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Paladin/Trickster can be quite tanky while dealing proper weapon damage.

Ah, then maybe a mod can put this thread into the PoE1 subforum. @Amentepmaybe?

Barbarian/Fighter also profits a lot from a Morning Star, as Barbarian/Monk does. Before getting Brute Force you can use Knock Down/Mule Kick to target fortitude once you lowered that with a hit from the Morning Star (Body Blows modal causes -25 fortitude). The combination of Blood Thirst with Cleaving/Mob Stance is pretty fun. Also Clear Out (AoE attack) + Carnage has the same mechanic I mentioned above (pushing enemies into their own Carnage,dealing additional damage). Clear Out's AoE attack stacks with Weapon AoE (see for example the Great Sword Whispers of the Endless Paths): every hit of the Clear Out AoE triggers an AoE of the sword. This leads to an enormous amount of hits and sends enemies flying in all sorts of directions. All this is more late(r) game stuff though. As is Voidwheel by the way... A Furyshaper/Unbroken can have nasty, nasty Disengagement attacks and summon a Fear Ward that terrifies enemies. Terrified enemies crouch around and can break engagement, giving the Furyshaper/Unbroken several free disengagement attacks. Since those have very high acc and damage they can trigger lots of crits. Those might kill enemies which triggers Blood Thirst and also Mob Stance... Also this is where a weapon like Amra (2-handed Battle Axe) comes into play. Works very well with this setup. You need some engagement slots though (Hold the Line or a cheap Barbaric Shout at the start of the battle). Also works well with Devoted, the Unbroken only adds +10 PEN to disengagement in this case (when not using a shield). When it's about being fast not much beats a flanked Barbarian/Streetfighter though. Needs lots of CON and an amulet of health in the beginning, but can leave MIG at 10 and pump DEX and PER. Use some sort of emergency button (Escape for example) to prevent knockouts, but as long as he's flanked and rel. safe he will dish out attacks with incredible speed and also damage per hit. I really love this with fast daggers but it's also great with two handers. Helm of the Falcon is your friend with two handed weapons by the way (if it's speed you seek).

Carnage cannot crit in PoE2 (only miss/graze/hit) and is also doesn't count as weapon attack like it did in PoE1. Swift Flurry procs do trigger Carnage, but you cannot hit the same enemy with Carnage multiple times during one action. There's also a nice litttle synergy between Monk and Barbarian: if you use Force of Anguish you will push the target into its own Carnage area - so it will suffer the weapon dmg and th Carnage dmg. I played several Helwalker/Berserkers. They are great. I would recommend normal MIG and very high CON - then the self damage is manageable (with a healer) and the wound generation is supereasy (Frenzy just generates wounds for you). For a Monk/Berserker with Swift Flurry the best Great Sword is the Sanguine Great Sword. It is a weapon that has an additonal hit roll that can trigger Swift Flurry - greatly increasing the chance for it to proc additional attack cycles. I would say the best weapon for a Monk/Barbarian is the Morning Star though, especialy Saru Sichr. It also has a double hit roll. And a morning star with its modal (Body Blows: -25 fortitude on graze/hit/crit) it synergyses extremely well with Brute Force and stacks with Spirit Frenzy (stagger enemies on hit, -10 fortitude) and Enervating Blows (weaken enemies on crit: -10 fortitude).

Are you playing Turn Based Mode or Real Time with Pause? If Real Time with Pause you can opt in to several pausing options (for example once a party member has finished an action) - it's in the game menu.

