NotDumbEnough

It is worth noting that +defenses to affliction is very strong (such as passives on Fighter and Paladin skill tree). If, for example, you have +20 defenses against dexterity afflictions and a rogue attempts to use crippling strike on you, you get +20 deflection against the actual weapon attack as well as +20 fortitude for the hobbled roll.

This game, like oldschool CRPGs and certain other games like new XCOM, does not have clearly defined roles for classes. Most classes often have multiple roles, and it's easier to list what a given class CAN'T do than what it can, e.g. Wizards can't buff their teammates in any way with their usual spells. But pretty much everything else they can do.

For absolute single target burst damage Streetfighter/Soulblade is highest imo. With your streetfighter passive you can easily hit for hundreds of damage.

Are you sure the skeletons are not poison immune? It's been a while, but I believe at least enemy skeletons are.

A correction: Stunning Surge not only refunds Mortification, but actually gives you wounds on crit IIRC. If your accuracy is decent it's a very powerful wound generator on Forbidden Fist who might otherwise lack wounds.

The change for Resonant Touch is a bit misleading, for a moment I thought you deleted the ability from the game.

That might be it, I think I was fighting the escaped slaves with their beasts, and some of the beast attacks bypassed Blade Turning.

I would be careful. I used to goof around with Streetfighter/Helwalker where I essentially played as a glass cannon and dumped all defenses and solely relied on Blade Turning to not die in melee (as it is fairly useful with high intellect and recovery time bonus). However, it does not appear to work against all attacks, though I don't know why. Sometimes I would fight in melee and an attack would circumvent Blade Turning, even though the previous attack and the following attack do not. I did not move at all. I guess Blade Turning is not 100% reliable so be careful of blowing up your own monk.

Is it possible to make The Long Pain summon a melee weapon with very long range rather than a ranged weapon? The primary problem with the ability, I think, is that it is ranged and does not work with many monk abilities.

The symbol spells have lower penetration, quite low cast range and deal their damage over a longer duration (i.e. you cannot cast from stealth and kill everything before they ever reach you).

It is also worth noting that non-food clear-on-rest bonuses always stack. So Prostitute bonuses, Amira's Boon, bonuses from drinking from the mystery pool in Bipara's cave, etc. all stack with everything.

That is buggy/unreliable, so BPM simply changed it to always stack.

Personally, I think most offensive spells, at least AoE spells, should be forbidden from out of combat. It is very weird to have a druid or priest be better at assassinating enemies than a literal SC Assassin and would help tone down the broken-ness of SC casters at high levels. They would still be plenty powerful, but the player would not be able to annihilate entire fights by casting Wall of Many Colors + Call of Rymrgand + Great Maelstrom from stealth all at the same time or something.

How often do these ticks happen and how long does the effect last? I guess they are affected by intellect and PL but is 15 seconds the hammer's duration or the debuff's duration? Or in other words, if I need to cast CCD every X seconds to escalate the bonus, what is X? The tooltip is not very useful.

I think it's certainly good, the problem is just that it's not often worth using after you get Great Maelstrom because everything dies so quickly. On the other hand this is also true for 90% of the Druid's other offensive spells.

This makes multiclassed Beckoner a bit more interesting now, as you don't need the power levels to make Drake/Spore interesting. Also nice to have the Drake last long enough to reliably die so that the upgrade can take effect. IIRC Dragon has extremely high stats so the DoT will likely last a very very long time. That said I don't think the Dragon lacked for AoE damage in the first place, I used weapons all the time because the Dragon was terrible at dealing single target damage (very long recovery time, unable to compete with 4 weapons attacking the same target).

There's a mod on nexus which auto-updates all companions to be the same level as you whenever you switch zones or reload the game. Strongly recommend. If you don't want to use the mod you can also cheese the game in the opposite direction. Keep companions at level 1 and bring them when you turn in quests. They will get a large XP bonus due to being under leveled. They will gain so much xp that they will easily outlevel your Watcher and you can end up with Eder being 2-3 levels higher than you.

It is quite powerful by itself. Keep in mind that Power Level scaling for damage over time effects is always very powerful since you are double dipping (both damage per tick and number of ticks), and with high Might and PL you are looking at a maximum of ~20 damage per tick. Even at half that value for bloodied enemies it is very nice for a low level spell.

It's worth noting that the Frost AR on Flame Shield is really just for show. 80% of the time this is redundant since a Frost keyword attack will directly cancel your Flame Shield, since most Frost damage comes from spells with keywords. Perhaps a more extreme proposal for your suggested spells. Maybe give Priest of Magran inbuilt healing from burn damage like Fire Naga, Dorudugan, Rekvu's cloak, etc. instead of massive Burn AR and self heal. Would facilitate a more up close and personal play style (e.g. stand in your own Storm of Holy Fire) and perhaps more interesting than an instant self heal.

Symbol of Wael is pretty underwhelming though as it rolls against Fortitude. So does Symbol of Berath but it has Weakened effect attached on the same roll. Skaen has one of the better symbols due to rolling vs Deflection and being pierce damage (normally a downside vs skeletons, but since you're a priest you can just OHKO them), and his mobility abilities like Shadowing Beyond can help you get into position as the Symbol spells all have pretty short range. Priest of Skaen also has better martial capabilities as a fallback against more durable single targets as well as an Incarnate that deals OK damage. Priest of Magran has the best Symbol, of course assuming the enemy is not immune to fire. Simply having Fire keyword means that you can find lots and lots of +PL for it, and it rolls vs Will. There are extremely few damaging attacks in the game that roll vs Will so it's quite useful. Blind affliction is also very good. Unfortunately you only have Spark the Souls of the Righteous for fire immune foes which tend to be quite common. Even your summoned weapons have a burn lash.

For higher tier Wizard/Druid spells the trick is not to cast them in the middle of combat. It is indeed hard to micro your party to not wander into a Meteor Shower. Instead what you should do for Meteor Shower and Great Maelstrom is drop them on the ground while you're still in stealth. Casting the spell itself does not break stealth -- the enemy has to actually walk into it and have a hit rolled against them for your stealth to break. If you position the AoE at proper distances from enemies, the enemies will walk into the AoE while it is still ongoing, but enough time has passed that you get your spell cast restored. Effectively, you get half a cast of these abilities for free. These spells hit extremely hard, so if you make sure to be the only one visible you can bait the enemies into the AoE and watch them get vaporized. The remaining duration of your first cast should be sufficient enough to cover you while you cast the second instance of the spell which should end the fight by itself. The other way to handle this is to chain high tier spell casts from stealth. If you synchronize Call of Rymrgand, Wall of Many Colors and Great Maelstrom to drop at the same time, most fights should end instantly.

Symbol of Skaen is vs Deflection, which is arguably its primary advantage.

I think Force of Anguish and Skyward Kick are not interrupt on graze because they only consume wounds, and it is fairly easy to get an infinite chain of Efficient Anguishes with Dance of Death, Nazpalca, Voidwheel etc.

For WotEP I think it is a case of weapon-bound abilities benefiting from weapon enchantments, sneak attack etc in general. Voidwheel's Necrotic Lance also deals huge damage with its damage over time from sneak attack, Streetfighter, etc.

I think the scariest part of enemy monks is Inner Death usage. It is pretty much an instant OHKO if you are unlucky enough, as the damage numbers are just not very balanced for the enemy using it against players.