Shai Hulud

You want berath's challenge on. I'm not sure why invisibility satisfies the flanking condition but it does. Maybe because the enemies can't see you they're considered "blind" to you and flanked is a subcondition of blind. If berath is off then i guess the battle eventually ends while you're invisible and you lose your buffs. The invisibility / Brilliant interaction is well known but kind of esoteric as to why it works. It should be noted Brilliant tactician won't be procced if enemies are attacking each other so you may have to skip a few rounds if you confused them with ABD Also you have to be solo. Theoretically it could work in a party if everyone were invisible. Watch the tactician/skaen during megaboss battles and you'll see him proc brilliant with shadowing beyond because that's the only way to get back resources. IMO the only reason to go pure blood mage on potd upscale solo is Major Grimoire Imprint which can be (ab)used to permanently steal spells. Though I've tried this and the game gets pretty dull when you have free casts of shadowing beyond, barring death's door, salvation of time etc. Also very tedious stealing spells because there are 7 spell tiers it affects and most enemy casters have 2 or 3 spells per level so it can take a LONG time to get a particular spell. Minor Grimoire Imprint can also steal spells in a much less game breaking way. And it works better since it only targets tiers 1 to 3 so odds of getting a spell you're seeking are over twice as high. Escape, Nature's Balm, The Moon's Light, druid chill fog are all nice spells to steal. But im getting off topic. So yes you get bonus PL with SC which could be worth if it if you're just nuking things...and since blood sacrifice is a free action you can restore unlimited spells per turn if you are protected by a potion of final stand at least. Without the potion your survivability will be pretty bad unless you abuse temporal cocoon. To do that you need highish resolve, cast temporal cocoon on yourself, then when the paralysis ends you extend the untargetable part with wall of draining which makes you basically invincible. In turn based I think melee attacks are even better since they're just standard actions, so you can do a mule kick with citzal's spirit Lance then switch grimoires if you need to throw up a wall of draining or use ABD next turn. It's annoying that "cast" length actions like most damage spells you have to end turn before they cast, which makes switching grimoires harder due to the cooldown. Of course with SC blood mage you could memorize most of what you want to cast and just not switch grimoires. You can definitely make either work. But... If it were me I'd go multiclass mostly because 7 levels of another class is worth more than level 8 and 9 spells. This is particularly true with wizards since you don't actually need to memorize anything. Only spell I'd be tempted to memorize is wall of draining and maybe pull of eora. Then carry llengrath, arkemyr (mostly these two), plus whatever damage grimoires you want. Ninagauth and Ironclasped are good choices and have just about everything you'd want (besides wall of draining and pull of eora). WOD is in jernaugh's careful calamities which is also a nice grimoire for jernaugh's equalizing burst. Can't overstate how good wall of draining is. How often you need to cast it depends on how many enemies you hit and how many buffs they have, you can track on your character sheet how many rounds you have left for given effects, you'll get a feel for how often to cast the wall to keep up the buffs. It extends weapon and item procs and potion effects as well as spell effects, so there's a ton you can do with it.

Awesome, and awesome. I was just wondering about that because I needed a way to try the changeling fight with Vela in tow. She disappears when you use OpenCharacterCreation to make a character. Can probably spawn her back but don't know how. I'm going to be out of town for about a week and away from my computer (yikes!) so I won't be able to test any of this for a bit even though I really want to. So if you haven't heard from me for a while, it's just because I haven't had the chance to play.

Afeared not sir. Strand of Favor, Cabalist's Gambeson...they don't extend existing buffs in BPM. I am intimately familiar with that mechanic, even made a *very* simple macro to swap the items as fast as possible. But been there done that, on to new challenges. I take it protecting Vela in this fight is hopeless without starting invisible? I can't actually test it with this build because although I started this save file with all the trials (except iron), once you use OpenCharacterCreation to test new builds, Vela disappears the next time you load the game and I have no idea how to make her spawn back. It says the Hylea challenge is enabled but she just isn't there. I wonder if there's a SSS standalone mod, could try it out that way if there is. I feel like 99% sure it's impossible to save Vela though, or at least you're praying to RNGesus which doesn't work well with an iron run. Maybe I should just enable the no forced rests mod and go seeker.

Never tried it, turn-based pillars is heresy as far as I'm concerned. Still, there has been only one ultimate submission using turn-based mode and he used a tactician/skaen. I figure the main difference from tactician/bm is he's using salvation of time rather than wall of draining to extend buffs, and he's using shadowing beyond instead of arkemyr's brilliant departure, but otherwise I expect it is pretty similar. Different buffs, barring death's door instead of potions of final stand but it's the same idea. I haven't had time to watch much of it but check out some of the combat videos. Zero assassin/anything submitted for ultimate. Probably due to vela, though it wouldn't be hard to protect her with a blood mage / assassin. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqC3iYYkToNODONcafmJILEcSvOIw9etc ----------- Actually I decided to try turn base mode and it works pretty much the same but appears significantly easier, at least from my couple hours of testing. The fast wizard casts are free actions. Blood sacrifice is a free action. So you can start an encounter in stealth approach, drop a wall of draining, then on your turn, cast every buff in Llengrath's Martial Masteries and any you have memorized (besides Llengrath's Safeguard), cast blood sacrifice on yourself until you are near death, fire your fighter buffs which are also free actions, and drink a potion of final stand as a standard action. Since the wall of draining was already up, you're invulnerable with zero risk. You can also move ridiculously far every turn. Plus, enemies don't seem to move around much making placing the walls much easier. In particular they don't seem to chase you when you use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure. And they never tried to flank me, which was kind of amazing. Brilliant Tactician proc is similar to RTWP except because the enemies don't chase you, you're likely to land a bunch of wall of draining hits and greatly extend your invisibility. Unbending seems to heal more per round, though I'm not sure how you'd stack it to the obscene amounts possible in RTWP. I quickly got 4 stacks for passive healing of about 70 per round, and it seemed to stay around there even when hit later. While waiting for my mule kicks to replenish, I completely healed from 1 HP. You get 2 resources in the first round no enemy is confused, then 1 round every round after, including after I launched a new wall of draining and used blood sacrifice. Also, all "cast" length spells take the same time to cast. So a fireball is the same as Ninagauth's Shadowflame, making long casts like summons and the shadowflame more attractive. I'm frankly not sure what the "rapid casting" and "martial casting" abilities do though I'd taken both... Some things I'm not sure about...I didn't test kiting, unsure if you can draw out one enemy for the purpose of proccing some effect like blade cascade, though it wouldn't have been hard in this fight, it just would take a long time. Combat is much slower even at the highest speed compared to RTWP on slow. And you can see the enemy's intended actions! While fighting Hauni O Whe this was super useful since it says "merge" or "symbiote" etc. In RTWP you get icons, which can be hard to catch if there are a bunch of little oozes and a couple big ones, and with Magran's challenge you can't pause at all. In turn based Magran's challenge gives you 10 seconds per turn which seems WAY more than enough, particularly since you can pseudo-pause by checking your inventory screen. So turn based seems easier, however, it seems like it would take hundreds of hours to get through all the content in turn based mode, and I don't know if it's worth it. I also tried turn-based mode with an assassin/blood mage but I couldn't really figure it out. I was taking so much damage with no healing the only way to survive seems to have a potion of final stand, or kite enemies one on one if that is possible. While Shadowing Beyond was a free action, Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure is a standard action, so the cycle of attack, flee, attack can take several rounds especially if you don't have many spells memorized and need to switch because grimoire cooldown takes a round. Most importantly I couldn't both cast a spell and then flee the same turn, though you could do this in RTWP (I think) if you start the battle from stealth, and you can always run while a spell is in cooldown. I couldn't figure out how to flee the battle, even tried turning Berath challenge off. It might have been because I was testing on a megaboss map and those fights could be treated differently, IDK. Or I just don't know what I'm doing with assassins. The spell penetration bonus from assassinate is very nice though, I can definitely see the appeal for just nuking things to oblivion. The weapon penetration bonus is also nice, but with well chosen mythic weapons and good ol' fists plus (if necessary) haymaker and/or tenacious/energized, it isn't really necessary, as you typically have sufficient weapon pen with mythic + tenacious/energized and if necessary haymaker or rending blows. So...I'm sticking to my analysis that blood mage / tactician is an excellent choice for the whacking things with a stick approach, while blood mage / assassin is preferable for nuking.

