grasida

It scales pretty well with religion for me. +10 health per point of religion before might or other bonuses. If you’re maxing religion, it’s very solid. Overall it seems like a really nice weapon for a more fragile character. I wish two handers were more attractive in general.

I've considered a berserker shaman of berath as a fun conceptual character. Berath hates passionate behavior, which seems to contradict the fighting style of a berserker. But you could easily imagine it as a cool headed death trance, where the character simply has no regard for his own life (or anyone's life, kill em all and let berath sort them out) whatsoever. Sort of like super bushido. I think kind wayfarer actually fits berserker as someone fanatically convinced they're a good guy and willing to put everything on the line in combat to prove it. Mechanically, goldpact paladin clashes with berserker somewhat since the armor boosts won't stack. Bleak Walker makes plenty of sense, though. If you're metagaming pretty hard, you avoid almost every fight except the ones where you can clear the confusion with svef until you have a permanent solution. Then berserker confusion probably isn't such a big issue. If you're just playing the game in a relaxed way and taking fights and loot as they come, kind wayfarer seems like something to avoid.

Am I missing something with the slippers of the assassin from the DLC? I spawned them in the with the console, and I kill something, but nothing happens. And there is no tool tip or description for "shadow form". They do make it harder for me to flank enemies, though. I'm thinking of a soul blade/assassin with a greatsword. That might be the highest soul annihilation damage you can possibly get (barring a bloodied and flanked streetfighter who goes invisible and switches to a greatsword for a backstab, which seems pretty hard to pull off) because backstab boosts SA's raw damage. Looks like a nice use for the new greatsword, since it's a build that likes to crit, is likely to score quite a few kills per fight and is very squishy. And savage attack is very good with soul annihilation, since it's yet another source of +weapon damage.

I normally am the fastest to jump on the ugly fantasy sword hate train, but I don’t hate that one. I can make exceptions for bifurcated swords or swords with two blades because there’s real world precedent for a legendary bifurcated sword, Zulfiqar, the sword of Ali.

Maybe I’ll try an arcane knight with that sword. I wonder if the wizard’s phantoms can be revived by it or proc the heal on kill.

I’m not an arms historian, and the people who put the flails in museums are. But I’ve read that there’s a good chance most of them were created later or weren’t made for the battlefield. In European martial arts treatises there is a surviving work on the use of the two-handed flail, but nothing on the types of flails we see in Deadfire. Flails and flail like weapons certainly were used in Europe and elsewhere. But they were also almost always rare or exotic and mostly used for demonstrations of skill than as reliable weapons, like the meteor hammer in China.

If dual wield had an accuracy penalty, it would be a little worse with normal attacks but a little better if you have strong access to full attacks. That’s not much different from how it was in a lot of cases in PoE 1. And it would prevent dual wielding from being superior to single weapon when you’re trying to be accurate, too. I think separate bonuses to different styles with full attacks could solve the problem without offending the feelings of people that don’t like numbers to go down, but it also adds a lot of complexity. I don’t know what the right answer is. I’m glad I’m not the person who has to make the call.

My understanding is that historically, the flails that actually saw use as combat weapons in Europe were two-handed flails, and while there might have been the occasional, very rare flail like we see in rpgs, mostly they’re an invention of later ages. Actually I really hate the typical rpg flail, because how would you actually use it? It’s probably an okay implement for performance, but extremely dangerous to yourself and your companions on the battlefield. This isn’t adding much to the discussion, but I had to grab the opportunity to complain about flails. To be more on topic, the twin eels sword looks pretty good if you can get a lot of kills with it. The hit to crit seems like 1% per point of religion, which is not so great, but the heal is not bad and applies over a good area and the resurrect is cool. I’m not sure what the best build to use it is, though.

Thinking it over, I think an accuracy nerf to dual wield (-7, say, off the top of my head) really does make the most sense. It’s the simplest, most straightforward solution and doesn’t make an already complicated, imposing game even harder to understand for people new to rpgs. But there’s absolutely a contingent of posters that would scream bloody murder about a nerf like that.

