Esajin

So I've been doing some solo testing, and one particular fight has been giving me headaches, that be killing everyone in the Balefire Beacon in Dunnage with a single class fighter. The main problem is the Gouging Strike dot. After the first pack of Marauders, pirates and priests at the entrance is dead, my fighter simply stays in combat and dies slowly to the infinite dot. I think it means I should aggro the entire room and kill them as well, but if I get a bad roll on a Trial of Iron attempt, this simply won't do. I was wondering what options are viable in these situations, short of alt-F4, killing all of them in one go, or avoiding this particular fight. From the top of my head, there's Rust's stiletto with Shadowing Beyond, although I think the dot will keep me in combat. I'd also need a ton of +healing for Pale Light and Three Trolls Stiched to overheal the dot, far more than I can fathom. The dot is 5 damage per 3 seconds, whle pale light is 1 per 6 or something. Do antidotes work to clear Gouging Strike?

Think outside of your "summons are for tanking" box. A Beckoner's summons are for damage dealing, not tanking. And they're pretty good at it.

Other subclasses might be able to cast their summons more often, but that's because they need to. Here's more pics of my team of Beckoners in Pahowane. Level 9 against level 16, I don't remember. (Sorry for the poor image quality) I feel sorry for the people who can no longer enjoy the subclass after the nerf.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think out of combat regen kicks in after a set time without taking damage? This should favor faster attacls (eg: dual pistols, attack speed modal). 80 deflection is a bit low to reflect actual POTD deflection: enemies have between 90 and 110 on average at high level. This skews the analysis towards weapons that have low penetration and non-blunted crits. I'm pretty sure that's why you see crossbows and hunting bows so high. Side note, the highest armor figure I've seen on POTD is 18 slash on Eoten Dwellers in Nemnok's cave (at level 17, and they're 18 so it's their natural armor). Things like Flame Nagas or Elder Flame Bats have 14 base armor so your test is solid on that side. On a fun note, I've attempted to do this with melee weapons and the Magistrate Cudgel singlehanded always seemed to win this competition for me for some reason, with kills taking only a couple seconds at best. Then I remembered I was always 1 level higher than my followers

If you have gold issues, make sure you only sell in trading posts on islands, you get a 50% sale bonus instead of the, what, 10% discount at best in Neketaka

In the beginning vs fire immunes it looked something like this I'm no longer using base wurms/skellies though. I graduated to a healthy mix of various summons.

I see you're a man of taste Level 7, already at -5 with both Delver's Row and Principi... absolute power makes you do stupid things like attack first ask questions later

Honestly the way I munch through low level (supposedly hard) content with my party of 5 beckoners, if anything, tells me that these guys were busted before. Fun fact: if you kill Clario before he repairs your ship, you simply wait a week for the high tide.

I'm not completely sure this was the wrong stat to tweak. I mean, Beckoners will open all fights with a summon, right? So basically this was a nerf to all other active abilities, without actually nerfing them? I know it's semantics, I'm not familiar with Beckoners past the tutorial island and never played with one before.

That fight is really hard. There's a barrel of gunpowder that you can shoot on the south side, with an arquebus or a pistol, it should deal approximately 50-60 damage to half of the pack. It's recommended to do the fight with a party of three (eder and xoti). If all else fails, you can include a cipher mercenary just for this fight, get whispers of treasons, it helps a ton. Also, cinder bombs are awesome, you can get 3 from the vendor above the Kraken Inn, or buy 1 spice, 1 onyx, and go steal the blackpowder from the bedroom of the injured guy in Port Maje, that way you can craft three more cinder bombs. You're going to need them And finally, if all else fails, that fight is optional, you can stealth straight into the Arena. Once you complete the arena, they will have despawned. Good luck with that too