Unbending by itself can provide a ton of healing because of how it stacks, and Rapid Recovery is pretty significant particularly if you have Dawnstar's Blessing (about 13 health per 6 seconds), also am wearing Devil of Caroc armor that heals about 4 health per crit. But I don't just mean healing. Assassins take +15% damage from all sources, and blood mages have a -15 defense malus against bloodied or worse enemies. Tactician/BM has the same malus but it is easier to counter with refreshing defense and some small fighter bonuses from conqueror stance. There's also fearless etc. which I only take for certain encounters. It should be noted tactician gets confused and shaken when flanked, but this is fairly easily countered with immune to flanking gear like squid's grasp, which is good for caster's anyway because of the action speed buff. And Armored Grace provides -25% recovery also. Are you playing turn based? I did see a tactician/skaen ultimate run that was turn based so should be possible but I have no experience with it. I may have misunderstood what you meant by round, though, maybe you just meant 6s? I'm going to proceed assuming you meant 6s in RTWP mode. Anyway you don't get back 5 resources per 6s, you get 1 resource per class per 6s for as long as brilliant tactician is procced, plus one immediately. The easiest way to proc it is to go invisible, and for a tactician/BM this is easiest with Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure. With starting 18 INT and good gear the invisible duration is about 30s. So if you proc brilliant tactician with Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, you immediately get one resource per class, then every 6s another, so over the next 30s you should get 5 more for 6 total. It isn't instant though, I just cycle to fast mode while I'm standing there invisible and 30s passes in real time 15s I think. You can cast Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure again to get another 6, which should refill the fighter side and most of the wizard side unless you've cast a ton of spells. Unfortunately blood sacrifice does disrupt invisibility so you can't use that while regenerating from brilliant, but you can use it during combat once your defenses are up. Another thing to note about tactician is any source of interrupt can regen fighter resources, like the slicken spell, though it doesn't seem to proc consistently. I suspect only the first hit is checking whether there's an interrupt and giving resource return based on that. If you have the llengrath's martial masteries and arkemyr's grimoire you should start with llengrath and rapidly cast infuse with vital essence, deleterious alacrity, llengrath's displaced image, spirit shield or iron skin, arcane reflection, llengrath's safeguard, switch to arkemyr, I usually spam blood sacrifice while it is switching, then arcane veil from arkemyr's, followed by a well-placed wall of draining. Most of these bonuses stack making you pretty hard to hit and if you get even a few enemies with the wall of draining you can extend the effects as long as you put up a new wall every now and then. It also extends fighter buffs which are instant, plus rapid recovery. In difficult fights you'll want to use a potion of final stand which you can only use when near death, so after placing the wall I like to run off and use arkemyr's brilliant departure if needed to get far enough away I can safely blood sacrifice to near death and drink the potion. If the wall is hitting anything the short duration of final stand rapidly accumulates and you're invulnerable. But potions of final stand require quill leaves which are sorta rare so I wouldn't use them for standard fights. Getting into arguably "cheese" territory here, but you can also buff by proccing weapon effects before a fight, like Scordeo's Edge blade cascade, you can lure one enemy away from the group, cast essential phantom, and attack the phantom until it procs. Conduit can greatly improve your damage. From Deltro's Cage Helm. Stack +damage gear and hit yourself (hopefully crit) out of combat with a lightning spell (chain lightning is easiest), then switch gear, you have about 20s for the effect, run into combat and use wall of draining to extend, you can double or triple your damage output. With blade cascade and conduit both you can make it more like 10 to 15x. Once buffs are up you can either nuke or beat things with citzal's lance or concelhaut's parasitic quarterstaff. Usually prefer the lance unless things are resistant to pierce. Doing all this can eliminate the challenge for most fights (particularly the blade cascade + conduit combo) but in really tough fights (like hauni o whe and dorudugan) it is practically a necessity. Another great effect to extend is energized. If you get the slayer's claw in SSS you can get a might inspiration from any source, then quick switch to slayer's claw and it upgrades it one tier. So for instance Lover's Embrace dagger enchant lover's quarrel has a 33% on crit frenzy effect, you can lure a single enemy and attack a phantom until it procs, upgrade to energized with slayer's claw, and extend with wall of draining. Hope this helps. You can do 99% of the content with either of these builds it's just a matter of playstyle. Assassin style is probably easier since you don't really need this buff routine with attack and vanish strat, but once you get the hang of it it isn't bad. Also what's your stat spread? I'd use something like 9/12/15/19/18/3. Can flex on might/con/dex a couple points, but generally dex should be in the 12 to 16 range with the rest put towards might and con. If you use an assassin and are REALLY diligent about instantly going invisible so you never get hit you can dump CON more, and you probably don't need much DEX since you're mostly attacking from stealth I assume (which greatly reduces recovery), then immediately vanishing. In that case you could put more points into might.

