Ymarsakar

The recommended stats have also changed several times over the game's patch history. That's why I think it's superior for a person to understand the basic game mechanics over following recommendations by rote or like a zombie. To a newcomer, if the game recommends X and players recommend Y, there's no individual authority for the newcomer to rely upon to judge that, other than the authority of player vs game designers. Once a person gets experimental and test/actual experience with something, then they obtain their own independent individual authority to judge for themselves what is what.

KDubya's experiment reminds me of what I used to do in the Dyrford tavern, testing stuff out. I just aggroed the entire village so that I could use on combat effects, using the villagers as either test targets or the party itself if more health was needed. Those guards of the aristocracy are rated as fighters, so they regen END, and they have chainmail DR. -5 DR penetration is sort of like adding 5 extra damage per hit, and it benefits faster weapons because they hit more per minute. So the dps goes up. I generally take swift aim and dr bypass together for bows and firearms. I didn't realize it before 1.03 but the reason why Sagani was doing so little dps was because I wasn't using the talent or weapons to bypass Dr per hit. So she would do like 9-12 damage per hit, against enemies with 5-15 DR. That's about 3-5 damage per shot, which is like 1 dps. With dr bypass, she loses an extra attack every 5 attacks, but she gains 8/3, as dps vs 1 dps. More than twice the impact, multiplied by .8x shots for the 20% attack speed. Vicious was also pretty good with firearms as an alpha strike. Swift aim back then didn't have a reload component, if I recall. And maybe even the attack speed didn't work at all, the ranger was pretty bugged back then.

Anyone know how lash effects get reduced from DR? 25% of a 10 dmg hit seems to be about 2.5, but it's not exactly 2.5

I'm guessing you have some of the dialogue tooltips turned off. Passionate is generally when an emotional reaction is the response to an event. It's very similar to aggressive, except the emphasis is on denying evil or bad behavior, vs trying to hurt/attack people. I mostly go with honest, diplomatic, and benevolent. I turn the dialogue options off and on sometimes to check what Obsidian thinks is X and Y though. That's a good tip about the Sword and Sh talent, I hadn't seen that one. Another reason why Silver Tide is too powerful for the current balance mix. 3 per encounter level 4 aoe regen spells vs class talents. Since the paladin doesn't need another buff or rebalance, it's more convenient to isolate that one racial.

<B>Talents: I don't know exactly the order yet, but more or less the talent would be:</b> Good starting plan so far. Weapon focus soldier goes with flames of devotion and sworn enemy, because all 3 works together to deal solid damage with two handed sword, pike, or shatterstar. Shatterstar is the warhammer one handed, that goes with the shield deflection weapon slot. It gives +1 engagement, so you can save a talent just by using that weapon, which is available early on at the city store. Strange mercy takes a little bit of observation. Either change your ranged dps to another target when the enemy is at near death, or use the 2 per encounter flames of devotion to get the killing blow. Reminds me of FPS games where you try to kill steal and get final blows on people for more pts. It's like a mini game. But Torm's advice is solid, with lay on hands, you can push off taking strange mercy until you have a solid two handed dps line up. Sworn enemy, flames of devotion, weapon focus soldier. Any two of those should be sufficient damage potential to proc strange mercy well. The exhortations and some other talents are level locked. So until level 4 or 6, you won't see many class talents, which is why people tend to go with lay on hands first. After level 6, however, paladins have so many good talents and class talents that it becomes difficult to choose, even for those experienced with building paladins. That's why I have two paladins in my party now. The two cipher combo was also excellent in my experience, but took a lot of micromanagement and they were kind of squishy. Race: Meadow Folk (interesting abilities, even if our CON is not so great to sustain it. But I wanted it for RP anyway) You could also play a pale elf, the backstory would just be slightly changed for mother and father. Far as I know, only the Aedyr Empire have technical marriages between humans and elves, but there are no half or mixed elves or humans for that matter. So a human picked up by a pale elf family or a pale elf picked up by a human family, in the wild, should work in that context. On another note, the Kind Wayfers feel very close as I've read many stories of knight errants in human history. Learning how to wield a sword in real life was also more fun and exciting than Hollywood movies or most fictional accounts. Here's some interesting vids on the subject. 11111 22222

The ranger is very good at pulling enemies, because they can stealth in or they can shoot at extremely long distances, preventing some mob groups from seeing the ranger or the target he hits. The roots and the wounded shot makes pulling easier and does not expend many per rest abilities. The pet is a little bit of micro, but it's manageable given the new party AI s. The ranger has the most reliable single target CC with stun on hit/crit at level 11, against targets pet is attacking. That's like having 30 extra accuracy right there. The ranger and the pet was horribly broken in 1.0 Many abilities didn't even work right. The pets died really fast due to low DR. So they've been rebalanced, yes, and certain broken mechanics have been redesigned to make it more smooth and efficient.

