Boeroer

The usual ranged cipher stat spread.

I'm pretty sure that the Alpine Dragon will give you Ryona's Vambraces, not Black Sanctuary. In order to get the shield you'll have to kill him.

Yes, that's true. It doesn't stack with several debuffs which lower deflection and/or reflex and gets suppressed. However, it's a good AoE debuff 1/encounter that covers a big area and has a long duration. At the beginning to the mid game there's nothing comparable. That's why I recommended it (amongst others) for the early to mid game and then retrain. Same with Prestidigitator's Missiles. Unless you haven't something like Deathblows or Driving Flight in your later level progression it gets pretty weak after the mid game. In the beginning however it is a very powerful, 1/encounter burst attack. For a ranger with Vicious Aim it's great. the ACC buff of Vicious Aim works with it. And since it has +10 ACC on it's own said ranger will have +20 ACC for that missile attack which leads to crits very often. Even later on with Driving Flight and Penetrating Shot it's worth it.

White Worms needs corpses, yes. If one wants to use it regularly I would turn off exploding body effects in the game options (that effect is stupid anyhow) because it leaves. Corpses don't get consumed by it. So you can use the same corpse multiple times with White Worms. Spirits and some other enemies (oozes and such) don't leave corpses! This invocation is best when you combine it with pulling enemies to a chokepoint. You can clear whole maps this way, including one-shotting whole bounty groups. Come Soft Winds of Death is good in the early game. It deals raw damage, which means that enemies DR is ignored. And don't forget that it works in a huge AoE. It' great against numerous but weak enemies (wichts) or numerous enemies with very high DR (beetles and such). Although maybe one can only appreciate it on PotD difficulty because there are simply more enemies per encounter. I like it on an otherwise very tanky chanter because it's a way to contribute to the party's dps without actually doing anything while you build phrases quickly. Lashes are independent from enchantments like fine, exceptional and so on. Lashes have to overcome 1/4 of the corresponding DR (burning lash has to overcome 1/4 or the enemy's burn DR). If you enchant any weapon with a burning lash then it deals additional burn damage, yes. It works like this (example mace, exemplary numbers, enemy's DR 0): You roll an attack with a mace that has a burning lash. You hit. The roll for the crush damage is 20. Additional burn damage gets calculated: 20 * 0.25 = 5. All in all you will deal 25 damage: 20 crush + 5 burn. Now against 10 DR (crush DR 1, burn DR also 10): Crush damage roll again is 20. DR is 7 (10-3 from mace's DR bypass). You'll deal 13 crush damage. 20 * 0.25 is still 5. But 5 has to overcome 10/4 = 2.5 burn DR. Therefore you deal 2.5 = (rounded) 3 burn damage. All in all you deal 16 damage. Now the same with a lot of damage modifiers (imagine high MIG, Sneak Attack, fine enchantment or whatever, examplary numbers): Crush damage roll is 40. 40 - 7 is 33. Burn is 40 * 0.25 = 10 - 2.5 = (rounded) 8. All in all you deal 41 damage. Dual Wielding will reduce your recvery phase by +50% (so to speak) without any accuracy drawbacks or anything. That means - only by taking two weaoons into your hands you already gain a lot of attack speed without spending any talent points. This only works for attacks with those weapons of course. Other actions won't have reduced recovery. Two Weapon Style reduces the recovery time further by 20%. Rapid Recovery/Bonus Knockdown are both good. Aspirant's Mark is a bit wasted on Edér because he only has 10 INT and so its radius would be rather small. It's much better on characters with high INT. But it would be good enough nevertheless because Edér has good accuracy. I think I would pick Bonus Knockdown first. Aspirant's Mark doesn't stack! Edit: Ooops, took too ling to type this so I got stabbed by a ninja.

Right! Dat huge over sexualization! At least OBS should have allowed to put her in a burqa or niqab. I mean I really get testosterone overflow when I look at her character sheet. And the centerfold level up screens! Holy moly...

Sweet!

What about the item by the way? Any decision?

Hooray mighty Monsignieur Flufflé! I finally send my submission just a second ago. Hope you can sort it out with the different mail address (same domain though). Sorry for the inconvenience!

