KDubya

World where gods have concrete influence in people's every day life by direct acts of power that people can easily perceive themselves it would be quite odd if they would start kill outright children that is marked by god, is such mark blessing or curse is debatable but marked by god anyway. Especially in area where they suffer something (Waidwen's Legacy[hollowborn children]) that they think is caused by people crossing will of the god, probably is even less willing to do anything that could anger gods more, even if they dislike or even fear how those who are marked by gods look. In ancient time Roman law had "The mother is always certain, the father is always uncertain" If your child does not look like the father there is a good chance/certainty that the wife was unfaithful. In a tightknit village community where everyone know everybody, having a child that does not look like you would be the source of ridicule. Having a child that looks like a monster would be much worse. Was your wife unfaithful with a demon? Was your wife unfaithful with another man and the demon child is a punishment from the gods? Knowing how cruel kids are when it comes to someone being perceived as different, how cruel would they be to the little demon spawn in the village? The game setting has a lot of superstitious people, it would be easy for there to be a drought or a crop blight and someone would spout off that it must be the demonspawn that caused it. People accused of witchcraft were drowned because witches are made of wood, if you float you are a witch and they kill you, if you sink you drown but are not a witch.

I tested in game with hired adventurers fighting in the tavern and checking the combat log. When one handed style activates you get a message.. With fist & shield I punched out my five companions and read the message for every hit, the single handed never activated. One handed style while holding a shield works with weapons but not fists. Weapon and shield style works with fists and shields. With weapons you can have both one handed style and weapon and shield style active at the same time One of them is bugged, either one handed style should not work with a shield or it should work with fists.

A monk can interrupt AoE with rooting pain when they receive a wound. A ranger with hunting bow or war bow with vicious shot has a very high accuracy for more crits and more crit assisted interrupts and has a pretty high rate of fire as well. Stunning shots on crit would be like a super interrupt. A fighter going for high deflection will have a high perception, even going for a more DPS based build will still have above average perception along with maxed might and dex. A barbarian also wants an above average intellect so they'd run out of points to place in perception. To me a fighter would just naturally be a better interrupter due to where his stats get placed compared to a barbarian, who'd have to go against type to get a similar high perception.

I full clear and wipe out everything I encounter. I usually pick a dialogue option that initiates combat, I really liked the "You can call me spider squisher" My dialogue choices end up with aggressive and rational as traits, playing with the spoilers off. The call me the November man as after I pass through everything is dead. Monsters always have something to gain from killing them, crafting ingredients, sellable loot, something. Also I don't like leaving enemies behind me, what if they walked out and hit me from behind while I engaged another group? What if I forgot that they were still there and ran into them on the way to the exit while heavily wounded or just out of position? Better to kill them all and let Magran sort them out.

How did estocs perform? I screwed around with having characters "fight club" at taverns, auto attack only. Mainly for seeing differences in weapon types, armor and stats for fighters looking for good DPS while maintaining adequate tanking abilities. In my results, especially in plate, two handed did better than dual wield due to needing to bypass DR and estocs were runaways. I tested at level eleven, I think the issue is testing level one characters. At that level there are no abilities or talents to differentiate the contestants. At level one stats have a massive impact on performance, hence the winning combo of hatchets, high res and per for the largest deflection. At high levels your stat bonuses matter less as you get talents that add 15 to deflection or 20% to damage, plus your accuracy becomes closer to your target's deflection. At level one you have like a 30 accuracy and deflection would be like 46 for your winner. He'd be missed 31%, grazed 35% and hit 34% of the time.

I look at the godmode races as something people can use to cheat but without having to actually use the console. It makes it hard to look at class balance when every encounter can be made so much easier with the simple "make everyone a moon godlike, steamroll the game" When a fighter, or better yet a monk, moon godlike can do a better job at party support via AoE healing three times per encounter than a Paladin there is something wrong. Replacing any class that will consistently take damage with a moon godlike is the best strategy, there is not a better racial ability, except perhaps for the fire god's AoE fire aura when combined with carnage and blooded. At the least the moon godlike's heal should be self only, no AoE. Changed to per rest if you keep the three heals or per encounter if you drop it to one heal at 50%. The fire godmode's fire aura should not increase per level, nothing else does and this should follow suit. In a world where hollowborn are put to death, I find it hard to believe that some monstrously deformed devil child would not be killed at birth. Also there should be a setting or a mod that changes all of the backer godlikes into something else, every other person you see is on fire or glowing blue.

