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).

The variant saying re: opionions and buttholes is: "Everybody finds it a little uncomfortable when their own are examined too closely."

The easiest way to simplify pet management for a ranger is to go Ghost Heart. That makes your pet into a summon, with a very fast cast time, a very long duration, and a moderate summon targeting range, for 1 bond. This is so, so much better than it sounds. You get, starting from level 1 and requiring no ability point investment, the ability to effectively short-range teleport your pet, while simultaneously healing and dispel all CC from it, even bringing it back from death if it had died, just for 1 bond. At lower levels, the bond cost is a little painful, but eventually it gets trivial in comparison to what you get for it. There are a couple of very minor downsides to Ghost Heart. It combines poorly with summoning classes because a given character can only have one summon out at a time (so a regular ranger could have their animal companion and another summon, but the Ghost Heart pet counts as the summon itself). There are a couple of metagame things where a meat pet is handy but those are hard to describe to a new player. And the summon duration is very long but not infinite. In a very long fight, an animal companion might keep going after the point you ran out of Bond to keep the summon up. But that’s almost more theoretical than practical, because that’s a VERY long fight indeed, and it would be exactly the kind of fight that a regular animal companion might easily die early in.

Minor chime-in, my cipher mod buffs the otherwise-a-bit-sad Psychovampiric Shield to give +20 Deflection along with Steadfast. The old PoE1 Vamp Shield gave +25 Deflection which definitely made it a real defensive tool. Being +Deflection specifically means it can stack with Borrowed Instincts’s +20 All, although in practice I think it will be challenging trying to keep too many transfer buff/debuffs going at the same time (probably also want Body Attunement too!) while still getting any DPS done. When I publish the mod, I would greatly appreciate playtesting of things like tank/cipher solo builds. Trying to find time to work on it has been challenging lately.

Auranic, of course, is probably totally boned against any of the others, sigils or not.

If this little lash trick works the same against Nagas, it would work GREAT because of that low Burn AR issue (which suckered me in the first time too- IT’S A TRAP!). If the lash doesn’t get converted, it’s going to instead get the +30% Overpen bonus. That doesn’t apply to Dorudugan, because his Burn AR is sky-high like most of his other AR, instead of baiting you with a feinted weakness.

That’s a keyword vs damage type issue. Nothing does “Fire” damage. Only “Burn” damage. The damage-to-healing effect that Dorudugan has operates against Burn damage, not Fire keywords. But it sounds like that status effect is only applied against the direct damage of an attack, not lashes. This is interesting because this loophole probably applies to Flames of Devotion, Turning Wheel, and Mith Fyr as well, all of which I was expecting to be worse than useless against Dorudugan. If those abilities are not affected by this loophole, that’s also interesting in itself because it reveals a difference in code path between a weapon’s inherent lash and an additional ability lash. Also, what about Magran’s Spiritual Weapons? You’d probably see the inverse effect at play with Boiling Spray, which does Burn damage but does NOT have the Fire keyword. I would expect Dorudugan to convert that to healing normally.

