Boeroer

Unfortunately Battle Forged is crap in Deadfire. But maybe I can try. By the way here's Vanishing Mortars: An important factor is to enchant Hand Mortar with Blinding Smmoke and put it into the main hand to unlock Deathblows asap. Or you use Smoke Grenade or Pernicous Cloud. The clou with Vanishing Strikes is that the invisibility it brings does not break on attack(!). That means Assassinate and Backstabs (if near enough) all the time. And you won't get attacked and can plan all shots very carefully without getting bothered. Being a Glass Cannon is no risk. Works equally well with a Streetfighter (because of Powder Burns). Damage with Vanishing Strike is nearly the same (less PEN on Poweder Burns but more direct damage due to Heating Up). But of course you'll get more mileage out of Streetfigther/mortars before getting Vanishing Strikes due to higher attack speed and more Sneak Attack dmg. Also: Gambit with mortars is broken. You get bonus damage per remaining Guile. Gambit refunds Guile on crit. With mortars you crit a LOT in an AoE. But the refund is capped at 4 max. But internally, during the attack, it seems that your "inner" Guile counter raises like crazy and only after the attack the regain is cut to 4. Taht means that all the AoE attacks profit from immense dmg bonus due to "internal Guile". I saw numbers like +260% dmg bonus just from Gambit. Only possible with mortars. But Vanishing Strikes is also very nice with melee weapons like Battle Axes + Assassin + Backstab. Remember: the invisibility doesn't break, so the DoT problem (ticks make you visible) does not exist here.

Not to forget "He hagrode them with Driving Echoes".

Why dual battle axes in general? Just for the weapon modal?Yes. It is very strong once you can skip recovery. Which a barb can do with two things: Blood Thirst and more importantly Barbaric Retaliation. If you combine the thickest armor (Patinated Plate + Thick Skinned + Blunting Belt etc.) and Bleeding Cuts you will be very slow. But Barbaric Retaliation doesn't care and dishes out those bleeding full attacks like there's no tomorrow. Will will kill stuff. Which triggers Blood Thirst... And so on.

Does this (Skewer: Fires a bolt through multiple targets) trigger the imbued spells multiple times? Nope

Or... you just don't finish the quest. They will be standing there until the Wheel breaks apart. Nobody moves - nobody gets hurt.

Hehe. Next may be a gif of a single class rogue with mortars and Vanishing Strike. My my... Same league as Helmortar.

Also Clear Out and its upgrades target Fortitude as well. So you will not only debuff in an AoE with Clear Out/Clean Sweep/Clear the Path but also those abilities will directly profit from it on the next attack. You can do a lot of AoE dmg with that. Hence Morning Star is one of the best picks for single class fighter in my opinion.

I think that the highest damage would come from Persistence if you would use Champion's Boon on yourself or cast Minor Avatar in combination with Aggrandizing Radiance (stacks with everything). Persistence's wounding damage grows with MIG. That means it does 25% raw dmg with 10 MIG but 40% with 30 MIG. And that lash is a multiplicative dmg boost. And of course the physical dmg also gets boosted by MIG. So the lash profits twice: from the higher physical dmg and then again from its own boosted dmg. It also works very well against pierce resistant or even immune enemies since the lash is calculated on pre-DR dmg. Add a burning lash and Scion of Flame (useful for a priest anyway) and put Durgan Steel on it and I think you have the perfect weapon for this kind of priest.

Awesome. Can't wait. Maybe I'll even restart my current playthrough as turn based.

You are most welcome.

Mine is Combusting Wounds + Minor Missiles. With high PL it's so reliable (auto-hit) and you'll have so many projectiles. You only have to debuff fortitude once for the CW to hit. THe rest is "I don't care". I mean besides the obvious Wall of Flames and stuff. This just doesn't work very well on enemies with very high burn DR.

It's def. not faster than just sinking the ship. That doesn't take 5 minutes. And even with the best Paladin/Chanter you can't board and win fights against lvl-15 or 16 crews if you are lvl 5. But you can sink them - because char level has no effect on ship combat.

I always use it. One of the best spells in the game for me.

Maybe. But I guarantee you can learn to sink any ship with the starting sloop faster than to reload and fight the same boarding fight 10 times. Because naval combat is very easy and allows to sink ships way above your level once you know what you are doing. And it's not much that you have to learn. 5 to 8 basic points maybe.

Yes, that it the same as with Essential Phantom and Sporelings and some other summons. They don't scale correctly atm.

Why on earth didn't you just sink them to get the loot instead of reloading 10 times?

