Boeroer

The only bashing shields are Tuotilo's Palm, Magran's Blessing and The Best Defense (SSS). They count as offhand-weapon and shield. Visible because they have attack properties as part of their enchtantments. "Normal shields" only have defensive properties. Ha, they are not off. My inbox was full (again). This happens quite often because the forum doesn't notify me when the inbox is full. I'll delete some older messages... Edit: accidentially deleted all messages. Jeez, I'm too tired. Ah well... At least there's room for new ones now.

Confusion + Blood Thirst + Cleaving Stance + Riven Gore against skeletons is a deadly, deadly combination. SC Berserker would also work well (and can get plenty of Rage back via skeleton kills + Blood Surge). But the Berserker/Devoted kills a lot faster due to the "skeleton-kill-chain" that is triggered by confused Cleaving Stance + skeletons. Doesn't need to be Devoted tbh - any Fighter would do. But Tenacious + Devoted stacks to +4 PEN which is pretty sweet I think. Especially since Amra is slash-only and you meed quite a few slash resistant foes.

It should count. I guess you mean mortars (have AoE) and not normal blunderbusses (don't have AoE)? And then (confused) Berserker and not Barbarian (because mortar AoE has no friendly fire as long as not confused)? A confused Berserker/Rogue who's firing a Gouging Strike into his party will apply Gouging Strike to everybody in the AoE. Powder Burns (blunderbuss modal) doesn't transport any ability/weapon effects such as Gouging Strike. It's "only" a spell-like AoE that comes on top of the weapon attack.

I really like Witches. Pick Spirit Frenzy (not Spirit Tornado!) and give him the Willbreaker Morning Star (use the modal). Its hits lower fortitude by 25 (once, no stacking) and Will by 3 (stacks per hit). Use Secret Horrors, it's just great. That way you will have applied Staggered (Spirit Frenzy), Frightened and Sickened (Secret Horrors). Even without hitting the enemy with the Morning Star yet you lowered the enemies fortitude by 20 and the Will by 10 with just one spell. Now attack with the Morning Star - the targeted enemy will get -25 fortitude and a Will debuff on top (-45 fortitude!). Not only is this cool for your party, but also with Brute Force it will be very easy to hit enemies (who didn't start with astronomical fortitude). Resolve afflictions work well in combo with the Willbreaker. Also charming/dominating works well with a witch in general (can try to shake enemies with a yell to lower Will right a the start of battle - also here Staggered from Spirit Tornado gets applied). Wild Mind can be very annoying. But imo it's less dramatic as some other players make it seem. It's unpredictable and that doesn't sit well with most players who like to have full control. From time to time I enjoy a little chaos so I'm fine with it. Though I would't be in an Ironman run I assume.

Apologies for the "stupid" - I don't meant it, it's just the quote.

Yes, bashing shields profit from Two Weapon Tyle AND Weapon and Shield Style. The main reason for "shield for monk" is Tuotilo's Palm - because it's very good for Monks specifically.

Alchemy lets the drugs last a lot longer. Nalpasca gets addtional Power Level for drugs on top, too. Also Alchemy makes stuff like healing potions supereffective so it's not a bad skill to raise.

Animancer's Energy Blade would only be a backup weapon - for when you meet enemies who are immune to slash damage (and thus Scordeo's Edge would do 0 damage). A lash is a multiplicative damage bonus that sometimes is part of unique weapons' enchantments. Like here (see "+20% Damage dealt as Burn" etc.) : Edit: finally @theleemanaged to backstab me.

It's not mandatory to have or be a Druid. It's just a nice little gimmick. Forbidden Fist works just fine without Tanglefoot. You could also get a resistance against DEX afflictions (several items) and do the same with Binding Web (Wizard or Arcane Archer) - but that's also not mandatory. Forbidden Fists can generate enough wounds by themselves.

If you go with max RES for a Forbidden Fist and also use -x% to hostile effects duration items + -food it's no problem at all. The Forbidden Fist curse will be secs and the healing you get once a hostile effec expires will be higher than the self damage you suffered. Also: Clarity of Agony and Crucible of Suffering... As Forbidden Fist you don't need many attack abilities besides Forbidden Fist itself. It's very strong. Small trick: if you have a Druid in the party the Forbidden Fist can get a lot of wounds in shirt time - when running through the Druid's Tanglefoot.

