Not So Clever Hound

Thanks! Sounds fun. i thought about using flame shield (or the mini flame shield of a Darcozzi) but in practice I want to keep the build super lean and use as few active abilities as possible, to maximize the efficiency of the AI script and of Blood Sacrifice. But there definitely are fun variants to play around with to get a more active build. They wouldn't necessarily be more powerful but maybe feel a bit more dynamic. For instance I was for a time using Crushing Doom on top of Draining Missiles as part of my routine, for example against the Messenger. Also if you want to inject just a tiny bit of cheese, you can take great advantage of casting Draining Touch with the Iron Clasped and switching grimoires to have the weapon last until fight end…

There you go. I have one simplified behavior for simple encounters where I rely purely on passive defenses (90% of even high-level stuff): Then I have the full behavior below for hairier encounters where I want additional defenses. It's in 2 screenshots: Most of the time, everything works well on automation, you just have to decide here and there to cast brand enemy, or maybe lay on hands, or force a blood sacrifice below 50% health. Even in boss fights I'm basically relaxing having a coffee or multitasking to check what's up once in a while. The Oracle of Wael I just redid the first fight with the simplified behavior and didn't touch it once - I was just having a beer and playing ball with my kid.

Thanks. Ray of Fire can be great for some time with Wall of Flame + Combusting Wounds along with Ring of Focused Flames and +Fire PL. But being an Evoker that's not relevant.

I would expect consistent behavior and I would agree with Kaylon. Also, although it affects a small minority of players, you wouldn't be able to check AR oddities with Wael's Challenge's on.

On the topic of stacking spell echo chances, @Kosai had posted something interesting that I haven't tested myself but amended slightly below for clarity: Evoker/Priest of Magran: evocation keyword spells can stack with all three echo effects below: -Evoker (wizard class), 15% chance on evocation spells evocation spells only (will work with those on Magran priest spell list) -Marux Amanth (weapon - dagger), 10% chance with priest spells (including Magran's evocation spells) -Vithrack Silk Slippers (shoes), 5% chance (works with all spells)

Indeed as I mentioned they always drop there. Nice idea! Theoretically, I think you could maximize AR by using my build + this shining bulwark trick + having Giftwrapper as a pet + using Fine Aedyrian Mead for food (save/reload to make it passive) and proccing the right Kaul's Stance from Eager Blade at the beginning of the fight (obviously then you need 3 weapon sets). I believe this could shortly give you 24 + 1 + 1 + 1 +1 = 28 Minimum AR. That's a lot of trouble to get there but it can give nice ideas to get variants around the build and still grab similar AR. I also forgot to mention that in the build I get +3 Deflection against Melee from Akola and +20 All Defenses against MIG/DEX/RES Afflictions from Divine Purpose. As you know, this is so good because the +20 is also applied to damage rolls that come with the Affliction components (unlike Affliction immunities, which only cancel the Affliction). On a high-defenses build and especially with max RES, +def against afflictions is MUCH better than affliction immunity.

