Boeroer

I guess they meant Spell Binding (Ring of Searing Flames) or Spell Chance (Curoc's Brand). The ring had auto hit, so I assume it's the ring they were speaking of. There s no item I know of that triggers CW when you receive a crit.

That's true. And I really don't know why OBS made it like that.

Also keep in mind that MIG (and INT of course) can help a lot when it comes to (self)healing like with Shod-in-Faith boots, Veteran's and Constant Recovery, Ancient Memory and so on - and also casting damaging scrolls. If you have to use a consumable scroll which will not "regenerate" after resting it's better to get the most out of it. DEX doesn't help at all with those two things. That's why DEX has a lower priority than MIG for me most of the time.

I normally don't listen to that kind of music - but I have friends who do. Honestly speaking I don't actively listen to any kind of music at all...

Well - some invocations can be really helpful, even with 3 DEX. Like reviving, charming and summoning for example. Or paralyzing when you want to set up a cone shaped debuff right before one of your teammates launches a damaging AoE attack. E.g. a monk who wants to execute Torment's Reach and you paralyze the group with your cone first right before he strikes.

As far a I know, interrupts don't get influenced by DEX (of attacker or defender) at all. They will just add the interrupt value (0.35, 0.5, 0.75 or 1 sec) onto your recovery time. Crits and grazes work as usual if I do remember correctly.

Yeah. So it's totally cool to give a melee dps guy who is normally not exposed to attacks 0 recovery AND high DEX. It's just so that most melee frontliners can use a bit of CON and RES and therefore need to lower some other stats - and DEX is the least painful for a dual wielder with fancy speed buffs (or so it seems).

Hehehe - finally someone noticed. I do that with nearly every build (at least the newer ones) - using a song that is already there and twisting it a bit. Most of them are a bit more popular though (see "Ice Ice Baby" with the Chillfog build and so on). Also I think that necroing a build thread is totally ok. They are meant to diccuss and develop.

Chanters have one healing spell, but it's bad (at least that's my conclusion ). But they have an aura that works like Constant Recovery of a fighter, and it has the AoE range of their chants (=very big). It even stacks with Veteran's Recovery. They can reach better regeneration this way than fighters while also healing everything around them a bit while chanting. They have buffing chants and invocations. But those are not too good. The paralyzing invocation is one of the best though, especially when Brisk Recitation has lowered the chanting taime a lot so you build up phrases more quickly. White Worms is also superpowerful if you know the tricks how to make it so. But the most effective approach for me is to combine high "normal" defenses (without chants and invocations, just talents and items) with damaging chants. First of all those chants attrack enemies and secondly most mobs will die before they can harm you too bad. Especially the Dragon Thrashed is so powerful that you don't have to tank long. Just long enough to survive the first 40 seconds or so whithout loosing too much health. One thing with chanters: If you give them 3 DEX and never use invocations you're good. But if you want to build up phrases quickly and then do a lot of invocations please note that your recovery after an invocation will be abysmal and you won't chant in that time. That means not healing as well as well as no quick phrase reloading. So high DEX can help you a lot if you want to use Invocations as quickly as possible. If you don't want to build a tanking chanter but a ranged one I highly recommend high DEX in order to cast things like "Killers Froze Stiff" or "White Worms" or "Seven Nights" and whatnot. Edit: edited the text a bit, sorry...

In my opionion cipjhers are still powerful because of the cheap mind controls like Whisper of Treason. In (solo) encounters you can start by charming one enemy, the rest will hit him instead of you - you can regain focus and then cast Puppet Master (which lasts way longer and is also not too expensive) and rinse and repeat. Against vessels or other immune foes you need to do something else, like paralyzing or Antipathetic Field (awesome when you're soloing and have high movement speed, the casting range is huge) or other stuff, but usually those tactics work great. The problem of focus famine when fighting high DR enemies I overcome by using guns with quick switch. Whenever I need focus desperately I switch and fire. Ciphers more than double their power if you have two of them instead of one. Be it Ectopsychic Echo, Going Between, Pain Block, Tactical Meld or Reaping Knives. Especially Reaping Knives get ridicoulous when they cast them on each other: both ciphers will get the focus from the raw damage they cause as well as the focus from the damag the other cipher does. To basically you doulbe the fopcus gain for both ciphers and you will overflow with focus after a few seconds while doing aweseome damage even against high DR foes. When you combine two flanker Hearth Orlan ciphers (played like rogues) with Phantom Foes, max flanking bonus from camping and items, coordinating or vicious weapons and later reaping knives they are a lot of fun.