Thoughts on 1.1 version of Nemnok I loaded a save halfway into the dungeon, level 17 party of fighter, Serafen-Witch, fighter, fighter & ranger, I thought I'd be fine with just the AI like on live AHAHAHAHAHA I couldn't even make it to him, The Fire Nagas before them were bad enough, had disable the AI and up my game, but the Eoten Dweller horde with their Flame Bat pets along with the Acolyte son of a bitch shooting binding web three-pointers from downtown just so you can't run outside of the fireball spam radius. Eoten is Mighty, Eoten is Mighty, indeed, overpowering that will require some work. I feel schooled. Pre-1.1 that fight against the Eoten miniboss was "cool", now it's actually worthy of respect. Overall it's very much a high level zone. The weakest mobs were 18 in there. Observations: - It's balanced still. My party had a terrible composition, gear, and absolutely no optimization was done. The winning tactic is literally written on the mob pack tooltip, and I didn't bother reloading and checking if I had the adequate tools available. Still that's a hefty amount of raw power we now have to face later on. It's a good surprise. - Disengages don't work, at least for the Flame Nagas. You engage them, you autoattack them, they run away from your tank to go cast their finishing blow on your character far away, and even a fighter with guardian stance and the improved disengage attack talents will simply chase the mob, not doing anything. There's something bizarre happening here but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I should have stopped the autoattack, but would that count as me breaking the engagement or as the mob breaking it? And why don't we have an "engage" action, for that matter? Looks like mobs can choose what to engage at any time, but not us. - The buff/debuff tooltips have become so large and take so much of my screen at high level that I can no longer read most of them.

I knew I made the right choice to focus on Intimidate when I made that dragon run with its tail between its legs. Twice. I can't think of a single top-tier Intimidate check that didn't crack me up. Yeah, sometimes you get the avoidable fight, or you avoid a good one, but it's always been at least funny and in-character. It's like, the Watcher is really tired of everyone's bull**** and just wants to get to the end credits ASAP. I think the Indimidate check for Nemnok was something like an 18. And it was absolute badassery.

In-game search engine for merchants you've already visited. Type the name of an item, it tells you the name and location of the merchants selling it.

If you want to test the range on miss mechanics, I suggest summoning something like an Adra Ooze, they don't have engagement, but they have decent range. Run away as they launch their attack, and see if you riposte with a pike, with a dagger, with wotp... I know for 100% sure that riposte works on those "out of range" misses.

That's the thing, it's misleading, prone is not an interrupt. I meant to agree with you and merkmerk73, the Concentration/Interrupt system is obscure.

Prone is a 1.5 seconds paralyze with no debuff. a Push (for instance Clear Out) is a Prone effect with movement. "Interrupts" are very specific, when an interrupt hits you, you either lose 1 concentration or you lose 1 resource, end your casting animation and start a recovery. Knockdown is powerful because it's an interrupt *on Graze* that adds 1.5seconds to the recovery time. Clear Out is a Push that only interrupts on Hit, so the enemy doesn't lose their resource or recovery on graze, just 1.5s What I don't understand is information such as "0% immunity to Concentration attacks in a 2.5m radius". I think Chanters have an effect like this, prevent people from gaining Concentration.

...you mean Eder, right? (never post late at night)

There's a little display bug with Berath's Wrath in the debuff tooltip. I just hope this little sprite won't eat me alive like that soul collector, see attached screencap

Yup, good catch, brain fart on my part. It was a "best" case scenario in favor of Accuracy. Priests of Magran for instance don't have a lot of variety with the damage type of their spells. Accuracy is very good for them.

What I never understood was the long cast time. 3 seconds is looooooong. How fast is it, talented?

Okay I finally (finally!) fully cleared the Arena below solo before ending the first act. This was on a Single Class Unbroken, with 2 stealth. Here are my observations: - I had to upgrade the Gladiator's Blade to Exceptional AND use both the Sword and the Shattered Vengeance club to stand a chance. I also needed to use both a Medium shield and a Large Shield, both with the modal acive and inactive depending on the enemy and situation, and I had to stance dance between guardian/duelist/cleave to maximize my tanking and damage. I was lucky to find a Plate armor in a random loot sequence on the overworld map, and ended up using that the whole run. - I entered the Arena near the end of level 5 (started at level 4) and reached level 7 before meeting Serafen. I didn't know there was so much xp available. - Stance-Dancing between "The Wall" and actually evading attacks is really fun and saved me a LOT of health vs the Adra Ooze. - Choke points are invaluable, especially the little cell for the cristal spider encounter at the middle of the map. Get to the cell, activate the wall - Combat Speed is your friend, you need to go bind the keys in the Control menu. - Curse of Woedica seems to have been nerfed and no longer stacks with itself. No more ray of fire abuse - the Fight at the southwestern corner is insane, there are like a dozen mobs in there. Fortunately I had a pistol lying around. Shoot the gunpowder barrel and keep some distance. You won't get xp for 80% of the mobs there, but at least it will be down to 2 crystal spiderlings and a couple wurms. Far more manageable. After completing the Arena I realized I was stupid: my entire battleplan for the anomalies fight relied on the Blessing of Eothas + Fresh Fruit for +75% healing bonus, and I forgot to go get them. Oh well, I had to waste 3 Cinder Bombs on them. Instead of going straight to Neketaka I paid Meriel a visit and promptly dispatched her. She wasted all her healing reduction spells at the start of the fight, desperately trying to stop my constant recovery. She seemed to be completely unchanged from pre-1.1 Overall the Unbroken is a mighty fine tank right from the start, but I was a bit irked; all the monsters in the arena have 10 penetration, and even with my class bonus I could only reach... 10 armor.

