Shai Hulud

Not how I would have spread the stats but I'll defer to your expertise on this. My experience with paladins is relatively limited and heralds really just Pallegina. I guess it's pretty different solo, and in a great many fights just outtanking things is sufficient to win, though these kinds of builds inevitably have trouble with certain fights where enemies heal themselves (like Dorudugan, or the vithrack and moon spiders in forgotten sanctum). My line of thought was you'd generally have a wall of summons and good healing, hence little need for resolve. But I can see that dexterity is not very important either, granted phrases build up automatically and invocations are rate-limited by phrase buildup more than dexterity.

I wasn't aware withdraw procced brilliant but I guess it makes sense as you're "invisible" when withdrawn. I've never seen it before because usually you proc brilliant to try to get some effect like blade cascade from scordeo's edge, or buffs like barring death's door to become relatively permanent with repeated casts of salvation of time, which you can't do when withdrawn. But that would be very useful until you get the higher level spells, particularly if while withdrawn you get back the casts of withdraw. You could cast it repeatedly until all your spells and fighter resources are back. The spells you get back are random I think, only way to be sure you get back a certain spell tier is to have that be the only one you're missing.

I made a rough guide in this thread on psion/troubadour, and abot (resident psion/troubadour expert) also posted a lot of stuff. The abilities I listed are what I'd typically take at later levels. For individual battles you sometimes want to respec because certain summons may be usesless in that battle, and you'd prefer more cipher spells. I've never been much of a fan of the thrice was she wronged spell, but kaylon does have a point, the very early summons are kind of bad. But...paired with psion you are fine. You can still easily win fights with them but it may take a while. Take soul shock at L1 and cast that on top of your summons for early damage. Even the wyrms you get at level 4 aren't that bad, particularly once you reach level 7 on cipher side and can cast pain link on them. With pain link they just have to go out there and get killed and they'll do damage. Their upgrade at level 10 / 11 is also quite good. The very top tier summons is the instruments of death at l18, but you can get by with the lower ones until then. It is very easy to reach L7 without combat, just stealth through maje and stealth through deadlight. Tadah, you're L7. Not that you have to do this, but it's faster than grinding out low level encounters without meaningful rewards. Psion builds up focus passively, as a troubadour builds up phrases passively (and very quickly with brisk recitation on). The two go together very well and you can often cast cipher spells on your summons while far enough away the enemy won't even attack you. If they do head towards you, use whispers of treason on them if you took it at L1, which I'd suggest. I think you'd enjoy this, it's a fun play style that can handle nearly every battle without resorting to cheese tactics. MIG tends to be overrated, there are a few builds where you should max it but generally you want it in the 7 to 14 range. You also don't need to max dex because there are diminishing returns on action speed. For a herald the stats depend whether you're melee herald or using pistols (or whatever), for melee I'd probably do something like 13/10/13/19/18/3, dumping resolve doesn't hurt a paladin's deflection that much because of deep faith but if you want something tankier try 9/12/10/19/18/8. For ranged herald you really don't need resolve or much con, you can keep summons between you and enemies even solo, I'd do 13/7/16/19/18/3

I need to make a proper guide for tactician / blood mage and tactician / skaen. There's a tiny bit of setup I guess. Godlikes are a trap unless you really know what you're doing...particularly death godlikes since they benefit from fighting near death. Troubadour / psion is not complicated FWIW. Summon things, buff things. Send summons to fight things.

I haven't played druids much...that could work but you don't have a super reliable tactic like shadowing beyond or arkemyr's brilliant departure. And yes defences would be considerably worse than a mage or priest. Also you can actually steal that chill fog spell as a blood mage. Biakara has it, among other watershapers. She sails around Hasongo. In case you didn't know, to steal a spell permanently, take a grimoire with minor grimoire imprint (like aloth's grimoire, do not memorize it), cast it on an enemy spellcaster, then if you graze or better the spell appears in your quickbar. If you get a spell you want to keep, cycle to another grimoire and it will stay permanently. I stole party friendly chill fog in my ultimate run. Used it most fights, just threw it down on top of me at regular intervals. Very useful, though I had unlimited casts of it. Well you can certainly go tactician / skaen, that is super reliable, though in my opinion a bit too easy compared to blood mage. I mean blood mage is also easy but it takes a bit of technical knowledge and setup to become immortal, whereas with a tactician / skaen it's really just barring death's door -> salvation of time -> shadowing beyond -> brilliant -> salvation of time -> buff whatever -> salvation of time -> keep buffing -> salvation of time over and over, the end. You don't need an uber powerful build like these but soling on POTD upscaled is actually pretty difficult if you're trying to do it "legitimately" without cheese strategies. Background...I usually pick artist, dissident, or explorer for the history. Stealth and mechanics are also useful throughout the game. For your skills you should invest heavily in stealth to at least 7 points, and put the rest of the points in mechanics for active skills, while for passives take diplomacy to about 13 for most of the game, then later you can respec with history maxed for combat, assuming you use the giftbearer cloth, otherwise you don't particularly need history. There are a lot of survival checks. The hard survival checks mostly come later in SSS. There are hard arcana and metaphysics checks in FS but you don't need to pass them. Stealth, mechanics, diplomacy, and survival. History if wearing giftbearer cloth. Other skills you may want if using certain items, like metaphysics for essence interrupter. If you grab the boots of stealth ASAP in deadlight that will help, also the burglar's gloves in periki's. Hylea's bounty in addition to the huge health and defenses boost gives +2 all skills, and luminous adra potions gives +2 all skills, and they stack, though you may have to save/reload to see them stack. So after you buy training you should have 5 to 7 points even in skills you didn't invest in, enough for easy checks. Carry lots of thiefs putty and the other unguents to bring those skills to 7 to 9. Mostly thief's putty, but they're all useful so don't sell them.

