aeonsim

Deep conviction only gives 2 deflection. So my lvl 6 Paladin has 103 Deflection before buff spells, which increases to 110 when ever he makes a kill. Deflection bonuses: +4 Perception, +5 Resolve, +5 Faith & Conviction, +5 Hatchet, +24 Large Fine Shield, +10 Weapon & Shield Talent, +10 Ring of Deflection. So +63 on top of his base, and I've not taken Deep conviction yet or the +5 Deflection talent. If you really want to max deflection build a Wild Orlan (+ 10 to defences when Will attacked) with 20 Per (+10 def) & 20 Res (+10 def, need to choose + resolve culture). Then use a Hatchet +5 def, Fine Large Shield +24 Def, Weapon & Shield Talent +10 Def, Cautious Attack talent +15 Def and a Ring of Deflection +10, Faith & Conviction +5, Deep Faith +2 for a extra 71 Deflection. At 6th level the Paladin will have 136 Deflection when Cautious Attack is active, before any buffs are added if it's hit by a will attack goes to 146, and if you've the right ability get +7 with every kill for 153 Deflection before spells. Most of the other defences will be reasonably decent as well from +15 from faith and conviction + deep faith, + 20 Reflect from the shield, and +7 from the kills and possibly +10 from a will attack.

I still enjoy it as I said I pause like crazy and you don't really need to pause that much you can instead slow the game down. This is also Path of the Damned the hardest possibly difficulty on the easier difficulties you don't need to pause nearly as much. Also I'm uploading a video where I play with a melee focused party Paladin, Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, Chanter & Ranger, they've got a lot less active abilities and require a lot less pausing to manage.

The Hatchets give +5 to deflection so if you want the maximum possible deflection then create a Hatchet and large fine Shield Paladin, with the Faith and Conviction upgrades and the Weapon and Shield talent. That should give you a deflection score in the 80-90's and if you add the ring or bracer's of deflection you can push it up to over 100 Deflection before you've even used any buffs. It doesn't ignore the enemy deflection it gives you a deflection bonus.

This is a pain in the arse and really needs to be fixed, otherwise you have to spend a fair amount of time baby sitting the party when they get hit by an AoE or ranged attack. Very annoying when the priest trys to run across the entire battlefield.

Yeah I've tried Barbarians before they were all right when they came in after the fighter engaged, but with this version they should be a lot better for the reasons you've mentioned. Note there are something like 10 encounters in the video and I rest 3 times, which isn't terrible. I could easily have cleaned out the rest of the spiders in the cave (except for the queen) with out needing another rest or gone down into the temple it's pretty easy to fight your way through half that dungeon with out using spells even on PoD and I had enough health after the Ogre to do so.

Check out the description on you tube it's got jump points to each fight now.

True to a degree I don't always need to rest so often, I could have gone through the beatles, wolves, outdoors spiders, and both lots of Drakes with out resting if I wanted. I'd need to build the party differently though to do more than that Chanter, Cipher, Paladin, Monk, Fighter, Rogue might work.

I'll add Jump points for the different fights check the video description.

Unfortunately the transcoding software only supported 720P.

Maybe if I've got time this weekend, in the meantime I'd recommend skimming or jumping it's pretty clear when the fights start. The Ogre + Bears fight is up separately:

If your interested in seeing what PoD looks like in the Beta compared to the easier difficulties, but don't want to try playing it here is about 1.5hrs of video showing it. Path of the Damned has the full enemy group sizes and all enemies have better statistics (might be a level or two higher). I take out Medreth's party, two groups of Beatles, the Wolves, Drakes, Bandit party, half the Spiders & the Ogre + his Bears. Party is: PC Wizard Custom Cipher Custom Druid BB Fighter BB Priest BB Rogue The video has had a few bits cut out where I tried someone more experimental tactics (and plain failed a couple of times, bloody Adra beatle), but there is still a party wipe or two in there. Note I pause a lot on PoD so don't expect particularly fluid combat. In general I'm not finding PoD too hard, some of the bigger fights can result in a couple of party wipes but it's fairly fun, at least for a party with a lot of spell casters. I'd be interested to see the same thing done by people who play with more melee or less magic focused parties, so if you do please stick up a video so I can see how it compares. Note the description has Jump points to allow you to skip to each of the fights.

