Braven

OP said: “I am new in the game and i try to understand if available to make reflect solo build...The whole thing is to take minimum damage from enemies and make slow aoe damage.” Sounds like the OP just wants to slowly damage enemies around the character in combat while taking the least amount of damage and lamented at the low duration of lesser flame shield. Sounds like reflection is exactly a solution OP would potentially be interested in. Also said new to the game so it is reasonable to assume the player might not know about things like spell reflection and monk’s soul mirror, or rogue’s counter attack ability, etc. Druid AOE Damage over time spells are also a good way to slowly kill enemies around you in an AOE and those spells have long durations. Not reflection/retribution exactly, but accomplishes the same goal of mostly passively harming enemies so stuff like dex is not very important and you can just turtle in and wait for your enemies to die on their own. These kind of strategies help soloing a lot since you have to do all the killing yourself and eat all the incoming attacks. It takes a very long time to hack down everything through traditional weapon attacks and single target abilities. Constant AOE damage is far more efficient.

Regarding the flame shield idea with paladin. You could instead use the burn upgrade to sworn enemy (branded enemy). I think, from the tooltip, that it has an unlimited duration and no accuracy roll at all, but I never played with it before. Everyone seems to take the refund upgrade instead so I never hear about it. Question: Can you have more than one sworn enemy? If so you could just use all your zeal and mark each one and wait for them to very slowly die.... now you can just complety dump perception. I guess you could then do the usual buff your defenses to insane levels with items, wizard buffs, etc which all don’t need accuracy either, or do the priest immortality tricks with withdraws, salvation of time, barring deaths door, etc. The main problem, besides being a painfully slow way to kill anything, is that it will do nothing against fire immune enemies.

If you have sky high defenses, which you want anyway for soul mirror to proc, you can just use Dance with Death for plenty wounds regardless of monk subclass. It still works in 1.1. The accuracy bonus stops at 12 (was that way before patch too), but the wounds keep coming in forever as long as you don’t take damage and it is fast. enough to keep up blade turning. I prefer helwalker since that extra might is another up to 20 fortitude. Monk/wizard can actually get among the highest deflection I think of any class because he only really needs ranged deflection. This allows shuffling around items and optimizing which ones you use with skill scaling to crank out much more deflection since those weren’t nerfed hard like the intimidate armor and atheltics shield which got the vocal attention. The extra fortitude from helwalker and duality’s CON allow you to be better than paladin in that respect too, particularly with the F&C nerf. Your “other” defenses can still get hit every once in a while, but you can get 4 casts of wizard double with items per encounter, and there is always mirror images. You have enough mortification to recast dance with death a few times if needed and can use mortification of flesh a couple times at the start to get to 10 wounds fast. That ability doesn’t break the dance. I wonder if you had a druid who cast Beetle shell on you if you could keep it up better since damage would just be aborbed by the shield. Can you still reflect attacks that way?

Monk/wizard works well. I played one and it is quite funny. Basically do everything you can to boost deflection. Never ever rest and use bonuses, like Hylea’s bounty. This really helps boost defenses further since they all stack with everything (see guide on permenant bonuses on this forum). Note, level 5 safeguard spell stacks with other bonuses to help boost defenses and lasts a really long time. Prioritize “ranged deflection” bonuses since melee can be reflected with blade turning regardless of defenses anyway. For example, there is an armor, Maia’s, that can enchanted with this and scales off stealth. There is a shield that provides up to 20 bonus defelection that scales off lost health.... not a problem since nothing can actually hit you so you just hurt yourself with mortification of flesh ability until really low on health then activate all your defenses, in particular the “wizard double” level 1 spell. Battles go like this: - Soul mirror reflects half of all ranged deflection attacks (given your extreme deflection defenses) - Arcane Spell reflection (several wizard spells have this) reflects all direct targeted spells. - Blade Turning reflects all melee attacks. - Dance with death provides a constant stream of wound resource to power blade turning so you can have it up 100% of the time. AOE attacks just miss you because your reflex is cranked sky high with large shield and shield-style, safeguard, Item bonuses, wizard displaced images spell, giftbearer cloak, etc. For the most part you can just stand still and watch your enemies kill themselves trying to attack you. I plan to write up a build report for this, but I am still playtesting it.

