Elric Galad

Some at least. And Nimble enables running on the side up to your target. No one will engage you then. I think at 1 Bond without other change, Bonded Fury would be strong, if anything for the massive increase of secondary defenses. But won't fix ranger as a whole... which might be your underlying point. Good definition You're too much focus on high level role. There are much more details below this level. Applying long duration Enfeebled is a role on its own. Debuff/DPS if you want. No one else can do that at least. Not sure tons of MC can do the infinite Single Target CC of a built-for-crit SC Stunning Shot ranger. But you were implying it. For AoE damages (its own category of damages), Whirling Strikes will top most things MC can bring. At least for burst because it is ressource consuming. That said, at some point you convinced me that SC Ranger only have a marginally better role than the ranger half of a MC ranger, which was your point I guess. I remember thinking the same when people pointed "errr... SC Chanter can summon 4 Weapons instead of 3, wow" Depending on other classes is not an issue in a party. When it starts to matter is when it requires dedicated ressources from other member. In a party, you will spam AoE Heal anyways. Requiring Pain Block from time to time isn't necessarily dedication either, since another character could have required it if your pet didn't take the damages anyway. But see more below. I disagree. Pet isn't more significantly more frail than other non dedicated tank characters. And I play in PotD with a party, which is BPM target. Please note however that all these arguments absolutely doesn't change the conclusion : since rangers have been given dedicated pet heal, this absolutely needs to be significantly better that what another class can do for any character, not just for the pet. Heal Companion isn't strong enough to be worth picking most of the time, "the cipher will do better with Pain Block" indeed, as you point. So I will address it indeed. This is slightly independant from SC issue, even if it does help a bit since Heal over Time scale well with PL. Not with Robust though, I think since the biggest issue with Robust is that it doesn't stack with other Robust. The real issue is indeed not the name but similarity with Rogue. I don't want to create a Rogue carbon copy. Still not my experience. This is only true in Solo I guess, where the pet is expected to do the tanking unless going melee ranger I guess. That said, buffing Heal Companion will help. That is a valid point. At some point Distraction Training worked on any attacks. Which was good because Bonded Fury was excellent at buffing secondary defenses. But people complained your own AoE backfired when pet was Hit. It also works on Grazes because people complained of the relatively low deflection of pets. Most foes don't have 50 Acc above pet Def. I don't want people to be forced into Distraction Training though (one should not feel commited to a particular Tier 9 choice), and it should work okay with a bit of Heal Companion buff. But the conclusion is that Ranger requires another option for getting Bond. Distraction Training would be a complementary way. But yeah, a pet-based Bond regen shall not be based on pet Crit, for sure ! In POE1, it was sort of "broken". Among the top 5 non-caster most broken abilities. I could have name it second most broken non spell ability after Dragon Trashed honestly. Granted that martial classes worked with having a couple of quite OP abilities for each of them, which was not degenerated because of absence of Multiclassing. Basically it was "balance born from unbalance", especially when compared to the brokeness of casters. I don't want to copy Gambit and people here pointed Twinned arrow to be fine. Some even said it at 2 Bonds but that worked only during burst wit Frost Seeker, which I believe to be too narrow. Also basing it on Crit needs the obscure design you can see with Wall of Flashing Steel. Or it would be too good with multi hits weapons. This still is only true for solo IMHO. Which doesn't change that Heal Companion needs a buff. Probably to 12s for heal and Hardy after upgrade (to align durations). That is 100 base heal scaling with INT (minus initial tick), MIG, and double PL scaling. Pain Block is twice slower healing and heal base 70. So this should be enough. This is the order of magnitude of the buff, but I'm still wondering about Bonded Fury / Hardy Companion redundancy. Still a MC Seer could go Heal Companion + Pain Block... So that won't fix SC Ranger... But make it more viable for Solo, at least. And open possibilities to tie Bond regen to the pet. Also SC Ranger can go Heal Companion + Shadowed Hunter. As you can see, I'm not decided yet.

So my conclusions for now : - Bonded Fury needs a buff. Nimble is great in my own experience though. Acute works with several pet abilities, even if not great. Could be tweaked to 1 Bond with a bit of Recovery, since Bond is the issue. - Keeping the pet alive isn't that hard in my own experience. Granted my SC experience was with a bear Stalker with a druid in the party spamming AoE regen. Heal/Hardy Companion will probably receive (yet another) buff though, also because Bonded Fury buff could make Hardy obsolete. - Vengeful Grief could be buffed a bit, maybe without expectation that it will save the class. Maybe a slow Bond Regen. - I'm not too much in favor of pet independant Bond Regen. The ressource is called Bond after all. And on Crit would be too similar to BPM SC Rogue. The Vengeful Grief Bond regen could address the defavorable scenario when pet is down. - I'm considering setting Heart Seeker as per encounter instead of Bond costing. Would ease the Bond dependancy. Or intermediate solution such as cheap with long cooldown. To be continued

