Boeroer

First question: the best class for retaltion used to be the cipher. But focus gain per retaliation got nerfed - now it's not so awesome anymore. Every class that can add something to retaliation hits is ok with it. Those are: - Monk: Turning Wheel and Blood Testament Gloves add their lashes to retaliation, too. Works well if you also add Rooting Pain. Enervating Blows also add weakened through retaliation. - Barbarian: One Stands Alone and Blooded add dmg to retaliation. Retaliation kills also count towards Bloodlust and Bloodthirst. He can also add Barbaric Retaliation ot the mix, it stacks with normal retaliation. - Rogue: Deep Wounds also get applied through retaliation. If you make a tanky rogue and also add Riposte this isn't too bad. - Cipher: in combination with Pain Link you can retaliate quite a lot, but you won't get focus from it. - Chanter: the chant Aefyllath Ues Mith Fyr adds a 25% lash to retaliation, too. And with focus on interrupts (high PER) and the Champion invocation your retaliations will interrupt a lot. All those approaches work well with a Ring of Searing Flames or a wizard with Combusting Wounds in the party. Since multi-retaliation gernerates a lot of tiny hits it's perfectly well suited for Combusting Wounds. What you might also want to do is to reduce DR of enemies via Expose Vulnerabilites for example and use Vulnerable Attack. For me, the best performance comes from monk or barb. Both also have the big advantage that they have huge health pools. Getting hit all the time can drain health a bit. It's good to have a big foundation here. Second: Cipher with a 2hander is totally viable. Estocs and Great Swords are nice. Estocs are a bit better in the early game because of the +5 DR bypass. Hours of St. Rumbalt is a great thing with a cipher, too. But if you like, try Firebrand (Forgemaster Gloves from Crucible Keep, Dunstan's shop)! The combo of very high base damage with Annihilation (=double crit damage) and the +40% dmg from (Biting) Soul Whip and eventually +15% from 2handed style, +15% from Apprentice's Sneak and +20% from Savage Attack (and maybe even +20% from Scrion of Flame) leads to enormous(!) focus gain per hit. You can even use an Estoc as backup weapon if you don't want to use Firebrand in every fight. Because Firebrand is in the universal focus group it works with every Weapon Focus, even Adventurer. Or you use a Great Sword like H. o. St. Rumbalt as backup weapon. Another nice (backup) weapon (often overlooked) for ciphers is Justice (Great Sword from Raedric): lashes on weapons also generate focus and Justice has two of them: one small crushing lash (10%) and an additional, normal one (25%). Often , in the early game, the smaller lash doesn't make it though the armor of a foe, but once you piled up enough dmg mods and also attack squishier targets or reduce enemies' DR you will get more focus with Justice than with another Great Sword. BUT. if you want to take Firebrand and add Scion of Flame to your talent list, then using an estoc or great sword on which you can apply a burning lash is certainly better. Scion of Flame will not only raise Forebrand's damage, but also the b urning lash damage on your backup weapon from 25% to 30%. Wounding from Tidefall does not generate focus by the way... Last question: It's not only viable to play a berathian priest with a great sword, it's great fun! Tidefall is exactly the right choice for him. A priest can reach very high MIG. Wounding damage (like on Tidefall) benefits twice from high MIG: first high MIG raises the initial damage of the hit on which the raw wouding lash is calculated. Secondly, wounding damage itself gets influenced by MIG. High MIG leads to higher wounding damage (because it's a DoT effect). With a priest as main character you can reach 40 MIG and more. THings like Aggrandzing Radiance (stacks with everything), Minor Avatar and Champion's Boon lead to very high MIG and therefore good melee damage. If you also have high INT you can pick Veteran's Recovery to make the priest more sturdy and also Envenomed Strike and Runner's Wounding Shot. Wounding and Envenomed Strike all work with Cleansing Flame. Cleansing Flame doubles the damage of all DoT effects on the target. You can imagine how awesome this combo can be. If you need to, you can kill a dragon with a few hits once Cleansing Flame is on. Additionally, all your healing spells will work tremendously well with such high MIG and also things like Shining Beacon are devastating with more than 30 MIG. However, such a priest is a bit frail at the beginning but rally starts to shine once he has access to lvl 4 spells. A thick armor is a good way to keep him alive in the eary game. Of course he will cast a bit slower then - but that's better than kissing the ground all the time. Another really nice side effect of very high MIG on an MC priest is that your Holy Radiance will one-shot most vessels if your dispositions are correct.

