Jump to content

Braven

Members
  • Posts

    616
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Braven

  1. The pain gives him brains (much of that comes from wounds). The roleplaying idea is that he can only find true enlightenment and strokes of genioud when undergoing severe torment and intense suffering.
  2. By the way; There is another interesting build I thought of that is less micro-intensive that fully uses death-godlike all the time. Described briefly below: StreetFighter / Priest (Weal) Flail/blunderbuss with modals (makes you always flanked and reflex debuff for blunderbuss AOE accuracy) Use Death Barred... spell to make yourself immune to death. Combined with the Salvation of Time spell, you can get about 60 seconds of death immunity with high int. During that time you blunderbuss like crazy with the full streetfighter and death godlike benefits. Why Flail and blunderbuss? Backstab is very lousy with blunderbuss, only applying to one bullet. With flail you backstab with that while at the same time debuffing reflex that the gun’s special AOE attack targets. Just like this build, you can dump CON and RES since health doesn’t matter.
  3. Sure! I haven’t fully tested and played all the way through yet, but I plan to. I may have more insight to add later, along with some suggested items.
  4. Like boerer said, there are lots of ways to deal with afflictions. You can counter with an inspiration or use resistance to “downgrade” them to weaker versions. Unless you are going for maximum possible deflection, it doesn’t do much to reduce durations. It is actually less useful than POE1, where you often wanted at least some for concentration. This build really doesn’t want it. I would go with negative resolve if I could since it is anti-synergetic. This character is in a persistant living hell; he has no resolve left! With all the paladin passives, all the really bad ones will be downgraded, if they hit at all, and the monk’s agony ability dramatically reduces the duration anyway; far more so than extra resolve ever would.
  5. Fists also do tons of damage with the extra power levels helping. I just was trying to fit weapon with build concept, but really any works. The “best” would be to just pick one with a nice enchantment. An enchantment that passively helps rooting pain would be better since it is quicker to self-create wounds with mortification of soul than using weapons. Monk is fun if you want high int/might. I considered also priest monk since they have good healing and longer durations. The +200 health from triumph of champions would work well with a higher con version... and there is always barring death... level 5 spell that grant immortality, with higher duration than lay on hands, and can be extended with salvation of time at level 6. I stuck with paladin mainly because it got up and running faster and had the ultimate self-inflicted damage option late game with sacred immolation which fits the theme nicely.
  6. At least it doesn’t use the even more broken chanter inspiration phrase. The immorality helps against accidental death and lets you keep con low, but your are healing so much that it isn’t really even needed until late game when any build wrecks everything. Healing actually outpaces damage if you don’t purposefully hurt yourself. That is why I used nature instead of death godlike. It can actually be hard to ensure you are at near death because of all the healing you also create. The 20% damage of death godlike might work wonders with rooting pain though. My favorite part is the massive might and int that helwalker monk provides and how you can turn it’s normally terrible downside into a huge boon. That 50% wound growth (from taking increased damage) is what really makes this build work wonders
  7. This is a retaliation based build where you also retailate against yourself. The idea is to create insane numbers of wounds to trigger rooting pain constantly, while not dying. The not dying part is is helped greatly by the huge amount of Intelligence and power level this build gathers. This greatly extends lay on hands which in turn generates tons of health. The low, 1 zeal cost and virtuous triumph ability allows you to keep the pain train going. Instant monk abilities allow you to use up wounds instantly to trigger rooting pain. They also have many quick and passive ways to cause themselves damage, in case enemies are not doing a good enough job of that for you. Class: Helwalker Monk / Shieldbearer Paladin Race: Nature or Death Godlike (tested with nature) Weapon: Dual Sceptors with profiency modal activated (to damage yourself for more wounds) Armor: Naked (clothes provide armor that slows down the pain.) Stats (including abilities that will always be active - no items) Mig: 33 (18 starting, +10 helwalker, +5 thunderous blows) Con: 8 (3 starting, 5 greater lay on hands) Dex: 21 (16 starting, 5 swift strikes) Per: 18 Int: 35 (20 starting, +10 duality, +5 clarity of mind) Res: 3 Abilities: Greater Lay on Hands: This build fully realizes the potential of this ability. Your high dex and increased action speed from swift strikes allow a quick cast/recovery time. Your really high might, int, and power level allows for huge healing and a long duration. Power level is more benefical on lower tier powers. Being tier one, you will gain +6 from levels and +2 from nature godlike. This adds another 80% healing and 40% duration. Total duration (for shield bearer death immunity), without considering bonuses from items, is: 5 + 125% (int) + 40% (pl) = 13.5 seconds. With items you can probably get this to 15 seconds. This is assuming additive math. If power level is multicative, it would be more. That might not seem like much but you will be constantly (nearly instantly) generating rooting pains so battles will go by -very- fast, and you can use this 12+ times per encounter if needed. Rooting Pain: your really high might and intelligence means this will hit hard and wide. While the base damage is fairly low, there is no DR in this game and it can be spammed over and over, nearly non-stop. Thunderous blows: this is key for getting rid of wounds. It also provides you more strength and penetration. Just use it whenever you have too many wounds. Turning wheel: The +10 intelligence make lay on hands less of a hassle to refresh, giving more time between castings to perform actions. The +50% fire damage is a nice benefit too. Not sure if it helps rooting pain... will check later and report. Clarity of mind: Mainly we use this for the +5 intelligence from it’s “smart” inspiration. It has a long duration so you only need to activate it once. It also, along with all the paladin passives, basically makes you immune to afflictions. Swift Strikes: This allows you to get off your abilities super fast. Not only 20% action speed, it also has +5 dex. Basically it increases the speed of all actions, even spells, by 35% which is huge. Keep it going at all times. Sacred Immolation, you won’t get this till late, but it just makes everythig better. Creates tons of wounds and also damages everyone. Build works without it, but certainly a good thing when you get it. Your intelligence will make it last a long time too. You can create wounds while you are being healed to trigger rooting pain using: - sacred immolation (passive tick) - mortification of soul (fast activation and costs nothing) - helwalker increases wound generation by 50% - less wounds increases by another 20% - scepters’ profiency modal - enemies hitting you - allies hitting you - aoe hazards - frriendly fire spells - ??? Wounds can be instantly used up with thunderous blows if you have too many to make room for more.
  8. I don’t think that is a bug. Some classes start with more than one abilty. All of the paladin subclasses start with two; one based on the paladin order, and one that is the players choice. The extra ability is part of the subclass bonus.
  9. While I agree some nerfs are in order, I don’t think the game will ever be remotely balanced. I am already finding even more powerfully broken builds than the currently, popular broken builds. There are just way too many class combinations to ever get anywhere close to balancing everything. If you “patch” one OP thing, the community will just find two more to take it’s place. It will be like playing whack-a-mole for the next couple years and every patch will just create another leak. This was always the danger of adding multiclass, but I think it was worth it for all the game play benefits. I personally enjoy finding ways to break games.
  10. Spears also all provide an extra engagement. But really, it doesn’t matter. In reality, only 2-3 enemies at most will ever be around you and those that don’t want to engage will just walk around the small engagement zone anyway regardless of how much engagement you have. Also, keep in mind that the most dangerous enemies use ranged attacks or spells anyway, making your engagement worthless against them. Summons are actually a much better way of tying up enemies. The tier 1 skeletons from chanter is particularly good at this; way more effective than extra engagements and enemies will happily engage them without you forcing them to. They can be upgraded to be even harder to get rid of and are way stronger than in the first game. If you want to go all out engagement, fighter is certainly best. They have many ways to increase it (probably can get 6 or so without too much work). Then, you can use the yanking ability to pull enemies to you or charge into the middle of a pack. That strategy would work well with Paladin as second class because of all the paladin affliction resistances. A number of afflictions can remove engagement, so it is helpful to gain resistances. Between paladin and fighter, you will have the best set of affliction resistances in the game.