Yes, it's weird. But my confusion got removed all the time - and once I removed Unflinching it stopped. Need to investigate more what happened...

Since it's a Berserker and the weapon to go is Amra I would go max MIG. Mediocre CON should suffice (get a heal-on-kill pet and maybe wear Amulat of (Greater) Health and mybe take Tough if it's not enough). Good PER. DEX can be mediocre I guess because the action speed buffs and Cleaving Stance + Armored Grace and later Blood Thirst will counter that. INT needs to pretty high because confusion will take away 5 points of INT - but you want to reach your bystanding skeletons with Carnage as much as possible so its AoE should still be big. Stuff like Ring of Overseeing can help, too. RES can be dumped IMO. Do NOT take Unflinching! I did that and it clears confusion at some point (dropping below 50% health because of Frenzy but healing up from killing skeletons -> resistances kick in). Removing confusion also means you won't kill skeletons anymore which also means you don't get the heal on kill from the pet and all the other on-kill effects. I died several times from Berserker Frenzy and wondered why for some minutes... So maybe something like this (ignoring racial/cultural maximums for the moment) MIG: 18 CON: 12 DEX: 11 PER: 16 INT: 18 RES: 03 Points can shift quite a bit depending on what items/consumables with attribute bonuses you like. For example I used two Rings of Overseeing and Aloth's Armor, Charm of Bones and Heaven's Cacophony - so I could def. get away with lower INT and invested a bit more in MIG and CON instead during my tests. By the way: high PER is nice with any player character because official companions have quite low PER which makes detecting some traps and secrets more difficult. If you have hired an adventurer with high PER you obv. don't need to think about that point.

Characters with more than 3 injuries will die there.

Besides "instadeath by script" you should also watch out if you have injuries and then walk into a scripted scene where you might aquire more injuries. I remember at least one scripted scene where you can get more than one injury (iirc something with the Survivor's route in SSS?). Too bad if you started into that with two injuries...

Does stuff like Strand of Favor and Cabalist's Gambeson with the lingering effects on you (of let's say Mith Fyr etc.)? Because WoD and SoT do work as soon as the effects are on you - so I guess those also add duration? There's also food that does +x% beneficial duration. So at least for yourself or a single character (not for the party) you could in theory have the effects of 3 phrases without using WoD and SoT?

If you have a Chanter in the party who can summon Ancient Brittle Bones and later use Many Lives I would suggest Berserker/Devoted with Amra+Riven Gore (after testing this combo yesterday more thoroughly). Confusion, Cleaving Stance + Blood Thirst make this Brute extremely devastating in combination with skeletons + Riven Gore. Cleaving Stance will lead to a situation where it will hit and kill a skeleton, procs again, kill the next skeleton and so on. Every time Carnage + Riven Gore will get triggered, damaging the "real" enemies as well. Attention: extremely deadly (like: final death as in "removed from party") for party members with <50 health who come too close (Riven Gore will destroy them). So either stay away or keep Modwyr in the second weapon setup for emergency "oh no" moments to unconfuse your Berserker right away. I also tried Berserker/Skald vs. Berserker/Troub. and Berserker/Beckoner so you wouldn't need another chanter in the party. It all works well but I'm still in favor of Troub. Skald can get lots of phrases from the fast hitting. Thus I tend to use invocations with him more often than with the other two (like Her Revenge) since they are so cheap and will also trigger Blood Thirst (especially if you hit your skeletons with it). A Beckoner can summon Wurms instead of skeletons and make good use of the Changeling's Mantle later on (Primal Carnage works on your own Wurms). Its action speed buff will reach the full stack quickly because of 6 Wurms in Carnage AoE and it stacks with Tempered Fury (Amra Frenzy) and Frenzy (and Bloodlust of course).

I just tried a variant: Berserker/Devoted with Mob Stance and Amra. It's... really wild. Mob Stance gets triggered from every skeleton-kill as well it seems. Edit: ah - it's more that a direct kill of an enemy triggers Mob Stance which then targets a skeleton (bc confused) which gets instakilled which triggers another Mob Stance attack and so on... all those doing Carnage and Riven Gore (if they crit).

