Boeroer

Battle forged will only trigger in very tough or long fights - but then it's a life saver because of the +DR and the additional damage. Moon Godlike ist also good of course - just shifting the char a bit more to tankiness. The thing ist: when your health drops because the fight is really tough or to long then all healing will not save you. That's the time the +DR of battle forged comes in handy. ALso nice to combine with defiant armours like "He carries many scars" from Undead Raedric or Palegina's armour. You can use them if you already have the frenzy ability and don't feel the need to use the spell holding from the sanguine plate. You can't stack more than two retaliations. That is because all same effects from clothes, neck, rings, boots and so on suppress each other. The only excaption ist weapons (and shields, which count as weapons). You can stack retaliation from Hiro's Mantle + Sura's Supper Plate - or the Coat of Ill Payment + Supper Plate - or Vengiatta Rugia + Supper Plate. But you can't stack Hiro's Mantle + armour retaliation. Same thing with stat bonus: you can add bonus might from bracers and so on with the Godansthunyr war hammer - but you can't stack bonus might from armour and bracers for example. So - 2 retaliations maximum + plus battle forged retaliation, because it's a different kind of retaliation (burn, not pierce). You can add retaliation of grazed ranged attacks with some special shields and armour plus the ability of the monk. Then you would have 2 times "normal" retaliation, battle forged and 2 times ranged grazes retaliation. The retaliation of ranged grazes is not really a retaliation as the others - it's more a reflection of the shot. Since it only reflects grazes, it's not super powerful but useful against hordes of weak archers/snipers and the like who annoy you. I honestly don't know if this reflection generates focus though or profits from all these +%damage modifiers. Would be good to know. You could also combine all these retaliations with riposte if you play a rogue. Would be an interesting build, stacking all these kinds of retaliatioin - but because riposte is so bad and the ranged reflection isn't powerful either it would just be a nice gimmick build but not very powerful in terms of dps. But maybe it's fun to see all these different retaliations trigger all the time. For me the most fun with retaliations comes with barbarians (retaliation procs carnage) or ciphers (retaliation generates lots of focus).

Tanking with a barb and still doing good dps works well if you use high DR armour and shod-in-faith boots together with retaliation items and battle forged. Battle forged seldomly triggers though because you get healed all the time. You don't even need good deflection. And because of the enormous health of barbs you don't have to rest more often than other chars. A nice combination is sanguine plate plus shod-in-faith (=frenzy plus consecrated ground when getting a crit. hit) together with hiro's mantle and sura's supper plate and a sabre or some weapon that does something special on hit or crit like overbearing, draining, interfering, stunning etc because these things also apply to carnage. Use all +%damage modifiers that you can get. They all also apply to your retaliation.

Barbs and draining weapons is still good of course because of carnage. Add shod-in-faith for the win. )

Retaliation doesn't trigger draining or other weapon enchantments as overbearing or stunning, because they nerfed it. It's not a full attack anymore as it used to be. The only things it does: pierce damage, procs carnage, generates focus, always hits, gets bonus from things like vulnarable attack or savage attack, blooded and so on. So you can't use it to regain endurance. But when you stack two ret. items like supper plate and hiro's mantle or one of the two ret. armours and add battle forged, then you retaliate two to three times when you get hit. It's pretty nice if you are a low dex tank barb with high DR. Or if you're a melee offtank cipher. Also nice when you are a low dex tank monk with rooting pain and turning wheel.Maybe it also works with blood testament.

And never play a cipher.

I used a chanter as tank on PotD and it's absolutely working. Your plan seems solid. When your enemies are debuffed or not superstrong, the lvl 3 chant that does slash and burn damage as hazard is also a great damage dealer against mobs. And don't underestimate the chant that drops frost traps: when you use your tank (plus offtanks) to pull enemies towards the rest of the group, the enemy gets hobbled and damaged. Hobbled lowers reflex a lot, so when the enemy arrives a your casters, all reflex based spells/powers will hit a lot harder. It's very useful in the early parts of the game.

Do your fights last longer than 30 seconds? 3 chants at 3 seconds each plus 20 seconds duration seems ok for me. In mid- to endgame the summons die way earlier anyways. I think they wanted to nerf the abuse of summons - for example with 6 chanters you could summon an army, let one puny enemy live that punched effordlessly at your tank while your summons roamed the area till every enemy was dead. Still doable, but requires more management now.

Use "Infuse with Vital Essence" on your Wizard. The health loss during combat will be substracted from your bonus health first. If the spell ends and you have not lost more than this bonus amount of health, you will be still at 100% health. It's not a big buffer bit maybe it helps.

No. The fists are great weapons by themselves if you just look at speed, acc and damage. But you can't have special enchantments for them. Things like draining, interfering, disorienting, stun on crit, prone on crit, marking, lashes, slaying etc. can't be put on your fists.

