Esajin

So far my testing concludes that unlike Shod-in-faith and others, Ryona's defensive procs don't trigger outside of combat, melee or otherwise. In combat so far, I've seen it trigger on an enemy's Clear Out, which is an AOE spell.

I can do this all day Dual-wielding hatchets Autoattacking with a staff Autoattacking with a hunting bow ...and with a blunderbuss ...I do think it's bugged indeed. It's not a broken OP bug, just a plain, mundane bug. Edit: and just so you know, Two handed mastery, Savage Attack and the various Fighter focus, specializations and masteries are not bugged. I didn't test attack speed from Two weapons mastery, and I specifically left Soulbound weapon out of the study as I know nothing about their intended rules.

Yes and no. I've tested with Prestidigitator's Missiles, so it's not exactly 100% confirmed for everything, but at least it's a spell I was able to spam. - Confident Aim applies - One handed style applies if you're using a one-handed and no shield - One handed style applies if you're using a one-handed and a shield - the accuracy penalty from using a medium/large shield applies (I had 106 accuracy instead of 110 with all other setups) - the accuracy bonus from using a single weapon does not apply - flail graze-to-hit effect from flails does not apply - One handed style applies if you're using two fists - One handed style applies if you're using two one-handed weapons - One handed style applies if you're using a bow (non-soulbound) - One handed style applies if you're using a two-handed mace (non-soulbound) So I did the ultimate sacrifice and used Envenomed Strike with a non-soulbound two-hander (The Rose of Salthollow that has heal on damage dealt) I also reproduced the one handed style effect with the Rose, using normal melee attacks. I think it's safe to say that one handed style and confident aim apply all the time to everything these days. I haven't yet tested two-weapon style, two-handed style and the various modals.

The healing bonus from items like Fulvano's Amulet or Belt of Bountiful Healing or Maneha's Armor always gets multiplied after MIG bonus is calculated. So with a lot of Survival plus one of those items you can achieve such a high amount on bonus healing that - if you wear Shod-in-Fait and have high MIG - you're nearly unkillable as long as COnsecrated Ground is up. Tested it in the midst of Nalrend's bounty while doing nothing else than eating crits. Didn't go down - even from multiple Insect Plagues. But as soon as CG stopped, I was dead in seconds. Do you know if those healing bonuses stack multiplicatively or additively together and/or with the resting healing bonus?

That's what I'm running. Well, except for the savage attack. I no longer see Battle-Forged procs though, due to Ryona's Breastplate and generally speaking, too much passive healing going on everywhere, too often. Enemies generally start to ignore her when she has wounds, so I prefer spending them immediately on duplicates. So don't plan on using Ryona's Breastplate with such a monk, it's a bit counterproductive. But yeah, when they do show up, those 70-80 damage battleforge ticks are sure nice I still use the breastplate though, since my frontline (3 fighters and a monk) is apparently immortal anyway ever since I gave everyone Triggered Immunity. I took the Radiant spore down on my very first time there, with all the Vithraks against me and with my watcher confused at the start, without resting after clearing the previous level, and without knowing killing the spore would despawn the remaining tentacles. It doesn't get much more broken than that.

The thing I'm not certain about yet is whether confident aim works on spell proc attacks (the damaging parts of firebug or wicked briar) and whether one handed style works on spell proc additional effects (hobble, crit, prone...). My gut feeling says they both work, but I've yet to notice them on the combat log. One thing you could try is use a one-hander to push the hit into crit range through raw accuracy bonus (and Durgan Steel), then push the graze into hit range through one-handed style for a longer stun effect? I don't run a barbarian in my party so it's kind of hard for me to test that. Also, I'm getting ideas of a "prone yourself" riposte build. Drunken Monk-style.

