Boeroer

Look at this build: Bath!t Crazy Works really well with Hiravias - one of my favourite builds of all times. Sturdy, great CC and debuff. Lots of damage for a tank, too. Look at the synergy of Blaidh Golan + Ilfan Byrngar's Solace: not only will you have -50% stun and prone duration, but you will also have +100 to all defenses if you got stunned or prone - because shield and item enchantments stack! This guy is nearly always up and casting.

I'm just developing a Vengeful Defeat build (with an appropriate backstory to explain why he kisses the groud all the time) - and I can only say it's so much fun. He surely needs a priest/paladin/chanter or scroll user to be effective, but the combination of "Barring Death's Door" and 1 health is so much fun. He gets up aaand down... and up aaand down again. He just can't die! And every time he goes down he nukes his surroundings like crazy. You don't need DEX or CON or RES at all. I dumped RES and CON, maxed MIG, PER and INT and put the rest in DEX. Even works when he's totally disabled with prone/stun/petrified and so on. It's like you boosted your revival-abiltity with a nice AoE damage talent or something. And the best part is: the monsters only want to hit him and him alone. He's like living bait which shouts "Hit me!" - and they do! I think I will post a class build tomorrow if I find the time to write it all down.

I find that Holy (+Brilliant) Radiance alone burns most vessels to ashes. Especially if you play a priest who has maxed MIG from the start and uses Maegfolc Skull & Abydon's Hammer and casts Chamion'S Boon on himself before casting the radiance. Does the Sanctifier talent also work with Holy Radiance? Never thought about that. It would be the (perma)death for nearly all vessels I think. Even Eyeless should be afraid of that. Who need St. Ydwen's Redemmer when he has a Brilliant-Radiance with +112% damage. What would that be? More than 300 burn damage on lvl 16 with flawless dispositions I guess...

Any weapon with low damage profits from VA if you hit fast enough. There's a break-even point for every weapon/foe combonation where it makes sense to use it. And it's a no brainer if you have zero recovery even with VA on. Also, for a monk's Resonant Touch it can be important since you have to do 10 DMG to build it up. Same for retaliation: no-brainer. With Twinned Arrows and Blunderbusses it's also good. I mean Penetrating Shot of course.

If you wear items with Spell Holding (like Sanguine Plate or Shod-in-Faith for example) and you receive a crit in kith form then the spell gets triggered. You can then spiritshift and the spell keeps on going. So you could say it works as one might expect. But you can never be sure in PoE.

If you dual wield you don't need that much DEX. And with 3 RES you will get hit/crit a lot. With 3 CON you will go down very quickly. I wouldn't do that. In fact with a Fire Godlike I would try to raise CON as high as possible. Because when you drop below 50% endurance and Battle Forged gets activated you want to have a lot of endurance left (in plain numbers). And 50% of 400 is more than 50% of 200, right? Because you plan to get hit a lot you will also go down more often than others. You can use Vengeful Defeat as an additional form of retaliation. With a chanter, priest of Paladin in the party (or all of those) you will have tons of revivals. So if your barb falls under 50% endurance and starts to retaliate with fire, he will likely go down after some time and retaliate with Vengeful Defeat. This is very powerful if you use it with dual sabres. Also, with dual sabres, Barbaric Blow is good. Add Heart of Fury for the really hard mobs (like bounties). Because you want to go under 50% endurance, you might also want to take Blooded. And One Stands Alone. Those add nice damage to your sabres - if you're surrounded and under 50% endurance. Also take Vulnerable Attack - it's good for your carnage. So if you go down, you will have a +40% damage modifier most of the time and do a big AoE Full Attack with increased crit chance. Most "swarmers" don't survive this or will at least get stopped. Then revive and do again. There's also a pair of rings that is quite funny with this: You can swap 100 endurance once per rest without losing health. So if you want to trigger Vengeful Defeat on your barb - use the ring so he loses 100 edurance and gives it so somebody else. Then revive.

I will publish a "Season 2" of my build series. One build for every class. This time the basic theme is "Twisted Builds". Basically I try to take a class and let it do things that it#s normally not supposed to do. For example I have a rogue who plays like a wizard, a barb who plays like a monk and so on. Those builds are not especially powerful (well in some cases they are), but totally viable for PotD. I hope that this brings back some excitement in battle. Because I will have to change my usual tactics a lot. We'll see what I will come up with.

They are all dual wielding I think. Novice's Suffering doesn't work with spiritshift weapons - it also says it in the talent despription. If you skill towards Spiritshift the melee damage really gets nasty.

Thanks a lot!

It has speed, so yes. Ok, so now it's all correct I guess.

