Jojobobo

Thinking about it some more, even if you wouldn't want to use the hat in the long-term it will be an incredibly useful item to have through most of the game - particularly on a lowish Resolve character who can easily trigger Confuse (which is an extremely powerful spell).

Yeah I should be sticking around for a little while again, the sequel peaked my interest.

“Scorpions are nature’s way of saying, ‘Screw you! I’m gonna combine lobsters, spiders, wasps and nightmares!’” This build provides a tanky Rogue, who also has high single target damage and produces his own status effects through the Stun on crit version of Cladhalíath. Dexterity and Intellect have been pitched so that you can keep an enemy permanently stunned so long as you score a hit on the Stun vs. Fortitude roll that results from a melee crit. In this way, you can have high damage against a single target – while simultaneously disabling other enemies through periodic Riposte stuns as well, giving this build a nice offensive-defensive balance. Hopefully this should subvert the idea a Rogue is a weak class, with defences that are comparable to other solo tank builds but compared to some a great deal more damage. While the Yellow Flash build also uses Riposte mechanics to great effect, it seems more pitched towards the classic tank style of grinding enemies down with a wounding weapon rather than aiming for high single target damage. The Flaming Porcupine build seems to be much of the same idea as this build, but seems to have weaker defences and a slightly different focus (use of a two-handed weapon for one). As such, I think this build is distinct enough to warrant its own write-up. Why the name the Sprightly Scorpion? Because scorpions are well protected and defensive, Cladhalíath provides a stunning sting, and it’s sprightly because its attacks are fast enough to chain Stun. And because I said so! I will say this build is ENTIRELY UNTESTED (apart from the Stun-locking mechanics, which I've just had a play with, making sure the Stun-locking works). I hope to get around to testing it soonish (after Christmas maybe) but currently lack the time. I’ll update the build when or/if I finish testing it (or if one of you kind people do first), however I don’t anticipate their being any problems in terms of solo viability with the build. Without further ado… =================================== The Sprightly Scorpion =================================== Difficulty: Untested, but will test on expert PotD solo, no respec, with full upscaling -------------------------------------------------------------- Class: Rogue -------------------------------------------------------------- Race: Wild Orlan -------------------------------------------------------------- Background: Old Valia (Colonist) -------------------------------------------------------------- Starting Attributes: MIG: 17 CON: 15 DEX: 10 PER: 5 INT: 19 RES: 12 Final Attributes: MIG: 21 (Gift from the Machine, Garodh’s Chorus) CON: 16 (Rymrgand’s Boon) DEX: 14 (Viettro’s Formal Footware) PER: 8 (Elryn’s Jacket, Song of the Heavens) INT: 26 (Gwyn’s Band of Union, Forum resting bonus) RES: 16 (Siegebreaker’s Gauntlets) -------------------------------------------------------------- Important skills: Survival 16, Lore 9, Mechanics 5 (boostable to 10). This gives third stage survival accuracy bonus for +20 accuracy against anything but kith, as well as access to things like Scrolls of Confusion and Paralysis in tougher fights. Skill point allocation: -------------------------------------------------------------- Abilities and Talents: Abilities: 1 – Crippling Strike 3 – Reckless Assault 5 – Deep Wounds 7 – Dirty Fighting 9 – Adept Evasion 11 – Riposte 13 – Deathblows 15 – Withering Strike Talents: 2 – Veteran’s Recovery 4 – Weapon and Shield Style 6 – Weapon Focus Peasant 8 – Vicious Fighting 10 – Wound Binding 12 – Deep Pockets 14 – Superior Deflection 16 – Deflecting Assault Quest Talents: Blooded Hunter Dozen’s Luck Dungeon Delver Gift from the Machine Rymyrgand’s Boon Song of the Heavens Scale-Breaker The Merciless Hand --------------------------------------------------------------- Weapons and Equipment (listing only new enchantments): Weapon set 1: Cladhalíath (Stunning, Vicious, Superb, Durgan-Refined, Freezing Lash) and Badgradr’s Barricade (Superb, Durgan-Reinforced) Weapon Set 2: Alternate Stunning or Overbearing weapon, Little Saviour (Durgan-Reinforced, Legendary) Armor: Elryn’s Jacket (Legendary, Durgan-Reinforced) Neck: Cape of the Master Mystic Belt: Looped Rope Rings: Gwyn’s Band of Union and Ring of Protection Hands: Siegebreaker Gauntlets Head: Garodh’s Chorus (Retaliation) Feet: Viettro’s Formal Footwear --------------------------------------------------------------- Weapon accuracy and defenses: Cladhalíath accuracy 100 Def/Ref/Fort/Will 110/108/108/118 Calculations: Buffed defenses: Def/Ref/Fort/Will 160/168/170/148 Calculations: -------------------------------------------------------------- Playstyle overview: Using Cladhalíath, every crit on an enemy triggers a Stun vs. Fortitude roll. Stun itself gives a -30 Deflection debuff, meaning that once an enemy is stunned crits against that enemy should occur extremely frequently (with the Deflection debuff, but also with 40% hit-to-crit conversion from Vicious/Dirty Fighting and Durgan-Reinforcement). This provides more Stun vs. Fortitude rolls, which so long as they result in a hit themselves will result in the enemy being permanently stunned with the 14 Dex 15 Int combo. Cladhalíath itself can also be made Vicious as the second enchantment, dealing an extra 20% damage to stunned enemies. With a permanent Stun effect, triggering criteria for Deathblows becomes trivial. Both Withering Strike and Sever the Soul themselves debuff Fortitude through the Weakened affliction, meaning you will easily trigger both Stun and Weakened in a single attack opening up Deathblows. Crippling Strike and Figurine flanking, as well as occasional Eyestrikes from Elryn’s Jacket, give enough other means for you to get Deathblows easily in a single encounter. With the previously mentioned massive -30 Deflection debuff from Stun, Badgradr’s Barricade also really starts to shine, with every Bash crit resulting in a Thrust of the Tattered Veils, which itself targets the massively debuffed Deflection and is effected by Deathblows. This combination of effects against a stunned enemy gives you great single target damage, while also being defensively bulky. Riposte, Retaliation and Deep Wounds provide an excellent means of crowd control. Riposte itself gives free attacks to surrounding melee enemies on misses and grazes, made viable by the build’s good Deflection, giving you a chance to Stun these enemies with Cladhalíath for a few of seconds. As these enemies are entirely immobile during this time, this reduces the overall damage you’ll take from a melee group, making it an indirect defensive maneuver. Deep Wounds and Retaliation ensure that all melee enemies are constantly taking some raw damage, making them much weaker when you get around to targeting them specifically. Eyestrike from Elryn’s Jacket has nice synergy with Riposte, Retaliation and Deep Wounds as essentially melee enemies are always at risk of something (miss/graze -> Riposte chance, hit/crit -> Eyestrike chance, all the while taking Deep Wounds raw damage and Retaliation hits). When an enemy has been blinded, their accuracy debuff means that they’ll now tend towards more misses and grazes, and as such trigger even more Ripostes. For spellcasters, the extremely strong Adept Evasion (75% reflex grazes to misses, 50% reflex hits to grazes) coupled to your reasonable Reflex score means their attacks really aren’t much of a concern. When you couple this to the 20% spell reflection from Durgan-Reinforced Badgradr’s Barricade, and the chance they also have of suffering Eyestrike, they can be comfortably left until the end of combat when you’ve dealt with the melee enemies. Hopefully this rundown should have given you an idea of the build’s high damage, coupled to some great defenses that marry some of the best qualities of a Rogue and a tank. -------------------------------------------------------------- I’ve provided a few other little sections below, for anyone interested… Attribute score choice: Race and equipment choices, damage calcs: Talent and ability choices: Early game equipment: Big boss advice: Pairing for party play: -------------------------------------------------------------- And that’s that! I hope you’ve enjoyed the build, and even if it isn’t playtested I think it’d be worth a try. If anyone manages to give it a playtest before me, let me know and I’ll update the build with your findings. Have a nice day! EDIT: Re-tested Cladhalíath, and found the previous attributes I listed to be way off. The new set work fine to chain Stun on Stun roll hits.

