Boeroer

Fortune for a pand, good sir?

A fun CC/damage hybrid I played recently is a Troubadour/Psion. The idea is that while one resource pool (phrases/focus) is refilling you can cast from the other one. No fuzz with regenerating resources: it's purely automatic. Pick Killers Froze Stiff, Phantom Foes, Ben Fidel's Neck, Secret Horrors, Mental Binding and so on. For the damage part pick Thrice She was Wronged, Soul Shock or whatever you like. You will have nearly no casting downtime. With Killers and Mental Binding I could paralyze-lock one enemy 100% and the rest for a good amount of time, too. If enemies cluster around the tank then I can cast Soul Shock almost non-stop after some levels because the focus regeneration is faster than the spending of 10 focus and the recovery time. Should focus generation stop because I got hit there's always my phrases. Healng can be done with Ancient Memory, Pain Block and Two Fingers of Daylight. You can even revive. I wasn't too impressed with the idea first but after playing it I have to say it was one of the most fun character concepts so far. It may be though that the basic idea doesn't work as well in TB mode. But I think it's still valid. I don't like Barring-Death's-Door- and Salvation-of-Time cheese. The fun of breaking the game only lasts a short while for me.

Sonce alwais thx ubi

I agree that it would have been nice to be able to see the respective defense in those spell lists. For Deadfire there are lists of abilities (in another wiki though) which directly show the defense the ability has to overcome. Doesn't help you with PoE of course. 🤷‍♂️

There are also other spells and abilities that target reflex but instead of damage, prone or stun cause a debuff like for example "hobbled". Especially the Druid has stuff like Tanglefoot (hobbles) and Nature's Mark (lowers deflection and reflex) that targets reflex. A stun effect targeting Reflex is more of an exception. Usually stuns (and also weakened, also sickened etc.) are defended by Fortitude. Effects that have illusion and 'mind' vibes often target will. But there are also some priestly fire spells that target will. There is no strict systemic rule to this. Honestly it's all over the place and depends a lot on the whole idea, in-game explanation and "lore" of that spell/ability. Like how does char X apply the prone effect? Does he swipe you off your feet? Then he targets reflex. Does he induce a dizzyness right into your head so you fall over? Will. Does he shove you? Fortitude. And so on. Sowithout lots of meta-knowledge (been there, done that) you cannot know which defense the enemy is targeting with a certain spell/ability. I would just dive into it and not overthink it. Most players restart after a few hours anyway because they understand the game mechanics a lot better then and have a better idea what they want from their character. My first ever char was a Fire Godlike Barbarian on normal difficulty. I scrapped him after some hours and restarted after Act I with a Hearth Orlan Rogue on PotD and so on...

Too far: maybe. Although in my solo Assassin/Bleak Walker run I never experienced this. But most of times I only stacked True Love's Kiss with Gouging Strike and Brand Enemy (maybe finished off some weaklings with Ring the Bell etc. before going invisible), retreated and then waited until the enemies dropped dead. I didn't switch weapons a lot nor did I cast a ton of stuff while I was retreated.

I surely didn't.

Reflex gets targeted by a lot of Area-of-Effect spells such as Fireball and so on. Have a look at this list for example (same stuff exists for Druid spells, Priest spells, Chatner invocations and so on and so forth). If you click on each spells you'll get a description which also tells you what defense it targets. List: https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Wizard_spells Individual spell (look at "Defended by") : https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Arkemyr's_Dazzling_Lights If you don't want spoilers then you can assume that most damaging spells that have an AoE and are not having a disabling component but rather deal direct damage will target reflex.

interesting. Well - for the case of this Bloodmage it wouldn't be a problem though because you can easily prebuff etc. first with Lover's Embrace still in hand and afterwards switch to another weapon, right after walking back in sight I guess.

Huh? Never heard about that. I just tried again and I can switch weapons just fine whenever I want (while invisible or later), no problem. Doesn't matter if I use Smoke Veil or potion. Maybe it's Pukestabber in your case? It has some buffs that work for all daggers (that are equipped) - and maybe on weapon switch it overrides True Love's Kiss or something. No idea. I just switched from Lover's Embrace to Watcher's Blade and nothing weird happened. Combat and DoT went on as expected.