Yep the poor little bear is horribly confused, which is kinda understandable as all his friends have become enemies and his enemies have become friends . The combination of the party, the other bears, changing targets and the non pathable camp fire really confuse the path finding.

If they do enable prebuffing at some point in the future what I'd like to see is if you cast a buff within visual range of a neutral group they cast there own bufs or go hostile and attack you , would help keep things more interesting.

You can see 20-30mins from the start/introduction level of the full game in the following video, it cuts off just before they get to the start of the story.

Seems to work fine on Bears, or at least I've got a video of it doing so in 435.

More of a neutral stat rather than a dump one then, an easily interrupted fighter/melee char who is also easy to dominate or charm would be a pain in the arse to play with. While for casters if you dump it your interrupt chance goes up and your making it easier to be dominated or charmed. That'd be scary seeing your wizard Charmed or Dominated (Very rare in IE, but possible here if you dumped Resolve and ) time to suck up your own AoE spells.

You do realise that if you dump (reduce below 10) resolve, your decreasing your deflection, will & your concentration? So your making your self easier to hit with weapons, easier to hit with spells and increasing the chance that when hit you'll be interrupted breaking engagement and slowing your actions? I just created a lvl 4 fighter to test this and the stats he ends up with at level 3 are (20M, 18Con,14Dex,12Per, 10Int, 4Res): Deflection 31 Will 18! Concentration 57 (under JS's new system) With 18 Will, any will based spell is going to hit or critically hit, while with concentration reduced from 75 to 57 even with a basic interrupt there will be something like a 40% chance of interrupt per attack.

With careful positioning the cone spells are very useful and well worth it, especially with engagement once the front line has settled down you can move up exceedingly close and use them to good effect. Eldritch aim is useful not just for increasing damage, but also for increasing the chance and duration of the crowd control effects. Getting a Crit with a CC will increase it's duration by 50% and combines nicely with the bonus from Intellect. It's also really useful for making sure the spell hits the boss monsters. I agree for the most part about the buff spells though about the only one I use is Mirror image, as it works much the same as the IE one and gives you a chance to get several more useful spells off while they're trying to hit the images.

Psychovampiric Shield does not work in the current build. When cast it appears to hit the target and the spell effects play however there is no change to the Ciphers Deflection as a result (or none shown). Hit shows the log results on casting it when it hits. After shows the Casters Def after it's hit (status icon is present on enemy). Before shows the Characters default Def. There is no difference before or after the spell successfully hits. Expected Some change in the Ciphers deflection. Other Issues The flavour text says it drains Intelligence, but the mechanics show it targets Resolve, which is correct?

I would also prefer the higher quality images.

You are theorizing. If you had actually tested all of those methods, you would find that Charm Beast is not working properly in this build You need to check charm beast again, it works perfectly for me. See the following video where half the Bears and Elder Bears wipe out the Ogre (Path of the Damned). Would have been better if I'd been bothered to pull the Druid back after the first Charm worked so he could do it again when it wore off. I've tried over half the approaches I've mentioned and they work fine, (just not always with some of the alternative classes I listed). Note for any one who watches it sorry but I pause like a spastic monkey :D so it's not the easiest thing to view.

