the streaker

I agree with you, and this is exactly how a ranger's pet should be played. The difference is most people take care of their melee rogue, but don't give a **** about the ranger's pet, then complain that it dies too easily.

What armor and skills/build did you use to keep the melee rogue alive through PoTD?

My guess is you might be able to pull something off with a chanter running around while preparing his summons. I could never find half the patience to actually try it out, though.

I don't mean to make this another ranger argument, but if you think 10 less accuracy tips the damage scale in favor of rogues over rangers, you're sorely mistaken. And driving flight is the bomb, don't you dare argue it! If you don't position your pet and ranger to maximize use of the synergy and driving flight mechanics, don't blame that on the build. Anyhoo, the best warbow rogue is a wood elf. talents: weapon focus (xxx) penetrating shot marksman vicious fighting abilities: all of the +damage ones deathblows Just keep penetrating shot active at all times, and make sure someone from your party is applying status effects that let your rogue do sneak attacks (and x2 status effects for deathblows). You can look up the wiki for all the effects and who can apply them. Very important you keep this up, otherwise the rogue's damage will be pitiful. In terms of weapon sets, you don't have much options unless you take a second weapon focus in arquebus. Or you can pick the blunderbuss/pistol weapon focus, as each is good vs. a different amount of DR. I think at (very roughly) 20 DR, the warbow starts falling behind the arquebus/pistol in damage.

You could load another non-ToI savegame and the current ToI game would not save.

Congrats, that's quite the achievement Also, not to say yours or any other TCS run is not legitimate, but unless it's 100% streamed, there is always the potential of backing up saves and restarting from the last save point at every break in recording (in your case, 6 parts on youtube). The first 100% confirmed legit TCS run will be the one that is streamed live, I think.

Oh man, we must have been playing a different game!!! Did you manage to ever get your cipher to level 11? Amplified wave - (maybe shoot blunderbuss if bored) - amplified wave - shoot blunderbuss - amplified wave. Everything in a 12m radius dead and spent the -entire- fight on the ground. I would definitely love to hear how well you can play the druid and wizard to beat that but such a large margin, I really would! As of 1.05 blunderbuss isn't working as well for focus gen unless you use drugs. It is possible to use arbalest/arquebus/pistol/dual sabers to almost the same effect though. You can also open with only 1 AW now. The big problems of AW is that it targets fort, which is quite high for most tough enemies. So while AW spam obliterates trash encounters it doesn't work that well in many boss fights. Priest/Wiz otoh have spells that work very well in most cases. They would never outdamage a level 11+ cipher though, since he racks up damage like crazy on trash encounters. But to me it is weird how people rate the class performance on damage dealt in trash fights, which has nothing to do with your party/class effectiveness. The only thing trash fight performance influences is clear speed. We were talking about pre-1.05 ciphers, see above. The comment on fortitude is not fair, the cipher has great spells that target will, so there's something for everyone. Large/strong enemies have high fortitude, but a lot of high-priority targets are not large and do not. Gaze of the adragan is one of the wizard's best spells, and I've never heard anyone say it's trash only because it targets fort. A graze still gets you 50% duration of a great effect. Which wizard and priest spells would you say set them above cipher in terms of effectiveness? If I make a list of my favorite spells and explain why it will become the nerf list for the next patch so I won't . Check my vids in this thread http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79181-paladin-solo-vs-adra-dragon-potd/ (and i'm actually avoiding the most cheesy stuff there). Try to replicate this with cipher (Well, this fight IS doable with cipher, but needs much more finesse as of 1.05). too long, can you post a summary re: group play wiz/priest?