I'm going to post a class build for it shortly, though as a disclaimer it will be entirely untested as I've got too much on right now to play it through. But, I'd be very surprised if it works anything less than very well on solo PotD. It's supposed to address the conception that they're are one of the weakest classes.

I'd probably advise against min-maxing on PotD unless you really know what you're doing - otherwise you risk putting a hole in your defences. I've been thinking when I have the time trying out the Stun-locking Rogue I spoke about in the provisional builds thread I made a while back. The endgame spread for that would be: MIG: 21 CON: 17 DEX: 14 PER: 13 INT: 15 RES: 21 With a shield, this gives 105 Accuracy using Superb Cladhalíath, Def/Ref/Fort/Will 115/118/110/106 and over 300 Endurance, 4 damage per Deep Wounds tick, and damage on crit (which should happen more or less constantly, with single enemies being perma-stunned and Dirty/Vicious FIghting plus Durgan Refined for 40% hit to crit conversion) of 70-103 without Deathblows, 95-139 with. This isn't factoring in Thrust of the Tattered Veils from Badgradr's Barricade, which given the enemy is constantly stunned should also proc constantly (and as Boeroer has previously mentioned, is effected by Deathblows). The defences are comfortably buffable to Def/Ref/Fort/Will 165/174/163/136 (Potion of Llengrath's Displaced Image and Scroll of Defense mainly) and your accuracy against beasts can be buffed to 140 (Blackwarden's Breast plus third stage survival bonus). I'd say with the high accuracy, high damage and solid defences, plus constant raw damage from Deep Wounds which you can distribute through Retaliation the ability should easily be able to hold its own - despite not really having anything maxed or minned. I'll probably post the build up untested in full so people can have a play around with it - I won't be able to have a go at it myself in the near future.

Soooo, obviously you've advertised the v3.07 patch as the Deadfire Pack, is this supposed to contain the content? Someone found a separate installer on the GoG website, yet it's not under the ordinary downloads list for the game. Which is supposed to contain the content, and if it is the latter could you ask GoG to link to it under their ordinary files list? Thanks again for all the hard work, it's good that you're still chipping in some support from the game so long after its release.

Rather weird, but yeah it's listed as free for me, yet isn't in the GoG menu for the game. I guess an oversight of some kind from someone.

Is he triggered by an event? WM Pt I is, so it wouldn't surprise me.

I think it's all just incorporated in the 3.07 patch (the DLC I mean). The announcement in the other subforum says "v3.07 - the Deadfire Pack", but given that the other DLC has separate installers it is a touch confusing. Hope that helps.

Thank you kindly, MaxQuest. I think the Helmsman's Uniform is pretty insane. The only thing that offers that level of Deflection is of course the Cape of the Master Mystic, which means as a surrogate your cape slot is freed entirely - so you can use something that offers a high attribute boost (Mantle of the Excavator, Finreah's Grace, Shroud of Morning, etc.). I'm not a big fan of % affliction chance per hit/crit weapons (as with both the Soulbound and non-Soulbound ones), I prefer guaranteed rolls on crit (We Toki, etc.) - but they still seem decent and pretty interesting, certainly not underpowered by any stretch. Someone should certainly think about slapping on all of Fulvano's stuff now. The belt is good, but I can't see it surpassing the Looped Rope defensively. Still, with the hat too, I like the idea of some of these higher level attribute boni being concentrated on a single item - certainly frees up other slots without losing too much, particularly with the belt if you aren't too bothered about defensive boosts. Good stuff, and thanks again!

What are the new items? Anyone care to share? I'm soon going to have to give up my mac, so I won't be playing the game until after Christmas at the very least so there's not much point in me getting the hefty patches. However I'm very curious if anyone else does install it (preferably with screenshots, if you want a big pat on the back). Please and thankyou.