Indeed, that's in combat with all the passive defenses procced and only the 2 active defenses I use: Llengrath's Safeguard and Infuse with VE. If you're using an Arcane Knight that wants to use Wall of Draining to extend short lived buffs, you can get all defenses in the 220-230 range (e.g. extending First to the Fight and Drawing Parry from Furrante's Breastplate and Duskfall). Effectively making you out of reach for anything under 150ACC. But in practice I realized, being in the 200s was enough and that sky-high AR was as or even more important. You actually face quite a few enemies with hard-hitting autohit abilities (Fampyrs, Librarians, Oracle of Wael...) - removing 80%+ of that damage is very good. You also face quite a few enemies that have over 150 ACC so you need to soak up that damage too. Only very few baddies have both very high ACC in the 140-150 range and PEN in the mid 20s (e.g. the ridiculous Monk in The Bloodletting SSS fight, his Skyward Kick hits at 26PEN and I assume, Crits at 39PEN...). I found that 200 All Def + 24 minimum AR + Regen from stealing enemy HP was as foolproof as it gets. I'll see if I can post a video later - indeed the fights are looong but at least you don't have to do anything, except occasionally use Brand Enemy or once in a while in boss fights cast Lay on Hands. I still finish all fights with half my Zeal, at least. Akola's Apex Ward is super easy to get early. Once out of Maje, go collect all the good sailors and the nice cannons at the Smithy in Brass Citadel. Sail around the map and sink ships for easy experience and to build crew experience high. Now you can take tough ships in boat fights and your char has gained a few levels. Go to Serpent's Crown, Takano's Estate and murder everyone. Now you have -3 Rep with Huana and can go sink the ship to get Akola. Then proceed with your questing and in no time your Huana rep is at +3. Undying Burden is a nice suggestion, however I think Eothen has more incremental impact here (+Fort and +HP) because of how inversions work in the game, as @thelee demonstrated in his Almanac and in various threads. DMG reduction is calculated as an inversion, so it's behaves like % negative effect reduction modifiers: when you already have 35 Resolve (or pushing anything in severe Underpen), additional modifiers won't make any difference. If I already have a -75% reduction, adding another -30/-50% will only put my total reduction around -80%. After that, no additional modifiers will have any significant impact. Boots of the White are looted in the first fight above the village in BoW, once you beat the Messenger the first time and get the icepicks to climb up. I personally like to play BPM because indeed I like the challenge of removing some of the most powerful cheese and still find a way to solo consistently. It removes the temptation to "regress to the average that works" and forces me to really think differently and streamline the builds. I find it's actually interesting because you end up having a lot of cheesy heuristics in this game, as in many others. Find X, then Z abilities, then use that over and over and be invulnerable... Using BPM breaks those habits. For instance, forcing yourself as a SC Mage to not proc Wall of Draining every single f****ing fight... helps me rediscover time and time again that you can have Wall of Many Colors active instead, often for even more impact (and definitely more fun IMO). This build above, I found it because of (or thanks to) BPM but it's actually more consistently powerful than my Wall of Draining Arcane Knight because it does always good, even when there is no good target to wall-of-drain. Just take longer and is less demonstrative. Everything changed in BPM is logged by @Elric Galad on Nexus (see below). Buffs and Nerfs can be implemented separately and also you can individually remove any buff/nerf or anything you want to not include in your game, while keeping the rest of the package. https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/438?tab=description

Totally! Had you seen the short video I put to the Thundercat build above that @Fab3686 added? Everything you state plus the super fast casting speed of Cat Form + Cat Flurry buff creates an exponential pulse damage/DoT mayhem, also because Infestation of Maggots + Combusting Wounds at the same time turbocharges all those ticks. It's one of the most fun things in the game IMO.

I agree with @Fab3686 and would add that Evoker's power level bonus and small double casting chance can be seducing, but in practice I find that a vanilla Wizard or of course, a Blood Mage has more potential because a lot of very strong nukes aren't Evocation, and you might miss on those. You have other ways to stack power levels if you wish, an endgame Evoker vs endgame Blood Mage/Vanilla will be very close in raw nuking power, but the latter two will have a lot more flexibility and utility.

Ha! I'm late and only seeing now that you made good on your promise. Fool, I. Empower Passive Rework All the following changes are from <Version 1.4> <Version 2.0> Removed a glitch that allowed using Empower before battle to get benefit until end of next battle.

Conversely, when you cast Confusion on enemies, it's like you're actively trying to waste a spell slot . Well to be fair, there is one enemy really worth Confusing, the giant grub-like miniboss near the end of SSS. Weakness to Intellect Affliction suddenly turns a somewhat useless spell into a super long duration AoE Charm. But you have to actively look for the few enemies weak to INT affliction in the game.

