Boeroer

Before opening it one of the options is to wait to see what happens there and you can choose this option over and over with a single click and make the time pass. It's less tedious than resting where you have to click multiple times each time you want to rest... Oh yeah - right! That's even smarter. Thanks for the info.

I think that would be a good thing. Not very important, but convenient.

Sure thing

Anyone with high MIG and INT and low deflection can be a really good front-line healer if he puts on Shod-in-Faith boots.

Now I know somtehing: I wish I knew before that all these gold plate npcs are totally unimportant. I'm no backer so I didn't know anything about this fuzz. At the beginning I clicked every one of them and thought "Whooha! All that text has to be important somehow". Man - I wasted so much time.

Tehehe: a Shieldbearer dual wielding sabres. Sounds fun!

It's like that, yes. Some things get multiplied (like speed enchantment, durgan steel, abilities, items like Gauntlets of Swift Action...), some added/substracted (like Two Weapon Style and armor recovery penalty). You can read it all here, Kaylon did some intense research and testing: Attack Speed 2.0

Ah - clever! I didn't understand why you have to go to Lle a Rhemen though...? What's so special about that place?

That's right. It's even better: the speed bonuses from abilities and items stack muliplicatively. So it would be like: 1.33(frenzy)*1.2(bloodlust)*1.15(durgan)*1.2(speed enchant) > 2. That means that you have zero recovery - whether you have 3 DEX or 20. But if you're wearing a plate, use Vulnerable Attack and wield a non-speedy 2H-weapon DEX ist still useful.

No, it's not a special build I invented. I read about it somewhere when the game was new and it was one of my first barbs. I really liked him. It's just Sanguin Plate, Tidefall and Shod-in-Faith combined with low RES in order to get crits that trigger Frenzy and Consecrated Ground. Stats woul be like (without cultural background and special race - but can be different) MIG 16 CON 10 DEX 15 PER 15 INT 16 RES 3 High MIG and INT are great for Healing and Duration of Consecrated Ground and also the duration of Frenzy. You could lower DEX a bit since TIdefall's wounding lasts for 5 seconds base (longe with high INT) and only gets refreshed when you hit again while it's still on - it doesn't really stack. Abilities Barbaric Yell Bloodlust Savage Defiance One Stands Alone Thick Skinned Threatening Presence Brute Force (only if you have someone who can apply Weakened in an AoE - like Priet with Painful Interdiction) or Dragon Leap Talents Accurate Carnage Stalwart Defiance Vulnerable Attack Savage Attack Two Handed Style Weapon Focus Soldier Bloody Slaughter DR+2 from the Crucible Knights Items: Helm: Dunryd Demon or Tempered Helm or Garodh's Chorus Neck: Cloak of Protection Armor: Sanguine Plate (crush proofed, INT +2 or MIG+2 - depends on helmet) Ring: Ring of Overseeing Ring: Ring of Thorns Hands: Bracers of Deflection Belt: Blunting Belt Feet: Boots of Stability With the new Survival bonuses I would give him 9 points (you get +2 from the plate) and use the DR+4 bonus most of the time. With Exceptional Sanguine Plate, the Blunting Belt, Thick Skinned, DR+2 from the Knights of the Crucible and +4 from resting his DR is really impressive. His Deflection and Concentration are not... I think his DR against physical damage will be around 31-33.

Erm... "buy two Rimecutters from Azurro" - not very predictable or reliable. I had that once in about 10 playthroughs. You could use Sword of Daenysis & March Steel Dagger though. Both also have speed, are in the same weapon group and you can get them early. Or Spelltongue plus Sword of Daenysis or March Steel Dagger. You could also use Danulya & Rêghar Konnek, but they both come quite late. If you don't care about Weapon Focus you can of course combine other weapons as well: Strike Hard and Unforgiven also have speed. But I think that two Rimecutters would be the coolest solution - also literally. Since v. 3.0 you can also use Svef to gain another +15% Attack Speed in order to reach 0 recovery by the way.

It really depends what you want to do and which weapons or other items you want to use. For example: If you want to wield Tidefall and wear Shod-in-Fait boots I would always prefer max MIG and INT. You can even drop RES to 3 because you want to get a crit in order to trigger Consecrated Ground from the boots. If you want to use weapons with on-crit effects I would max PER and DEX. With weapons that have on-hit-effects I would max INT and DEX. For pure DPS without any debuffing sideeffects or draining I would try to distribute stats like so: DEX>INT>MIG>PER>CON>RES. Then I would use two sabres, Shod-in-Faith and the Berserker's Belt, take Two Weapon Style, Bloodlust, Vulnerable Attack, Savage Attack, One Stands Alone, Frenzy, Greater Frenzy, Heart of Fury(! it's so good if you dual wield sabres and can reach 5 or more foes with it.) With Durgan Refinement you can reach 0 recovery with a robe, a monk's outfit or even a padded armor. If you can find Gauntlets of Swift Action you will even be able to wear a hide armor like Blaidh Golan (which is awesome) and have no recovary. Your DPS will be very, very high. But you will also go down quite often until you reach higher levels. Maybe Vengeful Defeat would also be nice. Add Shod-in-Faith for a lot more survivability.