I'm in the middle of a clearing of all the Ondrite Monk packs in WM2. I quickly figured out the best option for my party was to bruteforce them with my heavy melee party and simply let my ranged characters either wait it out in stealth or get knocked out. The cool thing is, when you don't need to design any tactic and the fights are long and guaranteed victories, you can easily discover or test mechanics by looking at combat logs. Here are my findings so far, most of these are most likely common knowledge by now, they were new to me though. - Preservation defense bonus from different sources stack! Here it's from Little Savior and Malina's Boots. The original penalty from being prone applies, though, so you get both the defense penalty from the status effects and +50 defense from each source. - Confident Aim applies to spell effects (here you see it apply to the Hobbled Effect from Wicked Briars cast by The Colored Coat at 50% endurance. - Spell proc effects use your spell accuracy, but One Handed Style graze-to-hit effect applies to spell procs. Here you see it apply to a Firebug cast by The Unlabored Blade. - When Ondrite Monks land a Hit on a force of anguish, they prone for 14.5s. Since the ability has a 10 seconds base duration, it means they have 19 intellect on POTD (upscaled). - Crits give a straight +25 Interrupt bonus. 30 interrupt becomes 55. It's unclear for me at this point how much of a penalty to interrupt a graze yields. Here are some things that I couldn't easily edit into proper screenshots from the combat log. You've got to take my word on this, or simply know it to be true already - Healing Chain cast by the Unlabored Blade with 18 might (+24% healing) is healing for 86.8 on a 40% rest healing bonus character (regardless of their Might), 99.2 on a 60% rest healing bonus character (regardless of their Might). Since the base healing is 50 per jump, we deduce that Might bonus from the caster and Healing bonus from the receiver are applied multiplicatively (50*1.24*1.4 = 86.8 and 50*1.24*1.6 = 99.2). Also of note, the chain is not "smart", it will definitely bounce to the closest character that's not at full stamina, and ignore everyone else. - Ondrite Dudes aren't killing your Stormcaller Ranger - she's most likely killing herself. Check your combat log. Monks have high defenses and reflect ranged attacks on misses. With Twinned Arrows, Driving Flight and chance to cast Returning Storm, you're very likely to miss one monk with any one effect, and then shoot yourself in the foot (both literally and figuratively). What other nice things did you guys find from exploring the Combat log?

Update: I went back at level 16, after oneshotting the Radiant Spore. I took extra precautions to not trigger any bug, followed some of the advices in here. The soldiers and druids were still overly deflective, at 140ish deflection/reflexes, but at least they were at a manageable level. Long story short, they went down easy. I assaulted from one side, killed a priest keeping the rest away with the help of summons and confusion scrolls, charged one of my fighters into their backline, quickly soloed the two remaining priests, had him tank a few soldiers then used dimensional shift on his Unlaboured Blade to switch with my Monk when his Triggered immunity ran out. The monk then tanked the soldiers while the party finished the rest of the pack. Triggered Immunity is truly as insane as you guys said it was. With seven of those per encounter throughout my party, I feel completely invulnerable at this point.

In my experience the charm effect will end on any periodic AOE effect, and also whenever there's a disengagement attack, which happens a lot with mobs who have longer engagement than weapon range and many engagement slots (eg: Magran's Faithful Soldiers). You charm one, it walks into range to attack the other, gets hit by a disengagement attack, charm is broken. I 100% concur on the fast cast. It's not exactly fast.

Sure you can drop con, but why would you. Funnily enough, Constitution can be seen as an offensive stat on a fighter, as it allows you to use 10% more offensive gear/talents/abilities per point of Con (instead of, say, deflection, defenses, healing or dr), which may or may not be better than points in other stats depending on your approach. Honestly part of me is starting to think that a flat 13 base in every attribute may be very well be pretty damn close to optimal for a fighter.

Well, I work in software development and trust me, even with the best of intentions, the best tooling there is, even with a team of seasoned rockstar vets, there's always a fixed bug crawling back to life every now and then. There's a reason they're called "bugs". They're like ****roaches. You put them on rockets and send them in deep space, some of them will eventually crash on a comet, one of the comets will eventually cross back into the solar gravity field, melt down into the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, only to be picked up by the solar winds and carried back home. See that shooting star in the sky? That's your deflection stacking bug coming back to say hi. edit: oh and by the way, we meet again, profanity filter bug from 1998. Good to see you're still in shape. How was your trip in deep space?