I have a shield slot for most squishy and melee characters, so that they can up their deflection to give more time for healing. Or to take less hits from disengagement. Druid needs an excuse for shapeshift and someone getting right up next them is as good as any. Their claws do the damage of a two handed weapon, except as a 2x fist attack, benefiting greatly from the lash wildstrikes. Generally they just need to survive long enough for the cipher to drain enough focus for a mental binding, then they can reposition. My wizard uses normal hatchet and fine large shield, because his deflection is low and he has better spell weapons than locking up a rare item in his slot. That makes up for the wizard's lower base deflection, and combined with arcane veil or the mirror images, his deflection is high enough to make attacks miss him, which is nice because no interrupts or poison or other effects attached to the hit.

I went through a lot of his build videos, they provide some good experimental data and theories for new concepts I've used. I would have had to go through a lot of personal testing using many many custom characters, to get the same results as his work. The glories of the internet. Don't even have to pay 5 dollars to a phone hotline tip service.

What, at that high a level you aren't using overwhelming wave, mind fog, and aoe spells to kill those people from afar? That's much more satisfying than having Durance or a priest cast that spell.

What kind of weapons did your rogue use?

Dumping stats doesn't get a person through Path of the Damned. Better tactics, party composition and equipment, first movement attacks, those provide the edge at higher difficulties. Dumping stats has little to do with overcoming high difficulties, it has more to do with min max perspectives. Like when people ask for stat builds on the forums here so they can get the optimum builds. Int has a bonus above 10 and a malus at 9 and below. So dumping it in favor of X, would mean your aoe and durations would go down. This is all part of optimizing the build or at least arguing about strengths and weaknesses. Unless a person just takes a randomized roll of the dice and not care what happens later on, they will be doing some min maxing with their stats. It's just where the minimum should be is where the argument is. Some think 3 is the minimum and 18 is the max that should be obtained. Others think 10 is the minimum instead. Without a basic or deep understanding of game mechanics, there is little possibility anybody new to Pillars will be able to verify the information or advice they get from here. Equally good, equally bad, an equal mix of the two, it's hard to say. Depends on the outcome. <B>The main reason I dump intellect is to get the thug type dialogue options that need a high resolve. Not needed and many will say that it is not a good idea anyway</b> I might need to try that out, since the vanilla resolve and int dialogue options seem very un interesting to me. <B>My one concern is that the prone on crit effect from Tall Grass might be too small. In that case I'll just have to pick a different weapon</b> KDubya prone or crit on hit weapons are hilariously fun to use. Even if the duration is minor, it still interrupts them and stops them from moving or doing anything.

