Boeroer

Hm OK. Good to know. News for me.

He? Doesn't it work like all the other DoT effects where both MIG and INT are beneficial? The first raising the damage per tick and the later raising the number of ticks? Deep Wounds for example works like that - as do The Dragon Thrashed and Envenomed Strike and all the other stuff. Why is wounding so different? I mean there was a time when every DoT was better with low INT - but they patched that and I thought this applied to all DoT effects. Seems stupid to leave that one out - it's also highly counterintuitive. In my opinion the wounding shouldn't be influenced by anything at all - just the 25% of weapon damage that was rolled. Like it says in the description. But maybe I never realised it because I mainly used those weapons for triggering Predator's Sense with ranger builds and here the longer duration was highly beneficial.

Wounding works with carnage and it stacks, yes. It's damage also gets bigger (DoT effect lasts longer) with high INT (like Deep Wounds, only that Deep Wounds don't stack). I see no reason why it shouldn't apply multiple times on every target of HoF - it's no on-crit effect or something and other lashes also get applied correctly. But I didn't check this yet. But the combat log should give info whether it was applied or not.

The White Worms screenshot is from Endless Paths lvl 6. There's a ton of skeletal enemies. I wasn't overleveled (as you can see there are more grazes than crits). In fact I was too weak for that level, but I had a whole party and therefore could buff ACC and debuff the enemies defenses before my phrase counter reached 3 points and I could cast White Worms. I used an animal companion to drag all foes of the level to the entrance (no health loss then). It is one of the best spells for the early game and also not bad later on. It is a bit circumstancial of course. You need a big map with lots of enemies in it and they have to leave corpses. But it's also very easy to do bounties in WM if you get the bounty quests as soon as possible, don't clear the map before but instead lure all enemies of the map to one spot, kill them there and leave their bodies. Don't reaload by all means (except you died of course, then you screw up). Finally lure the bounty group there and one-shot them. It's also possible to do it with the Adra Dragon if you can manage to lure all the xaurips to one place and then cast White Worms over and over while the dragon stands on their corpses. But it's a lot of a hassle. For all the other dragons it's no option though. Most important thing is to turn off the gib effects in the game options. When enemies explode with gib effects they leavo no bodies behind. Besides that drawback I find those effects ridiculous. Would be ok with certain spells like Detonate or so, but not just because you killed with a crit from a rapier or something....

Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff helps a lot in the early game. Who else can have an exceptional reach weapon which has very high base damage and drains endurance that early in the game? I would love to have that on a barb. Or take Chillfog: one of the nicest spells in the game - and it's lvl 1. Cipher's Whisper of Treason is also very nice at lvl 1. Enemies fighting against each other is very valuable. A good thing to do in the early game is to take Aspirant's Mark and Presidigitator's Missiles as soon as possible (if you want to play caster-style). You will have two baby Spell Masteries plus your usual spells. Later on you can retrain if you feel they're becoming too weak, you have better alternatives or want to take other talents more desperately.

You should have lured the animancer to a pile of bodies (which you produced earlier) and use White Worms. You can do it everywhere in Raedric's Castle: choose a doorway and lure everybody there, use White Worms and don't reload (because the bodies will disappear). There will be a ton of bodies and when you lure another group there usually you will ne-shot them with White Worms. Raedric also. White Worms works on bodies over and over again - they don't get "used up" or anything. This is great because you can take all the loot (lots of plate armor and stuff) of the castle which means you will bath in gold after Raedric's Castle. It's like a chanter is made for that castle. Also works great in many levels of the Endless Paths. You only need enemies that leave bodies. So spirits for example don't work. Here I have an example that I posted some while ago (and that's only one third of the list):

Dyrford Village (especially a secret place beneath it) is very hard although you can reach it very early if you want. There are also other maps that are too hard if you rush them (Searing Falls for example - it's a bit of a Firkraag Thing ).

