Wotcha

Oh, I fully agree, but the schtick of whittling (almost) everything down from perfect safety via summons was promising enough that I Wanted To Believe. It is such a solid and wide-coverage trick, that it seems at least faintly plausible that the enumerated list of fights it DOESN'T cover might be manageable to figure out alternate bespoke tricks for. That's what I meant by "seemed like it had any chance of working at all". To merely have a glimmer of hope is head and shoulders above any other trick I'd seen, besides the proven Brilliant Priest cheese.

4 out of 4 so far are Skaen priests. I guess when the entire world is dedicated to making your life as miserable as possible, worshipping Skaen is the only logical choice. I wonder what happened to the guy who was trying to do chanter/ranger. That was the only non-Priest build I'd heard of that seemed like it had any chance of working at all.

The cheesy way to avoid getting interrupted in TB mode is to exploit a glitch. Disable auto-ending of turn. Do something with a cast time. Move your cursor over the "end turn" button but don't click it! Then move your cursor away. For whatever buggy reason, this resets your action to complete instantly. You can then end your turn and have your thing go off instantly. It's cheesy as hell but works right out of the box. A lot of people never ever even notice this because they never disable auto-end of turn.

One upside of arquebus is the absence of recovery time, which means you always get the Smoke Veil off before any enemies can react. Rods wouldn't have that benefit... but mortars would! Get a few extra copies of the mortars via exported characters and you're in business. The lower range compared to arquebus may make things a little trickier for purposes of getting the shots off properly from stealth though.

My first playthrough with a custom party, I did everybody as a flavor of multiclass assassin, and had everybody use arquebuses. You can breeze through a surprising number of fights by having the entire party focus-fire Devastating Blow against a squishy enemy, with everybody Smoke Clouding immediately afterward to reset the fight, minus one enemy. Lather rinse repeat. It gets really tedious and boring after a while though.

I like it because it's a one-stop-shop for a lot of the stuff you otherwise need to spend points to support the pet. You get SO MUCH as just a class feature, requiring very little further investment at all. - Pet got hurt? You could spend a Bond AND a ability point AND a long cast time to heal it, or... you could Ghost Heart resummon it for 1 Bond, no ability investment, and fast cast time. - Pet died? Same deal, except it also costs less Bond to resummon than revive. - Pet Immobilized? Dominated? Stunned? Paralyzed? ANY kind of CC? Resummon. Problem solved. - Pet needs to be moved? Either let it walk because it's immune to engagement, or resummon.

Oh, come on, you couldn't have found a LOTR meme to use instead?

I hadn't thought of that as another reason to go Ghost Heart if you're willing to sign up for the micromanagement. Not that I NEED another reason to go Ghost Heart, it's absolutely my first choice for Ranger.

Surprised you didn't get disqualified due to use of external playing aids like Netflix! I'm reminded of my old Angband-playing days, where the True Final Boss of the game is not Morgoth, but Boredom. Just endlessly grinding for the perfect set of gear, fleeing instantly at the first sign of trouble, until you get the full list checked off and can make the final attack run. There's a similar thing in play for Nethack, but Nethack play is FAR less boring than Angband play.

If you don't have something specific to do with your phrases otherwise, and the enemy is not immune or highly resistant to Shock, having your chanter spamming Revenge is extremely good damage single-target, and probably the best thing you can do multi-target, for the vast majority of the game. A Skald with Brilliant running hardly needs to do anything else. It's a particularly good strategy for a paladin/chanter or fighter/chanter main tank, because it needs so little investment, freeing up a lot of points for focusing on your tankiness. Pretty much the only downside is that it's really boring.

A REAL Path of the Damned would change the scripting of the initial conversation with Berath, to make her always reincarnate you as a small animal regardless of your dialogue choices. To actually progress in the game, you'd have to figure out how to hack around that scripting to get back into your body. Kids these days, getting coddled by their easy-mode "hard modes", I tell you.

Correct! because Time Parasite has full buff stacking mechanics, which do basically work as expected duration-wise (and why I want to use them). But full buff stacking mechanics for, say, Borrowed Instincts, would result in +20 acc and all defenses for EACH target affected, which is problematic to say the least. The idea here is to try to take advantage of the proper duration mechanics for fully stacking buffs on transfer attacks, but to decouple the buff stacking from the buff effect.

I tested this very thoroughly back when I was more actively working on my cipher mod, which has been sadly languishing while I've been otherwise occupied by life. I hope to get back to it with some fresh eyes now that I've had a break. As it stands now, there's no way to refresh the buff except by casting it again at the same target. If you cast it on another target, the other target gets the debuff, but the caster's duration remains tied exclusively to the first target's remaining duration. So if the first target goes down, you are doomed to have some kind of downtime on your buff. Either immediately because the target got gibbed, or because eventually the duration on the now-dead first target will tick down to zero, and until it does, you can't get a new duration by affecting any other targets. If you're relying on those buffs to be tanky, well, sucks to be you. I have a technique that I want to try, to make these transfer spells a little less flaky. The idea would be to turn the spell transfer itself into a stackable buff. That buff does nothing at all, so it can stack without causing any weird scaling effects. There would be another, invisible buff, which would become visible and take its effect (NON-stackably) if the number of the stacks of that specific do-nothing buff is greater than zero. What this does is tie the caster buff to the presence of ANY enemies that have the debuff on them, for only as long as any enemies have the debuff. That makes the buff easily persistable without gaps if the player just takes care to get the debuff spread to another target before the first one dies. If the debuff ticks down on all enemies, the buff disappears, as one would expect. This may all sound needlessly complicated, but I think it's the only way to get a non-flaky behavior for the transfer spells. I tried every combo of flags that I could think of within the existing framework, to coerce the engine into decent behavior. No dice. I like the flavor of these transfer effects, I'd like their mechanics to not be quite so grossly inferior to their equivalents that other classes have.

To be clear, Psychovampiric Shield and other such transfer-oriented buff/debuff spells DO continue through their full duration even if the enemy dies... but only if the enemy's corpse still exists. If the enemy in question dies of Disintegrate (which destroys the body on death), PVS and other such spells end immediately. That also goes for when the enemy is gibbed by a crit on death (because you foolishly hadn't turned that off yet), or the body gets consumed by Flesh Communion or similar.

You can pretty mindlessly plow through almost every fight if you have decent sustained healing, even if you're all the way in -75% pen range. You can live practically forever against nearly all opponents if you have Ancient Memory, Exalted Endurance, and the Two Fingers of Daylight invocation every time you get the phrases. Unless the enemy has healing. In which case, you need to outdamage their heals. When you combine enemies with self-healing AND Llengrath's Safeguard or similar massive-defense-boost spells, it gets nastier. Neriscyrlas is the first such serious opponent with that combo, and that right there is what makes BoW such a huge step-function check on difficulty. You suddenly have to start paying attention to your melee stacking up (and thus all getting hit by Corrosive Siphon for both significant damage and enemy healing), getting decent penetration to up your DPS, and being able to reliably interrupt or cleanse Safeguard off. Or, y'know, just cast Brand Enemy and chill out around the corner for half an hour until she dies. But you can't do that for every such nasty fight. I only do it when I want to recruit Vatnir early (he's easily the best offense-oriented priest in the game).