Boeroer

Your party looks good. Like Sfzrx said, 3 RES and 3 CON is the way to go for minmaxing. I personally would max MIG and PER and INT and put the rest into DEX, but that's neglectible. The higher the MIG, the easier it is to overcome DR later on. And that can be important to also get focus from high DR targets. But as I said it doesn't really matter. WIth more DEX you can cast a bit faster. Keep in mind that your cipher will go down very quickly if he gets attacked, so try to prevent that. Fast Runner can be a life saver if you can squeeze it in. In early game the chanter's speed chant can also help. The "0 recovery with weapon" thing is hard to achieve with a ranged weapon. With Time Parasite (lvl 6 cipher power), a speed enchanted bow and Durgan Steel you can get it, but that will come really late and you shouldn't focus your whole build around it. About skills: - Mechanics can be done by your chanter, he has a starting bonus. 10 max should be enough. With scrolls, resting bonuses and eventually gloves you can do every trap/lock in the game. - Survival: is useful for every party member nowadays. The ACC buff against certain monsters is a great help as well as the healing bonus for front liners and so on. The Lay on Hands or chanter's Ancient Memory will heal a lot more if the target has a healing bonus. Now what you can do with a cipher (and what pays off in terms of focus generation) is to pump survival to 12 (or 10 and put on an item with +2 survival before camping) and choose the bonus flanking damage. You will get +20% damage against flanked targets. Then put on an item with the same bonus, like Glanfathan Stalking Boots for example, that's another +10%. Also take Apprentice Sneak Attack, that's +15% and also works for flanked targets. So in total you can have +45% against flanked targets which is comparable to Sneak Attacks from rogues and stacks with the +40% damage from Soul Whip (+ Biting Whip). So, when it's all set up, you will do +85% damage against flanked targets. Flanking is supereasy for a cipher: cast Phantom Foes and a lot of enemies will suffer the flanked status in an AoE. It's also good for everyone else who has Apprentice's Sneak Attack and also for the animal companion if it has the Merciless Companion talent. THis allows to deal tremendous damage with your normal weapon attacks and also hurt high DR foes big time. For your wizard I can tell you that Envenomed Strike (offensive talent) works with Blast for implements. Don't remember the Skeletor and if he used Blast, but this combination, if taken early, is very powerful. See it as an additional spell with 3 uses per rest. With high MIG and INT you can deal nearly 100 raw damage to each in blast radius which is insane in the early game and will stay to be good throughout the whole game. Way better talent option than bonus spellsfor example. In fact, on of the best talents for a wizard who uses blast with high MIG and INT. With a tanky Dragon-Thrashed-chanter, a priest and a cipher you can have a very neat late game trick: Give the chanter the medium Solace Shield (early, lvl 5 Drake Endless Paths) or Little Saviour (late, from the Adra Dragon) and another item with the "preservation" enchantment (e.g. Blaidh Golan hide armor from the sanitarium, rel. early), then position him where he can reach all enemies with his chant and then cast Withdraw on him with a priest. The chanter will get stunned, untouchable and gain +100 to all defenses, but will not stop chanting (= still contributes to the party with chant). Then the cipher casts Defensive Mindweb. All party members will have the immense defensive values of the chanter now (like around 200 in every defense) which makes them invincible even if they were total glass cannons before. May be that this also works with Statis Shell (cipher) instead of Withdraw, but I didn't test. Then you don't need a priest (which you don't have atm, but it's ok). Don't use Bloody Slaughter - it triggers at 10% of the enemies' endurance and only helps with overkilling. The ony thing where it couldbe useful is against dragons and other enemies with a ton of hit points. It's quite useless as it is. 25% would be good, but it's 10%. Nobody knows why this hasn't been fixed yet.

Yes, sad - but you can still use it for your normal attacks and switch to your second weapon set for HoF.

Kaylon posted earlier (maybe in another thread) that with HoF those things only proc once per HoF - for whatever reason. So - no multiple Firebugs when using HoF

Yeah - I was thinking about pairing it with a more heavy hitter like a sabre or mace (or even Drawn in Spring - if you want to stay in the same weapon group). A lot of times (in not so hard encounters) my second swing of the full attack gets cancelled anyway because the initial target dies - with Spelltongue there's a bigger chance that most enemies survive the first attack and then get finished by the second. It surely isn't as powerful as dual sabres but maybe fun and good enough. For people who want to play that distinguished barb from Old Vailia.

That's right. It's a pity that some of those awesome buffs like Pain Block and Going Between can't be cast on the cipher himself. That would make him a better tank option and improve soloing with a cipher a lot. They are a bit like reversed wizards who have a lot of self buffs which you can't cast on others. But there are a lot of potions or scrolls which do the same thing as wizards's self buffs, so that's kind of a workaround. A class talent or ability for a cipher that lets him use those buffs on himself would have been great. Then you could decide if you want to play a ranged glasscannon and don't need it or if you want to stand in the front row.

I don't think so. The most limited are fighters in my opinion. Tanky ciphers can be good - also because they can make better use of some of those friendly fire powers like Antipathetic Field and Mind Lance and some other short ranged things like Detonation and so on. And Psychovampiric Shield is pretty good for the early game. But ciphers can also be played like rogues or rangers, melee or ranged. Their +40% damage boost without any prerequisite (other than spending a talent point) lets them be good enough in terms of weapon damage even when wearing a shield. A fighter for example has to invest 2 points for getting +35% and will be restricted to a certain weapon group.

