Boeroer

Solo PotD barb is quite easy - once you get Heart of Fury and use second chance + Vengeful Defeat you can obliterate even the most hefty bounty fights. It works with an offfensive dual sabre approach (with lots of CON) or with the tanky approach (stacking daze, frighten, sicken and fatigue with high deflection from weaon & shield). HoF also works well with Badgradr's Barricade and Dragon's Maw. However - a barb somewhat stinks when it comes to fighting dragons. Maybe they are all doable, but I didn't try more than a few times. All fights with more than 5 enemies are pretty easy though, thanks to the mechanics of HoF and Vengeful Defeat. The more, the better... which also answers your last question. Monks can also do that - as well as priests or wizards. Ciphers have some very nice buffs - but they can't cast them on themselves. Back in the days, when retaliation did generate focus, I did a solo run with my Backlash Beldam build and it went smooth - but again dragons were a bit of a problem. Can't survive too many dragon wing slams - even if you retaliate like a pro. And nowadays retaliation doesn't give you focus any more, so... Maybe a ranged cipher can do it. Can't see why druids can't do it.

At GameBanshee

Well - he uses a gunshot at the beginning of combat and the Wood Elf racial also grants higher defenses against distant attacks - so it's not completely wasted. But maybe yes, a Pale Elf might be a better choice from a powergamer's perspective.

Nope

Yeah - I guess the terms "slow" and "average" in the dexriptions are a relic from the early days and never got changed.

Maybe that's why they are exactly as fast as the slow one handers like spears, swords and sabres. The descriptions says "slow" when you look at 2handers and "average" when you look at the slower 1handers - but in game they both take the same amount of animation and recovery frames to attack. A bit counterintuitive, but it's like that. So... a great sword has exactly the same speed as a sword in this game. But a 2handed weapon does indeed more damage and can punch through armor more easily than a 1handed. Usually an 2 handed variant is a lot heavier - but there's not much speed loss (if it's not too front-heavy) because you can swing it with two hands. But it's way easier to fell a tree with a two handed axe instead of a one handed one. You can translate that into the game with more damage or DR bypass. More damage seems to be ok for me. THey already do more damage, just not enough to make up for the high defense and speed bonus of a shield or the huge speed bonus of dual wielding.

Ok, you took wood elf out of nostalgia, that's totally ok then. Sadly, Savage Attack + Reckless Assault don't work together. It's either one or the other (modal). A pure DPS fighter and a sturdy rogue (without shield, but Veteran's Recovery and stuff) can be played quite similarly. The rogue has the better mechanics skill of course.

No, I meant since Driving Flight allows to stun secondary targets even in melee with Driv. Flight it maybe also could be used to generate more hits that trigger spell chances - because there has to be some kind of hit roll for the secondary target, or not? Just an idea - most certainly it doesn't work this way, but who knows?

Sure!

And then use Crowns for the Faithful on top. Hope Grubs'n stuff don't get suppressed by it?

Yeah that is fun to watch - Missile Barrage and Bounding Missiles with Driving Flight are also fun. Does Rolling Flame and such spells also work with it? I don't guess so... But because of the greatly reduced damage of the second hit it's not too powerful. For items with spell chances and stunning shots this doesn't matter though. You generate more procs (and stun more enemies) with driving flight - that's what makes it so valuable in my opinion, not the whimpy damage. But a melee ranger with Grey Sleeper could be fun. Since Stunning Shots + melee also works with Driving FLightI it may be that Driving Flight + Stunning Shots generates more hits that make it more likely to trigger Paralyze, Twin Stones and Invoke Vessel (a bit like carnage does)? Twin Stones would then also use Driving Flight for that hilarious effect...

They use your equipment except weapons I think. You can see that they wear the exact armor and headgear that you wear. It's not too difficult to tell if they profit from the enchantments of your gear: summon a phantom in battle and let it get hit. Watch the log. Then reload, take off your gear and try again. You should see differences in edurance, ACC and defenses when the gear is off. If you don't, they don't get any bonus. But I recall they not even run faster with Boots of Speed, but even shoot faster with Gloves of Swift Action. But I haven't tested the phantoms for a while. Spell Bindings on items are no longer usable (sadly). OBS reduced the usage of spell bindung from [all items] to [rings only] to [nothing]. It was kind of abusable because after summoning those items always had all charges, even if your own item was empty. Imagine those items with limited charges like Father's Teeth with Essential Phantom or the monk's twins.

Nice! I seldomly use drugs and food (most of the time only when going solo or when trying out weird/difficult party comp.) - so I'm not too familiar with all that stuff. Maybe this is also the case with many other players - so nobody (or only few) found this combo until now.

