Ymarsakar

Veteran's recovery is infinite duration while the chanter regen heal (Ancient memory) is limited right?

Are you able to do this run on Easy mode? Because then you can just ignore the fatigue, use a bunch of ciphers, rogues, rangers, paladins, etc who don't have so many per rest abilities, and just play the game without resting. Health pools can be dealt with using extremely high deflection and cc. So ciphers might be the solution to that. They're the only class other than monks that can just CC people left and right the longer the fight becomes. One early tactic I used before 1.04 was the kiting trick. So not sure if it works now or not. The paladin or chanter with their permanent movement buffs are needed, and then you just pull the enemy while hitting them with some kind of slow or debuff cc. And then continuously move away from them until you pull a single enemy away because of distance limits. Sometimes they will head back to their area, breaking combat, but so long as you hit them again before you exit combat, they won't regen endurance and will die eventually. This allows you to kill extremely high damage hitting enemies like ogres or lurkers without taking health damage. Everyone, even the tank, will need a ranged weapon, however. And in situations where you need to tank normally, then the tactics are normal.

I never had a problem on normal in Caed Nua, the Temple of Eothas, or the Banshee inn clearing--the places where people always complain about the spirits going for the back line. In those situations, it's almost always one or at most two spirits teleport and arrive at the back line. In Cragholdt, I have to deal with four melee-specialized mobs completely ignoring engagement and going straight for my back line every time--often by using abilities that simultaneously knockdown my tanks. It's a very different issue. I only play on Path of the Damned. Generally the hp and stats are higher on POTD and the enemies are more numerous. The spirits are enough to surround the main tank on all sides, and then the other half of them shoot through to the backline. I also notice that they seem to be using drain spells that buff their deflection or summon new shadows. I heard Cragholdt is the hard version of the expansion content. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81708-dps-tanking-party/ has some info on the new tactics I've experimented with. The White March content is very well designed tactically speaking. It is much more challenging than most POTD fights in the core game crit path or even the Caed Nua Dungeon.

Jsaving, heavy armor with DR buffs. Although that is less of an issue once a cipher is high enough level to steal DR from enemies. High ish deflection 80+ just to be safe. Tanks have 100+. The higher your deflection, the longer your health pool lasts. So Constitution is after getting your deflection. CON and food buffs help compensate for when your low deflection somehow ends up with you taking chunks off your health pool and then the cipher becomes a crippled ranged person. Spell wise, you use pretty much the same thing as a ranged cipher, you just acquire focus differently. To compensate for the heavy armor, dexterity or attack speed buffs are good. Math wise, I heard -50% recovery from plate is about the same as -33% attack speed. So with attack speed buffs from potions, wizard spells, and various priest buffs or paladin exhortations, you can attack as fast as if you didn't have armor on. Which helps with focus gain. Retaliation mods are also a good way to get focus gain for a melee cipher. It's a bit unpredictable, but it's pretty funny since interrupts work too for the backlash damage from retalation, and if you debuff the enemy's DR, the retaliation attack does a lot more effective applied dps. DPS wise, dexterity and perception are more important than might. Because perception prevents misses, converts grazes to hits which is 2x the damage, and converts some hits to crits (another +50% something chunk of dmg). Might merely adds a few percentage points so it doesn't scale as much at the end. Perception + Dexterity gives good results. Generally the same paralysis combo will work with a melee cipher. Get some good focus hits, use the ray dps spells. Ecto is more controllable than the antipathetic one since you can control where your party is. Work with another melee tank, stick to his back so he can't be flanked and neither can you, and then cast ecto on him and then run around the enemies. They will all get hit. A ranged cipher can do the same, but he sometimes gets stuck when someone engages him. INT wise, apart from dialogue reasons, can be reduced heavily. From 18 normally to 16 or even 10-13. This is compensated by having 18 perception and a high dexterity, since it allows you to gain focus faster. It's also points that might go into resolve, to stop interrupts and to buff up your deflection. The higher your deflection, the longer the health pool lasts and the less crits you take. Equipment wise, sanguine plate and tall grass. That way the cipher can buff up his accuracy, get more focus, do paralysis and debuffs, do damage and mind wave attacks, and then also crit people to control them with that special weapon proc. A belt that either reduces damage or increases your might, dex, per. A cloak that is deflection defense or a retaliation one. Rings that are deflection or saving throws. Gloves may be accuracy or attack speed and movement buff. Talent wise I usually take the two focus whip abilities, a focus weapon group, the apprentice sneak attack, and maybe 1-2 defensive talents to up deflection. I use the retaliation shield, so shield/sword talent is useful. A melee cipher that wants to do dps like a rogue, may be taking two handed weapon or dual weapon wielding talents instead for that extra dps.

