Boeroer

It's not affecting them if the chant didn't hit them. There's a roll every time a chant's effect gets applied on foes. Because the base radius is already quite big, high INT and also Overseeing (+10%) and The Voice of the Mountaintop (+20%) do a lot for your AoE. Those % numbers apply on the radius, not the acreage of your AoE. So let's say you have 20 INT and an overseeing item and th Voice of the Mountaintop then the radius will increase from 4 m to 6.4 m - which is awesome.

I just read "Who else wants an arian" and my heart stopped beating. Anyway I would love to have an arena - but an arena in which you could fight other players. Not a problem with a turn based system - but what about this pause-thingy we have here?

Sounds good, but I guess you will start with normal stats and retrain when you got those items and abilities, or not? If not the beginning of the game will be so horrible for this Prof. Dr. Rogue. Actually I want to try a build that is a bit of a rogue wizard: high MIG and INT and all spells that cause crush/slash/pierce damage in an AoE - combined with Deep Wounds. Maybe even an implement like this new soulbound scepter is worth it. It deals 15% raw damage after all - should be good with all those damage mods...

I'm playing on linux. My biggest thanks for all your work!

The monk seems to really bug infested right now. Look at this: One monk did that to me with one punch of Force of Anguish. We named this "Force of Fury". I think it's the same bug that is causing this. p.s.: I still won the fight.

That's right. After Act I even PoTD becomes quite easy if you have a full party. I just steamrolled Cragholt Bluffs and Concelhaut. I think I had to rest once because of low health on a squishy. That's not the fault of my party - I just think my level's too high because I always do every stupid quest and task I can find. Maybe you will need those OP powers badly against whatever awaits you in the second part of the expansion.

Hehe - that's the first time ever that I read that rogue's damage is too low. There's no other class that can achieve a rogues damage output against a single target. How comes that you have the feeling it's too low? Deathblows + Sneak Attack = +150% base weapon damage. Sounds rather high to me.

Ok, we don't want to offend you, we just want to discuss this. Let's take the heat out of this before it gets hot. Frenzy + Cat speed buff + potion doesn't stack. The fastest one will suppress the others. Two weapon style does stack. You're right that claws and stuff have a faster base speed than most weapons - but that doesn't help to reduce recovery to zero. Speed modifiers from abilities (including potions) and item like weapons and gauntlets work multiplicatively on your recovery time. Two Weapon Style gets added after that. As a spirit shifter you don't have items to reduce recovery. So you will only have abilities to reduce your recovery. It is true that your recovery is already short. But you can't reduce it to zero. Any other character who wants to can achieve this. It doesn't matter how high his recovery was before: if he reduces it to zero it doesn't matter how long it took to recover before. I think you don't know exactly how attack speed works. I mean no offense by saying this. I just think we should have the same basis before we begin to circle around each other fruitlessly. But when I look at this then I'm very sure that spirit shift attacks are fast. But any character who uses items can be faster. And rogues will then do more damage also. But they can't cast spell which makes spiritshift still awesome: dealing lots of damage while being able to cast is good. I just don't think it's OP. These new items you mentioned sound nice. Can you tell me more about them? I mean if they come late it's not so OP as if you could get them early. At least we could built a decent spirit shift guy now. Before it was a bit UP, but this sounds rather cool

How do you get 2 uses per encounter? Is that new? I didn't try out Spiritshift since 2.03 when it was 1/encounter only. You can't have lower recovery than 0. Since a rogue can use durgan enchanted gear he will be faster and deal more crits if he focuses onto attack speed while he can wear thicker armor. That Lightning Spell is level 8 - it's ok if it does some serious stuff. If you want to compare spritishift with other melee attacks we should exclude things that others also can benefit from - like burning lashes and Inspiring Exhortation. That's nothing that makes Spiritshift more powerful exclusively - it makes every attack more powerful. So let's concentrate on what you can do with a druid and Spiritshift alone in order to be able to compare it to other classes. - You said it's 2/encounter - that's way better and more powerful than before I have to admit - It's superfast - yes, but besides Two Weapon Style and the high attack speed of claws (or the other unarmed variants that are a bit slower) you can't buff your speed further with gear. Potions ans Outlander's Frenzy should work though. So: is it possible to reach 0 recovery? If that's the case it's very powerful. Any other class can't do it better in terms of speed then - they can only try to achieve the same speed and wear thicker armor at the same time. - If you crit a lot that's nice - but a druid will always have lower ACC than a rogue or monk or ranger (we don't want to factor external sources of ACC in because as I said everybody can profit from that). And other classes have abilities that even boost ACC further and/or have hit-to-crit conversion So all in all the attacks of a spiritshifted druid might be really good - especially because you can also cast spells when spiritshifted (I would cancel that) - but I don't think that they can compete with a fully equipped rogue or even a fighter who focuses on dps. When I tried some builds with spiritshift, I found the damage to be great but the survivability to be bad and als othe duration to bee too short (that may be outdated if you can have 2/encounter now). I had much better experiences when I just let my druid cast spells all the time.

