Raven Darkholme

Well as I wrote in topic I'm using it for flanking with Persistent Distraction.

Hm, maybe the reach of my fists just felt weirdly high to me, because I never played with engagement slots before because it seems mostly useless. (Could engage a ranged enemy even when one kith type melee was already between me and the ranged (and also engaged)) I will test out more engagement slots later and see how many I can engage with the help of kiting and escape, but ofc one of my major plans was reach but you guys are right ofc, I forgot u can't even engage from reach.

Because I really like the class I messed around with Tactician/Trickster today a little and for the memes tried out defender Stance. Totally unexpected the range of pcs own engagement seems really high and I imagine it would be even higher with reach weapons and it is very easy to engage a lot of enemies (ranged characters can be repositioned easily with a little kiting) which in turn triggers persistent Distraction and with a flank immunity item triggers brilliant. I wonder how many engagement slots a Fighter/Rogue can have, 10? (it does not seem to be limited by the amount of enemies that can engage you, as far as I can see pcs own engagement is separate from enemies)

I just tried this vs Ooze and Symbiote immediately ended Saint's War effect, but without Symbiote I can't Wotw? edit: It might have been related to tb mode, turned to rtwp and kept Saint's War, but when I wotw symbiotes instadie and I'm back to 0.

You can't pickpocket when observed, unless that somehow got changed.

If you play with a party you can import a mercenary with gear.

Late reply but yeah those defenses are mostly from shield (weapon and shield style for the insane reflex) and buffs like Llengraths as Boeroer stated. edit: also defenses don't do anything for me in case that wasn't clear and are nowhere high enough for any of the megaboss fights.

Well there is still other ways besides cipher, but I don't want to derail this thread any further, once again great find and great build.

Even tho I haven't tested it with ticks I'm quite certain least unstablke coil won't work with those. I used it quite a bit with chanter and it doesn't work with Eld Nary for example, it appears the hits have to be in very short succession and any kind of delay in damage stops the coils effect. The build you made for Aloth is quite nice but for a lot of endgame requirements it doesn't do much more than simply casting brilliant on a priest (with a cipher). Still very nice find for sure.

Last time I checked modals didn't stack with actives, so they also counted as actives. Mirror Image is far worse in this game, because for some reasons also grazes remove it, afaik 8 grazes remove the entire buff, so I guess you lose 1/8 per hit, also not only deflection attacks can remove it. Hit to graze is pretty good as well in this game, cuz AR is op as opposed to Poe1. Not sure about the disengagements I seem to remember it works with engaged weapons but not 100% positive.

Wow another finisher, congratz @Armaxy! I just wanted to clarify that at least what josh posted on my stream was purely related to having to reload a game because of bugs. He might have meant that bugs were fair game in general but he didn't specifically say that. Maybe he said it elsewhere tho.

Fewer enemies get an attempt at interrupting you, but interrupts can be quite vicious in TB solo so rapid casting is probably not the way to avoid them.

god cheat code?

Maybe I play too much solo and just have a different perception of slow or fast combat, but with my trio party and the chanter fights never felt too slow, I think both in Poe 1 and 2 just adding a barbarian will probably make most fights insanely fast, no matter what the comp looks like. But youa re right fun is most important if playing with a party for example I personally need a "theme" or it would bore me to death.

I mean there is other fights besides megabosses where these types of characters shine, but I think it's safe to say that quite a few people have different opinions on what makes a character strong. (And I honestly don't think there is a wrong or right opinion here, opinions usually form from personal preferences and experiences) I have played with parties to little for my opinion to carry too much weight for others than myself (I never used a companion in Deadfire, ever. And in poe 1 I only had two full playthroughs with a party one of them a trio another a six chanter meme party) but from my limited experience I can say that especially in Poe there is always a way to not only include one solo type character but make it the centerpiece of the party without it it wouldn't work. From my experience with other games like Baldur's Gate, kingmaker, Tyranny and quite a few others I can say that the type of synergies you can make in poe don't exist in those games and if you try to play solo characters in a party they end up doing their own thing while everything else minds their own business as well. I feel like PoE is unique in regards of synergies between different classes so while my own record of finished playthrus with parties have been meager I have played most of the classes extensively and enjoy theorycrafting parties every now and then. A probably unpopular opinion I have: it would be much easier to make a party that shines at trashmobfights and can't beat megabosses, then to make a party optimized for megabosses which somehow finds a way to struggle with the rest of the game. And I think in this little detail our opinions differ: for me it doesn't matter if I don't get to use my full arsenal in every fight, as long as I don't struggle and am just somehow "unoptimized" it's ok, as long as the optimization for the difficult fights is there.

