Climhazzard

I wouldn't want to try going through PotD with just buffs, you really want that CC, area of effect damage, and debuffing as well, but it only works if you have decent accuracy. In general I prefer druids over wizards because of the grimoire mechanic and the fact that wizards don't get many spell picks when they level up, but for PotD that accuracy buff helps a lot.

No because on PotD accuracy becomes very important and Wizards have better accuracy thanks to Eldritch aim.

If you use it properly, plan your battles around using it, ectopsychic echo is very OP. A lot of cipher abilities are mediocre, but they have great abilities available through most of the game and their gameplay mechanics let them use their good abilities as often as they are able. Wizards are great for PotD because of Eldritch aim, but druid is preferred for earlier difficulties, at least for me.

I am sorry but again, not really. Its doable with exceptional weapon. Yes, with a weapon sure, but I was talking about fists, as in Unarmed, or are they accuracy-boostable as well? EDIT: gkathellar: Where do fists get accuracy bonuses from? Fists have natural accuracy and damage bonuses (monk only) that make them equal in damage and accuracy to average speed superb weapons by the end of the game (by level 10 actually). It should be noted that fists are as fast as fast speed weapons, making them better than most weapons before considering enchants such as endurance drain or +crit damage. Peasant weapon focus is very good for a monk since you can use spears or hatchets for their extra properties or fists for their extra dps.

I noticed it's pretty hard to chug a potion while being attacked if you don't have any concentration. Well, starting a PotD run, I rolled a pale elf monk with high perception for decent reflexes. There is a group of 5 wolves in Valenwood I was trying to solo, almost succeeded a few times but kept getting annoyed at my potions getting interrupted and ended up re rolling the character back to the stats I usually use which include decent resolve. I haven't done any solo playthroughs so I don't really know what people are actually using. I just hate getting interrupted so I usually have resolve on my characters, lol. It is quite noticeable while trying to chug potions while solo, but for me the experience doesn't go much past Valenwood.

As far as i'm aware those combat only skills don't turn on unless you initiate real combat, smacking your team mates doesn't count.

Well, I've noticed on my dual sabers monk that the recovery time after using torments reach is a lot shorter than the recovery time after using a dual sabers attack, I haven't done any testing either but I felt that it must be unaffected by the slower weapons. It's rather hard to test because you have to generate 10 wounds then find a target that won't die before you use them up. Even if it is a bit affected by attack speed, it's still limited by the amount of wounds you have, and attack speed wouldn't matter unless you have excessive amounts of wounds.

The auto attack class will definitely beat the non auto attack classes in an auto attack duel, lol.

Damage mods increase its damage, intelligence extends its reach, improving the rate you receive wounds by tactics or the amount of armor you wear will allow you to use it more, using higher base damage weapons will increase its single target damage (dual sabers). Does your weapon speed even affect the animation speed of torments reach? I'm pretty sure it doesn't, but I bet dexterity does. So ideally, it's something like.. 18 might 18 intelligence lesser wounds and light armor dual sabers (for higher damage on the initial hit not the AOE) dexterity as high as you can get it You'd be pretty squishy though if you pumped might, dex, and intelligence.

None of the remaining bugs are serious and could very well be what are being referred to when they say they are working on the "quality of life". It could very well mean other things as well, such as AI improvements, which would be very welcome. The worst bug for me at the moment, is one where, later in the game, enemies that use deprive the unworthy strip you of your passives (permanently) along with the benefits they're supposed to be stripping (temporarily). It's an optional and entirely skipable side quest, so I've skipped it on every playthrough, but I'd really like to do it this time so I hope they fix it in 1.05. There's other things, but they all mostly fall into the quality of life category, nothing really show stopping. The game needs balancing at least as much as it needs the remaining bugs cleared up, so I'm glad they're working on both. I agree with the other posts here that, if you rely on the forums to judge when you should play the game you just may never end up playing it. Pretty much all the game breaking bugs were fixed in 1.03 so if you want to play the game now is as good a time as any to get started.

Use the gap in the trees before the fight with the warchief as a choke point. The priests in that fight are a big nuisance, use your casters and ranged dps characters to CC and kill them while your front line holds off the horde, they are capable of using "devotions for the faithful", and will, counter it preemptively with the same spell from your own priest. With devotions for the faithful up, your CC and ranged dps won't miss their priests, and should help you to take some of them out before they can use their own buffs or healing.

