Jayd

Power level boosts also increase DoT. For example, having Spine of Thicket Green with Empowered Instinct equipped will increase the damage dealt by Plague of Insects. And this isn't just on cast - it's reactive. If you unequip the Spine the damage of the spell ticks will immediately decrease on the creatures it is affecting.

Shifter/Monk is great, yes. Shifter/Barbarian feels really good, too. Shifters get good armour without a recovery penalty, making full use of the Barbarian's focus on armour and HP and their bonuses to action speed. The sizable base damage and lash of spiritshift weapons+wildstrike makes good use of Barbarian damage bonuses too. Plus Barbarian on-kill abilities work with spell kills. Blood Frenzy/Spirit Frenzy work on spell crits/hits. (Spirit Tornado seems to be bugged in base game because it doesn't stagger on spell hits een though Spirit Frenzy does. Can be fixed with the Community Patch mod.)

Hi, I managed to encounter and isolate a nasty bug. @Elric Galad Took me a while to figure out what was happening but if you have the Strand of Favor exploit fix in the Nerf package of this mod active and use Cabalist Gameson with the +beneficial effect duration enchantment on a Druid who uses spiritshift, and the spiritshift expires while in combat, then the game will crash. Or, at least, my game crashes. Doesn't seem to happen if you manually cancel spiritshift in combat or if combat ends before the duration of your spiritshift expires. Only if it expires in combat.

Sorry for the topic shift, and it might have been discussed before, but has there been an investigation into why Chanters with +1 phrase cost passives don't always start with max phrases? Briefly discussed in this thread.

I only ever take Hands of Light. The worst feeling in this game is having a key character get chain interrupted so they can't get their actions off. It's also one of the most threatening things about high-level fights. It's also one of those things that it's very hard to do anything about if the enemy AI fixates on doing it. A Paladin being able to completely negate that threat is worth a lot more than the benefits of Greater Lay on Hands, in my opinion.

I posted this class build a little while back that you might find of interest. One of my favourite characters for sure, maybe the favourite. Monks get a good accuracy boost from Dance of Death/Enduring Dance. My build uses speed, crowd control, and tanking support from companions to avoid getting hit. Worked great. The vast majority of your damage with this class combo will come from Her Revenge Swept Across the Land. It's going to be a caster first and foremost if you play it to its strengths. If you're keen on focusing on weapon damage instead, a Rogue multi might be better.

Straight and omnidirectional are much better adjectives! I would say it looks to me like this is working correctly according to the game’s internal logic (what the developers intended and what they simply didn’t think too hard about – who knows). The confusion from our end is that the Fury’s weapon and Caedebald's Blackbow are the only weapons in the game that have omnidirectional bounces instead of straight bounces (and Blackbow isn't available to multiclasses so the Driving Flight question never came up). Players are otherwise led to expect that weapons have straight bounces and spells have omnidirectional ones. That expectation is reinforced by the existence of Driving Flight which is explicitly supposed to give a bounce to ranged weapons, and that is translated in the game’s logic as a straight bounce, stackable with weapons which already get straight bounces. I guess you can interpret Fury and Blackbow as special magical exceptions which don't work like other weapons (including Watershaper's Focus...which also looks pretty magical, but whatever). I think it's reasonable to want to change Fury to a straight bounce to preserve an otherwise clear distinction in player expectation for ranged weapons but, again, that’s a nerf to a weapon that is not at all too strong. On the other hand, the weapon itself is intrinsically underwhelming (Furies are all about the spells, not auto-attacks), but can become more interesting if made to interact with Driving Flight, especially with Arcane Archer. So the ‘nerf’ enables at least one interesting edge case to an otherwise underwhelming weapon. So, this has become a judgement call open to interpretation rather than a bug fix or simple question of balance, I would say.

This is a nice find and great work, thanks! There is an issue, though. With this fix, the first Fury bounce also becomes a 'straight line' bounce, whereas before it was an 'unconditional' bounce. This is a pretty significant nerf to the Fury weapon in every situation other than a Fury/Ranger with Driving Flight. Perhaps everyone else here already knows the ins-and-outs of the different kinds of bounces, but I just figured them out after a little testing, so I'm going to explain. Watershaper's focus has a 'straight line' bounce, and this is the kind of bounce that Driving Flight gives. The Fury's vanilla blight form weapon has (what I'm calling) an 'unconditional' bounce. I haven't checked, but I imagine pretty much every spell which has a bounce is also this sort. The difference between these two lies in whether or not the projectile can bounce along acute angles. Draw a line from the shooter to a target and then from that target to another target. If the angle formed where these lines intersect is obtuse, then either the 'straight line' or 'unconditional' bounces will work to hit that second target. If the angle is acute, however, the 'straight line' bounce won't work, but the 'unconditional' one will. At a guess, the 'straight line' bounce is supposed to represent a projectile which glances off a target and strikes another, preserving its momentum (not one that is reflected) while the 'unconditional' bounce is supposed to be one that seeks out another target regardless of its original momentum. I suppose the developers didn't want these different bounces to mix. An 'unconditional' bounce is obviously better than a 'straight line' bounce, except in case you pick up the Driving Flight talent, so changing the Fury's weapon to a 'straight line' bounce is a straight nerf to every Fury that isn't a Ranger multiclass. But it does enable a pretty delightful interaction in that specific edge case. For my game, I'm currently doing a Fury/Arcane Archer run and I'll install @Noqn's mod once I take Driving Flight (headcannon: my character learns to curve the lightning the same way he curves bullets/arrows, but that restricts the way that it bounces). But @Elric Galad may or may not want this (mostly) nerf as a general feature of his mod.

