Steampunkgears

So far I am enjoying Pallegina as a crusader. Having tekehu with chants probably will make up for Pallegina not being a herald. If I did make her a herald I probably would of swapped tekehu for aloth. But at the same time I don't know how I would of built her if she was a herald. I need to come up with something for next time.

Right thelee mentioned this to me similarly where someone else starts the fight and I load up on Eldritch aim and some kind of other buffs I have yet to get. Any recommendations? And as for another companion getting a AR reducing ability I got to look at who and what to get skill wise or even equipment wise that might help.

Once I get access to higher lvls I plan to get high-impact aoe spells that you can cast from invisibility to take advantage of the bonus PEN, crit damage, and accuracy. fireball or noxious burst for example.

Right but if I'm correct that still counts as a sneak attack. I have only used stealth in the beginning to proc the engagement and I'm considering using it to get sneak attacks on enemies that my tanks are engaging. I am also dual wielding a mace and a stiletto both fine quality for the 10pen. I plan to get the other stealth's like shadowing beyond later on as they are probably infinitely better than smoke fail. Edit: lol voice to text doesn't like smoke veil and says fail.

@ Theurgist at the moment I took build advice from thelee. Party is lvl 7 so I'm starting to see some fruits come from spells and skills. Most fights I pretty much start off with chill fog or slicken depending on foes. Tekehu also has chill fog thx to his background traits. I'm using Pallegina with the endless paths greatsword and she's doing pretty well besides eder. My mc bounces back and forth between Eldritch aim, blood sacrifice, chill frost or slicken, and cancolhaults corrosive siphion. Noxious burst as well. Once things are as best as I can cc them with my main I start using Eldritch aim and then escape to get behind someone my tanks are engaged with and try to get a stab or 2 in. If they start to agrro me I escape to safety and start siphion again or actually heal. I am wondering if I should pop smoke veil the use escape to get behind a engaged enemy to get a sneak attack in. That's basically what I have been doing with the mc. My companions have custom behavior set for some of their off the rip skills and I try to micro manage anything that needs to be done in fighting. There is alot I'm still learning but since I added tekehu and Pallegina to the group I have been able to take on more enemies. I am have a tad bit of trouble with the The Cornett's Call in the ancient city where my fights are really close usually one or 2 enemies are at a quarter health when I'm out of everything. Need to prep more potions or scrolls. I'm not using consumables as much as I should.

So I realized that the build I'm doing on Aloth kind of relies on either a ranged heavy group and or a priest to help buff his perception......if this is the case I'm keeping xoti as of level 7 she starts getting some nice spells such as Devotions for the Faithful & Shining Beacon. So I'm dropping aloth for tekehu and probably going to crusade Pallegina. So currently party comp is Mc - spellblade assassin/blood mage eder as swashbuckler Pallegina -Main role: Striker, Tanker Sub role: Support Auras Xoti - stiker/support Tekehu - Main role: Disabler, Healer Sub role: Striker, Summoner Looks solid to me but still open for opinions.

At the moment it's a hard choice for me. I don't know how great tekehu is bit he looks like a nice support/healer and if I used him in place of xoti or Aloth I would probably have Pallegina as a crusader for the double tank with eder. On the other hand having her as a herald is good all around as everyone says. The problem is a solid build for her that works in the current patch. I got a build for the crusader already. You got any build recommendations for herald in the build forum post of yours?

On a new note I am highly considering grabbing tekehu and dropping xoti and making Pallegina a crusader. This is a hard debate.

@ Ophiuchus good to know, at the current time I need to be carful of might buffs as it directly damges my mc more when I use blood sacrifice. But that being said later lvls and a higher health pool might not be a issue then. My current MC actually has a nice holiday pool but that can move up and down really fast depending on the situation. Any herald builds would be nice I anyone has any. If none are presented I will assume one of the builds in the pinned forum posts is fine. Also what are some recommend skills/spells/chants like must haves for herald?

