Kazuma

So, to summarize, you might be able to achieve dps parity (non-Bash vs Bash) on trash with relatively low deflection and DR. But in tough encounters (moreso in PotD I would assume) you're better off with going with a non-bash shield, having higher deflection, sacrifice an indeterminate number of ripostes, and ultimately have a more consistent dps rather than a slightly higher alpha strike. Did I misunderstand anything? Might be interesting to get some video of rogue solo fights illustrating the difference. Of course time trials would only make sense if you had many datapoints due to RNG.

Lol, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that Godansthunyr is good/bad for riposte. Just what I had down for my build for the devil. I think it was probably Boeroer's suggestion from my earlier thread. I was mostly looking at it as an extra disable. Though I do have riposte in my build. Not sure if there's something better to take or not. I think I just stuck it in there because of the buff it got in 3.03. /shrug. Personally I'm not that worried about it because my rogue is pretty much just there for the companion story. Too bad there wasn't evasion tanking in PoE. Though I suppose there is in a manner of speaking, but having only high reflex is not really viable. I guess it's a bit more reasonable to think a rogue doesn't have a supernatural ability to avoid any incoming attack. One-on-one sure. N+1 not so much

Well two different results from the same date seems to indicate that your getting random rolls instead of a static list. I'm guessing that is probably working as intended. Just not sure what the difference is.

Whatever you do you'll want your MC to be something that can pretty much solo the first 2-3 levels. The good news, assuming you're not against it, is that you can respec to something more party friendly once you get your other characters created. I started with a paladin myself. They're certainly tanky and I don't regret it from a combat perspective. I thought I'd like the RP aspect of sticking to your order's preferred dispositions but I've found it frustrating that some (very few) quest rewards are locked behind a single disposition that happens to be disfavored. At least that is my experience as a goldpact paladin (passionate, aggressive). I know I could pick a talent to make this go away but it's a talent you know? Anyhow, rather than suggest a specific party I'd suggest picking an MC that you like from a mechanics/RP perspective and make the rest of your team be in support of that. A little obvious I know, but once you've decided on that it's easier to think of abilities that will support (or at least not impede) it. i.e. You play one of Boeroer's elemental themed tanks means you need casters in your party that can dump that specific element on his head. Fwiw I'm currently playing 4 man on PotD. I've gotten to Act III and plan on taking a 5th member but so far I don't think the 5th is really necessary - Paladin (Basically started with a Solo Tank build and swapped in a couple party abilities) Chanter (Chillfog) - Support/dps Monk (Juggernaut 3.0) - Offtank/dps Pallegina (Paladin Accuracy Support+Ranged Alpha Striker) - this one wouldn't work for you as it uses a talent only she can have - Wrath of the five suns.

Too bad you couldn't melt down weapons and armor to acquire some unit of essence that you could then use to enchant things with some of the "unique" enchants. Balance it by making it only practical to do by sacrificing other uniques or items with higher lvl enchants. I'm always bummed when I realize I can't get something until mid-late game. Speaking of rogues I still haven't picked mine up. Looks like I already planned on using Godansthunyr+Barricade.

Well, yeah that would be broken stacking sworn on one enemy. My original point was that you can't tell targets apart if you're marking multiple mobs. Usually it won't be a problem if you don't take them off their targets. But if someone needs LoH, etc and the mobs are still in motion (or disengage due to pathing issues) you may find yourself wondering which one it is. Not that you can't figure it out by process of elimination more often than not and it doesn't matter a whole lot with charming.. unless you want to reapply it. It's a situational issue, but it would be nice if had the characters name next to the sworn enemy icon in the mob tooltip. /shrug Running 6 charming paladins seems a little fringe to begin with Speaking of pathing issues I somehow managed to get my monk chasing a mob that was chasing him.. endlessly in a circle around my paladin. Well not endlessly but it did go on for quite a few circuits. *Queue chase music*

Figures. Well it hasn't really effected me because I'm using pallegina's wrath as part of her alpha strike against casters and such. Tbh, I forget to use it on my MC most fights because my monk and chanter kill things so fast.

Yeah, I thought I ran into a problem spot myself last night but it turned out I had the wrong loot point (Ogre cave, Dyrwood crossing). I'm kinda at a loss as to what might be happening if you're playing 3.03 on Win7 and having a problem. But to be clear it's not that it's totally different from the list but that there seems to be an offset of a few hours? As if it's counting the days at a different interval than what is displayed on the UI?

Which is kinda strange since the buff only applies to the paladin who cast it but I suppose that is a limitation/oversight as the buff must look the same to whatever code handles sorting and suppresses all but the "most powerful" effect. Unless I'm wrong and it does apply to everyone? The tooltip for sworn enemy seems to indicate otherwise.

Btw, AndreaColombo thanks for keeping this list updated. Newbs like me would be truly lost without it.

