Boeroer

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

When you want to use Amplified Wave (or other spells that target fortify) a lot and will based spells like Mental Binding, try to combine it with the priest's Painful & Empowered Interdiction. This hits most of the times because it has +25 Acc. The weakening effect lowers fort and will by 20 (besides other nice debuffs like speed penalty). Once it hits, cast Secret Horrors with a cipher (or some other wiz/druid spell with high +acc bonus that adds sickened and targets will or fort) - this will hit more often now because of the lowered defenses of the enemies. You can also use Threatening Presence with a Barbarian. This will add the sickenend affliction on top of weakenend. Now you have a crowd with more than -40 Will and Fortitude. All will and fort based spells hit like trucks. A Barbarian with Brute Force will cleave through these mobs like a LSD abuser thrashes through a foam party (the only case in which Brute Force is worth it). I'm doing that at the moment on PotD and it so rocks... ore raves... not sure. ;-)

I also think that rapid recovery is ok when you stack it with the special fighter's cape and the trollhide belt or something similar. That's some fine recovery rate in the end.

He's a good tank though - even in PotD. Much more interesting than a Fighter. And if you debuff the mobs around him, his 3rd level chant which does hazard slash and burn damage hits super hard. Best thing is: his chants don't care for DEX or recovery time.

I was using Tactical Meld and Borrowed Instinct with both of my ranged ciphers, sometimes added Body Attunement on high DR enemies. The last will be eben more useful for a melee cipher. Too bad you would need another cipher to cast Pain Block on you. Also be sure to use Sura's Supper Plate and Hiro's Mantle (or Vengietta Rugia), since Retaliation of weapon (shield) and armor/cape stacks. If you eat Carow Golan, you will get +4 Focus when you hit something. So if you get hit by melee attacks, your stacked retaliations will generate focus so quickly you can't run out of it. Retaliation never misses and always does some damage. Combine it with Shod-In-Faith so you don't go down quickly. Dual wielding sabres will possibly be the best option for generating focus when you don't get attacks and nobody hits you. They have huge base damage to punch through DR and are not too slow. Switch to the supper plate when you get mobbed. Maybe it's nice to have draining weapons, but with Shod-In-Faith I don't think it's necessary. Basically you should play him like a melee rogue. Antipathetic Field and Mind Lance are nice powers for melee ciphers too. And Mental Binding of course. The Ring of Wonder is also very nice, since it will give you Second Chance and some minor stat boosts. I found melee ciphers not only to genereate a ton of focus, but lots of fun too. Enjoy! )

Maybe that's the reason it's not easy to fix: all other speed mods apply to the character, not the weapon itself.

Barbarian: build for max DPS, Shod-in-Faith boots, Sanguine Plate and Tidefall plus Vengeful defeat and a second chance ring = maximum fun. Goes down sometimes, but dishes out so much AOE damage and is still a good offtank.

Right. When you dual wield sabres or other one handed weapons which have just average speed, this turns out to be even better because Blinding Strike, Crippling Strike an Withering Strike all result in full attacks, which means you will strike with both weapons very fast. The normal weapon speed doesn't matter. I had two hearth orlan rogues with deathblows, one dual wielded sabres (purgatory and resolution) the other battle axes (edge of reason and we toki). They always engaged the same enemy and spammed these special strikes. What can I say? Thaos was dead in seconds and here had even better abilities than heart of fury.