I think you just got ridiculously lucky. Or something is broken. Are you consistently seeing results like that? Swift flurry and heartbeat drumming aren’t supposed to activate off themselves, although they can proc off each other. The chance for an 8 hit flurry, even with a 100% crit rate, should be very low.

I haven’t really played any characters that tried to maximize the use of spirit lance. I seriously contemplated a sage, and have played Aloth as a battlemage, but restarted the game right around when spirit lance came online. Do you think it deserves a nerf? Personally, I think it’s a summoned weapon that can time out and be dispelled, competes for casts with the strongest hard CC spell in the game and is only available to a class with limited damage boosts and no extremely good way to use it on its own. So it’s fine that it’s really powerful. I guess it might be a little broken with swift flurry and heartbeat drumming, though.

I haven’t played a fighter as my PC all that much, but I always take eder as a swashbuckler. I think they’re still pretty good. They no longer have simply absurd damage output, but they do what they’re supposed to, which is provide reliable damage output and limited control options attached to rock-solid defenses. Of those weapons, I’d say citzal’s spirit lance is the best. It will do less single-target damage than other choices, but more damage overall. It goes really well with some class skills on martial characters, like fighter’s mule kick and clear out, or rogue’s affliction strikes, since it will apply them to everything in the AoE of the blast. Whispers of the endless paths got nerfed really hard. It’s still good if you’re hitting several targets with it, but it’s quite situational now. I’m not sure about the chromoprismatic quarterstaff because I’ve never really used it. I guess it has the overall best single target damage and it boosts your spells, so it’s a great choice, but probably overall does less damage than citzal’s spirit lance. If you go for a warlock (wizard barbarian) you should try lord darryn’s voulge. Your summoned phantoms inherit your weapon and can increase static charge stacks. I’m not sure if that’s better than the spirit lance, though.

I think you’re selling fighter a little short. Clear out will apply the lance’s blast to every enemy you hit, meaning if you attack a dense pack of enemies, set up by pull of eora, say, you’ll deal massive damage to all of them. And the spirit lance is perfect with cleaving stance, since you’re damaging everything around you, once you drop one enemy you have a decent chance to start a chain reaction. Finally, you have strong aoe disruption with mule kick. I don’t know if all that’s enough to make fighter best, but it’s certainly a good choice. If I had to pick, I’d choose monk for overall versatility, since helwalker provides an enormous boost to your spells, and streetfighter for pure damage. But fighter is a really good choice if you want a tough character with strong utility and good damage.

Partly I think that’s because for ARPGs gear is so important to every build, and almost every piece of gear should be supporting your damage in some way, that it becomes a lot more obvious. The one-handed fire sword has +100% fire damage, so the 2-handed fire sword has to have +200% fire damage. A decent claw can give your assassin +200% damage, so frysturgard had better blow it through the roof. Gear is far more low key here, with strong caster gear giving a +10% bonus to spells and plenty of caster builds don’t have an “+% to spells” at all. But still, if you can find a one-handed sword with +10% to spells, you should be able to find a two hander that helps casters about twice as much, one way or another.

For example you have by 15 higher accuracy than enemy defense and:> you make a Full Attack while dual-wielding:- chance to crit on mainhand: 16%- chance to crit on offhand: 16%- So the chance to crit at least once during FA is: 29.44%> you make a Full Attack while wielding 1H weapon: (with built-in +12 acc bonus and +20% hit-to-crit conversion from 1h-style) chance to crit on mainhand: (16 + 12 + 0.20 * 50) / 100 = 38% This only applies to stunning surge specifically, since that’s the only full attack that really cares about crits. For the rogue’s strike powers, for example, just hitting is more important. In that case, single weapon style is more or less never better than dual wield. You only have a higher chance to apply the affliction if you would have a 14% chance to miss while dual wielding, or a 2% chance with single weapon style. With a few higher points of accuracy, while technically single weapon will be more reliable, the chance for dual wield to fail to apply an affliction is less than 1%. It’s true grazes are important for the duration of afflictions, but not enough to compare with the other advantages full attacks have. For a skald looking to score crits, for example, a fast single hander with a rapier + modal spamming accurate wounding shot would almost certainly build more crits over the course of a fight than a single rapier using the same ability. Aside from a specific band of accuracy vs. deflection within the single case you mentioned, dual wield beats single weapon in terms of crit generation and reliability of affliction application in the vast majority of cases. Does it have “enough” accuracy? 100% crit rate seems quite unattainable, and since the overall speed increase from dual wielding with full attack is far, far higher than the accuracy boost from single weapon style, there’s only a certain band within which single weapon is better. In most cases where you want to be accurate for reasons other than just dealing damage, dual wield will still be more effective because of full attacks. And how much +crit damage would you have to give it? It would have to be a lot. +25% crit damage would still only be a moderate damage increase, even if you crit 100% of the time assuming some bonus from might, a legendary weapon, class damage bonuses, etc. And one specific goal Josh Sawyer has repeatedly mentioned is his desire to avoid reliable, extreme damage spikes, since that would encourage scumming the opening of a fight until you roll a powerful crit and one shot an enemy. That’s the reason guns have -% crit damage. So an extremely high bonus seems problematic as well. If people don’t like the idea of accuracy, maybe instant recovery on melee crit, or something more exotic, like 50% chance to retaliate against melee attacks on crit for 2 seconds, would be better.