It's no bug. It's done on purpose, you can see it in the code. Why else would they introduce a seperate category of DoT effect if not on purpose? I don't say it's good though.

Yes, it's special to wounding as enchantment (Persistence, Drwan in Spring, Tidefall) and also Wounding Shot. INT influences the diration, but not the damage. It only gets spread out. It is indeed stupid, but it is as it is. So, basically with 10 INT you could have 10 dmg over 5 sec. With 20 INT you would have 10 dmg over 7,5 sec (made the numbers up just to illustrate). It's not superbad to have high INT, it just takes a biut longer for the whole damage to apply. IN certain cases this might even be better to have a longer DoT effect (for Predator's Sense and Cleansing Flame for example - playing a berathian priest with Tidefall, Cleansing Flame and tons of INT atm and it's great). However, with very low INT (you can reach a value of 1 with items I guess?) the DoT of wouding gets applied very quickly (roughly 2.5 sec) which is generally better. Most other DoTs work "correctly" with INT, meaning that you get more damage ticks and therefore more damage with higher INT. Those are Deep Wounds, Envenomed Strike, I think all of the DoT spells (there may be excaptions) and so on. Those are two different categories of DoT effects. I recall there are three categories of DoT effects (in the code), but I forgot what the third was...

My comments about Pen. Shot and Vicious Aim were made with either Persistence (wounding) or Stormcaller (spell chance/shock DR debuff) in mind. With other bows it might be a bit different. But in my opinion a bow ranger should aim for one of those bows. Persistence for the best single target DPS and Stormcaller for good DPS, nice (kind of) AoE CC and DR debuff. Both are obtainable quite easily and early for such good weapons.

If you use Persistence, then lower INT is actually a good thing because of wounding. it's damage gets buffed by MIG, but not INT. INT only stretches out the time over which the damage gets applied in this case. Same with Wounding Shot's bonus damage. But if you want to use Outlander's Frenzy and outer stuff like Binding Roots you don't want to dump it I guess. Persistence has the highest single target DPS of all bows by the way because of wounding. Outlander's Frenzy can be used to counter Vicious Aim's speed penalty. With both you will have +5% speed, +10 ACC and +20% DMG and +3 MIG (which will lead to additional +9% dmg). Swift Aim and Outl. Frenzy's speed bonus don't stack. Also note that neither Vicious nor Swift Aim work with Twinned Arrows. Those all all modals and only one of them can be active. Outlander's Frenzy takes some time to cast - time in which you can't shoot. If you let enemies come into range after initializing combat this dosn't matter so much. Before reaching lvl 13 (Twinned Arrows), I would recommend Swift Aim (+ Driving Flight) if you use Stormcaller - you want to proc Returning Storm as often as possible. Persistence works really well with Outl. Frenzy + Vicious Aim. Wounding profits hrealy from high MIG and dmg mods. Vicious Aim also works with some spells like all the Missile scrolls and so on. Apprentice Sneak Attack is a good choice. With Binding Roots, Wounding Shot and later Stunning Shots it will be triggered all the time. Also note that Marked Prey works in a very special way with multi-projectile attacks like Blunderbusses, Golden Gaze, Missile scrolls and so on: the first projectile gets +20% DMG, the second +40%, the third +60%and so on. Don't know if it's also the case when using Twinned Arrows. With Persistence and also Stormcaller Pen. Shot is of no use. As Loren Tyr showed in a nice graphic, there's only a certain sweet spot where Pen. Shot is paying off. It's not worth a talent point. Wounding gets calculated before DR and is raw damage - so the extra 5 DR bypass aren't needed - the speed loss is too severe. And with Stormcaller you will already have an automatic 6DR debuff and you want to shot as fast as possible. So I strongly don't recommend Pen. Shot as long as you're not using things like Blunderbusses or missile spells. If you want to deal a lot of damage with your pet, take either Wolf or Stag. Wolf has the highest base damage which works very well with all the DMG boosts like Predator's Sense and all, making his attacks the most devastating against single targets. When you use Hiravias or Kana Rua who can apply a lot of AoE DoT effects, then use Stag. It's carnage is now 1/encounter. With AoE DoT and carnage + Predator's Sense + Vicious + Merciless Companion and so on the stag is great. For tanking the bear is still nice. The DR bonus scales with level. If you buff the antelope's defenses further it's quite sturdy. But real tanking with pets is not possible anyway if tou don't provide support with defense buffs. Continous Healing with pets is great (Consec. Ground, Moonwell and so on). They have no health issues. A really, really good combo is Triumph of the Crusader (priest) plus a DPS pet like wolf or stag: as soon as the pet kills an enemy (which happens a lot when fully skilled and all DMG mods are on) it gets healed completely. And since it has no health this can go on and on and on...