With that in mind should I look at dropping xoti potentially?

I have not looked at any builds for the herald, pulled this off the forums here https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/102541-companion-build-tuono-e-fulmine/ I'm looking for potentially passive hp gain, any insight into a build would be great.

You have a point, however depending on how long the game is I'm only playing one night a week for my community as I do not have alot of time right now. Plus 100% on potd is probably going to be awhile so right now I'm enjoying it. Plus I'm a disabled veteran with memory issues so I'll probably forget my companions builds by the next time I play lol. Just wanted to get a comfy set up. I'm also working the companion ai to hopefully help me with not having to micro managing everything.

Once I meet Tekehu I will look into him, however I am quite fond of Aloth so thats a hard choice for me. good news is I can always swap them out if im not happy later I just want to make sure that i make the right multi class choices for my companions as I cant re roll the class later.

Hey everyone, I am currently running a assassin/Blood mage on POTD with AI up scaled. I wanted to use Pallegina and originally planned to use https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1400804034 as her build. although this looks like a solid build, I can not help but think I should go with her as a herald mainly because I read that she would be putting out great passive hp healing and was not sure if that would mesh better with my class. I will provide the rest of my party comp. I just picked up Pallegina so only lvl 7 currently and this is the farthest I have been in poe2 as I was burnt out at launch after playing 120hrs on hard in poe1 Current Party comp *MC -assassin/Blood mage -I use blood sacrifice "A LOT" to control what spells I wish to continue to use. I also use concelhaut's corrosive siphon as a form of gaining health alot as well when im having issues either with running low on hp pots or xoti is running low on healing casts. *Eder -swashbuckler - and pretty much tank atm..... using lost sinners build as well as it looked solid https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1398100119 *Xoti - Priest - currently only party heals and support. I am also not sure I want to keep her if another "better" healer comes up. *Aloth - Wizard - also using lost sinners build for aloth https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1406080663 I mainly wanted advice on Pallegina but I am also looking on input on my other companions and what might mesh well with what I got pre planned here for my party. Thanks for the help. Updated: I have received alot of pointers toward using her as a herald. Any builds for her would be appreciated. Also the recommendation to get Tekehu and swap him out with aloth and go with Pallegina as a crusader is up for debate.

Yeah it's a hard say. I was looking at originally playing paly/assassin but I feel that might get a little boring if I'm too tanky. I feel the spellblade was a good pick because you can technically use inv spells and evade to tank/ control your position in a battle. The potential for continuously using your fav aoe or even alpha a single target multiple times sounds like a fun challenge to me. Also being able to target nuisances like backline bowmen is a boon too. It all comes down to managing your blood sacrifice to control your spells. The wiz/monk also sounds great but as you said self healing is a problem and I don't know if that class has any get out of harm spells/skills.

Yeah it was a hard choice between spellblade and monk/wiz, I ended up picking spellblade as I have not really played any playthrough with this kind of class and wanted to spice things up. Don't get me wrong I feel the pain but I also see the potential power. I may end up also trying with the monk here in a few days to see how that plays out. The synergy sounds amazing with the monk and I can imagine it dishing out some damage. Is the blood mage/monk tanky at all? @ Boeroer

makes sense @ thelee

i ended up going 10,15,20,10,18,5 I probably could of dumped res to 3 and put that in con but at the time was not sure. and i wanted good con as the health pool really gives you the resources to work with. Perception and be buffed early by eldritch aim. edit: 20 dex was achieved from background choices i think base was maxed at 19

