Boeroer

Erm - I don't think he was too serious.

I mean if you can kill all bounties solo on PotD I'd say it's proof enough that a build is viable.

Great! I love the combination of blinding + Dragon Thrashed + immune animated weapons in solo run. Never thought about that. Blind is such a powerful debuff. Only yesterday I was thinking about how to raise a chanter's ACC (and how to lower enemies' defenses) for better The-Dragon-Thrashed-hits. Besides the obvious Killers Froze Stiff or scrolls nothing useful came to my mind. Should also work nicely with any party. By the way I'm currently doing a playthrough with your paladin-prince-charming and the barb supertank (shield, frighten, fatigue, Stalwart Defiance and so on) and it works really well. Will post both builds (besides one or two others) after finishing off Thaos. There I will def. mention that those are your inventions that I merely playtested. The idea of Sworn Enemy + Charming alone is not enough to "fill" a whole paladin build. So I added some tweaks here and there.

TUB's spell chance is broken somehow. If it triggers it only does 1/encounter. And it doesn't work with HoF at all. On-crit weapons also don't seem to work correctly. I only see 1 proc when I do HoF with them. However, Badgradr's Barricade and Dragon's Maw work really well with it. You'll deliver tons of Thrusts of Tattered Veil or Taste of the Hunt with them when doing HoF. Way more than you should. For optimal HoF you want dual wielding. Vulnerable Attack, lots of DMG mods like one stands alone and Frenzy on and weapons that hit as hard as possible - so dual sabres are an obvious choice. With that and a bit of luck you can nearly one-shot the hardest bounties.

Hehe. Sounds nice. Make sure to pick up Persistence - it's wounding is great with low INT. @Slacker83: I guessed so. That's why I said you shouldn't read that special part.

The Lady of Pain is fun. The Engineer build is a tank with shield and tremendous self healing that has some nice burst damage after a while and is not worthless in melee, too. Note that some - or most - of my builds are 2.x versions. They are also not 100% optimized for PG, but make some minor compromizes so that they stay true to their style, basic idea and indiv. backgroud. However, they are absolutely viable to beat PoTD difficulty. I did a playthrough with all of them. They still work the way they are advertised, but you can add some of the new talents/abilities and items now. But if you get the basic idea of the build I think it's easy to squeeze those in. Feel free to report in those threads if you discover something new or which new feats work great. The builds of mine which *don't* work with official companions are: - Monksterlasher (needs to be a Fire Godlike) - Backlash Beldam (it's beauty was destroyed by OBS - it doesn't work at all atm. - Scheemer's Needler (needs to be a priest of Skaen) - Bilestomper (should be a Mountain Dwarf) The Devil of Caroc can be build as a Mad Hornet without problems - but her racial feats, her armored body and her stats make her more suitable for melee. I still have 4 or 5 builds in the pipeline - but don't wait for those. Could take me weeks to finish my curr. playthrough with them and write the builds.

Yeah I can't even say when it was changed. All of a sudden it gave +10 starting focus as well. Maybe they did it along with the cipher rebalance which also made all the powers above lvl 1 super expensive (basically +10 focus for every spell level instead of +5).

It gives you +10 max focus as well as +10 starting focus (this was added in a patch to make it worthwhile). It doesn't scale. It lets you cast powers of a higher level at the start of the combat - which can be pretty nice. The max focus itself is not so powerful if you spend focus asap. But combined with the starting focus it's a viable pick.

There's only the priest's litany against stun. But there are a lot of items with either high defense bonuses against prone/stun (like boots of stability) or preservation items (including two shields that lets you stack preservation) or even Breakout items (-50% or -33% duration) so that prone and stun shouldn't be a such a big issue as paralyze or petrify can be. And the sanguine plate can also be good in such encounters: Frenzy raises your fortitude defense quite a bit via +8 to the related stats.

Would be nice if they tweaked difficulty not by raising stats like crazy, but by adapting AI behaviour. At the moment - no matter the difficulty setting - enemies are dumb like pebbles. Like casting Tanglefoot and Calling the World's Maw on themselves all the time, running in circles around my party to reach someone who's standing in the middle, that sort of stuff. It would raise the difficulty a lot if foes with brains (like kith an so on) would have better tactics. Like not breaking up their formation when they see there's no spellcaster, spread if there is, better tactical movement and so on. That would mean a lot of work though. More than just tweaking stats.

Hilarious find! Need to evolve a build around that asap. There's an item with minor spellbind "Pain Link" - forgot which one it was (starting to build...)

No rest for the wicked.

Eh, right. Confused the lore with that of the Redeemer. Which is also not a bad choice of course - especially as backup weapon against vessels. Still THe Hours of St. Rumbalt is somewhat suiting for a faithful, paladinesque fighter. You could choose the clergyman background.