Probably not for a couple of months, my degree course is soon finishing where I'll have to surrender my laptop, so I won't be able to have a good go at PoE until after Christmas. Still I'll be popping in from time to time, I'm very interested about the Deadfire Pack items will be.

Thanks for the update to the build, seems like you made some great tweaks to make things go along a bit more smoothly.

It works as normal during combat, healing health but not endurance. What this means is you have much more health to allow for healing endurance, because if your separate endurance heals greatly outweigh your health pool then they're no use. As this variation hits the x1.8 Survival modifier, and has the Belt of Bountiful Healing, the heals you are going to see will be massive - and I wouldn't imagine a 2500 health pool would accommodate them. If someone does test this variation, and finds something you're only healing 4000 endurance points per match then post it up so the CON can be fiddled to allow for that. As to how useful it would be, it's hard to say. During dragon fights I would say it would work pretty well, it's already pretty tanky so for even a boss monster to overcome 5000 health is no mean feat. Even if the talent doesn't see loads of use, it's quite cool conceptually to have so much health and endurance healing as it's a take on being an ultimate tank - substituting the high defences of things like the Monk and Paladin for good defences and ludicrously high health and healing.

You can cheese Azzuro being there, just chain wait at the Stronghold to see what dilemmas appear and then if he doesn't repeat. Then once you've solved his dilemma, do the same for the item. It's definitely tedious, but entirely do-able to get the cloak mid-Defiance Bay-ish. I guess I quite like builds that pay off after a lot of effort (the Gunslinger was a far worse example than the Rogue) so I think I'd enjoy the pay off more, maybe I'm just more masochistic than you I finally got the Sandals of the Forgotten Friar plus Ryona's Vambraces on the Barb, and currently doing 31-35 damage with 8 DR bypass - to say the least, it's very good.

Were you playing solo or in a party? I think on solo it would differentiate itself quite quickly, especially if you spam for things like Hiro's Mantle early (which dramatically ups the builds viability with Deep Wounds - and is probably for more impactful then Retaliation in terms of dishing out damage) - but if it is party play I think it would be a little trickier for it to shine. In terms of the goodies coming late game, when I eventually get round to playing it I'll probably rush to get to Lle a Rhemen for the spear, which I don't think would be too onerous. However you are right, there is a definite wait for the payoff no matter how much you meta-game and rush things.

I'll be trying it when I get there with my current unarmed solo Barb, I'm thinking Blackwarden's Breast and high DPS. Barb's tend to have defences in the right places (high Fort for example) and decent might to punch through the DR - just keep healing and I think it would be do-able. But no, I would say they're the most ideally suited class for a dragon fight by a wide margin.

I'm sure that would probably be better, but I like Dex for the coolness factor - the DPS gives the Barb a selling point over being just another tanky Barb. I'm close to getting Dragon's Leap, so maybe I'll get that and have another go at Longwatch Falls, I have cleared quite a bit of the area - just not the monk bounty so I can get the Sandals or the huge group of Lagufaeth to get to the cave and get the Vambraces (you know, the two most important bits of the area to take on for the build ).

Sounds good to me. Work has been keeping me busy so I haven't been keeping on top playtesting these. I got as far as Act III and WM Part I with the Barbarian, but damn, some of the upscaled encounters are tough without a tankier build.

Nice work on a hotfix! As I mentioned, I didn't necessarily think it deserved one in the first place, but it's great you're putting the effort in.

I'll be sticking around, I don't think I'll even install Tyranny for a little while - plus it's good when Obsidian gets it's first obligatory major bug fix patch out the way. I'm committed to seeing at least my unarmed Barb and almost certainly my solo Rogue I put in the provisional builds thread until the end. Cheers to you Boeroer for your dedication to the game and making this forum a better place Why thank you, but I will say I've contributed far less than those two fine gents. PS I did do some builds for Arcanum, once upon a time, if anyone new is ever tempted to play that game - you can find the thread here if anyone's ever interested in playing it. I think that's about the only other game I've done builds for, most of the time I wait until a late patched version on a game to come out and then I'm too late to the party I'll make a new signature with the PoE and Arcanum links in, and make sure I use it when I use the Tyranny forums to drum up some interest.

