughter a bunch of people out of the blue just to build a nest. But yeah you can only do one or two superb enchants. The people complain that a fully enchanted weapon is just as good as uniques and that is a bad thing are indulging in a bit of hyperbole. Any uniques with superb on them are a serious thing because its one less weapon type that competes for the eyes.

It would probably be best to boil down the flaws in the current design to as simple and elegant a statement as possible. I would the two following statements are the main issues (keeping in mind other design intentions maybe desireable to keep): 1) the length of chants and invocations cannot possibly scale in a practical sense when compared to encounter length 2) Invocations/chants scale both negatively and positively and other classes do not. This means that a higher level chant is both more powerful and take more of a non-increasing resource to cast. All other spell casters either a) have no special cost for more powerful spell or b) recieve more resource to balance out the higher cost These are two different issues although #1 does currently impact #2. When taken in conjunction they make the current design obviously completely out of whack when compared to wizard/druid/priest spells. #1 is a problem that is a basic flaw that has no upside at all. Its just flat out bad. #2 is something some people like in that it can, from some points of view, be an interesting trade off. However since #2 is dependent on #1 this gets a little hard to discuss. Therefore #1 must be tackled first. #2 could be solved via blaancing powers OR by a slightly different design. But you cannot consider balance on #2 until #1 is solved and #1 is flat out bad and must be solved.

Its not a beautiful design decision. I know some people will say that is a matter of opinion but its not. It would be OK if it was static, for example it had 3 tiers and these tiers were INDEPENDENT of level. And those tiers were available from level one. Maybe use them as an adjustment on invocations and chants, where these have no inherent tier and you actively assign the tier on them. But when its dependent on level its inherently a poor design because encounter duration must necessary have a finite length and in general is most likely fairly invariant. At level 6 invocations/chants the numbers are completely ridiculous and impractical. Its just obvious a poor design since it becomes literally useless and unusable. Perhaps the basic idea behind (which is not "design") is fine, but since its something that essentially is tied to something that is invariant (or at least varies within a constrained range) then the design must also be this way and its not. This is the crux of the design flaw.

Yeah I made a post about a month ago basically saying exactly what the OP does, I think most people who care to do the numbers on the class realize its flawed in the long run. The class needs another design iteration. There are a number of ideas to address stuff. A number of ways to go. But bottom line the class can't possibly scale right given the way encounters scale. Its pretty much inarguable. They are mostly effective and fine as far as the released game of POE as is right now, although problematic at around level 9 still perfectly usable and useful. But if we had a POE 2 that went to level 20 the class would absolutely have to be reworked.

No. The interrupt duration is solely based upon the weapons interupt "strength" rating, i.e. a morning star is 1 second. I do not believe crits increase the duration but its hard tell. Crit certainly affect whether the interrupt happens.

For interrupt wands and sceptres are same as hunting bow. Also my experience with hunting bows is that very large hit you take due to DT is not worth the modest improvement in interrupt, just use a crossbow in stead. Good Friend is a great xbow since its Coordinating.

I thought recovery was only reduced by dex and other attack speed bonuses only affected how fast the actual action was

Yeah its all been done solo, just having 6 idiots and enough traps/scrolls/figurines could work. So I haven't bothered. I did clear all of Od Nua up to adra dragon though. And I killed Sky Dragon in 30 seconds going purely range and having the companions tank with nothing below 75% end at the end. The strategy worked for hard solo encounters and hard group encounter such as Ogre Shaman bounty. Note: that my party was an interrupt build and my rangers were actually specced for melee interrupt so they sometimes switched to 10 melee actors in certain circumstances. But the main point here is multiple animal companion and a support caster is a very viable tanking strategy, not saying its the best, but saying they are useless is provably wrong. And against things like Dank Spores they are very useful. I can't say this would work on POTD, I seriously doubt POTD scales well do the math behind the systems of POE. But on hard is a perfectly viable strategy. If you can't make say 2 animal companion tank 3 guys when you have a priest in your party then you are doing something wrong probably. I wasn't even using bears I was using stags for their aoe carnage.

