Ymarsakar

Sounds like a different kind of "game" and "play" there.

I probably missed a patch note, but how do monk wounds work now? They used to be a dot that does damage over time. Without lesser wounds, do the wounds just disappear after 10 seconds and applies full damage back to the monk? (10 damage per wound?)

For the druid, firebrand isn't that good a spell for them to use for damage. Their claws and the sunbeam spell is much better for that, since instead of upping your accuracy, the druid debuffs the enemy so his damage spells do even more damage. Less misses and grazes, which is a big deal for spells that do 50 pts of damage or are raw damage duration dots. Firebrand is much better for rogues, ciphers, and paladins using flame acc buff. Since they have the natural base damage and/or accuracy to compensate for the firebrand issue mentioned.

One of the early tricks I used for casters to avoid that issue is to have them use ranged weapons that reload. That way, they are still applying dps to debuffed targets even though I missed a spell cycle. That way they aren't wasting time sitting there doing nothing because I didn't realize it. And the reload animation is very noticeable, makes it easier to grab them and cast. When they added in Shift Queue spells, that generally wasn't needed as much. Shift clicking spells will allow them to be cast in sequence. Although I had issues getting 3 spells together, but 2 tend to work all the time. First cast + shift click on second spell. The funny thing about perception is that how much damage % it compares to might is based on your acc vs the enemy's defense. Meaning, if acc=defense, then extra points of perception help a lot, close to 3% damage. It avoids misses and grazes by 1% per acc point, which is noticeably more than 1% damage increase. Once your acc > 15+defense, then each point of perception does less, as it converts a 15-49 graze chance into a hit chance, 1% per point. There's also additional damage from the extra crits. It was really hard to factor that in back when perception was supposed to give accuracy, but it was much better than 2% damage per might point. Now that might is 3%, it seems much more balanced and even. For reliability of cc and what not, perception will still be king though, and anything else that hates misses or grazes.

2.02 beta is out on steam right now, that might be it.

This is why I tried not to level up my characters in POTD, the IE Mod that makes higher levels take more xp is also pretty good for that reason.

The thing about Tall Grass is first, don't talk about Tall Grass. Joke from Fight Club.

They also zoomed in on ciphers. Paladins and rangers and wizards probably got the most benefit from the rebalance passes.

Okay, then it just always bugs out all the time, no situations where they work at the same time. Before I was wondering if it was a bug that only showed up in certain situations, that is what I meant.

The graze to hit conversion isn't particularly unique nor does it add that much to your dps. The fighter has a passive talent and there's the paladin zealous aura. So things like +accuracy or DR bypass on weapons is more noticeable. Flails are generally used in dual wield strategies, sometimes for the unique proc like the drain on the gaun's share. They faster than the big swords, but lack the sabre's top slash damage. They don't have DR bypass or accuracy like spears or stilettos or maces or estocs have. They aren't a reach weapon. The side benefit of attacking faster would be on crit strategies, but a flail doesn't have a crit bonus, an overbearing bonus, or a prone on crit effect like a certain Toki axe has. So basically it would only be used in dual wield strategies that need the special attribute of a special flail. There might also be a problem with the weapon group it is part of. If it is part of the weaker focus group, then fewer will use it as it is out of their focus group for their main weapon dps. This doesn't apply to the soulbound flails, nor particularly to any superb enchanted ones. For the soulbound flails, I think it's more like people haven't had enough time to plan out the builds for them.

Does swift lightning not stack with Turning due to too many lash effects on screen or it just doesn't work period together?

The super high dps shock monks that attack on the flanks or behind enemy lines, tend to wear medium or light armor. I like to use full plate on my monk, as then have him pull the enemy. He gets lots of wounds that way and because he's always hitting enemies, it's not hard for him to draw attention that way. A paladin's lay on hands and reinforcing exhortation is needed to keep him alive without a priest though, at times. Savage attack for -5 accuracy is also pretty good, since paladin aura zealous focus gives +6. Not a lot of stuff buffs base damage bonuses. Dual wield, peasant focus, penetrating, savage blow, on top of torment's reach is very good dps. Duality, iron wheel, and some other stuff makes him tougher as well. The two things that probably helped the most with the monk's tactical contribution to my party, is the paladin buffs to the speed and per encounter usage of lay on hands and the introduction of the new AI that allows auto use of wounds. A chanter increases the monk's dps further and also aoe paralyzes in a cone. Swift strikes + lightning upgrade + torment's reach + fire lash.

The monk is also a very good primary tank given its modal bonuses to saving throws or deflection, as well as iron wheel. Fist + shield. It's what actually gave me the idea to make the paladin into a dps tank, because the monk and barbarian are already dps tanks, heavy on the dps, whereas the paladin looks heavy on the healing and the defense part. The monk was also the reason my level 4 party kept wiping in Dyrford, fighting the human npc party before the bridge. I didn't realize that shooting him literally made him increase his dps with fists. When I read the combat log, torment's reach and that wheel fire bonus was adding up to some ridiculous amounts on the primary solo tank. I only recently played a monk after that, because of the new AI. Makes the monk into a fire forget missile, vs something that needs to be microed or it dies.