Oh by the way, I just stumbled upon this bug report https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85882-skaen-temple-guards-nigh-unkillable/ Basically, any mob with weapon and shield focus will have their deflection and reflexes boosted each time there's a save/load cycle in the zone. Which is probably why OP and I have difficulties dealing with impervious soldiers and godlike druids and consider the barb and priests as easy fodder, while other people can deal with them with a relatively straightforward plan on their first or second try, but see priests as the most dangerous of the pack.

I just had this bug happen to me... twice. I do have three fighters who just dinged level 15, and specced them all in Triggered Immunity. One fighter got the bug during a fight vs 3 adragans and a few beetles, another got it after the Sky Dragon fight. All within a few minutes of each other. I reloaded the save from when I levelled up, specced the two fighters with triggered immunity, walked west to the temple of hylea and recklessly charged the Adragans from before (the ones in front of the passage to the sky dragon) with only my three fighters, monitoring their damage taken stat. One of them suddenly became -Infinity. So it's semi-reproductible this way. Save file (from before the bug): https://www.dropbox.com/s/3vfewgt6mj758bb/97d0683b1c7e40ef82b64784381f55ce%2032420309%20Northweald.savegame?dl=0 Output log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/05q5imjo4rjq0x9/output_log_bug_infinity.txt?dl=0

Right now I feel it would be less cheesy for me to split pull than to respec or change the party composition to allow, say, Aloth, Durance and GM in and follow the great advice in this thread. But of course, having just dinged 15 this morning, that might change. I haven't yet got a taste of all those new skills. If they're half as good as half of you guys say they are, I'd be half as thankful as I'd like to be.

There's also the Celebrant's Gloves, which does the same thing for your entire party when being hit. It used to be bugged though and would also buff the enemies, ruining your interrupts. I don't think I tried them since the last patch, maybe someone can confirm.

Yeah my question was about a party without any sort of spellcasters, hence the scrolls. I've since revised my "kill-kiss-marry" strat, since they have such high defenses on POTD upscaled. Soldier's weakness is Will and possibly Fortitude, as they have only 113 and 127 respectively (147 vs prone/stun) and are otherwise walking fortresses of doom thanks to their talented weapon & shield (165 deflection and reflexes, even when paralyzed they're hard to graze for your run-of-the-mill 100 base accuracy character without further buffs) Druid's weakness is Fortitude and Deflection, as they have only 121/127 (reflexes and will are in the 140's). Priest's weakness is Melee, as they are using arquebuses and have only 90ish deflection and 120ish fortitude Barbarian boss's weakness is Ranged, as he has only 90ish deflection and deals a heavy raw damage retaliate melee attack Charm (as in Enigma's Charm) won't work with the Soldiers, at least single target charms, because the Soldiers have Overbearing Guard and pretty much an unlimited engagement limit and far longer engagement range than their own weapon range... so charmed soldiers will have to walk to melee other soldiers and will instantly get hit/grazed/proned by the guard, ending the Charm effect half a second after it lands, for an effective 1sec CC with a 3sec cast time. The druids have 140ish will, so Charming them isn't an option either.. I think I need to Dominate/Confuse the Soldiers while my melee damage dealers charge and kill the Priests (possibly using Ottffsse's backdoor monk tactic), and hope that the druids will kill the soldiers for me with their instagibbing firebugs. Afterwards it's paralyze spam to finish the druids. Or maybe charming/dominating the priests can work, hopefully they won't nuke themselves in the foot and will boon/crown/devotion me instead. They only have 123 base will, after all. I'll be back at 16 I think. 14 is clearly too low for my party on the upscaled POTD version. I've seen someone kite and kill them all with persistence on a paladin on triple crown solo; I'm not sure that's even possible with the upscale (again, 165 deflection...) but having a rogue split the pack and go invisible may be an option, especially if you can have a summon tank the alpha strike.