@ Jojobobo: Yes, you are right - there would be a slighty higher chance to get a stun-crit result when you score a weapon crit before (and only then) - but since you will cause stun anyway with any weapon on hit I would then focus on a weapon enchantment that has more to add. Like Wendgär's predatory enchantent for example or Good Friend's coordinating one. Coordinating is a very nice enchantment for a ranger because he wants to attack the same target as his pet anyway (because of stunning shots & stalker's link for example) and then can benefit from +4 ACC and +25% damage all the time. There are not too many things that can boost ranged weapon's damage, so that's nice. Or Twin Sting of course which I find to be very nice - especially the Plague of Insects part. Hehe - you are right with blind and stun - they do kind of stack but it's not very effective. --- A bit of theorycrafting (Slacker83 shouldn't read this if he doesn't want to get too confused ) A Boreal Dwarf with Stunning Shots, Stalker's Link (+10 ACC), Bartender's Ring (+20% dmg to spirit and vessel), Stalker's Torc (+20% dmg), Beast Slayer talent (+25% dmg), Appr. Sneak Attack (+15%), Archer's Gloves(+10%) and Good Friend (+4 ACC / +25% dmg) with kith slaying (+4 ACC / +25% dmg) enchantment will have the following "passive" ACC/dmg bonuses when attacking the same foe as his pet (not including the math for more crits because of stunned, the ACC survival bonuses with 10 survival, Marked Prey or quality enchantments like fine, exeptional etc. - those would add on top of the following): - Primordial: +29 ACC / +70% dmg - Wilder: +29 ACC / +70% dmg - Spirit: +14 ACC / +90% dmg - Vessel: +14 ACC / +90% dmg - Beast: +14 ACC / +95% dmg - Kith: +18 ACC / +95% dmg Now add marked prey, +15 survival (except against kith) and the quality enchantments and do some math with crossbows' base damage and you can see that it's quite awesome. You could also stack +40% bonus against flanked targets with boots and survival, buit it's a bit of a hassle - I like the +ACC from survial more. I think for a ranger Good Friend is even better than Wendgär once it's enchanted to superb. With stunning shots and your sky high ACC you cause crits all the time - you don't even need Wendgär's 10% hit-to-crit conversion I guess. Twin Sting is also very nice because of it's raw damage, the auto-superb enchantment and the two shots without reloading (you shouldn't move between thoise two shots because then it doesn't work). The best thing is of course the Plague on Insects that has a much higher chance than 25% when you use Driving Flight: ~43% instead of 25%. So nearly every second shot will trigger this special version of Plague of Insects - great! @Slacker: Boreal Dwarf as ranger + crossbow is a good combo. Both in terms of power as well as lore and roleplaying. I would take a wolf or stag (let's call it moose in this case ) as animal companion.

It's cool. Your chanter will not even reach 0 recovery with his 40% invocation and durgan steel: 1.4*1.2*1.15 = 1.93. Minus armor penalty of maybe 0.2. Even if you add Gauntlets of Swift Action you could then use Vulnerable Attack without slowdown - nice weapon dps from the back row I'd say. Or give it to the fighty fighter. Knockdown & Clear Out plus quarterstaff fit nicely. I like Clear Out (it's one of the few things on a fighter I like). If your barb is going to get HoF please consider dual wielding (anything) - even if you just switch to that special weapon setup for HoF only and then switch back to your usual weapon(s). It will end most trash encounters at once - you only have to reach as many foes as possible. It also works perfectly well with a weapon & special bash shield like Badragdr's Barricade or Dragon's Maw (playing a barb tank with that setup atm - 0 knockouts so far at lvl 11 by the way). Godhansthunyr + Dragon's Maw also looks very neat.

Right - maybe having two options is better with ToI. But even if you look for more defense then Inspiring Triumph might be worth it. Especially with Sacred Immolation it's very nice. The buff seldomly wears off then because you tend to kill an enemy every now and then even without FoD.

Revive you have with Durance or scrolls, he also has Prayer against Treachery at lvl 9 (or 11) - so what for do you need Reviving Exhirtation, Aegis and Righteous Soul? If he's killing stuff regularly you could pick Inspiring Triumph. It's defense bonus stacks with everything like Durance's Circle of Protection. Together they can give the party a defensive bonus of +27 (including Outworn Buckler) that stacks with everything else. If you want to improve his FoD a lot you could pick Intense Flames and Scion of Flame. The later boosts an intense FoD's burning lash damage from 75% to 90%, boosts the weapon lash from 25% to 30% (lets you deal more burning damage than initial damage actually) and is great for Immolation, too. I did both with my current paladin (Shieldbearer) and added Shielding Flames and Shielding Touch (also stack with everything) as well as Reinforcing Exhortation and it's great.