Gouging Strike is nice for long fights.Devastating Blow on low health boss could be devastating. So it depends on situation. And prolong thought about 5% up or down may be waste of time. But here is a thing: Martial classes have limited pool, and abillities are generally costly. At low levels you have to pick something. And you dont heave many options. Result: Over focus on low tier abillities, and just sticking tot them, since we already picked them, and are good enought. And for high tier... we dont have Guile or levelpoints for that. Other aproach: Fron load basic form of active abillities (at least most), with backload upgrades. So at level levels you could pick Cripping Strike, or Blinding, or Sap, Whitering, Ring the Bell, Just sap it. All options. But for upgrades... you need wait for them for tier 4+. That would be nice. I consider the guile cost too, Gouging is good yeah, Devastating I'm not sure if it worth 2 Cripple Strike, maybe you are right. Econmically I will just use Cripple Strike most of the times.Yeah, that is my main issue with a lot of higher tier active abilities. It is not so much that they are not strong enough; but that they are too expensive. Why pay twice or three times more for something only slightly better. Also, you miss out on taking a passive ability with martial classes if you do so making it even more not worth it. The patch lowered the cost of some of the weakest late game abilities in a couple classes, but it still isn’t enough to justify taking most over a passive and just keep using lower tier powers you already have. This is much less an issue with casters since they can’t simply spam the same thing over and over again.

Last time I checked it did not (beta3). Did they change that? Helwalker's MIG bonus does stack because it's a passive. I know of no example (after quite some testing) where two actives that directly address the same stat will stack. Just checked in game: does not stack Duality of Mortal Presence (INT) does NOT stack with Elightened Agony (Smart, +5 INT). The lower one automatically gets suppressed as it should be. Oh, really? I thought I tried it before and it worked. Maybe something else was adding it and I just assumed it was the smart inspiration from agony. Or maybe it was that shield which grants smart doing it since it is from an item. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead. Update: The suspected shield inspiration is suppressed by duality, so that wasn’t it. Annoying, since some item powers do stack with active abilities while others don’t so you still don’t realky know what will be suppressed for certain. Update 2: Looks like I was not crazy. I checked again today and they stack again.. not sure what causes the same inspiration to sometimes stack and sometimes get suppressed. Now this is the Pillars of Eternity I love and remember... inconsistent stacking behavior.

Monk’s turning wheel INT bonus stacks with smart inspiration. Both are active and both provide a direct INT bonus. I would be highly surprised if there are not several other examples of things like this where two active abilities with the exact same bonus stack. I’ll try and console around some later and pull some more concrete examples.

I didn’t think either really needed buffs. Illusion, along with enchanting, are the best magic schools in my opinion. Instead they should make all the wizard subclasses actually worth taking instead of no subclass always being the best option. Not sure how trickster made it to the top of the list when there are so many subclasses that are clearly worse off. For example... why would a transmuter ever want to turn into an orge who is slow as hell, can’t cast spells, and is bad at fighting? What kind of subclass power is that? Conjurer’s power is almost as bad: summoning a useless, pathetically weak tiny creature. Somehow, the random flee-laiden stray cats and dogs that you find drinking out of various backwater cesspools provides far better buffs than your own familiars. To add further insult, it uses up your spell casts and arcane power source and takes forever to cast and must be recast every encounter. Tricksters on the other hand get a very useful spell, mirror images, which synergizes well with the rogue passive counter-attack ability.

