grasida

Graze only influences the duration of DoTs. Most DoTs adjust their total damage according to duration, so if you graze and roll a shorter duration, you do less total damage. For those DoTs, reducing damage on a graze as well would be overly punishing, since you'd multiply the total damage twice. Similarly, crits only affect the duration -- if they applied to damage as well, that would be overpowered, since total damage usually scales with duration. But there are a good number of DoTs that do the same amount of damage regardless of the duration (or actually, more damage with a lower duration, though I've only checked that specifically with disintegrate). For those, reducing the duration means you apply the total damage over a shorter duration and deal more damage per tick. The way to tell the difference seems to be DoTs that have a bugged description and state their total damage in the description as per tick don't scale their damage according to duration. DoTs with a normal description do. Going from other threads, not my own personal testing, "wounding" type DoTs that do a percent of your damage over time don't scale with duration, and therefore are the "stupid" type.

Okay, no scratch what I said, it does more total damage on graze with lower int. The reason seems to be that the damage presented in the description is the total damage after the first tick. The first tick that applies as soon as the spell lands doesn't count. So with a bigger first tick, you do overall more damage. With 10 might and 1 int, on a graze and with no other damage boosts, I did 175, 175, 65 with a listed duration of 4.5 seconds. On a crit, I did 70, 70, 70, 70, 31 with a listed duration of 10.3 seconds. On a hit, I did 87, 87, 87, 65 with a duration of 8.3 seconds.

More dps, definitely not more overall damage. But I tested it a few weeks ago and I can't remember exactly what I did and what the numbers were.

That's consistent with my understanding, but I haven't tested it very thoroughly. I think grazes and crits also only influence the duration, not the damage, so it does more damage per tick on a graze and less damage per tick on a crit. The received wisdom of the community is that fortitude tends to be the highest defense among things that are hard to kill in the first place. If something has low fortitude, usually it also has low deflection and low HP and therefore dies quickly to weapon attacks. But since disintegrate can be made to do hideous amounts of damage anyway, it's still good. The fact that it's better on a graze and worse on a crit also contributes to the fact that accuracy isn't a huge concern.

As far as I understand, 240 damage per 3 seconds is a display bug. Actually, it does 240 damage over the entire duration of the ability. It's strongly in the running for best single target DoT (maybe losing out to toxic strike), but 240 damage per 3 seconds would just be insane.

The penalty can’t go negative, but the recovery boost on Miscreant’s leathers is just a normal recovery boost, not a reduction in armor recovery penalty. So a fighter with armored grace and Abraham gets 0 penalty from leather armor, then enjoys a 10% reduction in recovery time as a property of the armor.

Numbers and aoe can be tweaked) And, in fact, could stand to be changed anyway, since the tooltip for soul annihilation is lying. The more I think about your idea the more I like it, even though I think soul blade is okay, balance wise. But gameplay wise people often complain that soul blade’s discount on shred spells is mostly pointless and that it advertises itself as a hybrid spell/melee damage dealer, but ends up playing as a strict melee class with a few AoE debuffs. Shred spells “marking” enemies to be damaged by soul annihilation would solve both of those problems and and add interesting complexity to soul blade’s play. I haven’t tested it extremely thoroughly, but I’m fairly sure. I played around with a seer with 1 int in the console to see how it interacts with takedown combo and what kind of damage per tick I could get. But I don’t remember if I tested with different int values. However, it does noticeably more damage per tick on a graze and noticeably less on a crit. I think this is the case with any DoT that lists it’s total damage over duration in the ability description as opposed to the DoTs that list damage per tick. Regardless, that’s not a good distinction form soul ignition because there’s no way you could know about it without specifically testing.

Wall of Thorns is probably an okay way to debuff fortitude on a druid. Even though it targets fortitude itself, it also hits incredibly fast, which makes it pretty likely that you’ll get through at least once. That then opens up enemies more to stuns from relentless storm, which debuffs fortitude even further. That’s not to say fortitude saves aren’t generally too high across most enemies.