How do you feel about BPM SC Rangers ? I got recent complaints about it from @Shai Huludso I started thinking again about the class. The thing is, I've tweaked most of SC Rangers abilities and I was pretty satisfied with the results for each of them. To summarize BPM Considerations. Tier VIII : Bonded Fury is a 2 Bond instant pet buffer, with all 6 Tier 2 Inspirations. Basically 2 times stronger than BPM Inspired Discipline, but for pet. Whirling Strikes has not received major buff. Basically a better version of Heart of Fury, but that you can't use with dual mortars. Twinned Shot is a great 1 Bond attack, the best for damages apart accurate wounding shot (but instant). The nice thing is that it synergizes extremely well with weapon with per Hit/Crit effects such as the obvious Frost Seeker. Vengeful Grief is... probably not as useful as I imagined since it indeed works only in a ****ty situation where your pet is down, with all the abilities you invested on it. Probably a good enough ability on its own, but won't make SC that much significant. (Great Soul is slightly better for all classes) Tier IX : Stunning Shot : Not changed, does its job. Good ability, maybe not top tier, but good synergizes with stuff like... ahem... Frost Seeker again. Distraction Training : great now with a reliable stacking debuff and a roughly 7.5% chance of +1 Bond per attack. Good on its own, but won't fuel your build. Shadowed Hunter : good package of buffs (like 3 times longer Disciplined Strikes, Clarity of Agony, half of Savage Defiance and repositionning for both you and companion), worths its 3 Bonds. Good synergizes with... again Frost Seeker. As @Shai Huludmentionned, a not convenient aspect is that companion shall be alive to be activable, it could make SC Ranger slightly more versatile to remove the requirement (unless it works weirdly since it auto-target the pet, I'll check). Heart Seeker : the 4 Bond infinite duration Enfeebled, probably the game most powerful attack ability and the biggest trump card of Ranger. Obviously so expensive that can't carry SC Ranger on its own. I feel this ability is forcing a bit SC Ranger usefulness with a single special trick. (Prestige not changed obviously, probably not worth picking for Ranger) All in all, I find mostly good or very good abilities (I disagree with @Shai Hulud for that) BUT overall I still feel that something doesn't fully work. I think what causes this impression is the following thing : - Everything cost a lots of Bonds, from your gamechanging Heart Seeker to humble Marked Prey. Do you want to start with Bonded Fury, Marked Prey and a Heart Seeker Shot ? Good, you have 4 Bonds now (plus bonuses, but still). It's really hard to use these high tier feats without basically skipping every low level ones. - Ranger scales very poorly with PL. For all non Tier 8-9 abilities, SC Ranger is mostly the same as MC. The animal companion is the best example. - There is not something obvious and powerful that would make the SC a go-to solution. So what could I do ? I'm thinking about adding an infinite "pseudo passive" effect to Bonded Fury that causes companion attacks to give back Bond. The inspirations themselves would still be limited duration, but once the Bonded Fury has been activated, the regen will lasts the whole encounter. I could also buff a bit Whirling Strikes and Twinned Shots which are melee and ranged SC Rangers Bread and Butter. The special thing about SC Ranger is their special attacks. (MC Ranger does not have so much punch, by far, but can use their trick and passive to synergize with another class.) These unique attacks can be seen as Ranger true specialty, since they don't have an absolutely gamechanging passive. I'm thinking about buffing Whirling Strikes DoT duration, and for Twinned Shot... maybe add an additional bounce ? Could cause a bit of an overbuff with a certain weapon quoted several times on this post... I don't want to buff too much Tier 9, cause it could force certain playstyles since Tier 9 ability points are so limited... Having to pick a particular Tier 9 ability is a big constraint for a build.

Transcendant Suffering should give exactly the same results with or without BPM. It gives 7 more PEN, but fists start at 0 PEN instead of 7. What is slightly better is that Food bonus systematically stacks, so you can stack 2 PL from Potion of Elevation with the +1 one from food.

Okay

It's 2 x PL. So 14 for MC and 20 for Prestiged SC. 14 per tick is a bit above what robust can regen, so isn't that big. Once more it has to be a significant drawback. SC gets arguably a harsher penalty which doesn't seem fair. PL scaling is annoying though since it makes any PL boost a drawback. I might be tempted to tune it a little to 3 + (char lvl x 0.5), up to 13 at level 20. 13 is a much more satisfying number than 14 (cause it's rounded 2/3 of 20). Not much of a boost but just cutting the PL boost drawback.