I have killed the Sky Dragon (on Hard) with a party using 4 rangers and no tank characters. Note I didn't truly have the AC's tank the Sky Dragon rather I interrupted it and stunned it via Stunning shots. People seem to forget about stunning shots. Multiple rangers lays down an ass ton of stuns from range. A priest + multiple animal companions actually works pretty well. You can tank ogre spawns with it. A single AC that gets focused will die of course. But multiple AC's, as far as Ican tell, pretty reliably spread out targets and provide a pretty good meat shield that requires no resting. This might sound weird but rangers actually do well with more rangers. Also the +50% reload speed on Swift Aim is pretty amazing with arbalests etc and a chanter. A party with 3 rangers and heavy hitting slow reload stuff can offtank much better than I think most people realize and with Gunner + SA + chanter have +90% reload. You can take out caster VERY fast with that setup and three AC's are possibly the best offtank in the game, considering they are quite decent damage. If you lay down a consecrated ground or a druid heal thing for your AC's they can deal with 3 things no problem. Getting em to work with a real tank will take some micro of course. But in general with 4 actors you can obstruct a lot of things. I had an AC hit sky dragon for 26 damage, considering its DR is over 20 that's pretty nice and its deflection is rather high. People saying Ranger's do no damage if pet dies are just being silly. Its about 15% less damage. And hopefully if you are doing things right your pet isn't dying at the beginning. And if they die near the end you still have plenty of damage to finish. Anyway if you do it right you can make a Ranger heavy party that barely needs to rest at all and kill very fast. Don't use warbows, use the hardest hitting thing you can and get a ton of reload speed and use clothes. Tank+priest+druid and 3 rangers can wreck things (don't need the tank actually, but you could do it anyway, o really just make chanter tank).

Peasant is great. Spears are really good, a number nice uniques. Accuracy is a great special. The only unique with choosable qualities etc etc. Quarterstaves are really good. It is weak for ranged though. Dual wield hatchets is a very unique and interesting options, its more deflection than a small shield. They all have their pros and cons. Noble is weak for two-handers. Peasant is weak for ranged. But Knight is actually problematic because for every weapon class there is a better option (in a general sense) in another focus. Knight probably should have had mace and instead of battle axe so they had a crushing options (of course that would screw noble pretty bad).

Pretty much, I find Knight the least likely to take for things that I do. This can be modified by specific builds due to uniques or already having a party member with a focus of some sort. One of the problems with Knight is the one-handed weapons are both slash with little return. The slash/pierce is inferior to crush/(slash or pierce) and the effect on axe is kind of mediocre. The only two handed weapon is morningstar whose special effect is extremely marginal and specialized. And there are no fast weapons in it. Its just a really limited focus in comparison. Of course if you are targetting a specific unique sword or whatever its still fine.

Most of the bounties are fairly fine once you have a decently hard hitting weapons and some OK to good CC/AOE. If you can deal with casters and a large crowd then you are fine except for the ogres which hit too hard and have to many HP but are otherwise similar so you need either to be tough or have some really overwhelming damage to deal with the Ogres and that cave is like the bear cave so you basically have a room with a chokepoint entry Most bounties you can, say, kill a couple casters pretty fast by having 3 people alpha spike them with arbalests and then AOE/CC/tank (w/e) everyone. When you get that sort of thing will depend on your build and where you have gone, but basically you will have a crowd of about 8 things and there will be some casters you want to kill fast. You will want to tank and/or AOE burn down/CC the melee/ranged guys. The caster could be wizard or priests or pwgra. You could kite too, that is a somewhat specialized strategy and depends on class and/or gear. Generally 6-8 should be doable for most.

I don't think ancient memory is a buff, maybe I missed something, but I have only seen periodic hits in the combat log. It seems to just pulse out from the chanter every few seconds. It says something like 1 endurance per second but it seems to pulse out like once every 6 seconds and hit for 6 endurance.

Also the machine talent from tower in heritage hill

its 10% more xp per open slot so a 3 man party is 30% more xp, however the xp display does some kind of multiplication by followers so it can be misleading. Try disarming the traps in Cilant Lis alone and then with full party and it will tell you radically different xp numbers in the log