Not really. Do you know what the difference between 18 Dex and 10 dex is? Yeah. +24% action speed. This means that a pike-wielding rogue with 18 Dex will be able to hit something with his pike 4 times in the time it takes a pike-wielding rogue with 10 Dex to hit it 3 times. Sounds positively game changing, right? Except that it isn't. Because fights don't last that long in PoE, unless you're a really Sh*tty player, Or you're soloing. And we're also dealing with Pikes. They're slow weapons. And no amount of Dex will make them fast weapons. Maybe if we were talking about Stiletto dual-wielding it'd be a different matter, but again...we aren't. How can attacking four times with a pike instead of three not be a game changer? But it would if it was four stiletto strikes instead of three? I am confused here. 24% more actions is 24% more actions regardless of what you are doing, it is always more and doing more is better than doing less. Who would you rather be the rogue with 300% added base damage attacking at the base speed or be the rogue with the 300% added base damage attacking 24% faster? Your battles finish before you get four attacks off? In that case I'd recommend upping the difficulty. Of course this is just the opinion of a ****ty player.

This is my custom PotD party. First time PotD, other than a short trial of iron experiment. PC melee Pirate Rogue, coastal aumaumau wielding one handed sabre and (soon) a pair of pistols Might 20 Con 8 Dex 19 Per 10 Int 3 Res 18 Two hander fighter spec'd for damage, human. Will be going estoc/war bow currently with flail and shield as I need the deflection more than damage. As I get wary defender and better gear will be able to open up on the damage front, or at least that is the plan. Might 19 Con 10 Dex 19 Per 10 Int 3 Res 17 Tanky chanter - Boreal Dwarf - his job is to live long enough to summon phantom, on the frontline. sword and shield Might 15 Con 10 Dex 8 Per 12 Int 18 Res 15 Pale elf monk - on the frontline in heavy armor using fists, sometimes fist & shield, uses torments and FoA Might 18 Con 15 Dex 20 Per 4 Int 11 Res 10 Wood elf cipher - main job is CC which also sets up sneak attacks for the rogue. Has pike for reach melee, hunting bow Might 18 Con 7 Dex 19 Per 8 Int 18 Res 8 6th man is story companion, will rotate them through. After clearing temple went and got Durance. Level 4 just cleared magrans fork and black marsh. Rogue leads in damage followed by monk, fighter and chanter tied for 3rd place, chanter has the least. Temple was difficult due to low level, bad equipment, and general PotD issues of higher stats and numbers. With three guys on the frontline the battles can be controlled. After firing two weapon slots off the rogue circles around with one handed sabre for reckless & savage attack slaughtering. Cipher drops phantom menace to debuff the crowd or whispers small tough group then regens focus with pike from behind frontline. Monk spams torments and FoA as he gets wounded. The chanter gets a summon off while taking a beating. The whole team has decent damage output spread between melee and ranged with max dex on most for faster actions. Once I get some plate, fine weapons and firearms this should start to snowball into a wrecking crew.

Is the duration of the prone effect caused by a crit with Tall Grass affected by your intellect? If it is not I might swap your intellect and resolve, as getting interrupted with a pike is bad. No one plans on getting hit but it sure seems like it happens a lot If the choice is between dex and might, dex will add more damage. As a rogue you will have a lot of damage modifiers and all are additive. A higher dex gets you more attacks all of which are affected by all of you damage modifiers. As in you get 0.24 might, 0.5 sneak, 0.5 deathblow, 0.2 reckless, 0.2 savage, 0.45 superb for a total of 3.09 damage multiplier at 1.24 attack rate with 18 might and dex for 3.83 damage per base attack speed . A 17 might and 19 dex gets you 3.06 at 1.27 attack rate for 3.88 damage per base attack speed. The more modifiers that are present the less importance there is on might. It matters most in the beginning when you do not have all of the damage modals nor expert weapons. So then for say a barbarian it would be wisest to invest heavily in Dex and Int. You could leave might at 10 and invest the rest in resolve or perception to help with survivability? Your just basically giving up a 30% damage modifier for survivability and there are plenty other damage modifier to take. And is it best to take fast or slow 2 handed? I also read that 2 weapon style only affects recovery and not attack speed. Also for 2 handers. Is Tidefall better than any estoc because of enchants? Better than say b lade of endless paths? Might is still very important, its just that grabbing the Living Lands for the +1 Might is probably not as good as grabbing. from a pure DPS standpoint, the +1 dex from Deadfire Archipelago. A barb is going to have less total damage mods than a rogue so Might will have a larger overall effect. A barb also has several attack speed modifiers which will make better use out of a higher Might. A fighter gets to increase his passive endurance regen plus add to his total damage with a higher Might. A barb gets to increase his total damage which then increases his carnage and is amplified by his attack speed increasing abilities. A spellcaster has only Might available to increase his damage output, beyond the small elemental boost talents. Might is very important for casters. A rogue gets so many additional damage modifiers than everyone else that stealing a few points from Might will not be noticeable. For weapon types I am partial to big two handers to punch through enemy DR. My time with barbs has been limited and with poor results, the inherent sturdiness and durability of fighters fit my gameplay style more than the crazy, all out assault style that barbs are better at. There are interactions between attack speed and carnage that affect dual wielding more beneficially than slower, bigger two handers, or at least that is what I've picked up from the forums. Barbs have a low deflection to start and frenzy drops it even more. I am not sure how successful you can be trying to get deflection into the 90+ range without really adversely affecting your damage output. It does not mean it can not be done, but I am not sure that I've read any barb builds that went for a more tanky approach, most have been something like get OSA, reflection gear, firegod, ........., profit.

