Esajin

All this talk about the Fighter makes me realize I'm probably an expert in singleclass Fighters pre-1.1, as my party featured three (!) of those by the endgame. I've refrained from talking too much about it because I didn't optimize the three builds I ran for beyond RP aspects, but eh, I still got to test the pros and cons of every ability, and there are a lot of misconceptions. single-class Fighters are only ever superior damage dealers when they use a single one-handed weapon against enemies that the rest of your party can't reach because they suck. In other words, at the early game, when you fight higher level enemies with crazy defenses and you still don't have a good arsenal. Remember that time when Tekehu was dominating your run with foe-only chill fogs and Blizzards? Yeah. That's when a single-class Fighter dealt more effective damage, when each of their weapon swings dealt 30-40 damage every 3 seconds like a metronome, whereas the rest of your group takes bets on their supposedly stronger shots. It's not flashy, but it gets the job done. Every fight, you're the main tank, and you deal higher total damage than everyone else, and you require less micromanagement. So by the time I got to level 10 or something, when the game became too easy and my Fighter's damage dealing services were no longer really effective because of the burst the rest of my party could do, I filled my rank with two more custom fighters, and experimented with other abilities. Here's what I found: - Power Strike is not a damage dealer. I'm sure you guys noticed, it's crowd control. What matters is the Staggered debuff that you apply on pretty much everyone, and the Stun on the primary target. You use that, then you can move everyone around as you see fit, no disengage attacks. The main problem is that it costs too much, and the impact on the battlefield isn't worth the cost. It would be fine at 3. - Clear Out's AOE is too small, and it doesn't benefit from Intellect (AOE is the same on both low and high Intellect fighters). You can generally only hit one target with that. It's not usable as it stands. - Clean Sweep is too high level. It's what Clear Out should have been. Basically you spend two ability points to get a working version of an ability you should have had access to 8 levels ago. - Clear the Path is great. Don't touch it. - Inspired Discipline, as it stands, it's a powerful self-cleansing spell, clearing all afflictions and granting you a level of resistance to all future ones. Costs too much and gives too little. When you get it, you have like 10 discipline, It's like minor Avatar for the priest, except using it costs you all your level 4, 5 and 6 spell points on top of the level 7 you just spent. The terrible part is that's it's merely a sidegrade to your other two sources of inspirations. At the very least, for this cost, durations from existing selfbuffs (eg: Acute or Intuitive) should stack, so you don't have to recast your Barrage. - All Empower passives: the only one that's worth looking at is Empower Duration. It's all complete garbage. That's fine though, Empower is always used on the Fighter for more of those really expensive abilities. Consider this though, Empower a Universalist and he gets to cast 14 more spells. Empower a Fighter and he gets to cast two. - Unbreakable/Unrelenting: Actually useful because of the discipline regen. haha. - Critical Defense: Critical Defense is counterproductive and will make your fighter worse, believe it or not. - Toughened Fury: Frankly, should be a level 1 passive for all Fighters. The chance is never specified, but it's roughly 10% on being crit. This passive ability, by itself, defines the Fighter, the way they tank, and the way they deal damage. Seeing it baseline at level 1 should tell the newbie that "hey, maybe wearing a shield might not be the best of ideas". - Sundering Blow: best attack in class. Nothing to see here, move along, get it and use it, it's good. The damage is crap, but it's a good tool to have. - Take the Hit: Should have been a modal. Right now it's 10 seconds buff that's buffed by 5% of your power level *beyond 9* and your intellect. It also costs 2 discipline, which is mind boggling. Empowering it makes it last for 17 seconds on my fighter with 17 intellect. And you have a cast time of 1 second, and a short AOE. It just doesn't work. Even if the effect itself is powerful, it's just not reliable enough to justify spending *any* discipline on this buff in battle. - Vigorous Defenses: counterproductive pre-1.1, didn't test it after. See Unbending and Toughened Fury. Refreshing Defense upgrade is rumoured to not work, I can't confirm. My fighter that had it simply never needed it. Into the Fray upgrades are better. - Into the Fray: best single target burst for the Fighter at high level, that's saying a lot. Before you ask, it doesn't have any reload/cooldown. The penetration upgrade applies to itself and the next attack. With moderate stats you're going to hit for 30 something, and crit for 50 something. But you can cast 5 of those in a row if you want, it's instant and no recovery. On a blackjacket you can open with Into the Fray accuracy buff shoot shoot into the fray shoot shoot into the fray shoot shoot into the fray shoot shoot into the fray. That's what I call blowing your load akimbo. It's of course completely useless to dump all your discipline on that, but you'll get bonus for artistic impression. There are advanced fightering techniques involving poking your own teammate with dual dagger on parrying mode to give them discipline, but I never really got to that kind of advanced teambuilding and groupie management. At the end of the day, Fighter single class was, believe it or not, more fun in PoE 1 because you had limited uses per encounter instead of a discipline pool. I no longer use into the fray because I use Inspired Discipline instead. I no longer Clear Out because I Charge. I no longer knock down because of Unbending Trunk, etc. In my opinion the class needs a complete rework, maybe make it use per-level abilities like a spellcaster instead of a global pool. The cool thing about Fighters in PoE1 was all the positioning shenanigans, you were the king of pushing, pulling, dazing, positioning, you decided who had engagement with whom, and who did not. Who was standing and who was down. Right now it's not about the numbers, as long as they nerf Unbending I'll be a happy camper, it's just there's something in the gameplay that was lost in translation from PoE 1 to PoE 2, and I'm afraid that when people say the Fighter is "bad now", they're not entirely wrong... I mean, charge spam/cleave is dead now, and with it the damage dealing nuker has nothing in the fighter class beyond utility and hit to crit. They're just sort of missing the mark by a mile. IMHO. I'm at the stage where I'm not even sure reducing the discipline cost of Power/Inspired Strike to 2 or the cost of Into the Fray/Sundering Blow to 1 will even help there. I think the "all your eggs in one discipline pool" is the main offender, because you compare your abilities against each other instead of combining them. Right now it's better to use 4 penetrating strikes than 1 Power Strike. It just doesn't fit the same "be proactive and commit" mindset of Rogues and Barbarian. Even rangers, another reactive class like the fighter, has a lot more versatility, because their abilities don't really compete against each other (that and they're far cheaper). I didn't play enough with a Paladin to be able to comment on them. So what needs to be done for Fighters, if a rework of their resource system is out of the question? Here are my suggestions: - nerf Unbending to 25% (done!) - rework Unbending Trunk to give "+1 armor per heal in progress" instead of +33% - rework Unbending Shield to give "static +1 armor and periodic concentration to teammates in the aoe". No one cares about resolve, because... - make Toughened Fury a level 1 passive. - rework Take the Hit as a free modal on demand. Somehow. - give Clear Out the same range as Clean Sweep - rework Clean Sweep as a primary attack that no longer pushes enemies so you can spam it if you choose. - make Inspired Discipline refresh the duration of higher rank inspirations - gain +1 engagement temporarily (like 5 seconds) and use it to immediately engage whatever you hit with Into the Fray - rework Refreshing Defenses: now no longer buffs Deflection but instead gives 25% crit damage reduction There you go, you now have a Constitution class.