Don't know about the blind, but Divine Mark only on a single target I did some tests with that Silver Flash blunderbuss: - Blind only applies to the initial target. - Stunning Shots also - but also works on the target behind the initial one that gets hit by driving flight (can't confirm if blind works the same way). - Driving Flight seems to work with Powder Burns: When I chose a target in the back row of my cone, several targets behind the cone (=out of reach) got hit, too. But maybe that's just an effects of the blunderbuss and it's multiple projectiles who choose different targets after the initial hit. It was very good on an Island Aumaua with Arms Bearer and Quick Switch, wearing a fat armor and standing in the front line. I also gave him weapon and shield style. Shot three times with Powder Burns (and the eye patch thingy) and then switched to tank mode. Not too bad. Does anybody know if Scion of Flames works with this?

If you reach Twin Elms you might want to pick up the Aila Braccia shield from the monks in the tavern. It turns all ranged grazes into misses and reflects them back to the attacker. That includes targeted spells! Lagufaeth can be really dangerous for a solo monk as they will paralyze-lock you if your defenses are too low. With this shield those encounters turn from hefty to easy. Just put it into your second weapon slot and switch back to dual fists when they all paralyzed themselves.

Don't know what you did exactly to reach consistent hits with 100 dmg - but yes: Spiritshift is quite powerful if you put efford into it. Maybe that's why its duration is so supershort? I mean it's even shorter than my sexytime performance (which does zero damage and is 1/rest by the way).

As far as I know this marshal guy in the stronghold just tells you that your faction will join the battle (if you did their questline) - you don't have to ask them. At least I did not have to. The guy in my stronghold just told me that the Crucible Knights will send help and that was it. Maybe you can ask other factions and parties.

All spells that are targeted on a certain character count as ranged attacks. Things like Cleansing Flame and all nearly all cipher powers for example. Pure AoE spells that you place on the ground instead on a character like Fireball for example don't count. That's what makes the Thaos fight so easy: he uses his Cleansing Flame and it gets reflected back to his face. He does that two times and the fight is over. Same with all the Lagufaeth. They paralyze themselves and on top of that the eat their own Necrotic Lances. Relex instaead of Deflection could be a high level talent. Let's call is Master Evasion and you need the Adept Evasion ability to get it. It also doesn't have to work 100% of all times. Maybe it can be a modal that lowers other defenses or lowers ACC a lot or it could only have a 50% chance or whatever works to make it less OP.

I pretty much agree with everything. Especially Riposte. Working with grazes (and also turning them into misses) would make it worthwhile and would be one of the few possibilities to turn your allways-squishy into a more sturdier frontliner. It would also be OK if it did a graze-to-miss conversion. I mean look at that shield: Aila Braccia. It turns every ranged graze into a miss and also reflects that shot or spell back to the attacker. It turns fights against Concelhaut and Thaos into jokes if your defenses are high enough. Similar thing with the monk's Soul Mirror. It reflects 50% of ranged misses. That's a lot worse than the shield, but still better than Riposte. Now why is there such a great feature on a shield and a good ability on a monk while riposte is so bad? Another thing I wish rogues had is an ability that lets them evade instead of deflect/block. Something like Brute Force but the other way round: the rogue uses reflex instead of deflection as a defense. That would be very cool and also work well together with adept evasion and make this worthwhile. You could make is so that it only works if the rogue hasn't more than x recovery penalty from armor (or that it works only on cloth). That would be a dodger rogue. And that Riposte only works with attacks that target deflection - that would be a fencer rogue. Something like that.

What was the bug?

Oh that's sad. I hope it works with carnage. Deep Wounds with retaliation worked in 2.03. Didn't test 3.0 yet. What also doesn't seem to work is retaliation + Resonant Touch. There are way too few touches building up when I stand in the middle of a mob. Only Rooting Pain seems to work. Don't know yet for sure. I so hope they don't nerf Deep Wounds in combination with spells. It's the only way to make it really good.

But that was already the case with 2.03.

I usually have four sturdy melee and two ranged these days as this seems to work best for me. Also works in open fields. You seldomly have to watch out for the backline. Fights last a bit longer, but are easier. If I use chokepoints then in a way that 4-5 enemies can pass it and then end up in an arc of four melee guys who hit at them while the two ranged nuke them with AoE (either weapon AoE like a Stormcaller ranger or Blast or spells).

Yeah - it's Shallow Faith now.

Ha - true!

So why don't you guys just run a quick test so that we all know for sure?

Yes, it does. But since when does Backstab give you a 150% bonus? It used to be 100%. However - you can stay in stealth mode (or be invisible) while your buddies cause two afflictions and then you go and backstab. I used that with Firebrand and the Cloak of the Master Mystic bug and it was quite funny to see those numbers.

Yeah - it's also good with a barb (with his new raw damage retaliation) and a monk (resonant touch is hard to trigger with retaliation - but rooting pain gets nicely supported by all the retaliation and battle forge hits for absurd numbers - I guess it also profits from Turning Wheel and stuff).

For me it's basically AoE > single target. Unless you meet a very dangerous single foes who should go down very fast of course.