Did you level yourself up with the console? Because a lot of strong builds start out kinda weak. Soul blades don't get their best spell until level 13 (borrowed instinct). When I'm testing builds I usually load a L20 character with lots of gear in the SSS arena, remove his gear, then use console "opencharactercreation" to make a new character, then "addexperience 200000" to get him to L20 (or whatever). Tactician / soul blade sounds good because phantom foes can flank everyone, but for that to work it has to land vs everyone, and even then, brilliant is kind of useless on the cipher side. So it isn't as good a combination as it might seem initially. Also you have no way solo to avoid the penetration and accuracy penalty of not having an ally. So you always have -1 pen and -10 accuracy. Cipher can make up for that with hammering thoughts and borrowed instinct, but still. A tactician / blood mage can just summon an essential phantom every now and then. Tactician / skaen can summon spiritual ally. Your stats are not how I would have spread them but there are many ways to build characters depending how you want to use them. I'm assuming since it is a soul blade you want to melee more than cast spells. Your stat spread is okay for that, though you really don't need that much resolve. Just wear the ring of the solitary wanderer to make up for the +hostile effect duration, and keep up psychovampiric shield and you can dump resolve quite a lot. You want max INT almost always though. I'd probably have done 12/9/14/20/18/4 assuming I'm a wild orlan. Before berath. So 14/11/16/22/20/6 I guess. Your stats seem too high, they should sum to 88 with berath. Yours sum to 94. Yeah I think you don't need that much resolve because psychovampiric shield is +5 and borrowed instinct is +20 all defenses. Your might is too low for soul annihilation to do much damage or build focus fast. Blood mage / tactician is a lot of fun. Tactician / skaen would also work. All you have to do to proc brilliant is use arkemyr's brilliant departure or shadowing beyond respectively. But with blood mage you also have blood sacrifice which once you have unbending built up you can spam as much as you need. You do need Berath's Challenge on, but don't worry, it doesn't make the game harder at all for solo. Berath's challenge is two things: if you go unconscious for 10 seconds, you're dead. Since you're solo, this would happen anyway. And the second thing is you can't flee battles. That's what allows invisibility to proc brilliant, because for some reason when you "flee" with invisibility the enemies start to ignore you after a few rounds. Normally combat would have ended there, but with berath challenge they're all considered flanked at that point for some reason. And yes you use either invisibility spell, then wait like 3 or 4 rounds and brilliant will proc, then you just wait and they refill both fighter and wizard / priest resources. Blood mage can also proc brilliant with chill fog, may be useful at lower levels. Also interrupts give back fighter resources, but it isn't "any" interrupt, you have to interrupt a spell or ability, something with an icon. Mule kick interrupts on graze, and if you're using citzal's spirit lance and you mule kick, you mule kick EVERYONE in the lance AOE radius, so you can often do that for free if one of those people is trying to cast something. You can also interrupt with things like the slicken spell. I'd use similar stats for either a blood mage / tactician or blood mage / skaen as they're both caster / fighter hybrids. Something like 9/12/14/20/19/4 for blood mage (need a bit of CON for blood sacrifice), for skaen maybe 13/8/14/20/19/4. You don't have to dump CON and RES that much though, could do like 9/10/12/20/19/8. Most important thing is high PER and INT and decent DEX so your spells last a long time, your attacks and spells have good accuracy. Resolve doesn't matter much for deflection because blood mage and priest both have so many buffs. Troubadour / psion is fun if you like summoning things. That's most of what you do. You don't need a lot of the traditional combat stats like mig / con / res because it's your summons fighting and you shouldn't be getting hit much or doing direct damage that much either. The Ancient Instruments of Death are really good, though you don't get them until level 19, but other summons are quite good in various situations, like the wyrms, the ogres, the will o wisps., even the lowly skeletons. You can cast pain link on your summons which returns damage to things attacking them. You can also buff them with pain block, echoing shield, tactical meld, use ectopsychic echo for beam damage, as well as using direct spells like ringleader and mental binding. If you like summoning and crowd control, this is the build. Stats I would go like 9 / 8 / 18 / 20 / 19 / 4 (as an orlan, but you can be whatever, though little point in being human). Hey I like doing this kind of thing It depends which of these three builds you pick, though gear for tactician / skaen and tactician / blood mage are similar. Here is a tactician / blood mage gear. I tried to pick gear that is available in the first half of the game, though really this gear is fine the whole way. The sword is important, squid's grasp. You need that or the club kapana taga for the flanking immunity, and devil of caroc breastplate you should enchant with mechanical mind so you can't be confused. You can still become shaken if you summon a weapon and get flanked. The late game pet retina can help with being flanked. What I like to do is start with squid's grasp and a shield (lethandria's devotion is good but whatever you want), cast a bunch of buffs from llengrath's martial mysteries, switch grimoires to arkemyr's grimoire (or arkemyr's illuminating discoveries), cast arcane veil, then all the wizard buffs are up, cast unbending trunk and a wall of draining, position yourself or cast CC spells as necessary so you won't be flanked, then cast citzal's spirit lance. You'll lose flanking immunity but the weapon is insanely good and distributes mule kicks. You can of course attack with whatever other weapon you prefer, but put squid's grasp in your offhand. Not only for the flanking immunity, but you also get +20% attack speed when threatened by 3 or more enemies. It is really good solo, you can get it at treasure trove in dunnage. Here's what I picked at each level (not necessarily in this order) Disciplined Barrage, Knock Down, Slicken, Chill Fog Fighter Stances, Weapon and Shield, Two Handed, Confident Aim Disciplined Strikes, Mule Kick, Rapid Recovery, Hold the Line, Bear's Fortitude Charge, Weapon Specialization Conqueror Stance, Unbending, Tough, Uncanny Luck, Armored Grace, Pull of Eora, Rapid Casting Improved Critical, Martial Caster Unbending Trunk, Weapon Mastery, Wall of Draining I should note I skipped Vigorous Defense and Refreshing Defense because although these are very good, the +20 defense doesn't stack with Llengrath's Safeguard, which gives +20 all defenses AND +5 armor, so the safeguard is better, though you get it a couple levels later I think, so you might want Vigorous Defense in the meantime and respec later. Note you don't really need to memorize any spells, but I'd take at least Wall of Draining, Chill Fog, and Slicken for their utility to the class, and I personally love Pull of Eora because it groups enemies nicely and interrupts them (though I don't think it returns points like other interrupts), mostly it is just awesome for setting people up for citzal's spirit lance or AOE spells. Wear Upright Captain's Belt or take Hold the Line so you'll be immune to the push/pull effect from Pull of Eora. I can go into my picks for Skaen if you want though I'm less familiar with that build, can also do troubadour / psion, I am pretty familiar with that build Items starting at helm and going counterclockwise: cap of the laughingstock (gives you +10 accuracy vs deflection and if you have a phantom summoned or use mirror image it gives you immune to resolve afflictions so now flanked won't cause shaken or confused) charm of bones devil of caroc breastplate (take devil's due and mechanical mind) ring of the solitary wanderer boots of the stone pes (or frau nils or abraham, replace later with blinky or retina) girdle of mortal protection (can replace later with girdle of eoten con) entonia signet ring (stays good, may want to replace with ring of prosperity's fortunte when rich) gauntlets of accuracy (stays good, lot of good bracer choices) giftbearer cloth (use cape of falling star or cloak of greater protection before you get this, once you get you want history at least 15) weapons griffin's blade, squid's grasp, kapana taga, lethandria's devotion other equipment of note: rekvu's fractured casque gives immunity to interrupts if you have an injury. Just run over a caltrops trap to get a wrenched knee (-25% stride), stride doesn't matter since you have deletrious alacrity of motion. Or you can kill yourself with necrotic lance for acute rash (fortitude debuff) or with fire for serious burn (-2 dex). These are the least bad injuries and in some cases absolutely worth it, particularly the wrenched knee, there are caltrops traps at poko kohara ruins. If you need to clear injuries drink luminous adra potion, which also gives you +2 all skills, and it stacks with hylea's bounty. For solo runs you should try not to rest so you can keep dawnstar's blessing and nature's resolve. Just use hylea's bounty early, or hot razor skewers which you can buy in neketaka would also be good for this build. Guide for no rest run