One thing I've noticed is that my characters rarely get significantly disabled in PoE. While in a pure 1vs1 damage/mitigation/avoidance often my PoE party would get wrecked by many of PoEs encounters, when you're able to freely disable without much worry about disables yourself it definitely gets to feeling formulaic. Granted, many of the enemies in the BB aren't the type to be tossing around major CCs, maybe we'll see more in the finished product. But I breezed through hard mode every time once I learned/got a feel for the mechanics and classes. Even my first run through I only wiped on beetles a few times because I didn't expect I'd need to take them as a serious encounter worthy of spending serious spell slots on CC. Probably the most worrisome moment was when a couple of my party got proned by a Skaen caster, but I just as easily CC the whole group with my remaining characters. Perhaps the problem isn't really damage related as much as it is CC imbalance between players and AI. In this build on Path of the Damned I've seen a fair bit more ability use by the creatures, wood beetles poison is now ranged and they often start off combat with that before moving up to you. Ivory spinners are using their web ability from range to lock you down, some of the smaller spiders have petrify and are using it regularly (had half the party petrified at one point) though it has been toned down a bit compared to earlier builds. While the big crystal eaters are doing a better job of dropping the Ice/crystal attack on the party (that does a lot of damage!), and the wolves LOVE there knock down ability.

I actually don't mind that so much, the high damage is ok it's just the accuracy that's potentially a problem and personally I'm not finding it a major one. I think it makes it a lot more interesting if there are a few types of enemies that require a completely different tactic to fight against. As such having a few classes of enemies that will kill you in a couple of hits if you get into melee with them is fine especially in hard or PoD. Considering this is Path of the Damned we're talking about I think the Elder bears at that level of difficulty are perfectly fine, especially seeing they're not on the critical path and you don't even need to fight them to complete the quest. As it stands there are several different ways to kill them at the moment, even on PoD. Ignore the ordinary bears and use someone to distract or lock down the ogre then have everyone else charge in and focus on just one of them (using weapons they're weak against), a priest will help a lot or you'll need a lot of healing/regeneration potions and buffs like Ironskin to pull this off but it will work. Use a Druid or Cipher to charm or dominate one or more of the bears or elder bears and once they engage focus the party on the elders. Use the Druid, Rogue , Ranger or Wizard to slow them down and hammer them with ranged weapons or AoE. Use a Monk, Fighter, Cipher or Druid to knock them down or back while using ranged weapons to deal with them. Use a Cipher, Druid or Wizard to paralyse or Blind them and stack up the debuffs then just slaughter them. Use summons to provide disposable meat shields, this is a bit harder as most of them come from the Chanter and need a a fair bit of time to get ready. Use the protection spells send in a fighter or Paladin set up for max deflection (hatchet (+5) and large shield (+20), and sword/shield talent (+10) before spells, abilities or potions) to attract and hold there attention while everyone else attacks then when you character's endurance gets low use withdraw or beetle's shell to protect them while they heal, allowing them to continue to distract the bears for a bit The main reason the fight is challenging is because it's a boss fight with 2 (or is it 4?) normal bears, 2 Elder bears and Ogre on PoD. Individually I don't think the Elder bears are much of a problem unless the only way you know how to fight is to just charge up with everyone and try to beat them to death. As far as I'm concerned PoD is probably a little too easy at the moment for Players who use a lot of crowd control and sit back. The fights are reasonably fun but they're not requiring me to sit back and think about exactly what strategies and tactics are needed to win each one.

The elder bears weren't much of a problem for me this time on PoD, something to slow them down (web or the druids vines) and then paralyze them with mental binding or the mage spell and they died very quickly (didn't bother pulling them just wiped all the bears together then finished off the ogre), 392 PoD was much worse. With this build PoD is very playable with none of the one hit kills from 392 occurring. I've only had 3 party wipes and they were all from trying something stupid to see if it would work ( let's try killing all the spiders with out using spells sort of thing).

Seeing we've already seen a couple of items which offer Skill bonuses It probably won't matter to much if the first few levels of points have been spent not in your preferred skill for a companion. With the cost structure of the skills 1,2,3,4,5,6... points it's relatively quick to catch up to within a level or so of a char that's been maxing out one skill and with items of +1 or 2 to Stealth or Mechanics you should be able to get to a similar skill level.