Boeroer

These days it might take some time I assume. Maybe we tag @SChin (hi Sam) for a quick nudge to know if the submission was received. Cheers!

Heartbeat Drumming used to work like Swift Flurry in the early days of the game. As soon as the community found out how easy it was to produce crit chains with both Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming the devs patched it. I never bothered to look into the code, but it was noticeably harder to proc crazy chains afterwards, but still possible. Your post makes it clear why that is, thank you! 😃

Not if you use (Enduring) Dance of Death. But if you want your Priest to mainly buff and only occasionally fight then I'd pick single class Priest.

A single class Priest can absolutely fight in melee. It's just so that his damage output with a weapon would be better if he multiclassed with a class which added some melee prowess. But in general you can stand in the front line and swing a great sword. I place Xoit as SC Priest at the front line all the time - often with a Morning Star - and it works fine. Will she be tanking many enemies? No - but that's not her role. But she can stand her ground against an enemy or two for long enough. In Deadfire, a Priest of Berath can summon a spiritual great sword for himself which has a nice corrosive lash that grows if your reputation matches your god's dispositions. It can become quite powerful. That way even a single class Priest can contribute with weapon damage. If you are okay with giving up the highest tier spells you can multiclass with not much regret. I personally love to multiclass a Priest with the Helwalker Monk because this has two main kinds of synergies: better melee output: with stuff such as Lightning Strikes + Turning Wheel and some attack abilities such as Force of Anguish or Torment's Reach you can do some serious damage, especially when paired with the spiritual great sword (resulting in a shocking lash, a burning lash and a corrosive lash on the sword). Also the high MIG of the Helwalker leads to more weapon damage. the Helwalker can offer +15 MIG (+1 MIG per wound and +5 from Thunderous Blows) and +10 INT (Turning Wheel) which are both fantastic buffs for casting: INT enlargens the AoEs and prolongs all durations, MIG raises damage and healing power(!). Spells like Shining Beacon profit a lot from +15 MIG (higher dmg per tick) and +10 INT (a lot more ticks) and so does healing over time such as Consecrated Ground. Aso you can be a bit faster (Lightning Strikes add +5 DEX and +15% action speed) and get some other goodies. The Monk is a great multiclass choice for a lot of classes, Priest is no exception.

Enduring Dance gives you wounds per second and accuracy, too. If you stay hidden and only use Dichotomous Soul to send summons out from hiding it can last forever.

No, you'd have to kill him unfortunately.

Hello, welcome and thank you! 🤗 Same 😉

Offensive Parry from the Whispers of the Endless Paths does drain health with a Steel Garrote. Iirc Riposte does, too.

Against Belranga it's good to have summons (like Dichotomous Soul) so she can destroy them instead of you. For Huani you need interrupts such as Force of Anguish in order to prevent the merging process. If you use Edér's armor with "Veteran's Maneuver" and also use Keeper of the Flame as weapon and have picked "Imagined Pain" you can farm wounds while doing Whispers of the Wind and thus spam it endlessly. You will gain wounds because Keeper of the Flame's AoE does friendly fire and targets reflex. Because you will be immune to reflex based attacks (Veteran's Maneuver) every AoE roll against you will miss, granting a wound via Imagined Pain. If you can spam Whispers of the Wind you can mostly stay invisible. If you use Ajamuut's Stalking Cloak then all attacks made during Whispers of the Wind will stun enemies. This is very good in the Belranga fight to kill a lot of little spiders fast in order to drop the defenses of Belranga quickly. If you put Keeper of the Flame in the main hand and Mohora Tanga in the offhand like we described above you can do a lot of single target and AoE dmg + CC with Whispers of the Wind. Not necessarily against the mega bosses themselves (unless you brought Belranga's defenses down a lot) but the weaker spiderlings and the smaller split oozes. Against Belranga you can also just hide behind some rocks, use Enduring Dance and send Dichotomous Soul summons to Belranga & friends from hiding - over and over again. You can also resort to that tactic in the middle of the fight if you have a potion of invisibility.