Fun fact: one handed weapons with official "average" speed are as slow or fast as two handed weapons which are officially "slow" - in terms of frame count. So a sabre is as fast as a Great Sword. But of course you can dual wield sabres which gives you 50% more speed - or later wear a durganized shield which will give you 15%. That's really sad for two handers. They should either give the Two Handed Style more damage boost (30% instead of 15%) or let durgan steel give more benefits because there's more steel on a 2h than on a 1h which should make the effect more dramatic. Leaving uniques aside, I still think the go-to 1h dps weapon is not sabre. At least for PotD (don't have much experience with the lower difficulties). I mean if you look at the stats it seems so, but it has slash damage only. If you concentrate on sabres (and ignore Bittercut for a moment) and do a solo run, you will see that a lot of foes are more resistant to slash than to anything other - also in the early game. I don't know if that's a coincidence or done on purpose because sabres deal so much damage per hit. I mean I like sabres - especially for Full Attacks because then the slow recovery doesn't matter that much. They are great for Heart of Fury because there you want to squeeze out every point of damage per hit you can get. But in general I think that weapons with different damage types are the best - IF you don't plan to switch your weapons a lot and adapt them to every encounter (which you can't do very well if you don't know the game). Here, I really like the war hammers. Two damage types, great Weapon Focus group (arquebus, arbalest - which you can already get for free at Anslög's Compass, great swords ). Flails are not my favourite because of crush-only. But they can be great on a low PER fighter who uses all the graze-to-hit abilities with a flail. And of course Starcaller is great. If you look at the raw stats then this might look different, but if you would take all the enemies in the game and make a statistic about all the resistances and immunitites, maybe it came out that sabres are not no. 1. I think the best 2h dps weapon is Tidefall by the way. It's wounding should beat even the speed of the Blade of the Endless Paths. But I did no math on this one. And it also has no wasted points for Marking like the Blade has (which can be a nice enchantment, but is worthless for your own dps). So you can put more dps enchantments on Tidefall than on the Blade I guess? Never tested that out, either, just thinking...

Some of the unique soulbound weapons have truly unique features. St. Ydwen's Redeemer for example has a 25% chance per hit to destroy vessels - diesn't matter how many endurance there's left. Only thing is you have to be of equal or higher level than the enemy - else it "only" does a huge amount of raw damage. So this may be a circumstacial weapon, but PoE (at least on PotD difficulty) is a game where it's better to change weapons according to the encounter/type of enemy. So this weapon is best against vessels. This special effect also works with barb's carnage AoE hits, which means that a barb can obliterate a mob of vessels in no time. Stormcaller causes -6 shock DR on the target for quite some time while doing shock damage itself. That alone is very strong, but it also procs some spells, depending on you class. Rangers for example have the chance to trigger Returning Storm per hit, ciphers can trigger Soul Shock and so on. The Unlabored Blade has a chance to tigger Firebug per hit, which is a very powerful, high lvl druid spell. And there are also soulbound weapons which are only ok, but not as powerful as fully enchanted "normal" weapons. But you need to have the resources for enchanting weapeon, whereas soulblund weapons unlock themselves while doing special tasks with them - without resources.

Here it is: http://www.gamebanshee.com/cgi-bin/search/banshee_search.pl?_layout=Pillars_Items_Page&_cgifunction=search&Pillars_Items.id=964 GameBanshee is more up-to-date than the "official" wiki (which I update from time to time if I see mistakes or when patches changed something) with all that stuff. But sometimes that site is veeery slooow.

Actually Bloodlust and Blood Thirst work nicely together, also for casting scrolls for example. Of course Blood Thirst doesn't do as much for you anymore for your weapons' attack speed when you have durgan steel and are dual wielding, but it still makes spamming dps scrolls in tough encounters possible.

I try out build ideas with the console and test them in bounty fights. If they are good and I want to post a class build I wait till I have 6 good build ideas and do a playthrough with them. Sometimes I also do a playthrough with one new build and official companions. Or a playthrough with only two or three guys and stuff like that. But the most time I need for using the console and test various build ideas. I can't remember where you get the circle, but it's somewhere in WM II if I'm not mistaken. Can't check atm, I'm on a train.

2 per rest would be even more powerful against those tough enemies than 1 per encounter (1/rest is really lame). I think one per encounter is OK, but I would have used a Primary Attack instead of a Full Attack. That would favor two handed weapons and would make HoF a bit less powerful. Dual sabres with Vulnerable Attack and stuff is just crazy. But also awesome. Remember all that talk that barbs are inferior and can't do anything? Try Magran's Faithful with a rogue.

Sometimes you die spectacularly, but it's more satisfying doing it like this than to "divide and conquer" all the tough fights.