You make a lot of point and I agree with most of them, but I want to comment on a few. -Into the Fray: I think it would be fine for tanks with lots of engagement if it only cost 1 discipline. Maybe the worry there is that it would be spammed for damage, but then the damage could be changed to a dot, a damage received debuff or just removed. -Soul Blade: I don’t think it’s that bad or terribly in need of changing except that ascendant is clearly better, but I think that’s more a problem with ascendant. Your idea sounds really cool though, if a little too strong. Wild leech: it really needs to be improved. Here’s an idea I had randomly yesterday — it negates an affliction at random on an enemy to give you a tier 2 inspiration of the corresponding type. That way ciphers could give themselves any type of inspiration, but at at a high opportunity cost. Soul Ignition: one thing to note is that this is a “smart” DoT while disintegrate is a stupid one, meaning it scales positively with intellect and disintegrate scales negatively. For a cipher with very high intellect, soul ignition is probably better. That’s not to say I disagree with you, though. Having it target will would be better still. Full attacks with single weapon style: I’ve written before that I don’t really agree with a critical hit damage bonus. Single weapon style is already the weakest style. Such a bonus would have to be so high to be worthwhile that it would encourage scumming the start of a fight for opening crits. If we’re going to make 3 or 4 separate effects on full attacks (which I also don’t agree with) I think single weapon style should get more accuracy. The builds that care enough about accuracy to take single weapon style probably gain enough from it that they’re more worried about maximizing crit rate or avoiding misses entirely than they are about the diminishing returns in damage granted by accuracy. Right now, the builds that care the most about crits, monks and skalds, are better served by using full attacks supported by large accuracy and hit-to-crit bonuses than they are by single weapon style. A higher crit damage bonus would be unlikely to change that. Also, an accuracy bonus for full attacks with single weapon style would create a more realistic range in which single weapons are more reliable at applying afflictions than dual wield.

There were massive changes in 1.1 and a few in 1.2. The big disappointment for me is that 2.0 didn’t really change anything. I think a lot of 1.1’s changes were hastily done, and perhaps obsidian is aware of that and waiting for the dust to settle a little. I think the big thing that everyone wants fixed is how full attacks influence weapon style balance. It’s hard to justify two handers or single-weapon style because almost every martial character can spam cheap full attacks and those are far, far better for characters with two weapons. Otherwise there are obviously some abilities that really need to be buffed and possible some overall skill sets that need to be tweaked. Paladins are really good, for example, but barely anyone pays any attention to their exhortations. Rogues are strong, but they have some real dud powers, like sap and exchange places. Lots of priest spells are designed around aoe inspirations being very valuable, but it seems few people actually care about that, so the priest spell list in general could use some work. Ciphers still have a few really bad spells, too. I think some fighter abilities are really overpriced. And so on.

- 10 all defenses also stacks with specific debuffs like -25 fortitude from the morning star modal, so those spells are doubly valuable. One issue with priests, I think, is that so many of their key spells are concentrated into a few levels. Level 1 gets restore and suppress affliction and in addition, most subclasses free spell at level is quite good, like sun ray, touch of rot, arcane veil, etc. That makes it much harder to take and use something good, but less class defining, like halt, interdiction or barbs of condemnation. Level 4 is similar, with barring death’s door, devotions, triumph of the crusaders, circle of protection and shining beacon all on the same level and all of them are core aspects of the priest’s power. Level 7 then has minor avatar, cleansing flame and storm of holy fire, but multiclass priests only get 1 cast of a level 7 spell. Even for a single class priest, resurrection or shields for the faithful may look really good, but it’s hard to justify using one of your precious level 7 casts on one of them. By comparison, levels 2, 3 and 5 are much weaker. It’s very important for players to need to make choices and it shouldn’t be possible to get everything you want. But the priest spell list still feels pretty unbalanced with a fair number of early weak powers and too many important spells competing for very limited resources at the same levels.

The “problem” with single weapon style on monks is you can’t use it with your fists. Streetfighter/ monk probably isn’t better off with single weapon style because the massive damage to sneak attack boost will push fists ahead just about any weapon because of their higher base damage. I’ve done a fair bit of number crunching and with the right weapon, single weapon style will beat dual wield on a monk, assuming no full attacks, as long as you aren’t getting too many damage boosts from you other class. So maybe it’s a good choice for an ascendant, possibly a brawler or maybe a caster multiclass. Given that there are a lot of these threads, it’s clear not a few people want to try this kind of build. I wish obsidian would improve single weapon style a little bit and fix full attacks for the people who like fancy duelist crit builds.

I think the only thing making skald strictly worse than troubadour is that offensive invocations are much less powerful than summons. But for using offensive invocations, skald is strictly better, particularly since there are so many really powerful ones at PL 1 and 2. For powers like hel hyraf’s, thunder rolled and at the sound of his voice, skalds can cast them just as fast as troubadours before scoring phrases through critical hits, and keep their lingers too. A cantor could potentially even manage two chants while casting offensive invocations faster than a troubadour could at the same time. The problem is that offensive chants just can’t compete with summons and skald is only good at the weaker one while troubadours are good at both.

Firebrand will probably be the best single target damage out of any great sword except maybe for void wheel, but whispers or twin eels also have things going for them, so you can certainly get use out of them if you get tired of firebrand.