I'm playtesting a tactician/BM now and it is pretty ludicrous. It is simple to become straight invulnerable with monstrous defenses, but same is true of any blood mage I suppose, though tactician has some extra fightery stuff. The tactician can regen spells faster by proccing brilliant essentially at will, which also replenishes fighter resources. Unbending (shield for resolute), Refreshing Defense, Disciplined Strikes are instant activations and up more or less permanently. I figured out Mule Kick gets distributed by Citzal's spirit lance which has some hilarious results. You get back discipline on interrupt and mule kick interrupts on GRAZE, so you can just stand there spamming mule kick and laughing as five enemies fly into the air, you don't even need to recast anything besides wall of draining. And with confident aim, intuitive, conqueror stance and weapon mastery I'm not missing much. Also armored grace is a pretty large attack speed boost if wearing armor. Assassinate passive is a net +5 accuracy, +4 penetration, +50% crit damage in comparison. The penetration and crit damage is pretty significant, though fighter does crit more often due to intuitive and can mass interrupt things at will, regens health and attacks faster. I guess it just depends on your playstyle. You do more damage on individual attacks with assassin/BM but you have to go invisible to regain the passive for ONE attack. With a tactician you go invisible and regain roughly 5 fighter resources and 5 wizard resources plus however many blood sacrifices you can throw into that period. Also much easier for you to die with assassin, either have to stealth strike and go insta-invis or use potions of final stand in any nontrivial encounter. If you like to do sneak spellstrikes assassin/bm is going to be more enjoyable for the high burst damage I guess. I like running into combat and mass mule kicking things. It makes me giggle. ---- I loaded my assassin and ran off with enduring shadows. Didn't get back any guile. I mean you don't need to get back guile to run off given arkemyr's brilliant departure but it does mean your rogue resources are finite. Though I'm playing with a bunch of magran's fire challenges including Berath's. I think without Berath challenge you can get guile back but I don't have any saves I can open to test that.

If you're MC you don't, you use invisibility potion or arkemyr's brilliant departure or priest of skaen shadowing beyond to run away and they reset with berath challenge off. If SC you can do the same thing, but you can also theoretically use wall of flashing steel and gambit but it's kind of pointless, typically SC assassins are built with super low defenses and you'll get slaughtered if you actually try to fight. The whole strategy with assassin is go invis to reset the encounter and regain guile and more important the assassinate passive, then go attack, then repeat. ----- Can somebody clarify how brilliant tactician interacts with invisibility? I just tried a tactician / blood mage with arkemyr's brilliant departure and it didn't seem to do anything. Yet I'm absolutely certain I've seen people do this with shadowing beyond in tactician / skaen builds. The spell description of arkemyr's brilliant departure says invisible, untargetable for X seconds. And you look invisible. But the spell sheet just says untargetable, so IDK, does it not with arkemyr's brilliant departure? EDIT: Nevermind, I think I figured it out, though I'd still appreciate confirmation. If there is any kind of damage being done then you aren't considered invisible and brilliant won't trigger. Arkemyr's brilliant departure has an AOE confusion effect for 8s, then invisible/untargetable for 15s. Roughly double with high INT. So if the AOE confuse hits enemies this delays onset of brilliant, but you can just blood sacrifice and keep using arkemyr's brilliant departure to run away. Over 30s you replenish 5 spells so once you trigger brilliant tactician you get the spells back pretty quickly.

In this quote I was musing how to kill HOW as a blood mage or multiclass blood mage. May not have been clear. Also I meant without using the usual tricks of extending blade cascade and potions of final stand and whatnot. BPM constraints, more or less. brilliant from wit? Wit of death's herald. Assume sacrifice means marux amanth? I thought I mentioned that. Hmm yes...I did, though the post was pretty rambly. I just think assassin is boring as hell and have only played one for like half an hour. Stab things and run away. Or shoot things and run away. Fun. I've managed to kill HOW with quite a few builds but have only found two that can also reliably kill the other megabosses. Not counting stabbing them with Lover's Embrace and running away. Or the blood mage wall of draining deification process. I'm experimenting with "legitimate" builds and strategies after having done all this the easy way. Your posts are quite terse yet packed with information. I kinda go the other way. Ramble for days and still leave you confused.

I'm working on a build (MC monk) to do an ultimate style run using the BPM mod, which removed most of the abusive mechanics like using Strand of Favor to extend invisibility with Slippers of the Assassin. I've solved every encounter but this one. I could go seeker or survivor route but these force rests, which I'd strongly prefer not to do. Also the Slayer's Claw is really nice and lets me get Energized from Thunderous Blows. This build actually does fine soloing the changeling's dance, but NOT with Vela in tow. My experience is the rogue and ranger prioritize Vela as a target, and 9 times out of 10 kill her. If I'm able to start the encounter stealthed, I can move her far enough away and circle around, take out the rogue and ranger, and then put myself between Vela and the ciper, monk, and fighter. But I can't start stealthed. Not sure if it's because Humaire sees me or the transformation turns me into the ironclad construct and immediately emits a fiery aura which starts combat. In my vanilla ultimate run (still unverified, Obsidian) I used the Slippers of the Assassin to start invisible plus stealthed, and that does work, together with circling around and starting behind the ranger. So I'm trying to figure out how to start the encounter invisible, or otherwise protect Vela without abilities, potions, or scrolls. I figure this is impossible so I'm focusing on starting invisible. I have tried the following Gulping a potion of invisibility at the end of an arena fight. The duration is 30+ seconds which theoretically should be long enough, but the invisibility from the potions ends when combat ends. Didn't know that, unfortunate. Tried leading out Humaire and company with sparkcrackers, all the way to the south end of the hall, then running back, stealthing, and starting the encounter. I do start stealthed this way but it still turns me visible on transformation. Killing Humaire and company with summons, then killing the last one myself to proc the Slippers. This does give me invisibility, and with 18 INT, Strand of Favor, and Ooblit equipped (consoled him in), this gets me about 12 seconds of invisibility. It isn't enough to even get through the forced conversation with the ghosts of Humaire and that other guy. After step 3, led an Arena Warden near Cook Corrin to the pedestal using sparkcrackers then killed him to proc invisibility. This ALMOST was enough, but time passes while the slaying face yells "luck is for the weak" and all that, and it runs out. I think I need somewhere in the range of 15 to 20s of invisibility. After step 4 I ran out of ideas and here I am. Are there other ways to become invisible out of combat? Or some way to extend the slippers invisibility even longer or skip the slaying face's speech? Or some other way to get Vela out of harm's reach when I can't use abilities etc.? If I can't figure this out I'll have to go Seeker or Survivor path and lose my Dawnstar blessing, nature's resolve, alchemic wits/guile/brawn, amira's blessing, rikuhu's blessing, etc., which is not ideal. I can probably still complete the challenge this route, but I'd either need to skip these buffs, do the forced rest *first*, circle back to get buffs, or do SSS last. Second choice is probably easier, but both routes are a bit circuitous. I'd normally do SSS => HOW => Dorudugan => BW => FS => Auranic => endgame, I guess this way I'd go Auranic => BW => FS => Dorudugan => HOW => SSS => endgame. Not a very clean route, wastes several days going to Auranic first, but otherwise I'm fighting Auranic without the buffs which isn't great either. Also have to fight the Purakau and some SSS fights without the buffs, so...much prefer not to rest. EDIT I tried noqn's Seeker Slayer Survivor standalone mod but it doesn't seem to work with Vela, so although I have Hylea's Challenge enabled she doesn't appear, I guess because I skipped the scene at the beach. There must be a way to console her in but I can't figure it out. There just has to be a less tedious way to test this fight than to run through half the game with vela in tow and unlock SSS... EDIT 2 Solved the encounter using invisibility and very careful kiting, see my post near the bottom for details.