Hello! Yes, it will work. There are enough unique great swords in the game - so there should be something nice for you. I personally think the potential synergies of a multiclass are more interesting than a single class Barbarian, but fortunately Barbarians also do very well as single class characters. Check out the late-game versions of the Barbarian's Shouts/Roars which you can only access as single class - those are extremely good. Heart of Fury still exists but it's not as good as in PoE. Blood Thirst still exists and it's still great. What's also great is Barbaric Retaliation (late game gain, single class only) which allows for an instant Full Attack with 0 recovery against an enemy that landed a crit on you. Combined with Blood Thirst this can turn your Barb into a meat grinder. But watch your health. There's also several subclasses. The Berserker is the one most players tend to gravitate to because his upsides are obvious, but the self damage (from Frenzy) scales quite steeply so make sure you have some good healer in the party. Also the concealed health and the confusion can mess things up. My personal favorite subclass is the Furyshaper. Especially the Blood Ward he can summon (only for single classes) is very good since it draws health from really all damage your party does. The Fear Ward is also very good.

Did some more goofing around with a Skald - and man: with Wahai Poraga it's even cool to go SC Skald. With a fast setup (high DEX, low armor penatly etc.) I can generate phrases from skeletons so quickly that I can basically spam Eld Nary's Curse. Sometimes I can cast a second one before the first runs out, hehe. Also a CC-focused build with almost any second class is very nice. I can stunlock or paralyze-lock all sorts of enemies because those invocations are so cheap while the phrases keep flying in.

I was playing around with Konstanten as Howler today in the BoW DLC and gave him Wahai Poraga. I was almost drowing in phrases. Was able to keep Soul Collectors perma-stunned with the help of the Helm of the White Void and "Its Crash Could Not Be Denied" which then has +25 ACC. Most enemies, even with high Will, cannot defend against that (except with immunities and resistaces of course - then Killers Froze Stiff is a nice alternative I guess, though shorter CC). Didn't try the charming invocation but that could be great, too, maybe I'll try that later. One or two swirls - stun! - another swirl - stun! and so on. It's pretty cool. The easy way to get phrases from the crits on skeletons makes phrase generation a breeze. It's more fun that I expected. Good option for Konstanten imo.

In the action bar that pops up above your party's portraits (when you hover over them) there's a button on the far left that shows a head symbol. If it's highlighted (blueish hue) then AI is steering that character. You can use generic AI settings, make and use custom AI scripts with the "AI scripting tool" (which is pretty useful), or turn AI off completely for that character so he/she only acts if you give commands directly.

I neither use Abydon's Challenge nor BPM and I try to write stuff that applies to the vanilla game so that everybody is on the same page. The difference is (as I said in the initial post) that with Wahai Poraga you don't have to be confused (that usually means picking Berserker or Tactician) to combine on-kill effects with summons because Wahai Poraga does friendly fire. This means you can combine the skeletons with any other class pick (that has some useful ability to combine friendly fire with) instead of being bound to classes that can confuse (themselves). Another point was that it was not known (at least not to me) that when using Wahai Poraga with a Cipher you can gain focus from hitting friendly targets. Usually a cipher won't generate focus by hitting non-hostile targets (for exame when hitting charmed or dominated foes) - Wahai Poragas special mechanics seem to solve that "problem". As I said above, this makes it easy to harvest focus in fights where a Cipher usually struggles to generate good focus (like boss fights). --- I did lots of posts about the ability to use Confusion (mostly Berserker) to your advantage. Like a topic about Berserker/Cipher + Amplified Thrust and other cipher spells that can usually only be cast on allies, Berserker/Priest who uses Withdraw on enemies in order to take them out of the fight right away with no chance to resist (auto-hit), Berserker/Chanter with Grave Calling/Chilling Grave for unlimited Chillfogs, Berserker/Skald with Blightheart (bound to chanter) with Her Revenge so that using it on enemies would also kill your skeletons which grants 1 phrase (and Her Revenge only costs 2), turning you a bit into Emperor Palatine, Paladin's Devine Retribution with skeletons to gain unlimited Zeal (cool with Kind Wayfarer - unlimited AoE healing) and so on and so forth. Also a topic about Berserker+Amra+Skeletons. In that case the skeletons came from a party member - because I used a Berserker/Fighter to combine Blood Thirst with Cleaving Stance - which is a brutal combination with Riven Gore of Amra. It always instakills the many-lives skeletons because they always have less than 50hp. But this topic was more about the weapon and ways to make Wahai Poraga a viable pick - because else it's one of the most lame unique weapons there is unfortunately. Which is a pity because the way to get it is rel. long and imo cries for more rewarding loot. So maybe those few ideas for some weird synergies would help to build something cool and functional with it.