I start doing them around level 6 or 7 on my playthroughs.

RIP

If you think about it, it only makes sense to send your toughest character forward to initiate a conversation when facing a group of powerful looking adversaries. Rather than calling it cowering, just think of it as being mindful of the situation. If cowering isn't your thing though, make sure you picked up all the figurines when you were playing through the game, and pop them all at the beginning of the battle. It's a bit chaotic, and they die off pretty fast, but they'll give you enough time to prepare yourself, and if you're lucky they'll soak up a few charm spells as well. Use the priest spell that increases your defenses to charm and dominate, at the least they will graze more and if you're lucky a few will miss. After that, a devotions for the faithful always goes a long way.

I also consider recovery a good reason to stick to average or better speed ranged weapons on my casters (even though the slow ones usually have better dps), I don't like recovering from firing slow or extremely slow weapons when I need to react with a specific spell right away.

Pretty sure it won't triple it, but it will increase it. If you wear plate armor you'll have longer recovery times after casting spells or making attacks. I tend to just wear medium or light armor on my casters, so that I can react to situations faster. For example if I want to get a healing spell off right away it'll happen faster if I'm wearing less armor because the recovery from my previous action will be faster. Same thing can apply to any casters, if I want to CC a group of enemies as soon as I can, I can do so faster if I'm wearing less armor. You really just have to play around with different weights of armor and decide for yourself if you think it's worth the slower recovery or not.

So, don't tanks without might have low fortitude scores? Meaning a 3 might tank would be quite vulnerable to prone attacks? And by extension, losing all aggro once prone? Anyways, I like the idea of the AI making occasional risk/reward assessments to disengage from the tank, the result being a bit less min/maxing. Sure you could just equip greatswords or something instead, but then your tank will be far less tanky and his enemies less likely to disengage from him (more likely to overwhelm him). Properly balanced it should discourage 3 might tanks with no accuracy wielding hatchets, without overall discouraging the use of tanks. They would just have to balance their offense and defense. Suddenly those weapon mastery talents look pretty tantalizing, and Eder on your frontline wielding the resolution Saber is suddenly looking a lot better than before, he would do enough damage with his disengagement attacks that enemies would not try to disengage to often, yet still be tanky enough that you want him there. You'd also probably want more than one, instead of one tank and 5 squishies, you start running 2 or 3 melee of varying ability to hold enemies, 2 or 3 squishies, and 1 or 2 backliners who can hold their own when necessary.

Considering their organizational structure, like a cell based terrorist organization, most of them probably don't know who the leader is anyways. The person who knows the most about the organization is the most likely to be able to assume its leadership, Aloth may qualify. I personally don't think the Leaden Key will be a part of POE 2. Maybe it'll be the Gods, some, all, or one of them.

Probably depends a lot on your build, for example, the boots "shod-in-faith" synergize incredibly well with monks.

Given his dual personality, it's not hard to imagine him going off the deep end regardless of what his ending was, but, because it is relatively weak (his personality), I don't think he'd make a very memorable antagonist.

I'm thinking about a playthrough where I use neither armor nor shields, haven't decided on the classes I'll use yet.

I'm pretty sure that some or all knockdown attacks are fortitude attacks, and I think prone reduces defense and reflex both, so then you could hit with other attacks. I'm not sure about Eder's prone attack because it doesn't say if it attacks fortitude or not, but I know the monk attack force of anguish is a fortitude attack. To bad it's only 2 uses per encounter even if it does attack fortitude, i'm sure there are other things you could use that attack fortitude as well though.

Does your monk have any problems with having to much deflection? I mean are the wounds stacking up enough for you to benefit from turning wheel? If you aren't having any problems with wounds then your build is probably just right for a passive monk offtank/dps, if you are then having less points in perception/resolve and more in constitution may be the better option. I'm assuming that on PotD you probably don't have too much deflection, and therefor your build is working pretty good. I know that if you were playing on hard though that would be to much. My preferences lean towards an active monk playstyle that requires more micromanagement, so I can't really provide much more feedback unfortunately.

Probably depends on your definition of cheese, but if it includes petrify or kiting then there is probably no way to solo him without cheese.

So far a reach weapon cipher has been performing very well for me, I am finding that as long as I pay attention she does very well while staying relatively safe. The only big weakness she has are large aoe attacks, like the opponents that explode on death, fire blights and phantasms I think.