I discovered this issue while experimenting in the console and it's easily noticeable in more than one save. I tried to make a save that would let the team easily reproduce it, but I can't successfully upload an attachment. But the issue is easily reproducible by having any soul blade at all use soul annihilation and comparing the damage in the combat log with the damage in soul annihilation's tooltip. The tooltip states a number that conforms to the formula: (10+focus/4)*PL Bonus * (Might bonus + Misc Bonuses). Miscellaneous bonuses are from things like takedown combo, sworn enemy, etc. The actual number is clearly different from that. It's (10 + (focus-10)/4)*might bonus*PL bonus*(weapon damage bonuses). Weapon damage bonuses are anything that directly multiplies the base damage of your weapon, like might, sneak attack, soul whip, etc. This affects every soul blade, because every soul blade has soul whip, and eventually uses enchanted weapons, both of which multiple soul annihilation's damage.

I agree that a lot of effects were over-nerfed in 1.1 and on-crit effects and procs were among the worst victims of this. I’m not railing against nerfs, a lot of things needed nerfing on release. But obsidian went for a blanket nerf approach to everything and adjusted a whole lot of numbers in a huge hurry that resulted in making a lot of procs feel boring or pointless because you almost never see them happen.

Clear Out pushes enemies out of melee range, making it hard to use for sustained damage, but it’s also a model of a strong primary attack. It hits the primary target twice, hits a bunch of other enemies around you once and only costs 2 discipline. I think 25% crit damage would be a pretty weak bonus, since crits aren’t multiplicative with other damage bonuses. Plus 10 accuracy would be better. First, it would make single weapon more of an alternative to dual wield if you’re mostly interested in applying on hit effects, especially if you already have good accuracy, which fits the flavor of single weapon style very well. Around the point that accuracy=deflection for a dual wield character, they’d have a better chance to apply afflictions with a single weapon than dual wielding. Second, an accuracy bonus would make single weapon more a choice for characters like swift flurry and stunning surge monks or skalds that want to get as many crits as possible. Even if single weapon full attacks did more damage on their own when critting than full attacks (they wouldn’t with +25% crit damage almost for sure), the builds that care about crits the most would still prefer dual wielding in order to maximize the total number of crits and on-crit procs that are more powerful than some extra damage. The biggest problem with these kinds of changes to full attacks is that it’s really complicated compared to right now. I’d prefer to just change a bunch of the full attacks to primary attacks and buff them to compensate.

I was considering a zealot of berath. Trickster/priest with maxed resolve, high int, might and perception. The idea is you escape into a group of enemies at the start of a fight and focus on casting. Riposte allows you to passively deal damage to enemies around you while you focus on casting spells. When you do attack, you focus on DoT powers like ring the bell, gouging strike, toxic strike, touch of rot, etc. At very high level, you can supercharge your DoTs with cleansing flame to deal heavy damage against a single enemy. Using DoTs and riposte to deal damage lets you spend more time casting spells. For weapons, I think I’d take Marux Amanth paired with Griffon’s Blade, though Rannig’s Wrath might be an interesting choice. Chance to recover when missed could be a really good power for a deflection tank that wants to get out a whole lot of actions. I don’t think the spiritual greatsword would be the best choice here, unfortunately.