Any tips for speeding up the Soldiers? When upscaled they're kinda hard to tank, they have confident aim, sundering blows, 161 deflection, 165 reflexes (probably due to weapon and shield talent), 127 fortitude, +20 vs stun/prone. They also daze you forever and their overbearing guard kinda prevents you from using their friends against them since they instantly engage and prone each other for half a second back to reason. In your opinion, is Confuse spam while the stormcaller ranger grazes them the only option for a group without a caster (no wizard/priest/chanter/cipher/paladin/druid)? The best I could do without confuse scrolls was to kill two of them before running out of health and revive scrolls lol

Did you upscale WM2 on POTD? If so without a dedicated tank to soak their alpha strike, you might be in a world of pain. I'm also experimenting with them these days. Right now my current strat is "kill kiss marry": Kill the priests (kill them), kiss the soldiers (tank them), marry the druids (dominate them). I tried a couple tanking techniques for the sunlances and arquebus opener, going solo with my level 14 fighter main. One useful thing that I noticed is, Frenzy and Outlander's Frenzy seem to prevent from taking Endurance damage for its duration, but the damage is still taken as Health. Work your Burning DR as high as possible on your highest "HEALTH" character, give it the Frenzy on being crit and he should be fine for the first few seconds, giving you time to run in and land a few buffs, debuffs and dominates/paralyzes/CC. With outlander's frenzy and the frenzy plate, along with the 40% health over time talent and a few DR potions & beers, my fighter was able to solo tank all of them for about a minute before running out of his 2000 hp. Both their priests died to their own AOE in the process, haha. It was faaaar from optimized (deflection tanking would probably be better), but it's a good start. If all you want is kill them, you might be able to do that through an exploit (I did). Give a rogue the cloak with invisibility on being hit, and hope the bug triggers and the invisibility never runs out. You're then free to murder each and every one of them. Be careful with their boss, he deals raw damage as a melee retaliate. Kill him with ranged attacks.

Haha, that's so unfair, upscaled Magrans Faithful are stupidly strong :D I actually got them on my first try by accident, but reloaded the save because it was an obvious exploit of an obvious bug. Now I'm scared to even attempt them again, they nuked my entire party so hard, only the rogue survived due to the permanent invisibility bug. It then took a looooong time to murder them one by one (those druids took FOREVER), and at the end of it all, I realized they didn't even count as "human" for the Nightshroud soulbound upgrade. Talk about nasties. Anyway regarding your last remark, if I can flank within the first five seconds on every fight I must be doing something right

There's no such thing as a "taking up a valuable melee dps spot". I'm playing a party with five melee and a ranged ranger, so a total of 6 able melee bodies. I never run "out of room" because when I do, it's because I'm playing badly. So I always have room to maneuver and opportunities to flank, by choice, much like ranged-heavy parties never have room to maneuver, because they will almost always favor fighting in chokepoints. Flanking is great because it's a debuff you don't need to cast, it just comes naturally while you're doing your thing. You're actually gimping your party when you don't flank imho, because you have to spend valuable resting resources and damage uptime casting buffs and landing debuffs on every mob just to be able to crit or sneak attack. People who say they can't flank or it's not worth it obviously never tried to make it work, and never realized how much power they could have by using different sorts of tactics. Now regarding using the pet to flank, it's generally suboptimal at the start of the fight. Pets aren't exactly useful while they're waiting for a flanking opportunity. You should use a couple speedy hybrid ranged/melee characters in your back line, using high burst ranged weapons at the start of the fight, deploy your front line, figure out how the enemy is maneuvering and flank accordingly while your guns reload. Just like in Blood Bowl, if you know the board game, the same tactics apply. Pets are better used as part of the front line if you're going for the flanking gameplay. With that in mind, you don't really need to invest more than the base scaling DR on the pet. Their base damage is good enough, doubling it is obviously better but does not bring you enough benefits due to their slow attack rate and lack of versatility. I'd much, much rather use the passive slot on the Ranger himself. Playing ranged, I took Resilient Companion (26 DR at level 14 isn't too shabby for a Bear), Interrupting blows, all the Accuracy bonuses I could get, since I don't have a priest and those fortitude & concentration checks aren't gonna win themselves, and Enigma's Charm, because everyone in the party took it and six of those per fight is ridiculous. If I were to play melee, I'd probably do the same (damage & utility) and simply go for a hybrid approach. I see no reason to wear heavy armor or defensive talent on my flanking rogue and even use Escape offensively nowadays, I don't think I'd need any of those either on a flanking ranger either.