Grave calling looks like it could work with a one-handed build. You could ramp up the bonus faster, then get paralyze on crit. Scordeo's edge on a monk should be decent because of all the accuracy. I haven't tried sun and moon, but it looks like it could be really strong on a crit build for a monk too. Stalker's patience as well, though not perhaps not as strong as the previous two. Griffin's Blade has a 50% chance of AoE daze on crit and daze is very powerful, but it has no other offensive stats, except for the spell damage on a caster. It would probably need a very specialized build to make sense.

Force of anguish or clear out with an aoe melee weapon following arterial strike should be good too.

People seem to really like the high end priest spells, so single class is always a good choice. For multi, probably you could make every combination work, but there are only a few where the skill sets are truly complimentary. Among the martial combos, I'd say berserker is a clear choice for any caster. Helwalker too, and especially for a priest of berath, it will make touch of rot, shining beacon and storm of holy fire do massive damage. Priest healing helps mitigate the damage penalty, and helwalker is stylistically appropriate for combining with priest of berath. Assassin could work too. It's should be an amazing DoT character, since you can stack rogue DoT's, especially toxic strike, on multiple targets with rot skulls, then supercharge them with cleansing flame. I only played through a little bit of the early game with an assassin priest of berath, but it was a lot of fun. Assassinate makes touch of rot a devastating opener, then you can summon the spiritual great sword and deal tons of damage with backstabs. Later you can open with shining beacon and summon rot skulls.

I think I tried that recently with a cipher/priest and it didn’t work. I wish it did, though! It’s a pain to get good enough penetration with spells!

The goal of something like a Lifegiver/Beguiler would be to build as “pure” a caster as you could. Beguiler’s main bonus is to be able to regain focus from casting spells on enemies that already have afflictions. So the idea would be to open with tangle foot to hobble everything, then cast cipher aoe control spells non stop. You could fight in melee, but you won’t be amazing at it. Soul blade / Lifegiver won’t be the strongest melee character ever, but with firebrand you’ll have good accuracy, decent penetration (scion of flame boosts all attacks with firebrand) and quite respectable damage from soul annihilation. Then you can still make great use of control powers on the cipher side, but they’re less of a focus. Neither combo will be a minmaxed power build, but there are synergies to be found either way. So it’s up to whether you want more focus on melee damage or ranged, aoe control.

I think shadowing beyond points to assassin, personally. Assassin is really nice with casters, but is heavily limited by resources and by the fact that it's cheapest invisibility option also has a recovery time. Two to three uses of shadowing beyond per fight significantly extends your capacity to backstab and assassinate before you start dipping into consumables. All the other priest spells you gain also can make up for losing out on high level rogue abilities.

Just the summons, unless I misremember badly. Taste of the hunt is “beast”, right? My lifegiver used that frequently. Tekehu’s subclass loses access to all beast spells, I think.

Aside from flavor, the decision between animist and lifegiver comes down to whether you want to take summon spells. Are you going to choose at least one summon? Then take animist. Otherwise, lifegiver is much better. I think both subclasses are going to end up taking moonwell and the moon’s light anyway.

Priest of Eothas was really cool in earlier versions of the backer beta, which makes the current state of the subclass even more frustrating. It used to get a bunch of druid elemental damage spells. Now it's just vanilla priest, which is mostly pointless, disappointing for the player and also boring. I don't think it's totally awful. The support spells you get aren't very exciting, but the revives can be very powerful, circle of protection can be good and withdraw is strong. It's just not very satisfying and not many people find priest to be all that useful for healing and defense to begin with compared with paladin, druid or chanter, since those are better at preventing people from dying while priests are better at reviving, and it's obviously better to stop your party members from dying in the first place. I imagine people who have multiclassed to priest of eothas for roleplaying reasons got some use out of their free spells. But I'm also sure they wish they got other, more interesting powers instead.

The point isn’t that it’s hard to find rare ingredients, it’s that it’s infuriating to refresh merchant inventories over and over in order to get common ingredients. I know this is a feature of old school frogs, but it’s also bad design. Edit: I love that my ipad's spell correct turned "crpg" into "frog" and am going to leave that error there for the enjoyment of others.

If I understand correctly, offensive parry on WotP doesn't apply the AoE, rather it's a special strike against a single enemy. It's still really good. Even ignoring the damage, dazed is very powerful for a tank, since it's effectively plus 4 armor. I can't think of that many reliable sources of dazed that can be kept up against an enemy reliably throughout a fight. Griffin's blade could possibly manage it on a crit build, but I'm not sure what else could.