Thanks very much for trying. Really curious issue. This obviously isn't a solution, but if anyone is desperate for a workaround I've created a gamedata file that gives the Fury blight's weapon two bounces instead of one (building off/learning from Elric's files again). If you're playing a Beastmaster you can just drop this file into one of the gamedata folders in your override folder as soon as you pick the Driving Flight talent and you'll be good to go. Just remember to take the file out again before you play a different Fury Druid character (or not - I'm not the police). Edit: Hmm @Elric Galad would it be possible to write something that gives the fury weapon two bounces on the condition that the player has Driving Flight? cl.druid.fury_weapon_bounce_twice.gamedatabundle

Quick question: does the 'treat as weapon' change to the Fury blight form's weapon in CP/BPM allow it to work properly with Ranger's Driving Flight so that it bounces twice? I assume so but having trouble finding confirmation. Edit: Just remembered you can hire adventurers to test these things in this game! It turns out that Driving Flight still doesn't work properly. The blight's attack only bounces once even after you have Driving Flight. Has anyone figured out why this interaction doesn't work? @Elric Galad have you encountered anything in the code that would explain this?

The point of this spell is that it never misses and is a guaranteed interrupt so I'm not sure what you're experiencing here. It doesn't strip away a concentration when you use it? You say Ydwin is a Rogue but don't mention using the Rogue's many cheap interrupts. If she has two weapons then you've got two interrupt chances from one Guile with crippling strike. Blinding strike gets +10 accuracy but is more expensive. Sap is only a primary attack but it's cheap, gets +10 accuracy, and interrupts on graze instead of hit. Does Konstanten have Barbaric Roar? That's also a spammable interrupt.

Ah, gotcha. I thought you meant competing for the two casts at that level per encounter.

Sometimes I feel a bit crazy because I feel like the 'Symbol of x' spells are clearly some of the best spells in the whole game but this isn't the first time on this forum that they seem to be forgotten or regarded as unimpressive. But yeah, Dismissal is sweet.

OK, I've published my alternate Shifter Spiritshift cooldown rules here: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/613/ I haven't noticed any bugs but do let me know if you try it and notice something. I also haven't tried the meme builds I mentioned but I feel pretty satisfied with the 180s cooldown. I don't think I'd want it much longer or shorter. I explained the design philosophy in the mod page but copying it here too: Design philosophy: By default, the Druid class is a caster first and foremost, with Spiritshift as an ancillary feature. Ideally, the point of the Shifter subclass is to make Spiritshift the class’s primary feature rather than an ancillary one. Thematic Shifter builds should aim to spend the majority of their time in animal shape, with spells playing an important but secondary role. Because this is my perspective on the subclass, I disliked BPM’s implementation of a global cooldown on the Shifter’s Spiritshift forms. Preventing the Shifter from transforming freely discourages the player from treating Spiritshift as the centrepiece of their build and therefore, in my opinion, runs counter to the spirit of the subclass and the fantasy it encourages. Accordingly, I altered the relevant file in BPM so that the Shifter has a cooldown on each of its forms independently. For example, if you use the bear shape, you will incur a cooldown on bear shape only – you can still freely use any of the other four shapes, subject only to their independent cooldowns. This should not feel different to vanilla except in extraordinarily long fights, wherein you will no longer be in danger of losing your ability to Spiritshift altogether. This ensures that the player can feel confident building around Spiritshift no matter the length of an encounter. The cooldowns are set to 180 seconds. That is long enough that the player should not be able to use the same form twice in any ordinary encounter but short enough that a character who spends most of their time in Spiritshift in a very long encounter should always have at least one form available. Keep in mind that BPM has Spiritshift base duration scale with Druid power level. @dgray62 tagging you because you said you were interested @Elric Galad Let me know if I did anything wrong with the credits. (Also, I took you to be a “him” because of your name but just let me know if that’s not the right pronoun.)

Alright family, mission accomplished. My Shifter forms now have independent cooldowns (it was way easier than I'd feared). I plan to play with it a while to see if there's any unexpected behaviour and fiddle with the cooldowns. They're at 180s right now. My pet goal is to have playable Shifter/Cipher or Chanter builds that go back and forth to cast spells while still making you have to think twice about shifting back and forth too quickly if you don't want to get locked out. I don't know how long it will be before I test something like that properly though - work is rough right now and don't have a ton of time to play. Happy to make it available to others if there's any interest. Maybe when I'm happy with it I can upload it to my own Nexus as an optional rule change for BPM? Would that be appropriate, Elric? Oh, I've also changed that other file to make bear claws Slash/Crush and boar tusks Pierce/Crush. Thought those suited a mauling bear and charging boar better