@thelee you can even use Greater Maelstrom as a trap-like tool to pull enemies and start getting damaged by it while you already got the spell back and are casting the second one along with your wizard buddy casting salvo or meteor shower cast at an obscene power level. Then everything else

Thanks @dgray62 I'm having exactly the same problems. So far I've been able to piece together via trial & error that some kind of new filter or bug doesn't like too much formatting and will break on some acronyms mixing upper and lower case letters. But it's not consistent. The build above... I had to start posting it line by line (!!!) until I figured out the stuff that was blocking the post (which I think was Path of the Damned written with "o" and "t" in lower case letters and "P" and "D" in upper case). We've entered the Path of the Damned difficulty level of forum posting

Wild Mage is actually the most broken thing because if you double cast Nahal's Reckless Dweomer via a hotkey, you can cast all spells in your spellbook (even the ones beyond your current level) for as long as you want as if you had unlimited casts and Improved Alacrity, and only the first 2 of those casts trigger a Wild Surge roll. It's really ridiculously powerful from BG1 to the end of ToB.

Merci Constentin ! It seems that I have other issues because even with your trick I cannot post certain things as I used to be able to (like the forum will allow me to post "POTD" in all caps but not the same with o and t in small caps... weird!) Yeah it's very sturdy and so hard to kill it can be a great experimenter. It's a very brute force type of build so it's not subtle at all but it just illustrate how the combination of really high Armor and pretty good everything else (Defense rolls, healing, overall health...) can make a big difference. You see the game differently when almost all enemies on Upscaled POTD cannot reach you with more than single-digit damage.

Welcome! Don't sweat too much your stat spread, particularly on such a build. It will do great whatever you choose. I'd go with MIG, INT, DEX because Druid has stuff that generally scales so well with MIG + INT and DEX is generally a good investment. Usually I go crazy on PER, but in a party and as a Druid/Troub you will have a lot of can openers to help your spells land. You could do 16/16/16 and 10 everything else, really you don't have to minmax.

Sorry about the clunky formatting guys, the forum is giving me a lot of trouble these days. Took me 30mn to find a way to post everything without having the forum blocking the post for whatever reason...