Yeah, I figured the n was for numeric. And if they are globally scoped variables it would make sense that it would include the NPC's name. Seems they settled on "variabletype_Objname_variable_name". My bad for not considering that in the first place. I get a chuckle out of the fact that they don't seem to have something like a b_Durance_is_dead variable or at least don't check it. There's been several times people have talked about Durance as if he were still alive in my game and unfortunately he was killed by a pack of wolves I was kiting near him. In fact I got banter about him when I never even recruited him. Ah, well.

Hey, at least we can all agree (I think) that it's a good thing that the humble trap isn't the best class in the game. Iirc there was more than one D&D game were you could stack many many traps on one spot and instagib anything in the game given the chance to prepare it. Though that was patched out of most (all?) of them.

Ahh, it's been so long since I've played a cipher. Tactical Meld > Sworn enemy. At least in terms of pure Acc. It doesn't have the damage bonus and has a base duration of 30 sec. Probably more than enough for most targets. Well the chanter has a mind control invocation, right? So it has more options that way? *Goes to look at Drake's Ambassador again*

Strange. Wouldn't this mean that whatever node this condition was attached to, would only run or be available if Andred was winning? And only once he had won 3 or more games? Unless they confusingly stored the players wins in a variable with Andred's name? Not that I'm questioning if you're right. The other possibility is that comes to mind is that this is the "Let's play a game (again)" message it will default to until he's losing and then it falls through to a message in which the player is deemed the champ and has the talent added? At any rate I don't doubt the dev could have been mistaken. *edit* Ah, unless internally they called it Andred_games simply because they hadn't decided on a name for the game. So really n_Andred_games_won = n_Orlans_Head_games_won. Or perhaps they've named it so because it's a variable/token attached to Andred, the npc the game is started from.

Oh, yeah I hadn't even thought about PotD stats being different. Otherwise I could have used the saves from my Act 3 hard run from a year ago. Well maybe after I'm done with this playthru I'll update my spreadsheet for PotD and post it here. Well, when I do finally try the dragons solo at least I won't have to worry about people spawning the whelps. But more dots!

Fair point on the rest bonuses. I've not really needed them (haven't done any dragons or such). Well Fallout 4 is just proof of bethesda dumbing down their games even more. One of many reasons why I refuse to buy FO4 until it's the GOTY edition with all the DLC for 10 bucks on steam (exaggeration, I know). Btw, I really enjoyed FO:NV. I've put a fair number of hours into Skyrim but never bothered finishing the story. I modded it like crazy because I really didn't like the base game much. I don't think PoE is that punishing. It does have a learning curve. You see repeating the game as a difficulty curve and I see it as having to repeat the story. Something I don't really want to do for a minor adjustment to my stats. Personal preferences and all. Speaking of learning curves I wish bestiary was unlocked for the game overall rather than by save/run. I understand they attached the xp rewards for killing mobs to filling out the bestiary but seems a bit silly to have to do so each game. That said it's common for this to be the case. I just have a bad memory and went to look for the DR of something on this playthru I realized I hadn't killed enough of them this run. They could have had books that fill out the bestiary like the witcher too. Shrug. It's then I remembered I had a great many of the DR's of mobs recorded in a spreadsheet I was using to try to figure out the best weapon type to shoot for in the past. Well, I'll try solo but It's optional for me.

Well I certainly don't mind being able to respec as I'm learning what works. I do agree that respeccing stats is a little strange. But then this game limits you to a single gear buff per stat and is relatively low magic setting if you will. Meaning there's no +6 Giant Strength belts, etc. If it was easier to make up for sub-optimal stat distribution with gear I'd be for freezing stats and only respecing talents/abilities. It's also a shame they choose to stick to stat checks in dialog rather than having skill checks (and more skills). I guess that is somewhat accomplished with dispositions though. Admittedly there were a few must have skills and a lot of junk ones in those Wotc (or TSR before them) games. Imo, Skyrim was too streamlined. I like being able to customize my characters as much as possible. Anyway from what I've read here I don't think I'll be taking a dragon on solo.

I know this is probably not the case, but to be sure are you looking at the number of days played? Also, as we were just discussing what platform are you running on?

The best class is the one you beat the game with.

At first this got me thinking - Full Paladin party! As silly as it would be to run a full party just to exploit this tactic It occurred to me that sworn enemy shows up in a mobs debuff list but I don't recall it saying where the debuff came from. So having multiple sworn enemies might get confusing (especially on mobs that teleport). Too bad the whole party couldn't take advantage of sworn enemy. Then it'd be obvious to pair a Paladin and Cipher. Well you still have zealous focus and coordinated attack. +16 Acc is actually more than sworn enemy but stacking them is +31 Acc... and 20% damage.