Barbs seems the way to go specially because we can abuse weapon procs. I guess I would need very high dex/per to abuse them right? You need high PER, not necessarily high DEX. Dual Wielding, Two Weapon Style and Frenzy will lower your recovery a lot so high DEX is not needed. It would be useful when you decide to use Tall Grass because there's no dual wielding and two handed style then. But it's ok then because with a reach weapon you can park him behind the front line and poke from a distance. You don't need that much armor and CON then and can put something into DEX.

It doesn't negate it, it only doesn't do as much for you as if you'd have a slow weapon or even one with reloading animation. At first the your recovery gets calculated and after that the DEX bonus gets applied. So let's assume you have 100 frames of recovery and 20 DEX (30% speed bonus), then your 100 would be reduced by 30% which would mean 70 frames (don't know if it's calculated like that, most certainly not, but let's just pretend it's like this to make my point clear). You'd win 30 frames because of your DEX. Now, with dual wielding your weapon recovery gets halved. Two Weapon Style lowers this even more. Most other speed mods get multiplied with that. You might end up with - let's say 20 frames of recovery (or even zero if you can stack a lot of buffs). Now look at your bonus you get from DEX: 30% of 20 is 6 frames which will give you 14 frames for 20 DEX. You only gain 6 frames for an investment of 10 points of DEX. In the first case you gained 30 frames. The ratio of DEX to frame gain is 10/30 in the first case and 10/6 in the second. If you have reached 0 recovery and put your DEX to 3 you won't see a lot of difference while attacking. You will be a bit slower because DEX not only lowers your recovery, but also speeds up the attack animation itself (and reloading animation - those are not affected by "attack speed" buffs). So it's not completely useless even if you have 0 recovery. However - it does less for you than with slower "base" recovery. That's why DEX is not super benifical for your attack speed when you already have a very fast recovery phase. BUT - some of those speedups like Dual Wielding, Two Handed Style and Durgan Steel and so on only affect weapon attacks. Every other action like drinking potions, casting and stuff will be superslow in animation and recovery if you have 3 DEX. YOu will get interreupted a lot while drinking or casting if you stand in a mob and DEX and RES are low. Your superslow animation will start all over again when you get interrupted, it's a chore. I play a solo barb atm with 3 RES and 2 DEX and 0 recovery - but when it comes to drinking and casting I have to be supercareful not to get interrupt-locked. But I like the challenge.

Time Parasite speeds you up like a potion of Alacrity would, but for a longer duration - and it slows the enemy down. Like Alacrity, Frenzy and stuff it gets multiplied, not added. It is expensive. Normally I don't start with it. My "usual" cipher is an Island Aumaua with 4 weapons sets, three of them fiulled with guns, and the Coil of Resourcefulness or Quick Switch. Last weapon set is melee with shield or dual wielding. I usually go for +20% against flanked as a camping bonus and put on an item which does +10% to flanked and Archer's Gloves. And I also add Apprentice's Sneak Attack. With Biting Whip I will have a dmg. mod of +95% without MIG bonus for my shots. So I start the fight with a low cost mind control spell like Whisper of Treason, then usually Phantom Foes. Then I shoot all my guns and will have max focus. If I see that focus will overflow then I stop at no. 2. Then I cast Time Parasite and go into melee. With 0 recovery you will generate focus very quickly and you can cast CC spells again. If I have Reaping Knives it's the spell I want to cast before Time Parasite. With this strategy it feels like it's worth the focus cost.

A monk with dual weapons and high CON is absolutely great and sturdy anough, Torment's Reach is a Full Attack meaning that he will strike with both weapons in quick succession causein an AoE crush cone which can be huge each time he swings - but he is not low micro. A fighter can be a good low micro hybrid between dps and sturdyness. Knockdown is also a Full Attack. A high CON/MIG/INT barb with thick armor, dual weapons and Shod-in-Faith boots plus Veteran's Recovery and Savage Defiance is low micro and sturdy.