Yeah. It woul be great if one could have 10 mechanics, 10 lore and 12 survival at the same time. However - with a mind control spell or summons you can manage to distract those nasty disablers sometimes. I just put my summons as cannon fodder into the midst of the enemies and then I jump right after them and start HoF. It's really bad if the enemies do not want to cluster because they have ranged attacks. I then run behind a corner to force them to follow and cluster at that corner, then I jump in (or use the Cape of the Cheat to "escape" into their midst).

Throughout the game you will encounter enemies both with low and high DR. For example higer level ghuls still have 0 DR, but low level paladins will have high DR. But genrerally speaking the average DR of enemies gets higher the more you advance. DR bypass enchantments are nice when used with fast weapons. So look out for that if you want to use fast weapons. Besides talents like Vulnerable Atttack there are also other items than weapons whioch can have this: Ryonas Vembraces (glove slot) for example give you +3 DR bypass. Then there are certain abilities and spells that lower DR - this can be important. If you use fast hitting stilettos (3 DR bypass) with Vulnerable Attack (+5) and those Vembraces (+3) you'll have 11 DR bypass with fast weapons - that's not bad. With the Bleak Fang Stiletto you can even have +14. Stilettos are also not too bad of a choice because there are not only piercing ones in the game. Lagufaeth sometimes drop slashing stilettos. Use those when you meet foes which are resistent or immune to pierce damage. This basically works with all fast weapons (without the inherent +3 DR bypass of stilettos of course). So you can make them work even against foes with higher DR. But against enemies with very high DR all the fast weapons are nearly useless - except the wounding ones like Drawn in Spring and Persistence, because the raw lash gets calculated before DR and immunities, so they will still do good damage against slash or pierce immune enemies or enemies with very high DR.

It's awesome. And all my encounters since lvl 11 look like this... without the arquebus shot. The weaker ones also don't need Comb. Wounds. And look how big the AoE of Combusting Wounds is with that much INT. The good thing about Blood Thirst is that you will have 0 recovery for a quick Barbaric Blow right after HoF - or any other action that you need, like healing and such. Also works after standing up after Vengeful Defeat. Then you need healing very desperately most of the time. Bloodlust is also not too bad because you will most likely also have +20% speed after HoF and Vengeful Defeat. Good to clear the rest of the bunch - if there are any rests. As I said it's easier to use this against smaller targets like kith and more difficult against bigger ones (blobs, ogres, drakes and so on) because of the range. And now imagine you have a full party with a priest for buffing and a wizard for debuffing... :D

Look out for the Iron Circle (ring) for your paladin. It will give you +4 CON (great for fortitude defense, esp. together with Maegfolc Skull) and also gives you more DR when endurance drops. And I think I would use the White Crest on the paladin until Ryona's Breastplate (although I think that breastplate is a bit overrated) because Overwhelming Wave with high PER can make hard encounters easy. What I also expericend is that the Ring of Changing Heart (2 dominates per rest) and Munacra Arret (3 Whisper of Treason per rest) can help a lot. When you face enemies with Insect Plague they will cast it on the charmed foe instead of you. Helps a ton. Both can be used by your paladin. He don't have to wear them all the time and forever of course.

Well, it is not forbidden to use other spells than the poison ones with Bilestomper.

Get 4 Lore and use Binding Web scrolls.

You don't need superhigh deflection to tank him, his slams and breath target other defenses. A Wild Orlan will be permanently buffed because the fear aura of the dragon attacks will (I think it even works when you used a Prayer gainst Fear and are immune, because your will gets attacked nonetheless). Kaylon will know. So a Wild Orlan is pretty nice against all kinds of dragons and kin. Also, I can imagine that a pale elf with Secrets of Rime, thick armor and Rhymrgand's Mantle plus potion of Bulwark against the Elements (does this stack with the DR of the mantle?) is worth a try. The breath should easily be survivable - even if it doesn't miss...?

Ok, walking around like a boss is a legit reason.

Do you even need it? I feel the game is so easy at the end that I seldomly enchant anything to more than exceptional (if it doesn't come superb or better).

Using a draining weapon like Purgatory or Tidefall with HoF is actually quite funny...

Right - figurines also work twice sometimes for me. I also have 3 RES and get interrupted all the time.