Josh Sawyer, the production lead on Pillars, wanted to move away from min max builds with dump stats. So people can still min max here, they just take a big minus for a big plus in another area. But min maxing was big in DnD Baldur's Gate 2 style, where charisma in combat was... non existent. Maybe on a sorcerer for more spell casts. Dump that to 3 to get more strength that actually does damage, and all the npc companions with 12 cha and 16 cha for role playing... didn't do much in combat as a result. In pillars every stat applies to every class in some fashion, just some play styles like a certain stat spread over others. Why that is, involves a very deep understanding of the game mechanics. High dexterity builds affect the fast and medium weapons more, the single handed weapons over the ones that need reloading or are two handed large. Which also means that a low dexterity build doesn't decrease the dps of an estoc White Spire build as much as it would for other mixes, from what I've noticed. There's not much difference between medium armor and heavy plate armor speed wise. If front line melee, I would merely go with the heaviest armor, highest DR for the damage being taken. Full plate is the best, but also expensive or slightly rarer. Even my monks wear plate or full plate. I went with small shields for the accuracy improvement over large shields. Paladins also get access to a special shield for only paladins that is small. Scion of flames is more for tanking drakes and fire dragons. Not all that necessary if you got potions and scrolls. The damage buff does apply to the flame attack, because the flame lash effect from the power is a percentage of your base damage. So if your two handed sword does 30 damage in one hit, a lash of +50% fire damage would deal about 15 extra fire damage added to that 30. The second flame talent adds another +50% on top, so it does about 30 damage. DR mitigates some of it, but not sure how the formula works for the dmg from lashes. So 20% extra fire damage would take the lash damage and multiply it by 1.2 But that's not the trick people use with paladin if they want max fire damage. The trick is to wear forgemaster gloves and use firebrand on your paladin. This gives you a two handed sword that only does fire damage. I've heard it can do some pretty good top damage hits with the flame attack. The way DR tends to work from my experience, is that it slows down the rate at which large hits can kill you, by allowing emergency heals time to take effect or cc to stop the enemy. The ogre hits for 50+ sometimes, but only every once 4 seconds or more. DR is most effective against enemies that have lower accuracy than your defense, where they tend to graze all the time. So 20 DR vs 50 still lets in 30 damage per hit. But if you can make the big hitters and the small hitters graze all the time, that's 20 DR vs 25 damage. So high DR plus high deflection is very good for anybody that is taking continuous physical damage. It's also good against some spells. So the difference between -50 recovery and -35 recovery from medium armor, is about maybe 10% attack speed. -50 itself is about 30 or 33% attack speed, debuff. In my experience, 10% attack speed debuff isn't important vs having 8 DR vs 16 DR. The attack speed stack on the naked ranger, now that's a different matter. Torm, I mostly used Kana's move speed party buff in those instances. Most of my front line has enough defenses that they can just go through a bunch of disengagement attacks without a lot of problems, if their endurance is maxed from HOT heals and auras. I normally turn off the Obsidian notifications in dialogue where I lack a requirement. From what I've seen the dialogue for Might and PER were the most interesting, with INT being like the investigator who jumps to the end and gives the answer without explaining the logic of deduction, and Resolve being a shortcut pass challenges. It doesn't make things feel more challenging or difficult, as if you were fighting it, it just cuts a way for you via the option. But that's generally why I prefer Planescape Torment writers with their peculiar notions of world building and Shadowrun's own peculiar notion of dialogue and class building. Obsidian has some good flavor in the dialogue and adventure texts, but their factions are more interesting overall than the dialogue system for me. White March is definitely a step up in the content quality across the board, however, from what little I've played of the content.

I would probably go with Pallegina, Zahua, and Kana as main tanks if my PC was rogue. Paladins are a little bit too versatile from level 1, to not use them at this time. I have to have at least one paladin, somewhere. Especially since I've started running without Durance or a priest. Just using some boots, no Silver tide, to heal party. DPS has gone up substantially, however. Also I just found out that IE Mod allows Pallegina to have custom favored and disfavored dispositions, so she can get the same buff to her faith and conviction just like a MC paladin would.

Take a look at the combat rolls. In an even situation of 50 accuracy vs 50 defense, 15% is miss, 35% is graze, and 50% are the hits, as far as I remember. With every one accuracy over the defense, is 1 point of extra crit chance. So the +10 defense is good for avoiding the charm having a critical duration. And it improves the graze chance within a certain range. So in longer fights it shows its use because the front liners are usually the ones enemies see first so they charm them first unless there's some kind of special Ai routine running. That means the more defenses they have, the more the enemy has to cast charm on them to keep them locked up. And charm in and of itself, does little damage because your ally turned enemy has so low an accuracy. It's mostly dangerous if they get one of your chanters or dps members, then it can hurt. Against those mind controlling mushrooms, a tank with high defense against these attacks will snap out of it faster because the durations aren't as long on average. That means the mushrooms won't be able to chain cast charm on your entire party in a row. I mostly deal with the charm issue on mobile mobs by controlling who they see first and using cc on them. It's only a problem for parties that are level 6 and below, since they don't have much good cc. On mushrooms, I precisely control the range at which I engage, which prevents every mushroom from attacking, since they're stuck in the ground they can't get to me.

