Boeroer

Thank you. I will take the liberty and link directly to the post in question (less searching):

Yes, if you put a melee weapon into your offhand and a blunderbuss (for example) into your main hand and attack from range it will use the ranged weapon. And since that has 4 projectiles you can get 4 stacks or more with Driving Flight. With Fire in the Hole it's even more because AoE + bounce + Driving Flight. I once achieved a full stack (20) with only one use of Hunter's Claw on a tight group of enemies. I didn't test if Hand Mortar's Blinding Smoke also counts as hits (as it does for Resonant Touch and Avenging Storm). If so it would be even better.

No, because Whirling Strikes requires you to wield at least one melee weapon. As soon as you equip two ranged weapons (or one single handed ranged weapon) you won't be able to use the ability (greyed out). If you want to do huge amount of damage as an SC Ranger with mortars alone then pick SC Ranger (whatever subclass) and skill Arcana so that you can use scroll of Avenging Storm and then use Serafen's Hand Mortar with the enchantment Blinding Smoke. Use Driving Flight and Twinned Shot and you will destroy most enemy groups with one Twinned Shot (because Blinding Smoke hits will trigger Avenging Storm). But that's not a melee build anymore of course. No, because the cone shape of WotEP doesn't work very well with the circular AoE of Whirling Strikes. You will actually hit not that many enemies. You can use Keeper of the Flame though. Its flame AoE attack will hit you, too - but you can either raise reflex really high or wear Edérs armor (has an enchantment that makes you potetially immune to reflex attacks) or wear Rekvu's Scorched Cloak with an injury (in that case the flame AoE will even heal you). I also liked Stalker/Paldin with Bear or Boar. Brand Enemy unlocks Predator's Sense for cheap, Exalted Edurance raises AR of you both, AR and deflection bonus of Stalker stacks with Paladin's passives, Lay on Hands can heal the animal companion, Flames of Devotion + Ring of Focused Flames has +20 ACC which stack with Ranger's ACC bonuses and so on. Also cool imo: Stalker/Druid if Animal Companion and Spiritshift Form are the same animal. I prefer Stalker/Ancient I think.

Indeed. And because of the AoE of Fire in the Hole and Driving Flight and Fire in the Hole's build-in bounce (Chain Shot) you will do 3 AoE blasts for every target in range It's a ton of attack rolls... try with Avenging Storm... And one attack to each target with Scordeo's... St. Drogga's Skull instead of Scordeo's is also nice. It has a chance to trigger AoE dmg, too.

I played a very good (imo) solo Stalker/Bloodmage with a Morning Star (Willbreaker). The idea was that I would lower enemies' Fortitude and Will with the Morning Star and Miasma, my Bear did Takedown Combo on the enemy and my Essential Phantom with Draining Touch weapon could then hit easily (because Drainng Touch targets Will instead of Deflection) for high damage. Rinse and repeat. With WIllbreaker's enchantment that grants 25% miss to graze (awesome) and Gauntlets of Greater Reliability (again 25% miss to graze) and the general high ACC of Ranger/Companion it was always so easy to hit even the toughest bosses (excluding Megabosses, didn't do those). For example I soloed Neriscyrlas on PotD without any resting bonuses or consumables. The two additional sturdy bodies were great, too. My Geomancer went for high AR and not too bad deflection. In combination with the Wizard buffs he was very sturdy. Another fun concept was Stalker/Helwalker with one-handed Stalker's Patience spear in combination with Swift Flurry/Heartbeat Drumming. It has a nice enchantment that removes recovery after a crit (20% chance). With Ranger's high ACC and some crit chains with Swift Flurry etc. the recovery skipping went pretty great. Best against low defense enemies like casters and so on. SC Stalker with Fire in the Hole + Scordeo's Edge using Whirling Strikes (+ Driving Flight) is wild. It's more like a melee/ranged hybrid, but the combo is great because it also allows to use Hunter's Fang etc. with the blunderbuss which gives you plenty of stacks with just one shot (if enough enemies in range).

I tried to do that but I couldn't make the AoE size fixed then - as I described above. Else that would have been one of my preferred solutions, too. As I also described in one of my former posts. That pulling/bouncing was just born out of desperation. I knd of like it but it has some minor issues (like the bounce still being able to leave the red AoE). I now tested all abilites I thought might cause trouble (even Instruments of Pain and Whirling Strikes and whatnot) and so far I didn't run into broken stuff. Besides Swift FLurry/HBD which is probably too strong with this against low defense mobs. If you know how to make the "normal" AoE size non-scalable that would be great. I would then only alter the description: remove the "up to 3 targets" and be good. Because it looks really confusing if you have a yellow circle around a red one (because friend or foe) and still get firendly fire from the yellow area.

Citzal's Spirit Lance is very good. Don't think you can do better as Wizard. In the late game a fully enchanted two haded melee weapon with a lash and durgan steel can outperform Firebrand despite its high base damage. Tidefall for example does more dps - but its wounding doesn't generate focus... Hours of St. Rumbalt also works well. If you stack a whole lot of dmg bonuses Firebrand will be good for a long time - just because its enormous base damage works very well with dmg bonuses. But its ACC and speed will be rel. bad compared to fully enchanted stuff.

Which links exactly?

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It does. It just doesn't make much sense to me to have a weapon that has a whirling animation, says it hits up to 3 targets and then hits 1 with puny dmg. I find my solution to be better atm. It's somewhat unique and imo also interesting. Of course dmg etc. can be tweaked.

Not quite, it's like that (with my mod): intial attack: 9-13 dmg slash/crush with 0.75 range at 9 PEN + 1.5m pull effect secondary effect is an AoE of 1.5m which procs the additional attack (an invisible projectile) once to a random target in the AoE. The AoE itself does not pull. It does nothing besides triggering the additional attack. additional attack: 9-13 dmg slash/crush at 9 PEN + 1.5 pull effect, a delay of 0.1 secs, two bounces: bounces happen in order of range (nearest gets the bounce) bounces have no dmg malus, 0.5m reach I could lower the additional attacks' dmg again (or make the bounces lose dmg per bounce or whatever) - and also remove the 1.5m pull of the initial attack in order to remove the wonkyness with Clear Out and other push effects like Forace of Anguish. It looks really yo-yo like and makes not much sense. Maybe there's a more elegant solution like using the mortar-style AoE without scaling (couldn't make that work, always scaled with INT) or something else. This was what I could come up with which somewhat does what the description says - in my first little modding project. Without my mod it's just the initial attack at 9-13 dmg (same values as above otherwise) - and then the 1.5m AoE triggers one additional attack to a random target at 5-9 dmg. That's it. By the way @Elric Galad: where the heck do I find the description text for "Reckless Cyclone"? I find the name of that item mod in the stringtables and I also found the general item description for the bottom - but not the text for the item mods. Where it says "up to +3 targets, friend or foe"...? Edit: Apparently it's only Clear Out that's wonky with the pull/push. With Force of Anguish the push just overrides the pull which is neat. Clear Out's pushing is always wonky with AoE weapons anyway (enemies jittering around like crazy) so maybe I'll just leave it like this. Thinking about giving Whahai Poraga 1.5m reach in order to make the initial attack range fit the AoE size. Doesn't make much sense that the initial attack has to be done from 0.75m range while the additonal work at 1.5m.

5? I thought it had 6. Checked in game: it's 6.

Exactly. It was the only way I could think of that avoids the short bounces to just cancel - despite enemies being in range of the 1.5 AoE. A longer bounce would reach targets way outside the AoE - so that wasn't a good option imo. Especially since it would also jump to your own fellas. I also thought it's a neat "tanking" effect. Pulling enemies back into engagement - or keeping them close if you haven't much engagement in the first place. I even think it's so useful that the additional attacks could be lower base dmg like before (5-9) and still be useful just because of the pull (and other on-hit effects of course). The pollaxe looks quite odd and has a lot of hook-shapes with which you could pull somebody towards you - so I thought this even makes sense from an aesthetical as well as and "in-game-logic" point of view. Two handed tanking weapon. The enchantments point in that direction, too. So why not?

Carnage only procs from the initial attack. Also Carnage doesn't stack if there are multiple triggers simultaneously. It then days something like "effect with longer duration already applied" which doesn't make a lot of sense but I guess that's just the generic description if some effects suppress each other. Clear Out with Barb/Fighter is great with LDV. Also because Clear Out hits the initial target twice and the initial target is pushed into the Carnage area and also gets Carnage dmg. So it's not only a good AoE too but great against single targets even. LDV also has devastating potential when a Berserker/Monk uses it. Because Turning Wheel lets the Carnage AoE grow and more importantly because sometimes Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming can cause a chain reaction which results in a while series of critical hits. LDV with a SC Barb and Heart of Fury can also be lots of fun.

I tested with Carnage and only the first attack triggers which is good. Clear Out is especially weird because initial target enemies will get pushed and pulled several times which looks funny. I thinkt I can fix this by removing the pull effect from the initial attack (which has to be done at 0.75m anyway so it isn't part of the 1.5m AoE. The AoE*AoE with Clear Out is always bonkers (see WotEP and mortars) so that's not too special for this solution I think. Good thing that the weapon's AoE doesn't grow in size. I tried Heart of Fury with Avenging Storm and it wasn't as wild as some combos with mortars or blunderbusses or Frostseeker. Clear Out with Swift Flurry/HBD was extremely devastating. I think I really should make the additional attack non-melee or find another way to proc Swift Flurry stuff.

FTL is one of my favorite games (I've got ~450 hours I believe). Not really because of fabulous writing (like... what writing? ) - but because of everything else.

If they run past the MC there's Edér, binding them with engagments, doesn't he? Like a backup. Maybe if you send in Edér first then all enemies might cling to him and also attack him - and not the MC.

Hm... so I did a little trick: I raised the additional attack's dmg to 9-13 like the initial one's. Then I added a 1.5m pull effect to all the attacks. That means that if you hit an enemy in the 1.5m AoE that enemy will get pulled towards you. I didn't increase the number of additional attacks - because I can't tell the game to only hit an enemy once with them - but instead I let that additonal attack bounce up to 2 times. The bounce distance is 0.5 meter and it bounces in range order (so the intial target ususally doesn't get hit by the bounce again) and you can determine that those bouncing attacks don't hit the same enemy twice. With the pulling and the bouncing I get pretty good results that are in line with the description (most of times): you will hit up to 3 additional targets like the description says, friend or foe. The pulling is a nice side effect for such a weapon I think. Its one echantment only works well if you don't move - so that pulling should be nice. It's just there so that I can get away with very short bounces though. If I don't do that I have to make the bounces a bit longer and then they ofen bounce out of the AoE and into your party or so. I also gave the attacks a slight delay (0.1 secs each) so that they are a bit in line with the whirling animation. Just a visual touch. Before they were all hitting simulaniously which was a bit odd imo. If somebody wants to test: just copy that folder into your override directory. I guess I could raise the pull to 2m just in case an attack bounces from a 1.5m distant enemy to a 2m one. But that's details. Would be cool if this solution worked in most cases and make it a valid weapon (even if only for rel. specilialized builds). I didn't try AoE attacks or Swift Flurry etc. with this new version yet... Edit: did try Swift Flurry/HBD and it's a bit bonkers. Each attack roll from Swift FLurry or HBD leads to 4 new attacks... yeah... Stuff like Heart of Fury isn't too bad. Maybe I can prevent Swift Flurry and HBD from working with the additonal attacks by tagging them as non-melee.

I don't know how to fix those mutiple hits on one enemy if there's less than 4. I now know why they reduced it to only 1 additional hit. I tried to copy the AoE of mortars (which works) - but I can't remove the AoE scaling then it seems. Atm the easiest solution would be to set the base dmg to 9-13 for both attacks and alter the description accordingly (not up to 3 targets but one additonal target). That would be okay dmg wise I guess because a normal pollaxe has 14-22 base damage and 2*9-13 would be even higher. Not so great against single targets but good against two. Or maybe sombody has a tip how to either prevent the mortar-like AoE from scaling or how to prevent double- and triple hits.

I found it! The additional attack triggers were implemented as ranged component and the projectile count was set to 1. I set it to 3 (like in the tooltip) and also set the base damage of those additional attacks to 9-13 like the initial attacks has. Not it does exactly what the tooltip says. Maybe with stuff like Riposte and Swift Flurry or also Heart of Fury etc. it's too good now. Will test a bit. Then I will clean up the mod and post it here. Edit: argh... now even two enemies get hit 4 times: 2 times each. Damn it, why did they have to implement it so stupidly?

I looked more deeply into Wahai Poraga's attack game objects and it's pretty weird: First of all the dmg value from the tooltip (9-13 slash/crush) only counts for the initial attack. The additional "AoE" attack is a separate game object and has a base damage of 5-9 slash/crush only (same PEN). 5 - 9 Wahai Poraga does the initial attack and only one of the weak additional ones. Not 3 as the tooltip says. Besides that it's friendly fire as you know - and the AoE is fixed at 1.5m radius. Somebody nerfed that thing into the ground for good. No idea if intended or not. The enchantments are cool. I wonder why they made the additional attacks or the AoE part so different from other AoE weapons. And so darn complicated! It should work like mortars imo: low base damage but (small) AoE. Done. No problems. Anyway, I'm still trying to fix the number of additonal attacks. No luck so far. I can mod like everything of that weapon - but not the number of additional attacks. Why? Still have to find that out... If I can't fix it the easy way (by simply rising the number of additional attacks) I will try to copy the AoE functionality of the blunderbuss mortars and make them fixed size + friendly fire. Screw that weird "up tp 3" nonsense...

I took a look into the attacks.gamedatabundle and found Wahai Poraga's AoE attack object which had this property: "numHits":2 Seems like an easy fix. Will edit and then try out if it works. Will report later...

Best companion after Zahua imo. Maybe better because you can get him a LOT earlier than Zahua.

Yes, sorry. I'm playing with the Community Patch and forgot that Lingering Echoes gets buffed a bit by it. I also believe it's +15% with CP, not +20%.