Shai Hulud

WOTW was nerfed to cost 9 wounds in BPM. Not spammable now. Might remove that nerf since I've never played a SC monk. What weapons would you use? Fists seem about as good as anything, gets huge penetration, accuracy, and damage bonuses for SC and attack fast (maybe not in vanilla). For instance was messing around with ff / soul blade and I didn't realize Transcendent Suffering scales all the way to PL10. At least in BPM. It makes a SC monk have like +17 accuracy and +20% damage compared to MC. Better than mythic weapons. So transcendent does not look as good as it otherwise would, though I really like soul blades and soul annihilation has great synergy with FF. Focus builds up in only like 4 hits usually.

I agree with that guy. Also I thought the blood thirst ability was bugged but after testing it and rereading the descriptions I am convinced it is working correctly, but would request a rewording for clarity. Description says "Effects: Self per kill (on kill) - recover immediately for 10.0 sec" Sounds like "For the next 10 seconds, you recover immediately" or possibly "Recover immediately once per kill" (which implies the ability stacks if you were to say one-shot a bunch of summoned skeletons) For clarity something like "Effects: Self (on kill) - recover immediately once over the next 10.0 sec" And this ability is really disappointing. I checked in vanilla and it is kinda useful in some builds, like howler you can one-shot a summoned skeleton then attack another enemy, then one-shot a skeleton, etc., reducing overall attack cycle time from like .4 attack + 3s recovery to .4(3) attack ------ And...while I'm bugging you, is it possible to get devoted to work with forbidden fist? Doesn't get the +2 pen or...pretty sure the hit-to-crit.

solo? what subclass? guessing ff? I've 35 resolve, dex 2 (dwarf), int 13, might 18, per 18, con whatever's left, ring of the solitary wanderer, ring of prosperity's fortune, strand of favor (doesn't extend already existing effects in bpm), rekvu's scorched cloak, rekvu's fractured casque, gauntlets of accuracy, no armor, unarmed two weapon fighting. Pets have tried eevie, grog, and ooblit. Think I like ooblit though that puts me at 34 resolve. Grog is nice because no disengagement attack. Eevie actually not that great in this encounter. script goes enlightened agony on not smart => lightning strikes on not quick => dichotomous soul every 25s => instruments of pain every 40s => forbidden fist if smart+quick Manually trigger resonant touch on 25 resonance (don't think i can script that). Does 22 damage per resonance, so 550 on a resonance trigger, about 70 per ff hit every 2s (when not casting something else). This is a really good build and I think would handle most encounters, possibly all of them, but I am still having trouble getting doru below 2.5 bars of health. Might be doing something wrong, I haven't played monks much or SC at all. One thing of note, BPM nerfs dichotomous soul to require 6 wounds but potions of enlightenment give 1 wound per 30 seconds so it is a very slight nerf compared to vanilla if using the potion. @Elric Galad I know BPM isn't centered around solo but I think SC ranger sucks in party too. In a party ranger is DPS ranged but give a bow to a devoted, a rogue, a cipher, a dozen MC chars and they'll out-DPS the ranger. The pet is the main difference of the ranger and it is kind of useless if you can't keep it alive, which SC can't and requires diverting resources from other characters to help the ranger keep his accuracy bonuses and level 9 intuitive buff. I think a lot of SC classes can solo the game if you cut out trials and skip certain megabosses. Barbarian, chanter, cipher, fighter, monk, paladin, rogue, wizard, can probably all do it or come close with at least one subclass. I haven't played druids or priests much but without woedica/eothas challenge I think would do okay. I mean yeah lay on hands sucks but paladin doesn't have to keep a pet alive in order to use its l9 abilities does it? And it has much more armor and defenses. And a really, really good L8 ability that lets you die and revive full health upwards of 3 times. Paladin also does very well in its party role of support, as most classes do very well in some party role. SC ranger is just bad, any role it can perform can be performed much better by another class IMO, but it could be made viable pretty easily by increasing duration of the heal on Hardy Companion (or change it to Robust Companion, or add a higher level tier to the same effect). The effects of the pet dying are too severe, you lose all the pet abilities (which mostly suck because the pet can't stay alive, but could otherwise be good), a number of ranger/pet abilities, and get some severe debuffs. Another way to make the SC ranger more viable would be to change the Bonded Fury ability to give some or all Tier 3 inspirations (particularly robust), the tier 2 inspirations aren't really enough to justify ever spending 3 bond on it. I do appreciate adding monastic unarmed to other classes, should help with abydon's challenge for some builds and just makes sense @dgray62Yeah I'm sure that's a good build with blade cascade, fact is a great many builds can solo if you proc blade cascade and can extend it in some manor (SOT, Wall of Draining, SOF). BPM nerfed the hell out of all that. SOT adds 50% to an effect and can't more than double it even if you keep casting it, and blade cascade only applies to the weapon. I'm stuck with recovery. Maybe wielding four generic legendary axes could work with barbarian / devoted or similar class, haven't tried it yet. Don't think I can slashing pen high enough (21!) so I guess the bleed effect must do good damage even with underpens? EDIT: I DID IT! Thanks Waski, SC FF monk did the trick but man what a grind. I checked before/after combat stats and I did over 62,000 damage, meaning he healed for like 54k. Yeesh. I've figured out the hardest part is getting Doru down to half health. Once bloodied he starts throwing in magnetic overdrive which is a waste of time if you're wearing upright captain's belt (or horns of the auroch or whatever), so it becomes slightly easier to outdamage his healing from that point on. At least half the fight was grinding him down from 2.5 bars to 2 bars. The resonant touches add just enough damage to change it from a neverending grind to actually beatable. FF monk / soul blade might also work vs Dorudugan doing similar strategy except triggering soul annihilation for burst damage, and that one could easily do HOW with disintegration, plus hammering thoughts gives +1 pen which is awesome, and gets a lot of accuracy buffs. My barb/devoted I think can probably defeat him also. Got to 2.5 bars pretty easily with fists, if I use axes with bleeding cuts to get him bloodied I think fists can finish him. Both builds are pretty much invulnerable but I suspect the SC monk may have more problems with Hauni O Whe than barb/devoted. Maybe SC monk can do it... can tank HOW form, then stack 25 resonances on each gigantic ooze, detonate when they start the merge, and pray can finish one of them. Barb/devoted can just use high hit to crit and interrupting blows. Don't think Belranga will be much of an issue, just kill enough spiders and she's easy. Auranic probably not too bad if I don't get turned into a pig. Other bosses IDK, but probably not tougher than HOW or Dorudugan. Got a few promising builds now, one of these will work.