Sounds like a combination dps/tank, the stat spread from the OPost. With the high resolve and perception. The paladin can get away with having 14-15 in the tanking and offensive stats, minus dexterity or con. The one I use had a similar weapons setup to a defensive paladin, but took sworn enemy, flames, flame upgrade, two handed damage, zealous focus. Both share lay on hands at first level, so there's no difference in offensive or defensive paladin there. Both have two weapon slots, one with a two handed weapon or arquebus, the other with a weapon/shield combo for when deflection is needed. Since deflection is immediately improved once you switch, before recovery disappears. So something like 15 might, 12 con, 8-6 dex, 15 per, 14 int, 16+ resolve might do it. Per and int can be further increased via selective equips. Those aren't the exact stat mix, just a general distribution that allows a paladin to do a little bit of defensive tanking and then doing some offensive tanking/dps when switching to two handed weapons that prone on crit and using flames or sworn to get more crits. Which also apply more damage. Tanking in 2.0 has gotten back to the original military term. Meaning a slow moving bunch of armor plates with a big weapon on top it to threaten enemies with, but vulnerable to a bunch of flankers and infantry with penetrators without infantry support. It used to mean a meat shield, something that could deflect a lot of damage, but had little offensive abilities or threat on its own. Which, of course, is what a tank provides infantry, with a metal shield to break through defense hardpoints.

It was bugged before 2.0 white march and then it was bugged in 2.1 white march. So the only build it actually works in is 2.0 white march most likely... it's noticeable on the youtube tests when they keep stacking attack speed and some guy with a rapier attacks at .75 attacks per second or something ridiculous. Most of the buff effects for attack speed should stack. Before white march came out, I heard the attack speed on weapons didn't do anything. After white march, the 2.01 patch broke a lot of talents and powers, so it's unreliable testing anything there. I just assume the stuff is broken even if the tooltips and effects show it is applied.

Flames of devotion is generally for the offensive paladins. Meaning you need zealous aura, around 14-15 might at least, and about the same perception to make good use of it with two handed +15% damage talent. In other words, pick up lay on hands, endurance aura, and then worry about whether you want the paladin to become semi dps. The paladin won't have issues staying alive if you keep the deflection high and use lay on hands on the paladin. For Eder, defender is not particularly all that good. If you need engagement slots, choose the talent instead of the class ability, under defensive. If you are playing on Hard, you won't need to buy placeholder party members. 3+ front line melee characters are just a change up for some people who've done it using only one or two front line tanks before. So it's not necessary, it's just a tactical flavor. But it's not something you can easily decide for yourself unless you've experienced more of the game's fights. The Chanter would be your third melee. For example. Paladin MC= warhammer/shield, two handed sword or pike. Eder tank= hatchet/shield, dual weapon sabres. Chanter Kana=Plate mail. spear/small shield, ranged weapon like arquebus, two handed weapon. So the paladin tank and the dps one benefits a lot from Soldier Focus, given the weapons involved. +6 accuracy makes a big difference early on, so choose one. You can always respec later if you find better weapons you want to use with the bonus instead. The hatchet for Eder gives him more deflection 5+, so with his self recovery regen, it makes him last a little bit longer when taking damage. The two sabres wielded are listed under Ruffian, and dishes out pretty good damage if you have two of them. Eder doesn't need to deal much damage, so you can pick more defensive talents for him if you feel he's getting downed too fast. Generally the omni level talents come at level 2 and then 4. So try to get the accuracy focus for each character by at least level 4. The paladin will choose lay on hands at level 1 and an aura modal at level 3. Zealous for dps and endurance for taking less damage. Chanter is a very different class, but weapon focus adventurer with superior deflection or cautious attack, is a good combination for the chanter at level 2 and 4. Their class powers is a bit trickier. Get phantom for the first level summon. Illya at level 2 phrase is also pretty good if you have ranged characters.

HoF caused people to use a gnome illusionist in order to bump up the defense high enough. But a lot of it was too much of a buff to hitpoints, whereas PotD improved on it by adding more enemy encounters. In Pillars terms, it would be like using a single 200 deflection tank to negate damage from 110 accuracy enemies, but the party's dps doesn't go up even though the health of all enemies increased by 500%.