I finally tested this build when I came up against Sissak and found the encounter seemingly impossible with my savage build, which has otherwise been able to solo everything. Anyway, I was surprised just how damn tanky the armored arcanist is. Was getting pelted on all sides by minoletta's missile salvos, death of 1000 cuts, and various melee attacks and the enemies might as well have been sneezing at me. But...the encounter was still impossible, just for different reasons. It grinds on indefinitely. With BPM enabled I couldn't get past the second stage (after the moon spiders come out). The spiders heal everyone too quickly. Also, I noticed the toon has the unfortunate tendency of switching targets for no apparent reason. Would get a guy to bloodied then switch to someone else, then get that guy to bloodied, then switch back to the other one who is now healed. I made some changes to the script because you have enough health regeneration that you can cast one or two more long duration spells. The script @Not So Clever Hound provided casts Llengrath's Safeguard every 70s when the ability lasts over two minutes after being activated, so I changed it to recast every 120s, and added Arcane Reflection which has similar duration (though it can be used up faster if the target of many spells). The Arcane Reflection made a huge difference, some of the vithrack killed themselves with reflected spells. Also added a block to cast Concelhaut's Crushing Doom when above 50% health, and this also makes enough difference to kill enemies who otherwise won't die fast enough. Still, couldn't get past stage 3, when even more spiders come out. The fight stabilized with Sissak and three moon spiders and it seemed impossible to kill any of them. I think it is just a matter of DPS being too low, so I tried the fight in vanilla where Blood Sacrifice doesn't have a recovery, and in vanilla the encounter did resolve itself although it took over half an hour on fast mode. I may test this more later, I suspect this build would do better with some scripting improvements. Only casting Concelhaut's Draining Missiles is overkill on the healing front. Most of the spells I'd like to mix in are also level 2 though (Combusting Wounds, Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon). A spell like Death Ring cast every now and then could make a difference, or possibly some large AOE CC spell like Arkemyr's Capricious Hex. Sickened and Paralyze would both be very helpful. Jernaugh's Equalizing Burst would be ideal but, unique... I do have a question, why take Goldpact Knights? I noticed Gilded Enmity's armor doesn't stack with I suspect Llengrath's Safeguard. Exalted Endurance doesn't stack either. So paladin really just gives +3 from stoic steel. Not sure what a better paladin class would be though. Or could not do paladin at all. Hmmm.