It's shorter compared to many wizard tanking buffs, which are additionally much faster to get stacked up due to zero recovery on most of them. Admittedly it also comes with a target debuff which makes it a little more worthwhile, but for these powers the real point is that of the buff, because the debuffs are single-target and not particularly overwhelming. If it were possible to do within the cipher "unwritten rules of flavor", the cipher would generally be better served with a no-recovery buff-only spell instead of a buff which is chained to the baggage of a mediocre debuff. But the game fluff of ciphers needing to anchor every power invocation on the mind of somebody else forbids simple self-buffs, and it would be an extremely bad idea to remove recovery from a spell that also inflicts a debuff, otherwise an Ascended cipher (for instance) could debuff the entire board in just a couple of seconds. A tank-oriented wizard can get fully spun up in the first few seconds of a fight, compared to a tank-oriented cipher who is going to have recovery between each cast, and on top of that has to build up focus to get anything more than one or two of the cheapest things going. That's pretty damning for a tank, because tanks generally need to be focused on the job of tanking from the very instant that the fight begins, and need their defenses the very most at the very start of the fight, when they are getting pounded on by the most enemies. Admittedly the wizard tank would have to figure out how to get his spell slots back if he wanted to do this trick multiple times in a fight, while the cipher is going to be getting focus from attacks along the way, but that should be discounted by the tank role rapidly fading in importance as the fight gets underway, the enemy alpha-strike gets absorbed, and the enemies under management dwindle as they get taken out in turn. I consider the tank's job to be important for roughly the first third of the fight, after that the tank is useful but not essential except when there are REALLY tough hard-hitters that need long term management. I'm not sure it's possible to make a cipher-powered tank work well enough to succeed at the tank role without either significantly changing the flavor of the class (like by letting them outright self-buff), making them ridiculously overpowered for other uses, or both. But it's a design goal I'm trying to meet. I suspect I'm going to fail here, but I'm doing the due diligence to find out. An additional wrinkle is that after testing, it appears that you can't even overlap these buffs to achieve redundancy. If you Vamp Shield a second target while the first is still active, the second target gets the debuff, but the buff side gets totally ignored, and the cipher still only has the original buff attached to the first target, even if the time remaining on that effect is shorter than it would be if the second cast's transfer buff overwrote the first cast. The vamp shield buff is tied exclusively to that first target. I'm going to experiment with this a bit. Ideally I would like the caster buffs to both appear alongside each other, each with their own duration attached to their own debuff, but not actually stack in terms of bonus effects (i.e. you could have two Borrowed Instincts buffs on you, originating from different targets, and get the benefit as long as at least one of those targets is still affected, but you'd only get the +20 defenses and +20 accuracy once even while both debuffs were live). If I can make that behavior happen via standard mod configuration, I'll do that and call it a day with respect to these powers.

Right? I noticed it when I was specifically testing these effects for other reasons (the ongoing work for my cipher mod), and it was a very obvious and strange thing to see. It’s a bit limiting that the cipher’s best survivability buffs are attached to this mechanic, which 1) makes them impossible to extend via standard SoT style shenanigans, and 2) makes them easy to lose prematurely in combination with one of the cipher’s best DPS abilities (Disintegration). I don’t have any immediate plans to address this particular weakness, but time and testing will tell if such a weakness is severe enough to prevent cipher-power-oriented tank/solo builds. I still need to test how things work with multiples of the same transfer effect work when one target expires or drops the effect. The standard longer-replaces-shorter behavior doesn’t seem to apply for transfer effects, or rather the only such duration checking applies on the debuff side only.

There are a few effects in the game, mostly Cipher powers, which inflict a debuff on an enemy or enemies, and a corresponding transfer buff onto the caster which is linked to the enemy debuff. I thought that in addition to the buff disappearing when the debuff expires, the buff would also immediately disappear when the targeted enemy dies. Turns out it doesn't, unless the enemy is gibbed (but anybody with sense turns gibs off of course), or destroyed via Disintegrate or other such body-destroying effects. I haven't tested it specifically, but I suspect that eating the corpse with Flesh Communion or other such after-the-fact body destroying effects would also prematurely end the buff. I don't know where I got the idea that the buff would disappear with the death of the enemy, but I suspect maybe I noticed such a buff disappearing long ago when I started playing the game but didn't realize I wanted to have gibs turned off. But having corrected that misunderstanding, I thought I'd mention it in case others had somehow also gotten the same wrong idea. It certainly made the transfer-mechanic abilities seem a lot less appealing to me for a long time (with exceptions such as Borrowed Instinct or Time Parasite, which are so good as to override such minor concerns). I still don't entirely approve of them from a min-max point of view, because they can't be extended with SoT. I assume they could be extended by debuff-extending mechanics against the source of the transfer, but there aren't nearly so many of those.

Simple answer: yes they do.