Oh man, we must have been playing a different game!!! Did you manage to ever get your cipher to level 11? Amplified wave - (maybe shoot blunderbuss if bored) - amplified wave - shoot blunderbuss - amplified wave. Everything in a 12m radius dead and spent the -entire- fight on the ground. I would definitely love to hear how well you can play the druid and wizard to beat that but such a large margin, I really would! As of 1.05 blunderbuss isn't working as well for focus gen unless you use drugs. It is possible to use arbalest/arquebus/pistol/dual sabers to almost the same effect though. You can also open with only 1 AW now. The big problems of AW is that it targets fort, which is quite high for most tough enemies. So while AW spam obliterates trash encounters it doesn't work that well in many boss fights. Priest/Wiz otoh have spells that work very well in most cases. They would never outdamage a level 11+ cipher though, since he racks up damage like crazy on trash encounters. But to me it is weird how people rate the class performance on damage dealt in trash fights, which has nothing to do with your party/class effectiveness. The only thing trash fight performance influences is clear speed. We were talking about pre-1.05 ciphers, see above. The comment on fortitude is not fair, the cipher has great spells that target will, so there's something for everyone. Large/strong enemies have high fortitude, but a lot of high-priority targets are not large and do not. Gaze of the adragan is one of the wizard's best spells, and I've never heard anyone say it's trash only because it targets fort. A graze still gets you 50% duration of a great effect. Which wizard and priest spells would you say set them above cipher in terms of effectiveness?

- send in fighter, buffed to the nuts. Make them run around a bit so that some/most of the spirits use their teleport. Engage as many as possible. - send in the rest of the party, shoot some nukes, bunch everybody up against a corner to avoid teleports into the middle. - buff against fear - priest uses armor of faith and consecrated ground to fight the collateral AoE damage from killing banshees or whatever - use fire, I think they are vulnerable to it

Oh man, we must have been playing a different game!!! Did you manage to ever get your cipher to level 11? Amplified wave - (maybe shoot blunderbuss if bored) - amplified wave - shoot blunderbuss - amplified wave. Everything in a 12m radius dead and spent the -entire- fight on the ground. I would definitely love to hear how well you can play the druid and wizard to beat that but such a large margin, I really would!

And it's the number one character that gets you into these near-defeat situations because it's not doing anything during the critical moments of the battle. Description of Chanter class is: "Does nothing for x seconds. If you manage to survive because your party was handicapped during this time, you have 90% chance to instantly win battle." Chanter class is like Eagle class in Tolkien's world. They are nowhere to be seen but if you're doomed there's a 90% chance they will appear and do something useful. Oh come on, exaggerating much? There's chants that frighten enemies, reduces reload and recovery times for shooters by 20%, add 30% damage. A lot of bad chants, but there's enough good ones considering you only need 2 good ones at any one time, and the rest can be activated situationally. And the summons... assuming you can last 15-20 seconds in a fight, how many times have you summoned two ogres and had them both die? Pretty much guarantees a win at that point. The tough fights last long, the easy fights who cares if the chanter didn't do much? Also, he pretty much only needs strength and dexterity, so you have a lot of flexibility in how you build the attributes. Can make him a solid tank or shooter.

I like playing ranged elven characters, so it seems pretty fun to me. What's fun is entirely relative. How could you possibly find a constant +5 accuracy bonus fun? If that bonus was gone, but everything else in the game took a 5 defense hit, literally nothing would change. You don't define what's fun for me. OK well good for you, then. This thread is about the power of their racial ability, not your fun.

I like playing ranged elven characters, so it seems pretty fun to me. What's fun is entirely relative. How could you possibly find a constant +5 accuracy bonus fun? If that bonus was gone, but everything else in the game took a 5 defense hit, literally nothing would change.

I completely agree. Building up enough chants to use a 3rd level invocation takes so long that by the time you could use one, it's often too late to matter, since your party has probably nearly won the battle or is nearly dead. I think that the devs desperately need to rebalance Chanters. But in the meantime, I tend to think that the best way to use chanters is to mostly ignore their invocations and just focus on making best use of their chants, including the highest level ones. Chanter is the number one character to pull you out of nearly dead situations and into victory. Extremely useful if you're not save scumming and/or playing ironman. With the speed chant and maybe some speed items or talents, he can almost always save your game. Also, the Ila chant and the +30% lash damage chant are great for shooter-heavy parties. The rest of his abilities aren't that great, but that just means you can outfit him as a damage dealer and spend few points upgrading his chanting ability.