Berzekers isn't supposed to be a strict upgrade over barbarian though. +2 PEN, + 2 AR, and 30% Hit to Crit is top tier material. It has to have a significant drawback, not just one that forces you into Mowdyr/DoCB. I won't use Blood Storm with Zerkers cause you won't control the Frenzy duration as well. Voidward and BPM Moon Godlike help mitigating the damages as well. BPM Savage Defiance buff helps too. Also indirectly since it doesn't cancel/make redundant Hardy anymore since it is no more a Robust inspiration. At high level, you will have way more ways of mitigating the health loss, so the scaling is nasty but probably appropriate. But a Berzeker best interest may not be to be 100% of time under Frenzy effect. Basically you use it when you have health to spare, as for Sacred Immolation.

Good to know. That is a little detail, but Heart Seeker is an auto-hit. Yeah, I wasn't taking God challenges into consideration. BPM isn't balanced for this. It is still strictly better than Lay on Hand as long as pet healing is concerned. And can be upgraded with a rather long duration Hardy, while Lay on Hand can't (I mean you can grab one of the 2 Zeal improved versions, but that is a different ability). I think it is fine, just indeed not strong enough for solo, since pet is an offtank at best. Hardy is also mostly useless vs such High PEN foes as Dorudugan, and may anyway require Bear to start becoming relevant. SC Ranger is probably not suited for solo then (which is not a surprise, I just had some hope for this particular battle). Never had pb as a party member, the Line auto-hit enfeebled is contributing enough. I'm not sure there are many SC that can Solo as a general rule. Apart Wizards and maybe other casters. Monk maybe ? SC tends to give you more specilization in your class assets, but for Solo you need some degree of versatility. Need to heal (at least yourself), deals damages, tanks, etc... And I'm ot even speaking about God challenge which requires another level of specific skills (I'm not forgetting your request of Monastic Unarmed Training for everyone by the way).

BPM buffed Long Pain to recovery 3s. They are basically ranged fist with 5m range and +1 base damages. A bit like what you get for Instrument of Pain bar versatility (and plus Driving Flight). It's a bit off topic but sometimes I wonder if the easiest BPM class against Dorudugan could be non-Ghostheart SC Ranger. With Heart Seeker, you can cut his regen in half for the rest of the encounter (and lower its HP pool a bit) and Vengeful Gried gives you permanent Nimble and Tenacious once pet is down (at the cost of a bit of some accuracy). With the cloak, you can be immune to fire and you can find a way to escape magnetic overdrive disengagement attacks, and from there you only have to run and shoot while spamming some Twin Arrows with Potion of Enlightenment. Not sure how it works in practice ^^, I'm not into solo, and SC Ranger is probably not the best solo class for the rest of the game.

In case you want to try the new version of Blood Sacrifice (the proper description works with the complete mod, but isn't included in this particular file) cl.wizard.blood_sacrifice.gamedatabundle.zip@Shai Hulud

Yes, basically this. There might be other way to do but I'm probably not going to reopen the subject. You have to consider that I also worked a lot to make all shifts balanced which also increases the benefits of the subclass. Adding a cooldown on a modal would feel weird. But I fully get why one would prefer Jayd's version. No harm in modding a mod

@Noqnhas actually made a tool to simplify the gamedata files edition. Look in the modder subforum.

That's good (and sad) findings, but unfortunately this is about the harcoded part of the effect. Not something that could be addressed by tweaking Gamedata.

If we're speaking about Forbidden Fist ability, this might be due to following Community Patch change (refer to CP notes on Nexus) : Monk: [...] Forbidden Fist penetration decreased from 9 to 7.

I think the very best item for interrupting should be Scourge of Bezzelo, granted that it is dropped by Frightened Child who could be scary to include in a very constrained run. It makes 3 separate rolls, all of them can interrupting with crossbow modal, which reliably interrupt and can even dig through concentration layers. Edit : OK you already mentionned it.

Usually : - If it is a Vanilla bug, best to post on Balance Polishing Mod thread. But as long as you tag me it's OK. - If it is a confirmed BPM (not vanilla) bug, you can post it on Nexus on the bug register. That being said, I'm not too eager to get bug report that could tarnish the reputation of the mod while it is... I hope... less buggy than vanilla (given I solved a few issues). Especially if it is not justified (such as an actual vanilla bug...). So you could use the same method as above. Penetration from active buff don't stack. Penetration from Inspirations are active buffs (with a few exceptions that I usually remove for harmonization anyway). Penetration from weapon modal such as Haymaker are active buffs. This might be annoying but this is not a bug. Beyond redemption. Hostile status display their duration without taking into account who they are applied too. Which is slightly sad when an effect is always self-targetted. Armor from active buffs don't stack. Armor from Inspirations are active buffs (with a few exceptions that I usually remove for harmonization anyway). Armor from modal such as Iron Wheel are active buffs.