  11. Paladin/trickster is another option because of all the passive paladin buffs, and you still get the additional massive deflection buffs from the trickster’s illusion magic (though the spell options are not quite as good as arcane veil, paladin passives more than makes up for that). You wouldn’t be able to use other spells then, though, like offensive magic that you could cast as a wizard. But this combination would be stronger purely for tanking and access to great healing. Keep in mind, you need a complete miss and have it be a melee attack (The most dangerous enemies use guns, spells, breath attacks, special abilities, etc, that don’t apply), and even then it is only a chance of happening; I think like 20-30%. I haven’t actually used it in this game, but that was my impression from the first. Considering how massively overpowered other things in the game are right now, it is relatively meh, in my opinion. Still would be very strong, though. Any build is viable, though, since the game is not hard; even on the highest difficulties.
  12. Extra engagement can still be helpful so you can pick a different (better) fighter stance, like cleave, when facing multiple foes. Fighter/paladin is a very strong tank. If you are new, devoted can be disappointing if you find a cool weapon that doesn’t match your original proficiency. This combination has a great mix of both defensive and offensive potential. Streetfighter is really only worth it if playing solo on harder difficulties. It is hard to be consistently flanked or bloodied with a party so I think you won’t find it fun. Paladin chanter is a really great tank. Really, any paladin, but chanter can summon disposable creatures to help tank too and create a “wall” of creatures to protect your party. Also great AOE healing. There is also a certain incredibly broken chanter invocation you can get late in the game that allows you to spam your abilities as much as you want without running out of zeal. Wizard / Paladin is really good; probably the best raw defensive numbers available and is super power really early in the game. Wizard has many spells at levels 1-3 for boosting deflection massively so you will mever run out of casts. My favorite is arcane veil which provides +50 deflection for quite a long time. Combined with a maxed out faith and conviction and thr mulitude of other paladin passive defensive buffs, all available in the first few levels, you will be an over-powered beast before even leaving the tutorial island. The short answer is that pretty much any class combination can be super over-powered right now, so you can’t really go wrong.
  13. If you want to make the game more challenging, let the gods choose your character class. Roll two 12-sided dice and assign a class to each number. If you roll doubles, play as a single class (if you roll 12, pick the “return to the wheel” option at the start of game and start over). Then, when picking stats, also, assign them semi-randomly. First, roll 3d6 for each stat as a starting baseline. Next roll 1d6 to determine a stat (MIGHT=1, RESOLVE=6) and roll the d12 to Determine how much to add to it. Repeat, until all stat points are used up. If a single stat exceeds total stat points allowed or available, just adjust to the max you can. By forcing an interesting class combination, you might accidently discover a fun new build.
  14. A lot of tooltips that say “ally” also include the caster. It is really unclear now; it used to be that “friendly AOE” included the caster and “allied” didn’t, but now many include the caster too. For example, many of the paladin powers also help the paladin where they didn’t in POE1. I wish POE2 better explained which are actually only allies and which affect both allies and caster (all green circles).
  15. Another option for the original build is doing Priest instead of paladin. Priest has an immortality ability with double the duration (10 sec. base). With INT and PL buffs, that can go to over 25 seconds or so, reducing the burden of recasting. There is also Salvation of time that adds another 10 seconds and is in a different power level so it doesn't use up spell casts. Instead of sacred immolation just use priest spells given the extra time you have from the much longer immortality duration. Works great with death godlike since you are always at 1 hp. Again, need a chanter though, unlike paladin/monk which also is available earlier (rooting pain is only tier 4), though it might be hard to massively hurt yourself until sacred immolation at level 19.