SA’s raw damage doesn’t benefit from lashes, but does grow with weapon enchantment, might, sneak attack, etc. but lashes are still good since 1) they still apply to the regular damage part of SA and 2) they make you deal more damage on “off” attacks, which also generates more focus. Regarding SA vs. disintegration, even if disintegration is more focus efficient, SA will almost certainly be better damage per second. If you want to kill stuff as fast as possible, SA is still probably your best choice. I do think the discount on shred spells is weird with soul blade, since that will never make them better at dps casting than ascendant, but maybe the idea is sometimes you choose to spam low level aoe spells instead of doing single target damage. If mind wave were good, that might be worth it, but as it is, I’d prefer to take a few core buffs and debuffs and mostly focus on passives and off class powers on a soul blade, rather than choosing shred spells.

One minor correction to that. It’s (10+(focus-10)/4)*stuff. At 25 focus a level 1 soul blade with no damage bonuses whatsoever does 13.8 raw damage, not 16.3 raw damage. So it’s 10 + 15/4, not 10 + 25/4. Along with not including weapon damage bonuses, this is another place where the description is wrong. With Soulblade, that was always the extremely clear case, even straight out of the box. Even without knowing that weapon damage bonuses apply to soul annihilation’s damage, could single class soul blade deal more single target dps with soul annihilation than it could with death of 1000 cuts plus multi hit powers like antipathetic field and mind blades? If it can’t, its main gimmick gets obviated by its own class powers at high level.

I don’t think that’s how it works. I was testing everything in the 2.0 beta. For me, for example, with 10 focus at 10 might, a plain weapon and no bonuses other than soul whip, I had 12 damage. I had 13.8 damage at 25 focus and 16.2 damage at 24 focus (soul whip) turns off at max focus). With a street fighter using a legendary weapon, I had 34 point something raw damage at 25 focus. Stalker’s patience also noticeably increases damage compared to other legendary weapons against flanked targets. But it’s bed time for me, so if you meant something else, I’ll have to formulate a better answer in the morning.

The description of soul annihilation suggests it adds (10+focus/4)*might bonus*PL bonus raw damage. Actually, it adds (10*weapon damage bonus + (((focus-10)/4)*weapon damage bonus))*PL bonus raw damage, where weapon damage means things like sneak attack, weapon enchantment, might and soul whip. To insert my opinion, I think that’s pretty weird. If it followed the formula in the description, it would be way too weak, but I guess it might be stronger than intended right now on rogue multiclasses.

I hope this isn’t something a bunch of people already know. I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned here yet. Soul Annihilation’s tool tip description is completely wrong. If you work backwards from the number it gives you, it describes damage dealt as (10 + focus/4) * might bonus * PL Bonus + miscellaneous bonuses (sworn enemy shows up in the description if you have it). That’s not how it works. The actual raw damage dealt by soul annihilation is (10*weapon damage modifier + (((focus-10)/4)*weapon damage modifier)*PL bonus (whoops, I forgot to actually test PL bonuses, so if it’s totally inconsistent with every other ability in the game, that part might be wrong). Weapon damage modifier means anything that multiplies your weapon’s base damage like sneak attack, might or even soul whip. Yes, that means you’ll do more damage with soul annihilation at one point less than max focus than if your focus is totally maxed. “Lash” damage doesn’t affect SA’s raw damage and even though SA is a spell, +% spell damage doesn’t either. The raw damage can’t crit or graze. tl;dr: 1. The Soul Annihilation description is totally wrong, it will typically do a lot more damage than it says it does. 2. Soul Annihilation is way better than it looks according to the description, especially if you go for a streetfigher/ soul blade, which on paper is probably the highest single target melee damage character in the game. Edit: wrote down the wrong formula, focus is subtracted by 10 before being divided and multiplied by all the other stuff.

He said "Maybe because of the sneak attack bonus from assassin", so I thought maybe that's what he's talking about. Otherwise, there's no accounting for the random number god. It giveth and it taketh away.