Excellent. Random question, I was running through The Enclosures in Forgotten Sanctum and I destroyed "The Mouth of the Organ" on the left side of the map, then got murdered quite rapidly. Reloaded and toggled "god" and "toggleresourcelimit" because something seemed wrong about the fight, and what it is is that it is completely impossible. Even with invulnerability, limitless resources, super high accuracy, carnage, high attack speed, and rekvu's fractured casque for freedom from interrupts, I could not kill even one of this group. It's a bunch of humans, mostly barbarians, monks and paladins. "Revised Thugs" and "Sanitized Fanatics". I watched it go on for about 20 minutes before concluding it was impossible. It is probably possible with a full party of custom made characters, but I suspect just barely. I mean this fight is by far harder than any megaboss. I tried it in vanilla and while challenging the enemies went down after a few minutes. I think it is impossible in BPM because the humans appear to have limitless resources. The barbarians spam Spirit Tornado and Heart of Fury for high damage and keeping you staggered, the monks spam Skyward Kick, and worst of all the paladins spam Light of Pure Zeal. This is a barbarian / ghost heart I'm testing and it is an incredibly strong and high DPS build but just gets wrecked by this encounter. Since the encounter is avoidable by stealth (or just not destroying the mouth of the organ, which I did by accident), it isn't that big an issue, but you might want to check it out yourself, I'd like to know if others find it impossible as well. ---------------- Also keep running into spore infested librarians who spam savage defiance like 20 times a second. Mostly a cosmetic annoyance since they don't stack.

Are you playing vanilla or do you have the community patch? Are you willing to do "cheesy" things like use wall of draining or salvation of time to make yourself invulnerable? Or do you want something more straightforward? Blood mage / anything can solo the game if you use wall of draining properly. I like blood mage / soul blade personally, but blood mage / tactician is insanely good and a bit more accessible, since you won't need potions of final stand every fight. Unbending is extremely strong solo, particularly with wall of draining since you can extend it to the point where you are healing more damage than you can take every round. And with tactician, Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure lets you get brilliant inspiration any time you want. Before getting ABD, you can do it with potions of invisibility. Tactician / Skaen is very strong for similar reasons, you can use salvation of time to extend buffs and shadowing beyond to proc brilliant to get more salvation of time. That and Barring Death's Door makes you immortal. For tactician builds make sure you have ON berath's challenge, it keeps you from fleeing from combat which is necessary for invisibility to proc brilliant. Priest / anything can do it, Skaen is usually chosen for Escape and Shadowing Beyond which help a ton until you get barring death's door and salvation of time combo. Tactician / Skaen and Skaen / blood mage are probably strongest. Assassins are quite good due to assassinate passive, you need berath's challenge OFF for maximum benefit, the idea is you do large spike damage then disappear, regain assassinate passive, spike damage, repeat. Kinda boring IMO but some people like it. Troubadour / psion is a great combo that can solo the game mostly relying on summoning things and buffing your summons. Monks are one of the more straightforward options. Forbidden fists are probably the best non-mage and non-priest options (those can make you immortal with wall of draining and salvation of time). You need to community patch for FF attack to work properly with some things like building focus. FF / soul blade is really good and can solo everything. Probably any FF can, if properly built. Tell me what you're looking for and I can be a lot more specific

I prefer MC monks. SC monks are a bit dull. Once you get Whispers on the Wind your fights are mostly using that as much as possible. Transcendents are really good. Particularly FF / soul blade. Have more accuracy than SC monks with a bit of work, more versatility, soul annihilation fulfills a similar role as resonant touch but can be used more often, you can disintegrate things, etc. Needs community patch for FF to build focus. Brawlers can be quite good if you like tanks. FF / unbroken probably being the most tanky. Wanderers can reach high amounts of accuracy. Probably won't surprise you I like FF / ranger. You can even play ranged with Instruments of Pain, but pretty sure FF attacks don't benefit from driving flight. You can use Long Pain Fists with normal fist attacks though, using animal companion and dichotomous souls to keep things off you. Works well as shattered pillar with the community patch, you can generally maintain enough damage and crits to keep up the long pain fists. Have also played votaries, cantors, ravagers, and sages, all of which have their selling points, but my favorite is probably transcendent. If you're willing to go through the blood mage deification process (buff self, blood sacrifice to near death, drink potion of final stand, put up walls of draining every 30 seconds), then helwalker / blood mage is insane. Blood sacrifice creates wounds, and you can spam it endlessly since you won't day, then use citzal's spirit lance and stunning surge on groups. Or spam raised torment, skyward kick, etc. Or you can play it as a caster just using helwalker for the +10 might and +10 INT.