Well that explains why I spent over an hour trying to get the talent from Orlan's Head. Dex 5, PER 13. In the end I ended up save scumming but that still took quite some time because I had been quick saving for a while and would have had to load back too far from a normal save. I think I found a thread somewhere here where a dev confirmed it takes 3 more wins than loses total. So I had a lot of loses to catch up on. I stuck with the nose as soon as I realized how frequently he seemed to hit it and figured that's all he was aiming for. Good to have confirmation on all this though. Next time I'll know to swap in some DEX/PER gear. After Orlan's Head I didn't chance it and save scummed on Dozen's Dice from the get go. I know I'm a horrible person and I'll burn at the effigy. But maybe next game I'll redeem myself by playing it properly - Spamming the 1 key while I watch videos on youtube... Maybe it would have been more interesting if they had given you multiple opponents for each game. Like a mini-tournament with some taunting back and forth. I'm not expecting gwent or anything but give it some flavor next time eh OBS? And why wasn't it called noober's head? "Heya!" "Whatcha playing?" "Why're you aiming that dagger at me?" "Ouch! Can I play too?" "Heyaaaaaah!" "Ohh, I missed." "Heya! Did I tell you about the time my grandma cut herself with a dagger?" "Actually it was a letter opener..." "Heya! Why did you stop throwing daggers at me?" "Heya! Why did you stop?" "Heya! Have you ever thrown a dagger at a dragon?"

Well it's really up to you in the end. I primarily wanted to make the point that MIG dialog is usually aggressive. Keep in mind that this isn't set in stone. You can respec the stats on your MC (costs/level). I've respec'd my pally MC a couple times on the run I'm currently working on (first PotD).

I don't think you mentioned what difficulty you planned to play but if you're going for more of a roleplay run instead of PotD min-max you might consider lowering your MIG and DEX to bump your RES to max. When it comes to MIG dialog choices they are quite often attached to aggressive disposition which is one of your disfavored as a shieldbearer. Granted it's not all the time but I think you'll find that the RES dialog choices are more often a safe choice in regards to Paladin Faith and Devotion. If you are playing PoTD then it's a tough call as you'll want to make your stats count for combat too. Mid-Late game you start to accumulate gear with stat bonuses that you will often have a chance to switch to before talking to an NPC. The problem is if a fight breaks out as a result and you're stuck with your talking gear instead of battle gear. So it helps situationally. TL:DR If you're playing PoTD stick with combat oriented stats for sure. Dialog is secondary. Otherwise you have some flexibility.

Well here's what my LoH tooltips say - MC Pally +94.9 Endurance over 3.8 Sec @ 18 MIG and 5 INT (3 Base) Pallegina +111.1 Endurance over 6.3 Sec @ 12 MIG and 15 INT (13 Base) If this indeed reflects what happens in practice then it does seem like INT buffs healing done. It's hard to test as it doesn't seem to output the actual healing done to the log. The log tooltip just mirrors the character screen tooltip. I'm not sure the tick interval but anecdotally I want to say it's 2-3 seconds. Which would support my observation of two ticks on my MC (one tick to start, a second at 3 seconds, and then the buff wears off a fraction of a second later). Pallegina would get 3 ticks assuming I'm right. If the stated healing is divided evenly over the number of ticks then in some ways you could say Pallegina's LoH is inferior, but you get one more tick. 111.1/3 = 37 Endurance / Tick vs. 94.9/2 = 47.4 Endurance / Tick. In the end it's only 10 Endurance per tick and 16 overall. If it was the stated Endurance per tick then that's a big difference. Another 143 Endurance. But considering Pallegina only has 168 Endurance atm I don't think the ticks are healing approx. 2/3 of her bar. 37 sounds more reasonable. *edit* The real benefit of INT is in AoE radius and buff duration. MC - 2.8m vs Pallegina - 5.2m

1) Well, afaik you don't need a body for loot drops. For example spirits don't (or rarely) leave a body behind (or maybe I'm blind) and yet you'll still get the occasional loot sparkle. But on the other hand I've seen bodies with keys I've left behind persist thru many loads (I try to pick everything I can unless it's one of those key only doors or the difficulty is too high). What I'm not sure of is if these bodies would count as such for white worm. But that doesn't really apply to you Short answer - Loot persists with or without a body as far as I've seen. 2) I'm actually curious about this too. The only HoT I have is LoH and I have a feeling low INT increases the hp per tick (as I only get 2 ticks). Whereas my second paladin has higher INT and seems to get 1or 2 more ticks with less healing per tick. But she also has lower MIG so it's not exactly a fair comparison. 3) I don't think I've gotten any soulbond yet, but I think I read somewhere you can't enchant them? So it limits what you can do with them build wise? Bittercut and late game Drawn-in-spring seem to be common recommendations but I honestly don't know enough about buff/ability stacking to have my own opinion.