Yep, I tried out the ranger build, doesn't work at all. I misread the "hardy companion" description, thought the healing lasted the duration, if that were true you could keep up healing and use the boar as a tank, but the healing only lasts less than half, which with max INT is about 16 seconds, not nearly long enough for the potions of enlightenment to replenish. IDK why the duration is so short, savage defiance lasts like 60 seconds (granted costs 2 rage, but still lasts 2x longer per resource). I'd written a nice script to keep up shadowed hunters (the intuitive part) which you CAN keep up, and thought hardy companion healed for 39 seconds with max INT leaving a bit extra, hoping distraction training would replenish enough resources I could use an occasional hunter's fang (turns out melee only) or twinned shot, but...none of it works because you can't keep the pet alive. Shadowed Hunters it turns out doesn't even work when the pet is dead. You do gain perma-nimble and tenacious from vengeful grief which is okay but not worth the huge loss in accuracy and hit to crit on my hearth orlan (bonded grief, hearth orlan, distraction training, stalker's link) for a net -30 accuracy and -10 hit to crit (and -2 might -2 resolve). Nimble is unfortunately not good enough for running past dorudugan, he will brutal cleave you. Swift might work, for this part of the theory anyway. But there is no way in hell you can damage him fast enough, even if your bows didn't break, and I had to console in 4 legendary war bows to have a chance of them not breaking and having enough penetration (requires hot razor skewers overdraw and a dead pet to get 18 pen) You are indeed correct about the damage to health being unaffected by health-modifying stuff and as I suspected helfire iron is not even affected by dorudugan being weakened, he still heals 100% of his damage, making heart seeker a one-shot max health debuff for 4 bond (which *can* miss btw). I give this build an F for solo. Pretty funny how one little thing can make or break a build. If Hardy Companion had a longer duration on the healing I think this might actually have worked. You can't keep up hardy companion, the boar dies in tough encounters. He dies, your accuracy goes to **** and you get aggroed. And now you can't cast your nifty invisible / heal / intuitive ability shadowed hunters, so you die. Could revive him but that costs 2 bond, and you'll still run out of resources before you've even touched doru. To be fair it may not have worked anyway for this encounter because brutal cleave would eventually stack so high the boar could be one-shot in helfire barrages, but in general hardy companion is the lynchpin allowing the boar to tank while you DPS ranged. @Elric GaladBuff Heal Companion and Hardy Companion! 20 health per 3 seconds for 6 seconds is just pitiful. Needs to be at least 12 seconds to work with enlightenment potions at max INT. The pet buffs (resilient companion etc.) could also use a boost. Had most of them but he does 2 damage and gets crit every time with overpen. Just my 2 cents. This is the least effective solo build I've tried so far. Some MC ranger builds could have potential, like I've played seer before and it is pretty decent because Pain Block + Borrowed Instinct etc., the L8+ ranger abilities are just bad compared to the ability to get 7 levels of cipher goodies (or chanter, or whatever). For ranger builds to be viable the pet needs to tank, and it can't tank without help from other classes.

With the hunting bow modal you could maybe do the "damage doru faster than he dies" part. Particularly with him weakened.. Except that your bow will break. There is also the part of surviving while he tries to murder you though and Ranger doesn't have the passive healing needed to face tank him, so once the boar dies you're dead pretty fast. Could run away but... With a boar companion and drinking potion of enlightenment, with resilient companion and other passive buffs, you can cast hardy companion once every 30s. Since you buffed that to 1 bond and 15s duration with max INT you could have the boar constantly robust. That might be enough to keep him alive. If it is then this build could work except...your bows will break. Regular hunting bows would also have penetration problems and Ranger can't boost pen I dont think. Maybe if you had 4 superb+ war bows with the modal on...but my one victory so far required 25k damage and you can fire 240 shots so that requires averaging 104 damage or being able to finish him off with fists. Well he wouldn't heal as much once weakened so wouldn't require 25k damage in that case, so maybe it is possible. I'm thinking my devoted/barbarian might be able to do it also if I took axes as my proficiency and had four axes. They'd probably all break but with bleeding cuts might get him to near death, then bloody slaughter kicks in and hopefully turns the tide. And that build is probably better overall with the interrupting blows and carnage. Interesting thought though might try it later Edit: was thinking about it, but is damage converted to health considered healing like any other? I'm assuming when he's weakened he only recovers 50% from helfire iron but I dont actually know that. I mean like when I have bloodfire that converts fire damage to 10% healing but it doesn't seem to be affected by things that normally affect healing like dawnstars blessing so it has me wondering. Will test when I get a chance

That's a good idea. Any specific build in mine? I just tried a cantor (ff monk / troubadour). Energized + skeletons are very handy to keep aggro off me. Wrote simple script to cast enlightened agony, lightning strikes, their champion braved the horde alone, instruments of pain, and spam forbidden fist. Was doing about 60 to 70 damage on a hit but still not damaging him fast enough to get even to hurt. The combo doesn't have great accuracy but constant energized is pretty nice, and it isn't too hard to keep up the shield cracks either (not that I need both in this case). My devoted / barbarian came closer to outdamaging doru's healing because of frenzy plus blooded, one stands alone etc. but couldn't get past 2/3 health. Only the ranged devoted / troubadour with hunting bow modal and sure-handed ila has worked so far...but that one wouldn't work with abydon. Maybe helwalker / troubadour will be fast enough if i max dex and chant sure-handed ila. Be a little less forgiving in keeping doru from aggroing me (sucks long pain only has range 5) but should outdamage the forbidden fist, i would think. EDIT: Ha, I left the ff monk / troubadour fighting doru and went to bed, when I checked back 9 hours later they were still fighting and at exactly the same amount of doru's health knocked off (half a bar). There seem to be inflection points at 3.5/4 bars, 2.5/5 bars, and 2 bars. These are places at which he changes tactics. At 3.5 he starts using helfire barrage more and at 2.5 he is using charged helstorms as well as helstorms. I have gotten below 2 only twice and can't remember exactly what changes besides he starts doing the charged overdrive thing, but it could possibly get easier if he stops healing so fast. So clearly for this battle you need two things: survive whatever damage he throws at you for a long time, and damage doru faster than he heals. The second one is what's really difficult.

