Not So Clever Hound

I think it would be Assassin/BM >>>> Vanishing Strike cheese + full-scale Bloodmage cheese = more potent cheese than the Pont L'évêque that I keep maturing at the bottom of my fridge. And I tell you this thing is potent enough to make my wife nearly faint every time she opens the refrigerator.

The time I bothered doing HoW with SC BM I did it with True Lover's Kiss then some good old buffing, Hard CC and Nuking on the second form et al. BUT... it was on standard PotD. It's one of those fights where the difference between standard and upscaled shifts the probabilities SIGNIFICANTLY in my opinion. Also, I wasn't playing with BPM at the time.

Glad you find it helpful! They're both top tier and you can complete everything with either. So you can really go with your guts and what feels more fun. SC has a very special place in my little heart because I just love those Tier 8 & 9 spells so much and I like the super fast Tier progression. Assassin/Bloodmage is lots of fun if you like sneaking around and launch crazy alpha strikes - comes online very early. The stealthy alpha strike strategy can get old after some time, and high level DLC content gives you a bit more challenges with encounter resets. But every Solo char has an element of repetition anyway, and high level DLCs provides challenges for every kind of solo build - nothing unsolvable with anything Bloodmage anyway. So if I have to give my personal preference, it's SC BM but if you like your run, you should definitely try other builds. As @Shai Hulud mentioned, Tactician/BM is another POE2 solo staples.

Ahem, « somewhat » cheesy?

As far as I have experimented, damage conversion to health is not affected by healing done or healing received, but it is affected by Might / % damage increase modifiers (on the outgoing end) and % damage taken modifiers (on the receiving end). So for example Shattered Vengeance, Assassin/Helwalker passive or Sworn Enemy (all on the receiving end) will increase how much health you convert from the (increased) damage dealt.

Yes I can totally see that with Abydon’s challenge, that build doesn’t work. Against HoW once it splits, scrolls of tornado, especially with BPM, are really good with high arcana. I think it was Kaylon who had come up with that strategy.

In Ashen’s Maw, if you get the support of the rathun to go in the Lair of the Ancient, they’ll give you +2 burn AR.

Personally, I would leave MIG, CON and RES at 10 and either put DEX, PER and INT at 16, or if playing POTD maybe max PER, then INT, then whatever left in DEX. Frenzy is most probably your first pick on the barb side, then Whispers of Treason probably - Eyestrike is nice too but it rolls against FORT so it won't land as easily early game even with Body Blows. You can pick later if you wish. Then you can be the Survival and Athletics guy, maybe also invest a bit in a social skill since you're the face of the party - Intimidate or Diplo. You're part Cipher so you can also in Mechanics if you wish, or leave that to a Rogue. Before The Willbreaker, you can very early pick Saru Sichr in Arkemyr's Manor and it is a sweet sweet morningstar too.

Aaah Deadfire. Game V5.something, plus Community Patch V4.something, plus Balance Polishing Mod V2.something... yet still, broken. Just as I like it.

Ha, I was wondering about that thanks for clarifying! Yes actually with Berath challenge, you can use a little trick which is to approach enemies from stealth (to be in visual range) and then quickly unstealth/restealth, then you'll be in combat but enemies don't notice you and you can buff, use summons etc. Works like the trap strategy, without using a trap. But, as I recall @thelee mentioned to me once, it's not as reliable as actual traps as you can get easily get the timing wrong on pressing the Alt key twice, and you can't split/pull enemies like with traps. So for The Ultimate this isn't as helpful, traps remain better (but in somewhat limited quantity).

You can just approach the pyre from behind from stealth and interact with the pyre without talking to the priest and you turn in the quest without any issue/rep loss. I usually sail around to discover all the map spots that give XP but that is not Magran Fires-friendly. Yes indeed

That’s odd, Elric implemented scaling for those effects in BPM specifically to address that issue. Do you have BPM enabled?

Awesome! I am 99% positive Meryel used Halt on me before.

I don't know if you can kite there, but it's true I wiped them out with a few levels under my belt already, lvl 12-ish I think.

Well the thing is it's incredibly hard or straightup impossible to tank your rep to -3 if you started raising your rep with a given faction. So I did it as early as possible, basically before doing anything that could positively influence the Huana. After, I got the shield, I did a couple quests for them and was back at +2/3 disposition with the Huana in no time. Yeah the ship to ship battle is on the harder side. I certainly wouldn't do it on an Iron run. I think I save-scummed until I got a number of "ship afflictions" on them, at which point they're just useless.