Nice idea. That would have been fun.

It heals for 20 base. edit: that was close. By the way: you can cast Nature's Bounty with Spellshaping, giving it +1 PL. I don't know if that does anything though.

Ah, yes. I now remember that my last Barb/Monk had that Frenzy+Swift Strikes issue. How could I forget? Maybe because it was still useful to use both because of the +5 DEX.

Just checked Lover's Embrace + Potion of Invisibility on Edér in Fort Deadlight: combat did not end once True Love's Kiss was applied.

I've done a whole playthrough as Assassin/Bleak Walker with Lover's Embrace (also Gouging Strike and Brand Enemy) and never did the combat end prematurely. Granted most of the time I used all three on one enemy. I can check later if the True Love's Kiss is an exception. Yes, Lover's Embrace only works from stealth. But you can sneak up tp any enemy with 0 stealth with the help of Bounding Boots and the "cancel action before landing" trick. Important part is that once you applied True Love's Kiss (obviously with single handed usage for the +12 ACC) you drink the potion and retreat. Then the combat shouldn't stop and you can do whatever you like (out of sight). There are some spots where that can't work due to space limitations (e.g. Water Dragon). Other DoTs would also work but most of them don't last long enough to give you enough time for buffing up etc.

You can keep combat running endlessly without Berath's Challenge if you use DoTs like Gouging Strike, True Love's Kiss etc. Endlessly not really because at some point the "dotted" enemy will die - but you know what I mean. Shadowing Beyond and Arkemyr's BD won't work (they break on any DoT tick) but Smoke Veil will not break. You can run away (out of sight) and prepare stuff all day, then return. Obviously Smoke Veil is no option as SC Bloodmage. But Potion of Invisibility works the same, so you could use that: Hit enemy from stealth with Lover's Embrace, retreat a bit (Alacrity maybe), drink Potion of Invisibility and run out of sight. Then prebuff all you want and return.

Are there any speed buffs that get suppressed? Since stacking of speed buffs is different from PoE's (where it had increasing returns so the stacking was limited) I believe there are none that get suppressed. Or are there? At least I didn't encounter those. But I don't use comsumables besides food so maybe I'm missing something.

[open console] iroll20s [hit enter] [reopen console] levelUpSoulbind <character name, if player char just type 'play' and hit tab> LAX03_Robe_Armor_Soulbound_Robes_Of_The_Weyc [hit enter] [reopen console] iroll20s [hit enter] That will do it. It will deactivate further gatherings of "Berath Blessings" points though because that savegame will be marked as cheated.

Right. Except if you're still wearing your Gremlins-Pyjamas.

...he mockingly urged one month later.

*Aloth-voice* "Now that's unusual."

I'm not Obsidian but I'm confident enough to say that it's going to stay as is. Last patch was several years ago. They will not throw any more time and/or money at it. The mod access to PoE is rather limited so I also would not expect any modder to be able to do this properly (with a reasonable amount of resources). In the game options you can define auto-pausing. Maybe that can help you? I prefer turn based myself but it didn't take too long to adapt to the RTwP system of PoE. I guess you can have fun if you give it some time.

Play single class pick Vengeful Defeat, use Effort, Effigy's Husk and Mantle of the Seven Storms and roll with it. Addendum: I wrote about that several times now so I hope I'm not boring anybody but if you export a character with Ring of Reset you can have two. If you stack them in the stash they will refill their charges, giving you 3 knockouts+resurrection without suffering from an injury per encounter. Cheesy of course but it can be fun to play such a suicidal character then. You know with Leaping in, having Barbaric Retaliation, using Heart of Fury and triggering the occasional Vengeful Defeat + Effort AoE attack + Mantle AoE attack.

With the popular* German TTRPG "The Dark Eye" you have attributes like Strength etc. and once you do a roll (skill check for example) there are always three attributes involved (sometimes one is double like STR/STR/CON). You then roll three D20 (color coded for each attribute is best so you can roll all at once) and then use your skill points minus difficulty to keep the dice roll <= attribute so the whole roll is a success. I found that to be a rather nice system - albeit a tad complicated at first. *) Popular in Germany