NotDumbEnough

It's worth noting for Forbidden Fist in particular, Suppress Affliction makes it so that you effectively have 0 stacks of the curse during the affliction, i.e. you can spam Forbidden Fist for free while it is active, though with a much smaller damage bonus due to the curse stacks being suppressed. However, you will continue to accrue curse stacks, so if you push it too hard you will die instantly as soon as the suppression wears off. But obviously you can use BDD to avoid dying. Can have some fun interactions with the SSS axe which suspends hostile effects on Paladins on kill -- a Votary will not only have their Thundering Blows inspiration upgraded to Energized, but can also infinitely spam Forbidden Fist as long as they keep killing.

Resting bonus if you choose violence in the quest to clear out the Kraken's Eye room. All universal damage bonuses should work including Ascendant's Ascended bonus in unmodded game.

It is worth noting that animals even have a recovery time for swapping weapons. e.g. the brine bats in the first cave will enter recovery if they switch between melee and ranged.

Yes, it does. However I don't think it counts as a rest so it will not replenish per rest resources.

If you're willing to spend cash on luminous adra potions or bathhouse visits, the pool in Bipara's cave also gives you extra attributes until you rest, which also stack.

Also works like this for Tekehu's Avenging Storm on his Stormspeaker subclass. If you abuse the phrase refund through Sasha's Singing Scimitar, you can infinitely recast Avenging Storm and it will always count as empowered as long as you don't allow it to totally expire. Edit: oops, already mentioned in the OP. It's worth noting that if you switch to Effort you won't get phrases back. I'd personally rather have infinite phrases than Effort cheese on hard to hit targets.

If you want a really, really powerful healer you can multiclass a Lifegiver druid with a Chanter and sing Mercy and Kindness. With high might and intellect a single healing spell (any healing over time, pretty much) will be enough to heal your party to full and more. As in you can get hundreds of HP healed per person from a single cast of The Moon's Light or Moonwell.

Resolve is mostly redundant on a Herald as 1. you'll likely be so tanky that enemies do not prioritize you, even if you dump resolve and have low deflection and 2. you don't really care about most debuffs except for stuns and paralysis so the reduced negative effect duration is also less interesting.

Yeah druids have naturally high penetration on most of their spells (I think ~70% of them have 9 base pen, whereas for a wizard it feels like ~80% have 7 base pen), so the +1 pen is nice but not as critical as it is for other casters. The main problem with a Fury druid is that your bonuses are often wasted. A lot of your early elemental spells are self-centered or cones so that cast range doesn't matter at all. Furthermore, until you get Great Maelstrom, a lot of your spells are crowd-control focused, rather than damage centric, which also contributes to an evoker feeling more flashy than a fury druid. Your damage output is pretty average until you get Avenging Storm at least, then goes through the roof when you finally do get Great Maelstrom. Unfortunately it's so powerful even on PotD that it kind of kills the challenge for me as casting it from stealth will instantly annihilate most encounters.

Should probably just pump Athletics for critical self heals. You're going to be in dicey situations occasionally due to your self damage, which by the way feels like it scales faster with levels than your HP does.

Would just go for a single class Chanter, probably Bellower. Dump dexterity, with high might, perception and intellect you should more or less blow up most fights with a single spell. Not a lot of micromanagement, just get into position and press button to win.

In case it saves you some labor I believe prostitute bonuses and other "until rest" bonuses like Dawnstar's Blessing already completely stack with other bonuses. It is only resting bonuses from food and inns that have janky stacking.

I personally think the problem with Hands of Light is that Courageous is overkill. There are very few situations where Courageous is a substantial improvement over Resolute (i.e. you are getting interrupted more than once every 6 seconds), and a Priest can already very easily give the whole team Resolute with a tier 2 spell with a very good duration. If you are getting interrupted more than once per 6 seconds then either your defenses are very poor or you are positioning badly.

No. Only healing received has an effect. Note that Fighter's Take the Hit DOES work against damage over time. One good combo is a single class Fighter and a single class Paladin in the same party. The Fighter soaks up half the self-damage from the Paladin's self-immolation ability, and with the appropriate upgrade the Paladin can also immediately help the Fighter heal it back for net gain of HP.