BPM halves the buff time to +0.5s per hits (but doubles the de uff to - 2s per hit too)

It might work only on "Party" (controllable) summons, and not allied ones. Or maybe just Clones indeed. I just checked the file, but nothing suspicious, it is supposed to work on allies.

Clones won't get the talent anyway. In Vanilla, their fists are really bad (no scaling). In BPM, they are even worse (0 PEN). As said above, I don't plan to add abilities to classes that don't get them in vanilla, although this one could make sense, and it wouldn't hurt NPC if I couldn't add to them. By the way, I'm also considering adding fast runner to monk and Bull's Will to Cipher as they are no reasons MC Monks could run faster than SC (stacking fast runner with Monk 25% speed talent) and MC Ciphers could have higher Will than MC (stacking +10 Wil with Cipher specific +15 Will talent). Monk Fists were set to 0 PEN and PEN was displaced to Unarmed Talents (to solve foe monk damages issue, search the BPM thread if you're really interested). Tutotilio's benefit from Unarmed Talents, so has to be set to 0 PEN too. Other shields benfit from weapon quality instead. Okay, so if it is a clone specific issue, I think I could add the scaling intresically to the clones. It might work. The scaling only applies to specifically tagged items attacks.

Are the items/fists not scaling on you, or only on the clones ? Might be a side effect of the implementation method (which can't be easily bypassed unless I had my own army of devs). On yourself, sometimes you have to reequip them to get the scaling, it might mess with clones. Tuotilio's Palm/Fist having a Zero PEN is a consequence of correcting a bug for foe monk damages. Having Monastic Unarmed Training / Transcendant Suffering is now the only way to use them, granted that without these talents these attacks are quite bad in vanilla anyway (but in the context of God trial run I can see the point...). I can't see another alternative for this apart non zero but very low PEN (something in the 3-5 PEN range) which might not help you anyway. Other Shield weapons should be scaling appart Tuotilio's. (NB: They don't scale in vanilla.) Please read the Mod Notes before asking (at least the classes/abilities you want to use) As a general advice, it would be a good idea to read them while planning a full run with all trials activated, so you won't be caught off-guard by something you don't expect. Or you can get ideas to use abilities you have discarded by vanilla habits. Yeah potions of Enlightment work for both classes, which can be seen as an indirect buff for Caster/Caster Multiclass.

I won't allow Great Soul for Blood Mage cause adding abilities to classes is a bit tedious and it would cause a confusing display saying it adds Empower Point to a class that does not have any. BPM Great Soul isn't great for caster anyway, so it is Just a minor drawback for BM.

Corrode isn't a Keyword, it is a damage type (Same difference with Burn damages and Fire - there is even a Water Keyworded Burn damages spell) But what I've self-ruled so far is that all spells with Corrode damages should either have either Acid or Decay KW. Decay is specific to Druid and White Worms spell. All the other spells should have Acid. (But BPM did not change Spirit of Decay itself.) So I will add Corrode damage type to all the ability and attack that miss it. For Walls, I suspect that is because they are coded as a hazard zone and not a direct attack. It is most likely impossible to change. I might be considering buffing a bit Fire Wall to compensate (for this and missing Scion of Flame and Fire KW beneifits). Wall of Many Colors does not require buff.

Noted, should be addressed for next version. I see no valid reason for Wall of Many Colors to be an exception (of course, each individual talent has less value here).

For memory, it would lead to a fixed amount of (10 + 2 x character level) x (1 + Might bonus) for blood sacrifice. So 50hp at max level at 10 MIG. The idea is to cut healing entirely and it is what it does. A -100% penalty always negates every bonus. It's a double inversion thingy and quite complicated to explain, although there might be another topic where it is explained. Basically penalties act multiplicatively with bonus up to a point where they compensate each other. -25% negates 33% bonus -50% negates 100% bonus -75% negates 300% bonus -100% negates every bonus So if you have 150% bonus and -50% malus, the malus negates 100% bonus and you end up with a 50% bonus.

I don't think I would remove the healing cut or recovery time, but I've been thinking about 2 actually unfair traits of Blood Sacrifice (that are hidden by its OPness in vanilla) : - The raw damages do have a PL scaling and a level scaling, making it quaadratic and making PL bonus kind of detrimemtal. I'm thinking about cutting the PL scaling. - Encapsulated randomness. When you finally get the major version of Blood Sacrifice (up to tier 9) and loose the most hp, you might end up regenerating a tier 1 spell anyway. Health loss should be IMHO either proportional to the actually regenerated tier (technically impossible to mod) or fixed. So I'm leaning to set health loss to always average, making it predictable AND FREAKING DISPLAYED (godd side effect). Both changes would be fair and a slight compensation for my nerfs I think.