Cool trick, thanks. I've been breaking engagement by "switch to squid's grasp" method or use leap but this is better Speaking of Dorudugan, have you been able to defeat him with all the trials without using SOF etc.? He heals himself so much I'm finding it extremely difficult. I did defeat him with a ranged devoted / troubadour, basically using the summons to keep him away from me and just shooting him really fast (sure handed ila + hunting bow modal) with essence interrupter but I had to turn off abydon's challenge because the weapon breaks when he has like 85% health. Tried a devoted / troubadour using unarmed attacks but after my shield and armor breaks I get killed. Abydon's challenge is really annoying in this encounter. Seems like only summoned ranged weapons would really work (or attacking with summons), but caedebald's blackbow for some stupid reason is a level 8 spell so I can't use it multiclassed... leaving ranged weapon choices as kalakoth's minor blights and rot skulls. Just as example of how much he heals himself, I checked the records before / after the devoted / troubadour ranged guy, and I did over 25k damage so he healed himself for like 18k. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with that with just summons (even using pain link), and direct weapon attacks cause weapons to break...can use cipher spells I guess but penetration is pretty bad. Disintegrate is raw but targets fortitude. Could do like 1000 screaming soul attacks maybe lol... EDIT: Tried some more builds v Dorudugan. Since weapons and armor inevitably break vs him I made a couple that didn't need weapons or armor. Devoted / barbarian and forbidden fist / barbarian. Idea is to stack tons of healing and out tank him. With the devoted/barbarian I can get him to Hurt but then the toons just punch each other forever. Doru can heal like 700 in a helfire barrage and starts throwing in helfires the more hurt he gets. I don't think I can damage him fast enough. So I thought, maybe I need to debuff his healing, hence the forbidden fist / barbarian, but the duration of the forbidden fist debuff is super short and it targets fortitude so it doesn't have much effect, and I have to dump dex somewhat so the curse doesn't build up before next FF attack so with that build I couldn't even get him down to hurt. Left the room and checked back like an hour later and no progress. The devoted / barbarian might have been able to do it eventually (but would still take minimum several hours on fast mode), I didn't wait as long with that one. Had to dump resolve in that build and kept ending up with like 12 stacks of brutal cleave, eventually killed myself with a disengagement attack... Seems impossible solo upscaled trials etc. Could do it if Pain Link worked correctly. There's probably a way but he heals so damn fast without cheese strategies IDK Edit 2: Tried again psion / troubadour, decided to go for maximum effort. It is pretty easy to get Doru to about 2/3 health. It took forever to get him from 2.5 bars to 2 bars though. He kicks up the healing with charged helstorms making the helfire barrages do insane amounts of healing. Engaging/disengaging the summons for pain link is really tedious because they're frequently interrupted and can't be moved in that state... did eventually get him to half health where he starts using magnetic overdrive. May try to finish him later but it took over two hours to get this far. Also tried some direct cipher spell attacks but he has 50 resolve so anything you land with a duration lasts like 3 seconds, so can't keep up borrowed instinct or psychovampiric debuff, and I landed disintegrate once but again 3 second duration so did very little damage. Best tactic seems to be just casting pain link on the animated weapons and trying to proc that as much as possible. It also helps negate the helfire barrage heal, but I've figured out to proc helfire barrage pain link multiple times the weapons have to be hit by different fireballs so if you send them in different directions you can sometimes proc 2 or 3 hits.

If you have a party plus summons, the troubadour/psion should almost never get damaged. Especially if you cast tactical meld on summons or tanks to get more engagement, though with 2 to 3 summons plus a tank it's rarely needed. Ranged enemies can still target you, but that's where farcasting helps. Can position yourself very far behind the front lines and nobody will target you because they can't reach you (except maybe in ambush situations). Was going to break down the stats to show why you still want high perception but abot has already done that and I mostly agree. Also like his spells breakdown, what I posted is just what I had specced for Hauni O Whe. Mental Binding can certainly be very useful and is a cheap spell. @abot do you really think we need resolve with psychovampiric shield and borrowed instinct? Can also throw in bracers of greater deflection or whatever. Resolve seems an expensive stat to invest for the payoff, though 8 is a pretty low investment. I prefer to have max INT and PER and rather have higher dex then might then con at the cost of resolve, because you get more action speed / healing and damage / health vs 5 points deflection. The affliction penalty can be offset with the ring of solitary wandering. I don't hate your stat spread though. Also I like Secret Horrors in a lot of builds but what spells do you have targeting fortitude? Like exactly Disintegrate? Amplified Wave? Don't have much to add beyond his post other than that you can in fact script casting summons so it isn't that micromanagement heavy. Most people don't use scripts enough. The interface is a little clunky but once you've scripted a few behaviours it gets easier to modify and make new ones. It should be added you do not NEED scripts especially if you pause a lot but they can make the game more enjoyable by automating the more tedious behaviors. Here is a very simple script to cast summons and buff them. I add an "always true" condition to most blocks so you can invert it with NOT if you don't want that block being used for the current encounter. The cooldown time you set for however long the spell lasts usually, except if you're trying to keep up an inspiration then you can set it at 0 and have it cast whenever you don't have the inspiration (see psychovampiric shield). For the summon section just move to the top the summon you want cast, and alter the cooldown time if it has a different duration. Can also lower the "at least X phrases" to match your level or the minimum cost of the invocation. And at the bottom is an attack block. I have it set to attack if you have a ranged weapon. This block only triggers if the conditions for the blocks above it aren't met. If you want it to just auto attack with whatever then remove the ranged weapon requirement and leave it as "always true" (or replace with some condition you prefer). I prefer to be casting invocations and summons most of the time so I usually turn off the auto-attack block by checking NOT for always true condition. EDIT: I cropped the second pic poorly, the summon block has a cooldown of 45. And you don't need the "set to their purpose" invocation most of the time, I had it memorized for a specific encounter to prolong summons and afflictions.