And: it does around 80 slash and 80 burn damage if you max MIG and INT and take Scion of Flame in a huge, huge area. Sure, it only fires off every 8 seconds (if you use no second chant) but it hits all foes at once. You basically have a good tank that also does great damage while standing around AND can also use invocations from time to time. Reviving is quite useful sometimes for example. But I know what you mean: it's not melee dps. Well you can of course build him to cause good melee damage and substitute that with his chants and invocations. Especially the level 4 self buff ist quite nice for a melee guy with an estoc. I think together with the Blade of the Endless Paths you can reach 0 recovery. Maybe now - because they can sing faster - it doesn't take an eternity to build up enough points to trigger that invocation. You would still have to use low level chants though to speed that up. That'S a bit sad because the lvl 3 chant that gives you an additional burning lash is also cool for a melee guy. The lvl 1 dr bypass invocation is also great, but it lasts rather short.

Or both?

You just have to max CON.

You can build a lot of things in this game, but you asked how pros do it. Our suggestion is just based on experience. He fits your requirements: he's melee, he does tons of DPS and on top he seldomly goes down or catches an affliction because his defenses are very high. What's not to love? He's basically like a tanky Paladin with Sacred Immolation - but can have his dps chant way eralier, has slightly less defenses - but his chant does not expire. In 3.0 it may be that he sings so fast that he can also do more invocations. With his MIG and INT they will be devastating - but he will cast slowly. That's no problem though because he just shrugs hits off. Autoattacks can add some damage, that's true, but it just pales in comparison to his main chant - so why bother? The good thing with this tank version is that you can dump DEX to three and it doesn't influence your DPS at all. You can pump MIG and INT and PER and focus on your chant for DPS. Scion of Flame is great for that for example. The DR debuff also works for his Dragon Slashed chant by the way. I think that even his burning lash chant gets applied to the slashing part. Not sure though since I liked to use Frighten + Dragon Slashed to debuff ACC of foes in order to be even more tanky. I once did a build with Sanguine Plate, Blade of the Endless Paths, Shod-in-Faith and all the talents that boost melee damage (Vuln. Attack, Appr. Sneak, Savage Attack, Two Handed Style and so on). He did good single target damage with the sword, that's true - but he also went down more often and got stunned, prone or paralyzed - then he and his sword and chants did nothing and that's a shame. I found this tanky variant to work better. It also needs nearly no micro.

Same here.

Yeah - now I had some encounters where my barb just ran away from the fight and stood there - 15 meters away - doing nothing - then coming back. And he's not supposed to see ghosts or stuff since he isn't the Watcher in the family.

The bonuses you get from Survival are really strong. Maybe too strong. I just loaded an old savegame in which a barb had 11 Survival. +4 DR for example is quite a lot. I suppose these stack with resting bonuses from taverns/inns? Good decision to integrate the consumables' duration buff into this system I think. The change of the skills is nothing I will rant about. I like it. But I didn't have the time to test out Second Wind yet. Is it getting any better if you pump Athletics? At lower levels the healing is quite whimpy.

That's exactly my experience with ranged ciphers. In fights against dragons they can be especially useless - now even more because Tactical Meld is total crap now. That was also one reason why blunderbuss ciphers were still viable: you would focus your fire on low DR foes anyway. If there was a weapon with raw damage it would be cipher's no. 1 (or two). Edit: i turned crippling off. To annoying if you don't want to play with a party of 6 turtles. My experimental Vengeful-Defeat-Barb just had a nervous breakdown because of them.

Huh? Why can't you beta test, why? I'm also not a backer of the PoE game. But now look at my installation: it says 3.0. Just go to you steam library, right klick on PoE select properties, selet beta tab, choose beta branch in the dropdown field and enter "BETAPASSWORD" into the text field. What you said is true - but how can they know it's too much if you don't comlain? A LOT? Not that I'm against nerfing certain spells like Amplified Wave. It's AoE was way too big and the damage part was too high. But they did this ONT TOP of this focus inflation. Would be ok if they buffed some higher level powers that nobody uses anyway because they are bad compared to others. Or invent some more useful. This statis shell is so useless... They also nerfed Tactical Meld so that it's complety unattractive now. You pay 50 focus so that you can hit foes better that... whait, which foes? They are all dead because the wizard, druid and priest started with their spell mastery CC and then turned then into pulp while the monk was spamming Torment's Reach and Forge of Anguish like crazy because he run around to catch some flimsy disengagement attacks. What will happen: every cipher will now spam low-level powers because nobody has the time to wait for 60 or 70 focus to build up. CC is great when you can apply it at the beginning of a fight and not when 50% of the enemies are dead anyway. If they are afraid that a cipher ruins every encounter because he can start with a high level CC then they should think about nerfing the initial focus a cipher starts with at the beginning of every encounter. They did that once and is was painful, but just. But with this cost increase they turn the cipher into the old chanter while buffing the chanter so that he can do things quicker. I beg that they will withdraw this focus nerf. It's totally ok if they balance the spells though.

Oh, Schemer's Needler time!

Did you guys know that you can pile up 13 Fireballs per rest as a wizard (without scrolls and Necklace of Fireballs)? 4(normal spell count)+1(Ring of Wizardry for lvl 1&3)+3(Flames of Rhi-Whatnot sabre)+3(Tiddletwat's Staff)+1(Curoc's Brand)+1(bonus spell talent). Plus another per encounter use if you choose Spell Mastery for Fireball. So you could cast 14 fireballs in one encounter if things really get messy. Sure they'll nerf this so that it will cost 10000 focus per use or something like that... Any other class could still have 7 uses per rest. Have to look for a substitute for cipher powers since my ciphers can't use their powers above lvl 4 any more. Because... you know... they cost 30000 focus now. Are there more items that give you fireballs/rest?

Ahhh - there you are! :D

Welcome to "Normal" difficulty.