Have you tried switching zones, restarting the game or even playing the game on another computer? I don't think anyone quite knows what causes it but those are my best guesses. For me it's unreliable, sometimes Hot Razor Skewers +2 Pen will stack with sword modal, sometimes it doesn't etc. After a while it seems to be permanent unless you lose and regain the buff, i.e. if it doesn't stack it never will, if it does stack it always will, until you lose the resting bonus.

I think that's a pretty good buff for Maia so that she has something to shoot with against pierce immune, though whether gun rangers deserve that buff is another question.

If you DON'T have it your recovery bar drops much slower.

IIRC aren't Fire Naga not fire immune? They simply heal instead of taking damage. They actually have very low Burn AR to heal more from burn damage. I don't think they have fire immunity to begin with, so I don't think it's the same situation as Essence Interrupter not dealing damage to keyword shock immune, or And Sip From the Marrow instakill not working against acid immune.

I agree that it would be much simpler to just take away keyword immunity from monsters and give them damage immunity instead. This is likely a minor buff for the player but would make the rules much simpler, especially since you often can't see keyword immunities in their descriptions. This might have minor ramifications for poison/disease immune Paladins and shock immune Furies but otherwise I think keyword immunities on monsters is just arbitrary punishment for the player right now, who often only realizes the monster is immune after trying a spell on them.

Offensive Parry does not have a cone. Only your active attacks do. Other triggered attacks like Riposte, Mob Stance, Barbaric Retaliation etc. do not have a cone afaik. If you're playing a single class Barbarian and just want to counter-attack everyone to death I'd suggest you treat deflection as a dump stat and make use of Barbaric Retaliation instead.

Shattered Pillar has an advantage in being able to use Soul Annihilation from range (though you must get the Instruments of Pain upgrade even if you're using fists -- the base ability and The Pain Persists both count as ranged weapons) which I think is fairly unique. It lets you forgo a lot of survivability concerns and just focus on damage output.

Do push/pull effects not serve as a soft interrupt in your game? i.e. if you hit someone trying to cast a spell with Llengrath's Warding Staff, do you not "soft" interrupt the spell cast? You don't lose class resources if you get pushed/pulled while using an ability, nor is your recovery set back, but you do have to start over with your casting animation again if you were in the middle of it. Add to that Pull of Eora's pull is not instantaneous (you spend a bit more than a second just flying towards the center, during which you can't act) and the janky interactions from multiple push/pull effects on the same target (very common with Arcane Archer) and you should get enemies which are barely able to act. They just spend most of their time with the prone icon above their heads and flying around helplessly. Note that I mean that they have a prone icon above their head. Mechanically, they're not interrupted/proned. It's just that the game doesn't have an icon for being ragdolled so it uses the prone icon. Obviously if your enemies are passing the Fortitude rolls this doesn't happen. But you have insane accuracy with Arcane Archer.

Don't know about you, but for me enemies cannot attack while ragdolled (i.e. while being sucked by Pull of Eora, or pushed by Anguish, etc.). In-game it is represented by the prone icon. If you stack Pull of Eora instances with Arcane Archer you can very easily get situations where enemies are permanently ragdolled and cannot act at all.

I think stacking multiple copies of Pull of Eora seems to queue up the pull effects or something. (Or maybe push/pull is just janky in this game. Sometimes I will use Anguish on an enemy to push them against a wall and they will get stuck in a buggy ragdolled state permanently) It seems that the pull effects queue up after each other so you will see enemies flying around erratically even after Pull of Eora has ended (without the need for Enfeeble). But yes Pull of Eora/Call of Rymrgand are some of the most powerful spells in the game and Arcane Archer is insane with multiple push/pull immune allies. Unfortunately it also means your animal companion will mostly be flailing around helplessly in most fights -- best to choose the boar companion because you shouldn't expect your pet to deal any damage at all.

Only Instruments of Pain count as true melee. The Long Pain and The Pain Persists are ranged weapons and in fact do not play well with many monk abilities.