Boeroer

You realize that that background story is that of Counselor Deanna Troi from the Enterprise, right? Yes, a spiritshifted druid, properly build, has the highest melee damage output against single targets.

None taken.

The wizard has so many awesome spells. I can't even understand how he can fall off in terms of damage or CC. A wizard can do CC as well as damage, you don't need to bring two seperate chars for that. I also don't use self buffs when he's in the back row. But then he has so many other great spells. Chillfog alone is so good, Pull of Eora is one of the best CC spells there is (if not THE best), The Wall of Many Colors is ridiculously good - and the best of all: there are so many different spells that you can build your wizard in so many different ways. It's a lot of fun. You just have to unlearn to spare your spells. Just knock out cool spells all the time and every encounter is easy. After a few levels you have enough spells per rest so that you don't have to rest too often. Normally I have to rest because of low health before I even used half of my spells. And even for the "I don't like resting"-faction there's Blast and Arcane Assault (it's one of the best per low level encounter abilities out there). ONce you can get spell mastery Kalakoth's Minor Blights you'll have the best per encounter autoattack weapon in the game. You can also spare a lot of spells with the Spirit Lance. It's base damage is so high - i killed the ogres in front of Nalrend's Cave with a solo (non-tanky) wizard with one single per rest-spell (Spirit Lance) in a few seconds. The rest was per encounter. FOr me, wizard is one of the best classes in the game. But to be honest I like them all.

Yeah, but only to one enemy instead of all. It doesn't help a lot when you get surrounded. Until you get Relentless Storm you should watch your back - after you cast that spell defenses don't matter much - that was my point. So low CON can be ok. I was arguing in your favour. If you have high MIG and INT and also survival bonuses, the healing spells Nature's Vigor and Nature's Balm are acually pretty good. You can cast them at the start of the combat and go in. Monnwell is even better of course. You won't die easily.

Hm... sounds like a bug. Normally, when you try to position your cone, the corpses that work should have a rollover effect when the cone touches them - they turn a bit red. That's the indicator that they will expolde. If you don't see red bodies flashing then it won't work. Loot that is on the floor doesn't count as corpses! This only works on visible corpses which did not get gibbed. So spirits and so on who don't leave a real body don't work. I can't say if the animation and the chanter's "invocation voice" get played when you cast it without proper corpses in range. So now I can't say if it's really buggy behaviour or if OBS nerfed it or if you just didn't have the right corpses. Maybe OBS changed something with the way corpses get detected because lately I have difficulties with Garden of Life (druid): although I killed some enemies nit all of their corpses will work. Strange...

If you choose to use lowish CON you can take Veteran's Recovery to balance that. With high MIG and INT it works really well and makes your spiritshift druid a lot sturdier. After you get lvl 5 spells you don't have to think about strudiness so much anymore because you will have Relentless Storm which will usually stun everything around you every few seconds, making defenses less important. Spiritshift Boar is actually a lot better than it looks. Is does wounding damage like Drawn in Spring or Tidefall which is really, really nice with high MIG and especially against high DR foes - and the boar form adds a bit of endurance regeneration to Veteran's Recovery, too. With high healing bonuses from survival the boar becomes very sturdy despite having lowish CON. It's a great spiritshift form for beginners and it also looks great. A boreal dwarf would fit really well. With that kind of regeneration you can always go melee, also when not shifted. That's also not bad when you want to make use of those nice cone shaped spells.

Most powerful class of all (party or solo) - how can you find that underwhelming? Even his lvl 1 spells are awesome.

Which character level?

The maps will be really crowded.

Actually - draining isn't affected by healing bonuses. But Wound Binding is as well as Infuse with Vital Essence. With all that healing buffs Wound Binding will give back all your health. You can get ~30 CON with a dwarf by the way. That's about 500 endurance and 3000 health if I'm not mistaken. With Wound Binding that's nearly 6000. My dual wielding HoF solo barb was a "Healasaurus Rex". Nice name by the way.