generic barbarian / soul blade wild orlan / old vailia / artist mig 8 con 14 dex 11 per 20 int 19 res 3 Can bump res and move mig/con/dex a bit, exact values aren't that important besides perception and int being maxed. Low might is fine because witches get tons of +damage (blooded, one stands alone, bloody slaughter, draining whip), and mediocre dex or even low dex is fine because you get lots of +action speed (frenzy, bloodlust, blood thirst). Getting good deflection with a barbarian is difficult and not really necessary given their decent healing so I usually don't bother with resolve, and we can fix will with cipher's iron will, but you could bump it up and dump might and dex some more. Borrowed Instinct and psychovampiric shield do give +25 deflection and +20 other defenses so even at 3 with frenzy's -10 you won't be *too* squishy, particularly with a medium to high CON. Anyway, I'd pick mostly passives mentioned previously on barbarian side, active abilities you want are stalwart defiance and either blood storm or spirit frenzy. Spirit frenzy is probably better in vanila. The upgrade spirit tornado is okay, but it will keep you from getting blood thirst if you also pick stalwart defiance. On cipher side pick hammering thoughts, iron will, the empty soul, echoing horrors, whispers of treason, psychovampiric shield, borrowed instinct, phantom foes, secret horrors, and body attunement. Main two spells are PVS and BI. Keep these up always, debuff will and deflection with PVS. Phantom foes is a good opener, secret horrors useful if you need to debuff fortitude. Recall Agony is good on bosses. Take Ancestor's Memory if you're in a party, also pain block and echoing shield and maybe tactical meld. Disintegration is sometimes useful but this is a melee focused build not a spellcaster. Basically you use cipher side to stack accuracy and defenses while using barbarian side to stack action speed, damage, and carnage. It's a good combination for melee characters which is why we take soul blade, because soul annihilation is fantastic. Then you hit things, build up focus and use soul annihilation. Can use morningstars to debuff fortitude, this is useful if you take brute force on barbarian side which is a valid strategy, though personally I tend to target deflection and skip brute force. Any high damage melee weapons are good. I like Squid's grasp in the offhand for attempted parley (+20% action speed when threatened by 3+) and flanking immunity, in main hand put whatever. Lot of good sabres like Aldris Blade of Captain Crow, Animancer's Energy Blade, Tarn's Respite, etc. Couple nice flails, sungrazer, sun and moon, ball and chain. The club kapana taga is also good and a tankier substitute for squid's grasp, also debuffs will though you rarely need it. Main thing with weapons is make sure you cover different damage types and have good penetration. A morningstar will do that for you as it has good penetration and does crush/pierce, but if you like dual wielding you can have piercing weapons in one slot, slashing in another, crushing in the third (take arms bearer or wear giftbearer cloth). And fists actually outdamage most of the weapons in the game if you take monastic unarmed training, particularly if you drink potions of ascension during battle, and have penetration about the same as most mythic weapons. Can also be used in conjunction with tuotilo's palm to get dual wielding and weapon and shield. Important gear. Nothing in particular, though favor items that stack accuracy or hit to crit like ring of prosperity's fortune, the pet blinky, etc. For helms cap of the laughingstock can be very useful, horns of the bleak mother vs beasts, and rekvu's casque against things that will interrupt you (you have to take an injury, just have someone kill you with a corrode spell for acute rash or step on a caltrops trap for wrenched knee). I like wearing robes, particularly high harbinger robes as these give bonus damage and action speed (at the cost of making you squishier). Devil of Caroc Breastplate is really good tradeoff for decent armor with low recovery, and devil's due will proc a lot giving you a constant stream of healing.

I mostly play with BPM now, main exception if I want to play a blood mage. Same question though, how do you keep up conduit? It only lasts like 20ish seconds with very high intelligence...short of using wall of draining or salvation of time, you'd have to self-damage with hazards or pulses I guess? I've tried like this but not been very successful.

In my parties Maia always does the most damage by like a mile. Just give her The Red Hand and stack a bunch of accuracy and -reload stuff (plus her gunhawk class is basically hax, gives her extra range to counter red hand's shorter range, plus interrupts, with no penalty). My main character is usually second by a wide margin, unless my main character is a high damage martial like a monk, in which case they might be close to Maia. The other three are always way behind. Of course damage is just one metric for measuring a character's usefulness. Chanters have huge utility with summons, heals, and buffs, and none of that is counted toward their damage count, for example. Same with characters built around healing and CC, they won't do much damage but could still be key to winning fights.