Speaking of party synergy once more: The Devil of Caroc is really good as a frontliner rogue with shield - preferably Badgrad's Barricade + Godansthunyr war hammer or a sabre. Then pair her with a wizard who does poison AoE spells like Malignant Cloud or Noxious burst (like Bilestomper wizard). She's immune to that - so you can just drop those spells on her while she attacks foes. Some of those spells will weaken which also counts for Sneak Attack/Deathblows. It's an aweseome team. Mad Hornet is a build that you would want for a hireling I guess. The stats of the Devil are not so cool for that build and more importantly you can't take off her breatsplate - which is cool for melee but quite useless for somebody like the Mad Hornet.

The description of Time Parasite is a bit misleading. With high INT I constantly get a duration around 90 seconds which is enough for most fights on PoTD if you have a party.

Hahaha... somewhat true.

Then add Time Parasite later on and you can add things like Vulnerable Attack or Cautious Attack plus fat armor without any recovery. Time Parasite lasts the whole fight most of the time (if you're not solo). Before that you could use potions (Power, Alacrity) or Outlander's Frenzy to further boost your recovery. With TIme Parasite and the stuff Kaylon said it might even be that you don't need to wear Gauntlets of Swift Action (which you'd have to find first, they are random loot) but can take other gloves like Ryona's Vembraces (+3 DR bypass) or Gauntlets of Puissant Melee (+10% melee damage) or bracers of Deflection or whatever suits you.

Some of the Soulbounds can be made to proc more often. There are some abilities that work with the proc chance and you will see the effects a lot more often: - high atttack speed up to 0 recovery: especially good when the spell that gets triggered is AoE based - for example with the Unlabored Blade or Stormcaller you shouldn't care so much about damage per hit but hits per second in order to proc the effect as ofter as possible. You can combine this with all points below. - Carnage: every enemy in range lifts the chance up. When you hit one enemiy, you'll have 10%, if you can reach two woth one strike, you'll already have 19%, if you hit three, it's 27% per strike and so on. St. Ydwen's Redeemer on a barb with Blood Thirst is the bane of all vessels. He will destroy one vessel in a group all the time and reset his recovery to 0 after each kill. Turns hard encounters against all kind of vessels into a child's birthday party (which can be pretty tough, too, I tell you... ). - Torment's Reach: same as carnage, but a Full Attack and can be a much bigger AoE with high INT - Twinned Arrows: is basically like a twice as fast hit rate: nearly doubles the proc chance but takes away a few percent because of the lower ACC. - Driving Flight (plus Twinned Arrows): Targets behind the initial ones also proc the effect. With one shot you can hit two enemies, nearly doubling the chance. With Twinned Arrows AND Driving Flight you will roll 4 hits instead of one - lifting the proc chance up from 10% to 34%. This is why Stormcaller is so much better on a ranger than on a cipher or a chanter. - Blast: like carnage. One special item is The Golden Gaze sceptre. It has two projectiles and therefore works like Twinned Arrows plus blast: You will have two hits per shot which trigger blast each. So you will have a higher proc chance as with with blast alone. Let's assume you can reach 5 enemies with the blast: that's 10 hits because of the two projectiles instead of 5. This means your proc chance per shot goes up from ~10% to ~40% per shot. That's why it only has a 5% proc chance per projectile - it would trigger all the time if it weren't so. So I think that's why the chances are not too high.

Tanking with one (or two) main tanks is still tricky in open spaces against fast enemies. It's easier to build sturdy characters who still do good damage but don't fold over when the get looked at. In general, the best party composition is one where the buffs and debuffs match each other. So for example a tanky monk with Enervating Blows and Force of Anguish and a tanky barb with Threatening Presence and a stunning weapon would cause Weakened and Sickened on the enemies around them which helps enormously with the knockdown effects and also allows caster to land their spells which target fortitude or will way better. Please note that the Chillfod Chanter is just a quite ordinary chanter until you get certain feats like items with healing received bonus, survival regenration bonus and later on the +100% healing chant. If you have reached that and also have a priest or someone with Shod-in-Faith boots or a paladin or whoever heals, then your party will be near invincible when it comes to endurance loss. Until that chant you can of couse use this chanter like a Dragon Thrashed Chanter (who is also superpowerful) and then retrain later. The stats match both types. Also Kana Rua (official comp.) can play that role well if you'd like to use companions (which i recommend for at least the first playthrough) The Juggeraut is always fun and easy to play and works well with every party. You just need to know how monks work. He can be played by Zahua (White March I - takes until lvl 6-8 to get there). Torment's Reach has no friendly fire. But monks require some micromanagement because of the wound management and the use of his great abilities. Scheemer's Needler can be played like an ordinary priest plus a tiny rogue. It's quite nice in the early to mid game. Later on you will pretty much cast all the time because the spells are so powerful. If you are looking for low micro classes then sturdy melee chanters, barbs and fighters are best in my opinion. Barbs can be played with very low micro after some levels because they are good with their auto-attacks and still do AoE damage all the time. Chanters can just stand around an damage stuff with a chant while fighter's AI script is smart enough to be left alone for some time. Ranged characters in general require less micro. A blaster wizard, a ranger or a ranged rogue can do good damage with auto attacks. Generally speaking casters of all sorts are the most easy to play. You can build them sturdy enough and they still can dish out tons of AoE dps or CC spells. They just need some levels to accumulate enough spells so that you don't have to rest all the time. Ciphers can be very satisfying after some time because they can do a lot of weapon damage and add very powerful but cheap mind control spells which can turn impossible encounters to easy ones.