I used the vanilla version. My mod also did a pull-effect - I didn't really use it myself, it was more like a little practice session. I think @Noqnor @Elric Galaddid a version where the additional hits meet the description properly (3). I think with the vanilla version 2 additional target can get hit, not only 1 - despite the description saying 3. One has to pay attention to the way wahai poraga delivers its attacks: it seems to do it counterclockwise. So if you face two or three enemies I would attack the last one in the row from a "counterclockwise perspective" if you know what I mean. Else the skeletons might not get attacked and the benefits of killing them quickly might not occur. Then, if you want to use Soul Annihilation I would target the first enemy in the row so that raw dmg gets applied to all of them and nothing is "waisted" on skeletons. The upside of the Chanter/Soulwhip is that it works at early levels (as soon as you get the weapon). Barbarian with Blood Thirst is stronger imo (esp. in combination with Interrupting Blows), but Bloods Thirst is late game material for a MC Barb unfortunately.

I don't quite understand. I sounds as if you missed that you can turn off the AI that is steering your character and companions and give all orders yourself, but I'm not sure. Are you playing with Turn Based Mode or Real Time with Pause?

Yes, I adressed Chanter/Fighter and Cleaving Stance as the main synergy in the opening post (only briefly I admit). I'm a bit sad that the Paladin's "on kill" passives don't work in this case. Inspired Defenses (100% uptime) and Inspiring Triumph (new Zeal all the time) would have been great - and Heralds are good to begin with. It's interesting though that this class is the only one where the devs seem to have been paying attention to this "profit from killing your own summons" trick. They did miss Divine Retribution at PL9 - but it's not obtainable for a multiclass character.

Awesome @SChin! You're the best. Thanks a lot - and have a great #CurryThursday tomorrow!

@The Guildmaster hello? No ideas? @SChinmaybe? Or@Shyla?

It would apply the raw dmg to the enemy and up to two skeletons and give you some healing. I don't see anything out of the ordinary with that combo.

Hehe - another plus is that the AoE size of Wahai Poraga is fixed. Konstanten's lowish INT often bothers me - at least this weapon doesn't care.

Okay, against tougher foes the crit chains don't occur that easily anymore. Still I see several additional attacks due to Swift Flurry/HBD which surely helps.

Another hint that the attacks are somewhat separate actions comes from Torment's Reach/Raised Torment: unlike all other AoE weapos, Raised Torment+cone triggers for every one of the attack rolls of Wahai Poraga! This is pretty cool... Funnily enough Wounding Shot (Ranger) refuses to work with the secondary attacks - as it does with all other AoE weapons (resp. their additional attack rolls). Shattered Pillar gains wounds from auto-attack dmg done to the skeletons - which is great. And somehow I also always "regain" 1 wound even when I use an attack ability like Skyward Kick for example. This is werid: It costs 3 wounds, I execute it, 3 wounds get substracted - but then I gain 1 back as soon as the whirling attack is done. Huh??? Also Rooting Pain might trigger frm that wound so I guess I'm not imagining this. Also Swift Flurry/HBD seem to trigger a whole whirl action again? Because I find it extremely(!) easy to produce AoE-crit-chains with Wahai Poraga. The Skeletons help to produce easy crits due to their abysmal defenses I suspect.

