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.

That mod is exactly what I was looking for, it's amazing. I just set up BPM so gonna toy with that first for sure. Are there any interesting combinations of classes you'd recommend besides this considering modding?, I'm not interested in cheating but the balance mods most people have been using do feel refreshing.

Just to get it out of the way, I am playing an ascendant/blood mage, I just happened to mention soulblade because I saw your build and really liked it, but that was after actually making my original post, whoops. I don't mind turning on a particular ascendant script once I ascend since I like to play my fights hands on, I have mostly issues with menial things like: buffing (there are a lot of buffs to cast and I am sure as hell not wanting to do it manually) and also getting my summoned weapon out, I also think it would be interesting to script blood sacrifice since I am mostly playing like a backliner with heavy debuffs and some DPS, avoiding most if not all damage (got escape handy too). Waiting on a few more levels to unlock Freezing Pillar and Desintegration to actually start ramping up self DPS. So all in all I have a very barebones script that casts Infuse with Vital Essence and Deleterious Alacrity of Motion and that's about it! Now that I think about it, I understand Kalakoth's Minor Blights are great DPS too from what you have written so far, and could be dual wielded with a pistol, for example, did you ever try them with Scordeo's Trophy?, with the stacking recovery bonus it sounds like it could be an amazing sustained damage combo. For even more context, I am also playing with the Community Patch and I am thinking on downloading the Balance Polishing Mod just to smooth things out and maybe give an honest chance to Tenous Grasp (already have it but rarely use it) and Soul Ignition. Just to reiterate, Hierophant is an incredibly versatile multiclass, my only grip is not knowing more about the game to automate certain behaviors and interactions that detract from actually playing the game and not playing buff simulator. I think I could toy with focus conditionals to do ascended state just fine now that I think about it, can't wait to get home. Thank you for sharing your scripts!

I will try and do things in the order you presented just to have a change of pace from my last run. I have been doing PotD so far but with a 3 person party (me as Hierophant, Tekehu as pure druid and Pallegina as chanter/paladin), they hate each other's guts but there is a lot of synergy with their kits and my own. It is kinda annoying to be doing the grimoire swap I agree, not sure if it's possible since I have never seen someone doing it but would you mind sharing your hierophant script?, I wanna see what a proper setup can and can't do. Also returning to one of your previous points, hunting bow modal Essence Interrupter is indeed quite fast and I suspect it's one of the highest DPS options for ranged at least in this setup, it's very satisfying to watch my character machine gun things and ascend the first few seconds of battle.

Wanted to give you an update since you gave me tons of solid advice. I have been trying summoned weapons more and noticed a nice interaction with Concelhaut's Draining Touch and grimoire swapping that lets you keep it if you swap out of the grimoire you used to cast it. It was probably known already but I found it super useful, the creepy hand is pretty good. The best thing about it is it targets will and I can absolutely nuke will with club modal, psychovampiric shield, borrowed instincts and miasma. It may be my favorite single target weapon in the game right now. Does it benefit from spirit of decay?, if it does then that's even nicer. For encounters with a lot of enemies I use the spirit lance and I can easily fill my focus in a quick moment, not sure I want to cheese yet with strand of favor focus stacking but it's still early in the game for me I think. What level do you recommend I tackle the SSS DLC with this build?

Would you recommend any other ranged weapons outside frostseeker?, It seems like an amazing bow for AoE but not sure it's that good versus single target. I am also looking at grimoire stealing escape and nature's balm to compliment the build as a whole though not interested in cheesing all the way with strand of favor (just saw your awesome soul blade/blood mage build) Btw, did you ever try stalker's patience on it?, Phantom foes > flanked enemies > stalker's patience gets bonus damage (does it apply to everything or just the weapon?) Thanks for the advice

Haven't consideres going melee, if I were to go melee I'd probably want to go soul blade instead I think, which isn't exactly what I'm wanting to do for this particular build unless it's much more effective heh

Hey guys, Played this game a few years ago and liked it a ton, back then it was a forbidden fist single class monk that managed to do all content on veteran difficulty without much issue. I'm looking to play a caster centered build and I'm toying with the idea of an ascendant/blood mage that does ranged weapons to reach ascended state and chain cast vampiric shield, secret horrors, mind minding and the better shred spells to massively debuff foes while being able to stack damage on bosses or high priority targets. Considering Pull of Eora, expose defenses and miasma as good wizard spells. I'm not too sure on what weapons to use though, and also not certain on what grimoire would benefit me the most. I am wondering if St. Omaku's Mercy recovery on crit helps with spell casting and what other good sustained DPS options are there for range that would allow me to pummel things from a distance. Not really interested in dual mortars because honestly they get boring pretty fast and I mostly want to chain together a lot of casting with brief moments of gaining back focus to ascend again for the longer fights.

Sasha's Scimitar with coil too so you can have all those chanter buffs and all those tier 3 inspirations?

Whoops, I must have misread then. I don't think many weapons outside Chain and Ball synergize well with the build then. And I'm not keen to think 15% extra damage is game changing (besides what OP is already using). Was initially messing with a monk/priest death godlike variation because it's really easy to control triggering near death with fist curses, but depending on Barring Death's Door always has me scared if Arcane Dampener is used by someone

Gotta say I am loving this build, it's very self sufficient. With enough heal stacking and doing a solo run you can try Slayer's Claw offhand, upgrades Thunderous Blows and also gets a raw leash when bound to Paladin.