This build can survive indefinitely without armor. Can try Mechanical Marvel, but getting it requires odd pathing and going through the survivor's trial which also forces a rest, so I prefer a solution without it. I guess that leaves tornadoes since they won't stay separated once the vessels die. Right. My weapon accuracy is extremely high (186 v deflection, plus power of money, plus uncanny luck, plus intuitive) and interrupts on crit, which rolls twice, so with cap of the laughingstock I roll 186 v 94 and crit 93% of the time (but it rolls twice with carnage, however carnage roll is a bit lower) so rolling twice I crit probably about 98%. When dual-wielding it is more like 90 to 95 percent. My accuracy vs. fort with tornado is just 122 (perception doesn't apply to scrolls I guess), but I think the hit to crit things still function, and it interrupts on graze, so as long as I hit one of them I can interrupt the other one during the knock up phase by poking it with a rapier. Or I can do the first tornado cast while they are far apart (using charm of bones to summon things), they do stay apart as long as the summon is alive, and BPM tornado has huge radius. Could just cast tornado repeatedly and probably be okay missing a couple times. So 122 accuracy vs 157 fortitude gives me an adjustment of -35, and I'll roll a 25 or better on a 60. So the odds of me missing both is 36%, not counting hit to graze conversions. That's too high to be reliable. If I switch to a morning star and debuff their fortitude nearing the bloodied stage then I'm rolling 122 vs 132, and I need roll only a 35, in which case odds of missing both is down to 12%. Think I'll try that. Currently the build is a human, but I could change to boreal dwarf for 50% miss to graze which would bring it down to less than 6%. A savage or witch could land the tornadoes, but I like the extreme tankiness of the brute. Conqueror's Stance doesn't stack with rapier modal. Bummer. I still don't understand why some things stack and others don't. Fighting spirit stacks. I thought basically all passives stack, but not clear what is treated as passive, since conqueror' stance sounds passive-ish to me as does rapier modal. Would beast's claw stack with rapier modal? Borrowed Instinct? Marked Prey? ---- Okay so the tornado strategy worked on the gigantic oozes, but barely. I got several miss/miss even with 20 arcana and it took 17 scrolls to kill one gigantic ooze from bloodied, while the other one was fighting a steelspine warrior across the screen. I could have used Lockdown from gloves of the dungeon warden at some point, that has a 97% chance to at least graze. Anyway, then went to fighting the massive oozes. My accuracy with rapier modal is high enough to always crit and interrupt, even without the hit to crit stuff, and if the massive oozes are next to each other, then at a modified intelligence of 29+, carnage will interrupt both from one attack. So I'll need to take tactical barrage instead of disciplined strikes for this fight for the massive ooze stage (or carry even more tornado scrolls). I consoled in the ability so I could finish the fight. With oblivion (high harbinger's robes), blood storm, and attempted parley (left a small ooze behind me) my attack speed is high enough to constantly interrupt them both. The greater oozes are auto crits even with the carnage attacks, and leap is sometimes useful if I can't get to them fast enough. Well, got it in one try (this time), though there were some close moments with the tornadoes. The gigantic ooze phase is the only one that presents any challenge. HOW is straightforward, and the massive and smaller oozes and can be simultaneously interrupted easily enough, but the gigantic ones are too large for carnage to reach outside of them (seems like the ability would be better if it was calculated from the edge vs center of characters, but I guess that would have been more complicated). I'd guess this strategy will work like...80% of the time? If it fails one can fall back on taking turns interrupting the gigantic oozes individually, though this is not super reliable and could require redoing HOW phase one or more times.

If you want to build around max lightning damage you really need deltro's cage helm. You don't have to start over if you want to change the race. This will disable achievements but from console type "setplayerrace orlan wildorlan" for example. This unlocks the helmet slot and changes race base stats but doesn't fix the abilities. So to complete the change you'd do removeability player<tab> wellspeing<tab> Addability player<tab> defiant<tab> Each race has different abilities like humans have fighting spirit. Usually the name is obvious in console like I think defiant resolve is defiant_resolve but you can find it with "findgamedata defiant" and look for the right ability. Then you can change tje portrait and appearance from inventory screen. ----- There are only two weapons that do shock damage iirc, lord Darryns voulge and essence interrupter (a hunting bow). Animancer's energy blade does raw damage, thematically it might be what you're looking for. If you went chanter / anything you'll want sasha's singing scimitar for the free empower point on invocation, so that would be a decent combination

Was thinking "Debtor's Helm" was a mistranslation but now I'm guessing you type Deltro's Cage Helm on a phone? How do you keep up the conduit buff? I've never played a shifter--do the shifter forms last long enough for longer combats? I usually don't like druids' shifting because it seems limited in longer fights.

@Elric Galad Got another question about carnage... is it supposed to proc on the thing you hit or just the things around it? I have a brute build I'm figuring out how to defeat HOW and at the point with two gigantic oozes, the carnage AOE is not large enough to hit both. It's kind of hard to see but these two screenshots are from the same attack. The first is rolling to hit the ooze, and I hit (not crit), then it rolls the carnage roll which crits and procs energized, interrupting the ooze. Basically it's rolling for interrupts twice on the primary target. Even if it's unintentional, probably a minor thing in most fights, though it might be the difference between this one being impossible and just really, really hard. EDIT- hang on, I keep uploading the same pic for some reason. Okay, it's correct now. Kinda blurry but you can see the second pic is the carnage roll for the same attack and both can interrupt. Which personally I'm fine with, just wondering if this is intended...