It seems that unlike other AoE weapons, the 3 potential hits of Wahai Poraga per swing count as seperate actions. This makes it possible for a Skald to gain more than 1 phrase per swing. With a weapon such as WotEP it doesn't work (Skald gets max 1 phrase from a swing even if it crits mutliple times) - but I'm pretty sure I saw more than that during my tests with Wahai Poraga + Skald. It's not that easy to determine because the Skald is also singing phrases which generate points in between. But I saw jumps from 1 to 4 in an instant often enough so I guess my assumption is correct. Maybe needs more testing to be 100% sure. This would also explain why Barbaric Smash doesn't refund if a secondary target dies and why Stunning Surge doesn't seem to refund if you crit secondary targets. Didn't try Gambit but I suspect it won't refund on secondary crits, too. Not motivated to test that though because Gambit can't be used with Chanter/Rogue in the first place - and I was looking for "self-contained" synergies. On the other hand: stuff like the stun of Stunning Surge does get applied to the secondary targets just fine. Maybe secondary attacks are not entirely separated actions after all...

Yes, indeed. Unfortunately Wahai Poraga has low base dmg and the dmg bonuses of Chanter/Fighter aren't too high so it's not as devastating as it sounds. Also the description of Wahai Poraga is wrong: it doesn't hit "3 additonal" targets as advertised but only 2 (3 including the initial target). So the number of skeletons getting hit is only 2 at max. And because you seldomly one-shot even your whimpy Many-Lives skeletons with that low dmg per hit you won't see a lot of that. But nevertheless Cleaving Stance offers a lot of "free" additional attacks against the initial target - which suddenly makes the weapon very viable. Without such tricks its dmg output is just bad. But the enchantments are pretty good for a non-shield tank though - so using a fighter to build an "offensive tank" might be a nice idea. Add some cool Huana gear that goes into the same direction (Reckless Brigandine mostly, stacks with the mob stance effect) and you might get a cool Huana Warcaller. If Wahai Poraga did attack the number of targets it claims it does then this would be even more interesting for sure.

Hello! Chanter/Soulblade (the big red button) The chanter can summon multiple skeletons (first with Ancient Brittle Bones and later with Many Lives Pass By) The Soulblade gains +10 max focus and concentration from killing an enemy (or ally, doesn't matter) Usually Ciphers don't generate focus from hitting friedly characters Wahai Poraga acts like a "confused" AoE weapon If you accidentially hit your Skeletons with it s AoE you will generate focus (all Ciphers except Psion)! If you kill your Skeletons with its AoE you will gain +10 max focus and concentration (Soulblade passive)! Echoing Horrors will get triggered every time you kill a Skeleton ( Frighten a bystanding enemy on kill - it's a passive...) If you use Soul Annihilation with it it will apply the full raw damage to the initial target (and some more to the additional ones). So against tough singular foes that usually make generating focus difficult you can harvest focus and also max focus and concentration from your skeletons while hitting the enemy You can collect a huge amount of focus that way and then dump it all into one Soul Annihilation that destroys the tough enemy Skalds can get phrases from crits against skeletons - I used a Troubadour though (faster Many-Lives-skellies) Chanter/Priest (the undying) cast Triumph of the Crusaders use Ancient Brittle Bones and/or Many Lives Pass By attack with Wahai Poraga and gain lots of health every time a skeleton goes down combine with health-on-kill pets for additional healing Chanter/Barbarian (the obvious choice) no need to be a confused Berserker use skellies every AoE-hit of Wahai Poraga triggers Carnage (foe only) accidentially killed Skeletons trigger Bloodlust and Blood Thirst (hack away without much recovery) Blood Storm (additional Frenzy duration on kill) makes it easy to uphold Frenzy endlessly Barbaric Smash: AoE-kills when using Barbaric Smash will not refund the Rage cost. The initial target has to die (booh!) Chanter/Sister of the Reaping Moon (the well of wouds) killing a skeleton grants 3 wounds Chanter/Fighter (clever cleaver) killing a skeleton triggers Cleaving Stance (attacking the enemy again because Cleaving Stance chooses the next enemy as initial target, not a skeleton) What doesn't work: Paladin's Inspiring Triumph and Virtuous Triumph won't trigger (too bad). That's all I found out so far.

Thanks to you, too. You are most welcome. Have fun!