Also put on an elemental lash as soon as possible. That is the best enchantment for damage you can apply yourself and it's available pretty early. Normal damage mods only buff the weapon's base damage (so the damage a plain weapon would do without any enchantments and without MIG bonus and so on). Lashes however are calculated based on the damage you actually score in combat - with ALL the damage mods included BEFORE DR gets substracted. So, +25% from a lash can be a higher damage boost than let's say +50% from Sneak Attack. Of course it's best if you have both.

Skip Persistent Distraction. It's quite useless in my opinion. Distracted doesn't count for Sneak Attacks/Deathblows. Reckless Asault is nice (but doesn't work with Savage attack, so you have to choose which one you want), Deep Wounds is ok. Dirty Fighting and Vicious Fighting are actually quite good - because you can also stack that with Durgan Steel later on and several other hit-to-crit conversions. Iy you combine that with an annihilating weapon (Rumbalt, Shatterstar, Resolution, Firebrand and so on) things get really interesting.

Thanks a lot. Monks are awesome. But you have to understand how they work. My first monk was a disappointment because I couldn't figure out his strengths in the early game. But once I got it right it was so much fun. Lots of micromanagement though. The total opposite of a chanter. Barbs start relatively weak (drop down quickly, miss a lot). But they have a steep power curve compared to other martial classes. A fun approach that works very well in the early to late mid game is to use Novice's Suffering (aka fists).

An example how to make the early game a lot easier with just two talents: Priest with Inspiring Radiance and any other character with Aspirant's Mark. The priest starts encounter with Holy Radiance, everybody gets +10 ACC. The other char casts Aspirant's Mark. Now your whole party has a +18 ACC bonus when it comes to rolls against deflection and reflex. This is a party-wide buff/AoE debuff that works in every encounter! You can imagine that a Paladin with Zealous Focus will also be very helpful here, adding another +6 ACC bonus to the whole party. Most CC spells / abilities that follow will be hits or crits, same with damaging attacks. You can add Prestidigitator's Missiles then (for example use a ranger with Vicious Aim) which will most likely one-shot most early enemies. Tricks like this will make you rest less and reach Act II with a lot less fuzz.

On PotD, the beginning is more difficult than the rest of the game. It's normal that this is the part where people struggle the most. One little tip if you don't oppose retraining: cross-class talents and other things like Runner's Wounding Shot, Envenomed Strike, Prestidigitator's Missiles and also Aspirant's Mark are very powerful early in the game. But they don't scale well with level (except Runner's Wounding Shot, which is always very useful). They make the beginning of the game a LOT easier. At some point you will feel that they don't work as well anymore. Then you can retrain and pick something else.

Hi! Your stats would work well with a ranged cipher. Just note that he indeed will be a glass cannon and will die quickly once he gets attacked directly. If you can avoid that (good frontline or smart use of crowd control), it's all good. And you'll have Silver Tide (Moon Godlikes' racial feat) which will prolong the time you can withstand a beating. Accuracy is very important in this game, because there's not only hit or miss, but actually there is miss - graze(only 50% damage or duration) - hit (normal damage or duration) or crit (+50% damage or duration). The higher the accuracy the more likey you will avoid misses and grazes an do more hits and crits. Since the accuracy bonus from PER stacks with every other accuracy bonus you can get, PER is important for most characters who want to hit/crit - be it with damage or with crowd controlling effects. However, since you are playing on normal difficulty, where enemies' defenses are lower than at Path-of-the_damned difficulty for example, you can do with lowish PER and still be happy. So, yeah, you should be fine. One rule of thumb for PoE combat: 1. buff your accuracy 2. use crowd control (favorably things that disable foes like prone, stun or things like blind which lower enemies' defenses a lot) 3. deal damage No. 1 can be easily done with a priest (some classes also have their own accuracy buffs), 2 is what ciphers, wizards and druids are good at and 3 can be done with any class, although some have more potential than others. Ciphers are also pretty good at it, be it with weapon or with spells. Crowd control is very powerful - that's why the cipher has INT as recommended stat. He has some good crowd control spells and INT prolongs duration as well as it extends AoE. If you want your cipher to be more of a crowd controller than a damage dealer then INT is more important than MIG. If he should be more of a damage dealer then MIG can be more important than INT (depends on the spell - some deal damage over time and in that case INT is important, too). Hope you like it!