Should also note the ability order probably isn't ideal for what to pick AS you are leveling unless you avoid combat until at least L4 (very easy to do) or preferably higher, the build really comes into its own when you have stronger summons at L10 (ogres + pain block) and L13 is also significant for borrowed instinct which is an amazing buff/debuff, and the wisps are pretty decent with the upgrade which has a spammable dazzling lights (use shift+click several times if you want one to keep casting it). Then the build gets REALLY strong at L20 with the animated weapons and "many lives pass by". If you do want to be able to fight things immediately you'd want some L1 summons. The phantom (but reny daret..) is better in combat but the skeletons make better fodder especially if you get the upgrade. And the summon duration is pretty short even with high INT compared to summons you get later which typically have 25s default duration vs 12s, and you can about double that with maxed INT. Could also take cipher spell tactical merge if you have room but most of the time I think it is better to use your focus on pain block and echoing shield. Pain Link is mostly useful vs enemies with very high AR like Dorudugan, but the ability is kinda bugged and only procs correctly on direct single target attacks, so to get maximum damage out of pain link you'd cast it on summons and then engage/disengage them so they are auto attacked. Recall Agony can add a lot of damage to bosses but otherwise isn't used much. Borrowed Instinct you definitely want up any time you're directly attacking things or trying to land something like disintegrate vs a tough enemy since you get +20 accuracy and +20 all defenses, but you don't need it up if your summons are handling things adequately. Psychovampiric shield is great because it is cheap at 20 focus and you can cast it on your own summons if needed for steadfast which offsets the low resolve some. Also a good primer for making borrowed instinct hit or crit vs grazing since it debuffs will. You can take a more direct role and attack enemies with soul shock, soul ignition, mind blades, and disintegrate, or control spells like mental binding, puppet master etc, but most of the time it is better to spend focus on buffing summons, so I usually skip most of the cipher attack/control spells (have disintegrate here because it can kill hauni o whe and you don't have to fight his split forms). Also I forgot to mention starting chant, I'd go with come come soft winds of death since you can do some damage passively that way and heal a bit from it. And finally you should almost always use brisk recitation because accumulating phrases for invocations is generally more important than whatever the phrases do. This is just my take on the build. I don't have nearly as much experience with it as abot but it should be plenty good to get you through veteran and regular POTD (even solo). If you start doing something crazy like solo upscaled POTD with trials, this build can still handle it but some fights can get very grindy and optimizing tactics, knowing which summons to use for various situations etc becomes more significant. --- One final note, this build works very well with the Balance Polishing Mod if you use that (maybe better even), but is great in vanilla also. Lot of the good builds are much weaker in BPM but troubadour/psion is still very strong.

@abot is the resident expert on this build, maybe he can chime in but this is what I had picked at L20 for Hauni O Whe fight. Exact summons you want may vary based on encounter, like if you respec for Dorudugan the wurms are useless. I have 14/10/12/19/18/3 mig/con/dex/per/int/res, race probably go wood elf but not that important, white that wends Char creation: The Thunder rolled like waves on black seas, Soul Shock (or valorous echoes, or whatever) 2 Iron Will 3 Lingering Echoes 4 Gernisc Slew the Beast / Psychovampiric Shield 5 Weapon and shield style 6 Recall Agony 7 Ancient Memory / Pain Link 8 My Son Do You See... 9 Hammering Thoughts 10 Oh But Knock Not.. / Pain Block 11 ...and their screams reached the heavens 12 Bear's Fortitude 13 The Lights Danced Across the Moors / Borrowed Instinct 14 Echoing Shield 15 Farcasting 16 Quick Summoning / Disintegration 17 The Empty Soul 18 Bull's Will 19 Called to His Bidding... / Rapid Casting 20 Many Lives Pass By.. Could have tailored this even more for the HOW fight by cutting summons I don't use but all you really need is the wurm summons, buff spells and disintegrate. And like you may want to upgrade the ogres when you get the chance but most of the time you'd prefer the animated weapon summons so you can drop the ogres. Generally you want brisk recitation on and my chants look like A: Ancient Memory B: Many Lives Pass By C" Many Lives Pass By, Ancient Memory Use B most of the time, before you get that you'd use A, or if you need healing, can use C if you want a mix of healing and summons Equipment: Head: Horns of the Bleak Mother Neck: Charm of Bones Chest: Miscreant's Leather (Magnera's Chain if you expect to get hit) Rings: Voidward, Ring of the Solitary Wanderer (I was doing solo, in general you might want ring of minor protection + kuaru's ring or 2 ROMP, chameleon's ring is also decent) Feet: Bounding Boots Back: Cape of the Falling Star Hands: Gauntlets of Accuracy Waist: Upright Captain's Belt Pet: Animancy Cat Weapons: Don't much matter besides probably want Sasha's Singing Scimitar for refreshing finale, and a shield You don't really directly attack things in most cases but when you do hammering thoughts is helpful and there are a number of good ranged weapons. War Bows are good for when you need high PEN if you take that weapon modal. The Red Hand is top tier alpha strike weapon You can dump RES and CON to lesser extent because you shouldn't be getting hit much and iron will + bull's will gives you plenty of will defense

Right i forgot to mention this one. Usually don't use the sky dragon wurm but agree its a great pet for some parties (range heavy). If you want the sky dragon wurm you need to have not killed the sky dragon. I usually choose the option that I scared the dragon away. I have gotten the wurm lot of times in unmodded game, dunno what this bug is?

If you make a custom history the first options for each choice are usually the best (or at least as good as the others). Important (possible) exceptions, and the only things you really need to check 1) which God you pledged - hylea is the best for nearly every case because she's the "good" option but more important you get hyleas bounty which is incredibly useful food for most of the game when your skills are lacking, and for many builds remains the best food throughout the game. If you're doing a no rest run which id recommend then hyleas bounty is the best food 2) whether to sacrifice a companion and who. There is no reason not to besides role-playing. The wiki has a list of bonuses under status affects (effigys resentment). Best one varies by build but Sagani is most useful for the largest number of builds 3) make sure devil of caroc spared harmke. Its the best armor you can get for about half the game, and for some builds may remain the best 4) aloths starting equipment depends on whether he was made GM of leaden key. If no he has keybreaker scepter, if yes then thaos headdress. The headdress is better unless you need an okay scepter early 5) whether eder remained faithful to eothas determines if he starts with night market amulet (+1 religion +1 stealth) or mayor of dyrwood for dyrwoodan mayor amulet (+1 bluff +1 diplomacy). Neither is terribly useful but the +1 bluff is harder to find for stat checks than religion or stealth, but stealth is very useful also 6) whether pallegina did her duty and screwed over the dyrwood. She gets better armor if she did her duty but it isn't amazing so not that important. Can't think of anything else of significance