One thing you can bear in mind - you can use it to self-damage yourself at the start of combat to trigger Llengarth's Safeguard as well as potentially to get your health low enough to use Potion of Final Stand, both of which you can then extend (along with all other buffs) with Wall of Draining. The trouble with Blood Sacrifice is that if you have cast a few spells from different levels, it's pretty random on which ones it will give back, and you can easily kill yourself spamming it too much unless you have a no-death effect (like Potion of Final Stand). it's also a good synergy with human or death godlike racial passives. multiclassing with priest or having a priest in your party solves the accidental self-knockout problem because unlike potion of final stand you can use barring death's door without needing to be near death first (and if you want to go for this angle, you can follow up with a potion of final stand after you've safely been dropped to near death). mentioned this in messages with steampunkgears but i'll reiterate it here just for anyone else coming to the discussion - blood sacrifice is powerful because you can control what spells you get back, and I suspect the only reason why the entire forum community hasn't come to an agreement that blood mage is like the most powerful subclass ever is because people haven't actually tried to play the blood mage like this, instead just using it as a slower, random form of self-empower for spell cast restore. it's worth "inefficiently" trying to use blood sacrifice at times, just so that it helps restore spells you do want later down the line (like if you opened with a few self-buffs, even though you don't need to restore spells yet you can use blood sacrifice to fill up again so that when you do want to restore spell casts you don't end up restoring spell levels you didn't want). it skews you heavily to AL1-3 and AL4-6 (to a lesser extent) spells, but it's worth it because spells in poe1/deadifre are generally better designed to be good from beginning to end regardless of spell level (unlike BG where frequently lower level spells were just not worth the time late game, hellloooo larloch's minor drain) @thelee I understand the (+7 Accuracy,+15% Damage) near death. but i feel like the +1might and +1res are a waste here. unless you go 9 might as a base stat and put that one point somewhere else like con, same with res i guess.

One thing you can bear in mind - you can use it to self-damage yourself at the start of combat to trigger Llengarth's Safeguard as well as potentially to get your health low enough to use Potion of Final Stand, both of which you can then extend (along with all other buffs) with Wall of Draining. The trouble with Blood Sacrifice is that if you have cast a few spells from different levels, it's pretty random on which ones it will give back, and you can easily kill yourself spamming it too much unless you have a no-death effect (like Potion of Final Stand). Yeah I got to messing around with it plus was given a nice explanation in a pm about it. As mentioned to me by thelee Blood sacrifice does 5, 10, or 15 damage to yourself and randomly restores a spell from AL1-3, 4-6, or 7-9 respectively; if there's no spell to restore at the given "bucket" it drops down a bucket until it finds something to restore or you have no spells to restore at all. I have actually setup my attributes to synergize with blood sacrifice by putting points into Con, so my health pool is not bad, there is also a item at the BB vendor in port maje that sells a necklace that adds +25 hp so that also helps early on. Although its still very early in the game for me i got a good feel for how to roll with this class but using blood sacrifice to replenish spells is quite handy. with the proper skills i.e. eldritch aim to help with accuracy and potential smoke veil later on creating crit opportunities are numerous and also keep the MC safe in a way.

Also, what have some people found as good starting weapon proficiencies for this class?

I meant to ask this as well but is blood sacrifice meant to be used in place of empower or is it a spam type thing to where I can use it to increase dmg output? I am assuming it's limited and that's why it has been mentioned to dump points in con to help keep the self dmg low.

Thanks thelee, I will keep that in mind for my build tomorrow. Anyone else with insight on stat allocation for the assassin/bloodmage would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone, I was planning on doing a Potd new run with a Assassin/wizard(blood mage) and I could not decide on stat allocation. I was reading from someone that Dex and Int are a must to max and Per is a nice added bonus if you could afford it. I was worried what to put into Might as I was not sure how that would affect my character when using blood sacrifice. Was also wondering how low should I dump Con/Res? So far the stats im looking at using from what I have gather so far are as follows (12,8,20,15,18,5) any help on adjusting this would be appreciated. Also starting spells abilities to grab asap for this build would be nice to know as I am unfamiliar with how this class plays. This class setup seems like it would be fun and Im excited to give it a try. Thanks in advance for the advice/help.