I've defeated all the megabosses with a variety of builds, but some still have trouble with HOW and Dorudugan. These two are sticking points for some really nice builds. Like for non-ciphers and non-SC monk, Hauni O Whe seems relatively impossible, though I did manage to defeat it using a forbidden fist / barbarian. The plan was initially to use interrupting blows, but the carnage circles aren't big enough for the gigantic ooze phase. What I ended up doing was using Dichotomous Souls to pull one gigantic ooze to the northeast corner and the other to the southwest corner. Eventually they stopped trying to move towards each other. So...theoretically any class with summons should be able to do this encounter. But that still leaves plenty of builds that are great at everything else but can't do HOW. Like a fighter/barbarian build I am working on. I had the thought to use Call the Restless on Charm of Bones to separate the oozes, and it sort of works, but as soon as they're killed or the duration expires, they head back towards each other. I'm not sure how you get them to stop moving back towards each other and now feel my success with the dichotomous souls may have been a fluke. And unlike with dichotomous souls I can't keep retrying if they go back to HOW form, I just have 10 casts. I guess I could supplement this with trinkets that summon things for 11 casts. Can get 12 with Living Illusions, and that one is an actual duplicate like the phantoms. I've also noticed there are various brambles on the map that can possibly block the ooze's AI when trying to merge but haven't had success using the terrain to my advantage. My one success with the summons seemed kind of random, I just kept trying it and eventually they stopped trying to merge. Tricky tricky...any other ideas how a brute can defeat HOW? ------- I had another idea to use the war hammer "Last Word" since it has a fairly long duration of 3s on blocking active abilities, and theoretically I could alternate attacking the two gigantic oozes, but the hammer doesn't seem to actually do anything...not to the oozes at least. ------ I managed to kill off one gigantic ooze once. I guess the "good" thing about this fight is in an iron run I have basically infinite tries as long as I'm using fists or generic weapons. I don't know why but the vessel summons don't seem to keep the oozes in place like the phantoms do. Some of them do, like the risen soldier or steelspine warrior but some don't have engagement at all. The AI is pretty reluctant to break engagement, I figure that's why the dichotomous souls work better because the AI has to eat 2 disengagement attacks... Anyway, the only "strategy" I have so far is getting both gigantic oozes across from each other with me in the middle, with hold the line talent, so I can engage both of them. This way they occasionally eat disengagement attacks, which since I'm always energized can interrupt them. Anyway, I'm dual-wielding rapiers with the +20 accuracy modal on. It adds 50% recovery time, but dual wielding subtracts more than that and nets slightly better accuracy and action speed than wielding one rapier without the modal. So I poke one ooze, interrupt it, poke the other ooze, interrupt it, repeat 50 times. My attack modifier is as high as it will get with this build, like +80ish but still I have to get pretty lucky to actually manage to take one down with this tactic as I only need to not crit once or twice and they merge. The time I did kill the gigantic ooze, I forgot that the massive oozes start merging sooner and wasted an attack, and by then it was really too late. There must be some way to separate them using summons from items and / or the terrain but I haven't figured out a way where they don't come oozing back when the summon dies. Oddly, with the soul mirrors one ooze was content to just sit there on the other side of the screen at some point... Might be time to break out the scrolls of tornado, which are pretty busted in BPM IMO.

I've tried like 3/4 of the possible builds but neither liberators nor templars. Not really a fan of paladins to be honest. For what it's worth priests are extremely strong. If you want something tanky with magic there are better options (in my opinion), e.g. battlemage - tactician / blood mage is ridiculously strong and tanky especially solo, if with party devoted / blood mage or unbroken / blood mage ff monk / anything - the best "with magic" options being ff monk / soul blade, ff monk / troubadour psyblade - devoted / soul blade or unbroken / soul blade war caller - devoted / troubadour probably the best, or unbroken / troubadour for more tanky If you are insistent on paladins heralds are pretty good as boereor indicated (I'd take goldpact knight / troubadour personally), or an inquisitor (goldpact knight / soul blade), also arcane knights are very good, particularly goldpact knight / blood mage, as they get extreme amounts of armor, like this build from @Not So Clever Hound and I recommend goldpact knight because they get +4 armor from gilded enmity making them very tanky, but other subclasses have benefits like steel garrotes heal for 15% of damage they cause to afflicted targets (can be triggered by many things like inquisitor and herald both easily apply afflictions), in addition to garrote ability

I did some more testing. Swift Flurry and Heartbeat Drumming were distributing carnage, and this build is centered around crits so I was critting a lot which is why I didn't notice carnage wasn't working until later fighting the Guardian of Ukaizo with much lower accuracy. Neither carnage nor blood storm seems to work with forbidden fist attacks. That's really unfortunate...this would be a sick build if that worked correctly. I can still solo everything just based on how good FF is, and the action speed, damage, healing, etc. provided by barbarian brings a lot to the table, but carnage not working is definitely a bummer, particularly since energized works with carnage in BPM and thunderous blows -> energized with slayer's claw in hand. Mage slayer also synergizes really well with forbidden fist because of the -25% hostile effect duration.

@Elric Galad We were talking about carnage in BPM earlier. I've been playing a forbidden fist / mage slayer and I could have sworn forbidden fist applied both carnage effects and blood storm effects to those in AOE, but now it looks like it's only triggering on normal attacks, so my question is whether carnage is meant to apply on forbidden fist attacks? Seems like it should since it is treated as a weapon in most respects. And I mean the raw damage, not like distributing enfeebled through the carnage area...

Pretty sure, though it's possible it's only certain legendary weapons and not all of them. I suspect it is all of them but I didn't test every weapon. It's more than just morning stars though, I've sometimes used legendary war bows with the modal (and razor skewers, and tenacious+) against Dorudugan to get 18 piercing. Also morningstars, hunting bows, and I think I've tested war hammers and maces. I just can't remember where you find them...I always seem to have some generic legendary weapons at some point in the game, but like I didn't see any in forgotten sanctum. Those were all superb quality. Seems just to be the weapons unfortunately. Generic armor breaks like uniques. Also I'm unsure about superb and lower weapons. I really only tested with legendary ones as I was experimenting with ways to beat Dorudugan with Abydon challenge on. I first noticed when using a devoted/troubadour with four legendary war bows, expecting to have to swap them out as they broke, but they didn't break. Wasn't using weapon abilities, just summoning things and firing nonstop at Dorudugan. The legendary weapons don't even get ticks if you show "toggledurabilitydebug" with the console. Armor breaking isn't as catastrophic though, lots of builds don't even really need armor. Also it lasts longer. Not only are the durability breaking values higher, but you tend to hit things more in a fight than you get hit, so armor can usually survive from freshly repaired against anything but megabosses.