So, easy mode basically I was looking back through the thread and someone mentioned gloves that cast stasis shield. I was like what...don't remember that. Figure he meant the Gloves of the Dungeon Warden. Not a bad idea, 15s stun that targets will. With high intellect that should last about 30s. That might be enough to grind down one gigantic ooze from half health. Maybe. Very dicey though, blood mage spell accuracy is not that great I'm guessing it just misses about 40% of the time. Also it just takes one ooze to merge...or does the untargetable part of this prevent it? If so that is great, on some blood mage MC combos with higher accuracy I think you could reliably graze at least, especially if you're a boreal dwarf. Still leaves the problem of the massive oozes, I'm not 100% they can be damaged fast enough to stop the merges. The greater ones shouldn't be a problem, citzal's spirit lance + energized from ire of death's herald can finish them off. I think this might work with a battlemage or hierophant at least, given they can stack accuracy enough to at least graze with lockdown. Non upscaled this will definitely work. Yes I meant battlemage, there are too many subclasses and multiclasses for me to keep straight. I meant fighter/wizard. Both battlemage and spellblade sound to me like fighter/mage, I think a better name for rogue/wizard would be something like "arcane trickster" like used in pathfinder. Or "Sneaky Wiz". Patent Pending. ------ @trias10IMO blood mage / tactician for a first solo run. There's a reason two of the five first ultimate runs used tactician / x builds. You have so much flexibility for restoring resources and you won't get insta-zerged if you fail to do the blood mage setup for not dying, which is basically proc brilliant from fire blight, cast wall of draining, proc conduit, proc blade cascade, drink potion of final stand, cast wall of draining as necessary to keep self invulnerable, kill things, wet yourself at the sight of arcane dampener being cast (You should enable Berath's Challenge in Magran's fires if playing blood mage / tactician to make brilliant tactician easier to proc, see Edit 2 at bottom) Assassin / blood mage is super tedious because all you do is alpha strike then go invisible, alpha strike then go invisible, alpha strike then go invisible, and I think this only really works well if you have Berath's challenge NOT on, so you can flee combat repeatedly If you get L8+ spells and want "ultimate power" use Major Grimoire Imprint to steal spells. Grab Enduring Shadows from Beina, a bunch of nice priest spells from her Goldpact priests, and grab Salvation of Time from Yseyr the Berathian. One of them has Barring Death's Door, not sure who. Once you have Salvation of Time, you proc Blade Cascade for zero recovery, then proc or cast every buff you can think of (Barring Death's Door being the big one), and cast Salvation of Time over and over until the effects become permanent. Doesn't take that much real time once you have the spells. A few minutes in fast mode. The game will be really boring though. Edit: Regarding the "7 grimoires" This is because rogues have "deep pockets" skill which gives them six quick slots, but you can actually get to five quick slots without it using The Giftbearer's Cloth (probably the best cloak for a mage anyway) and you can get to six either using Extra Pockets from the Community Patch Mod (which I'd recommend, lots of little fixes and improvements), OR using Fleshmender armor (Ikorno bounty) with Poacher's Tackle upgrade. It's pretty decent armor actually. That said... you do not need seven grimoires. For a spellcaster, if you memorize basically no spells you can still get nearly every unique spell and anything you'd want to cast from Arkemyr's Grimoire, Ninagauth's Teachings, Iron-clasped Grimoire, and Llengrath's Martial Mysteries. MAYBE you want to carry five, Jernaugh's Careful Calamities, which has a pretty nice opener and debuff "Jernaugh's Equalizing Burst". But like I usually don't carry Ninagauth because I only cast the Shadowflame as an opener and I prefer other spells usually. Pick and choose grimoires for the situation, I guarantee you there is no battle where you'd really benefit from carrying seven grimoires. EDIT 2: Does blood mage / tactician require Berath's challenge for invisibility to trigger brilliant tactician? I always play with it on so I'm not really sure, I seem to recall someone mentioning it had some interaction with that challenge. Anyway it isn't much of a problem if you need to use Berath's Challenge, it mostly affects parties. If you're knocked out in combat for 10 seconds you're generally dead solo, regardless of Berath's Challenge, and the other aspect just prevents you from fleeing. Hmm yes now I think about it you would need Berath challenge actually for invisibility to always trigger brilliant tactician, because otherwise if you use say arkemyr's brilliant departure and go to the other side of the screen, then it just exits combat? If you want to go blood mage / tactician I'd recommend enabling Berath's challenge in Magran's Fires. This way you can get brilliant tactician from traditional flanking sources like blind (chill fog) but also potions of invisibility or arkemyr's brilliant departure. This post is a mess.