1. PC cipher uses blunderbuss and special sabre/shield. 2. Eder fighter uses sabre/table shield or one hand weapon. 3. Aloth used to be wand and staff but now it's maybe an estoc/arbalest and hatchet/shield. 4. Druid hatchet/shield and the shocking garam pistol. 5. Durance has an arquebus and sword/large shield. 6. Pallegina paladins have a pike and weapon/shield combo. Used to have an arquebus and pike combo, but will need to switch to estoc and weapon/shield combo later. Estocs are way too good, given the special ones. Generally I switch around the weapon focuses with IE mod before 1.06, and when I found a unique weapon that was nice, I tried to integrate it into my party tactics to see if it worked better than an npc's normal weapons. Dexterity and perception are exponential whereas might increases damage directly. Which means I want to see what happens with weapons that give accuracy and attack speed. Some special weapons are really good, even though I don't have the focus talent, because they are extraordinary or superb.

I've been testing some different tactics in White March, party level 11, high content enabled and Path of the Damned, fighting those fish wildlings past the bridge near Durgan's battery. What tended to work the best or at least was the most interesting when the pull fell apart (which did like 50% of the time since I was experimenting, and the backline got completely swarmed because the enemy saw the tank last so didn't even go towards him), was to group everyone together for priest buffs and aoe heal, then use the melee to force the enemy into a line or certain formation so they can't flank my weaker members. It tended to look like a square or a triangle. Screen wise the fighter is blocking the left side using terrain bottlenecks like a bridge or something, that prevents the enemy from physically moving around and even blocks sight sometimes. North on the screen the paladin blocks that part, making the enemy form another line or cluster. The priest, the wizard, and the druid all have backup shields. The druid can do a lot of damage if his spells aren't interrupted, since wave crushes and stuns and various other horrible spells higher up (Wave crush can even hit 7 enemies out of 10, if I line them up right). The wizard, though, does crazy damage in melee with citzal's spirit lance, so with the self buffs he can actually hold part of the line if it breaks through. Although his low health, low DR in full plate even, and low deflection makes him take a lot more health damage than the paladin. Cipher is in heavy armor waiting to help any party members, if needed. So I was wondering if anyone had experimented with this tactic before, where most of your party members had tank defensive abilities from somewhere, but the main class was dps or spellcasting. Such as a monk tank or a chanter tank, using at least 2 defensive talents, built with deflection equipment and buffs. It's different from having a lot of paladins, fighters, monks, and berserkers in the same party I think, because it uses the opposite of what some of these classes normally do (sit in the back). Another tactic which I sometimes was able to trigger, involved the tank successfully drawing aggro from the dangerous enemy paladins and blowgun users with good AI, allowing most of my secondary team to bypass the enemy frontline and hit the enemy's back line, completely destroying their ranged blowgun users. And since this stretched the front out north and south, the enemy paladins couldn't even heal their backline because they had to run all the way back over there and then try to attack my dps tanks there that was just tanking the enemy ranged dps, while the druid and wizard just keeps casting aoe over them since the dps tanks have enough DR to sustain friendly fire. Terrain wise, they could not get to my druid and wizard, because they were blocked by their own people, a terrain bottleneck, the paladin, and the fighter. Plus cipher for when those red paladins still decide to run through my line, they get caught up by the cipher.

The player character can re spec at merchants for a gold cost, which can change the attributes. 2 points isn't going to make much difference one way or another, due to food. I wouldn't pay the respec cost just for 2 attribute points. Dialogue wise, most conversation options open at 15 or 16. Sometimes they want 18. Generally resolve and might have some options which require high stats, which factor into item buffs and passives and food too to fit the requirements. Dexterity doesn't have a lot of options, very different from Planescape Torment where thief roleplay centered around dexterity, as well as the thief class abilities. INT of 16 generally triggers a lot of options, with a +2 optional with food or the +2 int helm. Constitution is used in some of the athletic adventure text games. Perception and resolve is used a lot to solve quests dialogue wise. INT, I remember, did some of that as well but not as much. Role play in this game isn't based so much on stats as what you do in the game, which factions you like, who you kill and how you deal with quest objectives. But there's definitely a lot of animancy mysteries and science for your character to dive into, story wise. Be sure to check out aloth, pallegina, and so on, they tend to have very strong views on animancy (science). Take some time to experiment with stuff in Pillars of Eternity. The stats aren't that important and it won't break your game either way. If you do want to change it later, you can. Heck I ran through Path of the Damned using the npcs. The items are more important, getting good loot drops and enchants on weapons. That and a good tactically balanced party that suits your play style.

To nobear Oh sorry, I meant the Moon well from the druid line. I don't use custom parties, so it wasn't the one people were talking about here. I saw it used a few times in beta play videos, but that godlike ability isn't something I know much about. The moon well from druid aoe is a lot easier to use than consecrated ground, but I like to save high level spells and hoard them. Usually because on PotD critical path I try to fight until my fighter has less than 50% health and everyone is fatigued from going through so many areas. I try to limit rests to 0-1 per Caed Nua level, rather than the max of 2 or more that might be used per level. So my party structure is changed or limited usually by the NPC strengths. Which I tweaked a bit with console, but not to the min max of what is seen in custom parties. So generally the melee tanks are pallegina and eder, but I didn't use the ranger npc much, so I don't cast or shoot from extremely long range. Aloth was supposed to do that with his weapons, but that was before they buffed wizard ranges. He kept running up as he was out of range, so I said forget this and dropped him in favor of Pallegina. So my primary dps is always the cipher, and everybody else are just the tanks and healers. PoE has some fun tactical challenges, consistent with what you wrote about changing the tactical positioning based on context. The White March npcs and respecs give me an opportunity to check out some party builds which I haven't used before. Cipher retaliation build sounds pretty good, as it will save a party slot that I would need a tank for.

I'll cover the firearm differences and the resolve question. Getting interrupted can be an issue, there are food buffs to minimize that. So dropping 2 points in con and resolve is pretty balanced. Every 1 point of concentration is like 1% extra to miss for someone trying to interrupt you. Generally pulling range and using CC solves that issue, since only some enemies like to target the backline. For firearms, it's generally split by focus. The cipher generally only has one weapon focus group, that would be Ruffian, probably most popular, due to the blunderbuss/pistol/sabre combo. The arquebus, the pre rifle firearm, is in the soldier group. All of them have very long reloads, and have accuracy minuses on the weapon itself. The blunderbuss, however, has six projectiles, so missing generally isn't the issue compared to the arquebus or pistol which only fires one bullet (and if it misses, it does no damage at all). It's when you graze and thus do less damage than a hit. One way to get around that is by buffing your cipher's accuracy with paladin auras or priest buffs. Or by debuffing the enemy's deflection using a number of spells from druid or wizard level 1s, or the cipher's paralysis level 2 power. Dexterity actually helps a lot with ranged builds, even blunderbuss builds. The difference between 10 dex and 18 dex is that the blunderbuss takes 14 seconds between each attack vs 9-10s with 18 dex. That's without the reload talent. Recovery speed or the armor, determines the gap before you can take another action, when you attack. So dex makes your attack shorter, hit faster, and helps with the reload animation a bit I think. Recently, I've dropped a few points from the 18 int cipher I had, and made it into a 16-17 cipher. The intelligence duration doesn't help with a lot of cipher abilities as much as shooting faster and getting more focus from dex, I thought. The nice thing about how they designed Pillars is that you aren't locked into one weapon. If you want to try all the guns on the cipher, you can do that. The weapon focus talent just gives you six more accuracy with certain types. Generally the blunderbuss build gets the "special" gun from that one quest. People who played in the beta showed it off. It's a very good weapon. The trick with using the cipher's most damaging level 1 and 2 powers, is the positioning of the initial aggro pull or tank position. The tank needs to pull the enemies away from the main party, at a 90 degree angle, so that the main party ends up flanking the main group of enemies. This, depending on terrain and how many enemies there are, allows the party to put a line of fire across the entire enemy formation, hitting numerous people. Also good for wizard and druid cone attacks. This was very difficult to use without boots of speed or speed buffs, but now stealth is individual based, not party based. Should be a cinch to do now.

I tested a retaliation cipher, and it was pretty good in White March. It's sort of like a monk. If you get hit and you're near enemies, you're golden. If nobody is hitting you, well, you just can't do dps as fast as a ranged cipher, since their recovery times are lower as they use light or medium armor whereas the melee cipher needs heavy armor for the DR and the retaliation on that plate sanguine. But the focus gain is ridiculous if you do get hit and you're near a lot of enemies. It's ridiculous. Game breaking with ento and anti ray spells even, if you can keep the cipher healed. I would have thought some of teh faster weapons to get mroe focus quicker was good. The issue is generally DR. If your hits are weak and DR stops them. then your focus gain is nullified. So lighter weapons attack faster, but you still need to punch through the enemy's DR to get focus. Saber got buffed, so it has the dmg range of a two handed weapon but is still considered a medium one handed weapon for speed purposes. There's also a special sabre that always drops in Caed Nua dungeons. Or you can just use blunderbuss at point blank after debuffing the enemy's DR.

Pre buffs are food, traps, and having scrolls/pots ready to go. Spell levels are too valuable in path of the damned to be used on things like buffing much. Only when needed, like when the tank hits 40% endurance and more dps is incoming, we have to choose between direct heal or armor of faith. Or dps and cc. People who have a lot of spell levels in Path of the Damned, are using their spells and then rest spamming. That'll work, up until you hit the last boss fight or run out of health on one character while you still have spells left after a rest. If anything, I usually go through the Caed Nua dungeons with one rest per level. Rest spamming, or using 2 or 3 rests per level, is way too easy for me. I have to do things in Path of the Damned to make it harder after level 5-6 party wise. Like, not leveling up my characters. <B>Eh, it's just as soon as I try to get one spell off, the enemies superior numbers overwhelm my blockers and rip apart the spellcasters in milliseconds due to superior accuracy and damage.</b> That's a tactical positioning issue. You can get around it by buffing up your stats so you deal more damage or take less of it, but I prefer to solve tactical problems by changing my positioning and changing my party builds. For example, generally you need 2 tanks if the front line is breaking through to your backline dps. The druid and wizard also have some interesting melee abilities that can make short work of enemies that break through the line. Crowd Control spells such as the cipher's paralysis, is pretty good. It gives a lot of time, although ciphers don't get as much focus now so they might need to shoot first with the special blunderbuss before they can cast that. The reason why I think Path of the Damned gets easier after level 6 is because you have a lot more resources available to deal with things like that. The harder fights early on I used the kiting trick with cc slows and kept using range hits on enemies I couldn't tank, while out running them. Forest lurker is so easy to do that with, since it's slow and big. Ogres are too. The priest druid combo with moonwell, once you get that, tanking things for a long time using aoe heals gets a lot more feasible. Especially if you have the 2 priest combo with the 2 cipher combo. For fights where even that doesn't work, because the wildlings have heal buffs of their own and they have huge numbers, I use a terrain bottleneck so they can't attack me all at once. Using the corners, just like nobears said. A few times I even had to use withdraw, the priest level 1 emergency spell. Which means the fight itself lasts a lot longer than 30s.

Yea, defender nerf was a bit too harsh, especially since they nerfed deflection overall. DR and buffs are much more powerful or at least, effective. Since I had some time, I did a few fights in White March to test the new 2.0 AI with the new mob abilities. The paralysis blowgun is pretty effective, for the enemy that is. Their champions have paladin buffs or maybe it was priest buffs, and then they target whoever is casting spells from my party, and hits them with paralysis. I fought the same group, the bridge and then west of the bridge, about 5-10 times total, using same composition more or less. Every time it was different, some due to positioning, other times due to how I pulled them. Party level was 9-11. Closest result was 3 downed characters, leaving only my fighter, paladin, and cipher combat effective. Other times they focused in on the priest and he got hammered (cause of paralysis due to spells, and not having cast defense against paralysis yet). I was tanking on two fronts at least, even with using chokepoints on open field. On the bridge, it was a lot easier, I was able to ensure the blowgun users were either CCed or out of visual range of my casters. First time, I didn't even suffer below 80% endurance on most of my characters and health was still green (above 50%). Second time I tried the fight on the bridge, everyone went to 50% health or below. Generally, if I can cast my long range ccs and mess up their accuracy or disable them, then they have little chance to get back into the fight once the priest casts rolling the buffs out. But, they tend to interrupt people with that paralysis attack, which must be an interesting script, although I don't think it ignores recovery. So in this context, the fighter with his regen, allowed him to tank an entire battle line on his own without getting killed, and he was getting hit hard all the time. Only his high DR and deflection shields allowed him to regen it back in time. This ensured my priest didn't get in range of stuff that was bad, and I was able to keep the formation in the spot I wanted it. So tactically, the toughness of the fighter allows more random or unplanned for fight pulls against enemies with a lot of cc or dps. There's also those ice spirits that do aoe and cone attacks. They should be intercepted before they get near your backline and then turned around so their cone hits empty space. You're going to need a good solid tank for that, that can heal on their own. Of course paladin is more versatile and has group buffs, which makes it pretty powerful since it stacks with chanter and priest buffs. The fighter is easier to use, which was mentioned a lot early on when they developed it. In a fight where I was using cipher, priest, druid, wizard, I didn't have time to use paladin abilities much. So having a passive tank that you just click on to make him unkillable, is useful given certain compositions that don't use ranger or rogues. Here's some of the highlights of the tactical test. 1. Main Tank Eder 2. Off tank dps Pallegina. 3. Debuffer wizard Aloth 4. Healer priest durance 5. Healer druid 6. Main dps cipher PC All mostly level 11, some tests were done using level 10. Got killed on level 9, but that was due to inexperience usually and trying to pull the entire enemy using one guy that got paralyzed and swarmed. Path of the Damned difficulty, with info turned on for accuracy and defenses. Chose "high level content" in White March. Interesting MVP spells were citzal's spirit lance. Pretty OP, but it's a level 5 spell. Venom bloom, raw damage ate through the DR of enemies and also debuffed them. Great with roots and tangle from druid. Priest buff level 4, +20 accuracy, great stuff. Armor of faith and blessing didn't do too much, which was expected given the type of damages we got and how low level they were. Dire blessing was pretty useful as I was dps limited. Paladin's lay on hands was critical at times in saving a person tanking enemies, but which didn't have the healers near him. Consecrated and moon well were the primary heals, plus the healing boots that hold consecrated. Spike healing from the direct heals, weren't really effective because there's some enemy that'll paralyze the healer at that point. Coincidentally.

1.0 or beta builds had engagement, but not very smart AI for the mobs. So the standard tactic was to send in one heavy deflection tank and everyone else was in naked shooting dps. After some updates, somewhere around 1.05, they added in better AI, although spirits always could flash step to your backlines when they felt like it. I used the primary tank philosophy, but I chose to get a lot closer so needed an off tank to catch enemies in PotD that would go around the front, by trying to circle around each other and get to the tank, when they were blocked. The dangerous situations were generally when my tank blocked a chokepoint, but there were 10 enemies on the other side. If even one slipped past, it would cause havoc on the back. When enemies slipped past, the engagement mechanic allowed the off tank to stop the enemy from moving to the dps. 2.0 or white march seemed to have added player scripted AI, but only tweaked the 1.06 AI a little bit. Or perhaps made the AI they used in Caed Nua more applicable to the rest of PoE.

It works partially. You can accumulate wounds, and you can speed it up with 'Lesser Wounds'. However, wounds only last a limited amount of time, so for the most part I had like 2-3 wounds simultanously, as the new ones replaced the expiring ones. You could combine it with 'Veterans Recovery' to never run out of endurance, but even without it you usually have enough health to compensate. The catch, however, is that turning wheel does not affect implements (only melee), so from range you can only really use the wounds by using 'Swift Strikes' (better: 'Lightning Strikes', which works OK, but not great). 'Dichotomous Soul' (LVL 13 required) would be nice, but I can't see reaching 8 wounds without being attacked. That sounds doable. A monk would only use the wand if everyone was ignoring him in favor of the main tank, and the monk can do little if his wounds don't go up I noticed. So switching weapons should be pretty fast. Maybe shoot a few wand bursts at a mage/archer behind the front lines, then burn towards them as weapon switches to fists, using wounds to activate the special powers.

The pots and scrolls in this game is pretty op, in my view. They can make any class into a battle mage, temporarily. Then again, I don't use consumables much in POTD.

Nice to know, there's a couple of rare items I didn't buy or haven't gotten to yet to experiment with in P of E.

Torm, I generally used the overseer 10% ability range ring to compensate in the past for the limited size of the paladin auras. Back then the backline had even more problems, now it's less of an issue since I group my people closer up due to moon and consecrated ground healing aoe. There's also fights against shade spirits which teleport past my front line, bunching people up worked a lot better since aggro was randomly distributed around and I couldn't control them using one or two tanks. With the flames buff, I also made the paladin have pike + arquebus, so if she wasn't tanking anything, she could sit exactly in the middle between the back and the front, and do damage. This made the formation a lot easier to manage. That brackenbury +4 intel stay was pretty nice though, once I found it, and made the paladin aura have enough range so I didn't have to worry too much. Then again my primary dps was a cipher and a druid.They all tend to be closer together than wizards than rangers, to the front.

A fighter's strength in PoTD early on 1.6 was generally that you didn't need healing as much if you got enough deflection to stop crits. So that meant more spells went into buffs and debuffs. Or more dmg not cc to save the tank. The paladin got buffed, so you can do something similar with lay of hands now, 2/ encounter. As for engagements, I didn't notice too much of a difference in Level 9-10 Caed Nua from 1.6 to 2.0 AI wise. Except perhaps that the 2.0 AI is weaker with spirits. An enemy used to flip around and attack whoever is behind them or beside them, the flanker. That means it's nice to have more engagements for second line melee characters that wish to disengage without being followed. Mostly engagement freezes or locks up large amounts of enemies, making the swarms in various dungeons in POTD easier to manage. But the same can be accomplished using stealth and positioning. Given a choice, I would take deflection defenses, and dps over more engagement targets, however. There are circumstances where having 2 targets engaged is very useful on an off tank however. The reason is because some of the enemies like to attack certain targets, so you can't tank them if they avoid you. This is extremely noticeable when my paladin or fighter switches to a ranged weapon, and then some dps character hits the enemy that is now disengaged. That enemy then turns around and chases the dps target. Because he's not locked up by an engagement. This was true for some enemies in 1.6, generally in the Caed Nua super dungeon. The smarter AI that is. 2.0 should have stayed pretty much the same. Instead of engagement targets, I generally prefer to use debuff duration field spells like tangled or the blind/chill fog to control enemy movement, including using terrain bottlenecks. The enemies on the critical path of Pillars of Eternity aren't necessarily stupid. But that's how they look since it's easy to counter them with kiting tactics or something similar. When there's only 4 forest lurkers or 3 beetles, it's easy dealing with it using one tank (that doesn't die). But the moment you start hitting enemies in the range of Ikkala, the bounty wildling, who has drakes, champions, a bunch of priests buffing things at the back, and skirmishers that poison and/or paralyze, then things start getting complicated. Off tanks with engagement targets in those circumstances can help a lot. Because in those circumstances there are like 5 enemies running circles around the main group that can disengage and aggro anything that attacks it. And you can't get to the enemy's backline without getting dangerous close to these loose enemies. In fact, the little goblin like tribes were the most dangerous enemies I faced, because they had different tactical assets, healers, and numbers. It would be interesting to do the fight again with level 12 characters and 2.0 AI. The fighter's other option, btw, is to have a two handed large weapon on a different slot, and use that. Plus confident aim, and their overall dps increases significantly. So essentially two fighters could switch off their roles by using modals. A paladin with two handed weapon, is much weaker in terms of deflection because they don't use modals or defensive powers to boost their deflection as much. So a fighter with those invincible hard to kill powers, can still activate them even without a shield. The paladin needs a higher deflection to keep up, tank wise, but the paladin always has their modal auras and their healing powers. Fighters vs monks, monks can off tank and do dps, but they can't sustain as many crits nor avoid them. Even with same heavy plate armor. So a fighter can survive large numbers of ogres or drakes hitting it at once, whereas a monk can get so many wounds before he can get them off or get healed, that he dies. A priest has to use a shield on em or the druidic beetleshell to save em. Whereas a paladin with lay on hands or exhortations or a fighter with his invincibility power saves, can save themselves. I haven't tried using ciphers or monks to main tank, though, that should be interesting in PotD in super dungeons and boss fights. The issue with monk tanking is deflection, even though they have the health pools. If you can somehow get the monks to have 100+ deflection like paladins, they become a lot more valuable as main tanks. However, that usually requires some rarer items. DR bonuses and the cloak or ring.

There's a reported bug with spiritshift and that multi class monk bonus. So some people may be affected. It's mostly about it not applying for some reason in spirit shift.

Paladins with DPS talents and powers, such as flames, might want to get perception to boost your critical chances and lessen your miss chances, even with the +20 accuracy on flames. But generally if your paladin is the main tank, you don't have pts to spare for dps attributes like perception. Constitution or Resolve is what tanks generally need. Per used to give accuracy in the beta, back then nobody took might. So now dps needs might, dexterity, and perception or some weird balance of the 3. INT used to be pretty useful for a paladin because it increased the size of their auras. But given the size of the recently changed zealous auras, you don't need INT for that any more.

I think of a monk as having per encounter abilities similar to a cipher, so I need to spam them as fast as I can, while having the health pool of a barbarian but the DR/dps of a rogue. In other words, complicated and doesn't fit easily into the main tank or primary dps role. It does fit into the off tank dps role listed above, however. Mobile reserve. Flying column. Similar concept. Role wise, they're closer to the barbarian in how they play and what they can take. High health pools and endurance, but generally low DR or deflection makes them easy to spike damage down with crits or numbers. I haven't looked into the save game, so I'll give some general pointers. Generally try to wear medium armor to full plate, just to learn how the class is played. Get items that have resolve, constitution, perception, and then might. In that order. The shield in the off slot trick is very nice, I pretty much use that on all characters. It's good for when your endurance drops and you need an immediate deflection boost without lag time. So try to use increase the monk's deflection as high as you can with buffs or items or talents. 60-80 is a good spot to be in for off tanks. 90-110+ is generally what a main tank has. Also, there was a potential build I thought about that used dangerous implement talent with wands to get wounds. Not really sure if that works or not. So if you're in heavy armor and nobody is attacking you, and you want wounds, there might be some ways to get it. Kana the chanter can be pretty good as an off tank, but you need 4 defensive talents at least for him. The AI makes him a little bit more useful, I think, because you can set up his respec to only activate certain summon spells or buffs. I often forget what chant Kana is on or how many verses he has, so he's normally powerful at the end of a fight where you have lots of time to build up verses. And are running out of endurance and spells of course. Kana in full plate, using the white spire estoc and switching to the special hearth hatchel and buckler shield, is pretty versatile. In Path of the Damned, he was MVP of a few fights. In shorter fights, Kana's potential generally isn't seen. Kana's 3rd tier fire buff to the party is very good for the dps characters like rogue or cipher. I think of it has having free, although sometimes unpredictable, paladin auras. Whole party buffs, but unlike the priest, he doesn't use spell slots for it. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81483-rolling-a-2nd-character-in-potd-what-are-some-must-dos-and-must-not-tips-you-could-offer/?p=1725765 Has my general recommendations on party composition. Not sure how much of that will apply to you.

Playing POTD from the beginning, I mostly stuck with the defensive philosophy of raising deflection on a main tank (was paladin, turned out Eder worked out almost as well) to tank the damage, and thus allow the rest of the party to figure out what to do. Having a cipher and a chanter together, really helps early on, because you can actually use your abilities. Even with the 1/4 focus start nerf. It's a lot better than having to rest every few fights because the priest or the mage or the druid ran out of spells, which can happen before 5th level at least. So big tank with highest deflection, will carry you through to most fights. It's how I survived the beatles next to Dyrwood, with 5 very weak level 4 characters that weren't supposed to be there. Also killed Caed Nua with kiting techniques at level 2 party, but that's only for really difficult encounters you want to cheese. Or have to cheese through. Although in the Caed Nua dungeon, I pulled a bunch of spiders to the paladins, and they killed each other. That was funny. The chanter speed buff chant is pretty important for that, otherwise you might get caught. As you progress to level 5 party or beyond, or the Caed Nua dungeons where enemies start having crazy numbers (or just spiders and dragon tribes), you will need a second off tank/dps. The chanter is pretty viable for that. A priest is more viable now with the higher health pool. All the NPCs can be built to sustain that kind of party tactic, I didn't use pre built parties. It's more like I built the NPCs in such a fashion that the tactics I did use, took advantage of whatever they had. Know yourself and all that. I had IE mod for that before, but now you can respect (99% of it at least) with gold. It's not necessary to respect until you get six people and realize that this one NPC should have had 2 different talents. It's usually a good idea to have 1-2 dps characters with mostly offensive talents, and the main/off tank with all defensive talents. The gear is partially randomized now, but it's easier to find purple hidden containers. Mostly you want rings and items that buff your defenses, mainly deflection. Then you want healing items. Then you want dps and items that buff perception or constitution or any other attribute you need on one character build. Generally it helps to understand what a party's tactical role configuration and design is built around. 1. Main tank prods the enemy, aggroes and kites them into position, holds their attention so that dps can nuke the enemies without being killed. 2. Off tank dps helps the main tank by preventing the main tank from being surrounded/flanked, and distributes incoming damage so that aoe heals can heal the tanks before the tank gets gibbed by an ogre critical or something. Also helps to protect casters in case the main tank somehow loses a few enemies from his circle. 3. DPS primarily kills the most dangerous enemies on field, using ranged attacks, that will kill either your back end characters or your tank. Things that paralyze or cast spells or cast healing buffs, are higher priority. 4. Healers these would be your priest or your druid generally speaking. Their job is to sit there and wait, while doing some ranged dps on debuffed targets. You wait for the situation to change. Cast armor spells if the tank is getting swarmed. Cast debuff or buff spells depending on the situation. Save your spells though, it's easy to run out. Those are the main roles, there are also some special flavors if you use rogue or wizard or monks or ciphers, that can do a little bit of each depending on equipment. For example, the monk can do off tanking, but the more he tanks, the more dps he does too. But the monk has to wear heavy armor otherwise he can take so much damage he dies. So a high deflection monk can be useful, more dps than a fighter, but easier to kill too by crits. A Paladin is another example of a dps tank, that has talents that are good for dps or healing, while tanking. Chanter is also a hybrid at times, summoning, buffing, attacking, doing melee or ranged dps, while off tanking. A chanter is probably easier to use as a tank because you don't care about his dps, most of his dps is in his summons and his invocations. You just equip a big estoc or firearm on him, and he chants as he shoots. Switch to shield if he gets swarmed. It's also nice to have 2 weapon slots in use. One for ranged dps and the other one for your emergency times when you get ambushed and the casters start getting hit. If you can't CC the enemy so your caster can disengage, it's easier to just switch to shield mode on your caster and continue the fight, while using aoe heals to tank the damage until your dps guys can get rid of the threats. For Main tank, I recommend fighter or paladin. Fighter is very nice in the beginning of POTD Pillars because you don't need healing spells if your deflection is high enough. Fighter just regens. Paladin has some nice lay of hands though per encounter, try to get that out, but you won't get the paladin npc until after Caed Nua. For DPS roles, cipher and rogue are best early on. Druid and mage start becoming really nice at levels 9+. Rangers are somewhere in the middle, because they need good weapons. Haven't played ranger a lot, so can't say much about that. For healing roles, priest and then druid. The druid's healing has range issues though, so often times, you can't get your druid in unless your druid is wearing frontline armor. My main character was a cipher, pretty op back then because it had large starting focus which I used to spam paralysis on POTD enemies. That helped me learn how to get around tactical problems, though. Later on, at higher levels, it wasn't that necessary to debuff enemies since you could just buff yourself and heal. For the off line fighter/dps characters recommended by posters above, the paladin recently got flames buffed so they are pretty good with pike/arquebus now. Rogue can also do offline dps, since it's normally a primary dps. Ranger generally isn't used for off line, because the range on the ranger puts it at about wizard ranges. Very far away. They normally should not get that close to any enemies, and if they do, that's what the pet is for. Sacrifice em. Almost all the casting types, such as wizard, priest, or druid, can do offline dps when they aren't casting spells. Offline as in over reach weapons behind the main tanks. My favorite class to play is probably the blunderbuss rogue/cipher. The special blunderbuss has DR bypass, and you can always get it from that quest at Dyrford.