Is the duration of the prone effect caused by a crit with Tall Grass affected by your intellect? If it is not I might swap your intellect and resolve, as getting interrupted with a pike is bad. No one plans on getting hit but it sure seems like it happens a lot If the choice is between dex and might, dex will add more damage. As a rogue you will have a lot of damage modifiers and all are additive. A higher dex gets you more attacks all of which are affected by all of you damage modifiers. As in you get 0.24 might, 0.5 sneak, 0.5 deathblow, 0.2 reckless, 0.2 savage, 0.45 superb for a total of 3.09 damage multiplier at 1.24 attack rate with 18 might and dex for 3.83 damage per base attack speed . A 17 might and 19 dex gets you 3.06 at 1.27 attack rate for 3.88 damage per base attack speed. The more modifiers that are present the less importance there is on might. It matters most in the beginning when you do not have all of the damage modals nor expert weapons.

I also found that heavier armor greatly enhanced my hireling monk's survivability. Up to level 3/4 on PotD with Pirate melee rogue, two hand fighter, tanky chanter, cipher, Durance and monk. Best I had for a long time was leather for him, got him mail and it helped a bunch. Even switched sometimes to fist & shield for the extra deflection. Due to the party make up the monk can't be a skirmisher, he is on the line next to the sword & board chanter and the fighter. Each level up is a huge boon to the monk as his high con adds a lot of endurance, can't wait for the first fist upgrade level. The monk is leader in KOs and in 2nd place behind the rogue for damage. When he does not get wounds he still puts out good damage via two fists of fury, wounds just mean he lets loose with the torments and the FoA (which has to be one of the coolest abilities in the game. Knock someone across the screen and keep them prone for ten seconds? yes please ) P.S. Does one hand style work with fist and shield? I've read that with a weapon and shield that the single weapon talent works, as in it is not an either/or as far as shields go. Does weapon and shield style work with fist and shield?

The no spell radius shown and calling in AoE attacks is like giving your own coordinates to the jets on close air support. Sometimes it is better to go in a blaze of glory if it stops the horde and saves the team. With a high intellect you still have the huge area of foe only so there is plenty of wiggle room there. I think a character circle is one meter in diameter so you can gauge the distance by that. This one change has made combat more exciting, at least in my opinion.

Where does an axe do better than a sabre? Both only do slashing. The sabre has a bigger base damage 13-19 avg = 16 compared to axe at 11-16 avg 13.5 A rogue with 20 might, reckless assault, savage attack with a superb weapon gets 1 + 0.5 sneak + 0.3 might + 0.20 reckless + 0.20 savage + 0.45 superb for total of 2.65. Average sabre does 42.4, axe does 35.775, or approximately 18.5% more damage. A normal sabre attack does 34.4 on average compared to a battle axe sneak attack doing 35.775. Crits would get to 3.15 for sabre for 50.4 and 3.65 for axe for 49.275. Even on a crit a sabre is ahead due to the larger base damage.