Oh wow I thought you meant when you have two pairs of bounding boots you can put one in your stash and it refreshes the per / rest. Actually applies to all similar items like stone of power. Was thinking "that is really minor". But yeah the ability to zip around in stealth would save a lot of time if nothing else. Wish I'd known about that, would have knocked off about 10 hours from my ultimate run probably. I think you're conflating "cheese" with "exploit" though when traditionally cheese just means any easy and broken tactic. Killing megabosses with Sworn Enemy is not an exploit but it is definitely an abusive mechanic. And while the individual mechanics of blade cascade, wall of draining, salvation of time, brilliant, potions of final stand / barring death's door are fine, I don't think devs foresaw that combining them could make you permanently unkillable without recovery. But enough about that... Yes I easily killed HOW first attempt with troubadour / psion. I think I can probably do it with a lot of cipher / x classes, though some of them have trouble with other megabosses like Dorudugan. If I had the arbalest Mechanical Marvel with its weapon modal I think I could do that fight with a lot of builds because as you say arbalests prone and that one shoots three projectiles in a line so one char can hard CC multiple oozes. May be able to do that with Scourge of Bezzelo also, haven't tried it. But Mechanical Marvel is hard to get with Eothas and weapons in general are problematic in long fights with Abydon. They get damaged after a mere 30 uses and break at 60. If I had BOTH Scourge of Bezzelo and Mechanical Marvel I could maybe do it before they both broke, but I'd still need to use something else on HOW form like fists. I am skeptical Dorudugan can be killed with chanter summons without other tactics. Not in the way you mean, analogous to TLK like stealthing and scripting endless summons and then go afk. Helfire barrage and helfire heal him for too much and none of the summons besides the will o wisps do any damage but they get killed super fast. It took me over an hour in fast mode with summons and shooting him with a high damage bow. Like 99% of the damage was me and checking the records before and after the fight I did over 25000 damage, so he healed for like 18k. I don't think summons can outpace that without other tactics. I could be wrong, but I'm not going to test something that if it worked would take a day. The thing about TLK is he doesn't then use helfire barrage to heal himself, so the little damage ticks accumulate and he eventually dies. But with summons he will target them and end up healing himself more than they damage him. I just killed him with a Devoted / Troubadour using Essence Interrupter but I had to turn off Abydon, my weapons would have broken before he was even injured. Interesting thing about Devoted the bonuses apply to fists if you take monastic unarmed training and you can get enough PEN to damage him with crushing attacks that way, particularly with devoted/troubadour since with high INT you can easily both keep up Energized the whole fight and keep a constant stream of summons to draw his attacks. But it is easier to stack ranged accuracy than unarmed, and up close it is much easier for him to kill you (wearing the rekvu's scorched cloak helps), so I think it is doable but harder. That build will have more trouble with HOW though, but can attack very fast with hunting bow modal + Sure-handed ila. I'll try it on HOW it may be doable especially if I had a few arbalests with quick switch, then can just punch them when not trying to merge. Also devoted can have pretty significant hit to crit with Disciplined Strikes plus Uncanny Luck plus Power of Money, and Energized interrupts on crit. It is best to be unarmed or use summoned weapons because of abydon's challenge so blood mage is also appealing but SC has problems sustaining healing and interrupting HOW by itself (I can't figure it out in BPM), but I am thinking maybe a blood mage / devoted (specialty pike) could do it. A blood mage / troubadour could also do HOW with citzal's + energized but troubadour doesn't have as much healing as fighters. I haven't tried to fight the other megabosses but I think HOW and Doru are probably hardest so if I can take them with a given build then I will try it on the others

Brand Enemy and Gouging Strike can also be abused. Endless use of Bounding Boots is incredibly minor. Lets you use a useful ability twice per encounter instead of four times (two per boot) per rest. Would not be remotely game-breaking if the boots were written that way. Rakhan Field Boots have a similar 1/encounter movement plus corrode resistance. I don't see much difference. And for most players there really is no difference between 2/encounter or 4/rest. This only becomes important on woedica+eothas runs and even then I probably used leap like 10 times instead of 4. Stabbing a boss and hiding and coming back hours later OTOH circumvents the entire challenge of the battle. I don't think developers expected people would actually use the dagger that way even if that is the intended mechanic. In a typical battle you're fighting a dozen smaller things and stabbing one from stealth with constant damage doesn't affect the outcome that much. But in megaboss fights that's rather different. I don't really advocate hiding and sending in endless summons forever either but there is a difference in that that requires some active engagement by the user, plus at least some strategy in which summons to send plus building the character etc. You can script the summons and even spells to cast on them but typically if you're standing close enough for the script to be effective you are in danger of being hit (not in all cases admittedly). I don't think you can do this on Dorudugan map for example. I'm hiding in the picture because I was trying to proc something specific for the screenshot but I still got hit by the helfire barrage. Most fights it is better to come out of stealth at some point anyway so you can do direct attacks. This includes vs. Dorodugan. Especially vs. him. It is much easier to avoid Helfire Barrage if you're unstealthed. And if you watch Pale Shelter's battle with Dorodugan he doesn't just send in summons. That tactic isn't super effective by itself. Most of the damage he does comes from direct attacks and conduit's massive shock bonus. On the other hand I really don't care what tactics people use and I've used epic levels of cheese in previous runs including SOF, grimoire imprints, etc. But this time I'm trying to solve encounters without for the challenge. I just find it funny that that tactic is considered somehow legitimate but of all things Bounding Boots is not. I mean Wall of Draining, Salvation of Time, Shroud of the Phantasm, Scordeo's Edge Blade Cascade etc. all work as intended in vanilla but can be used to make yourself completely invulnerable with no recovery and limitless resources, whereas Bounding Boots let you use a movement ability twice per encounter, so how the developers wrote things isn't really the yardstick I'd use. It's more about whether your tactics circumvent all challenge. Imprinting specific spells is at least somewhat challenging, particularly with BPM nerfs to blood sacrifice. But...yeah once you get the right spells the challenge falls off dramatically (though doesn't disappear, so I'd still rank that as less cheesy than TLK). Anyway this just shows how subjective the concept of cheese is and why it isn't a very useful metric, but for me True Love's Kiss falls outside the scope of what I'm trying to do at the moment. But what I'm trying to do at the moment may be nearly impossible so I'll hold True Love's Kiss in reserve if I can't figure anything else out. I haven't found a build yet that can solo all the megabosses in BPM with triple crown solo + god challenges. HOW and to a lesser extent Dorodugan are the sticking points. Spiritualist could do it if Pain Link worked correctly. Can maybe do it anyway but Dorodugan will take absolutely ages of tediousness. In BPM a lot of the strong classes like blood mage, tactician, priest were nerfed pretty hard, but chanter/cipher not at all so that one is still pretty strong and only suffers from the general nerfs like lack of SOF.

Yes that is indeed unfortunate. The ability is not nearly as useful as it should be. What can be done, just adjusting the damage, duration, cast time, and recovery? None of that really would help besides damage. Improving the damage would be better than nothing because as is Pain LInk is kind of useless outside exactly seer, spiritualist, and maybe hierophant with intense micromanagement (like manually engaging / disengaging each summon to proc weapons attacks that actually return damage correctly). I think even if the return damage were like 66% it wouldn't change most builds because it rarely makes sense to cast pain link on yourself and facetank for retaliation damage given tough enemies tend to have vastly more health. But certain builds would be a little unbalanced (seer) and self-cast retaliation may be viable in encounters where you face lots of low level enemies like ship combat. BTW how hard is it to modify deadfire gamedata files? I'd like to look into some of these things myself. I've made minor game modifications before but if it requires anything beyond VERY simple programming it's likely beyond me.