Lactose Intolerant Armored Arcanist - Solo Upscaled Path of the Damned with Balance Polishing Mod Class: Goldpact Paladin Blood Mage Game Version: Real Time With Pause. Made to play with Balance Polishing Mod and the Community Patch, but will work basically the same without. POTD Solo Viable: Yes, all Upscaled. Megabosses: I farmed Belranga, Dorudugan and Auranic for their mythic stones, without honor. Didn't try Hauani. Companion: Nope. -----WHAT IS INTERESTING ABOUT THIS BUILD?----- For some time now, I've been trying different ways to build a Wizard that could solo at max difficulty, with all the Balance Polishing Mod components including nerfs, and without using anything that could be remotely considered as cheese. BPM already deactivates the funny business around Wall of Draining, Salvation of Time, Strand of Favor etc. On top, it changes Blood Sacrifice to prevent healing for 6 fixed seconds after using the ability. So I built around those parameters. I also didn't want to use Grimoire Imprint shenanigans at all. So I'd like to finally share this build because it does all that I intended in a deceptively simple and brutally effective way, although it's not the fastest at solving encounters... but it's all automated, which is nice. I will detail briefly the proposition and how it works below, and then I'll put the stat/equipment details etc. Please note that Balance Polishing Mod makes it slightly better (e.g. buffed Fire Godlike passive AR) but it can play just as well in vanilla. The core proposition is simple and stays the same from start to finish, it just gets better as we go and grab more gear and abilities: -Pile up an absolute truckload of Armor Rating through passive/active abilities and items, to push the vast majority of incoming attacks into severe under-penetration (-75% damage). You'll still find a few enemies that have Penetration 24-26 on a Graze/Hit (!) but that's rare and manageable. -Pile up high defenses that are easy to maintain through only a couple casts (basically only passive defenses plus Infuse with Vital Essence and Llengrath's Safeguard) to push the vast majority of incoming attacks to Misses (0% damage) and Grazes (-50% damage). You'll still find a few enemies that have autohits and miss-to-graze conversion but that's manageable. -Have max Resolve (35) and Ring of the Solitary Wanderer to cut all hostile effect durations short (approx. -80% duration). -Have a big health pool and some reasonable sustain healing (23hp per 6s, nothing to write home about) to stay bloodied almost all the time (to always trigger Fire Godlike passive +2 Armor Rating and Blood Rage +10 Accuracy from Akola's Apex Ward, more than negating the Large Shield malus). -Use the Large Shield Modal to further neuter any ranged/Reflex targeting attacks (-50% damage). -Offensively, use Concelhaut's Draining Missiles or early on, Corrosive Siphon, to transfer enemy health to our health. -Convert some of that health to replenish spells and repeat the whole process until there is no more enemy health to steal, which means there are no more enemies and the encounter is won. So here is the full breakdown of a high-level encounter: -Ideally, approach enemy from stealth, find a nice position to make a stand. This build likes being out in the open because it can't be flanked (Kapana Taga) and wants to be engaged by 5 enemies to get max defense bonus from Entonia's Signet Ring. Stay in that position for a few seconds to build the 3 stacks of Armor Rating (Stoic Steel). -Begin the encounter by casting Brand Enemy on a priority target (ideally a healer, or an annoying squishy). At this point, we start with defenses in the 170s-200s and Armor Ratings between 21 and 27 (Mythic Magnera's Chain, Stoic Steel, Kapana Taga, Akola's Apex Ward, Gilded Enmity). Not too bad. -My AI script will switch on The Wall modal, start casting Infuse with Vital Essence, Blood Sacrifice until under 50% health, then Llengrath Safeguard. At this point, we have the defenses as per the screenshot above, all in the 200s and minimum Armor Rating is 24 (!). Incoming damage is minimal and importantly, very predictable. Even Bloodied we still have around 250 health. -Then the AI script will chain cast Draining Missiles, prioritizing enemies by lowest Fortitude, and keep casting Blood Sacrifice in-between to keep us Bloodied and full of spells and maintain uptime on Vital Essence and Safeguard. Apart from Safeguard, we want to only ever cast Ability Tier 2 spells to maximize Blood Sacrifice's usefulness. Draining Missiles are very good because they always do the same damage even on Grazes, and having 6 projectiles means they'll always do something. We love