Stunning Shots work with Driving Flight. I'm not so sure about on-crit effects of weapons. After you get Stunning Shots all the on-crit effects on weapons like overbearing or stunning are obsolete though. Silver Flash is an exception because blind stacks with stunned. Boreal Dwarves are good as DPS guys. +15 ACC against two creature groups is nice. As I said in another thread, you can combine that with the Bartender's Ring and Beast Slayer (and/or Cloak of the Frozen Hunt) plus a kith slaying enchantment on your weapon to improve your damage quite a bit against any kind of creature. Edit: thanks Loren for the data. I now remember that arbalests were slower than pistols and blunderbusses, not arquebuses. Those are still the slowest. Sorry - I seldomly reload those things but use Quick Switch and/or the Coil so I seldomly experience reloading with guns.

I think arbalests are even slower than arquebuses, despite the ingame description. Vicious Aim causes 20% attack speed penalty as well as 20% reload penalty. Don't fully understand your question. Speed penalties always hurt - it's just not that noticeable since reload normally takes longer than attack+recovery. But you will be slower nonetheless. As Loren Tyr said, with Swift Aim, Gunner and good DEX you can fire with crossbows at a good speed. Swift Aim not only speeds up the recovery, but also the reload phase a lot. The reload phase with a crossbow is very short then.

Wendgär is without doubt the best non-soulbound crossbow. And you don't have to kill the dragon, you can also pick the easy road an help him escape.

However, an arbalest is always overbearing - meaning is causes prone on crit. It's not too powerful because of the long reload phase of course. You can't chain-prone stuff like with an overbearig melee weapon. I think arbalests have the longest reload phase of all weapons by the way and crossbows the shortest...? The first unique crossbow you can get is "Good Friend" and I think it's in the Endless Paths at lvl 8 (yeah, quite late I have to admit). It's not bad for rangers because it has +4 ACC and +25% damage when you and a team mate - preferably that should be your animal companion - attack the same target, which you should always do because of Stalker's Link and Stunning Shots. It may also be that using Vicious Aim, despite the longer reload, is resulting in more dps because of the increased damage and lot more crits. You can counter the reload malus with Gunner and lots of DEX. Yeah, maybe that's even better than Swift Aim. One should make a chart...

Crossbows have no reduced crit damage - so they're not bad for any class that wants to stay ranged and rolls a lot of crits - like rangers and rogues. There's a nice soulbound crossbow named Twin Sting that shoots two times without reloading. It is bindable to ranger, cipher and rogue. Ranger's special enchantments with it are the best in my opinion. But there are two other nice unique crossbows, too (both in the Endless Paths by the way). I personally would use crossbows with a ranger. With Swift Aim, Gunner and a lot of DEX it's not that slow anymore. edit: oops, Ben No.3 was faster with the Twin Sting thing.

A few points of deflection make no difference. Since you are using no shield you will get hit anyways, some points in RES will not change that a lot. Lower concentration can be countered with potions and items. With more INT however you can have longer knockdowns, more staying power because things like Constant Recovery and Consecrated Ground as well as Unbending last longer, Sundering Blow last longer, Into the Fray has a longer range and so on. Disciplined Barrage is such a great ability for a dps fighter - +20 ACC is huge and gives you a lot of dps. You want to keep that bonus up as long as possible with high INT. You could even trade some MIG for INT just because of Disciplined Barrage. You'd be better off in terms of dps. In my opinion will is the least important defense (and fortitude the most important). But even with more INT instead of RES you don't change the will defense. The Tempered Helmet I mentioned also helps a lot against mind control. And when you face opponents who use mind control a lot: eat some snowcap and you're good to gow. No need to raise your will defense a lot.

Right! That explains it. Should be listed in the in the inventory ACC value components though. Something like "bash: +10 (+1 per lvl)".

"Chance"? What do you mean? When you crit with the initial attack then you will roll another die with the same ACC against fortitude. When you graze/hit/crit the target falls on it's buttocks. All weapons with overbearing or stunning work this way. You can look that up in the combat log. It will be listet under "additional effect", like "XY crits for x damage.. and grazes with additional effect (prone) for y sec". You may then hover over the text to see the actual rolls that happened. There is no fixed chance. You have chances with other items which have something called "spell chance: xy" - like Wodewys or Redeemer or some other weapons. Those work differently. They have a certain chance to trigger their spells with every hit or crit. However, We Toki only works on crit, but then it rolls a die for prone every time. With high ACC you will nearly alway cause prone after a crit because a graze is enough to cause prone. Exceptions may happen if the target has low deflection and very high fortitude - then it may be that you land a crit but the target will not fall. But even against ogres this seldomly happens. I would say in 90% of times if you crit you will cause prone also.