Okay, now picture this little change: the guy with the boars, make him recruitable as a Shapeshifter sidekick with proper dialogue choice. Are the Engwithian Ruins now balanced, or should they adjust something else? Assuming his first skill pick is Charm Beast, of course.

I didn't solo on my fighter back when I was level 9 or level 13, so I can't comment on that. I am soloing on 1.1 at the moment and even with Mirror Image up on my Black Jacket/Trickster (some sort of stupid riposte build with long range pikes, just testing please ignore), and I get hit/crit all the time whenever enemies have engagement. I didn't think about those per-rest bonuses to boost my deflection. I'll look them up, thanks.

Oh, the build is simple: Pick the Fighter class At level 9, pick Unbending, you're now very hard to kill for 20 seconds on demand At level 13, pick Unbending Trunk, you're now immortal for 25 seconds At level 16, pick Toughened Discipline and stop using deflection/resolve gear do whatever you want with all other details. I think you need about 15 might with gear and buffs for it to work properly, and Int is probably another stat you want for the duration.

If you ask me out of all Fighter abilities, which one was degenerate pre-1.1, I'd have said "Unbending Trunk" without a single second of hesitation. It's just a degenerate ability that turned you into an unkillable enemy, the kind that solos the Elder Fampyr Crypt with nothing but the AI and no pausing and no consumables. Unbending Trunk was stupidly strong. See all those defenses and damage reduction abilities and shields that you were investing in and using? I didn't need any of that. I didn't need engagement because I was the lowest deflection target on the battlefield so enemies charged me instead. I actually wanted enemies to crit my fighter so I could regen discipline and self-fuel my invulnerability. I was simply healing myself back to full every second, passively, and triggering all "on being crit" procs that I could find.

The number of skulls doesn't matter, boars are merely bodies. They have a slow attack speed, a slow attack animation, a slow movement speed and they don't have engagement, so they can be evaded and kited around. Also give Eder Xoti's chain mail, boars do pierce damage and these guys overpenetrate his saint scale armor. He can now tank 30% better

I don't know of any Legendary armor you can buy at level 7 apart from the Devil of Caroc's, and it's not in the game if she survived Poe1.