I don’t think it is quite so simple as actives don’t stack and passives do. For exanple +X attributes stacks with inspirations that do the exact same thing, just hidden behind a name. For example +20 reflex from a wizard spell will stack with the +5 from a perception inspiration while at the same time +2 armor from an inspiration doesn’t stack with +armor from abilities (like gilded). So sometimes inspirations stack and sometimes not. +20 to all defenses also stacks with individually named defensive bonuses. Not exactly intuitive unless you know it works that way. It would be sensible to think they just wrote “all defenses” to avoid having to list each one out individually on the tooltip.

While I doubt it interests many of us, “classic” difficulty was also increased. I noticed that some encounters have more enemies. I mean, it is still easy, but I thought I would mention since the patch notes only mention Veteran and POTD.

Oh, I didn’t know they released it already. My mistake. Thanks!

Not quite. It adds flavor for “sub-classing”. Each subclass gets a seperate set of “auto-learned” spells that are different than the other subclasses. This benefits single class as well as multiclass. Note, this is a special perk specifically for priests and druids. Wizard gets no free spells (because they have the equipable spellbook mechanic instead to gain free spells). Wizard has it best since they can just collect all the books and basically be able to access any spell they are missing so they don’t need to waste ability selections on situational spells. I like it since it encourages you to try out spells you might not otherwise take and provides some nice RP theme, helping for example the different priest sects feel a little different.

Only if you subscribed to recieve beta patches (if using steam). The bug was probably caused because the druids animal claw “weapons” used that slot and the program code never reequipped your weapons after. Hopefully that was fixed in 1.1.

Cool ty, I suspect insect swarm doesn't scale, doesn't have the antidote counter tag. How do you feel about top lvl druid spells, im so in the dark about druids, love them thematically but I see ONE druid build in the forums and almost no one coming up with synergistic multi-classes. . Insect swarm (level 2 spell) is kind of lousy. In theory it can do a lot of damage, but it target fortitude and has a small AOE. I find Autumn of decay to be better because of the larger AOE and reflex defense. Both have a big problem: if you miss, nothing happens. Because of this you either need to ramp up accuracy somehow or just skip them and go for a healing power instead. My favorite level 2 power is “Taste of the Hunt” For the following reasons: 1) Massive single target raw damage. Great for assassinating enemy wizards or gunners who shoot through your arcane veil. 2) Also heals you for a good burst amount 3) Essentially no cast time since it has a normal attack as part of it. At third level, the lightning storm is good since it has multiple attack rolls so it is less prone to luck (a bad dice roll). Attacks reflex that you lowered with nature’s mark. First level, I just used nature’s mark that you get for free and then shift to animal form. I would also pick Vile Thorns since it will get decent later in the game after alchemy is skilled up. Tanglefoot is good if you plan to go heavy with the reflex-based AOE spells later, but I personally never bothered since I would rather get to animal form faster. It does have multiple attack rolls being a gound hazard to help hit reliability and a large AOE radius.

I am not a modder, so here are just some ideas with the vanilla game. I think spear only gets at most one engagement (with modal active). I believe the standard spear bonus is +5 accuracy. Or maybe you are already including the shield-bearer subclass bonus? Maybe there is a unique one that gives another. Not sure. Some other weapons get engagement through unique enchantments. I know there is a warhammer like that. There is a helm that offer engagement that is pretty good. There is also armor that provides an extra. So, with those items you are up to +5 engagements with a pure paladin and there are likely others possible. Of course, if you multiclass you can get way more. Fighter gets access to lots and some spells offer +3.

