Raven Darkholme

Well not that great for the Ultimate since you have to use it with abilities so it doesn't degrade. My rogue/(non skaen)priest was in a good spot to beat the Ultimate about 2 months ago but I just stopped playing because I didn't feel my best since then. At the end of the day a spot on the plaque is nice for those who've earned it but not getting it isn't the end of the world.

Here a little demonstration of Shared Nightmare AoE, keep in mind vs weak enemies as shown in the vid, the Aoe won't get to max, sadly I have not found a big enough group of enemies stronger than this one so far.

Chanter/Wizard is my fav combo in the game.

True if your goal is to debuff him to prove you can, it would be a useful affliction, but why debuff him if you can just permaparalyze him?

Yes, even tho the soul blade passive is not clear on this it also increases your starting focus by somewhere around 25% of your max focus. I am "only" at 4000 max focus atm, so my starting focus is "only" 1k, but I think with a cipher/wizard it might be less tedious to get more focus. The kind of tedious but so far best method I have found is to whack a ranger pet out of combat until I see one of my concentration stacks disappearing in red over character. Then use Strand 10x, rinse and repeat. What might be less tedious is to go to Belranga with wiz/cipher and WoD, once Belranga is angry enough to killsteal her own little spiders, stasis shell her (her defenses should be super low at that point) edit: I honestly think 1k starting focus is more than plenty already, should kill dorudugan in seconds and you could even use SA once he is half hp or so

Thanks to @HaplokI just tried this out and it's the most broken weapon in the game if you are willing to abuse any form of extension duration and a soul blade's passive giving them +10 Focus pool on melee kill. With 1k focus it already ticks for 130 every 3 seconds, with 2k focus its at 290 for some reason, haven't found a big enough enemy group to get to 4k yet, but I will report once I have It does seem to multiplicatively increase the more focus you have the higher the benefit per point of focus seems to be. This is much more broken than bleeding cut, since it doesn't scale off the damage of your initial hit but your focus instead. (and bleeding cut is already super op)

Well its not that hard to get 4 foes even with fights like Dorudugan, belt of magrans chosen will provide you with potentially infinite enemies. You don't need to "spam" Blood Sacrifice for unbending WoD combo, just refreshing WoD is enough and it's duration is far longer than 3 secs. I'm still not convinced that healing received even affects Unbending, since similarly worded positive effects don't affect it either. I mean there is still quite a few ways to cheese the game, if all else fails single class monks with brilliant will still demolish everything and all kinds of chanter combos with many lives can just kite forever, chanter/psion is especially busted.

No, because you have to have the unique item equipped to keep the 2nd unique effect. (the only exception found to that so far is Gipon Prudensco) But if you have Amra equipped and kill an enemy a new frenzy procs and overrides the old one even if the old one has infinite duration. However this way you can potentially still have it stacked during most normal fights by constantly killing stuff and reapplying the buff. Keep in mind I haven't tested a lot of items with this and deadfire just loves to have exceptions to "rules" everywhere, especially if these rules are unintended in the first place. For example I tested this with Weyc's Wand earlier and it doesn't work at all, you extend the intital buff, switch weapons quicksave and reload, so far everything is fine the buff loses its original name and chenges to "The Weyc's Wand. But then if you empower an ability again you just don't get a new buff, stacking or not.

My Soul Blade has a focus pool of 4000, but you're not gonna like how I got it. Jokes aside even with a normal party comp and no cheese soul blade should get more focus during a fight than Ascendant, you can kill a lot of enemies in 60+ secs and each melee kill is +10 focus pool. edit: wow I didn't even know about Seekers Fang, gasp. I haven't tested it with every weapon and deadfire is famous for having weird exceptions everywhere, but in general yes thats how it should work (theres just better afflictions than shaken imo)

This is why I suggested Soul Blade because it is the only melee cipher option that nakes A lot of sense with barbarian, barbarian is all about AoE weapon attacks and Soul Blade's Soul Annihilation does alotta damage which can be spread with barbarian. I think @Boeroer's suggestion was more because it seemed like you wanted to use less boring abilites than melee. so the Barb/Ascendant would be more like a caster hybrid. Sure it can still use melee, but theres no real point in going Ascendant then. (Once again in this game you can make anything work, and min maxing can steal fun ofc)

If you never remove shroud after reequipping it, it SHOULD stack, I will test in a little bit. Most unique effects stack like this see Gipon Prudensco where the unique wording of the duration even makes it stack infinitely. On most items you can "only" restack once, like Scordeos will end up giving you max 40 accuracy to all weapons etc. For shroud you might not be able to stack int, because Int buff still says "brilliant" (also doesn't disappear when you are confused tho), but you definitely should be able to stack resource regen, its just kinda overkill, brilliant in itself is already op enough. On another note I tested if Ondra's Wave generates focus and it does indeed SEEM like it does. There just doesn't seem to be a good way to test it, what I did look at my focus before and after a "normal" sceptre hit and one where wave procs and with a decent amount of enemies my normal sceptre gives me 200-300 focus per hit while wave seems to proc 500-600.