Well, when you do the Doemenel faction quests in PoE1 you can get 10000cp. So it depends what you have to do in order to find the 5000cp. Alternatively there could also be some gems with the same value - if those can be used in enchanting and crafting they won't inflate your purse as much. Also, in PoE some stuff was really expensive: To buy the medallion from Serel you'd have to pay 6000cp. And 1000cp just to get to her. The thing that was always like a gold pot for me is Raedrics Castle. Kill and loot all enemies and you will be rich as King Rich-art. So it depends...

I had it on the Counselor Ploi build (v. 3.03) and did not encounter that bug.

You will miss some stuff in the Ogre caves which you can't loot then without very high stealth, but you will get the shop. Fenwalkers are really good, so which approach is better for you depends on what you want for your character(s).

No, it procs both (as far as I know - last time I tested with v. 3.04 it did). And that's insane. It used to be so and I don't think it got changed. But I can't say for sure because they also patched some other stuff secretly - like Envenomed Strike + Blast not working anymore and so on. So maybe TR+Barricade also got affected by this nerf, but I didn't test.

Rangers have low endurance (but high health) - so even in armor they tend to go down quickly when they get pummeled a lot and don't receive healing. The good thing is that your animal companion can always step in front of you. Since it has no health it's no so bad if it gets damaged badly or even knocked out. So in general a ranger who wants to tank/offtank without goind down quickly needs high deflection. Ranger's starting deflection isn't too bad. So with a weapon and a shield and a ring of deflection and so on it should be ok if you don't drop RES. Maybe also put on a Blunting Belt, it reduces the damage of grazes even further without the slowdown of fat armors. Another approach is to use the pet for offtanking and staying near it and provide constant healing so it doesn't go down like the Riptide build does (it's a 2.x build without WM content and abilities). This is a melee ranger with focus on pet damage, but I guess you can easily grasp how Shod-in-Faith boots are used to keep the pet alive. Luckily, ranger's health is quite high despite the low endurance. So an approach where you don't have high deflection but constant healing works quite well if you're not trying to tank it all. This can be achieved with things like Shod-in-Faith and Veteran's Recovery as well as items with healing bonuses (Belt of Bountiful Healing, Fulvano's Amulet, Maneha's armor...) and bonus from survival. This way you can achieve a lot of staying power while not gimping your damage dealing too much. This might lead to more resting though because low health might force you to. More CON helps here - or some potions of Infuse with Vital Essence (they will give you back health if you drink them before encounter ends). A Moon Godlike would be the most powerful choice with this approach, but any other race will also do. Human is fine, too. If you go this road then high INT and MIG are benifical since both regenration as well as Shod-in-Faith will do more healing (because lasts longer) with high INT. INT can also be very nice for stuff like Stunning Shots (or using Borresaine with stun on crit) and especially Binding Roots. Those have AWESEOME base duration already but it gets really nuts with high INT and a crit. You can cause the stuck affliction for up to a minute with this ability, removing the need to tank the guy who is stuck. And it's 5 per rest - some folks think that's bad but actually it's pretty neat: in easy encounters you don't need it but in tough encounters you can easily pin five enemies in quick succession for 45 seconds and more - turning some tough bounties into a cakewalk. As a backup for emergency situations you can give Takedown to your pet - it's quite nice as an addition to Binding Roots. If you plan to use wounding weapons (Tidefall, Persistance, Drawn in Spring or Acuan Giamas) and also like Wounding Shots for pure damage then I would not go the "healing" way but push MIG to the extreme and drop INT altogether and maye even put on an item with a malus to INT (Dandy Hat of the Deseased Yak -1INT or Ultimate Hat of Alluring Perfection -2INT) because those woundings' overall damage (25%) gets increased by MIG but doesn't rely on INT at all. It just gets strechted over time by high INT. Low INT on the other hand leads to nearly instant appliance of the whole wounding damage which can be awesome. It works quite well with an Island Aumaua with Arms Bearer talent (= 4 weapon slots): You pick up two arquebuses, Persistance and a weapon + shield. Usually you would fire with Persistance and watch the awesome wounding enchantment do its magic. But once you have to take out some enemy immideately you switch to arquebus and use Wounding Shot (it's devastating with low INT and arquebus). If the enemies are not already dead you switch to shield and tank a bit. There can be some very different approaches how you want to solve your issue. If you want to use a bow a lot and don't like to offtank too much but just want to stop attackers I would use high INT and MIG with Binding Roots instead of high deflection and RES.