Sure, you really only lose out on being able to learn arcane veil which is useful to avoid getting interrupted. interruption means you completely lose the “power source” along with the spell so it is quite painful to a spell casters. This can be compensated with certain inspirations, items, or the combat focus passive ability. The +50 deflection is quite powerful sometimes, but honestly the biggest threat is getting snipered by gun enemies and arcane veil is useless against that so maybe a different spell would be better anyway. Generally you will have completed your initial DOT spell before melee even reach you making arcane veil maybe not so useful as I originally thought. I mainly liked it since it is really fast to cast and all the normal priest spells are pretty terrible for a solo character at level 1. Berath gets touch of rot at level 1 which is actually a very good single target damage spell. Also gets spreading plague so you don’t have to waste your level 3 druid spells to cast this, if you want to use it in order to increase your spell accuracy. Spell accuracy is a big issue with this build, so Berath is actually not that bad. As a shifter, staying in animal form is really better than casting spells early on, so your early priest spells can probably just be ignored if you want. The priest side is really only needed for big battles where you are heavily out gunned, like ship battles, where no amount of healing will save you and you must “withdraw” in order to survive.

Honesty, pure druid could be considered better overall simply because you get plague of insects so much sooner and the priest survivability is probably way over-kill... but it does technically have a stronger potential in the end game. Particular starting off as moon godlike and shifter, I suspect it would be super strong all game going pure druid and you avoid the awkward level 8-12 phase where you are not really powerful enough yet to take on large battle challenges and still need to grind through easy quests for EXP. Feel free to test it and report back. Beetle shell is a 200 hp damage shield instead of purely duration based, so it could “break” sooner if soloing on highest difficulty and under intense enemy fire. You are also not “untargetable” so it is possible that something bad could happen like getting de-buffed to death or maybe hit with something that dispels it like arcane dampener (I don’t know if an enemy would actually try to do this or not). In POE1, damage shields were worse than they seemed because it ignored some things like armor damage reduction (the shield was hit before armor was checked). I don’t know how it works in POE2 since there is no longer DR. Finally, Beetle shield is not nearly as good because the duration is base 10 seconds instead of 20 seconds with withdraw. Add in Int bonuses and the difference is even greater. Also doesn’t provide the full heal like withdraw. It is nice to be topped off so you have some buffer room if you need to cast more spells after.

All the ones with poison effects. This includes 4 druid spells and 2 wizard spells that I know of. You can tell if a spell has poison because it will either have the poison keyword or have “countered by antidote” in the tooltip. The Druid spells (with spell tier) are: 1) Vile Thorns 3) Spreading Plague 5) Plague of Insects 6) Venom Bloom I don’t know if it increases accuracy for all spells. I only looked at the combat log of Plague of Insects. I think that one gains one extra accuracy per PL, but I didn’t actually do the math; just noticed the big number. Grazes and Crits also matter much less with Damage over time spells since it just changes the duration a bit. The per tick damage is unchanged by hit quality. PL effects various depending on the type of spell and effects it has. There is a thread in this forum that explains the mechanics discovered about how it works exactly. It is kind of complicated. The extra power levels are so strong that you might want to consider just playing a pure druid. Druid/Wizard is also a fine option in order to have eventual access to all of the poison spells. In my opinion Plague of Insects is by far away the best of the bunch, but wizard/druid is better for a bit more total variety.

Haha thanks for the testing, so these works sometimes and sometimes not? Weird enough I think. Because I’m pretty sure I see my character use offensive parry when he disengaged.Invisibilty in general is buggy. I have noticed similar things with the priest withdraw spell. Sometimes moving ends it. Sometimes it doesn’t. Also, aren’t you not supposed to move if “stunned” like the description says? We all know how long invisibilty was a buggy mess in PoE1.

What about the companion paladin? Does your dispositions affect her? What does she favor?

I believe that's the case. I was dead worried about my templar of berath and ran some combats in 1.1beta: every time I used flames of devotion + spiritual weapon on a even armored enemy, corrode damage was higher. At character level 6, power level 2, Corrode lash is doing 30% dmg on normal attacks. Multiplicative. Btw, empower spiritual weapon has no effect on item scaling of spiritual weapon. The math has always seemed funky with lashes with the combat log showing a higher number than the percentage would seem to be. Maybe it is because the armor rating for elemental based damage if often lower so it over penetrates? I will look at it more closely later and see if I can figure it out. Druid claw lash got nerfed too, though not as drastically. Not sure if it scales better any better now. Shapeshift in some ways are worse because you not only lose your unique weapon enchantments. You lose all items so scaling is important to get right. Also you can’t really just ignore it like you can a bad summoned weapon.