You say "nothing unsolvable" but I couldn't figure out how to defeat Hauni O Whe with SC blood mage. Granted I had some self-imposed limitations, this was in BPM, but even in vanilla the only way one could do it is to proc blade cascade and extend it with wall of draining over the symbiotes. Also need some kind of defense like extending Potions of Final Stand. Otherwise you can't attack quickly enough to stop the merges and you get murdered. Probably need brilliant, potion of impediment, energized, then I guess just keep casting meteor shower when the merge icons appear. Did you figure out a different way or were you including Blade Cascade + Conduit + POFS etc.? For me the main selling point of SC blood mage is Major Grimoire Imprint. I can do wall of draining and all that with multiclassed blood mages. But I don't really see the appeal of the other high level spells. The penetration is usually not enough to do a lot of damage and you run of spells much faster than my "sticks to whack things" strategy. Unless you're using SOTF and SOF / WOD for endless brilliant I guess, which is fun. I killed Dorudugan by hitting him with Concelhaut's Parasitic Quarterstaff over and over. That was my entire strategy outside of prep (blade cascade and conduit mainly).

I'm not @Not So Clever Hound, hopefully he'll chime in, but I have played lots of blood mages and blood mage / x solo potd upscaled etc., and it really depends what you're trying to do (nuke things vs hit things) and what kind of tactics you're willing to employ. And the difficulty. LIke if you're willing to attack from stealth and then go invisible with Arkemyr's Brilliant departure and repeat this over and over, blood mage / assassin is pretty powerful and indestructible but I find this incredibly tedious and a bit cheesy. Spellblade (EDIT-I meant BATTLEMAGE) is probably the strongest solo contender you mentioned especially if you're playing vanilla and take tactician. All you need do to proc brilliant is cast chill fog or arkemyr's brilliant departure. And Unbending is extremely strong any time you're getting hit from a lot of sources, as the unbendings stack until you're being healed faster than you can take damage. This build (all of them really) might have trouble with Dorudugan and Hauni O Whe, unless you use wall of draining to extend blade cascade, conduit, and energized for HOW (use slayer's claw). Wall of Draining is insanely powerful in vanilla and can make you invulnerable extending potions of final stand and give you no recovery extending blade cascade and ridiculous lightning damage (up to +200ish %) extending conduit. Of course, you can also extend these effects with strand of favor in vanilla, though this is generally seen as overly cheesy... Pure blood mage with high resolve can cast temporal cocoon on self, the paralyzed part is considered hostile while the untargetable is not, so you get out of temporal cocoon with time left on untargetable and can extend that with wall of draining and you're pretty invulnerable. You can also use major grimoire imprint to steal spells permanently, which while fun is pretty tedious, and there are lots of good spells you can steal with a blood mage / x with minor grimoire imprint if you want. All that said, I find these tactics kind of overpowered and cheesy. My personal opinion is soloing is generally easier by hitting things than casting damage spells due to penetration scaling on POTD upscaled, so blood mage / martial hybrids tend to be preferable to straight blood mage. Hierophant is also a fun combination and can bring you a lot of +accuracy and +defenses with borrowed instinct, plus citzal's spirit lance procs focus gain on everyone it hits AND soul annihlation hits everyone the lance hits, so blood mage goes really well with soul blade for a fighter / mage type build. The thing with rogues is for the really good damage bonuses (deathblows) you need two debuffs and sometimes that is difficult to land solo. And rogues have bad accuracy without assassinate passive, not having a single ability that improves it and just dirty fighting for 10% hit to crit. Blood mages also have bad accuracy, their only way to improve it is eldritch aim (aware) and citzal's martial power, the second of which disables spellcasting and is not usually desirable. So I like pairing a blood mage with a class that can easily buff accuracy and/or healing. *Battlemages* are a good choice, particularly tactician for reasons states but also devoteds, take specialty pike and beat things up with citzal's spirit lance. You can get about +20 accuracy from the conqueror stance, disciplined barrage (+intuitive), and weapon mastery, and unbending adds a ton of survivability. Hierophants can get you effectively +30 accuracy with borrowed instinct + psychovampiric shield but you may not always be able to land both, and they don't have any passive healing besides blood mage passive. Loremasters are also a lot of fun because of energized + citzal's spirit lance, and with troubadour you can have summons tank for you for so the meh healing is not as big a deal. I should note soloing POTD upscaled is extremely difficult, particularly the megabosses. It can be done with wall of draining shenanigans, but I haven't found a way to do it without, not with blood mage / x anyway. Dorudugan simply heals too fast and Hauni O Whe merges too fast after first split. There are some tanky high damage builds that can kill Dorudugan without cheese (difficult but it is possible) but Hauni O Whe seems to require a cipher (to disintegrate HOW form). SC monk is the only non-cipher I've been able to kill HOW with (or priest, rogue, paladin can theoretically do it with marux amanth dagger and a lot of luck), using whispers on the wind and Ajamuut's Stalking cloak to hard CC the oozes during merge attempts.

This is probably an issue in vanilla, but I was doing Trial of the Naga with a monk and the bog oozes are immune to crush. Knowing this, I equipped Kapana Taga which does crush/slash. Bizarrely, hitting the oozes picks crush damage, which predictably does zero damage. So basically only way I had to damage them was dichotomous souls, spamming forbidden fist for zero damage to gen wounds. Dunno if fixable. I suspect this probably occurs with other weapons that do mixed damage types where one is immune but haven't seen it. I'm guessing even though they're immune to crush, their listed armor rating for crush is lower than slash ?

I've read the modding forum sticky threads and some others, and while I can follow most of the information in someone else's mod, the various GUIDs and sheer number of game data formats and where to look for them is kind of overwhelming. I downloaded noqn's Apotheosis tool and it looks very useful but still not sure where to start. Maybe I'll make a thread in modding forum once I figure out what exactly I'd like to mod. But for instance how do you know where to look or what to change in the gamedata to make summons tagged allies and targetable by these spells? What I'd really like to do is improve the scripting interface to allow a lot more conditionals and actions, but this may be way over my head or even impossible. For instance, one should be able to check if a buff like borrowed instinct is active, rather than just casting it and having to guess a cooldown for how often it should be cast. Currently you can only really do this with abilities that give unique inspirations. One should be able to check exact resource values for all classes, which would allow many things like casting soul annihilation at arbitrary focus levels, or using blood sacrifice when you've spent X number of spells. Many many other things I've wanted to script but can't. Sounds good, looking forward to the release BTW I've found a build that can do an ultimate style run in BPM (I hope), which was a huge challenge in itself. Going to see if I can do it with trial of iron off, then maybe do the real thing.