Here is a helfire barrage where I grouped all three weapons to get multiple times. The weapons are hit by a first explosion which does 252 / 295 / 183 crit/crit/hit, which kills one of the weapons. The next explosion kills the remaining two with 324 / 323 crit / crit. Dorudugan grazes himself three times and hits himself for 27, 30, 38, and 29 damage, all of which he receives in healing for 124 healing. He *should* receive (252+295+183+324+324)*.3 = 413 damage for total damage minus healing of 289. A small sliver of his health but not too shabby, it's decent damage output that eventually would kill him. And it cost me 7 phrases, 90 focus, all my summons, and some health to set this up so that seems like a fair return. Instead he only procs 76 damage from the first pain-linked hit (the 252 damage) and heals himself for 124, so yeah. This would go on forever.

Pain Link bypasses AR, it just does 25 or 30% (vanilla / BPM) of damage applied but only truly works as described on single target attacks that don't kill. And with a guy like Dorodugan he often outright kills things and the ability doesn't proc at all. Lover's Embrace is not massive cheese? You're right about his fire attacks healing prolonging things but he should still take more damage than received if pain link procced on all the fire explosions and not just the first. Pain Link procs while they don't show in the log they do generate a brief red damage tick over the enemy, like below. This brutal cleave crits two of the animated weapons (all have pain link) for 169 damage but only does 24 damage (should be 52), which is 30% of 79, so it is clearly just proccing the first one it hits with pain link (the skeletons can't be pain linked they're just fodder). Normally I'd position all three to get hit but it doesn't make any difference for return damage. Theoretically brutal cleave should damage Dorodugan about 75 per attack if it hits all three weapons, but often it kills one or more and only procs once anyway so it either returns 0% or 1/3 the amount it should depending if the one(s) killed were the first hit. Helfire barrage is even worse. Got a helfire barrage pic in next post, no room to post it here, but you can see how the ability *really* doesn't work in that one, he ends up healing more damage than he takes from pain link, so in that case the ability is working infinitely worse than it should.

It should be possible if pain link worked like the description...damage is also bumped up in BPM to 30%, so every time he kills your summons if all three are pain linked he should do about 540ish damage to himself. He has like 7k health or something like that so about 13 cycles should do it. Less if we're applying other sources of damage. But I tried after that many cycles and he was still "healthy" with first bar only like 1/2 gone. Maybe in part that's due to him being healed by Helfire Iron but I know pain link is doing way less damage than it should. That is a good idea to proc the disengagement attacks for pain link but it really shouldn't be that micro intensive. The description is wrong or it's bugged. Says "Allied Target: 25% of Damage Taken is dealt to attackers for 15.0 sec" in vanilla and in BPM the ability is buffed to double duration and 30% damage. But I've tested it enough now to be certain the ability is not being implemented correctly. @Elric Galad Hey, even though the last couple "bugs" I reported were kinda not (sorry), I'm pretty sure this one is (though it is also present in vanilla). Checked BPM and CP notes on Pain Link and found nothing relevant. Basically Pain Link description does not discriminate between sources of damage for whatever is pain linked, but it seems kinda bugged in what damages apply, for instance Dorodugan's Brutal Cleave and Helfire Barrage do a very small amount of damage to self compared with the total damage, which led me to... Testing pain link on myself since I could actually see my own health by casting pain link on animated summons. Attacking them with a weapon results in expected damage but abilities were hit and miss. Soul Ignition and Disintegrate result in no self damage while mind lance and detonate do. Then tried some scrolls and necklace of fireballs. Tried scroll of storm of holy fire, embrace of the earth talon, tornado, meteor shower, and ray of fire. They all did damage but the AOE spells do not proc pain link correctly. Tornado for instance I cast on 3 pain linked animated weapons, hit all three for a total of 87 + 102 + 108 = 297 damage, and I took 26 damage, which coincidentally is about 30% of 87... Seems pretty clear with AOEs only the first hit is procced, and this appears to be true even when the ability can hit repeatdely like Helfire Barrage or Meteor Shower. And if you kill the target it also doesn't seem to proc. Can't test everything but based on my smallish sample it looks like 1) Pain Link does not proc at all if target dies 2) Pain Link DOTs do not proc damage at all 3) Pain Link AOEs proc only the first hit As a result against enemies with a variety of attacks and ones likely to kill (e.g. Dorodugan and Helfire Barrage + Brutal Cleave), Pain Link results in far less damage done to the attacker than should be applied. Dorodugan wipes out three 600ish health animated weapons with pain link, theoretically he should take 1800*.3 = 540 damage but he takes none if the ability kills the weapon and only 1/3 damage (10% or less) on AOEs that don't kill and/or hit more than once.

Can't you just unstealth / stealth close to HOW (or whoever) to get the same effect and start battle stealthed? But yeah I often have the problem that Vela falls out of stealth before I do. I think the fire blight thing might have been removed in BPM...like maybe it only spawns in combat? I'm not sure, feel like I read that somewhere but I'll try it. The charming thing sounds like a good idea. Gotta kill Concelhaut to get that wand though, but they start blue so I can just reverse pickpocket a guy with a bomb, that's a cool trick. Speaking of pain link, I was fighting Dorodugan with pain linked summons and noticed he was taking way less damage than it seemed he should be. Like he was regularly dealing 600ish damage to pain linked summons from some of his abilities but didn't seem to take any damage at all. I only see the red damage tick if he does a regular weapon attack. Abilities like Brutal Cleave and the Helfire Explosions don't proc it at all, but the description of pain link doesn't distinguish between types of damage, it *should* be damaging on weapon attacks, spells, abilities, everything. Did you notice this or am I imagining things? I'm hesitant to report another bug to elric because the last couple times I was mistaken. But I cast pain link on an animated weapon and tried soul ignition and disintegration and they didn't damage me, but attacking the summon with weapons did. Granted I only tested these abilities and dorodugan so small sample but seems like the ability is bugged or the description is wrong. That battle seems like it will take absolutely ages with pain link only working on direct weapon attacks. Tried proccing chill fog with grave calling and all that but it hardly ever hits. Normally when I fight him I have super high weapon accuracy, no recovery and 300% damage from conduit and massive passive healing etc. so he is not that tough, but fighting him with summons...IDK I spent about half an hour and he'd only lost like maybe 10% health. Fighting HOW is strangely very easy with summons. Haven't gotten past the gigantic oozes at like 1/3 health, and I've gotten to that point three times. At least with the blood mage. And I've tried some other builds that don't even get that far. Like some tanky builds that work until their armor breaks and then they quickly die. Only build I've beaten him on without cheese is psion / troubadour. (Also pretty sure I can beat him with hierophant). I don't think BPM changed cinder bombs. One problem I'm having with this battle as a mage is I need to carry at least a couple grimoires in my pocket which limits how many potions and scrolls I can take. Tried using Giftbearer Cloth and even took community patch ability extra pocket so I have all 6 slots but is still like llengrath grimoire, arkemyr grimoire, concelhaut, ninagauth, potion of enlightenment, potion of impediment, potion of perfect aim, and I'm already out of space. Can drop two of arkemyr, concelhaut, ninagauth grimoires if I memorize more spells but still can only carry so much. What would you prioritize here? Avenging storm seems pretty good, but mostly because of the potion of impediment, perfect aim seems important. The enlightenment potion is extremely useful. Just not much room.

