the streaker

lol!

Nice tests. What about wounding shot? What does that do?

Druid makes a pretty interesting melee mage because of two storm spells which will regularly strike nearby enemies while you plug away with your weapon (even with a pike from behind a tank). Works really well for kiting also, which you might need to do if you've only got a 3-man party.

Keep in mind a lot of status effects reduce your defenses (and attack capabilities), so compensating with high deflect is more "expensive" than having high saves in the first place. DR always works, but it's not always enough and has other costs.

Whatever it is, try it without using scrolls, summoning tokens or consumables. Every TCS run that succeeds does so because whatever class you use can just use summons and rest after every fight. I think the intention here is "I'm so good, I can beat anything you throw at me"

Usually something that targets fort or reflex or will doesn't target deflection, so not getting hit (deflection) isn't really an option.

Sounds pretty good. The key point I think is for every party member to gain a tangible benefit from most/all of the skills, so there's actually some meaningful choice to be made in the skill selection part of levelling up, instead of being basically a meaningless task that it is now.

Would turning the difficulty down to easy and then restarting, reload the encounter in easy mode? Otherwise just keep reloading until you get lucky with the rolls (try to hit everyone with a blind and move into the corner, or end the game if you want to stick with your philosophy.

The problem is that other spells should be as useful as Mental Binding. Right now nearly none of them feel powerful to use. If every spell is as good as Mental Binding, then the Cipher on a whole would need a major beating with the nerf bat. Mental Binding should be brought in line with the others or moved to a higher spell tier. Not necessarily. You have to choose which spells to cast, so if there's one strong spell you simply keep using that one spell. If there are several options, you're still limited by time and focus to the same number of spells per round, but can at least cast several different spells.

These are all spoilers... You can go into the lower levels (not saying how many in total) at very low or very high party level, depending on your party composition and your ability, and your willingness to rest often.

Well, the highest level traps are the ones most likely to kill you, so you either save/load when hitting a trap, memorize or look up trap locations beforehand (just as cheap in my opinion), or max mechanics.

High level sneaking is only useful if everyone has it. What's your rogue going to do after he's sneaked into the enemy pack and backstabbed once? Die. There's barely any good scrolls for high level lore to be useful. Mechanics is universally recognized as the only valuable skill to max out, but for one character only. Everyone else gets no benefit out of it. The skills right now are pretty much flavor/roleplaying content.

Quick switch is most likely going to be "rebalanced" at some point, since right now it completely bypasses recovery time in exchange for a 0.5s delay and needing to have two weapon sets (a very minor disadvantage) and a lot of tedious micromanagement, so probably you shouldn't build around it if you're concerned with obsolescence. I think it might be stealthily fixed in some update, like how in 1.05 they inserted "Modal abilities now have activation and deactivation timers." which meant you could no longer activate modals right before an attack for the benefits, and turn them off right after to avoid the penalties.

I tried my first run on POTD/TOI and died at the bear cave... So then I tuned it down to Hard/TOI. Still the best decision I could have made in this game. Playing an RPG blind with no margin for error is great, and only doable once. edit: and the only reason I thought of doing it was because of this thread, so thank you very much OP!

So it looks like the monk doesn't really excel in any one aspect, but rather is a good tank with good melee damage output. Is that a fair assessment? It seems to me I'd rather have a fighter tank, and a barb for AoE or melee rogue for single-target damage. (ignoring roleplaying aspects, this being the builds forum)

I guess the idea is that smaller parties will get more benefit out of the xp bonus for having less than 6 members.

400+ posts, this guy knows how to search the forum for the million other times this question has been asked...

I haven't done the math, and you may be right, but the loss of Reckless Assualt (as it only works on melee) and the fact that a bow deals a lot less number of attacks in total than two fast or normal weapons, was in my experience substantially in favor of melee. By a wide margin. You also need to fiddle more with the other characters to apply a debuff since you can't flank the target yourself. Just my 2 ¢ of course Definitely true. Melee rogue does about 2x the damage of a ranged rogue. The ranged rogue has the advantage of being able to reach back row enemies instantly and not depending on positioning. Also, larger burst damage and far easier to focus fire on enemies.

Well that's exactly it, right? Either learn at level up or hunt down the grimoire. But you can also just go to the inn and learn all the spells you want for a nominal fee. Like I said its not a big deal, but it is an obvious circumvention of the game mechanics.

In their defense, a melee rogue has a LOT more survivability and unlike a pet, will actually have a prayer of surviving a disengage attempt. So while either may need rescuing, it's going to be a lot easier and a heck of a lot more profitable to keep the rogue up. My main difficulty with the ranger/rogue debates is that you can't count only the bonuses and not the risks and penalties in something so fragile as a pet being in the perfect position to attack the enemy that you want to shoot from an angle that allows driving flight, yet somehow the pet isn't being focused enough by these at least 2 nearby enemies to die from the attention. Depending on the Pet being always able to attack the exact right target throws away the freedom to choose targets that is the whole point of being ranged instead of reach in the first place. Perhaps part of the difference is how people use them... if you are always using doorways you can control how many come through, so as long as you only shoot one of the lead guys, you can be confident of getting pet accuracy plus driving flight. In other words, if you use your ranger like a gimped pike barbarian. But aside from the first couple of shots, I'm using my warbow rogue to nail archers/wizards that are too spread out or distant to be easily eliminated with spells. A ranger can do that, but 90% of the time driving flight and probably the pet will be useless if that's what he's doing. The only thing I could think of that a pet-using ranger could do better than a pike barb or melee rogue is stunlock the lead enemy in a doorway if they're using hunting bow. IMO you'd be better off ignoring the pet and concentrating on being the best gun user in the game, but then you'd have to abandon the "most accurate in game" claim. Curious where the rogue pulls this LOT more survivability out of? Low hp, low deflection, low DR, low move speed, low defenses thanks to min/maxed stats... got Escape once per encounter, which you have to choose over reckless assault, dirty fighting or any other great damage abilities at level-up. The ranger's pet can get master's call to KD and disengage, or takedown to KD then disengage. And anyways, I think all of this discussion is moot, because even without a bear, the ranger will out-DPS the rogue. I've already posted the builds and done the calculations elsewhere on this forum, but you're free to show me where I've made a mistake.

Funny that someone recently posted a full TCS run with a paladin on youtube, and has a partial ranger one on his channel also...

Not exactly a bug, but the wizard's spell-selection-at-levelup mechanic, including learning spells from enemy grimoires, is completely invalidated by the fact that you can go to any inn, create a wizard 1 level lower than yourself, and gain access to every spell up to that level. This essentially makes wizards identical to priests and druids, except you only have 4 slots per level. I can't think of any easy way of fixing this, or if it even needs fixing, but it makes spell selection feel meaningless.

I thought all NPCs in cities except for questgivers and shopkeepers have a day/might cycle?

What's so interesting about fighters in D&D? Barbarians? Bards? Clerics? Wizards and Sorcerers? You just picked the most boring class in PoE as a point of comparison...

Yes you're right. Even if you crunch the numbers, taking into account accuracy and attack speed and all sustained abilities, and work out an overall damage per second number, the ranger is superior to a ranged rogue. The pet hardly factors into the equation even if for some reason you can't figure out a way to keep it alive.