Boeroer

Spirit of Decay does indeed boost the corrosive lashes on weapons. Basically you'll do 30% instead of 25%. Bittercut is even better: the base damage gets a 20% boost as well as the lash. So it's a great weapon for somebody who has Spirit of Decay. Please note that the main point of this build is to make yourself nearly immune to your own AoE poison and disease spells. This approach will not work if you take away Wodewys and Mountain Dwarf (together they give you +45 defenses against poison) - and take a pale elf and use Bittercut, which even lowers poison defenses further by -10. For a pale elf there's a similar approach with ice spells like Chillfog and the Crossed Patch (immunity to blind) - I think it's also on the build list. You can even try to boost reflex and burn DR with a pale elf and do this with fire/fireballs: dropping them onto your own head and don't get harmed. This wizard is supposed to be a tank and therefore should use a shield. However, you can certainly wield melee weapons with a wizard like a two hander or dual wielding. Dual wielding might even be too fast because you have Deleterious Alacrity of Motion which gives you +50% speed. Together with the 50% automatic speed enhancement of dual wielding you're already (mathematically ) at -0.25 recovery - but of course recovery can't be negative - so it's a bit of a waste. If you skill for two handers (Two Handed Style, Savage Attack, not too low DEX etc.) you will be perfectly set up for using The Parasitic Staff and latet Citzal's Spirit Lance - which is one of the best weapons in the game. Its damage is huge and its AoE splash damage also works with Knockdown (you can get that from a Girdle of the Driving Wave - random loot) and also Envenomed Strike, turning it into an AoE attack. Plus: Citzals Spirit Lance and the staff are universal, meaning they work with any weapon focus. You could for example use an estoc as tour everyday weapon, take WF Adventurer and it would still apply to Concelhaut's Staff and Spirit Lance. If you want to be a melee wizard and feel super powerful, use Citzal's Spirit Lance + Alacrity and every DMG boost (like Savage Attack, Two Handed Style, Apprentices Sneak, high MIG) you can get.

Wolf has hoigher move speed (+1 like Fast Runner) and Knockdown per rest (meh) and bear has +DR (+2 I guess, meh) and 2 frighting roars per rest (supermeh).

Sorry, edited the post above because I forgot to answer that.

Wounding Tusks are the spiritshifted boar's natural weapons. Its damage scales with MIG and also works very well with the high base damage. It does 20% wounding (raw DoT) damage and is the special (passive) feat of the boar - together with regeneration (about 3 points of endurance per 3 sec with decent MIG). It stacks with Veteran's Recovery (which also works while shifted). If you combine those two with Moon Godlike (also works when shifted) you can totally go the dps way without the fear of getting killed quickly. The boar has no active 1/rest ability when shifted like cat, stag or bear have. Taste of the Hunt is nice if you need quick healing but you don't want to stop casting. Because when you are shifted you want to deliver as many blows as possible. Taste of the Hunt is "only" a primary attack, but it adds another raw DoT to the target and instantly gives you the damage you inflicted as endurance while hitting. It's only one attack though. I find it to be very circumstancial but sometimes it can save your buttocks. It's nothing I would use as spell mastery though.

The base damage scales (to a ridiculously high amount) and you boost damage with talents (Wildstrike and Greater Wildstrike, Savage Attack, Two Weapon Style, Weapon Focus Peasant, Outlander's Frenzy, Apprentice's Sneak and so on). Every damage mod, even if only 15%, works great because the base damage is so huge. Crits also add a ton of damage because of this - not only the tiny 50% of a usual weapon's base damage. If you take the Merciless Hand and add Dungeon Delver it gets even better. Also things like Wilder Hunter (+25% damage) do wonders. The only items that have some use while spiritshifted are those that are designed for the shifted Druid and those with Spell Holdings or Spell Bindings. The Wildstrike Belt also disappears when you shift, but with the action of shifting it triggers a timed elemental damage buff that lasts as long as you are shifted and gets add to the other wildstrike lashes. The Spell Holding/Binding items also disappear of course, but the spells that got triggered before the shifting carry on. For example you can get a crit and trigger Consecrated Ground from Shod-in-Faith boots, then shift. Conserated Ground will carry on. Same with Frenzy from Sanguine Plate and so on. And you can still cast spells when shifted. Avenging Storm for example is very good for a melee druid. It will add a quite powerful seperate shocking attack that also stuns each time you hit an enemy (and it also retaliates with thais effect when you get hit). As I said above, the combination of that very high base damage (scaling claws) plus the 60% lash and things like Avenging Storm makes a shifted druid the top single target damage dealer - as long as he's shifted. There is nothing else that comes close to this. Also not a rogue with Deathblows + Backstab + crit with annihilation weapon (and that's a real chore to get). My boar for example (who is not optimized for melee damage) constantly hits for >100 damage with the known speed of unarmed damage, then also adds wounding (usually around 20 to 30 raw) with every hit. Usually it takes not more than two hits to kill any mob. Also dragons fear his strikes. He can kill any dragon during shifting time at lvl 16 if somebody else cares about the adds. Scaling makes him very accurate, too.

For solo it's too short. With a full party it usually is enough time with decent INT. Just keep in mind the INT bonuses from items don't work so well while shifted.

Aila Braccia has an awesome mechanic: if the enemy rolls a graze it gets converted into a miss and then reflected (100% of ranged grazes get converted). No wonder you took no damage. I can't say if Soul Mirror and Aila Barrcia work well together. Maybe Aila Braccia makes Soul Mirror obsolete - when it also reflects all misses and not only grazes. Kaylon will know, he used it a lot.

Thanks again.

The unarmed barb sounds like a lot of fun. I thought about an unarmed priest because he hasn't any DMG bonuses but can get superhig MIG which works great with Novice's Suffering. And the high ACC bonus and the fact that garzing doesn't matter much works against the priest's low starting ACC without the need to use those special deity weapon talents. Maybe I'll give it a try. By the way Novice's Suffering still has some issues: for example Avenging Storm doesn't work with it.

@AeonsLegend: No. As I wrote above it has the same damage as the cat. Acc is also the same.

Fair enough.

Somebody did a test a few weeks ago when we spoke about cat vs. boar. The result was that they were on par: against weaker targets the cat does more damage because of speed and against stronger targets the boar is better. That's because wounding is very good against high DR. It was also shown that the higher MIG the better the boar (in comparison to the cat). As a bonus, the boar has regeneration. But it's not that powerful. However, in addition to Veteran's Recovery it's nice.

Oh, that is a good question. I guess it wouldn't work, but it's easy to test ingame. The only item that is useful for you shifting is the Wildstrike Belt. It gives you +10% elemental lash for the time you are shifted and with that high damage per hit it's a good item.

Yes, I rerolled him to lvl 1 and there he also has 16-25 base like everybody else. I remember Loren Tyr said something about the Stelgaer form having a tiny advantage - but either it's a bit faster attack speed or I don't remember correctly...

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.