Ah - maybe skeleton wizards are not real wizards and the lance is an ability and not a spell for them. They also don't drop grimoires - so that must be the reason. Maybe that spells from spell binding items also don't get reflected.

If you trigger it with multiple hits it's totally OP. Take for example blunderbusses, Spark the Souls of the Righteous on a whole party, Wall of Flames/Force or Missile Barrage. Or cast it on enemies who stand in multiple Chillfogs. You will generate a ton of parallel combusting wounds. Those get buffed by MIG and INT by the way. Even if only MIN damage gets through, foes will melt. It's especially good against tough foes. I'm currently writing down my blunderbuss wizard build. Her single target damage because of Combusting Wounds is awesome.

You can easily clear whole maps with it. Until Dragon Thrashed it's my main damage tool. It requires a lot of pulling though. No idea why you don't even get an animation or sound effect. That sounds wrong.

The multi-retaliation trick together with Pain Link + Combusting Wounds still works very well. "Only" the focus generation from retaliation is lacking. So - I would still use the Supper Plate I guess.

Normally a tick is 3 seconds. If you hit multiple times all those DoTs have their own ticks - I don't know if they get synchronized.

You can always use scrolls with a bit more lore - with high PER and INT they should work fairly well. And with Munacra Arret you can charm one of them three times (one is immune). It gets fairly easy then. I soloed them with a dual wielding barb and it worked.

He's not. With a large shield, barbaric yell and thick armor he's not too squishy at the beginning, even with 3 CON. I would also take Veteran's Recovery as the first talent. It's better than Constant Recovery (without Rapid Rec.) and adds a lot of endurance. I also pump survival to 8 in order to get +40% healing received. Since the deflection with a large shield and maxed RES is good you mostly catch grazes if you get hit at all. Thick armor will catch most of that damage and what remains as MIN damage will get healed by Veteran's Recovery. No, not squishy. Once you get Weapon and Shield Style (next talent I'd pick) you can easily take the role of the main tank. You can start with higher CON of course and retrain later. Because later you def. don't need CON at all. Remember: with 3 CON a barb has quite the same endurance as a fighter with 10 CON. And a fighter with 10 CON and a shield is not squishy. But I encountered no problem with 3 CON right from the start. Alse keep in mind that this was not a solo run. When soloing I would use more CON - mostly because of fortitude.

It's all written in the build description. I know: it's an awful lot of text. tl;dr: It not only works with the FoD arquebus shots, but also with Whisper of Treaon and Dominate as Ben No.3 said. It even works with enemies in range of your Sacred Immolation because your radius is bigger than 4 meters. And it also gives you deflection and reflex against distant enemies. edit: eh, NinjaKruger!

For me, the somewhat stupid thing is that if the chanter is wearing a single one handed weapon, the +12 ACC also applies to the chant, which lets it crit a lot, melting stuff even faster. Once you get attacked you can switch to a shield setup and be safe immediately (defense bonus is not affected by recovery) and if you are not attacked you can immediately switch to +12 ACC modus. It's a lot of cheese on top of a very strong ability.

Or if bash would cause daze on crit or something like that, maybe even prone... everybody would use it.

Chanter gets the Dragon Thrashed at lvl 9. Sacred Immolation comes at lvl 13. Not really the same time (if it's those abilites that you're talking about).

That's right. Bash doesn't give you +50% speed bonus like a second weapon in the offhand would give you. So your hits will alternate between weapon - bash - weapon - bash with the normal attack speed. Although bash has a short recovery phase, it still means that it takes away dps from your autoattacking because bash's damage is very low.

Huh? Maybe I mixed that up. I remember testing it after we talked about it. After that I didn't pay too much attention during the rest of my playthrough to be honest - I was already lvl 15 or so. And then it took me some time to sit down and write something. I will edit the post then... Thanks for letting me know!

Haha - don't worry - I forgot it myself.

That explains why I always got a ton of Taste of the Hunt/Thrust of Tattered Veils when I used those shields with HoF. Always more than I expected.