Without taking into account that crits improve your overall PEN by 50%. Which is actually relevant for spells since they often have lower penetration with fewer ways to raise it. It's more than relevant for a number of things. The harder the content, the higher the enemy's armor. Very often you will find yourself in a situation where a poorly chosen spell will do 25% damage if it's a hit due to poor penetration, and full damage if it's a crit. So assuming 10 Might, a spell that does 40 base damage will do 10 damage on a hit and 50 damage on a crit. Now, at 50 accuracy vs 50 defense: 25% chance to do 0 damage (miss) 25% chance to do 5 damage (graze) 50% chance to do 10 damage (hit) Average damage: 6.25 At 70 accuracy vs 50 defense: 5% chance to do 0 damage (miss) 25% chance to do 5 damage (graze) 50% chance to do 10 damage (hit) 20% chance to do 50 damage (crit) Average damage: (25*5+50*10+20*50)/100 = 16.25 So the multiplicative damage buff from +20 accuracy in the best case scenario is +260%. (and now you know why the armor/penetration/crit system is flawed, basically accuracy is king, hit to crit is queen, and everything else is mushrooms)

One thing I noticed, not sure if that was the case in the previous build, but Mule Kick now replaces Knockdown on the action bar. You no longer have both actions available.

I finally completed the ruins solo on POTD with a character that's not a rogue. Sorcerer (Shifter/Transmuter): nevermind the classes/build, it was a proof of concept. I gave the boars a couple tries and said **** it, let's see if one can stealth through it without being a rogue. I discovered something interesting: with 2 Stealth (and Berath Skills, I don't remember if they add to stealth), I was able to get through everything but the last room. The last room has: 3 wisps, 2 anomalies, 1 greater anomaly and 1 adra ooze. The thing is, you can rush through from stealth and only the three anomalies will follow you. Turns out the Shifter part of this class can tank them long enough to throw 5 Cinder Bombs into them, long enough to get one hit on each (better safe than sorry), long enough to kill them all. So Port Maje completed on Potd solo on a non-rogue, non-chanter class. After killing the anomalies I was level 5, and I had to put my next level up in Stealth. Stealth 3 is required to escape the ruins from what I could tell, because the annoying wisps are still there. How did I get 5 Cinder Bombs, you ask? Well the injured dude in his house with his kid. Inside his bedroom, there's gunpowder! At the vendor on the top floor of the Kraken Inn, they sell spices and onyx. With that gunpowder, you can craft 3 more Cinder Bombs. This helps a ton, solo or in a party. So for my final attempt to solo the Engwithian Ruins properly I'll try with a Chanter or a Herald. Also there are barrels of gunpowder that you can shoot south of the panthers/wurms/Drake. I noticed they get hit for like 60-70 damage when you destroy them. It's not much, but it should help a lot. Another idea for inside the ruins, there is a room with a ton of barrels to the southwest. Maybe a specific tank build could aggro the entire floor, kite everyone to this room and somehow manage to detonate it all and survive. It might even be the optimum route, possibly with a ranger pet. The Adra ooze would still be a massive problem though. It's too slow to kite to the room, and it two-shots a level 4 with its ranged attack.

Here are those I can check in my save: Arquebus: Blightheart (from some swamp ruins in the swamp quest island) gives Blightshot, an ability that causes Weakened (-50% heal) Mace: Bardatto's Luxury (from the Bardatto bank I think) gives 5-10% chance to Sicken on hit Saber: Min's Fortune (from the Old City Ruins) gives a chance on crit to inflict a random affliction, so could be a Con one Flail: Skullcrusher: inflicts wounds on empower, could be a healing reduction wound Armor: Effigy's Husk: aura that reduces healing of enemies by 50% when wearer is bloodied, can be upgraded to inflict random afflictions on attacker when being critically hit ...aaaaand that's all I have. I might have missed a few