Ok, thanks for the info. I recall that I got them in one of my earliest playthroughs. Version 1.x. Because I seldomly use the random loot table (only when doing ToI) I assumed that I just missed them since then. But apparently that was changed quite a long time ago without noticing me. Or I'm confusing something. Might also be the case.

Moar Power!

Don't know if this will help with the bugfix, but if you pause a LOT (like, every microsecond it feels) during drinking animation and click on that potion symbol again you can prevent the fizzling. Did that all the time during an ultimate run. Superannoying but it prevents that the game finishes the animation without actually drinking the potion.

And yes, if you have survival 7 then you will get +2 DR instead of +1 (if you choose that option while camping). You would get +40% healing if you'd have survival 8 (and choose this bonus while camping). However, the ACC-bonus doesn't scale like this: you'll get +10 with survial 4, +15 with survival 10 (so, only 5 more) and +18 at survival 16 (only +3). A good value for survial can be 4 (for +10 ACC against certain enemy types), 8 (in order to get +40% healing) or 10 (+15 ACC).

Ooops I guess?

Wait, this is the best? Didn't you read my other builds in the PoE charbuild subforum?

Depends how quickly you can end the fight. And you can have lots'n lots of health but bad defenses (barbarian for example). In that case constant healing is great. Every level reduces the health issue a bit, too.

No, we know it's cipher/barbarian.

Yeah, what Jerek said. For example plate armor: base DR: 12 Vs. slash and pierce damage it has a modifier of 1.25, resulting in 12 * 1.25 = 15. Vs. shock damage it has a modifier of 0.5, resulting in 12 * 0.5 = 6. Armor enchantments like crush-proof or shock-proof add their bonus to the base! So a plate + shock-proof would only get a +2 bonus in the end, because (12+3) * 0.5 = 7.5 which is rounded to 8. Putting crush-proof on would lead to a value of 15 (12+3, no modifier). Putting pierce-proof on would result in 19: (12+3) * 1.25 = 18.75 Any other, "external" source of bonus DR which has nothing to do with the armor itself, for example a ring with +4 DR and +4 burn DR from Scion of Flame and such just get added to the modified armor value. They will not be influenced by the armor's DR modifier. So, Heart of the Storm would add a flat +4 DR bonus on top your plate's 6, resulting in 10. A Blunting Belt will always add 5 to slash and pierce DR, no matter the armor modifiers and so on...

I think the resulting spells which you generate in Tyranny felt really... generic. "Bland" would be another word to describe it. Of course more adaptable and flexible, too. A bit like when you compare hand-crafted maps (PoE) with dynamically generated ones (Diablo or Torchlight or whatever). Pros and cons. I would be cool if you could not only create or craft spells and abilites from certain resources, but also develop them over time - like you develop your character. Would give even spells that feel bland a bit more flavor and a certain feel of "history" after some time.

It's totally possible in PoE1. Create a rogue with high MIG and INT, Pick up the Sun-Touched Mail from the guys that stole Wael's scroll in Woodend Plains, pick up the Amulet of Summer Solstice from Lady Aelys "father" in Dyrford and you'll have a rogue with 6 Sunbeams per rest pretty early. When slaying Maerwald, opt for siphoning his soul for knowledge. Then grab the sabre "Flames of Fair Rhian" from the Endless Paths lvl 13(?). If you have the Helwax Mold from a stronghold adventure then duplicate that sabre. You will have a dual wielding sabre rogue with 6 Sunbeams and 6 Fireballs per rest which work with Deathblows (not Sneak Attack). Which basically means double damage on hits. And hit-to-crit conversion of the rogie also works with spells. The great thing about Sunbeams is that those cause blind for a long time. Also pick up the Silver Flash! You can add more Fireballs with Taluntain's Staff (3/rest, Act III) and Curoc's Brand (1/rest, WM I). And of course you can add other AoE spellbind items like White Crest armor, Bittercut, Spelltongue and so on, adding more and more spells per rest or even per encounter. Swaddling Sheet is especially nice! Also use scrolls of Twin Stones or Concussive Missiles. Those will cause Deep Wounds in an AoE. Another thing would be Grey Sleeper for the Twin Stones proc, but it doesn't trigger often enough in my opinion. AoE rogue is very nice to play because you can get the first Sunbeam item quite early and it can be played like an ordinary sabre rogue - so it's not gimped in some ways just to get the AoE capability.