Hm, it seems like we define "strength of a class" very differently in the first place. For me the strength of a class doesn't need to come to play in every little trash mob fight, but it is important that a class does it's jobs in tougher fights (If one wins a fight "too quickly" for a tank to take damage, does it really matter if the tank could have been less tanky and the fight would have been over even more quickly?) As to PoE 1 specifically while I never build a paladin like that solo, since paladin's main weakness to me personally was damage and not tankiness, in fact I buld a very similar paladin when I played with a party, even tho it was only a trio: Very high resolve and general defensive stats, less damage (but not dumped), but in my specific party this paladin fulfilled an awesome role because my party members were Kana and GM, the cipher casting mind web on the paladin, which turned my entire party into defensive powerhouses, but chanter and cipher were build fully offensive and this was only possible thru mindweb being on the super tanky paladin. (While intense micro can often solve this without such tactic some fights felt like an absolute breeze because of this setup, which are insnaely tedious without it.

Squid's Grasp can just be bought tho and Kapanga Taga is not that hard to obtain. Gipon Prudensco is somewhat tedious to get but shouldn't be exactly hard with a party either. You are right it does shine solo and many fights will be over before one will need brilliant, also there is little need for it with Ancestor's memory, but all that doesn't change how op the tactician and bloodmage are, it just pretty much says: meh most of the time I don't even need something this op, but it nowhere takes away from the strength of a class. (Shouldn't soloperformance actually be the true measure of a class's strength by itself anyway? If you take other classes into equasion like the cipher or priest it says more about those classes than the class supported by it, and if we go by party play only nothing beats the opness of cipher and priest combo and you can make any class shine with it, Ghost Heart (to get back on topic :P) will be much stronger with brilliant from cipher and other ranger subs will be much stronger because of brilliant + SOT + BDD)

I mean keeping a party unflanked is not that big of a deal there are at least 3 items with flank immunity and very slight micromanagement will do the rest.

Bloodmage and Tactician are more op than Troubadour, Streetfighter and Trickster by far. Just because they feel especially good in boss fights doesn't make them any less good in other fights. (Especially Wall of Draining + Unbending combo is especially good in trash fights and no less good in boss fights)

That's a shame. The bigger Aoe is sadly pretty useless solo and there is no reason not to use upgraded lightning invocation 90% of the time since it is insanely good, does more damage and doesn't require a corpse and when the rare cases arise where you wanna do non lightning damage, chances are you have Seven Nights already which while being more expensive in phrases is just so much better overall, especially with the upgrade (one could even intentionally avoid lighning immunes till then but since there is also summons AND autoattacks....). Tbf the Aoe is pretty amazing if one plays with a party and for a low phrases invocation the damage is quite ok.

Oh I expected it to work like Poe 1, does that mean only 1 corpse explodes even if there are multiple? The indicator is greyed out if you don't have a corpse selected, so I don't think it's possible to activate without targeting a corpse.

Haha I just searched for white worms and this came up, I totally missed your post earlier. Not sure if it really missed I used it twice and there was just no reaction on screen OR in the combat log, also there was a lot of corpses around and it's an AoE, no?

Yeah I'm taking b6 (p-5-p) and quite a few other things but I know why I'm having trouble sleeping and sadly only time and patience will fix it. I took sleeping pills for 12 years because doctors aren't very smart and when my liver couldn'tt take it anymore I had to go against doctors orders (and I tried several different ones and they all refused to coopoerate, which made it really hard to lower the dose cuz they would keep describing me high dose) and stop taking them, now my body was so used to sleep on taking the pills that it needs some kind of signal to go to sleep which of course isn't there anymore, so all I can do is to tire myself out naturally as much as I can, take b6 and all kinds of other natural stuff and just hope that eventually my brain willl work normally again, but after 12 years it takes some time to readjust.

Yeah I've had a hard time sleeping for the past 4 months and it's really hard to concentrate, that's why the other day i managed to die in maje twice lol.

I mean it's a lot less good for party ofc, but for solo you won't be able to always keep the pet alive unless you are a priest multiclass which is also highlevel enough to do the bdd sot thing. One of the things Ghost Heart/Cipher could do for example was potd digsite drake, while ofc at that low level a normal pet would just get slaughtered and you can't even revive yet at level 4. Ofc it becomes slightly different once you reach pl 3 and can revive, but solo that might not be ideal either, since you will get bumrushed by the enemies, while reviving. I guess it completely depends on the classcombo, a class with summons like monk, wizard, druid, priest or chanter would not want ghost heart, since you can open combat with pet and then use the distraction to summon your regular stuff and someone who can keep the pet alive wouldn't want it cuz no reason and it is really easy to keep it alive with party as has been stated already or with a ranger/priest.