Speaking of range: there are some spells that work with the Monk's Instruments of Pain. I remember Sunlance did - giving it a ridiculous range of over 70 meters or so... Too bad you can't cast Instruments of Pain out of combat.

Yeah well. Being honest doesn't mean you have to take every opportunity to tell people... everything - as if you're drunk and got injected with truth serum at the same time.

Hi! So... why not summon Llengrath's Warding Staff as a Warlock, right? Just because nobody else does. And also because every hit with it pushes the enemy into their own Carnage area. That means you are not only doing the normal weapon damage to the initial target but also the Carnage dmg (which ususally only hits enemy bystanders and not the initial target). I think that's not overly powerful but a pretty good use for that staff - and most of all: it's fun.

So... I didn't read about this much - or at least I don't remember reading it: If you are a confused Berserker and are wielding Amra with Riven Gore - you will instakill your party-members if you accidentially hit them with the Amra-Carnage while they have 50 or less health. And I don't mean that they get knocked out. No... they will be really dead, destroyed, gone for good, tschüssikovski. So... if you are like me and have a Berserker (without removing confusion because it's so good with skellies) with Amra and Riven Gore: stay away from that dude like your life depends on it. Because it does. It's one melee and 4 ranged characters now...

Kind of. On that engagement works better in Deafire than in PoE so it has more value imo.

Wizard can be tanky if you gear up very defensively and give +engagement gear (for example Kapana Taga + shield + Reckless Brigandine = 4 slots). The missing engagement will be the worst part in the early game though. Tanks without engagement don't work so well imo. An essential Phantom can help tanking. Once you get Llengrath's Safeguard you can become very tanky (especially with the use of Wall of Draining). The universal defense boost stacks with all the deflection buffs.

It stacks with the Barb's Frenzy. I would suggest the "on kill" variant of course in this case. Also Amra's "Carnage" stacks with Barb's Carnage which kills those summons around you even faster. Also with Amra I would suggest to use Bleeding Cuts once you get Blood Thirst.

I guess you mean Beckoner, not Bellower? Generally speaking a Beckoner and also a Skald (lots of crits) work fine as well. I chose a Troubadour merely because of convenience/mircomanagement lazyness: - Beckoner's skeletons do scale with level and are harder to kill than the skeletons from Many Lives Pass By - at least at higher levels. - I'd have to micromanage the Beckoner's skeletons. They don't run on AI. The ones that appear after the initial skeletons get killed do have AI control though (which is good in this case). I personally found the added micro annoying for this particular character. - Beckoner has to invest casting time (and potentially recovery) for summoning his skeletons that can't be used for smashing things. His summons' duration is shorter than Troubadour's. Troubadour can summon more skeletons on the fly via chant + Brisk Recitation: comparable amount of skeletons but way less micro and time "wasted" with actual summoning invocations. - If you summon 6 Beckoner skeletons it often happens that you kill several of them (or sometimes even all of them) with the same Carnage attack. This means that you "wasted" all the nice skellies for just one Blood Thirst proc. Blood Storm will get extended several times and you'll also get the healing effect per kill though so it's not too bad. It just feels better to not have them die all at once. - Troubadour summons a skeleton every 3 secs which leads to a constant but fast enough stream of "fuel" for Blood Thirst and the other kill effects. Ideally with every attack only one skeleton dies. By the way, check out Amra's Riven Gore: since Many Lives Skeletons have very low health they will get destroyed on the spot. Of course this is only most convenient and "better" once you get Many Lives Pass By. Before that I guess it doesn't really matter that much because you will have to manually summon creatures anyway (don't need to be skeletons by the way, they are just the weakest summons and Ancient Brittle Bones is so nice). Beckoner can summon more at once, Troubadour can summon them more often and they stay longer, Skald will get a lot of phrases from crits against the skellies and thus can summon more often etc. I guess it would need testing which one is the perfect fit for one's taste. I just liked Troubadour because I could completely automate this character that way. In the end it's just using Frenzy at the start of battle and doing lightning fast auto-attacks.