From my own experiments on this, I formulated a hypothesis that the action speed from dex is what is causing the issue. -20% attack speed should be accurate, if we were only counting the frames from recovery, but an actual attack simulation like the one you ran also counts the frames from the attack itself, the action animation affected by dexterity. So the slower the weapon, the more action frames it has due to statistics. The faster the weapon attacks, the more animation frames go up and if the recovery is really long and the attack animation is really really fast, then it gets to close to 20% attack speed difference. If not, there's like 10-15% difference for vulnerable attack's -20% attack speed debuff. There's also the issue of whether there is any upper or lower limit on attack speed which comes when you stack too many recovery debuffs on one person. Similar to how there's an upper limit ceiling on the attack speed for a person buffed to +100% attack speed, which is actually more than 2x the attacks with fast weapons. I tried it with Exceptional Great Swords instead of Fine ones. Every time the guy using Vulnerable Attack on a target with only 5 DR dropped his guy first. The issue is if the main poster is using a superb weapon, soulbound. That's where the limit starts getting fuzzy.

Prone them with the seal and then hit them with another 1-2 level spell. Priest has some good fire spells but they aren't as easy to use as iconic. For single target dps, the halt + divine mark is pretty good once level 2 becomes per encounter at least. Before, I would normally save the priest spells for emergencies in fights that end with tank needing some saves.

-8 sounds like a reasonable compromise. Generally to get might to 15 at least. I got the monk and chanter normally to distribute damage on the line, so the incoming dps on the paladin has slown down drastically compared to when I used a single paladin as only tank in 1.0 They buffed up the Caed Nua resting bonuses too, so that +3 dex or other bonuses you can pick, is very good since it lasts for 2 rests. The alpha strike weapons or big hitters that apply much of their damage in the first 30-60s of the fight benefits less from dex than the weapons which rely on rate of fire to do many hits for damage. Vulnerable attack is very good early on, but if you have a superb weapon that -10 to -20% attacks have to be made up by the previous attacks x 5 points of damage from the dr pen. So if you make 10 attacks, and the last 1-2 attacks do more damage than 8 x 5=40 pts of damage then vulnerable attack doesn't increase your dps by much. A side note is that vulnerable attack somehow applies to retaliation attacks, so if you have a retaliate mod on or if the paladin fire aoe is considered a retaliate attack, then it might be worth taking vulnerable attack.

Unity programmers are much in demand these days. Plus they have various other resources they have to work on. And the modder work is often superior but modders first need to learn the engine before you get a few on top. But they've already made something similar for Pillars, they now have an AI system. The game needs more work on debugging and reverse engineering issues.

I see. It should be feasible to test the Paladin's Flames of Devotion with it then, since it would be 50% lash. That would allow weapons testing at 25% lash and 50% lash, or 75% lash in other instances as a way to differentiate the numbers.

The Raedric stuff was pretty fun. Back then I did it after I got a full party of 5 companions.

Ranger. Cipher. Rogue. Pretty much the same hard hitting classes as before. Wizard blight build is pretty strong with blast dr pen talents. Priest is pretty good with arquebus and the sun aoe seal.

"lvl 3 paralyze iceball (discovery only) - makes me wonder why they nerfed cipher's mental binding when this is far superior" Mostly because the cipher has infinite focus over time if they keep doing damage, so technically there is a lot of use of that mental paralysis ability. Obsidian likes to balance things with limited usage so people have to make a choice and trade off rather than keep spamming the same thing. Although that goes out the window with level 3 spells for the wizard due to the quadratic wizard thing at max level. The lightning bolt is very useful in tight corridor fights. If you move your character so the wall is at a 90 degree angle, the hit will reflect off the wall, so anyone between wall and you gets hit twice. Also another trick may be to use the spell reflection on you and see if that will reflect the lightning bolt back again on your enemies, allowing you to use your own wizard as a wall. The level 2 rolling ball thing also bounces off walls. Generally when shooting down a corridor, I try to do the zig zag trick so it doesn't come bouncing back at me (killed my party doing that against Bodi in BG2 when in the catacombs, due to accident of angle). There is no top down view or auto angle prediction, so it's a little hard to get right. But even outside I positioned myself so the ogre would be next to a tree and I would just shoot at the ogre, it would bounce off the tree and hit the ogre for 2x hits.

Lore wise a big flaming sword would hit against reflex due to burn damage in physics, but given the number of reflection debuffs in this game plus carnage, I'd rather they change the defense it hits rather than change the actual items or abilities involved.

The micro would be pretty fun to see in a video though. Like seeing a Starcraft 2 player at his keyboard, hammering his actions per minute away.

Lightning is really good for the druid or other people who have lightning attacks. It also affects those annoying kith that like to wear plate armor and use paladin/priest powers. The lash effect seems pretty weird now, I can't see how the DR is broken down with it, it just shows up as a damage added to the normal hit damage - DR. I ran a couple of experiments and simulations before with lash to see how DR affected it, but it's now different behavior wise. I try to pair up the lash with any utility talents such as scion. Doesn't make much difference, though I haven't checked exactly what difference it makes. Normally I go with corrode for the most consistent damage and my cipher has body attunement, along with the wizard's vulnerability aoe. Both can reduce DR by quite a chunk, so the higher my dps, the more will be applied in total with those spells. It's really noticeable on the blunderbuss build, since the lash adds a significant amount of damage if you can debuff the enemy below your DR bypass abilities. <B> KDubya</b> Did those numbers come from your experiences in 2.0 or something else?

Due to the accuracy on repulsing seal and the sun seal, their damage potential is quite high actually, aoe wise. Cause the sun hazard will usually crit and it's foe hazard only, your party doesn't suffer it, so you can blanket most of the enemies at once. As Wolken mentioned, some of the self buffs can be pretty good as well, although not equal to the wizard. I think they wanted to get away from those fighter/cleric super builds people used in BG2. So the priest got dd/aoe/cc spells but the self buffs were more limited. But having a few points of might combined with his spells is pretty good for damage potential.