Hello! In my opinion beginners should bring a Priest. They are just too impactful to pass, especially in the early game where you might hit some walls. They add more accuracy (via Priest buffs) which is very useful. Their healing is useful, too. One of the best talents of the Priest is "Inspiring Radiance" which turns the 1-per-encounter Holy Radiance of the Priest into a short +10-ACC buff which stacks with everything. Early in the game this makes a big difference - and even later its ability to stack with other ACC buffs makes it keep its usefulness. Most experienced players might agree that the Priest is the most potent class of Pillars of Eternity if you don't play solo but with a party. In general all "per-rest"-casters (Wizard, Druid, Priest) are the most potent classes after the early game. They mean a bit more micromanagement though - I mean as soon as you let them cast spells. Chanters are good, but in the lower difficulties they are also pretty slow. They are much better for Path of the Damned difficulty where fights take a lot longer - in my opinion. Once you get to level 9 though 3 Chanters will absolutely wreck everything because they will have access to "The Dragon Thrashed" - and that is incredibly powerful. By the way: offensive chants get an accuracy bonus of +12 if you only use a single one-handed weapon in your main hand. It's a little bug - normally only your weapon attacks should get +12 ACC from one-handed usage. But for some reason offensive chants do as well. Keep that in mind if your affensive chants do miss you enemies a lot. Paladins are good tanks - but 3 of them is maybe overkill on the tanky side. A Fighter can also be a good tank, has more engagement slots - and most importantly has better starting values (accuracy, deflection etc.) so the early game becomes more easy with a Fighter. Maybe I would switch one Paladin for one Fighter. Fighters are also low on micromanagement. The most potent powers Chiphers have are ones that can be used for Mind Control (charm, dominate). The powers you mentioned are good as well - but you will have the most success if you also employ charms and dominations (see Whisper of Treason, Puppet Master etc.). If you combine Mind Control with the Chanters' summons you'll have a much easier time later in the game when there's more and beefier enemies. Skills: Survival is very good because it grants you all-stacking accuracy vs. all sorts non-kith enemies. And accuracy is extremely important. Attribute points aren't very crucial - but for everything with an Area of Effect (AoE) INT is very useful because its effects on the AoE size scale very well with high INT numbers. Since it's the radius of hte AOE that gets boosted the actual area scales exponentially with INT. DEX is a very useful stat in general. DEX is the only thing that no only lowers your recovery or reload times but also the animation/action times. All other speed effects only affect the recovery or reloading times. Only DEX makes your actions faster, too. PER is very useful for the early game but not so much later on. CON is generally viewed as dump stat. If you have high defenses (Paladin, Fighter etc.) you won't get hit too often so you don't need very high CON/endurance/health - and if you are not in the frontline you won't get hit a lot even with low defenses so you also don't need a lot of CON. However - CON affects the Fortitude defense which gets tested a lot in the later game - so you don't want to dump it either for tanks imo (you cn, but then you need to raise your Fortitude defense otherwise). This isn't so crucial anymore if you have a Priest - because a Priest has prayers that make you immune to a variety of hostile effects. RES raises deflection. All defenses have increasing returns: every additional point of defense has more impact than the one before that. Since deflection is the most attacked defenses it can make sense to maximize RES on tanks who also wear shields and already have high deflection (see Paladins and Fighter). It also helps to prevent interrupts which can be nasty. A RES-3 character, if attacked by a bunch of enemies, might get interrupt-locked and die without being able to do anything. This won't happen to a character with high RES. MIG is not as impactful on damage-dealing as one might think - at least for weapon attacks. For damaging spells it can be important (because not much else raises spell damage) and it's also very good for your healing powers. But in general I wouldn't put too much focus on it. Cheers!

Hello @The Guildmaster! How do I deactivate 2-factor auth when I cannot access my athenticator app? Or how do I add another device/authenticator? I can use recovery codes to log in, but I cannot use them for disabling 2-factor auth - or to add new devices. For that I need a code from the authenticator... which is not accessible for me atm. My phone broke down and I set up a new one. I'm in a situation now where I only can use recovery codes to log in - since Obsidian doesn't let me remove or add 2-factor-auth options. Any ideas?