Thanks a lot for testing. With low(er) MIG it may well be that BotEP is better, too. High MIG is great for wounding, low MIG is bad for it. The BotEP doesn't depend on it so much because of DR bypass and speed. So maybe this rule of thumb can be applied: chars with high MIG should prefer Tidefall, chars with low MIG BotEP. And somebody should also test how Firebrand performs compared to those two in terms of DPS. I also find Hours of St. Rumbalt to be a very good DPS/CC weapon. Annihilation plus Overbearing is a great combination. As is Tall Grass's Predatory + Overbearing + reach. Attack speed is not necessarily the most important thing for DPS when you fight high DR foes. But it also helps a lot with CC effects like Force of Anguish: with enough wounds, it's supereasy to punch several foes to the ground in quick secession because of your short recovery. With a 2h this is not possible. The chance that you get interrupted is higher and it's not about damage when you use FoA. You want to disable. That's one reason why I think 2h should deal a bit more damage or do more crits in order to balance out the faster appliance of status effects with dual wielding or even weapon+durg. shield. Or they should have way higher interrupt values than one handed weapons. Something that resembles the impact/force when you get hit by such a big weapon.

For party play, she's awesome. Vessel immunities can be "abused" to gain big advantages. I also don't get the Wood Elf thing. Riposte is only worth it if you combine it with a shield and Escape in my opinion. Else your deflection isn't high enough to produce grazes and misses reliably. Also works OK when you stack defenses against disengagement attacks (up to +32 passive) - maybe then you can do without a shield.

The comparison between Monksterlasher and the semi Lady of Pain can't be done properly when you don't let the monk gain wounds of course. You would have to get in with the monk first to get fair results in a playthrough - the fighter doesn't need to get hit in order to do damage. Or, even better, do a certain encounter with the fighter and then again with the monk - as I did (also with the LoP). Until today I couldn't build a fighter who can beat the difficult bounties solo without cheesing or kiting and without spamming scrolls. I can do that with several monk builds. Monksterlasher's dual Bittercuts - although being nice with Spirit of Decay - are a bit special and unrealistic though. But even with fists every monk who's build with some sense and Torment's Reach should do more DPS than a fighter. AoE damage is key here. I also think (no proof though) that Tidefall does more DPS than The BotEP with the stellar MIG the LoP normally has. Wounding gets calculated with the damage you do before DR gets subtracted and is also influenced by MIG (the MIG bonus applies to the +25% raw damage). So, with high MIG even +5DR bypass and speed of the BotEP might not be enough to outdamage wounding of Tidefall. Plus: every time you meet pierce resistant or even immune enemies the Blade's DPS will go down. But maybe I'm wrong here. Bit since every calc showed that Persistence rules over any other bow when it comes to DPS I guess with Great Swords it's not that different. We should use the same build, optimize it for dual wielding and then again for 2h and then do some ingame tests.

If it doesn't proc at all (sometimes happens with spell chance items), try to unequip and reequip. That can help. If not, try to reequip, save and reload.

I would like it if they did a bit more damage. Maybe Two Handed Style could be buffed a bit to 20% instead of 15% and/or they could add a small hit to crit conversion. I like Great Swords because of the great uniques they have and also because of the two damage types.

Yeah - back then it was only about building a monk who needs a lot less micro than the usual Torment's Reach spammer (hence the "droni" = drone in the name) and about stacking move and attack speed. It's def. not the most powerful monk build, but it's a lot of fun because of the absurdly high move speed and the hefty push/prone effect. It's great for picking off single targets, but not so much for AoE damage. This build works quite well on it's own with AI settings.

Turning Wheel is not so great if you want to spend your wounds asap with Torment's Reach. But it can still have it's uses because it also works with any kind of melee attack - including retaliation and Battle Forged as well as Jolting Touch.

What targets do you mean? I only push the foe I hit with Force of Anguish and he flies quite a distance over the screen when there's nothing in the way, but that's it. Other enemies normally aren't affected in a way that it's beneficial to you. At least that's the case when I use it. No pinballing and not even pushing enemies out of the way when the initial targeted foe hits them on its flight. I still think it's a great ability though. Sometimes - when you have things like a fear aura from Executioner's Hood the effects of FoA get applied to all targets that also get hit by the fear aura - but that's a bug.