Then I assume Lightning Strikes is better in that case. Lashes do generate Focus.

PS: Swift Flurry/HBD procs do not generate wounds for a Shattered Pillar. I always forget if they generate focus for a Cipher. I believe not, but I'm again not sure anymore. Blame my reluctance to play Soul Whip Ciphers I guess.

Steel Garrote only drains health from direct damage attacks, not DoTs. Red Flag Flying does no direct damage so no draining. I would have thought that the Swift Flurry attacks however would drain health. If they do not: I learned something new. The order in which attacks appear in the combat log is not necessarily the order in which the attacks are processed internally. Not really. The phrase generation of a Skald is +1 phrase max(!) per attack action or "swing" - no matter how many attack rolls happen during that action. So even if you do 25 crits with Red Flag Flying + Swift Flurry/HBD you will only get +1 phrase point. However: since the Skald only gets a phrase point in 50% of crits, this setup makes pretty sure you get a phrase point every time you crit (and a crit chain follows). That's cool - but not insane. The good thing about the Skald is though: with Killers Froze Stiff you get a really nice paralyze effect (enhanced by the Monk's INT) which causes 25% hit to crit conversion on the enemy (not on you). This not only helps to generate more weapons crits in general but also is one of the few ways to convert a graze to a crit: If your character has graze to hit conversion there's a chance to convert a graze to a hit, but even if that character also has hit to crit: that won't get checked during the same roll where you initially grazed - because only one conversion type of your character is ever checked within one attack resolution. But if the hit to crit conversion is on the enemy this will get checked even if your char already had a conversion check. So the attack can go from char[graze->hit]->enemy[hit->crit] -> ouch! Not game breaking but a nice little detail. Killers Froze Stiff + Ben Fidel's Neck is a pretty good debuffing cycle for Swift Flurry procs if you can generate phrases quickly enough. Note that the most costly invocation determines your max phrase point counter. It makes sense to pick one very costly invocation even if you don't want to ever use it. Just to expand your phrase point maximum.

I think so, but to be honest I haven't looked at it in detail and also didn't test it as much as I did with most of the other weapons we mentioned. Very nice! 👍

PS: if I remember correctly then Magran's Blessing has a Fire Shield which also can proc Swift Flurry because this version of Fire Shield inherits the weapon attack tag from the shield it's attached to. So Magran's Blessing + multihit weapon could also be a nice pick.

I have definitely crashed my game countless times with Force of Anguish on a single-/one-handed Nalpazca/Stalker. So not offhand but main hand, nothing in the offhand. So that might play a role as well. Since Swift Flurry/HBD only execute main hand attacks (even if the offhand crit triggered SF/HBD) it is considered to be safe(r) to use Mohora Tanga in the offhand since that limits the risk of too many Red Flag Flying loops. But this is a theory mostly, slightly backed by some testing results but comprehensively proven I guess. Your observation with offhand auto-attacks may reveal something still. For example it could be that exceptions get caught by the game properly when attack abilities are used and then the loop gets canceled no matter what or are just more robust - but with auto attacks those exceptions might get totally unchecked and get handed up until the game needs to close before compromising the OS's performance due to memory issues. No idea, it's just a guess. But it could indeed be that auto attacks behave differently in that regard and that's why you see more crashes (or any) in the first place. Could also be that your hardware (RAM size, CPU etc.) influence how many loops can be processed until it has to shut down to prevent bigger issues. It might be that players with more RAM will see Crashes a lot less often than players with less RAM. Again: just a guess. But if a player tries out Mohora Tanga and it just works and doesn't crash the game often: that's great. I also made it fun despite the crashes. I just had to find a way that works well for me. In any case it's mad fun to just obliterate an otherwise difficult foe with a series of nasty crits - all in one strike.