Boeroer

Right! I have the exact same wish: That they make it a modal ability and remove spellcasting while shifted.

I used a rogue with Badgradr's Barricade which has bash and limitless spell strikings of Thrust of Tattered Veils when you crit. This shield profits from high crit chance and you will still have high defenses. There's a bug though: Two Weapon Style doesn't apply to bash - but it's in the bug database and should be fixed soon.

Ah, OK. Now I got it.

Maybe the key binding is messed up? Did you take a look at the game options?

I can't find it anymore. Can somebody else remember? It featured killing the adra dragon solo on PotD.

Best dragon hunter race there is on Eora.

Spiritshift is cool - it's just too short.

If you can geht it early, try The Golden Gaze rod on your wizard. It has 2 projectiles instead of one and they fly separately - meaning that it not only looks nice, but also causes 2 penetrating blasts instead of one per shot. If you have Ryona's Vembraces and Penetrating Blast your 2 blasts may have 13 DR bypass each. It also has a spell chance of 5% per projektile to cause Expose Vulnerabilities AoE. I tested this on a wizard build I'm playing around with and found it to be pretty cool - especially if you cast Combusting Wounds first. I really liked the setup. If you use Dangerous Implement you might want to try Veteran's Recovery + Trollhide Belt. It negates the raw damage from firing the implement. Your health will still go down, but your endurance will not drop (as long as the health pool is bigger).

I don't know. In 2.03 the animal companions can hit really hard. Predator's Sense combined with Merciless Companion is a +80% damage modifier. I used a wounding weapon once (Persistence), together with Predator's Sense plus Vicious, Merciless and Resilient Companion. My wolf was hitting for 70 to 90 against high DR targets. You could do that with quickswitching guns, too. Just apply the wounding effect with the bow so that Predator's Sense cicks in, then cycle through your guns and back to the bow. I developed that build further to a melee version with Tidefall and Shod-in-Faith boots, so that you and your pet both get healed while you flank one enemy. Don't know if it's viable for solo, but the DPS and survivability was really good. Pets have no health pool, so Consecrated Ground is really great to turn them into tanks.

It got fixed! If you watch the combat log, be sure that your burn damage is able to overcome the DR. Sometimes, when you only have one or two wounds and your weapon damage is not very high,the burn damage gets completely eaten up by DR and will not show up in the log.

There are three one-handed weapons for you that have higher interrupt rating: Vile Loner's Lance and Shatterstar have 1 sec, Godansthunyr has 0.75 sec. It's no enchantment, it's just there.

It is. There's a mini-guide in the charbuild section from somebody who did it. He said it was relatively easy.

AI will look for the weakest members of your party. With weakest I mean low defenses and DR. They will try to rush them. Best example: Penhelm fight on PotD.

Great. So Slicken is an option.

Another problem that you may encounter when you stop playing and try to come back later are the patches. Some of them changed combat mechanics and abilities - what used to work doesn't anymore and so on.

^ Not for everyone. If you want to rest after each encounter, they are very powerful - like priest and druids, too. I hate to rest a lot - so they seem to be quite ungodly to me. I have to admit that lvl 9 solves this problem. I like chanters. Easy to play and low mainteneance. They perform better on PotD because all fights tend to last longer. And as soon as you can get "The Dragon Slashed, the Dragon Wailed" they turn into great damage dealers. 6 of them is actually a very strong party.

If you're looking out for a support priest that casts fast, but will not be squished quickly, have a look at AndreaColombo's support preist build: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83506-class-build-support-priest-or-how-i-buffed-the-others/ I think it's optimal if you want to cast fast without being interrupted. He uses no (or light) armor for fast casts combined with high deflection so that the foes are not very motivated to attack him (most of them try to target low deflection chars first).

Nice. Just two things: - Fampyr - Supper Plate (although it's suuper nice) I didn't do this fight for some time. Are the fampyrs or Raedric immune to afflictions like prone?

I did that and it was awesome. Check out my class built "Riptide" in this section. But I didn't do a solo run. And my RES was dumped. Maybe it would work with some changes. You could still use arbalests or arquebuses for opening.

Ouch! Try my solution: earn more than 100 € per hour and never do overtime - unless they pay double. Tadaa! p.s.: I don't watch TV. p.p.s.: I don't sleep a lot either.

I will next test if Fighting Spirit (human) and Defiant Resolve (wild orlan) can be prolonged with Spelltongue. Since I can't edit my initial posting, I will write down the outcomings here.

The thing with "high deflection is good for not being targeted" is important. It really helps.

What I forgot: Don't be put off if you think that the beginning of the game is difficult. It's the hardest part actually - if you can make it to Act II you're good.

According to Steam I've played this game for more than 1600 hours... and I still discover new things about combat mechanics. So... either I'm suffering from Alzheimer's, or ... wait, where did I put my coffee mug?

I agree that knowledge about the combat mechanics and a solid tactic is way more powerful than any build. And a good party composition is more important than a single build. I would always choose the class or build that provides the most fun for me. For example I love the barb because of his carnage AoE ability and what you can do with it in combination with items, abilities and so on. But I also like monks, paladins, rangers and ciphers a lot. That doesn't mean the oher classes are bad - I just don't enjoy them as much. That changes over time. At the beginning I hated paladins and rangers for example. Can't say why. Some classes can be very diverse when it comes to builds (barb, monk, rogue, fighter, paladin), others a little less (ranger, cipher, priest) and chanter, wizard and druid are the most difficult to "twist" (at least for me) because they have few individual talents and their abilities are mainly their spells. If you don't like to micromanage every char then I don't recommend too many casters. You might want to use Chanters, Paladins and Fighters because they are useful even when you don't give them orders all the time. Other classes can be build into good "drones" as well (ranger, monk, sturdy rogue, barb). Then spice that with one or two powerful casters that you can focus your micromanagement on. For example a priest and a cipher or a wizard and a druid. That's how I do it most of the time. I find heavy micromanagement to be tedious. If you love micromanagement and power then the casters might be your thing. They all are capable of controlling crowds and doing lots of AoE damage. Wizards, priests and ciphers can be good frontliners as long as they have spells left - even the druid with his Spiritshift can go melee (but in my opinion the duration of that ability is waaay too short, at least for PotD). A melee cipher for example does awesome weapon damage and is still able to cast powerful CC and DPS spells. You can build him to be sturdy.