The crazy thing about unending is it stacks with itself every time you're hit during the duration, so long duration allows you to get enough stacks that unbending is massively healing you rather just limiting damage. You may have seen this before when fighting bad guys who cast unbending trunk and become impossible to kill until the duration runs out. MIG is overrated and DEX is good but doesn't need to be maxed. I max INT for every single build ever, except forbidden fists because it extends the curse too much. But even on martials high INT is super useful as your buffs can last over twice their stated duration. Like you can keep up Disciplined Barrage and Refreshing Defense, Swift Flurry etc. with fewer resources. Also abilities like Clear Out have much larger AOE, Stunning Surge will stun longer. Also will is a very important defense and if you dump resolve and int both your will is going to be lacking. Since you're helwalker I would dump might a bit. I would have taken something like this spread (use turning wheel) MIG 8 CON 12 DEX 15 PER 20 INT 18 RES 3 Basically you want max PER so you can hit things, you want max INT so your buffs and debuffs last longer as well as larger AOE. You get more damage from pumping PER vs MIG because you'll crit more. Dex over MIG because attacking faster scales better than hitting a little harder, especially since even with 35 might your might damage bonus is "only" 75%, which is a lot but mythical weapon bonus is about that much, and there are other +damage sources. I made a ranger with 12 might that had +139% damage. Other stats, CON you want as low as you can get it without quickly dying. In this case we don't need a lot because of unbending, devil of caroc healing etc. (plus you can have huge healing modifiers with dawnstar blessing). Resolve can usually be dumped. It is just too expensive for 1 deflection per resolve, the other stats you tend to get more out of them, and there are other ways to improve deflection if you need them like refreshing defense, bracers of greater deflection, etc. So this leaves DEX, and we want DEX fairly high but there are diminishing returns on action speed for super high dex, so you have a modified dex of 25, which in practice is not much better than a modified dex of say 22. (Try attributescore player(press tab) dexterity X in the console and you can see how your attack speed changes. To sum up, my approach to stats is like this: Max PER and INT for nearly every build. Dump resolve with some exceptions. With what's left, spread between might and CON so they add to roughly 18 to 22, and put the rest in DEX, which should be somewhere from 12 to 17 after tuning might/con. If you weren't a helwalker but say nalpazca then you don't need CON much and need more might, so I'd do something like 13/8/14/20/18/3 And fists are much better than WOTEP IMO. You get huge accuracy and damage bonuses and they have good penetration (especially single class monk, and super especially forbidden fist attack). Fists also are fast attacks and crushing is the best damage type, hardly anything is immune to it. And devoted bonus applies to fists as well as great sword or whatever you chose. Most of your equipment choices are fine, though keep charm of bones handy when fighting vesssels, and for helmet horns of the bleak mother, cap of the laughingstock are both super useful. The second is more useful solo since you won't be debuffing allies. If you liked playing as a monk there are some monk builds that are extremely good solo. So far I've only found two builds that can solo all the content in POTD upscaled without cheese strategies, a SC FF monk and a FF / soul blade. They're both a lot of fun. Various blood mage and blood mage / X can do it but relies a lot on making yourself immortal with potions of final stand and wall of draining, which is kinda too easy IMO. And various tactician multiclass builds can do it but relies on the game thinking when you're invisible you satisify the conditions for brilliant tactician. And basically any build can do it if you use Strand of Favor to extend the fun effects like Blade Cascade, Conduit, Darkest Before Dawn etc. Have found a lot of builds that can solo all the content besides Hauni O Whe, and even more if you skip Hauni O Whe and Dorudugan. --- BTW stats are hard capped at 35, if you have 36 might it is treated as 35

Yeah it is annoying those guys aren't tagged as allies, I can't cast echoing shield / tactical meld / pain block on them with my transcendent. That build is pretty good but would be a lot better if they were just tagged allies, even if they weren't party controllable. I assume there's no way to tag them as allies or make them party controllable? A cooldown on divine retribution is not a bad idea. Like one zeal pre 10s? Some day I'm going to learn how to do this stuff myself so I don't have to bother you so much

Really? The tactician sheet says "brilliant" gives +5 INT, +1 power levels, same as acute. Is this display wrong? Honestly haven't messed with trying to get brilliant in BPM because maintaining brilliant seems difficult now. Anyway my point was just perma-brilliant was OP but one chanter can regen zeal at about same rate without doing anything he wouldn't normally (at least how I had scripted the spiritualist solo). Yeah the skellies have 9 deflection and like no health so lot of enemies can zurg them as they spawn more or less, definitely HOW, also Dorudugan's Brutal Cleave and Helfire Barrages, I think Belranga's AOE paralyze attack, I guess maybe not in some more standard fights, but then again in those you wouldn't need such intense resource regen. Is there no way to distinguish between the summons you can control and the ones you can't? The scripting AI can do it, but I don't know how. For instance if I try to script cast psychovampiric shield on ally with lowest will, I want it to target the skellies but it jumps to a party-controlled summon or a companion. The skellies are unscriptable because the AI sees them as different somehow.

@Elric GaladBTW I tested the Divine Retribution talent in a party, and it is really, really busted even with +1 resource per fallen ally if you have even one chanter in the party. I made a small party with a troubadour/psion and two bleak walker paladins. The paladins just cast divine immolation repeatedly, keep up Greater Lay On Hands, Enduring Beacon and Inspired Beacon (one on each paladin), one has exalted endurance, other exalted focus, and they keep up zealous exhortation on the spiritualist. For stats they dump dex because their damage is almost entirely passive. Moon godlikes work particularly well. They attack with a flail when not doing something else (using the -25 reflex debuff). Spiritualist does a lot of stuff but most important here is brisk recitation and many lives pass by, along with summoning something (in this case wyrms) every 30s or so, keeping up set to their purpose, echoing shield, psychovampiric shield, borrowed instinct, etc. Anyway this party shredded Hauni O Whe in 3 minutes flat with zero interaction from me, nobody ever came close to dying, and they all had full or soon-to-be-full resources the whole time. I think I could have thrown in a light of pure zeal attack every 30s or so and been fine, but in this particular fight that wouldn't be much use since it targets fortitude. With just one chanter and brisk recitation they get back 1 zeal per 4s just from the skellies, more from the wyrm summons, probably closer to 3s. Also the little symbiotes have 50% chance to give back 1 zeal on kill. It's basically infinite resource for all practical purposes, procs even faster than old-school brilliant which was one per 6s IIRC. The only way I could have used up resources fast enough to deplete them was spam light of pure zeal nonstop. And that's just with one summoner and two paladins. 2 - 3 chanter / x plus 2 - 3 paladins and I don't think they could use resources fast enough to run out, even spamming the most damaging attacks / powerful heals / handing out exhortations endlessly.

