Boeroer

I rolled a stag druid 5 min. ago just to see the lvl 1 base damage: it's 16-25 at lvl 1 with 10 MIG. And it has 5 DR bypass and 26 ACC at lvl 1 with 10 PER. While doing this I also saw that OBS didn't secretly change Stag Carnage: it's still 1/rest, not passive. All the "active" shifted abilites like Cat Flurry, Stag Carnage and stuff are one 1/rest or 2/rest. And then they have a passive like Stag with +7 to all defenses or bear with +DR or wolf with +movement speed. The only exception is boar (2 passives). I'm now looking up Hiravias to see if his base damage is higher...

The carnage is only 1/rest. The boar wounding is passive and alsways on. He has no 1/rest ability but instead two passive powers: regeneration and wounding. The Stag looks totally badass though. If you want to take a Nature Godlike (the racial power is total crap, but they look nice) then I would take stag. Godlikes are not too bad a choice for a spiritshifter, because the powers of godlikes also work in shifted form. If you use another race and wear helmets... they will do nothing for you while you're shifted. So Nature Godlike would be ok. If you ask yourself if Fire Godlike's Battle Forged works with Wildstrike lashes: nope. Moon Godlike is a very good choice. Death Godlike is overkill because you already one- or two shot most enemies when shifted - not need to get a +20% damage bonus when your enemies die from two strikes.

Base damage? Because if that's the base damage that's very high for a one handed weapon. Especially for one that scales with level and has inherent DR bypass... There's a reason why a shifted druid often does more than 100 damage per hit. My highest crit with my current boar was near 250 - and that's without wounding. I like Bittercut - but there's no setup where it can so such crits.

I thought he has higher base damage than the cat. But since I never used him with spiritshift I can't say for sure.

Maybe a dwarven rogue with max CON, Iron Circle and dual Whispers of Yenwood has enough health.

Yes - when you try to build a sturdy rogue with a lot of self healing (Veteran's Recovery + Shod-in-Faith and whatnot) he still dies all the time because health gets eaten up sooo quickly. One encounter where he eats some hits and his health bar is red. It's a chore to keep him alive. And if you go the deflection way he's not better than a fighter in anything because he HAS TO take a shield.

His spiritshift form is unique and really good actually.

I think they are - for example all casters make the game a lot easier. But more important to me is if the classes are fun to play. Now I only have to find a rogue build which is fun (and not using spells/scrolls all the time of course). And nobody can say I didn't try hard...

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.