  16. Okay... I think I have it refined to being stupidly, broken OP enough now. Instead of preventing lay on hands healing, use it instead to generate a bunch of wounds over and over again. Because you will always be low on health from mutilating yourself, you also get all the benefits of death godlike. If sacred immolation is not painful enough to keep you at no health or generating wounds fast enough, sit in some kind of AOE damage spell or have your mates shoot you in the back with arrows. Your main source of damage will actually be rooting pain, which is also available earlier than sacred immolation. Though feel free to use both. How to use up all these wounds you are generating with self-inflicted hurt? That is where Thunderous Blows comes in. It gives you 5 more might, but the main thing is that it is instant cast so you can spam it over and over again without delay to always ensure you have capacity to generate wounds for Rooting Pain. Helwalker's penalty is actually a boon for this build because it allows you to hurt yourself much faster for more wounds. The might bonus provided by the subclass will significantly increase the damage of rooting pain and sacred immolation, and generate health in order to make more wounds. Class: Helwalker Monk / Shieldbearer Paladin Race: Death Godlike Key Abilties: Root Pain (AOE damage every-time you get a wound. This is your main damage dealing source because it will be firing off constantly) Sacred immolation (helps generate wounds and damages enemies) Thunderous Blows (instant cast no recovery buff and uses wounds up so you can generate tons by spamming it over and over. The extra might and penetration it provides will also help kill things quicker and gain health faster for more wounds) lay on hands (makes you immortal and heals you quickly so you are able to create more wounds) Turning Wheel / Duality of Mortal Presence / Iron Wheel (boosts your stats massively to lengthen duration of lay on hands, AOE range of all the passive damage, Virtuous Triumph (gets you more zeal for lay on hands. You will be killing enemies very fast, so you shouldn't need a chanter anymore) Lesser Wounds (helps generate wounds faster) Swift Strike (helps get out lay on hands faster so less time is wasted refreshing it.) Clarity of Mind can be used for another +5 INT from smart to help with durations. Buffed, this character can easily have 38 or more intelligence making for a decent length lay on hands immortality duration. Any ideas on how to hurt yourself quicker? Traps? Friendly Fire? Poison your self? I am open to ideas.
  17. I mentioned "it would be nice if lay on hands could just not heal" so that you can benefit from all of the "near death" items and abilities. Well, it turns out there are ways to prevent yourself from getting healed. This allows for death godlike instead of nature godlike, which has a higher +3 power level and +20% damage bonuses. The health is worthless with "can't die", so might as well try and stop it. Since paladin can regain zeal by killing enemies, if your damage is buffed strong enough you might not even need chanter support since lay on hands only costs one zeal. Here are a couple ways I have found to prevent healing: 1) Monk Nalpazca. My understanding is that you stay "crashed" until you rest or take another drug. So just take one drug per day, wait for it to crash, and start your day. Does the -1 wound/tick happen if crashed too? Might not matter because of the amount of self-inflicted pain you are giving yourself. 2) Weakened affliction removes healing if you can find a way to apply it to yourself on-demand. The monk seems easy since you are only limited by your drug supply, though I guess it can get pricy. I've heard gold is no object later in the game, though. Passive damage buffs, like turning wheel, could really super-charge your sacred immolation and also lengthen lay on hands with that +INT/wound bonus. Do you still gain wounds if you have no health and still are taking damage? Do wounds expire like in POE1 after a while? Can Mortification of the Soul be used multiple times for effectively unlimited wound resources? There is also rooting pain to do more passive damage to all enemies around you without having to do anything or spend anything. Weakened could allow for multi-class with Street-fighter for some crazy damage buffs. You would need to be careful to avoid any resistance that would prevent it and your high defenses might make it hard to get weakened reliably. So not sure how to make that work but I will be thinking about it...
  18. Endless lay on hands is the opposite of “too much effort”. Just set up the AI script to run it in loop, leave and get a cup of coffee, come back and see corpses littering the floor. No need to worry about defense buffs, or armor, or spell targeting, positioning, items, crafting, health, etc.
  19. I wonder if you can chant while invisible as a assassin/chanter multi-class. Seems like a wierd combo from a roleplaying perspective, but with brilliance inspiration, you can just sit around while invisible regaining Guile, all while harming enemies with phrases, backstab right before the invisibility expires, re-invisible again, repeat.