Yep that was it. That char is scripted to only use forbidden fist and not regular fist attacks. Lot of abilities get bonus pen / accuracy / damage, wonder why they nerfed it... Looked it up. Sounds like so it works better with ciphers they made it like a weapon attack instead of an ability. I guess that makes sense for that specific class but -2 pen is pretty bad nerf.

Ah you cast withdraw on her then kite him. Yes this works but I don't have withdraw, also temporal cocoon is a 7 second cast so I'd probably get some damage doing it that close to him, but if that's the only way to do it I guess I take some damage. Might mess up the symbiote thing though. Hmm maybe I can cast it while stealthed, removing most of the recovery, but...if Vela is cocooned does she still get scared if I unstealth? Which brings up the philosophical question, if a mountainous ooze attacks you but Vela is too cocooned to notice, did it really happen? That is a good thought with the wand but all the barring death door effects have been replaced by fixed duration damage shields. Also blood sacrifice has a 3 second cooldown and .8 second cast so not as spammable as it used to be. If you happened to be near death it could buy you a couple casts, but then afterward there's a 6 second duration where you can't heal, so...yeah. Much preferred the old blood sacrifice but I like new challenges. May not be clear from the image but the way the damage shield works is it doesn't trigger until near death so you'd still take a lot of damage unless you were already near death I think.

Maybe, because sometimes she stays near the corner. But getting her scared without getting her near the big blob in the middle of the map is kinda hard. How do you do that? And if you trigger her near HOW you'd have to get him all the way into a corner. Actually I think I did that on one of the attempts where I made it to the second stage... I went to the bottom left corner and I could barely see anything because of all the icons. I just tried a couple times with SC blood mage. Strategy is stealth buff long-lasting spells and potion of enlightenment / impediment / perfect aim then cast blood sacrifice to regain as many levels as possible and trigger llengrath's safeguard, heal a bit, unstealth, get hit with symbiote, try to bunch the 3 lesser oozes together, cast slicken, it hits the lesser oozes 100%, then the shorter buffs like arcane veil and eldritch aim, moonwell scroll, avenging storm, wall of draining, recast slicken, wall of draining when first one is out. Unlikely to get a third one unless I blood sacrifice a bunch which would leave me pretty low health. That's what I tried last time and died before got third cast (didn't get it back). Only source of healing was moonwell and blood mage passive and blood sacrifice turns off both for 6s. If you hit all four with the wall of draining you get maybe +15 to 20 seconds per effect which is just not enough. Even if I hit all four, the buffs will all run out before I kill stage 1 of HOW. Maybe this strategy is bad now. I mean old blood mage builds were mostly centered around extending potion of the final stand (plus scordeo's etc.) and if you watch videos people usually have very little health and would have died many times without it. I can barely extend moonwell. Might make more sense to kill HOW form without the buffs and keep my spells (is doable, but takes a long time) using phantoms and finality's claim ring so HOW damages himself. When he's near death, let my spells restore (mostly just phantom). Then I do the wall of draining stuff on the gigantic oozes. But the problem with that is I'm not sure if they cast symbiote...and hitting just two oozes is not enough. I mean I could leave the symbiotes from stage 1 alone if the phantom spawned any, but they probably have merged into just one or two by then. IDK, maybe it would work, but killing HOW now is 100X harder than it used to be. Except with the troubadour / psion, with that one I got it first try with almost no pausing. Maybe I'll try this again tomorrow but at the moment I am really frustrated with this boss and considering doing a troubadour / psion run. The great thing about that is recovery time barely matters because you don't need to spam summons. It only matters for the cipher spells and even then not that much because you still gain focus slower than you can use it. So the BPM nerfs affect the build very little (brisk recitation is slightly worse) but there are also summoning buffs that make the summons more viable, and they're summoned a little faster since quick summoning is better. And unlike a wizard's essential phantom, animancy cat actually gives bonus might and pen to chanter summons. @Elric Galad Suggestion here regarding potions of enlightenment, I know you were trying to make single classes more appealing, so would it be possible to give back more resources or give them back faster for single class builds? The potions are extremely strong for like a barbarian/monk where you get back mortification + rage (+ wounds?) every 30s, so if you started with 10 of each you get back 10% resources every 30s per class. This potion makes a lot of multiclass builds pretty appealing like wizard / barbarian only loses L8 and L9 spells and in exchange if your INT is high enough you can have perma-frenzy and perma-savage defiance for a truckload of healing and extra speed / damage. And I think that's great, but then you use the potion on the single class chars and it is half as good. Worse on casters. A l20 druid typically has 18ish spells and you get back 1 every 30s, and unlike pools like rage you don't get to then pick the spell to use the resource on, it's random. So...possible balance is to give single classes 2 resource per 30s or 1 resource per 15 or 20s.

Sorry I'm not understanding the first strategy with the traps. If I lure enemies with traps Vela just follows me, right? I'm missing something...do you do this in a particular video in your ultimate run? I can look it up. I've seen you use the fire blight and maybe the wand. Don't remember the traps but I've only watched some of the major battles. And yeah I've blown up Vela with the sparkcrackers before lol. Was trying to lure enemies to a gunpowder barrel. Edit: Whoa just saw you reverse pickpocket a bomb on one of Concelhaut's dudes, no idea you could do that. You had summons though, won't Vela just keep following me if I do that and then go into combat? I've used Halt and Binding Web and lots of stuff like that to try to keep her in place but a lot of the time she comes running toward me mid battle. Only super reliable method I've found is casting withdraw over and over. Edit 2: Okay I get the trap thing now, the second one starts combat but you and vela are still stealthed and you can lead her away. Still, how does this make her stay there? I've tried unstealth / stealth to start combat stealthed on HOW map and she still follows me, so how am I supposed to fight anyone without unstealthing her?