consistency and predictability. It is also important to not have too much dexterity in BPM, to have Draining Missiles fired just when the -100% Healing debuff clears out - projectile travel time and target distance play a role there too, so I went conservative with my dexterity, doesn't matter. -Draining Missiles benefit from Brand Enemy +damage so we want to selectively put this on high-priority enemies, but keep some zeal for occasionally casting Lay on Hands if needed on long fights, to reset our primary resource pool i.e. Health. -The encounter will slowly solve itself as enemies fall. There is actually some upside to taking enemies one by one: we limit the level of extra threat generated by the Blood Mage passive when enemies are below 50% Health. So we keep everybody nice and healthy to keep incoming damage under control while we remove threats one after the other. To my surprise, I never had to reload a fight once with this build doing everything on Upscale, even doing tons of mistake (forgetting to pick Stoic Steel on a respec in Splintered Reef, forgetting about The Wall modal in Trial of the Naga, having the script break causing my toon to dumbly autoattack in melee the Ancient Liche Battlemage for 10mn...). It also punches quickly above its level, .e.g I went to facetank Torkar at level 14 without any trouble. With all the little synergies, the math is in its favor to somehow always comes out on top, never being really in trouble. You might wonder if it also works well when enemies can do a lot of Raw DMG. Well, Frightened Child didn't pose any problem, same for all the Vithrak luminaries, the Oracle of Wael... Just a no-cheese, no-nonsense, slow and steady achiever. -----STATS & BUFFS----- Race: Fire Godlike Background: Ixamitl Plains – Hunter FINAL STATS WITH ALL PERMABUFFS AND NO-REST BUFFS AS OF 5.0 (without combat buffs): Might 14 (8 Base +2 Berath +1 Gift from Machine +1 Rabyuna’s Boon +2 Alchemic Brawn) Constitution 23 (15 Base +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Brawn +3 Girdle of Eoten Constitution +1 Hemp Pet) +5 Infuse with Vital Essence Dexterity 15 (7 Base +1 Godlike +1 Rabyuna +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Guile +2 Amira’s Blessing) Perception 19 (14 Base +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Guile +1 Savage Cunning) Intelligence 18 (13 Base +1 Godlike +2 Berath +2 Alchemic Wits) +5 Infuse with Vital Essence Resolve 35 (18 Base +1 Ixamitl +2 Berath +1 Effigy Resentment Pallegina (sorry, bird lady) +2 Alchemic Wits +2 Nature’s Resolve +2 Rikuhu’s Blessing +2 Rabyuna +1 Cauldron’s Brew +2 Token of Faith +1 Solitary Wanderer Ring +1 Boots of the White) ADDITIONAL PERMABUFFS: Food: Hylea's Bounty Adratic Glow All Trainings Dawnstar Blessing Luminous Adra Potion Nature’s Resolve (Accuracy) Savage Cunning (Survival) Galawain’s Gift Magran’s Blessing Immunity to all Sigils Infamous Captain, Bonus Skills, Champion Stats, Port Maje vendor, Fully discovered Map, Bonus Money… invested all 105 Berath’s Blessing Points SKILLS Mechanics 13-ish then max Athletics, Diplomacy 12-ish then max Survival. -----ABILITIES----- ACTIVE Paladin: Gilded Enmity, Brand Enemy. Lay on Hands. Zealous Aura, Exalted Endurance Wizard: Mirrored Image (for early game). Infuse with Vital Essence. Llengrath's Safeguard. PASSIVE Common: Weapon & Shield. Tough. Improved Critical. Spell Resistance. Bear's Fortitude. Bull's Will. Snake's Reflexes. Paladin: Deep Faith. Retribution (optional). Divine Purpose. Iron Gut (optional). Inspired Path. Righteous Soul. Virtuous Triumph. Stoic Steel. Wizard: Spirit of Decay (for Corrosive Siphon in the beginning). Farcasting. -----GEAR----- Weapon Set 1: Kapana Taga (Mythic , All Comers, Lone Champion), Akola's Apex Ward (Mythic, Hunter's Vigor, Hide and Tooth). Weapon Set 2: doesn't matter. Head: Nothing. Neck: Token of Faith. Chest: Magnera's Chain (Mythic, Padded Underlayer, Magnera's Commitment). Cape: Cape of the Falling Star. Grimoires: Iron Clasped (primary), Ninagauth Teaching (for Death Ray - early on or when we need more burst damage), Arkemyr's illuminating discoveries (not needed). Gloves: Bracers of Greater Deflection. Rings: Solitary Wanderer + Entonia's or Ring of Protection for fights with few engaging enemies. Boots: Boots of the White (to mitigate our only AR weakness, Freeze). Belt: Girdle of Eoten Constitution. Pet: Hemp (+Constitution and +Fortitude is good). That's it. I'm also happy to give the AI scripting details if needed, or pointers on the early game. I haven't posted a video to spare you the lengthy fights but let me know if you'd like to see it in action. Let me know if you have any comments or questions!