I don't have a save available and the log is a bit bountiful since I didn't quit the game right away (promptly won the fight, quicksaved over it, and went on with my business), and I'm not sure this is a bug at all and more like a gameplay question. If you can't see well on the screenshot: Greater Earth Elemental engages Character Greater Earth Elemental activates Teleport Through Earth Accuracy: 103 - Will: 73 =30. Roll: 63 + 30 = 93 (Miss) Character (Enigma's Charm) misses Greater Earth Elemental I was surprised to notice that since I took the hit for granted during the fight. Did I miss because of the Teleport?

I'm not sure, since I always upscale everything. Here are some upscaled potd WM2 stats, so someone who doesn't upscale can post the original ones: Magran's Faithful Priest of Magran: Deflection 91 Fortitude 135 Reflexes 119 Will 123 DR 7 Magran's Faithful Druid Deflection 127 Fortitude 121 Reflexes 141 Will 143 DR 10 (also has a permanent 10 hp regen every 3 seconds) Roedwith Deflection 98 Fortitude 147 Reflexes 119 Will 127 DR 11 (Unbending, Savage Defiance) Magran's Faithful Soldier Deflection 137 Fortitude 127 Reflexes 141 Will 113 DR 16 (Unbroken) One thing of note, the screen clearly shows Unbroken heal the Soldier for 136, while the combat log says Unbroken heals for 100, so I suspect a +36% bonus, so a Might of 22. I'm pretty sure Upscaling has an effect on HP and monster base attributes too, so if someone can check if the discrepancy between Unbroken on screen and Unbroken on the combat log is a constant, we might have a clue here. I didn't record/screenshot Nalrend, sorry.

I'm actually playing a wand-using fighter. It's more like a caster-slash-backup-tank than a pure wand user. Max Int and Per, do whatever you want with the rest. Gyrd Háewanes Sténes, the soulbound wand, is better than Curoc's Brand in most cases once you enter the realm of high DR everywhere. It comes with Accuracy 4 and deals Raw Damage, so that's a steady killer together with your high natural accuracy from your class, PER and abilities. You get it by doing A Call To Court in act 2. You don't need to bind it to your fighter, since you get no benefit from the soul bind. But Curoc's Brand is really nice too. Wands are weak in general though, especially on a fighter, but they're relatively fast and you'll be using your fighter for high impact CC anyway most of the time. One thing of note, of all the Fighter's abilities, only Knockdown is melee-only. Everything else is actually a spell that ignores the weapon type, accuracy bonus on your weapon or your weapon damage, but things such as Disciplined Barrage applies to scrolls and spells. You're going to switch weapons often depending on your role, too. My casterfighter (also the only caster in the party) currently uses: - Puitènte med Príncipi: high accuracy, graze to hit and crits to prone, good as an opener for quickly toggling Disciplined Barrage on (Disciplined Barrage requires a target to activate) - Bittercut & Scâth Gwannek (medium shield): Lets you cast a very long range Winter Winds, Infestation of Maggots, Vile thorns and Knockdown - Gloves that lets you cast some heals, just in case - Sun-Touched Mail of Hyran Rath that lets you cast Sunbeam - Boots that lets you cast Jolting Touch - Whatever else I like on other slots (more sunbeams, dominates, charms, whatever. I usually put on additional defenses to help with the tanking) She also has The Grey Sleeper on a third weapon slot, because why not. Since she's also the only caster in the party, she has deep pockets and 12 Lore. Her Int is currently 25. Winter Winds spans the entire screen and more. This setup lets her connect the large majority of her spells, even against really high defenses (130+) I haven't tested Sundering Blow on her yet, since double-charge and double-into the fray are such sweet bursts.

I see. I was under the impression that interrupts also worked on the recovery time between the last melee attack and the fast cast too, delaying pretty much everything.

Re: "RES: 8 --> we don't have to cast much" What am I missing here? Don't Interrupts affect melee and pretty much all of the monks' abilities?