I also encounter this. I'm canceling mire and more of my playthroughs because after some point it just gets so trivial and it's all routine. As you said: cast my per encounter stuff like Inspiring Radiance and Aspirant's Mark an whatnot, then just storm the field. Select the whole party and target one enemy. When he explodes target the next. No tactics needed - just be quick and don't waste time with micro. Then, after a lot of such fights, and after killing the bosses except Thaos (who is a wussy) I quit because there's no point. I proofed my builds are viable. Everything else I saw many times before. I don't think it's the games fault. I just played it more often then intended I guess. I would so love to see an arena where you could put builds into. Not even multiplayer duels - just put in your build and have a smart scripting API that would allow you to tell the character how to behave (more complex than now). Then let them fight. Like dog fights or robot fights. You train them, but you don't control them during fights. Would be so much fun to see my builds fighting against the LoP or the Juggernaut.

It's very hard to steal enough time for endless durations without carnage. But with very high attack speed it might be doable. Like... dual wielding Spelltongue.

As far as I know it's either Shatterstar or Strike Hard that has the interrupt bonus. Not both. Can't remember which one it is. So if it's Shatterstar (which would be nice because you can get it so early) you can take Strike Hard off the list.

Retaliation doesn't generate focus any more - at least at the moment. So you can take the Backlash Beldam build and throw it into the litter box. Which is sad. I don't know if it's a bug or intended. But Psychovampiric shield got buffed. So it's possible to build a tanky cipher. Cipher's endurance and deflection are not super high, so I would always use a shield. My favourite single weapon for a melee cipher is a sabre - preferably Bittercut because it has two damage types. Sabres have high base damage and work best with your soul whips's dmg bonus. Then I would follow the advice of my fellow posters and use a gun for the alpha strike in order to get a good chunk of focus at the beginning of a fight. A nice combo coukd be to use Antipathetic Field and Bittercut (plus corrosive lash) with Spirit of Decay. This will multiply your beam and overall weapon damage of Bittercut (as long as it applies corrode damage) by 1.2 (not like the other dmg mods that just add percentage of base damage).

It's not as powerful any more. But it is still viable. I just wouldn't count on retaliation as my main damage source. See it as a bonus to your weapon damage. The main reason it's not as powerful as it used to be is that it doesn't work with carnage any more. Neither Battle Forged nor item retaliation. So you don't need a barbarian to make retaliation work. But as KDubya said: the new barbaric retaliation ability is nice and stacks with the other ones.

Well, Dual Wielding itself halves your recovery time, and Two weapon style multiplies this with 1.2. A simple speed enchantment on the BotEP only adds a 1.2 multiplier - so it does not come even close to dual wielding in terms of speed. But the Speed enchant is surely good.

What? Really? I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. How exactly does it work? Will you get more than 40% health out of it then?

The good thing about Spelltonge is that you can steal attack speed and durations and then switch to a different setup. I didn't do a whole solo game with that Leech. But I did some bounties solo just to see how he performs on it's own. Turned out is was doable without pulling and splitting. I just stood in the midst of Nalrend and the Gang and kept hitting. Frenzy, Consecrated Ground, Savage & Stalwart Defiance, Suppress Affliction, Scroll of Defense, potion of Eldrtich Aim: they all didn't wear off and soon all Ogres were dead. I had low health afterwards but didn't go down. So if it still works that way I suppose you can solo with that. The big problem is getting Spelltongue.

I tried a monk with durance's staff yesterday. Also took Turning Wheel and Lightning Strikes and Scion of Flame. It's OK but not as good as fists with Torment's Reach. One problem is that the game will always choose crush damage if foe's crush and burn DR are the same. Even if you would do more damage with burn damage. So in many encounters in which attacking with burn would be nicer because of Scion of Flame he just hits with crush. You could surpass that with Firebrand, that's burn only - but that's kind of weird on a monk. Also: quarterstaffs are slow and don't hit much harder than fists. If you want to concentrate on CC, your hits are too slow (for my taste). Using FoA five times in a row feels like eternity compared to fists. And attacking from the back row is not a great option. How will you get any wounds? It's no fun to always shoot your monk in the back.

Yeah... something's not right in PoE at the moment. Double ACC malus from Savage Attack, Thrust of Tattered Veils procs twice, and now I discovered that Iconic Projection hits multiple times while it passes the enemy/allies. It not only does it's described damage/healing, but a lot more. If the target is big (Spidr Queen, Ogres and the like) they get hit up to 6 times with it. I can't say I saw that in former game versions - prior to 3.0. They screwed up some core mechanic or something.

Oh, that's so cool! I want to build a disabler monk with FoA, Stunning Blows and Skyward Kick next and this is really good news for him.

Oh right: forgot about that. You should be able to send your steward in a palanquin or something.

I think they have boots of speed and Long Stride. I build a monk like that once - plus Fast Runner - and he was a bit faster than those Brawlers. By the way: if you use boots of speed and Long Stride and Fast Runner your monk's duplicates will also be superfast.

Erm... are you sure the cone works like carnage now? Because back in the days it didn't. All the on crit effects would only apply to the initial target. When did that change?

Depends. Most of the time - when I'm not using thick armor - I get wounds faster than I can spend them with Torment's Reach - and that only costs 1 wound. So you will have 10 attacks with Torment's Reach that get +50%, +45% and so on. Force of Anguish is also cheap. If you like to use it only now and then Turning Wheel could still be good for you.