Only thing is that wizards can reach 0 recovery very quickly with dual wielding + Alacrity. We recently had a discussion here about a wizard with Novice's Suffering because it could be both effective enough and also fun. It was played and reported to be viable. Since wizards have low ACC and only have few bonus dmg mods but can get a huge MIG buff (Martial Power) it seems to be a good choice. Too bad wizards can't summon one handed weapons. Besides that I also think a dual wielding cipher makes more sense. Usually dual wielding means more DPS and more DPS means more focus. Since dealing weapon damage is a must for ciphers anyways I'd also say that cipher is the better pick.

Yes

It used to be so, yes.

Is it a AoE petrify though? I always thought it's single target petrify only.

Yeah, it's true that a build idea is better the earlier it works as planned.

Just don't kill Ogres inside the cave. That's all I think.

Try Godansthunyr + Badgradr's Barricade with Torment's Reach. It's pretty nice.

He has a well balanced attribute spread. You can play him as melee wizard, ranged blast wizard - whatever. Everything works just fine with him.

Yes, I tried that in my Bilestomper wizard build. Another key item is Wodewys, because its boost to poison defenses stacks with everything. But that's deep in WM I. And of course you can also stack Hale and Hardy, but you will be stuck to that obviously. p.s.: You can also get Fenwalkers from Morug the Craig Ogre (he wil be there as a merchant in front of the cave if you don't kill the Craig Ogres inside the cave and choose a peaceful solution). So you can actually get Fenwalkers twice.

Can't wait to start. By the time PoE2 comes out I will be living in Bukarest - maybe time will be scarce - we'll see.

Actually it's quite nice that you can change the class. I'm doing a last PoE playthrough with my first ever char again (hearth orlan rogue, see avatar) and I remember now why I always say that the usual rogue sucks... a lot! But I can't be bothered with another playthrough either. So I will finish this and then maybe choose another class if rogues still suck in PoE2. p.s.: Only my personal preference and opinion of course.

Hey - good idea! Those two could indeed stack. I will test today and report. Could take some hours though... I mean until I get to it, not the testing process.

How come? As far as I can remember only the Chillfog build is a late bloomer (and says so in the build description)...? Which ones are only enjoyable from lvl 13 on? Just curious - maybe I can improve something.

Thanks - it's quite old now and lacks some of the awesome WM stuff (e.g. Ultimate Hat of Alluring Perfection: lowers INT 3 to INT 1), but it still is fun. A very quirky build though. Alpha strike damage is still top notch! The melee weapon should be Drawn in Spring - back then I didn't realize how good it is with 1 INT. Or I could make a Goldpact variant with Enduring Flames and Tidefall...

That would be better. But it would still favor the slow and heavy weapons over the fast but light weapons. Only a passive use could change that. Of course not with the same numbers, that would be totally overpowered. I think this mechanic is well suited for a passive. I mean Death's Usher is a passive, too. It's just a bit weak.

Ah, ok. Didn't know that.

For me, Finishing Blow - as it is now - is one of the most useless abilities in the game. Also totally overrated against dragons while stuff that is really good against them (like Knockdown, Force of Anguish or Whisper of Treason) doesn't get mentioned that often. The worst thing is that this rogue ability works best with slow & heavy hitters like an arquebus - much like Backstab. Not very roguelike. Not that rogues shouldn't use arquebuses - but those things are not really know as number one choice for Coup de Grace or as concealed backstabbing weapons... Whatever - the mechanic would be great as a passive ability though. That would also remove the advantage that slow & heavy weapons have.

No, doesn't sound like Edér at all. Maybe if he shoots them in the foot...

I meant that it's totally useless though.