I think it's a bit too strong. It's not even a fun ability, just "ok, so you're an elf, your dice rolls are automatically going to be 5% better than everyone else's." On top of that, they get a dexterity bonus. It pretty much does not make sense to pick any other race for a non-melee character. Having said that, it's a single player game, so I don't care much. It's not game-breaking.

How is it unreliable? Winter wind will consistently push a target away, and the fighter will consistently chase the pushed target. Failing to account for this is the failure of the player, not the game. I get that it's too much micro, but then you're playing a 6-man party with almost zero automation, where you have to order each character's every move. This is to be expected, right?

Turn off the option of auto-attacking when inactive, then hit X during battle if he's moving somewhere or in the process of attacking.

Awesome, thanks for testing. Got my hopes up for marked prey though :s

Ditch the rogue or battle mage for a cipher, I think. Rogue is just damage, no utility, and having a lot of flexibility is useful to deal with ****ty situations.

Very easy to cheese with chanters. Turn on the movement speed boost chant, run around until you have enough for a summon, then cast that summon to absorb damage while you attack and activate useful chants. Then rinse and repeat. Once you get the ability to summon two ogres, there are almost no fights in the game where both will die before you can summon another two.

The other way around, ranger out damages rogue in ranged combat. But picking pet talents is nearly useless and theres basically one good ranger build (with slight variations) so it's not an exciting class at all.

The hell? Who's going to bother even choosing an ability like marked prey that gives 20% lash damage vs. 25% DR, and on top of that, lash damage does not take into account DR bypass on a weapon or through special abilities? What a useless skill now, not even worth taking. At least at 40% for a once-per-encounter skill is something you can look forward to. I guess rangers are now limited to a couple of wounding shots followed by watching the combat log for damage numbers...

lol who voted no for a decent spirit shifter? You want druids to be crap at shapeshifting? The shapeshifting shouldn't be too strong like some of the suggestions in this thread seem to hint at, though. They're already great mages, and if they can just pop relentless/returning storm and go wreck something in melee while they wreck everything with lightning strikes, I don't know why I'd choose any other melee character for DPS. Their magic would have to take a hit.

Noticed a mistake on the spreadsheets that incorrectly accounted for missed shots. Revised is below: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s2dSwb53xGedRD7yZlknm6gk780KMWzAawco3Kq4OpE/edit?usp=sharing My methodology for working out damage per hit is: main damage = [%chance to graze/hit/crit] * [avg weapon dmg * (base hit + might mod + quality mod + dmg mods from abilities) - (DR - weapon DR bypass - ability DR bypass)] lash damage = [%chance to graze/hit/crit] * [25% of avg weapon dmg * (base hit + might mod + quality mod + dmg mods from abilities) - 25% of DR] where "base hit" = (%graze / %graze/hit/crit) * 0.5 + (%hit / %graze/hit/crit) * 1 + (%crit / %graze/hit/crit) * (weapon crit mod) The results push the advantage further in the ranger's favor, who is now number 1 in total DPS (vs melee or ranged rogues sneak attacking) when considering driving flight. Main target only, he's about 60% of a melee rogue sneak attacking. You can see why - sneak attack and all other rogue +dmg skills are just one part of the damage formula, adding up in the "dmg mods from abilities" section of the formula. Meanwhile, the ranger's speed boosts increase attacks/second, and effectively multiply the whole damage formula by the amount of extra attacks they give. Driving flight likewise.

If you mean "ciphers can do more in trash encounters that doesn't really matter in the first place since you can beat them with little to no health lost" then yes. If you made a list of the top spells in this game, cipher spells would be all over it.