Ankhegs were like free experience. My favorite was a 1/2 orc fighter/cleric with flails, shield and plate. Get to like level 4 or so, AC -5 and then go solo the ankheg map. Afterwards go collect my companions and start the main questline. Shades are tough, hard to hit, inflict blindness and teleport. Plus that slow big missile that hits your weakest team members. Real pain on PotD.

How are the goldrot chews supposed to work? When my fatigued guy takes them it does not seem to do anything. Do you have to take them before you get fatigued? The house rules I use are: 1.) No godmode races. - the AoE heal 3 times per fight would be an awesome high level ability. As a free racial ability it is just crazy. The level scaling fire shield is another "I win" ability. 2.) No retaliation gear - too passive aggressive and to me is un-fun. 3.) No exploit/bug abuse/cheese - This is rather subjective but I like to go with the paraphrased "Cheese, I can't define it but I know it when I see it" Setting a trap in stealth along the route that a monster will take and then shooting with a bow to get them to run over the trap is a good tactic. Running in and out of LoS to get a bunch of monsters strung out until there is only one or a few left to attack you - this is cheese. 4.) Don't reload a save to do an encounter again. If your party gets wiped then you can reload, but no reload until everything works perfectly. 5.) Turn off the AoE display for your spells. No more does your wizard have a GPS linked to a rangefinder to allow for placement of fireballs to within millimeters of your own crew. You need to estimate the distance and sometimes you miss a few enemies and sometimes your melee gets a little singed.

I think it is more debilitating if you have five glass cannons and one super-deflection tank. If the only tank gets dominated the glass cannons all get wiped. If you have multiple frontline melee types losing one to a dominate or even a death does not doom the entire team, you have some redundancy. As the SEALS say "One is none"

I wouldn't say Paladins are better tanks, keep in mind that Fighters can use Vigorous Defense (turning their defenses to +35/+30/+30/+30 for 15 sec) once per encounter, but more importantly is that Fighters have Critical Defense (turning 20% of incoming crits into hits and 10% of hits into grazes) which is a ridiculously powerful talent. Anyway, I'm willing to concede the point only for the fact that some of the most staunch defenders of the Paladins class, calling the Paladin "A great class that simply plays different from other classes and that people are playing them wrong", have brought up your exact quote about Paladin tanks as "proof" to back their claims. That you're disagreeing with them yourself is simply amusing to see. I don't think Critical Defense is that good myself. My fighters are already stacking defense, so critical hits are either unlikely or impossible. It also means the hits-to-grazes effect is less useful. If I'm hit on a roll of 50 or higher, Critical Defense effectively transforms that into a roll of 55 or higher. But if I'm only hit on a roll of 70 or higher, Critical Defense effectively transforms it to 73 or higher. It's a talent that gets less useful the better my fighter is at his primary role. If your fighter is a sword and shield, high per/res deflection tank, I agree that the Critical Defense ability would not see much use as you are not getting hit in the first place. This is tanking forever. If you go for a damage spec'd tank with two handers or dual wield, with deflection in the 70-105 range, then the ability comes into its own. At that deflection range you will get hit and the ability will block the worst of them. This is tanking "good enough for long enough" On my hard play through I ran into some chain stunning, paralyzing, teleporting enemies around level 13 or 14. As I blundered into them without advance knowledge, my team quickly started to suffer. Aloth, Durance and Grieving went don early leaving PC two hander fighter, Eder, and a fighter hireling with dual flails. Their DR, deflection, endurance regen and hit point pools allowed them to take the beatings while paralyzed, the self rez brought each of the three back into the fight, eventually Eder was the sole surviver who had to kill the last three alone.

Nice write up. Regarding the level two Phantom Foes it lasts a really long time, base 20 seconds, with a large radius of 5 meters. The -10 deflection will help all of your physical damage dealers and every attack by your rogue will be a sneak attack. At higher levels deathblows needs two debuffs to fire off and a huge AoE, long lasting Phantom Foes gets you one of them.