That's why I suggested the arc be directed behind the fighter If you sit on the backrow, the arc (somewhere 135 to 180 degrees) is going the opposite direction you're facing, so you're only benefiting people behind you, which if you're on the back row is no one. The only way you could tank from the back would with this arc would be to face the opposite direction of the fight which is pretty limiting given you won't be able to attack. Also, don't see how an arc can be "even easier than a circle" since it is literally a section of a circle. That said I don't really care if people tank from the back, though it would be ridiculously strong to have 50% damage resistance on your actual tank(s) while the guy spamming take the hit is behind them firing a bow and rarely getting hit... I just suggested rearward facing arc AOE as a solution since you mentioned this potential problem. Would be an interesting build, could have a devoted with hunting bow and stats like 12/10/13/19/18/3, very un-tank like, wearing +DPS and +accuracy stuff just firing the hunting bow and spamming take the hit, negating the downside almost entirely because he's rarely getting hit. With max INT base 2.5m circle he could stand pretty far back, and 10s duration with 4.5s cast, you could keep that up almost permanently with +beneficial effect stuff like ooblit and strand of favor. Not sure why you mentioned swift honestly. Not really seeing how it relates to Take the Hit. I guess lets you break engagement if you need to? -------------- Another idea if the +-damage resistance is too strong, the current Take the Hit can merely be tweaked to hand out the same damage type as received by those "protected". So fighter doesn't receive raw damage, but instead slashing or fire or whatever hit them, which damage can then be reduced by armor. So if say your protected caster is hit with damage roll 60 (slash) it redirects half (30 slash) of that damage roll to the fighter, then that gets reduced by slash armor. Dunno how hard would be to implement.

Good idea but Pain Link barely works as is so I doubt it...it only redirects the first hit of an attack/ability on the first target. Like enemy casts concelhaut's crushing doom on a pain linked guy they only get procced on first hit, if they fireball three guys with pain link only takes damage from first guy hit, if an attack kills pain linked person it doesn't return anything etc. @Elric Galadyou said this part of pain link was hard-coded right? I think Take the Hit as is is problematic because the game doesn't have a "taunting" system or anything that directs damage towards the tank besides engagement. Often the best strategy is just have a couple tanks to engage the melee guys and keep your range and spellcasters back, so they're rarely taking damage anyway and it doesn't make a lot of sense to cast take the hit. Also the damage being redirected as raw is gross because your tank might have 20+ AR which gets bypassed like he's as squishy as the ones he's taking the hit for. As proposed +- damage resistance AOE sounds good but I'd make the ability apply in a cone rather than a circle. Fairly large radius, 135 degree cone that directed behind the fighter. Or maybe 180 degree but not more. This would make it harder to "tank" from the back line (one still could by turning around but this would severely limit the character) I dont think it should have recovery unless it turns out much stronger than expected. Not with a 10s duration anyway. I kind of think the role of take the hit should be a panic button in case your line gets broken

Is Beast's Claw / Hunter's Fang supposed to stack with Enduring Dance? Doesn't seem to. I'm guessing...no, but not sure why.

Maybe, but you need to look at the ability as a whole and compare to other sources of healing. Concentration + 15s / resource intuitive with instant cast and no recovery is much better than 20 health per 3s for 5s + 7.5s/bond courageous (or 5s/bond robust) with 5s cast. It is not even close IMO. Disciplined Barrage lasts 41s without INT buff, 47.2s with Inspired Discipline on my pure fighter. Lay on Hands OTOH is one of the weaker healing abilities in the game (besides maybe restore, but that one at least heals instantly). With maxed INT and a ton of healing buffs I get at L20, 57 healing per 3s for 13.5. This is pretty much the absolute maximum and yields 256 health. Not too shabby, except my 10 CON paladin has 491 health and a lowly potion of major healing heals 272 with 0 investment in alchemy, and a potion of moderate healing heals 252 with 10 alchemy. So it's about the same as a moderate or major healing potion, depending on alchemy level, including similar cast/recovery time total. In fact my fighter could cast disciplined strikes and drink a potion in the same amount of time. Sure there are abilities that heal less, but they're passives with very long or infinite durations, or like Ancient Memory / Consecrated Ground and affect the whole party. Lay on Hands is the equivalent of handing someone a middling potion. Discipline Barrage is so useful partly due to the rarity of Intuitive buffs also. There are many sources of healing. Such abilities are fun and when brilliant was a thing and you could in fact spam them, yeah, pretty useful. Still useful sometimes, sure. But I think you are underestimating what you get from seven levels of another class in comparison to forfeiting PL8+ abilities, including getting back double resources from potions of enlightenment. Blood Surge is good in fights where there are tons of enemies but it is useless in some boss fights. And 33% proc is too random to be relied upon. Blood Thirst is not SC exclusive, but yeah, it's good in some fights. True, though I'd argue if a build is better at soloing it is usually going to be better in parties also. If I can solo the toughest encounters with a build it will surely do well in other situations... There are some exceptions, mainly with paladins and ciphers because they can't self-cast a lot of stuff, and when you have 5 times the resources using active abilities becomes more tempting for sure. Sounds reasonable I guess. Thanks for the explanation. Yeah it isn't hard to keep up blood storm anyway, I script it so it's always up in harder fights, was just kinda surprised seeing I suddenly had thousands of seconds. Barbarian's second best ability IMO. The raw damage on crit adds a LOT of damage, the 25% action speed buff is huge, and the long duration might inspiration is translatable to tenacious or energized with slayer's claw. Probably the easiest way to keep up energized outside of a chanter. Yeah I mostly agree with this, though I'm looking at the abilities as a whole and I think they're kind of bad at 2 zeal As pointed out earlier in the post it's basically a potion of moderate to major healing. It "does its job" I guess but there are so many sources of better healing. Also at high levels even with super high INT and healing modifiers lay on hands is going to heal one character for like 1/2 to 1/3 of their health. Just very very "meh" IMO. Yeah I noticed this, on my test char Hands of Light healed like 210ish while Lay on Hands 250ish. Less than I'd hoped for but reasonable enough, thanks. Looking forward to testing out the new SC ranger