This is a good point. The fortitude debuff is irresistible and has decent duration. Unfortunately it isn't distributed by carnage so it is single target. Also even when enemies can have their fortitude debuffed lower than deflection, it usually isn't way lower. I guess I don't really like morning stars for crowds, though they are extremely good for single target damage with high penetration and good debuffs. I'm usually playing with Abydon on also so weapons tend to break, though generic weapons don't break for some reason, and I'm pretty sure I've found legendary morningstars somewhere, but no idea where. Sabres are good because there are a lot of good ones and even with Abydon on you can cycle between them so they don't break. Really like Aldris Blade of Captain Crow on crit builds, combined with Devil of Caroc BP you can outheal the damage from berserker frenzy, which unfortunately scales with power level and can be quite high. Though the health hidden part is the worst. I've done testing where I manually remove that part and the battles are so much easier when you can see if you're about to die. The character usually says something like "I could use a healing spell" so there are some clues, also you can script to drink potions at various levels, but it is still pretty hard to work around especially for iron runs. Yep it was BPM. I made a berserker/witch and stasis shell does work on Vela! Also the confused affliction correctly scales with blood storm so it isn't hard to keep up. Can also cast pain block on vela, plus on ememies cast tactical meld for aware + 3 engagement, amplified wave, etc. Still can't cast pain block on oneself unfortunately, I guess confusion only applies to other things, though we can cast stasis shell on ourselves. Still have to be careful with keeping Vela away from the pack because even in Stasis Shell she gets hit by blood storm and carnage raw damage which kills her pretty fast, and you can't heal her when she's in stasis shell. But it would be nice to have stasis shell and pain block as backups when other tactics fail or you run out of withdraw scrolls. Speaking of withdraw scrolls, it never made sense to me why that one could cast that on Vela but not Pain Block. In general you can cast foe only spells on Vela, and a few ally or ally/foe spells. Like you can cast psychovampiric shield on her, not sure why. Maybe because under "Target" it isn't designated as ally or foe. While withdraw is tagged "friendly target" but pain block is tagged "allied target". So I think spells that are tagged "friendly target", "foe", or unspecified can be cast on her. Results are kind of arbitrary and heavily favor priests because of how their spells are tagged. Hmm. Rechecked, not this simple, because for instance Tenuous Grasp is tagged "foe only" but that one can't be cast on Vela. But you can psychovampiric shield, antipathetic field etc. But with confused you can cast anything on her! Berserker/X is pretty hard to solo though mostly due to the blocked health. Are there other any other sources of confusion? I mean there's confusion and bewildering spectacle but I believe those are foe only. Well I found one, but its use is kind of limited, and takes a while to proc. With "A Whale of a Wand" you can charm yourself by repeatedly casting a spell on yourself while holding the wand (like psychovampiric shield), it procs 5% of hits. Takes a while. But that's "charm" and leaves you no control of your character, so you need to be wearing like Devil of Caroc BP with Mechanical Mind and you could start fights confused for about 17s. Takes a long time to set up and usually not worth it since you can also cast spells repeatedly on vela to charm her and get her to stay in one place. Doesn't work on all maps, some of the SSS fights are pretty tricky and others where you're just dropped in to a small room like Scyorielephas, but in these cases you're usually better with withdraw scrolls anyway..

I might have had BPM on. I usually do but I was testing some wizard builds in vanilla (prefer vanilla blood mages, blood sacrifice nerf is too much) and thought it was off. I definitely removed interrupting blows, though, so the carnage crits were from energized. I'll check again next time I play. Honestly hadn't played barbarians much before trying BPM, played mostly wizards and the NPC chars but rarely serafen. Really like blood storm with on crit extension. Any idea why if might is upgraded by skayer's claw the duration becomes fixed? That is the might inspiration duration becomes fixed, the action speed and the rest can still be extended scoring crits.

Nope, doesn't stack. The shattering screech thing overrides cog of cohh. I saw it give aware to the phantoms but no status change on my guy, tried twice. Still it isn't bad since this build (transcendent) can't get aware solo, or indeed any perception buff. Could do belranga as first megaboss (what I normally do), then wear effigys husk armor (what I normally do) only this time use eyes of blackstone. Might immunity is generally better but perception immunity + aware is better I think, particularly since I wear the boots of the stone a lot anyway so I'm not getting stunned. Do resistances stack? Like if I have a coastal aumaua and someone stuns me while I'm wearing boots of the stone, does that get downgraded to dazed or staggered? Dazed can be really annoying in boss fights but staggered is basically nothing, I don't need engagement solo anyway. I think I've seen them stack before but can't be certain. Maybe on a wild orlan character who downgraded a dragon's terrify aura into shaken while wearing horns of the bleak mother. Or it could have just been a frighten aura...