Damn you are right. I totally mixed those two up. HoF only gives you 25% dmg for 1 sec - it doesn't even have hit to crit conversion, that's also Barbaric Blow. Sorry for that guys. Not the first time I don't remember correctly. Starting to build a bad reputation here... Maybe it was because I couldn't decide if I should drop Barbaric Blow after I got HoF or not and read the description too many times - so it burned itself into my head. So Vengeful defeat seems to be like HoF - only without the 25% bonus damage. But the description is totally different. Maybe someone with insight to the code could look up what exactly the difference is...? But wait a second... when HoF raises dmg for 1 second and you do HoF with Spelltongue - would this mean that Spelltongue prolongs this damage buff, too? Maybe so much that you would have +25% damage for the rest of the fight? I have to try that out... hopefully this damage bonus get's listed on the sheet, never looked that up while doing HoF. Now I regret that I'm on vacation and can't fire up PoE.

The loot will stay (glittering symbol like a sack and stuff or something), but the body will disappear. So no worries about the loot. Edit: overlooked Kazuma's answer, sorry - so what Kazuma said. Soulbounds can't be enchanted, but they can be "leveled" by binding them to your soul and then doing certain tasks, like "Kill 10 beetles with this weapon (or 50 other enemies)". While you complete those tasks some new "enchantments" get unlocked. They also improve when it comes to "Fine", "Exceptional" and so on. Most go up to superb, but there are also some which go up to legendary or even mythic. Some cool stuff is even accessible from the start without soul binding. Like Stormcaller's shock DR reduction for example. Normally, with healing abilities which use durations, the healing gets better with MIG and also INT. Somebody here like Kaylon, MaxQuest, Loren Tyr (who can look into the code or like to do excessive number testing) can tell you how exactly this works. I can only say that Lay on Hands from my paladin with 3 INT sucks.

Funny, I always use the left door where you can enter the throne room via the hidden stairs. It's because I hate it when I can't see the enemies properly (when they are obscured by walls/doors and so on). Never had a problem. I didn't even have the idea to use any other door.

@Kaylon: Yeah you're most likely right that Bloody Slaughter is uselessfor 90% of all enemies because of the 10%. Why is it so low by the way? 25% would make much more sense. Or to make it like Predator's Sense so it triggers when the target suffers a DoT. That would be so cool... Fighting Spirit is best for a barb who also uses Blooded and HoF, right. It's also good for Vengeful Defeat of course. I really wonder now what happens if you buff yourself, jump into the mob and do HoF with Spelltongue? Most buffs on the enemies should be gone (if they are nor dead) while your own buffs should have very long durations, or not? Fighting spirit gets prolonged by Spelltongue - as well as all the other timed buffs, even healing and buffs from potions. So maybe this can be a great opener for encounters where the enemies are not all clumped together. Just buff, do an HoF with Spelltongue and then switch to your "real" weapon setup, maybe a 2h to finish the bystanders. Also gives you +15% attack speed which stacks with everything for a very long time by the way. Also works with Vengeful Defeat I presume. @Eric: HoF gives you +0.5 crit damage multiplier. Barbaric Blow does this, too. Vengeful Defeat doesn't. It's like HoF without the bigger area and without increased crit damage. It's a HoF "light". Or diet HoF.

When retaliation still gave you focus it was a great class for tanky soloing (see the Backlash Beldam build). Sice then I didn't try it out. But the mind control alone is great. Also, when soloing a lot of micro isn't a problem - so a 4-weapon-slot island aumaua with arquebus and quick switch could generate a lot of focus at the start of the fight (after initial CC) in no time and then go tank mode while casting. Maybe this would reduce kiting.

But if reach wm1 you can get one hat that gives -2 to int and reach 1 And isn't there a drug that gives you -4(?) INT? Blacsonn ? Or the new Carow Golan? I saw something...

If you use HoF with a 2hander against a group of 6 enemies each of them gets hit 6 times max: one time for the initial hit of HoF and another 5 times from the carnage of the other hits (that target the surrounding enemies). In total that's 6² (or six times six) hits = 36. With Purgatory (or any other one hander that is dual wielded) you'll get 6²*2 hits = 72 hits or 12 hits for each foe (which is way better for Combusting Wounds of course). So I guess with Tidefall you maybe can have up to 6 (or how many enemies were there) woundings each, but as Kaylon said it can't be displayed properly. But that is the optimum/maximum because during the execution of HoF enemies tend to die, thus taking away targets/hits and also carnage hits. So maybe your observed 3 parallel woundings is correct. It's a pity that you can't see that things in the combat log. Another reason why HoF is good is because it also gives a bonus to your crit damage multiplier. With purgatory or resolution or battle axes or any other annihilating weapon that means +150% damage from crit alone. As i said before: since most enemies tend to die or be at the brink of death after HoF I wonder how Bloody Slaughter and Death's Usher behave with HoF. It could make a difference between 6 foes with 5% health and 6 dead foes. Death's Usher will raise the damage of your last hits and Bloody Slaughter woul turn some hits into crits with +200% damage. I for myself chose Doemenel for the crits and not +2 DR. I wonder how dual Drawn in Spring performs despite the lower base damage. If you put on Ryona's and also switch on Vulnerable Attack it shouldn't be so bad. Firebrand with it's high damage per hit and it's Annihilation should also work well, shouldn't it? But as long as your initial target survives the first swipe dual weapons is the way to go for HoF

It's also not working for me. Never has. I'm playing on Linux. Maybe that's a reason...? Not an issue for me though, because I just take it as it comes.

Are you sure that blast counts as ranged damage? Because Penetrating Shots and even Ryona's Vembraces don't work with blast, only with the initial shot on the targeted foe. Or let's say it didn't work when I last checked (pre 3.0 or so). So I assumed that the Archer's Gloves or the Cloak of the Frozen Hunt does the same (buffing the shot, but not the blast). In a post from BAdler somewhere (long time ago) I read that "spell" also means invocations and cipher powers. But maybe he was wrong and it was only intended, but not realised that way.

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.