I can't believe I haven't seen this already. I've watched at least parts of nearly every ultimate run, but never watched yours, I guess because I never tried a tactician or skaen/anything but messed around with lot of blood mages, ciphers, chanters, and monks. Your detailed notes are awesome and I wish I'd discovered them earlier. I had similar issues with restoring spells with blood mage / soul blade. I ended up scripting blood sacrifice to go off periodically and blood sacrificed three times at the end of every fight. Actually scripted everything. I practiced fights at first but stopped after a while because the game was kind of hilariously easy once I'd procced enough SOF cheese and got citzal's spirit lance. Lost a bunch of my buffs when I landed on Ukaizo and forgot about the forced rest, rushed into battle because "ah my script can handle it", I nearly wiped on that fight lol... See my problem I'm having with vela is even if I temporal cocoon her in the top right corner (like in HOW map), then run to the bottom left, kite HOW way down, she still ends up wandering pretty close to the center of the map and HOW chucks a symbiote at her, and she's stupid so she runs around and then is surrounded by oozes and gets murdered. The only way I've been able to deal with vela consistently (in this fight anyway) is to do most of the fight stealthed. I can send in phantoms and blood sacrifice in stealth, buff the phantoms from stealth, etc. Was also easy with the troubadour/psion because she stays with me and I didn't go near HOW in that one. My blood mage does have infinite withdraw casts since I stole that spell but I'm trying to figure out how to do it without that, and some fights are so grindy I don't think you can have enough withdraw scrolls. I know if you can start combat with vela far away sometimes she stays there, so like you used to be able to summon the fire blight with the magran's belt and that would scare vela and she'd stay in that area, but BPM changed the belt. Or I thought it did...but I don't see it in the notes. Hmm. Still, that is a very tedious method trying to proc the 1%... Watched the fight. That took you half an hour without recovery time. It's going to take me HOURS. Why didn't you use Marux Amanth on HOW? Can't sacrifice destroy him? But you have to be paladin / priest / rogue. I'm tempted to forget the SC blood mage and do a hierophant again or loremaster, warlock, sage, something that boosts my accuracy and crits or else healing. Hierophant has way more accuracy and defense, loremaster gets energized plus healing and summons, warlock gets tons of damage boosts and healing, sage gets thunderous blows and other monk goodies. I feel like weapons scale better than spells and you don't have to worry about restoring them, which is much harder in BPM since it takes longer, has lower chance to recover high level spells, and prevents healing for 6 seconds per cast. I mean I went SC blood mage mostly for major grimoire imprint but when I actually got to the point where I stole shadowing beyond, champion's boon, salvation of time, barring death's door, minor avatar etc. etc. (basically your whole spellbook) the challenge just disappeared and I was like what's the point. But now IDK what's the point of staying SC blood mage. The high level spells aren't that good and they're hard to restore. The only real benefit is you get two L7 casts instead of 1, and L7 spells are 1/3 chance to restore so that is a little significant if you're trying to use wall of draining a lot, but if I went MC I'd probably be melee focused. I'll at least try SC blood mage though. Didn't realize you could extend avenging storm.

I'm a wood elf at the moment but am changing stuff with console frequently and trying different builds. In BPM the moon godlike is actually pretty good for this fight because you take less raw damage from blood sacrifice and you also take less corrode damage from HOW, -25% damage and +4 AR vs corrode. I preferred boreal dwarf in POE1 with the +15 accuracy. 50% miss to graze is probably only useful in this specific fight when you're trying to interrupt with things that interrupt on graze like tornado. Or slicken yeah. Considering how massively high the fortitude and reflex saves are that could actually be pretty useful. I haven't tried again yet as blood mage. It takes so long to wear down his first form... I made a psion / troubadour and it was the easiest thing ever. HOW never even attacked me, you can start in stealth and just send in the bat things who spit fire until he has a sliver of health left, then psychovampiric shield => borrowed instinct => disintegrate. It didn't even take that long either. Wrote a simple script to summon things and cast pain block by least inspiration and then hit fast mode. Took quite a few tries to land disintegrate but meanwhile I had an endless stream of skeletons running at him with no chance to hit him because their accuracy is like 29. The bats are pretty tough actually but since they're in your party unlike essential phantoms you can direct them to attack specific targets or just sit there and get killed which is super useful. I'm pretty sure now this would be the easiest way to get through the game legitimately. The instruments of death are pretty decent vs most enemies and vela isn't as big an issue because if you stay in stealth she follows you. With an endless stream of skeletons running off you the AI rarely targets you even if you're unstealthed. SC troubadour would also do well but would probably have trouble with HOW. But Pale Shelter already did this build and though he used SOF I'd be doing basically the same thing. I do think I have an idea of what will work though with blood mage. After you get hit with symbiote run in a line away from him, cast slicken, drink some potions, ire of death's herald, wall of draining on the symbiotes plus HOW, if you hit all four you should extend the buffs long enough. Second slicken and wall of draining if necessary. Can maybe do a third using potions of enlightenment. Though I haven't really planned past that. I like to just summon citzal's spirit lance and phantoms and beat things to death. If potions of impediment worked on spells it would be pretty easy. But even if not, slicken plus storm of holy fire scrolls will probably work... How does dual wielding benefit accuracy? Stacking adaptive I guess? I think BPM fixed this to only apply to Scordeo's Edge. Not totally sure haven't tried it in BPM. Oh, to proc avenging storm. You know I've never played a druid, does this spell stun or interrupt like returning storm? The description just says it attacks anyone you hit or who hits you with a bolt of lightning. Vs. reflex. It's too bad there aren't any AOE spells targeting deflection...not that I can think of anyway. Will would be best after that. But most AOEs target reflex which is his second highest defense. And the hard CCs tend to target fortitude which is his highest. Assuming avenging storm interrupts (or I'm energized) that is a good idea since the duration is so long. Then throw down some meteor storms. Probably need a couple stacks of scrolls as it takes too long to recover L9 spells. Energized + citzal's spirit lance also works well on the smaller oozes (massive and smaller). Gigantic ones trying to merge into HOW is probably the worst part. Oh how did you deal with Vela in your ultimate attempt? In mine I had infinite withdraw casts so it was easy. If you're summoning stuff offscreen it is also easy. Harder with a character that fights directly because she tends to wander into the field of fire. I did manage to get her to stay in the upper right section but it was kind of difficult, had to temporal cocoon her and then attack HOW from the bottom left and kite him really far away, but Vela inevitably still comes running towards you. Think I'm doing something wrong as my success in keeping her in the corner has been pretty random.