I can find very few other ability trees where the upgraded ability costs more than the original (escape => shadowing beyond comes to mind), and they're all upgraded, different abilities, whatever. You can argue the tier 3 inspirations are extra strong and deserve special consideration. I don't think so personally, though it depends on the inspiration. There are many other abilities with very strong upgrades that do not require more resources. For instance, So Singt Thy Biting Winds O Eld Nary => Eld Nary's Curse Spread Through Their Midst goes from 4 jumps to 12, making the ability far better but it costs the same. Sacred Immolation => Sacred Sacrifice has quintuple duration, for the same price. Shadowing Beyond => Enduring Shadows adds a Tier 3 and doubles duration and costs the same (in vanilla anyway). Your upgrade of strike the bell has an infinite duration upgrade, for the same price. But it's not even unique for a Tier 3 inspiration to cost 1 resource, even at power level 3. Just look at Disciplined Strikes. It provides 15s of intuitive and concentration for 1 discipline. I think hands of light is similar. You get a tier 3 inspiration for a short duration (you upgraded it to 15s at least), plus another effect, in this case short duration healing. Greater Lay On Hands is even worse. 10s of robust + short duration healing. And intuitive is stronger than courageous IMO given courageous is rarely much more useful than resolute and there are other ways to get immunity to interrupts (rekvu's fractured casque). Plus there are other abilities that give tier 3s cheap, like Pain Block gives 18s robust for 40 focus. It is hard to compare 40 focus to X zeal. Ciphers start with variable focus (generally 100+, so higher initial cost) but can also generate about 50 focus in one attack, so I consider pain block a very cheap cast, similar to 1 zeal. Echoing Shield is Tier 2 but gives a very long duration AOE resolute (30s) for 50 focus, PLUS removes enemy concentration, and is another cast I consider cheap for the effect. Then there are wizard and priest spells which don't directly translate but deleterious alacrity of motion gives swift AND 15% action speed instantly, no recovery, with a healing malus but it is still ridiculously good. Champion's Boon gives resolute + tenacious for 30s. The only Tier 3 that is really busted is brilliant which is super rare and you nerfed (energized kinda busted but also quite rare). Anyway it isn't the cost you should look at so much as duration per cost. So one could increase duration of effects for GLOH and HOL or reduce cost with similar effect (increasing duration is stronger since you don't get more recovery time from casting twice). And *I have complained* about Lay on Hands being weak, for whatever that is worth. But that reasoning is illogical anyway. If the base ability is fine, that doesn't mean the upgrade (or separate ability that is higher up in the tree) is worth taking. There are many examples, do I need to list them? IMO Hands of Light, GLOH should either extend duration to 20s+ or cost 1 zeal. Alternatively, Hands of Light could give the healing plus resolute for a long duration (25s to 30s IMO). Personally would rather have long duration resolute than short duration courageous. GLOH doesn't translate to tier 2 as well since hardy is much worse than robust while resolute is only slightly worse than courageous. There aren't many sources of either robust or courageous so buffing these abilities would make paladins more competitive. Divine Immolation provides +20 health per 3 sec to allies in a 2.5 radius from caster. Unlike every other healing spell/ability I can think of, Divine Immolation healing does not scale with +healing items, buffs, might, and power level (you always get 20 per 3s), but the raw damage to self does scale with items, buffs, might, and power level. Seems like both should scale or neither. If you're taking more damage to self to fuel the immolation, it should produce more healing, right? Eh, what is laterna? You're not exactly wrong, but no I'm not *just* thinking about the context of megabosses, but yes megabosses, DLC content and other bosses, splintered reef, even the lowly cave grub fight. I focus on difficult encounters because they're gating, whereas easy encounters are easy. It really doesn't matter how a build performs in easy encounters if it can't handle tougher ones. Granted you can skip the very hardest encounters (the four megabosses), but not the rest. And a build that can handle the toughest content can easily handle the rest, while the inverse is not necessarily true. SC barbarian is not "bad" it is just worse than multiclassing barbarian. IMO Tier 8+ abilities should be really, really good to offset losing 7 tiers of abilities from another class. Eh... I think the shouts are very meh for being L9. Lot of enemies have might resistances so you may not even get them dazed, but staggered (if you even hit with barbarian's bad accuracy), the damage is meh (more meh on the dazing one), and they cost 3 ability picks. Any character can put on patinated plate or take fire godlike. If you want to be an armor tank, a barbarian/goldpact knight adds like 8 armor with gilded enmity, stoic steel, and exalted endurance, and all you lose is the questionable tier 8+ abilities. And that's passive, doesn't require you to spam daze to debuff enemies. Blood mage also offers +5 armor plus much more. Retaliation is the only really good L8+ pick IMO, and I agree it's good but pure barbarians suffer in certain areas, mostly lacking +accuracy, hit-to-crit, and armor, and all their +damage and action speed talents are tier 7 or lower, so you can gain more by multiclassing than going SC. That's my take anyway. I realize not everyone looks at this the same way.

Yeah multiclassing is almost always better. And an itinerant would be pretty fun with a party. On hard your damage spells still have enough penetration to be useful, plus devotions for the faithful is the drug of choice for companions with poor perception. That build should work well for your purposes. What stat spread you using? I'd guess something like 14/7/14/19/19/3 would be good if you mostly hang back, spellcast and use ranged weapons. If melee bump con and resolve some at cost of might and dex, but still you don't need much with all the buffs available to a diverse party. Definitely max INT. Can maybe get away with lowering perception some since just on hard, but still I wouldn't, high perception = more crits = effects lasting longer. I usually play solo for the challenge but I kinda want to run a party with an itinerant now. If you aren't taking aloth then wael/stalker would be fun, especially if you intend to wade into the thick of things. Arcane Veil, Mirrored Image, and Llengrath's displaced image are all extremely useful (the deflection bonuses stack). Plus Wael is just hands down the coolest of the gods. I wouldn't dismiss woedica though, the various writ spells can be pretty devastating, particularly writ of war and writ of sorcery which shut down special abilities and spellcasting, respectively. Only thing about Wael is it's hard to picture a priest of wael wandering around the wilderness with his pet lion or whatever. I guess Eothas/Gaun or Skaen probably make more sense in that way.

I've tried itinerants some. Lot of good insights here. Are you playing solo or with a party? If solo I don't like priests as much. And what difficulty? I feel like spells don't scale as well on POTD upscaled compared to weapons (not counting buffs). Rot Skulls are actually really good especially with driving flight. Skaen has some of the best autopick spells plus some really useful uniques. Enduring Shadows is especially useful in getting you out of tough situations. For ranger / spellcaster builds I personally prefer hierophant and seer. I think for itinerant the ranger is doing more for the priest than vice versa. Seer is especially good for buffing the pet with pain block, echoing shield, tactical meld, and you get a lot more +accuracy out of borrowed instinct than devotions for the faithful. Hierophants are just loads of fun (blood mage / soul blade) because you can explode things with soul annihilation and citzal's spirit lance. For ranger subclasses I like stalker for melee builds and generic otherwise. Ghost heart sounds cool but being able to position the animal before combat (and actually engage things) is really useful.