I have created a build completely immune to deflection based attacks and highly resistant to other types. Considering this, I don’t think accuracy is too high. Though, the true problem is that there are too many misc. ways to boost deflection and other defenses that is far more impactful than quality rating. If those were toned down, then I could see increasing it to match weapon quality. Some of the shields have enchantments offering 10-20 bonus deflection on top of the quality rating. While some weapons might have equilivent unique enchantments boosting them further... the enemies are not actually using those relics locked away in some hidden dungeon vault.

I forgot to mention. There is also the level 1 Natures Mark that has a good size foe-only AOE that reduces deflection and reflex by 10. This can be stacked with Tanglefoot or Spreading Plague for a total -20 penalty to enemy reflex. Priest also has a blessing to increase your accuracy by 5 at level 1, but I would rather cast arcane viels. I will test with these, but hopefully it will help the issues of accuracy in early levels. You certainly want to use Natures Mark early with this build. Because the AOE is so large, it hits every enemy and lasts around 45 seconds. It targets will, and the early enemies are all low in that defense. It effectively increases your melee accuracy by 10 which is great for attacking in animal form. I recommend casting it from stealth and then shifting immediately after... that way it takes no casting time to use. it has a long range, so you don't need to get close to the enemy before using it. I like the cat form best since it naturally has faster attack speed and has an ability to further increase attack speed. It is basically like having monk's swift strikes. The boar passive healing is also quite powerful with the healing multipliers particularly early on. It is basically like fighter constant recovery. The animal abilities are considered tier zero, so they start right off with a 10% increase from power level. With the dawnstar blessing, boar form was healing for over 8 hp a tick from the start of the game. After I restarted with Shifter and moon godlike it was way easier. Between moon godlike and the animal forms, that is eight additional passive heals. Nine counting the boar passive. I think I will actually pump might back up to max because of this and lower CON in the build. Note: Shifter healing was nerfed a bit in 1.1. It now does (15 + 5/PL base) * might * healing multipliers. That is actually good scaling because adding a literal value to the base amount is much better than another percentage based multiplier. It will be quite powerful when combined with the +50% blessing and +15% talent and +15% pet, +15% belt etc. it starts off with 1PL since it is consider tier zero, so you get the first PL for free making it actually base 20 hp.

I think you meant the talent adds +6 deflection and +18 reflex at end game. Correct (for small shield). Large shield is even better if you consider +1 deflection and +1 reflex combined is better than +1 accuracy. It is generally better to just use dagger and hachet in the very early game if you don’t plan to use the shield profiency modal since the base shield deflection alone is pretty pathetic without the talent. However, 50% damage reduction against all ranged and reflex damage is no joke. Particularly since the must stand still condition is no penatly at all. You can just turn off the modal when you need to move. Deactivating a modal is instant and immediate. Weapon modals are usually really situational and more often better kept off than on so this is a big advantage of shields.

Hmm, if shield style no longer gives reflex for the total shield deflection then that has changed from the first game and the tooltip is misleading. I will double check it, but I thought I remember seeing the total deflection of the shield applied to reflex on the character details screen. I updated my earlier post showing that dagger deflection is inferior to shield deflection since it only applies to “melee weapons”. In other words, it is conditional and only helps against around half of enemies. I also countered your argument about the “additional +16 accuracy”. Shield users also get that bonus too. Having more weapons doesn’t make that any better. The only advantage is higher attack speed. Don’t get me wrong, I think duel-wielding is powerful, I just think you are short-changing shields. They certainly serve a purpose in the game.