Lunateric

Does the Efficient Anguish expected behavior work the same for Soul Annihilation on Soulblade?, it's also a primary attack so following your previous example with Anguish it should be Soul Annihilation > Mercy Strike proc > second hit with Stalker's Patience immediately after. A Soulblade/Monk with the weapon then sounds superb if you can just fuel your focus generation with all the extra hits from this interaction plus Heartbeat Drumming and Swift Strikes.

Sorry to hijack this thread but was wondering what build you guys would recommend to maximize the effects of Stalker's Patience. I'd like to try a single class stalker because wordplay but not sure how they fare at higher levels and I'm always put off by resource limited classes. Monk/Soul Blade also sounds amazing because the extra hit spam should be off the charts and you get a significant accuracy boost through Borrowed Instincts. Important to note Phantom Foes adds an easy way to proc flanked for ciphers.

Yeah you're correct on all regards, was just testing it after getting annoyed at the lack of pet scripting on the Seer as I said on my previous post. Lance is incredibly strong and makes the build go from fairly versatile to an almost silly powerhouse, it's particularly funny to hit a crit on a paralyzed foe (mental binding) and watch it get chopped into gibs with everything around it. I also used Ectopsychic Echo for the first time and consider it a fairly strong spell if you aren't playing solo, kinda miffed I don't see it mentioned more since it's crush damage every second if I'm not mistaken. Imagine for a moment you could put it on Maia Rua's hawk and just roleplay as a bomber going behind enemy lines/or if you had the bird as a pet to begin with as a player. Not sure if it can work with the phantoms you can summon as wizard but it'll be a quick respec just to try it out. Thank you again for all the very useful information you have given me, I have enjoyed this game much more this time around and I'm actually eager to play more of it or similar games after being able to metagame a bit with people here.

Waaaaaiiiiittttt, @Shai Hulud have you tested the unique pike, Wahai Poraga?, wondering if soul annihilation distributes damage between all targets (read in BPM notes that the the weapon was fixed), sounds like an amazing weapon for a witch (soul blade/barb) build for example. Edit: set up my Seer and have been doing Maje island, kinda irks me I can't set my pet to just automatically attack apparently, it just stays put until I issue a command. Is there any scripting magic involved?

Hey @Not So Clever Hound, I have been playing your build with a slight flavour variation: Wildstrike corrode, nature godlike with BPM for more healing, but it's overall the same idea and I have been having a blast. Was wondering what grimoire/spells you would recommend for a heavier emphasis in acid/decay, without the ability to go for Grimoire of Vaporous Wizardry because Rekvhu's can't be equipped. Was also wondering what would be your general strategy for single tough bosses (thinking Dorudugan) without cheesing outside the typical WoD shenanigas that won't work that well on him or any other similar boss. I imagine you need strong workhorse single target spells, like necrotic lance but better.

I will give it a try today, I am looking forward to a true ranged DPS/caster hybrid since most of my builds are purely melee, I find the typical dual mortar build somewhat annoying/overused for some reason, though I know it's quite strong. Would you mind sharing any of the rules you got on your scripts for Citzal's Spirit Lance/Parasitic Staff?, I want to have them always on without microing the cast. EDIT: It's in the scripts you shared, nevermind my dumbness

I learned the hard way that cipher spells aren't available while in animal form as a Shifter (makes perfect sense, don't know what I was thinking). So not really synergistic at least as a Shifter/Soul Blade but could have a really strong party support and healer with Lifegiver/Psion. @Shai Hulud been playing with Hierophant (soul blade/blood mage) more and felt a power spike once I unlocked Spirit Lance, it feels quite strong right now. Still interested to make a good ranged DPS Ascendant/X. Been reading different posts here that recommend ranger (maybe Arcane Archer) and even Barbarian, so haven't decided yet. It will be my third and final build for this PotD fiesta: shifter/forbidden fist Ascetic, soul blade/blood mage Hierophant and ascendant/X.