I tested a 2.0 White March PotD offensive paladin with Pallegina as the defensive one. got sworn, flames 2x, and bumped perception to 15. Con went down to 11-12. Higher might can sometimes make up for lower con due to how fast lay on hands works. Attack speed buffs from different sources do stack, up to about +100%. Armor, though, can prevent that because it negates about 33% attack speed for -50 recovery armor. Once you stack past 50-60% though, the last 40% gives more than 40% damage. It's more like 80%, some kind of exponential or qudratic formula. DR bypass talents work better for one handed weapons, so unless you plan on going dual or using a weapon/shield combo for dps all the time, I would go for +15% two handed weapon talent and only switch to shield if you are actively taking damage. I got an orlan paladin that makes good use of the +10% hit to crit conversion. Using flames on crit, that's about 60 damage. St Rum then makes the enemy go prone on crit. This allows me to tank the front line as well as bypass the front to get at the enemy's backline, no matter what order I use my melee tank/dps in. Flames has a +20 accuracy and sworn enemy has +10 or so accuracy on an enemy all the time until it dies. Compared to a defensive paladin, I only have access to one aura, the zealous, and one exhortation at level 11. For a moonlike paladin, you normally don't need as high a con due to the way silver tide procs. You need enough not to get one shot from 50% to 0%. The fish wildling content from White March is pretty challenging on level 11 party. But normally it's not the tanks that die due to not enough con. It's more like they got cut off and didn't receive healing because the healers are paralyzed or cced. Paladins mitigate this issue because they can heal at the front, and it's hard to interrupt lay on hands even if your resolve is low. Running 3 melee, 2 paladins and 1 monk, plus the Itumaak 24 dr pet that does 30-60 dmg on hit with ranger buffs.

I just looked over a few things like the retrospective, and they said they made a lot of early game areas easier to run through. And they also seemed to have nerfed the stats on some Path of the Damned enemies like beetles. So all in all, Path of the Damned should be pretty easy now compared to 1.0

2.0 White March is playable, the bugs only affect a few things like the stash and that's only sometimes on area transfer. 2.01 introduced a lot more broken systems. Obsidian's early patches didn't break the game to this extent, so I surmise it has something to do with the PX1 content. Whatever things disappear from the stash they'll get back after a more stable patch, so I would just play it on that version if you can, not worry about the rest.

They may have been showing pics of White March part 2 content. But unless you finished part 1 and didn't see it, it's hard to say.

I did some fights with 2 paladins. One of them I used a semi crit build with, using the orlan hit to crit 10% conversion, as well as sworn enemy and flame accuracy buffs, to get more crits in. On a crit, a level 11 paladin does about 60 dmg with the 2 flame talents, without sworn on enemy. Compared to 100-120 damage per 7-12s that a blunderbuss cipher does. Using St. Rum two handed sword that prones on crit, makes the paladin able to control the battlefield better. At 65-80 deflection, most enemies with accuracy lower than 80 won't require me to switch to shield at all. I'm also starting to use a 3 melee line +1 ranger pet. In corridor fights it is super annoying to get past my own blocking forces, but in open field fights it can save the party. Generally if your defenses are equal to the enemy's accuracy, they'll miss 15% of the time and rarely if ever get crits. Half incoming hits will be full damage, the other will graze and be offset by your DR. So if your defenses are 50 above the enemy's accuracy, you become almost invulnerable to them, as they cannot crit or hit you for full damage, thus they can't easily get through the DR of the armor if the armor is high. Lay on hands helps the most with the paladin tanking, making it more self sufficient. Eder's armor is fine in the beginning, but you'll want to upgrade to full plate as soon as you can get it. Generally full plate can be found on the crit path, on various knight enemies you might fight, and with the Crucible related quests in the big city. Having the highest deflection on Eder is the most important, then the healing to support him. That's because for most people new to the game, they don't know the powers yet so their tactical efficiency is very low. Which means their tank needs to mitigate more damage in order to give the player more time to react.

Carrie Patel's work on Sagani and Aloth was and are very enjoyable. Especially after they rebalanced the wizard and ranger classes but that's a slightly different issue. Looking forward to the rp value of this devil.

Try shooting something at the pet and seeing if the DR is 24 instead of what it would normally be. Because if the DR on the pet scaled up, it should be pretty high, even if the stat information shows it as +3 DR only. Almost everything in the objectbundles folder was affected by the 2.01 patch, which includes items, powers, talents, etc. So it isn't merely the ranger class suffering.