  20. The weapon I would like to try out is the morning star. Seems like there must be a way to abuse the -25 fortitude debuff... From what I've heard, there is a lot more sabers, swords, and great swords, compared to other weapons. I think there is only one unique club... and it is not even very good. It is pretty lousy having an unequal weapon selection right after they add in weapon proficiency. I guess to be fair, it is not as impactful as the old weapon focus and you get a few of them (except for devoted fighter). I haven't even used any of the modal weapon abilities yet so I am not sure proficiency really matters much.
  21. Really? What abilities make the paladin so OP? Sacred immolation? How about being immune to death on LoH (unlimited with this invocation) and +gazillion to all defenses from faith and conviction. You don't need to do a lot of damage if you can't die. Btw you can spam Sacred immolation all you want if you can't die anyway . Death immunity looks good only on paper because the paladin doesn't need it to stay alive - a potion or a simple heal does the same thing. If it had 20-30s base duration maybe you could make a case... True, death immunity is not really needed, but that is like saying you don't need an OP build to win the game. Any build can beat anything with enough consumables, good tactics, etc. So how then do we define what makes one build more powerful than another? The speed that you can kill enemies while not dying? The fighter/chanter or wizard/chanter would be better in that regard. However, if faced with thousands of enemies with thousands of HP that dealt thousands of damage at range.... the paladin would still win while all other builds would lose... so I guess it is a "hypothetical" best build if facing unrealistic difficulty.
  22. I haven't tested it properly, but the tooltip remains at 4-7 no matter what your character level is. Hopefully it does scale and is just bugged but if not it's pretty terrible. Really hard to tell with testing because a lot of the tooltips are bugged and a lot of the power level scaling is also bugged. Welcome to Bugs of Eternity - Part 2. The new Scion of Flame ability seems pretty lack-luster... a measly +1 penetration for fire attacks. Most of the time, it will do absolutely nothing thanks to the new armor system having hard break-points. Still, I would take it with this build because why not. I wish it were just a +x% damage increase, though, like before.
  23. Hmm, I wonder if death godlike would be better. I don't think you can really stay at near death yourself for the +3 power levels because of the constant healing you get, whether you like it or not. I wish you could just turn off the healing part of lay on hands and just keep the "can't die" part. While the +20% damage when enemy is near death will trigger, I am still not convinced it will lower the total number of immolation ticks needed to kill an enemy; particularly when compared with just getting a straight up +2 power levels that applies all the time (thanks to lay on hands robust inspiration triggering wellspring of life permanently) I don't think fire godlike would work for the same reasons. You are not really near death or bloodied very much because of the constant healing. Also, I like the irony of a green plant-like godlike constantly on fire burning up and destroying the very nature it represents... maybe his/her way of snubbing the gods that cursed him with the ugly plant disfiguration.
  24. If the tooltip is correct, sacred immolation does seem pretty weak. If you add up all the ticks with high might, int, and power level, and factor in that it can hit multiple enemies at once, I think it is good. It is slow, but steady and since it ticks in the background, you can just keep spamming LoHs while it does it's work. I added a build earlier today for this. The neat thing is that you can just dump CON and RES since they don't do anything when Health is meaningless. Also don't need armor, and can freely disregard deflection. If not soloing, you can get everything in place by level 13 and have plenty of resources to make two characters immortal. Regarding the 6 phrases needed... that used to be an issue in POE1, but now you get starting phrases so you can cast that invocation at the very start of battle. Because it has such a long duration, there is plenty of time to get another 6 phrases in before recasting, even with a vanilla chanter. The main culprit is the chanter invocation... there are several ways to use this that effectively makes you immortal so getting rid of or changing all the other supporting abilities won't solve the problem. The funny thing is that there is a way weaker version of that invocation at the top ability tier (His heart did fill...) that grants a whopping 1 power source resource.... no duration, no other buffs. It is just strictly 100x worse and two levels higher making it level 19 for a single-class chanter and requires more phrases. I wasn't involved in the beta, but I think a lot of the core mechanics needed more time for balancing and reworking. Like power level scaling being applied inconsistently (in hidden ways), the lack of incentive to single class because most of the high tier abilities are worse (sometimes strictly worse) than lower tier ones, and some abilities being so clearly out-classed that there is no reason, even fringe ones, to ever take them. Because you give up "talents" to take more activated abilities, and the fact that abilities can be spammed over and over, and because activated ability effects don't stack with other similar ones, the best strategy is to just ignore most of the abilities and just take passive buffs instead. While you could simply pretend the OP abilities don't exist, that kind of takes away from the joy of trying to come up with the best min-max build. I think for a new "challenge mode", someone should make a party, or solo character, by rolling a twelve sided die twice (roll again on 12). If you roll doubles, you get a single class character. Then maybe some of the wonky multi-class combinations with funny names will actually get played.
  25. "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning..." The idea of this build is to have an immortal paladin that uses never-ending sacred immolation to slowly roast all enemies. It plays on the unlimited zeal theme that chanter's brilliance inspiration invocation provides, combined with the shield-bearers death immunity subclass perk. If soloing, you can multi-class to chanter and do the same thing (it doesn't need anything from the last two tiers), but the build doesn't come together until level 19 that way. if using a companion, the chanter and paladin can both be single class which allows the build to come together at level 13 instead of level 19. Before level 13, stay back with a gun and just play support with your aura and healing ability. Also wear heavy armor and anything with second chance or CON/HP bonuses to avoid getting one-shot from the minimized CON. At level 13, you can shed the armor as it will no longer be needed. Class: Shield-Bearer Paladin Race: Nature Godlike (Increased Power Level and INT for higher sacred immolation damage and longer lay-on-hands duration). Alternatively, something that helps resist afflictions is good. I think paladin has none for strength so coastal might be good to prevent getting stunned. Maybe there is a helmet that works good for this build? Not sure.) Armor: None. Damage mitigation doesn't matter at all in this build. I guess whatever you find that provides affliction resistance. Weapon: Weapon(s) that provides affliction resistance/immunity. I hear there is a sword that makes you immune to intellect afflictions - you don't want to be charmed, though maybe give that to the chanter since you can gain INT resistance with the Mental Fortress ability. Shields will give you a couple extra engagement if you have a full party to protect. Or just pick whatever is best for adding further affliction resistance or increasing the damage of sacred immolation. Str: 18 Con: 3 Dex: 19 Per: 15 Int: 20 Res: 3 Stat Thoughts: Resolve is not needed since any impactful afflictions (ones that can disable), you will counter with resistances and you will have sky high fort/will/reflex too so you won't get hit with afflictions too much to benefit from the duration reduction. Deflection is worthless since you will be immortal anyway. Likewise, Con is worthless due to immortality. You could increase CON and lower DEX or PER instead... which is certainly better before level 13, but the theme of this build is to not care about health so I dropped it. If you don't like dump stats, just move CON and RES up, and lower DEX and PER. Active Abilities: Greater Lay-on-Hands, Sacred Immolation, Exalted Focus (also sworn enemy with zeal refund, if you run out of passives to spend points on. Can also upgrade sacred immolation to heal allies, if going full party) Passives: All that provide defense or resistance against afflictions; with highest priority to resistance to down-grade the disabling ones. After that, you can buff fort/will/reflex... you should be able to get them all since you only need a couple active abilities and are single class. Also get anything that helps power level or resource regeneration. Flow of combat: Cast Lay on hands whenever the "can't die" ability duration is about the expire to ensure you and the chanter don't die. It only costs one zeal and you will get one zeal every 3 seconds. With high int and power level, lay on hands immortality should last over 10 seconds. This, along with affliction resistance, will ensure you and your sidekick will never die regardless of the amount of incoming damage. The concentration from lay on hands will ensure you never get interrupted too. Since you will have extra zeal beyond what is needed for lay on hands, you can apply sacred immolation to do the actual killing of enemies. The raw damage doesn't matter because you can't die.
×
×
  • Create New...