What level are you playing at? Who else is in your team? Are you solo? Tanking can mean different things to different people. 1.) Deflection tanking - you have so much deflection that enemies just can't hit you, 120+. Shields help/required to get to this level. Fighters and Paladins have the most class specific talents to assist in reaching this plateau. Others require more gear. This type of tanking requires the other members of the team to do all the killing. One super tank might be enough to hold the front while the five glass cannons obliterate the crowd. 2.) DR (Damage Reduction) tanking - you get the heaviest armor and just eat the incoming hits. Anyone can do this style. Works best when combined with deflection tanking as the number of hits are small and those are mitigated by your DR. I'd recommend this approach for anyone who will be in melee on the front lines. 3.) Offensive (or good enough for long enough) tanking - Here your frontline melee tries to get as much DR as possible and as much deflection while trying for maximum damage. Two handed fighters in heavy armor, spec'd for damage while still running defender modal. Deflection 95+, 40+ damage per swing. With this you can not hold back the hordes for ever like the deflection tank but you can hold them long enough for your higher damage output to put the crowd down. The crowd killing is more spread amongst your team and might need more than one frontline melee. A monk could perform well in this role, would have less engagements than a fighter but would output some good damage with nice AoE cones, would probably need heavy armor to take the brunt of the enemy horde. Monks are unique in that they need to take damage in order to generate wounds that are then turned into large bursts of damage via torments and FoA. A super high deflection would preclude generating wounds but if you are not taking damage you can tank forever and just auto-attack beat down the mob. A monk using fists has two additional empty weapon slots. You could put a shield in one for when you want to slow down the rate of incoming damage. You could put him in heavy plate with a shield on switch, maybe a endurance drain weapon on the other, and have him stand in the middle of the fray. Or put him in padded and use him like a rogue flanking the frontline. They are pretty flexible and durable.

Everything is % based, there are no step levels of boni such as in NWN nor massive boni at the highest level as in AD%D (Baldur's Gate) 15 Might gets you +15% damage, 18 might gets you +24% In the end a few % difference will not make a difference as the stat you lowered will allow another to be higher. On the highest levels of difficulty you need to be as efficient as possible, but on anything else it is pretty forgiving. Just play to what ever strengths your class and build have, or better yet play your team to its strengths.

Ten worked fine for me through the endless paths. There were a few (maybe 3) traps that I wanted to cross but could not remove. I just moved everyone away and sent Eder in like the Hurt Locker guy, he made his saves. This is a good place for Itumaak, the EOD dog

I'm fairly certain the dual wielding talent is actually just a 20% reduction in recovery frame times, despite what the tooltip says. When tested, it completely negated the recovery penalty while wearing padded armor (-20% recovery) -- but it did not decrease total attack frame times beyond that. Anyways, I think the only monk skill I'd avoid is lightning strikes due to the problematic way that secondary damage interacts with DR (secondary damage always uses 25% of DR in damage calculation no matter what). Found my post about two weapon talent: ...there was zero attack speed difference between: a) daggers (dual-wielding), 10 dex, naked b) daggers (dual-wielding), 10 dex, padded armor (-20%), talent: two weapon style So naked two weapon fighting is just as fast as two weapon fighting wearing padded armor? As in it does nothing if you are not slowed by armor?

In the tech forum, a dev has posted that One Stands Alone is bugged currently and that a change is coming in a future patch.

The Resolution sabre comes with 20% graze to hit, with single weapon it'd go to 50%graze to hit conversion., it also has an increased crit multiplier which would greatly benefit from the increased crit rate that single wielding will get due to the +12 accuracy. Seems it was custom made for a single wielder. In a bad situation where your accuracy was 50 points less than the monster's deflection (due to deflection or being debuffed/blinded): Normal guy 0-65 miss 65-100 graze one hand weapon 0-53 miss 53-88 graze 89-100 hit one hand weapon with one hand style 0-53 miss 54-76 graze 77-100 hit The one handed style would increase your hit rate from 12% to 23% compared to single wield without the style and any other attacker will at best get a graze. The higher the difficulty level the better the one handed style looks to get.

It doesn't. It simply adds time to the opponents action timer. The function of interrupt isn't to reduce damage, it's to prevent it. Your proposed experiment is exactly the same one I suggested a few posts back. He won't do it because he knows how it will turn out. He knew how it would turn out before he posted which is why he jacked non-related stats. It reduces the damage you take by reducing the number of attacks that the monster can get off before you kill it. You don't want to test stat balanced builds or have to worry about random damage or getting killed by the bear during the test. You just want to see that if I interrupt every time the bear gets five hits before I hit it ten times, or the bear hits me seven times before I hit it ten times with no interrupts. This would show that a 100% interrupter could at best avoid two hits, real world numbers would probably be one hit difference. - These numbers are totally made up, just using them to illustrate my point. Once you see what the absolute best one can do with interrupt is, you can then determine its relative worth compared to other design choices.