Recent tests with my blunderbuss cipher showed that marking does work, but you have to initiate the attack at either the same time in pause or have to wait until the marker makes one attack first if you're late. Range wise, I tested to about 4 feet. Within a paladin's aura or chanter's range, at least.

Sadexchange, you might have to test the retaliation mod on the plate armor and shield to see how much focus you can gain from it, if any. A level 9-10 cipher should be able to pop out 30-40 focus at start of fight. So that means 1 free use of tactical meld and pain link. But the general philosophy of putting heavy armor on a cipher and using ray dps with cc, should still work. You might need a priest or healer/buffer though. Sabres do the most damage but lack penetration of dr, so for some melee range enemies you need to debuff their DR as well. Sword and shield or dual wield, should work. With an optional switch to Estoc for higher crits and DR bypass. I played POTD for the release versions. Two ciphers working together, with priest buffs and healing, is hard to beat for melee. You just cast pain block on each other and then ray dps spells, so you create a scythe of death as you move around to flank enemies. But generally for melee cipher, might and constitution should be high, perception gives you a little bit of accuracy now, and resolve should be taken for the deflection bonus. Test this with your current party build, and then you can just lower the constitution via console and redistribute the points if your tests show that it is not necessary any more. The bottleneck with the melee cipher is generally that you need high defensive talents along with potions and might/dps to get your focus back. That's easier to do with DR bypass on the special blunderbuss, but that's not melee. The focus gain talents take up a substantial number of levels, since you need the +20/40% dps one and the +33% focus gain one. The wizard melee build has higher dps because of citzal's spirit lance and the lance spells, but they don't last forever in a fight. But 2 ciphers and a wizard works well because the wizard can debuff the will on enemies. Combined with the priest's second level healing aura or the moon spell from druid, and ciphers can definitely tank incoming damage up until their health goes away (which has happened before in extremely long fights, but generally not on my paladin/fighter main tank). There's a special boot which spell holds consecrated ground, the aoe regen 2nd level spell from priest. 2 per encounter now I think. I put those on the druid, but for a cipher tank that needs to deal with incoming damage, it's great. You just need enough defenses not to get cc (paralyzed or petrified) so you avoid crits that can kill faster than you can heal. Some other items like deflection bracers +9 or the deflection ring +9, should also be used. Beer for more DR buffing. Normally people used gaun's flail that has 20% endurance drain, but I think that item is bugged, along with the stiletto. Becareful of using that before they patch White March or 2.0 Has a good cipher guide, not just for melee ciphers. It's a good idea to understand the fundamentals of the class so you can create your own soup so to speak.

[swamp slime DR is calculating damage wrongly] Use a low damage attack beneath 22 pts for swamp slime, so that it would be minimum 20% of the dmg after reduction. Instead, it adds to damage. Windows 7 64 bit 4GB ram Path of the Damned for all The math formula is broken. I haven't tested this against other mobs with very high DR, but it may be a problem there as well. It's almost like something is adding 10 flat pts of damage at the end of every attack, no matter the damage between pierce and slashing. Should test this with fire damage. There's also something similar but different with the stone beetle, where very high damage melee hits returns a DR of 0, and a total damage of zero. I don't know how to reproduce this bug. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. In the combat log, Durance hit with a arquebus just fine with damage calculation. The Adra beetle was casting the aoe shock, I was casting blizzard, mental paralysis, and sunbeam blinds. I seem to remember that they're invulnerable when tunneling, so perhaps that is part of it. Version is 1.03 Typo in the title, can't change it now. [When Aloth or a wizard uses parasitic staff level 1 spell, the grimoire slots will disappear after use] Basically when the spell weapon is on and the spells are disabled, the grimoire has this potion consumption sound when clicked on, then disappears permanently in the quickslots. I would infer that the game is trying to switch out the grimoire, but cannot due to the spell weapon or the fact that the spells are disabled, so cannot be changed. The game then can't put the new grimoire in nor can take the old out, so the new grimoire just gets lost in the process. [Known issue with items disappearing from party members quickslots and inv slots] Since this issue is reported, I just want to describe why I think it triggers. This bug only ever happened to me when the druid was on an adventure at the stronghold, and another npc was being escorted away. I've changed party members at the keep and at the inns, and they keep their inventory items normally. The moment the druid is on an adventure, and I switch characters out of party and back in, stuff is gone. So I suggest investigating how the stronghold adventures are affecting the save information for companion inventories and escort missions, as it is seen from the party management screen as well.