Hm hard to say, focus is displayed weirdly once you have 3 digits, let alone 4. The next time I load up the save I will put slow motion and try and keep track of focus generation. One thing I also found out during that testing, even tho unrelated: Since if you have a unique item effect on you and then remove that item, then save and reload, the item effect gets renamed to the name of the item. (wtf even is that abomination of a sentence :P) Brilliant from Shroud of the phantasm doesn't seem to be considered the brilliant inspiration anymore. (buff is just called shroud of the phantasm, even tho if you hover over your int it will still say +5 brilliant) The way I discovered this was getting confused during a fight and NOT LOSING MY BRILLIANT. Now this is kind of massive because it makes self confuse strategies much more effective even in longer fights where you might want brilliant. (you still can't use Captain's banquet which kind of sucks tho. terrify is super annoying) So one of the things I wanna do with the massive cipher AoE is hire a chanter and then do the good ole confused Grave Calling chillfog triggrs another chillfog strategy just with 4000 % inc AOE xd. But even for solo this is pretty nice ofc, because Bers/Chanter would run out of frenzies eventually without Brilliant, I guess Tactician would kind of work, but its much less micro intensive to keep up berserker rage than confuse from bb.

Well you can deal with him quite easily, just not by targeting Fort. The main ways to damage him are things like Bleeding Cut and Soul Annihilation. He can die in 10 secs to a solo rogue as @Waskihas shown. He can also be perma cced with Blade Cascade + Grave Calling, even tho he is immune to mind afflictions, item effects are not afflictions and only share the name.

I have to add that yesterday when I tested it I was tired and stupid and made some mistakes. Reloaded the save today and either I straight up looked for a 1.5 radius skill that grew to 5.9, thinking it was the 2.5 one, or instead of looking at the numbers in combat with full focus I looked at them out of combat. Either way in reality the 2.5 radius actually becomes 9 with 1000% inc Aoe, so I decided to hire a ranger adventurer and grind focus some more on their helpless pet. (One of the reasons I was so annoyed yesterday is I really wanted to grind my focus solo but with single class cipher it is so very annoying opposed to ranger/cipher mc) I grinded my focus all the way to 3.8k and most Aoes actually become screenwide. WoteP honestly profits least from it, because it mainly becomes very long. I tried applying Soul Annihilation with it and only hit 1 other enemy even tho I was positioned well enough to hit 5 at least. The best thing really is Watershaper focus, that thing is a beauty because of the rod modal and additional bounce and the 5% proc for wave. (which procs all the time btw because of how many enemies are hit) It doesn't even matter if enemies have several hundred hp the entire screen just melts in seconds. I was using Blade cascade tho.

Well to an extent I can see how it's easier with a party because you can do several things simultaneously. The main problem is besides Morningstar most fortitude debuffs also target fort. If you have the extreme example of Dorudugan who has also massive resolve Morningstar debuff will last for 1 sec or so :s He has 187 Fort, so even with -25 you have to hot fort targeting debuffs vs 162 fort in a very short time window. (Yes with a party you can just keep smacking him with Morningstar but it can still be awkward). I agree that the rest of the game is not as annoying as Doru but there is quite a few enemies with bloated fort and to me it alwys seems easier to resort to other skills.

I tested around with Shared Nightmare and it isn't super impressive. I'd guess it's not a multiplicative bonus to AoE like Int A 2.5 radius is not even getting tripled with over 1000% AoE (It goes to 5.9). I already have over 100% Aoe from Int here and low and behold that is actually close to doubling AoE.... The numbers do look hilarious and ofc the AoEs are even nicer than just with alotta int, but its just not impressive, only "cool".

You don't really need to mod for Brilliant, just use strand of favour cheese xd.

You can confuse yourself with Street Sweeper btw. In a party it also way easier to reapply the debuff since someone else could use the sweeper. The only downside of confuse is it doesn't work with Captain's Banquet or Brilliant, that's why I rarely use it. Very good looking build @Jayd doesn't take too much to change it into a solo build btw, the stats are evry similar for what I've been using ever since this game came out, ofc vs megabosses you'd have to kite with Many lives, so there would be little changes here and there to the build but nothing too big.

Ye you might be right about Amra, shame. Whispers is probably the best option, but I guess the ranged aoe weapons are nice for clearing lower hp packs.

Just be sure to use bleeding cut.

Well as I said you can make anything work as @Boeroer pointed out a way to amke it somewhat viable already. The question I would ask myself is if you'd enjoy any cipher/barbarian combo, if you dislike SA "spam" especially Ascendant is all about spam, sadly thats how deadfire is balanced with the bloated hp on many enemies. I already pointed out SC wizard and will gladly do so again, because of how much variety you can bring into every fight. Ciphers sadly just arent about variety in this game at least not if you actually wanna do damage with them. Or before any cipher lovers cry out in anger let me try and reword that. The combination of high enemy hp and very high fortitude defense on relevant dangerous enemies makes awesome damaging spells from the cipher pretty useless in the harder fights (at least on potd) so you resort to the things that work, targeting deflection or at least will (won't always work)

Ascendant doesn't work too well with Barbarian (ofc you can make anything work) Soulblade + barb is a match made in heaven.

The only one I've ever seen effective vs Unbending is Enfeeble but the wording is different there: Enfeebled -5 Constitution, +50% Hostile Effect duration, -100% Healing done Either way you could just have smth like Dawnstars blessing with +50% healing received to counter it, but I doubt it even works that way.

Doesn't really matter if your Unbending heals you for several thousand hp does it? Can even reduce raw dmg with that ring from dunnage. Edit: Healing received buffs do not scale unbending healing, so neither should debuff from community patch?)

Hm I never really considered Shared Nightmare super good, but the more I think about it, might be secretly busted with AoE weapons ... I wonder if Amra crits can spread Soul Annihilation....