But @Waski was talking about a no-exploit, no-SoF run that would rest a lot and use when needed the Brilliant inspiration from Wit of Death Herald after He Waits in Fire . That, the full BPM complement would make it strictly better I believe.

I think both will affect equally Healing from active, passive and equipped item/pet abilities, except Unbending (see below). +Healing done will also affect healing from scrolls and potions which Might doesn't affect. Neither will affect Unbending (but +Healing received would, and would also apply to the stuff above). Only Might would affect health stolen from e.g. Corrosive Siphon or Draining Missiles because it's not exactly a healing effect (I think). Other damage modifiers e.g. Sworn Enemy would also increase that form of healing, through increased damage.

@Waski in case you're interested, it has even more potential with BPM I believe, because Smoke Veil costs only 1 guile and because Elric buffed Tornado significantly (which also affect scrolls), particularly the knock up effect duration.

IMO SC Blood Mage is more fun to play as a supernova orbital strike build on standard PotD than on Upscaled, because there is a big difference in damage output caused by increased armor rating and higher defenses for enemies. On Upscaled, a lot of enemies have their highest defense (usually FORT) in the 130-140 range and have armor rating in the 15-16 range, or higher. Both of those things have increasing returns on survivability past a certain point (-75% dmg from severe underpen and/or -50% from grazes). So that really hurts the damage output of the BM, because spell accuracy and spell penetration scale a lot slower than weapons and reach a ceiling way earlier. And if you keep spamming spells to debuff defenses and decrease AR, that's time spent not dealing damage anyway... Yes you can, e.g. Final Stand + Wall of Draining is a poor man's Barring Death Door + Salvation of Time They'll try, but you can make it so that it always misses you. BPM has actually renewed my interest in the game as I'm trying to find solo builds that can still come out on top even with all the BPM nerfs. But yeah they tend to be a bit more grindy I might post one other BPM build soon, I'm testing it in all the late game hard fights currently. I did a BG2 Wild Mage run recently, after literally 15 years thinking I should do one it was fun. Have you tried Tyranny? I started playing it, then stopped a while ago. I always want to come back to it because it really has something, but I loathe the cooldown mechanic which makes solo battles incredibly sluggish, at least in the beginning.

Could be fun to steal and prolong all the effects from Eoten and Ogres' chants. Especially the Eoten has a chant-like ability that regularly prones enemies I think (?) called "Knock You Down" but I'm not sure that's stealable, and I'm not even sure that's a chant. I might try to go do some clean up in Nemnok's lair sometime today and find out. EDIT: obviously that wouldn't be stealable because you can only steal beneficial auras, but I would love to have a proning chant!

Indeed, it's a one trick (well, one punch) kinda build but it doesn't need Scordeo or anything prolonged via Strand of Favor etc. to win the day (those aren't available anyway as I'm currently using BPM with the nerf package installed as well). Probably not viable for Ultimate though, but that is not my personal currency for deciding if a build is solo worthy or not. Pure Blood Mage can permasteal all kind of goodies like Crushing Doom and Skaen priest's Shadowing Beyond (hilarious to zapp around the battlefield and keep everybody permacrushed). Of course you can steal Barring Death's Door and Salvation of Time to be invincible, but you still need to watch out somewhat for Arcane Dampener/Cleanse. Generally stealing offensive stuff isn't so good because you're casting non-wizard stolen spells at 0 Power Level. That all being said, as gentleman and scholar of the Deadfire @Constentin Lévine discovered, you can simply cast Temporal Cocoon on yourself and extend the beneficial untargetable effect indefinitely while removing the Stun negative effect. So you can become completely invicible and untargetable at level 16 if you wish. God-like (as prolonging Vanishing Strike on an Assassin) but removes all challenge.

It's actually super simple. The key is to have max RES and low/dumped INT, and manage your action speed through equipment, modals, abilities etc. so that your FF curse duration is very short and just shorter than your attack cycle time (e.g. 2.8s curse duration vs. 3.0s FF attack cycle time). That way you can never build up the curse (which would be lethal to you eventually) and you can keep spamming FF for unparalleled Healing (curse expires every couple seconds) + single target damage. Just have to watch out for debuffs/negative auras that can screw with your RES and % hostile effect reduction (e.g. auras from Elder Fire Bats can lower your RES by 2 points without save as long as you're in the AoE). I had posted a couple builds using this if you're interested: