Boeroer

But I missed that the initial target gets hit twice. What a fail...

👍 Too bad stuff like Nature's Terror, Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage and Relentless Storm etc. are not implemented as beneficial effects on the character.

Puppet Master + Forbidden Fist attack + Lingering Echoes + 10 INT-> very long lasting minions for pretty cheap. Also works with Forbidden Fist + Whisper of Treason of course. Only that you have to do it the other way round and that you can't reapply FF because alignment will flip back. So Puppet Master is better imo. It's a bit work but you can switch a lot of enemies in a rel short time. In between cast some Phantom Foes stuff to gain some focus. At the start I like Secret Horrors, too. With Instruments of Pain you can do it from rel. safe distance, too. Add Dichotomous Soul on top for even more minions. Call it "the Forbidden Fisper". Or the "Banned Hand Puppeteer". Edit: now imagine those puppets where you put your hand through their... you get the picture... : 😂

It would have been so cool if Wild Growth (of the Ancient) worked on Animal Companions... You would have had a nice nature-themend build focused around the Animal Companion. DoTs for Predator's Sense, healing, buffing and a neverending Robust inspiration and a huge pet. Summons, too.

Great catch with the armor's buff! Combine with Bloodmage and Wall of Draining maybe (as you suggested)? Add Mask of the Weyc (stacks with everything except Arcane Veil) and Magnificent Escape Cape (stacks with everything except Escape, but only castable when bloodied - combine with Llengrath's Safeguard?) and the usual wizard stuff as well as Zandethu's Draconic Fury and you should have stellar defenses, nonstop healing as well as good dmg output. And your Spiritshift won't end like you said. Druid's healing easily counters Blood Sacrifice. Bear form with Llengrath's Safeguard could be awesome AR with 9 recovery. Lots of buffing and micromanagement though. Regaining the tier-7 spell slot alone to be able to cast WoD and then Draconic Fury... I like @thelee's idea of combining "spells" from Trickster with Shifter. Furrante's Breastplate could be cool there as well, stacking with Mirrored Images and all. Might carry you through the first phase of the encounter until you killed some enemies and things become less tense?

Look at that green little fella!

True. But at the same time it turns the game into something else. A sneaky thief game. You have to have patience, do a lot of rinse & repeat and also be a little bit of a one-trick pony. I guess not everybody likes that (which is okay of course). Also it's not great for party play. Your party would have to be all Rogues (or Priest of Skaen or Wizards) or just get parked outside the encounter.

Haha, thank you. Funnily enough the day I'm getting the odd but also welcome compliment that I'm not an ass is also the day when it was discovered that I have kidney stones. That explains the really, really bad last two nights I had. Seriously: I don't wish that pain to anyone. Not even to Megabosses...

FoD does work while you are shifted.

Whirling Strikes I assume. It's very good. Better than Barb's Heart of Fury.

If you prefer to cast with him you can still wear it. Besides that his dual axes are great if you want to play him as Rogue/Priest I think. Full Attacks with high dmg bonuses, a scaling lash and Bleeding Cuts? Awesome...

For melee mostly. It's very good because of its various enchantments. One of the best two handed weapons in the game. And it has reach... Class doesn't matter much. As long as you have melee prowess it's a good pick. Anything that hits fast profits more (at least when it comes to fun) from the 5 consecutive hits enchantments. Iirc Swift Flurry chains do proc that enchantment, too (if it's like 5 crits in a row I mean).

That was me (among others I guess). You could do it even sooner with Lover's Embrace and Bounding Boots from Benweth's study (if you can get those very early I mean). If you have trouble even grazing the Messenger you could try the Gauntlets of Greater Reliability (Berath Blessings vendor in Port Maje) and reload a few times until you get a conversion from miss to graze. Maybe even add some miss-to-graze consumables?

Speaking about Druid: Fun fact: the Fire Stag will die when you trigger its explosion. But if you cast Barring Death's Door on it (or use Lay on Hands from Shieldbearer) you can use its explosion over and over again as long as you like (until the BDD or summoning duration is over). SC Fury has access to the incredible Great Maelstrom and can use it with lots of PEN. With Prestige, Otto Starcat, Stone of Power, Lord Darryn's Voulge (or Sun & Moon + Magran's Favor or Chromoprismatic Staff) and Deltro's Cage you can use it with 8+ Power Level bonus (13+ when empowered)... A SC Druid can use Hand Mortar with Avenging Storm in order to deal tremendous shock dmg because Avenging Storm gets triggered by Blinding Smoke (although Blinding Smoke doesn't do damage). Shifter + Helwalker: the Boar form of the Shifter does a tremendous amount of raw dmg which is amplified by the Healwalker's +10 MIG and INT. Bear Form + Goldpact Knight gets very high AR with 0 recovery penalty. Also stack Eternal Endurance (which also works with spells) and Wildstrike for good melee dmg.

@Griffonheart Back in the days it was a "one-shooting mobs" build. But of course it can also do AoE DoTs very well.

I've been advocating a true* Spiritshift modal since PoE 1. Like all modals it would have needed a downside. Back then I suggested "no spell casting" while shifted. Years later we got the Shifter subclass... 🤷‍♂️ * in the sense of "turn on and off as often as you want".

Why with Blights? Their AoE is rel. small compared to a rod's Blast iirc. And with Watershaper's Focus you'd even get a bounce (AoE, too) which makes it easy to apply stuff like Gouging Strike to even more enemies (and/or have two chances of hitting with it).

Indeed. I once played a solo Assassin/Bleak Walker with triple "endless" DoTs just because of those mechanics: Love's True Kiss (from the dagger Lover's Embrace) + Gouging Strike + Brand Enemy. You use Gouging Strike with +42 ACC* from stealth which will apply both Love's True Kiss' and Gouging Strike's DoT and then immediately (bc. of 85% recovery bonus of stealth) follow with Brand Enemy**. It has a 0.5 sec casting time and no recovery which means you can immediately follow with Smoke Veil*** and then retreat far enough to be out of sight. There you can wait until the enemy dies. The combat will not end because of the ticks. However, you need the space to retreat. There' some encounters where this is not doable, most notably boarding fights and the Water Dragon encounter. Megabosses can be killed with this, too. It just takes an absurd amount of time because they have enormous pools of HP. The triple DoT makes it faster - but against Dorudugan you mustn't use Brand Enemy because fire damage will heal instead of harm him. * +12 from one handed, +25 from Assassinate, +5 from Dagger. Weapon enchantments and other stuff like PER etc. come on top of course. ** Brand Enemy is cheap (1 Zeal) and is an auto hit. Because it's easy to not miss with the first attack from stealth this auto hit is perfect to almost guarantee the triple DoT appliance in a very short amount of time. *** Smoke Veil doesn't break on DoT ticks. Shadowing Beyond does. So you need to use Smoke Veil.

I never tried but I guess it might.

Weird. I know there's a bug that removes items' enchantments. I only saw it once in one of my playthroughs though. If you don't have shield engagement on Magran's Blessing that surely is a bug - because I have it on that shield:

Look no further: The enchantment "Ondra's Wrath" was nerfed since then and doesn't trigger itself anymore, but it's still very good. The second revelation of that build - that gaze spells like Gaze of the Adragan work with Driving Flight - somehow flew under the radar so maybe this is a good time to bring it up again. But maybe that was nerfed, too. 🤷‍♂️ Edit: just checked - Gaze otA doesn't bounce with Driving Flight anymore. :sad_panda_face

Bit offtopic but speaking of Priest and keeping stuff alive: did you guys know that Withdraw works on the Furyshaper's wards - and that they work perfectly fine even when withdrawn? They tend to get targeted a lot (at least when playing solo - but also in parties if they are very obviously the most squishy target around) so that takes away one nuisance quite elegantly. 👍 def. underappreciated by me - because I didn't even know that engagement triggers the ACC bonus of Stalker's Link. I always thought it works like in PoE where only the actual act of attacking counts. I never bothered to check this. I seldomly took Stalker's Link for AoE Rangers because I thought it's only useful against single targets. But if it works on all engaged enemies that's a different story...

Somebody suggested the same at 10K posts - and then complained on Discord that I didn't even notice.

This sounded odd to me. All bashing shields are considered proper shields and thus should get +1 engagement from the "Shield Engagement" item mod. But after reading it I couldn't really dismiss it with 100% certainty - so I loaded up the game and used all bashing shields on a lvl-1-Rogue with no other source of engagement: they all gave me +1 engagmenent.