What I do is... Xaurip Skirmishers can be taken out one by one with your buddy the Animat - he can't keep you both paralyzed so if you send the Animat in first to take the aggro hopefully you can kill him in 10 seconds. If you can't, then buff defensively and try your best or leave them until later. For my current playthrough, I waited until I got the Orlan Bramble Ring until venturing into the Endless Paths - purely because the Skirmishers can be such a pain. For Madhmr Bridge, if you travel from a westerly direction to get there then it's much easier to get the drop on the Skirmisher you'd encounter coming from a northerly direction. For the Lighthouse, I leave it late in Act II to try, but otherwise I don't find it such an issue. Food buff, use Whiteleaf to stop the fear, possibly wear Rymyrgand's Mantle to heal freeze damage and take some potions with you. It's not too hard. For Phantoms that Stun-lock you, with someone with adequate defences I'll take them all out - a Coastal Aumaua with decent physical attributes and consumable buffing should be able to hit a Fortitude against Stun (because of the racial boon) of 90ish. So long as you have the positioning to fight them one at a time (which isn't too hard in the grounds and throne room of Caed Nua), they're do-able. If I don't have good defences, I sneak up the southern wall and go straight to the throne room. With the correct position in either of the corners close to the door you can make it so the Shadow blocks the Phantoms attacking you. I then use a reach weapon and a ranged weapon (the ranged weapon to aggro the Phantoms so they come in range of the reach weapon) and pick them off before killing the Shadow - with Rymyrgand's Mantle (see below in my early game walkthrough bit for where you can get it) you shouldn't die. The positioning can take a few tries, but once you have it 90% of the time the encounter will go your way. If I were going ToI, I would use a Stealth method as Reent mentioned. I literally craft most scrolls I want to use, I think if your build is incredibly dependent on scrolls to win every encounter then something is going a little wrong. Scrolls of Defence are the ones I'd most recommend, a level 4 Lore spell that shores up your defences significantly. Confuse scrolls are also extremely handy, but they're more of a late game thing I'd say. I think some spell bindings, like Shod-in-Faith Consecrated Ground or Arret Munacra Whispers of Treason, can be incredibly useful and I'll use them on most solo play-throughs when I need them. My standard play is... There you go! By no means the only way to do solo, but I find it a nice way to get through the early stages of the game speedily. Find out what ingredients you need for what you want to make, which vendors sell them and then stockpile when they restock throughout the game. For example, on my current Barbarian, I'm already tapping up Curnd for Tâ Ondra Tara periodically as I anticipate I'm going to need Scrolls of Valor late game - I've already made about 20, and I've some of Act II left. The animal parts can be the hardest to get as their sold in the smallest quantities, Cartugo in Ondra's Gift sells them as does the Curio Shop at Caed Nua. Vitrack Brains can be found at the same places, as well as the necessary jewels for exceptional weapons and armor from Curnd. For general pointers, never pick up keys to rooms you can unlock yourself for XP. I think pretty much everything else relevant to solo early I've already covered. I hope that was some help

Good to know you tried, and if it's localised to the Stalwart fight it's not a huge problem. I guess hotfixes should really be reserved for something entirely game-breaking, which this really doesn't seem to be. In any case, thanks!

I think this is being blown out of proportion a little, I was mainly curious to see if Obsidian were open to a hotfix rather than insisting on one. The bug does in some fashion seem avoidable, so it's not a huge problem at all - but as it's on the critical path, at least in terms of the expansion, it might be worthy of a hotfix. Plus, if it's only confined to Stalwart, which I think is the case then it's just a few encounters in a whole game full of more difficult ones. An annoyance, to be sure, but a fairly minor one - especially when you consider Obsidian have pulled out all the stops and done a great job on the patch otherwise.

No it is not, you fool, you foolish fool! But it is very easy to enchant to fine...