Jayd

I was wondering if it could be the wacky situation that it only works if you cast it yourself. This game never ceases to amaze.

I was specifically told on this forum before that it doesn't work. Guess I was misled. Or am being misled. Eh.

I don't think SOT works with Vanishing Strikes because you're untargetable while invis, so the SOT aoe doesn't hit you. What I would try instead is Wizard/Assassin with Wall of Draining. I don't think the wall needs to target you.

The coolest ability in my opinion is Instruments of Pain because it so uniquely alters how you can play a build. Melee vs Ranged distance is such a basic game mechanic and being able to fiddle with it really allows for some creativity.

I tried posting this in technical support but that place is a ghost town. I'm hoping this will be allowed here since things are kind of slow. In the middle of a playthrough my game stopped recognizing what achievements I have unlocked. My Steam account still lists them properly, but my achievements list in-game was wiped and, most importantly, my Berath's Blessings were wiped. They are unlocking again as a I play but I would rather not have to earn every single one again before starting a new playthrough. I've tried verifying the game files in Steam, and my computer has restarted umpteen times since this issue started. The problem still persists. Can anyone help me out here? Maybe I need to fiddle with the game folders or something?

Nice. Why is there no Stunning Surge? To me the #1 point of playing Wanderer is to replace your auto-attack button with Stunning Surge because it's always free. I also always consider Concussive tranq a priority on any Ranger. Best cleanse in the game.

I wouldn't have it another way tbh. This is the definition of endgame loot and if you target it you can still have it for most endgame content. It's not like you need it to make a build work - it's just a huge power spike. I wouldn't call casting Ancestor's Memory 4 times (280 focus and must be near half a minute of casting time and recovery total) doing "the same" as getting the result for free at the beginning of a fight. Most fights would be over before a cipher could even accomplish this.

This is one of those things I'm shocked I've never seen anybody mention before. The final upgrade on RotW gives Brilliant to all allies within a radius for a few seconds (4s base, affected by intellect) when you Empower an ability. This can be extended with SoT. Just like that, almost your whole team (not the character wearing the robes) can have Brilliant indefinitely once you keep casting SoT occasionally. You may say: "but Jayd, I rarely use Empower because of its per-rest nature." But Chanters get Sasha's Singing Scimitar, which allows you to empower an invocation per encounter (and RotW give you a special buff when you empower an invocation). This means that you can give your whole party (excluding the Chanter) Brilliant in every single fight, for as long as you want once you have a Priest. This is WILDLY powerful, obviously. Especially in a caster-heavy party. Just posting this because it hadn't even occurred to me until recently and I use Chanters a lot.

I did a playthrough with a single class Forbidden Fist using it. The idea was that FF wants max RES, so let's see about making a deflection build with it. FF's health regen on hostile effect expiration is also surprisingly clutch for survivability. Overall the character felt very strong. With all that deflection and Crucible of Suffering constantly active (because FF), he was very hard to hit with any attack. When he got WotW he was doing great damage, too, even though it wasn't as good as other monks can manage because of TP's low base damage. This mixture of offense and defense made him quite satisfying to play. I didn't play solo, though, but I understand SC monk is great for solo. I remember I messed up the Nemnok fight and he was left to solo Nemnok plus a couple minions after the rest of the team died. Took a while (I hadn't planned for it) but he did manage to facetank Nemnok for what must've been 15-20 minutes and whittle him down. And before anyone says anything, Wound generation is NOT a problem on FF. It was easy enough to maintain my wounds throughout the game, and when I got Imagined Pain I had more wounds than I knew what to do with. At that point you can also build for disengagement defense and just run through enemies to build wounds.

Thanks, and keep reporting back, I'm considering a Liberator playthrough as part of my Shifter obsession. With all the healing potential and DoT spells I figured SI might be good to top it off but I don't have a good sense of how strong it really is.

In my experience fire cannons are garbage because they have fixed ammunition (your choice of cannonball/grapeshot, etc. is meaningless when using a fire cannon) and they have a fairly even chance to hit sails or hull. Effectively this means that to sink a ship you need to get through both its sails and its hull since your shots will be hitting both. This is just bad. Any normal cannon is better. As for best ships, it's kind of boring but I think the Junk has it. Five cannons firing at once is just overwhelming, and ship fights become trivial. Now that you can board without penalty the only reason to not use one is that it's expensive (initial price and maintaining the crew). Before a Voyager could be used to close in quick for the board at least.

Last time I played Stalker I paired it with Monk (Forbidden Fist, mostly just cuz I like it but also to extend DoTs via Enfeebled). Stalkers Patience + one from any number of crit-based weapons. I used Magistrate's Cudgel a lot for even stupider accuracy; Magran's Favour with axe modal would probably be best endgame. Ridiculous accuracy = perma-stun anything with Stunning Surge, Enfeeble, and melt it. Ranger accuracy squeezes all the DPS it can out of Swift Flurry + Heartbeat Drumming. By putting Stalker's Patience in the off hand you can sometimes recover immediately off a Stunning Surge. It was a neat single target DPS character but got kinda monotonous tbh. I didn't get him to max level before starting another playthrough.

I was playing the other night and started to get achievements (and hence Berath's Blessings) that I already had. This is in the middle of a playthrough during which I had many Blessings active. When I check achievements in the Options menu I only have the achievements I've unlocked since this time, and I barely have any Blessings if I try to start a new game. However, Steam still shows me as having the correct number of achievements. It seems like the game lost track of them and is now counting them again. I'd rather not have to earn them all again. Any ideas on how to fix this?

In the Ultimate strategy thread someone is posting videos of their successful run with Skaen/Bloodmage. I think only two people have done the challenge and both used that class.