To my knowledge there are 3 cinder bombs, 5 stun grenades and a couple sparkcrackers in the starting island. Afterwards there are about 30 explosives you can find, and as far as I could tell there was about 30 gunpowders total, but I could have missed some. Cinders use 1 gunpowder for 3 bombs, grenades use 1 for 2. To give you concrete examples, most encounters are "simplified" with 1 Cinder Bomb. The Giant Cave Grub required me to throw 3 cinders and 2 grenades to solo it. Arkemyr can be killed with a couple concussions, but the golems tend to pull you into the crazy explosion radius as well, leading to a very quick fight

Well, there is a speedrun on youtube on potd / expert mode in about 26 minutes. You know what I mean

Well I've been soloing on a swashbuckler (Black Jacket/Trickster). Not the best character for the job by any means, but it got me to progress... slowly. After defeating the boars and wyrms, because my character could, I had to stealth through pretty much everything else in the Engwithian ruins, because my character couldn't This let me reach Neketaka and the various vendors though. Then I realized I had picked the wrong POE1 story so no Legendary armor for me, and I had no idea what to get instead. So bought nothing, came back at level 7 and attempted to do the Xaurip island. Nope. I could kill *one* of them, at a time, with effort. Still managed to recruit the Xaurip mother on board. Came back to the Engwithian ruins, managed to clear the Foreman's quarter of its Bugs and Brine Imps and get the medaillon. After a ton of resets/retries, I managed to kill one skellington fighter in the training hall. It dawned on me that my higher level wasn't cutting it, I just needed better gear, as my plain warhammer was the only weapon able to give me 100% penetration. So I went back to Port Maje and bought Shattered Vengeance, the most incredible weapon ever, with +13 accuracy and 9 crush penetration. They were no longer a threat. One thing I noticed was that the skeleton warriors were using swords, with 10/10 slash/pierce penetration. Check your tank's armor, if it's a chainmail (like Xoti's), he's good. If it's Eder's Saint's War Armor, he's going to get overpenetrated by pierce on every hit. You don't want that. I get the feeling that the planning required to beat a triple crown solo is going to involve some teamwork from the community.

It's doable. You have to figure out a strategy that works, though. It may take a few attempts. You have to look at what is killing you quickly and find a strategy to either minimize that or that takes it out of the equation asap. As for the thugs, you can sneak by if you can figure out how to get in at the bottom SE corner of the map and not the top. If you can only come in at the top of the map, there will be blood. Joe There is no taking anything out. The best case scenario is pulling only 2 boars and 1 young boar - that alone is going to wipe anything the story companions can do. Their stats are too high to land anything meaningful. If you manage to somehow deal with those, you still have huge packs of wyrms and panthers that will swarm you, and the lack of accuracy will guarantee spells/attacks/abilities don't really do much of anything A working strat is to pull the wurms from the stairs (ladder side, there's a wall you can use for line of sight as well) and use them to block the boars while you throw a cinder bomb in the pack. Once the wurms are dead you can evade the boar attacks by backing away at the last moment, they don't have disengagement attacks.

Basically after the first combat today I noticed that my accuracy became way off. Essentially the path of the damned enemy bonuses are applied to my party, negating the difficulty increase of POTD. I didn't see it in the known bugs list, but here goes: +15 to all defenses (Path of the damned) +15 accuracy (Path of the Damned) link to save game: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IptlvbmnCAmDNMT3z_CaYqmulPifjr_9 Entering a new zone fixes it.

You pretty much need to disable the AI and micromanage everyone, yes. It's part of the charm, I'd say

Not really; you have plenty of situational level 1,2 and 3 melee-like spells to cast the rest of the time (hold, pillar of faith, holy power, consecrated ground...), and you gear your priest as a melee tank otherwise, so you're never idling around in the back, reloading an arquebus and whatnot, rather in the middle of the pack, taking grazes and dishing small tastes of Eothas' benevolence with your flail. As a side note, just embrace the resting system. The limiting factor in this game should always be your party's health status, not their remaining per rest abilities. You have access to far more per rest abilities than you can use anyway. If all else fails just use a couple of the scrolls and potions that are currently piling up in your stash, and be done with it. That's true with any type of party. If your party is weak, you'll end up with people at low health every fight or every other fight. If your party is adequate, you'll be at low health once per zone. If your party is good, you'll never have anyone at low health, ever, you'll just be autoattacking everything anyway, and you'll be resting just so you can pick up the camping supplies that are left untouched in those blue boxes.

The "problem" with Storm of Holy Fire is that burn DR gets applied on every tick, unlike Shining Beacon where it gets applied just once at the beginning. So in the end it's not that clear-cut: it's great (and clearly the best) against low DR (10ish), but against high burn DR (20+), Shining Beacon is just far, far stronger.

That's completely off-topic at this point, but actually it's not entirely true In short, from level 7 on, Priest damage spells deal the highest base damage spell in the game - for the level - by a large margin (Shining Beacon, 80), that damage gets multiplied by both might bonus, intellect duration bonus and intellect range bonus to hit more targets per cast. And burn DR only gets applied once to the dot. You do the maths, your spell will oneshot entire enemy parties. At this point your companions are only there to gasp in awe, like extras begging your magnificence to get a day in the limelight once they have access to their own party busters, much later on. But unfortunately for them, they can't catch up to the Saiyan Priest. Granted, they have great abilities (Disintegration and whatnot) that can match or even beat the Priest's level 7 damage in various ways, but the Priest also did some training of his own, as he gets Cleansing Flame that triples Shining Beacon's damage, and Minor Avatar, that's like Super Saiyan Level 2, with its unique +8 Intellect bonus that applies only to the caster. You'll be looking for worthy enemies all game long. I solved that conundrum by not picking a priest at all (nor any caster whatsoever, nor even a buffer or summoner) in my melee heavy party.

Because it's about making a melee heavy team, not a party of casters? Good point I really meant "in general". Everyone talks about priest buffs and debuffs, no one really talks about their large damage potential. With that said, the "saiyan priest" style requires you to be already in melee range to work, simply due to the really short range on Priest offensive spells. You need to be literally inside enemy lines to maximize your AOE. I play mine as a tank that mostly melees stuff, and can turn into Goku on a whim to solo a fight that's somehow going south. Which makes it kinda sorta relevant?

Not to mention that you can also build your priest as a super saiyan that shoots large area ~300 damage spirit bombs shining beacons around. This trivializes a lot of fights. I'm surprised this isn't part of the discussion, to be honest. Am I the only one who ever built a tanky damage dealing priest?

I have up to 6 melee characters in my current party (one of them is a Ranger, so the bear pet counts as melee). I can tell you about melee heavy party, the better option is generally to tank several enemies at the same time with multiple characters. It has the great benefit of spreading the incoming damage across multiple toons, multiplying the effect of AOE heal effects and preventing enemy flanks. Also since your characters no longer take lethal doses of damage, you can entirely forget about deflection scores and forget about shields. The approach is to have everyone solo their target, then the first one who's done should come and assist their teammates to finish the fight. You generally ignore all the pre-fight stuff such as pulling, chokepoints or splitting enemy groups, you just blindly charge into enemy packs and make it work as you go. Strive on chaos.

Aren't Celebrant's Gloves bugged and also affect the enemy, preventing you from interrupting them? As soon as I saw this happen to me (against Ogre druids), I stopped using them. I'm not sure if it was before or after 3.02 though.

That's my setup. Except I don't use a shield nor armored grace, but that's irrelevant. Fighter wielding the Unlabored Blade and nothing else, 121 base accuracy, and I'm not even trying to keep it high. Firebug bounces up to 8 times by the way, and it can (and will) go back and forth between the two closest until they both die. I could raise the attack rate through the roof, but my party's already too powerful to my taste.

Yeah I was thinking the same. Well of course, it's based on my anecdotal experience, for me the only really important defense to check was Fortitude (I'm running a party with a ton of prone effects). I almost never use Will and rarely Reflexes attacks, and whenever I felt the need to check on these resists, they always appeared to be higher than their deflection. I'm pretty sure Crowns of the Faithful was the culprit now that I think about it, as it gave them Ondrites +25 deflection and +62 will.

I like the look and feel of the weapon, but I'm not feeling "it" as any sort of decent tool in a fighter's arsenal, especially when compared to the Grey Sleeper, Abydon's Hammer or The Unlabored Blade. Will defenses are generally higher than deflection anyway. Right now I'm pondering giving it to my Stormcaller Ranger, so she can at least hold her own in melee without dying right away whenever something is giving her funny looks, but it would be gimmicky as hell. So instead it lies in my stash, unbound and unblooded. Likewise, I don't really see it as a working tool for a rogue or monk apart from the invulnerability to fear/terror, since chance on kill isn't exactly practical and fists are so much better most of the time. I don't run with other classes. I'm looking at the boards, and the weapon keeps popping up. How are you using it?

The only partial workaround that I found was to reload an autosave from before I entered the zone on my last attempt. This brought the deflections back into the 140 range which was still manageable for me.

How about barbs of condemnation, divine mark, cleansing flame (targetted dot), hand of weal and woe (target + line aoe), pillar of faith (aoe but needs a direct target)?