At least you will be able to use some potions and scrolls - if you're allowed to use them. Ok, then you would probably use a prayer anyways and put on the most effectivegear. But true, those preservation items are really strong, especially because one is a shield and stacks to +100 to all defenses. Takes prone's and stun's debuffs away and makes you near invulnerable - but you are still disabled. And it doesn't help against blind or confuse or something like that. So without scrolls and potions we might see chars which are equipeed with all kinds of gear that protects you against certain disables. Crossed Patch, Solace shield, Hermit's Hat and such. @Kingsman: we're all missing things from time to time and the descriptions in the game are rather vague, it's true. But maybe you understand now why this can be really powerful with a barb and why this lifts him up quite a bit. Those items are also really good on a rogue by the way. Especially if he's after casters. They will give him 50% of Deathblows just by landing crits and the target can't fight back. You should try it out. I once had a rogue with The Hours of St. Rumbalt and it was awesome. Way easier to play than a dual sabre rogue in terms of babysitting and still great damage because of Annihilation on the blade. And I also think we turned this discussion which started somewhat fiery into a good one. Let's just ignore the scatological comment...

But while they are down you can easily cast/use buffs and all that and when they get up you'll have an advantage.

Yeah - I know it's a bit risky. I want to get a +concentration item asap but I didn't want to retrain then - I just see how it goes like this. Against certain foes it's really bad. For example the gouls at Anslög's Compass hit really fast. If I have to fight more than 3 at a time I nearly get perma-interrupted. Against Xaurips and stuff it's no problem. With 18 PER I also interrupt a lot, so it's kind of a balance against those slow hitters.

Once you can reach 0 recovery without Two Weapon Style and the dual-wield bonus of 50% that's true. But also keep on mind that every Estoc only has pierce damage and with dual sabres you can either have two damage types with an additional +20% damage without drawbacks (Bittercut) or dual Annihilation which will boost you damage, too. And you can spare those Potions of Alacrity which you are addicted to. Ciphers have no Full Attack abilities, so dual wielding doesn't do as much for them as for monks, barbs, fighters and rogues. But I still think dual sabres can outdps estocs if you don't drink potions all the time. You can also wear thicker armor that way. With Time Parasite and Durgan Steel you can wear Plate and use Vulnerable Attack and still have 0 recovery. Don't think it's much of a difference anyway. As I said I also like estocs for ciphers. Especially earlier in the game where you don't have a lot of DMG mods and the 5 DR bypass has a really big impact. I also think there is no "best approach". A cipher with a reach weapon can also be nice. Llawran's Stick with a glass cannon build is fun and gets a lot of focus. You can wear Durance's Staff for backup when you meet crush immune foes or ones with low burn DR.

The first 2 sabre guy looks good. You don't need Vulnerable Attack with sabres which get +95% damage boost from talents alone. Better be faster. You could also use Resolution + Purgatory because of the Annihilation - gives you more focus on crits and doesn't cost you a talent point like Spirit of Decay for Bittercut. But Bittercut has two damage types and Spirit of Decay also works with a corrosive lash, that's a plus (also for focus). Estocs work great until mid level - but dual wielding sabres will outperform them in the end - even the Blade of the Endless Paths. But if you like them you can use them - absolutely viable and cool looking. If you have high MIG and INT I would recommend Veteran's Recovery instead of Greater Focus. Makes you much more sturdy. If you go down you can't hit stuff. But greater Focus cann allow you better alpha power strikes - so you decide.