I have that character at level 14 and it's a one man's army basically. I had to lower my INT significantly to make room for Resolve (30 right now with all bonuses but I found out I have no easy access to steadfast, at least yet), ended up with 12 INT (8 base + 2 Berath's +2 Alchemic Wits) but once you factor in the INT duality of mortal presence (+10) and enlightened agony (+5, hostile effect duration reduction) it's completely fine, you can cast all the HoTs from druid once your first shapeshift is over and immediately start pummeling again with stag or cat if versus a boss, assuming you use the shifter mod discussed here somewhere. My annoyance was not having access to every animal form at any time (if it has no cooldown), that was how I remember it worked in vanilla. But I understand it's not what the mod maker wants or thinks is balanced. Also having issues properly scripting auto shape shifting for some reason (always true > shape shift > character is stuck not doing anything else for some reason). I ended up discovering a really strong build though, rarely see Ascetics being discussed here. I'll keep going until I unlock heartbeat drumming just to see what happens haha. Sorry for derailing your post so much @Elric Galad and thanks for your awesome mod, please keep updating it.

It works perfectly fine, the high resolve you need means you have to lower INT and make druid's spells a bit worse, that you regain back thanks to monk. You can spam FF thanks to all the HoTs druid gives and you can actually cast it while shifted while doing superb damage. Forbidden Fist/anything melee should work to be honest. I didn't drop it because it was not strong, I dropped it because shapeshifting felt terrible. Edit: now that I think about it, using forbidden fist while shapeshifted still uses fists, @Elric Galad?, not really sure.

Yeah, it takes you out of spirit shift and the cooldown goes regardless. Also you can't just spam spells on druid MC like you can on a blood mage, for example. That's why I said on previous posts the shifter as a whole runs out of juice pretty quickly. Maybe single class is much better considering you have access to the stronger storm spells. Even then you don't enjoy the PL bonuses you could get with wild strike because you can't cast while in animal form. Your mod as a whole is great, I just find the shifter changes anti synergistic.

I went with a forbidden fist/shifter build that was extremely resilient but was incredibly vulnerable to enemy casters, one hit and you are out of shift right after your spells, so no shift, no spells, in the middle of a fight. It may work much better in groups I think. Part of vanilla shifter's versatility was being able to access any form at any point as long as you hadn't used it yet. With your implementation you only get one form per "cast and then shift" cycle, or maybe none if you get knocked out of it by an enemy caster, effectively leaving you enjoying that oh so nice universal cooldown with no spells and no spirit shift. Enemy casters really like saving their casts just to kill your form in PoTD seems like. I ended up trying the mod that was mentioned in previous posts and like it more, the cooldown is much longer (180s) but it's also not universal, so losing an animal form hurts but doesn't break the flow of the class completely. Like you said, maybe that change should have been left in the nerfs package along blood mage's blood sacrifice, a much more egregious and possibly game breaking thing than having the ability to freely swap forms (and it exists still without that nerf balance file).

I didn't say shifter was a martial class, I did say a proper martial class will do more damage than shifter will ever do. And considering you have no spells while shifted that's a valid point of comparison. The question that has to be asked is: why pick shifter?, other than roleplay/people like animal forms. Unless you have a brilliant source the subclass as a whole runs out of steam surprisingly fast, I abandoned shifter for PotD really quick.

Well, shifter will always have the downside of not being able to cast spells while shifted, isn't that enough?, also not benefitting from the PL levels granted by wild strike because of said inability to cast anything. I do think the current implementation of it will make people just not use it at all, specially considering longer fights where a proper martial class doesn't have to deal with such large downtimes in damage. I think it breaks the flow of doing damage > casting spells > doing damage again pretty hard. I'll look for this discussion just to understand a bit better.

Hey @Elric Galad, I am trying a Shifter/Monk build right now and I am having the issue of not being able to shapeshift more than once before entering universal cooldown for all spirit shifts. IE: turn into cat, cat form runs out, I can't shape shift into any other animal because of said cooldown. Admittedly I haven't played shifter in years but I remember being able to use every form at least once in the same encounter, which leads me to believe it's a bug. If it isn't a bug then it's just a giant downside to shifter, already not being able to cast spells while shifted and relying on that weave in and out of animal forms to heal and cast things (75 second UNIVERSAL cooldown sounds awful for this particular subclass). Edit: nevermind what I wrote, seems to be intended and someone already made a mod that alters this implementation here: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/613 The mod maker makes very good points that I think you should take into consideration for shifter in particular.

I will give stalker a try (always liked Stalker's Patience bonuses and design), also deeply interested in how shape shift works with it since I feel like it does what it should have done since the very beginning, allow druids to shape shift more freely. I still think it should be akin to a modal but maybe that's too good. It makes a blood mage/lifegiver build significantly better I think and I wonder how it interacts with soulblade (do you gain focus while shifted?). That'll come after Hierophant though, but I think cat form for example could be a very strong DPS contender to current top dogs.