You can do the same with a one handed pistol by the way: gain +12 ACC and 20% hit to crit, then use the modal to suffer 15 ACC but half your reloading time. All in all it's "only" a loss of 3 ACC and a big gain in speed and crit conversion. Especially if you have a pistol that you want to attack/hit with a lot (see Opening Barrage of Scordeo's Trophy or Bullet Time of Eccea's Arcane Blaster): sometimes you don't want to alternate between dual pistols but hit with one exclusively. The modal gives you higher speed than dual wielding + two weapon style - which means dps doesn't drop compared to these - while you can make sure your weapon procs occur more often. I find this actually better than hunting bow + modal (which is also fine in some situations of course). Also because you can always skip reloading which makes a gun user more reactive. Drawback is the single damage type (not when using Eccea's Arcane Blaster though) and the shorter range. I mean when I compare generic pistols to generic hunting bows. Unique weapons are a different thing, depends on the enchantments.

No. I just tested it in game. No effect. The weapon has do deal base burn damage it seems. Lashes have no effect. The only weapons I know of that do this are Firebrand, Kalakoth's Minor Blights (the burn version) and Dragon's Dowry. The last one is an exception because it only deals pierce base dmg. But I guess this was done because it's all about dragon fire and such. Essence Interrupter works with Heart of the Storm though (+1 PEN). If you are a Bleak Walker/Wizard (or Druid or Priest) and use it you can even get it to +3 PEN and +10 ACC when using FoD: Heart of the Storm (Essence Interruptor +1 PEN) + Scion of Flame (FoD +1 PEN) + Spirit of Decay (FoD Bleak Walker +1 PEN) + Ring of Focused Flame (which will work with FoD attacks because they are keyworded with burn/fire).

I build him as tanky Swashbuckler in my recent playthrough. The goal was to make him 5-6 engagement slots and make him really sticky (Defender Stance + Kapana Taga + Reckless Brigandine + Overbearing Guard - Refreshing Defense and so on) and debuff enemies automatically (Persistant Distraction) while doing okish damage (for a tank that is - with Sneak and later Deathblows). It was also my goal to be able to bombard him with wizard nukes (which mostly target reflex) - so I gave him Cadhu Scalth and raised Althletics and Metaphysics. With "The Wall" modal most of those spells won't do much. THen I also gave him Adept Evasion. I just unstealthed with him first, waited till the enemies gathered around him, cast Pull of Eora and Miasma on Edér's Head and then bombard him (and his surroundings). Kapana Taga with modal helped to land Miasma on tougher enemies. I think I never saw an enemy break engagement. Maybe it happened, but it must have been so few that I can't remember. That way he's not the most defensive tank, but a great mixture of "sticky tank" and a bit of damage. Oh, and I gave him Pernicious Cloud in the end. That contributed a lot to his damage output. But beware: it's friendly fire and has a huge AoE.

Yes, but in case of the Dracolich you only need to land that one Combusting Wound cast and the rest is missiles and tiny hits from Walls etc. So it's totally worth it to debuff Fortitude for that one cast. Makes the whole fight a cakewalk (with a party). You don't have to target fortitude all the time. Only when it counts. Megabosses I exclude as you said. They do favor classes without Power Pools and fixed spell uses because the fights will last forever. I find the design of the Mega Boss battles underwhelming. I would have liked them to be more like Titan Souls encounters.

I would like to see new faces when it comes to party members. Cameos of Aloth, Edér and so on are fine, but please give us new, "fresh" companions - I mean if you're going to make PoE3 in the first place.

If you have summons out that "tank" or block for you you can switch to a single handed weapon set. For whatever reason offensive chants (Soft Winds, Dragon Thrashed) gain +12 ACC from that (like the weapon attacks do). It seems to be an oversight that never got fixed. Pretty handy though. You can then live with lower PER and still hit stuff good enough (with chants).

I tested it one minute before posting: two grazes for 15 secs each and suddenly I had ~30 secs on the dragon. I wasn't expecting that. I also checked if I hit the second time instead of graze - but no. Originally I just wanted to check how good/bad the duration with 30 INT on the Dracolich would be. Don't know if that's intended behavior. Afaik the "weird" DoT mechanics (less INT = higher dps) got fixed through the board. Yes, as I said: Disintegration doesn't do enormous dps. I would prefer Amplified Wave any time. But against certain tough enemies with high AR (Dracolich with Llengrath's Safeguard on is a pain) it's nice - if you are ascended. With any other cipher it's too expensive for my taste - so I skip it. To be honest I don't use it at all in "real" playthroughs. I debuff Fortitude in every encounter by the way. There are too many good abilites that target it - so debuffing fort. is usually one of my top priorities. That's why I'm a big fan of Morning Stars.