If you like sabres on a monk then I would go for ruffian and use sabres and clubs. There are three good sabres in the game and also two clubs that are nice. The first one does bonus damage to stunned enemies - which is good because the monk has two abilities that can stun. The second is a superb draining club that inflicts -5 def on hit. All clubs have +5 acc. A good combination is also to use that club in the right hand and a hard hitting sabre in the left hand. First you hit more easily with the club an inflict -5 def. and then the sabre with more damage follows. It just looks weird... )

I know. But 2.0 is coming and the speed mod bug will be fixed. Then it's a good early weapon. Quarterstaff looks good on a monk by the way. Other options for Style Police approved weapons are clubs and hatchets. Dual clubs will be better I think because there are better unique clubs than hatchets.

Then watch out for the Gwisk Glass robe that you get while bounty hunting. It's the best robe for frontliners in my opinion. It's superb, gives second chance and looks awesome. You don't need to use an adra dragon scale to wear a superb armour. If it comes to weapons, you can always use your fists or the speed enchanted staff Llawran's Stich which you can pick up early in the Endless Paths at lvl 3 (use the saber Resolition on the statue to gain access to the secret room).

No, that's right. It improves the casting time of invocations though.

I forgot: theres no unique clothing item in the game. So if you find - let's say a supercool robe or padded armour - you can of course use it instead of clothing. You can enchant your armour or clothing by yourself. So a simple vailian outfit can give you +2 INT for example. That's not much worse than what the unique robes etc. do.

I prefer clothing (= no armour) on ranged ciphers or rogues. Normally you shouldn't get hit and if it happens, light armour makes not much of a difference - but the difference in recovery speed is really big.

There's a cipher companion in the game. So you could pick a rogue for you and play a scripted cipher companion. Or you play cipher for yourself and pick a rogue hireling. You can play the cipher in two ways: melee or ranged. Ranged is safer and allows more minmaxing for stats, focus gain will be solid no matter which weapon focus you choose. I like war bows because they are fast enough and still do enough damage to punch through higher DR. Weapon focus ruffian is still a good choice, because you can use blunderbusses agains low DR enemies and switch to a pistol if you meet armoured foes. Melee ciphers can be played as pure damage dealers and should be handled like rogues then or can be used as offtanks. Focus generation better, especially if you don't use shields and don't wear armour. But it's more risky of course if you are a glass cannon. I personally like melee ciphers better because they are more fun to play and some of their spells benefit enormously from the fact that they are in the front row. But I can't say which way is more powerful or OP. A good melee cipher with some tankyness and more than one retaliation item is quite powerful though.

25% DR is for lashes. Does that also apply to DoT generally?

Two different afflictions stack most of the time if they are not too similar in nature. Two times sickened doesn't stack of course and some afflictions override their weaker siblings. For example: terrified overrides frightened and dominated overrides charmed. But that is mentioned in the description. So blind and paralyzed stack and so do sickened and weakenend.

The jump is really big. I startet my first game on normal and stopped when I reached Twin Elms because it was just too easy. Then I created a new hero and chose PotD. When the wolves in Valewood shredded me like I was made of crackers I thought "WTF???". But after a while it's ok. You have to use some powergaming though.

Or cipher. I use three of them and it's absolutely awesome. Especially if some enemies break through: Ectopsychic Echo on my tank and they go "pop" in seconds. I also use the echo for main dps on PotD: three ciphers cast echo on a fast running offtank which runs skips through the enemy's lines and tacles the foes from behind. That's extremely powerful and ends most fights in seconds, but I won't recommend it for trial of iron because its also risky. Sometimes the runner gets stuck or proned or the way is blocked and then all the focus is wasted and the fight usually gets messy. But three times Mental Binding at the start of combat is always a winner. So I recommend ciphers.

Also: you can get both weapons quite early and there are some other nice spears in the game. Even one with speed mod if I remember it correctly. "Danyula" or something like that. You get that in Lvl 11 of the Endless Paths I think.

Nice combination on a CC-Barb: dual wielding spears. Right hand: "Vile Loner's Lance" which is interfering and causes -5 defenses an hit - left hand:Cladhalíath with stun-on-crit and extra-damage-on-stunned-enemies. First you hit with the Loner's lance and lower defl. around you. Then you hit with Cladh. and stun them if you crit. Then again -5 def. and stun plus extra damage and so on... haven't tried this out though, but it sounds nice to me. Only thing is the weird look of wielding two spears.

Not enough DPS and CC capability, I would presume. Two full tanks and an offtank seems to be a lot of tankiness. Nobody besides your druid can control crowds or kill enemies really quickly. Barbarians are fun but in the early game they're not supereffective. They start to shine later on with the right equipment - which you don't have yet. You also lack the ability to kill enemies with a ranged damage burst when they break through the line. Four melee guys are also difficult to handle. Sometimes you can't position them because there's not enough space.

...on PotD that is. Amplified Wave also crits all the time.

Yep. It's minus 40... plus: some stats are also lowered by sickened, which lets will and fort drop even more. Don't know the exact numbers. These slime-things in Cliban Rilag end up with 12 fort. Then comes the Barb. :-D