You might want to look through this thread for build ideas. SC Barbarian is better than Brute in just about every way other than self-healing, I think. So unless you really, really want to heal yourself a whole lot I wouldn't go that route. I use SC Serafen as a main tank every playthough (POTD upscaled) and he doesn't really die so I don't think you need so much survivability once you have a squad.

@Boeroer I checked Blood Thirst and found it works like I thought it did. You don't recover from the killing blow and you still get the Blood Thirst buff which will remove your next recovery as well. Here's a shabby demonstration gif. No, that's not Crushing Blow.

When entering the fungus-infested wing of the library in Forgotten Sanctum, your party sees huge bookshelves ruined by the infestation, and Vatnir has some ambient dialogue. I'm going to paraphrase it from memory: "Scribes toiled for countless years to create these tomes. Now look at them. Fools." This really stuck with me because it was a rare example of a character in the game expressing a religious point of view in a way that was neither abstract nor directly about a deity. We hear plenty of talk about Rymrgand being the god of entropy, impermanence, final endings, etc., and we see plenty of people talk about their devotion to him and other gods. But it is rare to see a character's religious views influence their attitude towards the mundane in a way that's not entirely on the nose. It would have been nice to see more of this in the game. Have characters' religiosity come out in how they respond to actual situations, not just in abstract pontificating and declarations of devotion. Does anyone have more examples?

@Raven Darkholme I should have been more explicit that my reservations on Berserker are mainly personal dislike of having my build's playability be so dependent on food and items. Realistically it's not that hard to get around (late game it's pretty non-issue) and if you don't have that hang-up Berserker provides the most benefits (though also making you squishier - I'm also a glutton for fat builds). Glad to hear about Shifter getting a bit of love in The Ultimate. Maybe late game a regular Druid would be better because you can SoT your shift? Though maybe that defeats the point of early-game power. @Rimiu I didn't mention it in the build but I always choose Charm Beasts for a free spell too. It remains useful through the game though not often, because Druid foe/friend-only spells have anti-synergy with charm/dominate effects. But it's always a nice thing to have in your back pocket and makes the dig site cry.

Not transforming into giant anthropomorphic animals is never the awesomer option, sorry.

With Spine make sure to get the upgrade that gives you Beast power levels. For the other one I get Poison/Disease defense because I think they are more common/dangerous? But I doubt it has ever made a difference. For the Cuirass I chose Might resistance even though it is redundant with Unflinching just because it is just so incredibly better than 5% Hit to Graze. And then I picked the weapon damage reduction because the most infuriating thing in this game to me is getting stunlocked and killed by a Rogue firing squad. But other than the Beast spell buff these upgrades aren't a big deal.

My dude can you believe that I totally missed this post? The one I liked is the only one I saw from you. I don't know what it is about this forum but sometimes I straight up don't see stuff that's right there and it's pretty embarrassing. Thanks for this. On Blood Thirst not removing the recovery for the killing blow that is surprising to me. My experience is just as I described where the character will not need to recover from a killing blow and then will skip the next recovery as well. But with my track record of missing stuff that's not easy to miss I'll test next time I play. I've never used Avenging Storm scrolls (I'm really, really bad at using consumables in general) so I can't answer about those. The first buff listed on Barbaric Blow is a straightforward +20% Damage, separate from the crit damage increase. Is that a typo or something? Yeah, Berserker definitely has some great benefits and the downside can be played around. I just didn't want to deal with it. I think it's almost a RP thing with me where I'm totally reliant on stuff that is separable from my character (party, gear, food) to make my character even playable. Since confusion makes a Druid unplayable due to its reliance on foe-only/friend-only DoTs and HoTs, I just got turned off. Anyone without that hang up could certainly benefit from a Berserker though. Thanks again for your input and sorry to have missed it before.

No need to apologize, and of course. If there are questions/issues that you think might promote discussion, including strengths and especially weaknesses of the build, though, I'd encourage you to post here. But my PMs are open if you don't think a question is worth putting in the thread.

I had Dex, Con, and Res all at 10 and turned the others to max (Berath's Blessings). Point is I don't have strong feelings about using those exact stats and would actually be interested to see what other permutations would look like, so "what the build maker wanted it to be" might not apply here. Anyway, hope this helps and thanks for the interest. @Harpagornis sorry I forgot to respond before. Thanks for your work in that mod, it looks exciting (if maybe a bit OP). As you can see, I get a lot of enjoyment out of talking about builds with the community so I'm sticking to playing the base game so I'm playing the same game most others are. May try mods in the future.

Another thought I had: this would be pretty legit with Vatnir as a Zealot because of his robes that give action speed on low health, Godlike bonus, and the fact that he gets the prime cheese of BDD+Salvation of Time. You could make a custom Zealot with Streetfighter+preferred priest, Death Godlike, Vatnir's robes, and just go to town. Throw a Cipher in the party for Brilliant and you can go god mode pretty easily. Just a thought.

I mean, Rogue is the champion of weapon damage because of Sneak Attack + Deathblows among other stuff. Not picking Assassin doesn't mean to forget about Rogue. If you're willing to do potentially finnicky micro it might be worth going for a Streetfighter who plans to stay Bloodied via the sceptre self-damage. That'll certainly give you more DPS than anything else but you'll have to manage your health. If you multi with Devoted maybe you can get enough sturdiness to intentionally get your character flanked at times as well? Or stick with Monk and use Mortification of the Soul to get your health down and keep it down. You can also use Iron Wheel for a bigger health pool and extra AR, which can allow you to be pretty comfortable at low health. Stunning Surge works with ranged attacks too, right? I'd say a Streetfighter/Helwalker would definitely be the highest damage output you can get. If you're afraid of getting squished too easily another monk subclass would still leave you ahead of most competing builds, or you could try SC Streetfighter.